Postcards from the 20th Century.
Title: Postcards from the 20th Century.
Author:
the9thdoctor
Pairing: None
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Mostly Doctor Who - All three series of the new and several classic Who episodes. This may very well be totally Jossed by the final few episodes of Torchwood, so I shall stake it firmly in the AU camp.
Summary: Jack has to relive the 20th Century, and meets some interesting people along the way...
Semi-Sequel to The Seven Deadly Sins of Captain Jack Harkness
Jack will always maintain that Torchwood was an accident.
He'd had a bit of trouble after the war - gone a bit crazy. Jack told himself it was stress, and tried to comfort himself with the knowledge that he would never have to live through the horror of the trenches again. Unfortunately that was tempered by the realisation that he would soon be re-living the Second World War all over again, and this time he didn't have a spaceship or a Time Lord dressed in a black leather jacket to get him out when everything got a bit too hairy.
He didn't want to miss the Doctor, but in some ways, he already had. He knew when the Doctor would arrive - fiddling with the TARDIS all those years ago had provided him with the information on the Doctor's previous visits to Earth - but in reality, all that meant was that he knew when he had to avoid the Doctor. A Doctor who hadn't met him yet.
In 1925, while trying to avoid going to a small country house and begging a man who had never met him to explain something that hadn't happened yet, he got drunk. Awesomely, outrageously drunk.
He spun around the dancefloor with anyone he could catch hold of, laughing with girls in short skirts and bobbed hair, cigarettes in elegant holders wafting smoke through the hall. The band played jazz - new and exiting in this age, but Jack wanted Glenn Miller and a blonde and a spaceship tethered to Big Ben, and oh God, his head hurt.
He disengaged from his current partner and stumbled over to the nearest chair, dropping his head into his hands.
Jack had no idea how long he sat there, the party whirled around him, guests wired on substances that would become illegal in years to come, but could currently be purchased for a penny at the nearest chemist's shop. Then a hand dropped to his shoulder and Jack could taste it. A feeling of fire and sugar at the back of his throat. Jack gasped like he was coming back to life and stared at the man in front of him. Blond and passive, he was probably older than he looked, but his eyes made Jack swallow hard.
“When?” he mumbled, knowing the man would understand. Knowing why the man had found him here and why, out of all these people he had touched his shoulder like an old friend.
“November, 1913.” Jack knew without having to check that the date wasn't one of the ones he had carefully avoided. He closed his eyes, but the man pulled him to his feet. “Come with me...” he whispered. “We can help.”
“We?” replied Jack, still reluctant to open his eyes.
“Torchwood.”
Jack laughed. Torchwood had finally caught up with him - It had only been a matter of time, he supposed. The man who couldn't die. He had, when lying awake at night with his eyes screwed shut and praying for sleep, thought about contacting Torchwood. He'd learnt all about it in the Agency, but had always held back. If the Doctor was its enemy, then Jack wanted nothing to do with it.
The man whispered, “It's alright. I know...” and pulled his watch from his pocket, passing it to Jack.
After that it was easy. Jack followed.
In 1935, Jack doesn't go to Tibet. It was remarkably easy. He goes to America instead. Tim sends him, tells him to check out a rash of mysterious murders in Baltimore. Tim says they've detected strange readings, but Jack thinks it might just be a distraction.
Jack shakes his head and gets on the boat. He's had paradox training before, better than Torchwood could ever imagine, and he's well aware of cocking up timelines.
Whatever Jack was expecting when he arrives and makes his way to the construction site where the first body turned up, it wasn't the burning sugary taste of time and loneliness. It surprises him into silence and workers pick their way around him, until one - a youngish man in a suit, who looks out of place amongst the mud and bricks - approaches. Jack knows where the taste he thinks he could be imagining is coming from when the man introduces himself as the architect and shakes his hand. Jack knows the other man can feel it too and they stand there in the middle of the activity all around them.
“You met him too then.” the man finally manages, and Jack can just nod and accept Frank's offer of coffee.
Later, deep in conversation, when Jack is trying to control his anger over the survival of the Daleks (and trying to work out if that means he has to live forever so he can destroy them, or whether he died for nothing in the first place, makes his head hurt.) he realises that Frank's Doctor is the same man as Tim's.
Jack thinks that maybe this trip was arranged just for him - Tim's way of letting him know that he wasn't alone.
