Fic: Drift Factor
Fandom: Torchwood
Pairing: Jack/John, past and present
Spoilers: Through series 2
Rating: PG-14
Words: 3,800
The title is a bit of old Air Force lingo. If you have a high drift factor, you’re unreliable.
Concrit welcomed!
* * *
Loathe as he was to admit it, Captain John Hart was trapped. And ‘trapped’ was not a state he was known to tolerate with any sort of grace.
He’d spent months tracking down the man currently going by the name of Captain Jack Harkness. It would have been easier finding the proverbial needle in a haystack, as needles (to the best of his knowledge) did not possession Vortex Manipulators nor a basic understanding of how to change their identities on a whim. John couldn’t remember having spent this much time and effort on a single project before in his life, and now he’d found the man and Jack wouldn’t have anything to do with him.
Admittedly, there had been that whole mess with the bombs and the brother and the burying alive… but even so, Jack couldn’t hold a grudge forever, could he? Jack just needed a bit of time, a bit of space.
And therein lay the problem, because if John spent much longer in this little city (which was seemingly comprised solely of brave, stoic little Gwen Coopers and Ianto Joneses and a fucking infinite amount of rain) he would most likely lose his mind.
What John needed was a break. He had time to kill, a perfectly good means of transport around his right wrist and a fairly good idea of where he’d rather be at the moment.
So really, the only question was a matter of when.
*
Working his jaw to relieve the post-jump pressure in his ears, John knew that he had made it back to the Time Agency before he’d even looked up from his wrist strap. Once you’d been inside, there would never be any mistaking the place.
The halls hummed with aesthetically pleasing white noise designed to keep the Agents calm yet alert, and there was a slight tang in the air from the perfect blend of universal anti-bac meant to decontaminate without obliterating their immune systems. It was all so clean, so regimented, so orderly…
John had cheered out loud when he learned that the Agency had finally devoured itself.
As far as he could tell, he’d landed himself up on the third level. That Cardiff Rift would give you an extra nudge, whether you needed it or not. Never mind. He knew where he was going.
Starting down the narrow white corridor, the bank of windows on his right let him look down on a class of cadets training in the large common below. Sonic Weaponry, from the looks of it. Standard blue uniforms as far as the eye could see, dotted infrequently with the gun-metal grey of a CO. John spared a glance at his own red jacket, looking for all the world like something the cadets might use for target practice. He grinned, decided not to test his recently tenuous luck, and moved along.
At the end of the hallway, the doors to the lift hissed open before John could reach for the keypad and he was all but run over by a vaguely familiar ashy-haired fellow with the identi-badge of a mechanic on his chest. John threw him a haphazard salute, smirking at the resulting double-take and hasty aversion of eyes. They still lived in such superstitious terror of tangling their precious timelines here. If he didn’t have somewhere better to be, John would’ve liked to explore just how deep it went, to see if the poor fool had the sense of self-preservation to fight back when the impossible grabbed him by the throat.
It was the sole gap that John had discovered in their state of the art security, the one that would eventually lead to their destruction: The supposedly all-powerful Time Agency was defenseless against invasion by their future selves.
The lift didn’t give him the slightest bit of trouble when he asked it to float him up to the fifth level where the resident Agents bunked.
*
John had been with the Agency for just over a year and was already long past bored with the place when they’d moved him into Jack’s squadron and John had promptly and unequivocally fallen in love with the man.
The thing about Time Agents… They were supposed to be fluid creatures, to borrow a phrase from one of the many lectures he’d been all but physically forced to sit through as a cadet. They were meant to fit into any space, to adapt and become unnoticeable in any situation. They were to be like ghosts. (If you believed the rumours, there were at least a couple species that actually had them pegged as such.)
An Agent hanging on to any permanent sense of personality would become more… factual. No longer an innocuous fluid, but something solid that would break the surface of their destinations like a hypodermic needle. Like a bullet
Of everyone in that damned place, Jack had been the most real creature that he’d met.
Not to mention the allure of such a mysterious past. Most people only knew that Jack wouldn’t talk about his family and that, under pressure, a sharp, choppy accent common to the refugee planets would creep into his speech. So John watched him, practically studied him, noting his obsession with fresh water and his tendency to keep an eye to the skies when they were outdoors. His nearly reverent fascination with snow. John took a stab in the dark.
In retrospect, John probably could’ve been more tactful when he confronted Jack with his hunch about the Boeshane Peninsula. Jack had broken two of his fingers, but John wore his discovery along with his splints like badges of honour.
*
Even if John didn’t remember the way to Jack’s room like the back of his own Vortex Manipulator, it would’ve been easy enough to figure out where he lived. His was the only door in the corridor standing open. Doors were supposed to be kept shut at all times, but Jack had wedged a decorative chunk of diamagnesium into the jamb to override the closing mechanism and swore blind to Maintenance that it had always been that way. Anyone who’d been at the Agency longer than a week knew the tacit rule: if Jack’s door was closed, you really didn’t want to go barging in without an invite.
