Fic: Reunited (10/15)
Jun. 14th, 2007 07:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aibhinn_ficsTitle: Reunited (10/15)
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aibhinn
Pairings: Jack/Rose, Jack/Ten, Jack/Ten/Rose, Ten/Rose, mentions of (past) Jack/Ianto
Rating: PG-13.
Spoilers: Doctor Who through "Doomsday", Torchwood through "End of Days".
Summary: The Rift is much more active than it was, and has been disgorging aliens and out-of-time people at an alarming rate… including one person Jack never expected to see again.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Everything belongs to Auntie Beeb. I'm stuck here on the far side of the wrong continent, playing in her sandbox.
Author's note: As always, this chapter owes most of what it is now to the awesomeness of my betas. All of you rock my socks. Seriously. *bows at your feet*
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | Part VII | Part VIII | Part IX | Part XI | Part XII | Part XIII | Part XIV | Part XV
Rose drove along the winding mountain road, listening with amusement to Gwen and Owen taking the piss. Though there were occasional retorts that seemed to hit a little close to home, for the most part, they were behaving themselves. Even Owen, which was little less than a miracle.
This was the closest she'd come to feeling like part of a team in years. She'd been respected at the other Torchwood, but it had been a respect born more out of fear and discomfort than anything else; her immortality was no secret there, any more than it was here. But once this lot had had a chance to come to terms with it, it was as though she'd magically become one of them, no discomfort at all. Then again, they had Jack, who was as immortal as she; perhaps it wasn't the shock for them that it had been for the other Torchwood.
Whatever the reason, it was a wonderful difference. In fact, she realised with something akin to amazement, she wasn't just reasonably content, as she'd been in the other world. She was happy.
Not that she'd never been happy in her other life, because she had, of course. Her weddings; the birth of her sister and all the milestones of a baby growing into a young woman; family gatherings and successes at work—all of them had made her happy at different times. But she'd not really been consistently happy in her other life, the way she was right now.
And a lot of that had to do with Jack. Not so much because of their romantic relationship (though he'd taken to staying at her flat most nights—she'd even given him a drawer of his own in her dressing table) but because of their friendship, as well as the unique 'condition' they shared. There were things she'd never been able to tell anyone, fears and experiences and questions, that only another like her could ever understand. The physical agony of waking up from death; the emotional agony of watching everyone you care about wither away and die; the terror of what would happen if someone decided to 'study' you; the danger your loved ones could be in, simply because you cared about them. The exhaustion of living, and knowing you'll just keep living, going on and on and on forever.
The relief of knowing that she wasn’t alone any more was indescribable.
"It'll be getting on for teatime by the time we get back," Gwen said, catching Rose's attention. "Should we pick up take-away?"
"Could do," Rose acknowledged. "Owen?"
"Fine by me. 'Course, I don't get to eat my weight in food twice a day and stay skinny like some people I could mention, but I could do with a few hundred calories."
Rose grinned. She'd had to eat much more than she was used to in order to recover from her experience in the Rift, but she was back to a healthy weight now and eating normally, no matter what Owen said. She reached up and keyed her Bluetooth headset on. "Jack?"
His reply sounded in her earpiece. "Yeah, I’m here."
She could tell he'd been startled out of his train of thought. Probably he was still brooding on the business with André, the young French boy who'd told her, "Time searches for you." They were still no nearer to an answer than they'd been three months ago, and it frustrated him. Scared him, too, she suspected; he was worried for her.
"We've dropped off our passenger and are on our way home," she reported. "Plenty of moss and lichen up here; he'll be fine."
Their "passenger" was an odd sort of alien that looked and felt exactly like a rock a good foot and a half in diameter, but was, in fact, a sentient life form. It fed on simple plants like moss, and had been unobtrusively making its slow way around the grounds of Cardiff Castle for years. Unfortunately, when the landscapers decided to redesign the garden it was currently feeding in, they'd picked it up and hauled it off to a dumping ground for unwanted rocks.