It almost helps.
Jack catches up with an old acquaintance in 1956 and he knows who he is, even before he walks away from the accident without a scratch on him.
Jack catches the taste of him, tempered by years and blood. He's still young, and Jack is temporarily stunned, before realising that ninety years for him is only fifteen for Jamie. Jack is supposed to go to a meeting with the Home Office Minister, but right now, he couldn't care less. He turns to Tim, who understands. Tim has always understood Jack in a way that nobody else (well, nobody on the planet anyway,) could possibly do.
“I'll cover for you.” Tim says, fingering the heavy fob watch in his pocket and watching Jamie turn the corner. “You go.”
Jack runs.
He catches up just in time to watch the moped catch on the curb and skid into the young man who had tried to rip the world apart when he had been five. Jack watched as Jamie smashed into the telegraph pole. The teenage boy on the moped shouts in surprise and slams on the breaks, hurrying over to Jamie, who is hunched over on the pavement.
Jack licks his lips, trying to rid them of the sugar coating he knows isn't really there. The metallic smell of time growing stronger as Jamie unfolds himself and takes the boy's hand, pulling himself up.
The accident hurt him, but Jack, knowing what to look for, can see the slight golden glow of future technology as the nanogenes repair the damage.
Well meaning bystanders crowd the two men, but Jack hangs back. He wouldn't know what to say to Jamie anyway - The boy wouldn't remember him, after all, Jamie was dead when Jack met him. Somehow, it's enough to know that Jamie is alive now.
Jack walks away, smiling.
Jack meets Jamie again in 1961. He's been sent to Cardiff by Tim, who Jack suspects of knowing everything and never telling, which is no real surprise to Jack - after all, Tim had a good teacher. He's supposed to be inspecting Torchwood Three which is under the control of Captain James Harper, but the moment he steps into the shabby room decorated by dog-eared leaflets he gets the familiar taste and understands why he's here.
The man who emerges from a back room is smartly dressed and Jack knows instantly that he is part of this. At some stage and in some way, this man has helped to save the world.
“Can I help you?” he says with a faint smile.
Jack inclines his head, and gives the young man his widest smile. “Captain Jack Harkness, and you are?...”
“Thomas Connelly... James is expecting you, Captain.” Thomas presses a button concealed by the counter and a section of wall slides open. Jack laughs.
“Better lead the way then...”
In hindsight, it was obvious. Tim had found Jack, so it wasn't hard to believe he could find the others. The planet was probably full of people whose lives had been touched by a mysterious man in a blue police box.
Jamie shuffles some papers on his desk and looks up at Jack with a knowing smile.
“Captain Harkness... My mother sends her love...”
Thomas fetches them both steaming mugs of tea and when he leaves the office, Jack has to ask, “Did he...” but gets no further.
“He ran me over with a moped.” explains Jamie. “Guess who gave it to him...”
Jack shakes his head. The Doctor has been a stranger to him for almost a hundred years, but it seems very like him. Some people get immortality and nanogenes. Others wind up with a fob watch or a moped. For a second or two, Jack wonders which one he would prefer.
As Jamie shakes his hand, and Jack waves goodbye to Tom, he decides to ask Tim how many more of the Doctor's cast-offs he has to look forward to meeting.
Jack occasionally returns to Cardiff to say hello to Jamie until one day, one godawful day in 1967, Thomas calls and tells Jack that Jamie is dead. Shot. Vaporised by a hostile alien as he tried to reason with it.
Jack can't think of anything to say, so he drops the phone and heads for the nearest nightclub.
The Inferno has an apt name, it's packed and boiling hot. Jack thinks he's stepped into Hell, until the stink of spilt beer, cigarettes and sweat is drowned out by another smell which is deeper and more immediate than Jack has ever known.
A young girl stands in the corner, a fashionable cap pulled low over ironed-flat hair. Jack can taste her from across the crowded room.
Jack fights his way over to her, and holds out his hand. She looks up at him, surprised at first but then with dawning realisation.
“You've met him too, then?” she asks, after taking a deep breath. Jack imagines what he tastes like to her. Like deserted spaces and cordite, maybe.
Jack smiles. This girl is different from the others that Jack has met. She's not just a passing acquaintance, someone whose life has been briefly touched by an alien. She's travelled far away, and set foot on other worlds.