Trust Jack to devise some means of privacy in a building without locks.
Stepping inside the small familiar room, John found himself struck by the strangest bit of nostalgia. What was there to miss? He was here now, wasn’t he?
Jack… although he certainly wouldn’t answer to that name in this time… was seated with his back to John at the Agency-issue desk in front of the Agency-issue consol, hard at work like a good little solider. The John Hart of this timeline, luckily, was not present at the moment. That might’ve been embarrassing, although the thought of the higher ups trying to fill out the incident reports on that mess would have almost been worth it.
“Hello, Boeshane,” John said, touching his wrist strap and hearing the door slide shut behind him.
Jack spared him the briefest of glances. “I thought they had you off world until tomorrow, Lieutenant.”
“It’s ‘Captain’ now, matter of fact.”
Watching the words sink in and finding himself the sudden subject of Jack’s full attention was a beautiful moment. John leaned against the closed door, thumbs in his holster straps, and took advantage of Jack’s shock to really look at the man. He was young, obviously, the hair thicker, the skin smoother, but there was more to it than the physical. There were centuries missing from Jack’s gaze. (But then, the standard Agency blue had always worked miracles with Jack’s eyes.)
“Oh, you idiot,” Jack said and lurched to his feet without taking his eyes off John. “What did you do? When the hell are you coming from? You’re old.” He took an involuntary step towards John, clearly torn between that deeply ingrained fear of crossing timelines and surreptitious delight. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Come on, show some respect for a senior officer,” John chided, grinning. “Salute me or something. It’ll be fun.” He pushed away from the door.
“Whoa!” Jack held up his hand, his eyes widening. God, he was so young. “Just… stay there a minute.”
John rolled his eyes while Jack fumbled with his wrist strap. “I can think of a better way for you to tell I’m really me,” he said, holding out his arms while Jack scanned him. “Several, actually.”
Jack shot him a stern look, but he wasn’t paying as much attention to his scan as he should have been. Trepidation was giving was to curiosity now, and that was Jack through and through. Dangle something intriguing with a hint of danger in front of him and he was yours.
“Once in a lifetime opportunity, this,” John commented quietly, looking at Jack through his eyelashes. “You’re wasting time, Boeshane. Quit playing with your wrist strap and come say hello.”
Jack swore under his breath. “If this tears a hole in time and gets us all killed, I’m blaming you,” he muttered, striding forward and driving John backwards into the wall with his hands and his body. Jack’s kiss caught him on an exhale and then he was choking on Jack’s tongue, tearing blindly at the idiotic blue jumpsuit and not giving a damn about timelines or which way was up. Being with Jack had always been a near death experience like that.
*
The first time that John had propositioned Jack, Jack had turned him down cold. Needless to say, it came as a bit of a shock.
Jack, the deserving recipient of every ‘open door policy’ joke the Agents could dream up, had likely never turned someone down before in his life. And John had never actually had to formally proposition someone before. It was usually just a matter of dropping a hint and his trousers.
In his surprise, he had let Jack turn his back on him and walk a good ten steps before John’s sense of pride had remembered itself.
“What the bloody hell is that supposed to mean?” he demanded, storming after Jack and resisting the urge to get his attention with a kunai in the back, just in case this was all some sort of a sick test. You never could tell, with Jack.
“’No’? Last I heard, it meant no,” Jack said, keeping an eye on John but still walking. “Unless you’re talking to a Rhetanox, but they’re just funny like that.”
“You’re saying no,” John clarified, still stuck on that point. He grabbed Jack’s arm and yanked him to a halt. “Why? We’d be… atomic. Dynamite. Fucking nuclear.”
“I like the mass destruction theme,” said Jack. He put his hands on John’s shoulders, all blue-eyed earnesty and a gentle smile. (John vibrated with indignity.) “You’re going to stop following me now, Lieutenant.”
“Oh, piss off. Just tell me why not.”
Jack’s smile didn’t change when he leaned in to whisper in John’s ear: “Because I think you’re insane.”
*
John bit at Jack’s lip in a way that this timeline’s self hadn’t discovered Jack liked yet and felt continuity shiver around them like ozone in the atmosphere, swirling in dangerous little eddies.
“Careful,” Jack hissed.
“S’just a little turbulence.”
“You’re really not worth tearing time apart for,” Jack grumbled, pulling off John’s clothes and weapons with careful efficiency. (That was another thing about Time Agents: undress them without paying close attention and somebody was going to lose a finger.)