It had languished in the middle of a huge pile, unable to move and slowly starving to death, until its desperate attempts to shift had caused half the pile to come down, badly injuring a man. Rescue workers swore they'd seen it sliding down the walk of its own accord. Torchwood, of course, heard this rumour and immediately came to investigate. It had taken a lot of detective work, and Tosh's memory of information from some of the UNIT files that Jack had passed on to her, before they'd identified the creature. There'd been no way to speak to it, but they'd hoisted it into the back of the SUV, taken it to a park where they could let it eat to keep it from starving, and then hoisted it back into the SUV so Owen, Gwen, and Rose could take it up to the mountains where it could live in peace.
"Good to hear. How long till you're back?"
"Half an hour or so."
"More like fifteen minutes, the way you drive," Owen said, but in a teasing tone, not a snarky one.
Rose laughed. "At least we've got a better than even chance of arriving unharmed if I do," she said. "Anything interesting going on back at the Hub?"
"More interesting than hauling rocks?" Jack asked dryly. "Hardly. Unless you count reading files. It's been … a day." That was pure superstition on his part; he'd told her he hated to say 'it's been quiet' because some part of him was always afraid the universe would pop up and turn the tables on him out of pure spite.
"Good, then maybe we can all get home at a reasonable hour tonight. Anyone there hungry? We were thinking of picking up take-away."
"Tosh?" Jack called. Rose could picture Toshiko looking up from her work, probably sans headset; she had a habit of taking it off while she was at her desk. "Rose is asking if she should pick up take-away." There was a pause, then Jack said, "Yeah, go ahead, Rose. We're both hungry, and neither of us much cares where you go. Whatever the three of you want is fine with us."
"Okay. See you in a bit then. By the way, we're going to hit a dead zone here soon; we're going into a valley. Just so you don't worry."
"Who, me?" Jack said innocently. All three of them snorted with amusement. "Just get back here safe and with the food, that's all."
"Thinking with your stomach again, Jack?" Gwen asked.
"Better than what he usually thinks with," Rose pointed out, and the three of them chortled.
"Yeah, yeah, pick on me," Jack said in a long-suffering tone.
"Oh, we will, don't you worry," Rose said with a grin. "See you later."
"Bye."
She hung up, and said, "So, what do we want—Chinese, Indian, or pizza?"
Predictably, Gwen and Owen immediately started wrangling, and she grinned to herself. Gave her a bit of space to think while the two of them argued—and she had a lot to think about. A lot that she hadn't told Jack; and she was debating whether she should.
"Time searches for you." There was a time when the only picture that brought into her head would have been a blue box plunging into the Time Vortex. And it still would, except for one thing.
Her dreams.
She'd been having the same nightmare over and over since Jack had found her: pursued by a dark creature with batlike wings, talons, and glowing red eyes. She ran from it, never quite able to see her pursuer, through a double line of people she'd met in her travels with the Doctor—most of whom had died as a result of meeting them. To a person, they were pale, bloody, holding out their gory hands to her, begging her to help them. But she couldn't stop—she knew without a doubt that if she stopped, she'd be taken. So she ran past everyone begging for her help, begging for her mercy, and hated herself with every step.
Until she woke up.
She'd had that dream at least three times a week since waking up in the Hub's medical bay, and every day for a fortnight after André had given his cryptic warning and fallen dead.
It wasn't the Doctor that was searching for her. It was that dark, hideous thing. She could feel it getting closer. And she didn't know what to do.
The argument was waning; they'd ask for her opinion soon. To give herself a bit more time, she said into a pause, "Right, Indian it is, then."
"Who said Indian?" Owen snapped, and they were off again. Rose sank back into her thoughts, frowning. She should tell Jack, she knew. She really should. But how?
***
Jack hung up with Rose and shook his head in wonder. Sometimes it was almost like she could read his mind when he was thinking about her.
He was meant to be looking over some of the files UNIT had sent his way with an eye to sharing information between the two organisations—a goal he was definitely in favour of. But his mind kept drifting.
It had been nearly three months since André's cryptic warning to Rose, and they were still no closer to discovering what he'd meant, or what exactly had been possessing him when he'd spoken. The memory of his red eyes and the ancient, gravelly voice he'd used still sent shivers up Jack's spine.