He sits down beside her and kisses her hand like a gentleman. She giggles, which makes her sound like a child and Jack suddenly realises that in linear time, he's over one hundred years older than her.
Sipping her drink and chain smoking short, unfiltered cigarettes, she tells him about a grumpy old man who took her to see the stars, and who changed right in front of her eyes into a whole new person.
Jack listens attentively and realises that the Doctors (plural - Jack resolves not to think too hard about that one.) whom she is describing is whole lifetimes apart from the man he met during the Blitz.
He's heard of Time Lords and their regeneration before, knows that Tim and Frank and Thomas have all faced death beside a different man than he has, but here - in this poky London nightspot with a young girl who has battled both Cybermen and Daleks - is the first time he wonders if he'll ever see HIS Doctor again.
Tim sends Jack to Cardiff in 1969. Jamie's second in command has been struggling with the pressures of the job and Tim declares Jack the ideal candidate to take over. Jack can't help but think that since he has now been working for Torchwood for forty-five years, the promotion may be a little overdue.
Tom is still diligently working behind the counter of the fake information office and cleaning up aliens, a little older and a little greyer maybe, but as Jack watches him watch Neil Armstrong bouncing on the surface of the moon along with the rest of the world, he can see flashes of an awkward teenager in the way he nervously eyes the television.
There's a disturbance at an art gallery in Aberystwyth, and Torchwood Three is sent to check it out. Jack drives, and isn't all that surprised when he can find the gallery by following his nose. The owner, a young, pretty girl, blinks at him in surprise. The team behind him make inappropriate comments behind them as he draws her into the small back room and sits her down on a rickety chair. Jack asks her where she's from.
“1866.” she replies after a pause. “And yourself?”
Jack smiles and tells her. She doesn't even bat an eyelid, tells him in a polite voice that when one has battled robots and the Abominable Snowman, one is apt to believe most things.
Jack closes his eyes and asks how she can stand being so far out of her own time.
“If you'll excuse me, Captain Harkness, you seem to be further away from yours than I am from mine.”
“Did he leave you here?” Jack asks, desperate to know if she has been cast adrift in time, the same as he was.
“I asked him to.” she replies, still a model of Victorian poise. “He was a perfect gentleman, made sure I would be well looked after... I couldn't keep travelling with him. He understood that.”
The team pick up the suspect painting and Jack bids the girl farewell. He asks Thomas to drive home, Jack doesn't think he could prevent himself from swerving off the road.
That night is the first time he deliberately shoots himself, suddenly horrendously aware that he, out of all of them, has been truly abandoned.
Tim keeps Jack in Wales for most of the 70's. Jack knows why, but pretends he doesn't. Instead, he keeps himself to himself and gets Thomas to answer the phone each time UNIT calls. By 1979 he has almost stopped thinking about it, until Tim sends him a new scientific officer.
The tone of Tim's voice should really have tipped him off - that, and the fact that he has always previously allowed Jack to handpick his own staff - but it's not until she sweeps into the Hub that Jack works out who she is.
It's a slightly different feeling than the others. A more bitter, earthy smell, it lacks the fire of the others he's met, but it's enough.
Jack can tell from shaking her hand that here is someone who has never left the planet. She has stayed exactly when she should be, but is no less heroic for it.
She smiles at him, and stays quiet until they are alone.
“He got the TARDIS working again then?” she asks, a heavy weight of a question dropped into a conversation about inconsequential subjects.
Jack asks, and she tells him about a man with a velvet jacket and a classic car. Another girl, another Doctor it seems.
Jack responds with Slitheen warriors and a Time Lord with a goofy smile.
She tells him she has no regrets, but Jack can't quite bring himself to care. She has never been dragged all over space and time. No chance to be left behind or throw herself in front of Daleks. Jack could almost cry when she smiles and recalls leaving the one man that Jack has been waiting several lifetimes for, simply because she wanted to go back to Cambridge and study meteorites.
However, Jack's life has never been that simple.
She works at Torchwood Three for two years in the end, and Jack can't bring himself to become friends with her. The rest of the team wonder about them, he knows, and they concoct stories that neither of them confirm or deny.
Eventually she sweeps into his office and drops her resignation letter on Jack's desk. Jack looks up.
“You don't have to do that.” he says, making a stand at pretence.