“Maybe I am and you just don’t know it yet.” He let go of Jack long enough to let him pull his shirt over his head, then shoved Jack towards his awful little bed, pulling the jumpsuit the rest of the way off almost before Jack’s back had hit the mattress. He shoved his own trousers down, kicked them off, and crawled onto the bed, already aching to get his hands (and mouth and all the other funs bits) on Jack’s youth-hard, nearly unmarked body.
“This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Jack breathed, looking up at him with something akin to religious terror.
“Just you wait,” John laughed, and bent to kiss him.
*
The way John saw it, turning him down for sex was incredibly bad luck. To say that the squadron’s next mission had gone badly would be one serious fucking understatement.
John materialized at the muster point mid-roll in a shower of shrapnel, dark to the elbows with three shades of blood, his ears still ringing from the mercury bomb that had all but exploded on top of him. He staggered to his feet inside the abandoned shack, tripped over a cadet that was crouched on the wooden floor clutching his head, and realized that Jack wasn’t there.
“Where’s Boeshane?” he yelled at the cadet, kicking him in the ribs when he didn’t received an immediate answer. “Where’s your fucking commander?”
“I don’t know! Please, I don’t know! He went back in!”
“What?!”
There was a harsh crackle, the sound of too much matter shoved suddenly through too little space, and then there was Jack with an unconscious Agent slung over his shoulder, blood pouring from his brow and his blaster smoking in his free hand.
John could’ve positively shot the bastard for scaring him like that.
Jack dropped the man that he was carrying, shoved John out of the way and hauled Utterly Useless Cadet to his feet by his collar, slamming him against the wall with a thud that rattled the place and jamming the hot muzzle of his blaster into the soft flesh under his chin. “You cowardly son of a bitch,” Jack said, low and deadly, the accent coming out sharper than ever. “You left him behind. Tell me why I shouldn’t vaporize you right here.”
“They said we could pull out if it got bad!” the cadet wailed, on his toes trying to squirm away from the blaster. “Our orders…”
“You don’t leave a man behind!” Jack shouted, shaking him so that his teeth clicked before throwing him down. Blood was running into Jack’s eyes, his face ugly with rage. “I want you out of this unit. You’re going to request a transfer when we get back and you are never going to pull a stunt like that again. Clear?”
The cadet nodded jerkily, visibly trembling. Jack holstered his blaster with mechanical motions and glanced at John. “What the hell are you grinning at?”
“Nothing,” John said, his mouth dry and his dick halfway to hard. He cleared his throat. “Fun fight.”
Jack stared at him and opened his mouth to reply when a rapid series of clicks echoed through the shack. They all froze and Jack cursed vividly. “They’ve found us. Lieutenant, help me with Gray. We’ve got to move, now.”
John hauled the unconscious man up while Jack punched in the new coordinates. A time-jump with dead weight wasn’t going to be fun and when Jack slung the man’s arm around his shoulders, John could feel him shaking from there, so John didn’t bother to mention that there wasn’t a single person at the Agency named ‘Gray’.
Back at headquarters, the whole lot of them were unceremoniously herded into Decontamination, a process which had never succeeded in making John feel any cleaner, just scalded and vaguely lemony. Restless and reckless with adrenaline, John lasted about fifteen minutes before he went looking for Jack again. The rage that he’d seen in the man, that potential for serious destruction… It had been incredible. Damned if John was going to let one little ‘no’ get between him and something that amazing. He found his way to Jack’s quarters and hesitated in the threshold, one of the few times in his life that he’d been unsure of what to say.
Jack was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, snug in between his bed and desk, stupid-eyed with painkillers. Someone had seen to his head, at least. Jack dragged his gaze out of the middle distance and focused on John. “What?”
“I just wanted…” He got lost in a pause. “…to tell you the particle canopy didn’t work out there.”
Jack raised his eyebrows. “Believe it or not, I figured that out when the cruiser flew through it.”
Well, whatever he’d come here for, this wasn’t it. He wanted to see Jack angry again, wanted to see him rampant. “I would’ve left him behind,” John admitted, “Actually, I think he would’ve made a very nice shield.”
“You ever consider this is why they haven’t given you a partner?”
“It’s crossed my mind. Listen,” he said, “You can say what you like about me, but I think you’re just as twisted as the rest of us. Sometimes I think you’re worse and I… I fucking want you, you bastard. Let me come in.”
Jack exhaled sharply, not quite a laugh, and held out his hand without getting up. John stepped into the room and, for the first time, that damned door had been closed for him.
They came together half on half off Jack’s narrow bed, rough and raw and fast. Jack’s skin was fever-hot and he tasted of brine, like blood or tears.
It had all been a bit like throwing himself into the path of a particularly violent Rift storm. Quite a bit actually. No bloody idea where it would land them, but one hell of a rush.