In contrast, Rose had apparently moved on as though nothing at all out of the ordinary had occurred. Though he knew she still suffered from nightmares, he wasn't sure whether they were a result of the encounter with the thing that had possessed André, or a holdover from her time in the Rift, or something else entirely. He wished he knew. He wished she'd talk to him. She'd tell him about them when she was ready, or so he kept telling himself, but it was killing him to wake her from the throes of a nightmare and have her throw her arms around him, shivering in reaction—and not even know what it was about.
He shook himself, pulling his mind back to the present. He wasn't going to be able to concentrate on the UNIT stuff. Sighing, he closed the file and stood up, pulling his greatcoat off the coat tree. "I'm going for a walk," he told Tosh. "Need to clear my head. You'd better put your headset on; if something goes wrong, you're the only one here at the Hub until the others get back."
She glanced sideways at him, a little guiltily. "Sorry." She slid the earpiece over her right ear. "Keep forgetting Ianto's off today."
Jack rested a hand on the back of her chair and the other on the desk, looking at her monitors. "What are you working on?"
"A translation program, see if I can make sense of that weird stela thing we found last week." She flipped windows and her scan of the stela came up. "It looks like runes, Scandinavian runes, but none of the more common translation programs have been able to do much of anything with it. I'm trying to combine them now, see if maybe they're written in some sort of mixture of two languages."
"Still monitoring the Plass?"
"Of course." Tosh pointed to the lower right-hand-most of her four screens. "Quiet today, probably because it's been raining, but it seems to've cleared up." She blinked, then leaned forward. "Wait a minute. That's new. Where did that come from?"
Jack shifted so he could see the screen better. What he saw nearly made his heart stop. "Oh, my God," he breathed. It wasn't—it couldn't be—
"Stay here," he said, and sprinted for the door.
***
The food argument had eventually been decided in favour of Chinese, and Gwen and Owen were currently discussing which dishes they should buy for the group. Rose had caught a couple of sideways glances, as though they were judging whether they should interrupt her thoughts to include her in the conversation, but apparently they'd decided not to.
She'd tried so hard not to think too much about the Doctor these past three months, but it was nearly impossible, living and working in the city where she and her first Doctor had spent two of their adventures: one in 1869, just the two of them, and one in 2006, with Jack. She couldn't help remembering that the TARDIS had needed to refuel that last time, and the Rift had been the perfect petrol station. Would he stop there again? Or was it too soon, in absolute time, after Canary Wharf for him to risk it?
It didn't help that his metaphorical fingerprints were all over a few weird things that had happened recently: the draining of the Thames last Christmas; the London hospital that had apparently been transmatted wholesale to the moon and back; the Lazarus guy with his turn-back-the-clock jiggery-pokery. Doubtless there were others as well, scattered through space and time; he'd never been one to stay still for very long. He hadn't given up on the Earth, that was for certain—though she'd never really expected he would.
Did he miss her? she wondered. Did he still think about her? Had he found someone else to travel with? How long had it been for him?
And, of course, the big questions, the ones that had been on her mind since she'd found herself back in this world. If he did show up, would he want her back? And more importantly—would she want to go?
Yes, she thought decisively. Yes, she wanted to go…but only if Jack could come as well. The relationship she had built with him was too precious to destroy with a casual "see you later" and hop into the TARDIS. Besides, he had been waiting for the Doctor longer than she had, and with better reason; the Doctor had to be told that Jack was still alive, that both of them had been changed by the Vortex.
She loved the Doctor. She always had. She always would. But she loved Jack, too. She didn't really think the Doctor would force her to choose, of course; that wasn't like him. But if he did, she'd made her choice already. Jack was the one she woke up with every morning, the only other immortal on Earth, the one she could truly share her entire life with—and that meant more than anything she could imagine.
But there was really no point in thinking about this anyway, she reminded herself. The Doctor hadn't come, nor was he likely to anytime soon. With all of space and time at his fingertips, and several dozen other Rifts in the world to use as filling stations if he needed to, why would he come back to a city that held so many memories of companions he'd lost?
She suddenly realised the car was silent. Owen sat in the passenger seat with his elbow on the windowsill, staring out at the mountain scenery with a distant look in his eye. Gwen, she could see in the rear view mirror, mirrored his posture almost exactly on the opposite side of the car, probably without even realising it. We're all pensive today, Rose thought. It might be the weather, which, true to Great Britain, was grey and overcast, but she thought it was more likely to be the general frustration of the job recently. Nobody was making much progress on anything, and they were all on the verge of becoming discouraged.