“You know I do, Jack.” she replies. “It's not working, and you know it. You can't cope with the idea that I left him and not the other way around. I know you don't mean it, but you hate me for that... I'm sorry.”
Jack nods. “I'm sorry too...”
She kisses him once, on the cheek. “He'll come back.” she whispers softly, before leaving him alone with only his memories and a well-oiled revolver for company.
During the 80's, Tim tries to bring him back to London but Jack resists. He's become attached to Cardiff, and the team of young, enthusiastic people who are anxious to get out in the world and experience everything it has to offer. He visits him sometimes though - Tim's an old man now, confined to a wheelchair while Jack is still the same. Jack has had over a century to get used to that by now though, and thinks that he is used to it.
He's been wrong before.
During one of his visits, in 1985, he visits Tim in hospital. He takes one look at the man in the bed and suddenly he can't stand it any more, turning tail and walking away.
The woman in the cafe was loud, but stopped mid-sentence as soon as Jack pushed open the door. She turned to stare at him. Jack clutched the doorframe simply to hold himself upright. She picked up her cup of tea and hurried over to him, pulling him to an empty seat.
“Who are you?” she demands. Jack winces, her accented voice cuts through the muted conversation of their fellow diners.
Jack shakes his head slowly, unaware of what he's denying. “We have a friend in common.” he says.
She gasps, and starts talking a mile a minute. It's all Jack can do to keep up with her, so he says nothing and just listens.
She's another one who has seen him regenerate, spinning stories of a crazy, wild haired man with an uncommonly long scarf and of a young, blond Doctor who is handy with a tennis ball and wears celery as an accessory.
“And then, when he left me behind at Gatwick...” she says, taking a deep breath. Jack can't believe what he's hearing.
“He left you?” he bursts in. The girl stares at him in shock. Jack gets the feeling that she doesn't get interrupted too often, but he can't help himself. He needs to know he's not the only one who has been dumped out of the TARDIS without even a goodbye.
“He came back.” she replies. “I got into a bit of trouble and he came to the rescue...”
It's like a punch to Jack's gut. He can't understand how he was so easy to leave behind.
Tim dies in 2001. He had a good run, Jack thinks as he stands by the graveside.
When the taste and smell comes, it's suddenly all too overwhelming. The stink is acrid, sulphur and burnt toffee mixed with heavy, dense clouds of nicotine. It's wrong, somehow. So wrong that Jack has to stifle his gag reflex before staggering off in the right direction.
The man in the black sweater is waiting for him. Leaning on the bar of a trendy theme pub, he glances up at Jack when he walks in.
“You're different.” Jack says as he settles himself in a seat.
“You'll never know how different...” he replies. “I've been changed. So have you.”
“You can tell?” asks Jack. Not much surprises him anymore.
The man in black raises an eyebrow. “Believe me, you're not the strangest thing I've seen... If you think your timeline is screwed, you should see mine!” he laughs at that, and takes a healthy swig of his drink. Jack doesn't reply.
Finally the man turns to Jack and sighs deeply. “I'm waiting for him to come back too.” he says, like he's admitting to a horrible crime. “Or rather, I'm waiting for him to be ready to be found.”
“He left me.” mumbles Jack.
The man reaches out and pats Jack's hand. “And you'll find him again, don't worry.”
“Do you know that for a fact?” Jack asks, looking up. The man smiles.
“With a life like yours, I would think it's a certainty.”
Jack thinks for a while. “If you're going to see him again, you can tell him...” he starts, unsure of what he wants to say.
His companion shakes his head. “No.” he says, picking up his jacket. Black leather, Jack notices with a pang of regret. “No more paradoxes.” He holds out his hand for Jack to shake. He looks at it for a few seconds before grasping it tightly.
“You're wrong about the paradoxes.” says Jack. He knows his life has never been that simple. “But I think you might be right about the Doctor.”
The man in black pulls his hand away and turns to leave. Jack watches him go, filled with a new kind of hope that had always eluded him before.
The world, and maybe even the universe is filled with people who have loved the Doctor. Sometimes they leave him, and sometimes it happens the other way around, but the smell of neon fire and jelly babies will always follow behind them - marked forever by their association with the most amazing man in the galaxy.
Jack was one of them once, and maybe he will be again.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
I shall be awarding geeky cookies to everyone who can correctly identify all the characters involved!