“Who’s Gray?” John asked afterwards, sleepily scratching designs on Jack’s chest. “You lost them before the Agency got you, didn’t you?”
Jack shot him one of those withering glances that he hadn’t quite perfectly yet. “Anyone ever tell you that you’ve got a funny notion of pillow talk?”
“Ooh, baby, I’ve been with the Face of Boe and I’ll never be the same again… Quick, autograph my arse, would you?”
“Better. Try it again: same voice, less smirk.”
“Really, though,” John pressed, “A partner? Lover? Was he…”
“He was my brother.” Jack’s smile was strained. “Let it go, Lieutenant. It’s not your problem.”
(Needless to say, John eventually wound up wishing that he’d taken that advice.)
*
There should be a word, John decided, for the particular feeling of wondering if you’re better or worse in bed than your former self and knowing that whatever the answer, you’ve lost either way. On the flip side, there probably weren’t too many people besides himself that would get much use out of it.
“You come back tomorrow,” Jack murmured, idly running his fingers over John’s face, touching his throat. He seemed fascinated by all the little signs of age, the new scars. “Think you’ll be sorry you missed this?”
“Use your head. You never tell me about this because I never knew.”
“Right.” Jack seemed to consider that for a moment, then rolled to face him, sliding his arm across John’s chest. “So, am I dead? Where you’re coming from?”
“I couldn’t just be dropping in for a visit?”
“Yeah? What took you so long?” Jack countered, with a little gesture that seemed to eloquently encompass the years. (John narrowed his eyes.) “Seriously. Was it you? Did you finally kill me? I always thought you might.”
“You’re not dead,” John said. “Definitely not dead. In fact, if I were you, I really wouldn’t worry about…”
Continuity gave a grumpy warning wobble around them and Jack flinched. John tried to remind himself to be a good little time traveler and speak in nice safe platitudes like you were supposed to.
“What are you, though? Forty? Forty-five?” Jack guessed, speaking low like maybe the universe wouldn’t notice him breaking at least half a dozen quantum laws if he just whispered. “I never thought we’d live that long.”
“It’s not all sunshine and sonic cannons, mate. You’re in this for the long haul.”
Jack studied him, looking mildly troubled. He was easier to read now with some years between them, when John could look at him without having to repress the subtle but disturbing urge to worship the man. He’d been obsessed to the point of blindness when he’d been living in this timeline, but to look at Jack now… He was just another beautiful, twisted kid running on bad memories and purposelessness.
Maybe that’s where the nostalgia was coming from. It wasn’t that John wanted to be back here again. He wanted to be who he had been again.
John sighed and sat up, crawling over Jack and getting to his feet, casting around for the various articles of his clothing.
“Leaving soon so?”
“I forgot what rubbish you were at afterglow.”
“You can talk.” Jack watched him dress, smiling slightly. “I’m going to seriously regret this someday, aren’t I?”
“Oh yeah, probably. But it was fun, wasn’t it?”
Jack laughed and stretched. “I wouldn’t say no if you dropped by again some time.”
Snapping his wrist strap on, John hesitated, considering the next five years that he would spend in this timeline, considering Jack’s grumbling insistence that the mess with the time loop had somehow been all his fault. “By the way,” he said, keying in the coordinates that would send him back to the 21st century, “When they offer us that mission in the Adelaide Five next month? Take it.”
He managed to keep from laughing until the Vortex grabbed hold of him and dragged him into the future.
*
When John touched down in Cardiff near the Millennium Centre, it was raining harder than ever. Wonder of bloody wonders.
“I’m really starting to hate this planet,” he remarked, peering up into the soggy darkness.
His wrist strap beeped. There were exactly seven people in existence that had his frequency and it was a fair bet where this call was coming from. He answered it, audio only, hanging on to the image of Jack before he was Jack, before he was this eternally broken, yet unbreakable thing.
“Have a nice trip?” Jack asked, dangerously sweet.
“Not bad. At least it wasn’t raining there,” John said. “Are you tracking me?”
“Don’t flatter yourself. We track all Rift activity.”
John chuckled and started walking. The lone eye of a CCTV camera mounted on a lamppost followed his progress down the length of the Plass. Radio silence from Jack.
“I was with you,” he blurted. (John Hart, who had withstood interrogation tactics that this backwards century hadn’t yet dreamt of, blurted.) “I went back, visited you at the Agency.”
There was a nasty moment of quiet and then the sound of Jack’s chuckle coming through clear over the rain. “Oh, that. I’d forgotten about that. I said that I would regret it, didn’t I?”
“You don’t,” John scoffed. He located the block in the pavement with the crack in it, nudging its neighbour with his boot.
“No, I don’t. What are you doing up there, John?”
“It’s raining,” John said. He stepped onto the invisible lift, looked towards the camera. “Let me in.”
After a moment, the lift began to descend.