Time to pull us out of this grump—myself especially. "All right," Rose said suddenly. The others startled. "I've been dying to get some of the team together without Jack, at a time when we're not in the middle of fighting for our lives. Now's my chance." She grinned, first at Owen, then at Gwen in the mirror. "All the embarrassing stories about Jack. Come on, spill. You've got to have something good on him."
"You've got more of those than we do," Gwen said.
"Yeah, but that was from years back. You'd been working with him a long time before I arrived; I know there's something you can tell me." Gwen looked pained, and Rose added, "Oh, go on. You know I won't tell him who told. Besides, we've still got a good twenty miles to Cardiff."
"Well," Owen said thoughtfully, "there was that time with that slug creature…"
"Oh, God," Gwen groaned, and laughed, covering her face. "That was awful!"
"…and he had to leave a trail for it," Owen went on. "You'll never guess what the trail was made of."
"Knowing Jack, I probably can," Rose said dryly, and they all laughed.
***
It was him.
Jack slowed to a cautious walk as the TARDIS came into view. She sat three concrete squares away from the invisible lift, silent and heartbreakingly familiar. He ached to touch her again, but he didn't quite dare before he had more information. He'd learned a bit about the Doctor's history in the years he'd worked for Torchwood, enough to be wary. What if this was an earlier version of him, an incarnation who hadn't met Jack yet? It might be one who had lived before the Time War, before the destruction of the Doctor's planet.
He'd have to be very careful.
The door to the TARDIS opened and a young man stepped out. Thick brown hair, blue suit, red Converse, brown trench coat. He matched the pictures of the Doctor that had been salvaged from Canary Wharf, Jack thought with relief; he hadn't regenerated again. The right sort of Doctor, Jack thought with some irony, remembering his words to Gwen so long ago.
The Doctor closed the TARDIS door and started off in the opposite direction from Jack, hands in pockets, whistling. He looked like the very picture of careless sightseeing, but even in this unfamiliar body, Jack knew better, could read it in his body language; the Doctor was looking for something.
Or someone?
Jack had thought that when he found the Doctor again—and it had always been a when in his mind, not an if—he'd know exactly what he wanted to say. He'd lost count of the number of different scenarios he'd come up with over the century and more that he'd spent waiting and watching. It had never crossed his mind that he'd be standing here, watching the Doctor sauntering away from him, and feel his throat close up with a complete inability to speak. After all these years, here was his chance to confront the man who had left him behind, to find out once and for all whether the Doctor knew that he'd survived—and that he couldn't die.
And neither could Rose.
The thought of Rose galvanised him—though his own emotions were in utter turmoil, he knew that Rose wanted, needed, to see him. He took a long shaky breath, then broke into a run again. "Doctor!" he called. "Doctor!"
The Doctor swung around, brows furrowed as he looked for the owner of the voice calling his name. When he saw Jack, though, the frown became slack-jawed shock, and he stared. "Jack?" he managed. "Jack Harkness?"
And as Jack jogged the last couple of steps, the shock turned into a grin that could illuminate the whole of Cardiff, and he pulled Jack to him in a bone-crushing hug. Jack hesitated for a moment, then threw caution to the winds and returned the embrace. The Doctor was skinnier, certainly, than he'd been before, but there was something about him, something about this hug, that reminded Jack of the man he had known. Jack's eyes misted up slightly, and he had to blink to clear them.
"I came to find you!" the Doctor said, finally breaking the hug and clasping Jack's shoulders affectionately. "I'd just started off to look for you, thinking I'd have to spend days at it, and you just came running up to me!"
"You knew I was here?" Jack asked, disappointment curling in the pit of his stomach. So he had known that Jack had survived the game station. Why had it taken him so long to come, then?
"Oh, well, you know, there I was, looking for a place to go next, and suddenly, wham, there were all these anomalous readings coming from the Rift. I started looking into them, and imagine my surprise when your name came up. And so I thought, blimey, I could go find Jack again! And of course I had to do it." That smile was back, a thousand watts and more, nearly blinding in its intensity. "And so here I am. And here you are! Oh, it's good to see you, Jack."