Hope you comment, and please check out the rest of our fiction at
plotbunniesinc
Author:
the9thdoctor
Pairing: None
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Mostly Doctor Who - All three series of the new and several classic Who episodes. This may very well be totally Jossed by the final few episodes of Torchwood, so I shall stake it firmly in the AU camp.
Summary: Jack has to relive the 20th Century, and meets some interesting people along the way...
Semi-Sequel to The Seven Deadly Sins of Captain Jack Harkness
Jack will always maintain that Torchwood was an accident.
He'd had a bit of trouble after the war - gone a bit crazy. Jack told himself it was stress, and tried to comfort himself with the knowledge that he would never have to live through the horror of the trenches again. Unfortunately that was tempered by the realisation that he would soon be re-living the Second World War all over again, and this time he didn't have a spaceship or a Time Lord dressed in a black leather jacket to get him out when everything got a bit too hairy.
He didn't want to miss the Doctor, but in some ways, he already had. He knew when the Doctor would arrive - fiddling with the TARDIS all those years ago had provided him with the information on the Doctor's previous visits to Earth - but in reality, all that meant was that he knew when he had to avoid the Doctor. A Doctor who hadn't met him yet.
In 1925, while trying to avoid going to a small country house and begging a man who had never met him to explain something that hadn't happened yet, he got drunk. Awesomely, outrageously drunk.
He spun around the dancefloor with anyone he could catch hold of, laughing with girls in short skirts and bobbed hair, cigarettes in elegant holders wafting smoke through the hall. The band played jazz - new and exiting in this age, but Jack wanted Glenn Miller and a blonde and a spaceship tethered to Big Ben, and oh God, his head hurt.
He disengaged from his current partner and stumbled over to the nearest chair, dropping his head into his hands.
Jack had no idea how long he sat there, the party whirled around him, guests wired on substances that would become illegal in years to come, but could currently be purchased for a penny at the nearest chemist's shop. Then a hand dropped to his shoulder and Jack could taste it. A feeling of fire and sugar at the back of his throat. Jack gasped like he was coming back to life and stared at the man in front of him. Blond and passive, he was probably older than he looked, but his eyes made Jack swallow hard.
“When?” he mumbled, knowing the man would understand. Knowing why the man had found him here and why, out of all these people he had touched his shoulder like an old friend.
“November, 1913.” Jack knew without having to check that the date wasn't one of the ones he had carefully avoided. He closed his eyes, but the man pulled him to his feet. “Come with me...” he whispered. “We can help.”
“We?” replied Jack, still reluctant to open his eyes.
“Torchwood.”
Jack laughed. Torchwood had finally caught up with him - It had only been a matter of time, he supposed. The man who couldn't die. He had, when lying awake at night with his eyes screwed shut and praying for sleep, thought about contacting Torchwood. He'd learnt all about it in the Agency, but had always held back. If the Doctor was its enemy, then Jack wanted nothing to do with it.
The man whispered, “It's alright. I know...” and pulled his watch from his pocket, passing it to Jack.
After that it was easy. Jack followed.
In 1935, Jack doesn't go to Tibet. It was remarkably easy. He goes to America instead. Tim sends him, tells him to check out a rash of mysterious murders in Baltimore. Tim says they've detected strange readings, but Jack thinks it might just be a distraction.
Jack shakes his head and gets on the boat. He's had paradox training before, better than Torchwood could ever imagine, and he's well aware of cocking up timelines.
Whatever Jack was expecting when he arrives and makes his way to the construction site where the first body turned up, it wasn't the burning sugary taste of time and loneliness. It surprises him into silence and workers pick their way around him, until one - a youngish man in a suit, who looks out of place amongst the mud and bricks - approaches. Jack knows where the taste he thinks he could be imagining is coming from when the man introduces himself as the architect and shakes his hand. Jack knows the other man can feel it too and they stand there in the middle of the activity all around them.
“You met him too then.” the man finally manages, and Jack can just nod and accept Frank's offer of coffee.
Later, deep in conversation, when Jack is trying to control his anger over the survival of the Daleks (and trying to work out if that means he has to live forever so he can destroy them, or whether he died for nothing in the first place, makes his head hurt.) he realises that Frank's Doctor is the same man as Tim's.