* * * * *
Pairing: Jack/John, past and present
Spoilers: Through series 2
Rating: PG-14
Words: 3,800
The title is a bit of old Air Force lingo. If you have a high drift factor, you’re unreliable.
Concrit welcomed!
* * *
Loathe as he was to admit it, Captain John Hart was trapped. And ‘trapped’ was not a state he was known to tolerate with any sort of grace.
He’d spent months tracking down the man currently going by the name of Captain Jack Harkness. It would have been easier finding the proverbial needle in a haystack, as needles (to the best of his knowledge) did not possession Vortex Manipulators nor a basic understanding of how to change their identities on a whim. John couldn’t remember having spent this much time and effort on a single project before in his life, and now he’d found the man and Jack wouldn’t have anything to do with him.
Admittedly, there had been that whole mess with the bombs and the brother and the burying alive… but even so, Jack couldn’t hold a grudge forever, could he? Jack just needed a bit of time, a bit of space.
And therein lay the problem, because if John spent much longer in this little city (which was seemingly comprised solely of brave, stoic little Gwen Coopers and Ianto Joneses and a fucking infinite amount of rain) he would most likely lose his mind.
What John needed was a break. He had time to kill, a perfectly good means of transport around his right wrist and a fairly good idea of where he’d rather be at the moment.
So really, the only question was a matter of when.
*
Working his jaw to relieve the post-jump pressure in his ears, John knew that he had made it back to the Time Agency before he’d even looked up from his wrist strap. Once you’d been inside, there would never be any mistaking the place.
The halls hummed with aesthetically pleasing white noise designed to keep the Agents calm yet alert, and there was a slight tang in the air from the perfect blend of universal anti-bac meant to decontaminate without obliterating their immune systems. It was all so clean, so regimented, so orderly…
John had cheered out loud when he learned that the Agency had finally devoured itself.
As far as he could tell, he’d landed himself up on the third level. That Cardiff Rift would give you an extra nudge, whether you needed it or not. Never mind. He knew where he was going.
Starting down the narrow white corridor, the bank of windows on his right let him look down on a class of cadets training in the large common below. Sonic Weaponry, from the looks of it. Standard blue uniforms as far as the eye could see, dotted infrequently with the gun-metal grey of a CO. John spared a glance at his own red jacket, looking for all the world like something the cadets might use for target practice. He grinned, decided not to test his recently tenuous luck, and moved along.
At the end of the hallway, the doors to the lift hissed open before John could reach for the keypad and he was all but run over by a vaguely familiar ashy-haired fellow with the identi-badge of a mechanic on his chest. John threw him a haphazard salute, smirking at the resulting double-take and hasty aversion of eyes. They still lived in such superstitious terror of tangling their precious timelines here. If he didn’t have somewhere better to be, John would’ve liked to explore just how deep it went, to see if the poor fool had the sense of self-preservation to fight back when the impossible grabbed him by the throat.
It was the sole gap that John had discovered in their state of the art security, the one that would eventually lead to their destruction: The supposedly all-powerful Time Agency was defenseless against invasion by their future selves.
The lift didn’t give him the slightest bit of trouble when he asked it to float him up to the fifth level where the resident Agents bunked.
*
John had been with the Agency for just over a year and was already long past bored with the place when they’d moved him into Jack’s squadron and John had promptly and unequivocally fallen in love with the man.
The thing about Time Agents… They were supposed to be fluid creatures, to borrow a phrase from one of the many lectures he’d been all but physically forced to sit through as a cadet. They were meant to fit into any space, to adapt and become unnoticeable in any situation. They were to be like ghosts. (If you believed the rumours, there were at least a couple species that actually had them pegged as such.)
An Agent hanging on to any permanent sense of personality would become more… factual. No longer an innocuous fluid, but something solid that would break the surface of their destinations like a hypodermic needle. Like a bullet
Of everyone in that damned place, Jack had been the most real creature that he’d met.
Not to mention the allure of such a mysterious past. Most people only knew that Jack wouldn’t talk about his family and that, under pressure, a sharp, choppy accent common to the refugee planets would creep into his speech. So John watched him, practically studied him, noting his obsession with fresh water and his tendency to keep an eye to the skies when they were outdoors. His nearly reverent fascination with snow. John took a stab in the dark.
In retrospect, John probably could’ve been more tactful when he confronted Jack with his hunch about the Boeshane Peninsula. Jack had broken two of his fingers, but John wore his discovery along with his splints like badges of honour.
*
Even if John didn’t remember the way to Jack’s room like the back of his own Vortex Manipulator, it would’ve been easy enough to figure out where he lived. His was the only door in the corridor standing open. Doors were supposed to be kept shut at all times, but Jack had wedged a decorative chunk of diamagnesium into the jamb to override the closing mechanism and swore blind to Maintenance that it had always been that way. Anyone who’d been at the Agency longer than a week knew the tacit rule: if Jack’s door was closed, you really didn’t want to go barging in without an invite.