So many things he should tell him—so many things he's wanted to say. He knew from talking to Rose that they'd believed he was dead on Satellite Five, and that the Doctor's regeneration followed so close on the heels of her rescue that they'd disappeared immediately, so the Doctor could get somewhere relatively safe while he recovered. But still the questions lingered. Why didn't you try to recover my body? Why did you just leave me to rot on a station full of corpses? Why didn't you find me sooner? Why didn't you ever look? And of course, the all-important: Can you cure me of immortality? But he couldn't force himself to say any of them. Not now—not yet. Not when the Doctor's joy at the reunion was still so high—and so was his own, he admitted. For himself, and for Rose's sake.
A familiar SUV pulled up in front of the Chinese place a hundred or so yards up the street, and Jack blessed Rose's timing. Funny, he'd always thought there would be something cleansing about telling the Doctor his story. Perhaps there would be, but he didn't have the courage for it yet. "There's someone else it'll be good for you to see, too," he said, allowing a corner of his mouth to quirk upward.
"Someone else?" The Doctor looked over Jack's shoulder, as though expecting a familiar face to come trotting up behind him. "Good God, you've not dragged Alistair out of retirement to work for you, have you?"
"Not exactly." Jack turned the Doctor gently around. "Look at who's getting out of the black four-by-four."
The Doctor peered, then his jaw dropped for a second time and he went very, very still. "Rose," he whispered hollowly, and glanced back at Jack for confirmation, hope rising in his eyes—hope and the terror of being disappointed yet again. "Is it? Is it Rose? But—how?"
Jack smiled. "Go catch her."
The Doctor hesitated for the briefest of seconds, then with a soft sound from deep in his throat, broke into an all-out sprint. "Rose!" he bellowed, earning him strange looks from passers-by. "Rose! It's me!"
She spun on her heel, and Jack could tell the exact instant she caught sight of him, running toward her with the TARDIS in the background. Her face lit up. "Doctor!" she exclaimed, and took off towards him.
Jack would forever remember the next few moments as being among the longest of his life. As the Doctor and Rose ran for each other in a scene right out of a sappy romance novel, an enormous bat-winged creature, apparently formed of smoky-black mist with red glowing eyes, swept up through the concrete of the Plass directly between them and hovered there, blocking their paths. The Doctor and Rose skidded to a halt, staring up at it.
Heart in his throat, Jack drew his weapon and pelted towards them through the mass of shrieking, running pedestrians, though he wasn't sure what good bullets would do against a creature that seemed to be made out of smoke. He noticed Gwen and Owen had drawn their guns as well and were advancing cautiously from the opposite direction. Rose's gun was still in its holster.
The creature's head turned to look at Rose, then back to face the Doctor. We meet again, slayer of our kin, it said in a mind-voice loud enough to make everyone wince except the Doctor.
"What do you mean again?" the Doctor demanded. "When have we met before?"
When dragons ruled the far North. We were the ultimate predators then. Now we are merely the stuff of nightmares, barely surviving in the shadows between worlds. Until this one— It swung its head around to survey Rose again, who took a half-step backwards but did not look away. —crossed the Void, bringing immortal Time with her. It turned back to the Doctor. Only then were we able to slip our bonds with her power, following her path through the darkness and into the light of this Time."
Jack was close enough to touch the Doctor now, but the Time Lord held out a hand, keeping him back. He was close enough to hear Rose say in sudden comprehension, "That was you in my nightmares! That thing that was always following me—it was you!"
Its focus came back to her. No nightmare, Child of Time, but reality. When you escaped the Rift, we searched for you, but were unable to find you again. Until now, when you and the Heart which gave you birth are so close. It turned fully, facing her, and she stepped back another pace, this time drawing her gun. Gwen and Owen flanked her, all three of their weapons pointed steadily at the creature.
"I know you," the Doctor said in a voice that was suddenly flat and hard as diamond. "I name you." He reached into his pocket and pulled out the sonic screwdriver, holding it at the ready in his right hand. "Time Wraith."
The name meant nothing to Jack, but Rose's expression showed that she certainly recognised it. "You mean, from Aeswulf's time?" she asked, though her attention never wavered from the creature.