Jack thinks that maybe this trip was arranged just for him - Tim's way of letting him know that he wasn't alone.
It almost helps.
Jack catches up with an old acquaintance in 1956 and he knows who he is, even before he walks away from the accident without a scratch on him.
Jack catches the taste of him, tempered by years and blood. He's still young, and Jack is temporarily stunned, before realising that ninety years for him is only fifteen for Jamie. Jack is supposed to go to a meeting with the Home Office Minister, but right now, he couldn't care less. He turns to Tim, who understands. Tim has always understood Jack in a way that nobody else (well, nobody on the planet anyway,) could possibly do.
“I'll cover for you.” Tim says, fingering the heavy fob watch in his pocket and watching Jamie turn the corner. “You go.”
Jack runs.
He catches up just in time to watch the moped catch on the curb and skid into the young man who had tried to rip the world apart when he had been five. Jack watched as Jamie smashed into the telegraph pole. The teenage boy on the moped shouts in surprise and slams on the breaks, hurrying over to Jamie, who is hunched over on the pavement.
Jack licks his lips, trying to rid them of the sugar coating he knows isn't really there. The metallic smell of time growing stronger as Jamie unfolds himself and takes the boy's hand, pulling himself up.
The accident hurt him, but Jack, knowing what to look for, can see the slight golden glow of future technology as the nanogenes repair the damage.
Well meaning bystanders crowd the two men, but Jack hangs back. He wouldn't know what to say to Jamie anyway - The boy wouldn't remember him, after all, Jamie was dead when Jack met him. Somehow, it's enough to know that Jamie is alive now.
Jack walks away, smiling.
Jack meets Jamie again in 1961. He's been sent to Cardiff by Tim, who Jack suspects of knowing everything and never telling, which is no real surprise to Jack - after all, Tim had a good teacher. He's supposed to be inspecting Torchwood Three which is under the control of Captain James Harper, but the moment he steps into the shabby room decorated by dog-eared leaflets he gets the familiar taste and understands why he's here.
The man who emerges from a back room is smartly dressed and Jack knows instantly that he is part of this. At some stage and in some way, this man has helped to save the world.
“Can I help you?” he says with a faint smile.
Jack inclines his head, and gives the young man his widest smile. “Captain Jack Harkness, and you are?...”
“Thomas Connelly... James is expecting you, Captain.” Thomas presses a button concealed by the counter and a section of wall slides open. Jack laughs.
“Better lead the way then...”
In hindsight, it was obvious. Tim had found Jack, so it wasn't hard to believe he could find the others. The planet was probably full of people whose lives had been touched by a mysterious man in a blue police box.
Jamie shuffles some papers on his desk and looks up at Jack with a knowing smile.
“Captain Harkness... My mother sends her love...”
Thomas fetches them both steaming mugs of tea and when he leaves the office, Jack has to ask, “Did he...” but gets no further.
“He ran me over with a moped.” explains Jamie. “Guess who gave it to him...”
Jack shakes his head. The Doctor has been a stranger to him for almost a hundred years, but it seems very like him. Some people get immortality and nanogenes. Others wind up with a fob watch or a moped. For a second or two, Jack wonders which one he would prefer.
As Jamie shakes his hand, and Jack waves goodbye to Tom, he decides to ask Tim how many more of the Doctor's cast-offs he has to look forward to meeting.
Jack occasionally returns to Cardiff to say hello to Jamie until one day, one godawful day in 1967, Thomas calls and tells Jack that Jamie is dead. Shot. Vaporised by a hostile alien as he tried to reason with it.
Jack can't think of anything to say, so he drops the phone and heads for the nearest nightclub.
The Inferno has an apt name, it's packed and boiling hot. Jack thinks he's stepped into Hell, until the stink of spilt beer, cigarettes and sweat is drowned out by another smell which is deeper and more immediate than Jack has ever known.
A young girl stands in the corner, a fashionable cap pulled low over ironed-flat hair. Jack can taste her from across the crowded room.
Jack fights his way over to her, and holds out his hand. She looks up at him, surprised at first but then with dawning realisation.
“You've met him too, then?” she asks, after taking a deep breath. Jack imagines what he tastes like to her. Like deserted spaces and cordite, maybe.
Jack smiles. This girl is different from the others that Jack has met. She's not just a passing acquaintance, someone whose life has been briefly touched by an alien. She's travelled far away, and set foot on other worlds.