Trust Jack to devise some means of privacy in a building without locks.
Stepping inside the small familiar room, John found himself struck by the strangest bit of nostalgia. What was there to miss? He was here now, wasn’t he?
Jack… although he certainly wouldn’t answer to that name in this time… was seated with his back to John at the Agency-issue desk in front of the Agency-issue consol, hard at work like a good little solider. The John Hart of this timeline, luckily, was not present at the moment. That might’ve been embarrassing, although the thought of the higher ups trying to fill out the incident reports on that mess would have almost been worth it.
“Hello, Boeshane,” John said, touching his wrist strap and hearing the door slide shut behind him.
Jack spared him the briefest of glances. “I thought they had you off world until tomorrow, Lieutenant.”
“It’s ‘Captain’ now, matter of fact.”
Watching the words sink in and finding himself the sudden subject of Jack’s full attention was a beautiful moment. John leaned against the closed door, thumbs in his holster straps, and took advantage of Jack’s shock to really look at the man. He was young, obviously, the hair thicker, the skin smoother, but there was more to it than the physical. There were centuries missing from Jack’s gaze. (But then, the standard Agency blue had always worked miracles with Jack’s eyes.)
“Oh, you idiot,” Jack said and lurched to his feet without taking his eyes off John. “What did you do? When the hell are you coming from? You’re old.” He took an involuntary step towards John, clearly torn between that deeply ingrained fear of crossing timelines and surreptitious delight. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Come on, show some respect for a senior officer,” John chided, grinning. “Salute me or something. It’ll be fun.” He pushed away from the door.
“Whoa!” Jack held up his hand, his eyes widening. God, he was so young. “Just… stay there a minute.”
John rolled his eyes while Jack fumbled with his wrist strap. “I can think of a better way for you to tell I’m really me,” he said, holding out his arms while Jack scanned him. “Several, actually.”
Jack shot him a stern look, but he wasn’t paying as much attention to his scan as he should have been. Trepidation was giving was to curiosity now, and that was Jack through and through. Dangle something intriguing with a hint of danger in front of him and he was yours.
“Once in a lifetime opportunity, this,” John commented quietly, looking at Jack through his eyelashes. “You’re wasting time, Boeshane. Quit playing with your wrist strap and come say hello.”
Jack swore under his breath. “If this tears a hole in time and gets us all killed, I’m blaming you,” he muttered, striding forward and driving John backwards into the wall with his hands and his body. Jack’s kiss caught him on an exhale and then he was choking on Jack’s tongue, tearing blindly at the idiotic blue jumpsuit and not giving a damn about timelines or which way was up. Being with Jack had always been a near death experience like that.
*
The first time that John had propositioned Jack, Jack had turned him down cold. Needless to say, it came as a bit of a shock.
Jack, the deserving recipient of every ‘open door policy’ joke the Agents could dream up, had likely never turned someone down before in his life. And John had never actually had to formally proposition someone before. It was usually just a matter of dropping a hint and his trousers.
In his surprise, he had let Jack turn his back on him and walk a good ten steps before John’s sense of pride had remembered itself.
“What the bloody hell is that supposed to mean?” he demanded, storming after Jack and resisting the urge to get his attention with a kunai in the back, just in case this was all some sort of a sick test. You never could tell, with Jack.
“’No’? Last I heard, it meant no,” Jack said, keeping an eye on John but still walking. “Unless you’re talking to a Rhetanox, but they’re just funny like that.”
“You’re saying no,” John clarified, still stuck on that point. He grabbed Jack’s arm and yanked him to a halt. “Why? We’d be… atomic. Dynamite. Fucking nuclear.”
“I like the mass destruction theme,” said Jack. He put his hands on John’s shoulders, all blue-eyed earnesty and a gentle smile. (John vibrated with indignity.) “You’re going to stop following me now, Lieutenant.”
“Oh, piss off. Just tell me why not.”
Jack’s smile didn’t change when he leaned in to whisper in John’s ear: “Because I think you’re insane.”
*
John bit at Jack’s lip in a way that this timeline’s self hadn’t discovered Jack liked yet and felt continuity shiver around them like ozone in the atmosphere, swirling in dangerous little eddies.
“Careful,” Jack hissed.
“S’just a little turbulence.”
“You’re really not worth tearing time apart for,” Jack grumbled, pulling off John’s clothes and weapons with careful efficiency. (That was another thing about Time Agents: undress them without paying close attention and somebody was going to lose a finger.)