"Yes." The Doctor stepped forward. "I warn you, Time Wraith. We imprisoned you before, Rose and I. We can do it again. Leave now, and I will let you slip back into the shadows."
Ah, but all we need to be freed is her. Or rather, the Heart she carries. The Wraith looked over its smoky shoulder at the Doctor. Stop us if you can, Time Lord.
The Doctor rushed forward before Jack could stop him, holding his sonic screwdriver out like a weapon, but Jack had a horrible feeling that it would take more than that to bring this creature down.
"I lost her once before!" he yelled at the creature. "I'm not letting anything take her away again! Harm her, and I swear I will destroy you!"
With a snarl of triumph, the Time Wraith folded itself forward over Rose, Gwen, and Owen. "Nooooo!" Jack screamed, pelting toward his people, toward Rose, vaguely aware of the Doctor's own scream of protest. Ignoring them all, the smoky figure slipped back down through the stones of the Plass, disappearing utterly in the blink of an eye.
And to Jack's horror, it took Rose with it.
Author:
aibhinnPairings: Jack/Rose, Jack/Ten, Jack/Ten/Rose, Ten/Rose, mentions of (past) Jack/Ianto
Rating: PG-13.
Spoilers: Doctor Who through "Doomsday", Torchwood through "End of Days".
Summary: The Rift is much more active than it was, and has been disgorging aliens and out-of-time people at an alarming rate… including one person Jack never expected to see again.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Everything belongs to Auntie Beeb. I'm stuck here on the far side of the wrong continent, playing in her sandbox.
Author's note: As always, this chapter owes most of what it is now to the awesomeness of my betas. All of you rock my socks. Seriously. *bows at your feet*
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | Part VII | Part VIII | Part IX | Part XI | Part XII | Part XIII | Part XIV | Part XV
Rose drove along the winding mountain road, listening with amusement to Gwen and Owen taking the piss. Though there were occasional retorts that seemed to hit a little close to home, for the most part, they were behaving themselves. Even Owen, which was little less than a miracle.
This was the closest she'd come to feeling like part of a team in years. She'd been respected at the other Torchwood, but it had been a respect born more out of fear and discomfort than anything else; her immortality was no secret there, any more than it was here. But once this lot had had a chance to come to terms with it, it was as though she'd magically become one of them, no discomfort at all. Then again, they had Jack, who was as immortal as she; perhaps it wasn't the shock for them that it had been for the other Torchwood.
Whatever the reason, it was a wonderful difference. In fact, she realised with something akin to amazement, she wasn't just reasonably content, as she'd been in the other world. She was happy.
Not that she'd never been happy in her other life, because she had, of course. Her weddings; the birth of her sister and all the milestones of a baby growing into a young woman; family gatherings and successes at work—all of them had made her happy at different times. But she'd not really been consistently happy in her other life, the way she was right now.
And a lot of that had to do with Jack. Not so much because of their romantic relationship (though he'd taken to staying at her flat most nights—she'd even given him a drawer of his own in her dressing table) but because of their friendship, as well as the unique 'condition' they shared. There were things she'd never been able to tell anyone, fears and experiences and questions, that only another like her could ever understand. The physical agony of waking up from death; the emotional agony of watching everyone you care about wither away and die; the terror of what would happen if someone decided to 'study' you; the danger your loved ones could be in, simply because you cared about them. The exhaustion of living, and knowing you'll just keep living, going on and on and on forever.
The relief of knowing that she wasn’t alone any more was indescribable.
"It'll be getting on for teatime by the time we get back," Gwen said, catching Rose's attention. "Should we pick up take-away?"
"Could do," Rose acknowledged. "Owen?"
"Fine by me. 'Course, I don't get to eat my weight in food twice a day and stay skinny like some people I could mention, but I could do with a few hundred calories."
Rose grinned. She'd had to eat much more than she was used to in order to recover from her experience in the Rift, but she was back to a healthy weight now and eating normally, no matter what Owen said. She reached up and keyed her Bluetooth headset on. "Jack?"
His reply sounded in her earpiece. "Yeah, I’m here."
She could tell he'd been startled out of his train of thought. Probably he was still brooding on the business with André, the young French boy who'd told her, "Time searches for you." They were still no nearer to an answer than they'd been three months ago, and it frustrated him. Scared him, too, she suspected; he was worried for her.