He sits down beside her and kisses her hand like a gentleman. She giggles, which makes her sound like a child and Jack suddenly realises that in linear time, he's over one hundred years older than her.
Sipping her drink and chain smoking short, unfiltered cigarettes, she tells him about a grumpy old man who took her to see the stars, and who changed right in front of her eyes into a whole new person.
Jack listens attentively and realises that the Doctors (plural - Jack resolves not to think too hard about that one.) whom she is describing is whole lifetimes apart from the man he met during the Blitz.
He's heard of Time Lords and their regeneration before, knows that Tim and Frank and Thomas have all faced death beside a different man than he has, but here - in this poky London nightspot with a young girl who has battled both Cybermen and Daleks - is the first time he wonders if he'll ever see HIS Doctor again.
Tim sends Jack to Cardiff in 1969. Jamie's second in command has been struggling with the pressures of the job and Tim declares Jack the ideal candidate to take over. Jack can't help but think that since he has now been working for Torchwood for forty-five years, the promotion may be a little overdue.
Tom is still diligently working behind the counter of the fake information office and cleaning up aliens, a little older and a little greyer maybe, but as Jack watches him watch Neil Armstrong bouncing on the surface of the moon along with the rest of the world, he can see flashes of an awkward teenager in the way he nervously eyes the television.
There's a disturbance at an art gallery in Aberystwyth, and Torchwood Three is sent to check it out. Jack drives, and isn't all that surprised when he can find the gallery by following his nose. The owner, a young, pretty girl, blinks at him in surprise. The team behind him make inappropriate comments behind them as he draws her into the small back room and sits her down on a rickety chair. Jack asks her where she's from.
“1866.” she replies after a pause. “And yourself?”
Jack smiles and tells her. She doesn't even bat an eyelid, tells him in a polite voice that when one has battled robots and the Abominable Snowman, one is apt to believe most things.
Jack closes his eyes and asks how she can stand being so far out of her own time.
“If you'll excuse me, Captain Harkness, you seem to be further away from yours than I am from mine.”
“Did he leave you here?” Jack asks, desperate to know if she has been cast adrift in time, the same as he was.
“I asked him to.” she replies, still a model of Victorian poise. “He was a perfect gentleman, made sure I would be well looked after... I couldn't keep travelling with him. He understood that.”
The team pick up the suspect painting and Jack bids the girl farewell. He asks Thomas to drive home, Jack doesn't think he could prevent himself from swerving off the road.
That night is the first time he deliberately shoots himself, suddenly horrendously aware that he, out of all of them, has been truly abandoned.
Tim keeps Jack in Wales for most of the 70's. Jack knows why, but pretends he doesn't. Instead, he keeps himself to himself and gets Thomas to answer the phone each time UNIT calls. By 1979 he has almost stopped thinking about it, until Tim sends him a new scientific officer.
The tone of Tim's voice should really have tipped him off - that, and the fact that he has always previously allowed Jack to handpick his own staff - but it's not until she sweeps into the Hub that Jack works out who she is.
It's a slightly different feeling than the others. A more bitter, earthy smell, it lacks the fire of the others he's met, but it's enough.
Jack can tell from shaking her hand that here is someone who has never left the planet. She has stayed exactly when she should be, but is no less heroic for it.
She smiles at him, and stays quiet until they are alone.
“He got the TARDIS working again then?” she asks, a heavy weight of a question dropped into a conversation about inconsequential subjects.
Jack asks, and she tells him about a man with a velvet jacket and a classic car. Another girl, another Doctor it seems.
Jack responds with Slitheen warriors and a Time Lord with a goofy smile.
She tells him she has no regrets, but Jack can't quite bring himself to care. She has never been dragged all over space and time. No chance to be left behind or throw herself in front of Daleks. Jack could almost cry when she smiles and recalls leaving the one man that Jack has been waiting several lifetimes for, simply because she wanted to go back to Cambridge and study meteorites.
However, Jack's life has never been that simple.
She works at Torchwood Three for two years in the end, and Jack can't bring himself to become friends with her. The rest of the team wonder about them, he knows, and they concoct stories that neither of them confirm or deny.
Eventually she sweeps into his office and drops her resignation letter on Jack's desk. Jack looks up.