“Maybe I am and you just don’t know it yet.” He let go of Jack long enough to let him pull his shirt over his head, then shoved Jack towards his awful little bed, pulling the jumpsuit the rest of the way off almost before Jack’s back had hit the mattress. He shoved his own trousers down, kicked them off, and crawled onto the bed, already aching to get his hands (and mouth and all the other funs bits) on Jack’s youth-hard, nearly unmarked body.
“This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Jack breathed, looking up at him with something akin to religious terror.
“Just you wait,” John laughed, and bent to kiss him.
*
The way John saw it, turning him down for sex was incredibly bad luck. To say that the squadron’s next mission had gone badly would be one serious fucking understatement.
John materialized at the muster point mid-roll in a shower of shrapnel, dark to the elbows with three shades of blood, his ears still ringing from the mercury bomb that had all but exploded on top of him. He staggered to his feet inside the abandoned shack, tripped over a cadet that was crouched on the wooden floor clutching his head, and realized that Jack wasn’t there.
“Where’s Boeshane?” he yelled at the cadet, kicking him in the ribs when he didn’t received an immediate answer. “Where’s your fucking commander?”
“I don’t know! Please, I don’t know! He went back in!”
“What?!”
There was a harsh crackle, the sound of too much matter shoved suddenly through too little space, and then there was Jack with an unconscious Agent slung over his shoulder, blood pouring from his brow and his blaster smoking in his free hand.
John could’ve positively shot the bastard for scaring him like that.
Jack dropped the man that he was carrying, shoved John out of the way and hauled Utterly Useless Cadet to his feet by his collar, slamming him against the wall with a thud that rattled the place and jamming the hot muzzle of his blaster into the soft flesh under his chin. “You cowardly son of a bitch,” Jack said, low and deadly, the accent coming out sharper than ever. “You left him behind. Tell me why I shouldn’t vaporize you right here.”
“They said we could pull out if it got bad!” the cadet wailed, on his toes trying to squirm away from the blaster. “Our orders…”
“You don’t leave a man behind!” Jack shouted, shaking him so that his teeth clicked before throwing him down. Blood was running into Jack’s eyes, his face ugly with rage. “I want you out of this unit. You’re going to request a transfer when we get back and you are never going to pull a stunt like that again. Clear?”
The cadet nodded jerkily, visibly trembling. Jack holstered his blaster with mechanical motions and glanced at John. “What the hell are you grinning at?”
“Nothing,” John said, his mouth dry and his dick halfway to hard. He cleared his throat. “Fun fight.”
Jack stared at him and opened his mouth to reply when a rapid series of clicks echoed through the shack. They all froze and Jack cursed vividly. “They’ve found us. Lieutenant, help me with Gray. We’ve got to move, now.”
John hauled the unconscious man up while Jack punched in the new coordinates. A time-jump with dead weight wasn’t going to be fun and when Jack slung the man’s arm around his shoulders, John could feel him shaking from there, so John didn’t bother to mention that there wasn’t a single person at the Agency named ‘Gray’.
Back at headquarters, the whole lot of them were unceremoniously herded into Decontamination, a process which had never succeeded in making John feel any cleaner, just scalded and vaguely lemony. Restless and reckless with adrenaline, John lasted about fifteen minutes before he went looking for Jack again. The rage that he’d seen in the man, that potential for serious destruction… It had been incredible. Damned if John was going to let one little ‘no’ get between him and something that amazing. He found his way to Jack’s quarters and hesitated in the threshold, one of the few times in his life that he’d been unsure of what to say.
Jack was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, snug in between his bed and desk, stupid-eyed with painkillers. Someone had seen to his head, at least. Jack dragged his gaze out of the middle distance and focused on John. “What?”
“I just wanted…” He got lost in a pause. “…to tell you the particle canopy didn’t work out there.”
Jack raised his eyebrows. “Believe it or not, I figured that out when the cruiser flew through it.”
Well, whatever he’d come here for, this wasn’t it. He wanted to see Jack angry again, wanted to see him rampant. “I would’ve left him behind,” John admitted, “Actually, I think he would’ve made a very nice shield.”
“You ever consider this is why they haven’t given you a partner?”
“It’s crossed my mind. Listen,” he said, “You can say what you like about me, but I think you’re just as twisted as the rest of us. Sometimes I think you’re worse and I… I fucking want you, you bastard. Let me come in.”
Jack exhaled sharply, not quite a laugh, and held out his hand without getting up. John stepped into the room and, for the first time, that damned door had been closed for him.
They came together half on half off Jack’s narrow bed, rough and raw and fast. Jack’s skin was fever-hot and he tasted of brine, like blood or tears.
It had all been a bit like throwing himself into the path of a particularly violent Rift storm. Quite a bit actually. No bloody idea where it would land them, but one hell of a rush.
“Who’s Gray?” John asked afterwards, sleepily scratching designs on Jack’s chest. “You lost them before the Agency got you, didn’t you?”
Jack shot him one of those withering glances that he hadn’t quite perfectly yet. “Anyone ever tell you that you’ve got a funny notion of pillow talk?”
“Ooh, baby, I’ve been with the Face of Boe and I’ll never be the same again… Quick, autograph my arse, would you?”
“Better. Try it again: same voice, less smirk.”
“Really, though,” John pressed, “A partner? Lover? Was he…”
“He was my brother.” Jack’s smile was strained. “Let it go, Lieutenant. It’s not your problem.”
(Needless to say, John eventually wound up wishing that he’d taken that advice.)
*
There should be a word, John decided, for the particular feeling of wondering if you’re better or worse in bed than your former self and knowing that whatever the answer, you’ve lost either way. On the flip side, there probably weren’t too many people besides himself that would get much use out of it.
“You come back tomorrow,” Jack murmured, idly running his fingers over John’s face, touching his throat. He seemed fascinated by all the little signs of age, the new scars. “Think you’ll be sorry you missed this?”
“Use your head. You never tell me about this because I never knew.”
“Right.” Jack seemed to consider that for a moment, then rolled to face him, sliding his arm across John’s chest. “So, am I dead? Where you’re coming from?”
“I couldn’t just be dropping in for a visit?”
“Yeah? What took you so long?” Jack countered, with a little gesture that seemed to eloquently encompass the years. (John narrowed his eyes.) “Seriously. Was it you? Did you finally kill me? I always thought you might.”
“You’re not dead,” John said. “Definitely not dead. In fact, if I were you, I really wouldn’t worry about…”
Continuity gave a grumpy warning wobble around them and Jack flinched. John tried to remind himself to be a good little time traveler and speak in nice safe platitudes like you were supposed to.
“What are you, though? Forty? Forty-five?” Jack guessed, speaking low like maybe the universe wouldn’t notice him breaking at least half a dozen quantum laws if he just whispered. “I never thought we’d live that long.”
“It’s not all sunshine and sonic cannons, mate. You’re in this for the long haul.”
Jack studied him, looking mildly troubled. He was easier to read now with some years between them, when John could look at him without having to repress the subtle but disturbing urge to worship the man. He’d been obsessed to the point of blindness when he’d been living in this timeline, but to look at Jack now… He was just another beautiful, twisted kid running on bad memories and purposelessness.
Maybe that’s where the nostalgia was coming from. It wasn’t that John wanted to be back here again. He wanted to be who he had been again.
John sighed and sat up, crawling over Jack and getting to his feet, casting around for the various articles of his clothing.
“Leaving soon so?”
“I forgot what rubbish you were at afterglow.”
“You can talk.” Jack watched him dress, smiling slightly. “I’m going to seriously regret this someday, aren’t I?”
“Oh yeah, probably. But it was fun, wasn’t it?”
Jack laughed and stretched. “I wouldn’t say no if you dropped by again some time.”
Snapping his wrist strap on, John hesitated, considering the next five years that he would spend in this timeline, considering Jack’s grumbling insistence that the mess with the time loop had somehow been all his fault. “By the way,” he said, keying in the coordinates that would send him back to the 21st century, “When they offer us that mission in the Adelaide Five next month? Take it.”
He managed to keep from laughing until the Vortex grabbed hold of him and dragged him into the future.
*
When John touched down in Cardiff near the Millennium Centre, it was raining harder than ever. Wonder of bloody wonders.
“I’m really starting to hate this planet,” he remarked, peering up into the soggy darkness.
His wrist strap beeped. There were exactly seven people in existence that had his frequency and it was a fair bet where this call was coming from. He answered it, audio only, hanging on to the image of Jack before he was Jack, before he was this eternally broken, yet unbreakable thing.
“Have a nice trip?” Jack asked, dangerously sweet.
“Not bad. At least it wasn’t raining there,” John said. “Are you tracking me?”
“Don’t flatter yourself. We track all Rift activity.”
John chuckled and started walking. The lone eye of a CCTV camera mounted on a lamppost followed his progress down the length of the Plass. Radio silence from Jack.
“I was with you,” he blurted. (John Hart, who had withstood interrogation tactics that this backwards century hadn’t yet dreamt of, blurted.) “I went back, visited you at the Agency.”
There was a nasty moment of quiet and then the sound of Jack’s chuckle coming through clear over the rain. “Oh, that. I’d forgotten about that. I said that I would regret it, didn’t I?”
“You don’t,” John scoffed. He located the block in the pavement with the crack in it, nudging its neighbour with his boot.
“No, I don’t. What are you doing up there, John?”
“It’s raining,” John said. He stepped onto the invisible lift, looked towards the camera. “Let me in.”
After a moment, the lift began to descend.
* * * * *