“You don't have to do that.” he says, making a stand at pretence.
“You know I do, Jack.” she replies. “It's not working, and you know it. You can't cope with the idea that I left him and not the other way around. I know you don't mean it, but you hate me for that... I'm sorry.”
Jack nods. “I'm sorry too...”
She kisses him once, on the cheek. “He'll come back.” she whispers softly, before leaving him alone with only his memories and a well-oiled revolver for company.
During the 80's, Tim tries to bring him back to London but Jack resists. He's become attached to Cardiff, and the team of young, enthusiastic people who are anxious to get out in the world and experience everything it has to offer. He visits him sometimes though - Tim's an old man now, confined to a wheelchair while Jack is still the same. Jack has had over a century to get used to that by now though, and thinks that he is used to it.
He's been wrong before.
During one of his visits, in 1985, he visits Tim in hospital. He takes one look at the man in the bed and suddenly he can't stand it any more, turning tail and walking away.
The woman in the cafe was loud, but stopped mid-sentence as soon as Jack pushed open the door. She turned to stare at him. Jack clutched the doorframe simply to hold himself upright. She picked up her cup of tea and hurried over to him, pulling him to an empty seat.
“Who are you?” she demands. Jack winces, her accented voice cuts through the muted conversation of their fellow diners.
Jack shakes his head slowly, unaware of what he's denying. “We have a friend in common.” he says.
She gasps, and starts talking a mile a minute. It's all Jack can do to keep up with her, so he says nothing and just listens.
She's another one who has seen him regenerate, spinning stories of a crazy, wild haired man with an uncommonly long scarf and of a young, blond Doctor who is handy with a tennis ball and wears celery as an accessory.
“And then, when he left me behind at Gatwick...” she says, taking a deep breath. Jack can't believe what he's hearing.
“He left you?” he bursts in. The girl stares at him in shock. Jack gets the feeling that she doesn't get interrupted too often, but he can't help himself. He needs to know he's not the only one who has been dumped out of the TARDIS without even a goodbye.
“He came back.” she replies. “I got into a bit of trouble and he came to the rescue...”
It's like a punch to Jack's gut. He can't understand how he was so easy to leave behind.
Tim dies in 2001. He had a good run, Jack thinks as he stands by the graveside.
When the taste and smell comes, it's suddenly all too overwhelming. The stink is acrid, sulphur and burnt toffee mixed with heavy, dense clouds of nicotine. It's wrong, somehow. So wrong that Jack has to stifle his gag reflex before staggering off in the right direction.
The man in the black sweater is waiting for him. Leaning on the bar of a trendy theme pub, he glances up at Jack when he walks in.
“You're different.” Jack says as he settles himself in a seat.
“You'll never know how different...” he replies. “I've been changed. So have you.”
“You can tell?” asks Jack. Not much surprises him anymore.
The man in black raises an eyebrow. “Believe me, you're not the strangest thing I've seen... If you think your timeline is screwed, you should see mine!” he laughs at that, and takes a healthy swig of his drink. Jack doesn't reply.
Finally the man turns to Jack and sighs deeply. “I'm waiting for him to come back too.” he says, like he's admitting to a horrible crime. “Or rather, I'm waiting for him to be ready to be found.”
“He left me.” mumbles Jack.
The man reaches out and pats Jack's hand. “And you'll find him again, don't worry.”
“Do you know that for a fact?” Jack asks, looking up. The man smiles.
“With a life like yours, I would think it's a certainty.”
Jack thinks for a while. “If you're going to see him again, you can tell him...” he starts, unsure of what he wants to say.
His companion shakes his head. “No.” he says, picking up his jacket. Black leather, Jack notices with a pang of regret. “No more paradoxes.” He holds out his hand for Jack to shake. He looks at it for a few seconds before grasping it tightly.
“You're wrong about the paradoxes.” says Jack. He knows his life has never been that simple. “But I think you might be right about the Doctor.”
The man in black pulls his hand away and turns to leave. Jack watches him go, filled with a new kind of hope that had always eluded him before.
The world, and maybe even the universe is filled with people who have loved the Doctor. Sometimes they leave him, and sometimes it happens the other way around, but the smell of neon fire and jelly babies will always follow behind them - marked forever by their association with the most amazing man in the galaxy.
Jack was one of them once, and maybe he will be again.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
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