"We've dropped off our passenger and are on our way home," she reported. "Plenty of moss and lichen up here; he'll be fine."
Their "passenger" was an odd sort of alien that looked and felt exactly like a rock a good foot and a half in diameter, but was, in fact, a sentient life form. It fed on simple plants like moss, and had been unobtrusively making its slow way around the grounds of Cardiff Castle for years. Unfortunately, when the landscapers decided to redesign the garden it was currently feeding in, they'd picked it up and hauled it off to a dumping ground for unwanted rocks.
It had languished in the middle of a huge pile, unable to move and slowly starving to death, until its desperate attempts to shift had caused half the pile to come down, badly injuring a man. Rescue workers swore they'd seen it sliding down the walk of its own accord. Torchwood, of course, heard this rumour and immediately came to investigate. It had taken a lot of detective work, and Tosh's memory of information from some of the UNIT files that Jack had passed on to her, before they'd identified the creature. There'd been no way to speak to it, but they'd hoisted it into the back of the SUV, taken it to a park where they could let it eat to keep it from starving, and then hoisted it back into the SUV so Owen, Gwen, and Rose could take it up to the mountains where it could live in peace.
"Good to hear. How long till you're back?"
"Half an hour or so."
"More like fifteen minutes, the way you drive," Owen said, but in a teasing tone, not a snarky one.
Rose laughed. "At least we've got a better than even chance of arriving unharmed if I do," she said. "Anything interesting going on back at the Hub?"
"More interesting than hauling rocks?" Jack asked dryly. "Hardly. Unless you count reading files. It's been … a day." That was pure superstition on his part; he'd told her he hated to say 'it's been quiet' because some part of him was always afraid the universe would pop up and turn the tables on him out of pure spite.
"Good, then maybe we can all get home at a reasonable hour tonight. Anyone there hungry? We were thinking of picking up take-away."
"Tosh?" Jack called. Rose could picture Toshiko looking up from her work, probably sans headset; she had a habit of taking it off while she was at her desk. "Rose is asking if she should pick up take-away." There was a pause, then Jack said, "Yeah, go ahead, Rose. We're both hungry, and neither of us much cares where you go. Whatever the three of you want is fine with us."
"Okay. See you in a bit then. By the way, we're going to hit a dead zone here soon; we're going into a valley. Just so you don't worry."
"Who, me?" Jack said innocently. All three of them snorted with amusement. "Just get back here safe and with the food, that's all."
"Thinking with your stomach again, Jack?" Gwen asked.
"Better than what he usually thinks with," Rose pointed out, and the three of them chortled.
"Yeah, yeah, pick on me," Jack said in a long-suffering tone.
"Oh, we will, don't you worry," Rose said with a grin. "See you later."
"Bye."
She hung up, and said, "So, what do we want—Chinese, Indian, or pizza?"
Predictably, Gwen and Owen immediately started wrangling, and she grinned to herself. Gave her a bit of space to think while the two of them argued—and she had a lot to think about. A lot that she hadn't told Jack; and she was debating whether she should.
"Time searches for you." There was a time when the only picture that brought into her head would have been a blue box plunging into the Time Vortex. And it still would, except for one thing.
Her dreams.
She'd been having the same nightmare over and over since Jack had found her: pursued by a dark creature with batlike wings, talons, and glowing red eyes. She ran from it, never quite able to see her pursuer, through a double line of people she'd met in her travels with the Doctor—most of whom had died as a result of meeting them. To a person, they were pale, bloody, holding out their gory hands to her, begging her to help them. But she couldn't stop—she knew without a doubt that if she stopped, she'd be taken. So she ran past everyone begging for her help, begging for her mercy, and hated herself with every step.
Until she woke up.
She'd had that dream at least three times a week since waking up in the Hub's medical bay, and every day for a fortnight after André had given his cryptic warning and fallen dead.
It wasn't the Doctor that was searching for her. It was that dark, hideous thing. She could feel it getting closer. And she didn't know what to do.
The argument was waning; they'd ask for her opinion soon. To give herself a bit more time, she said into a pause, "Right, Indian it is, then."
"Who said Indian?" Owen snapped, and they were off again. Rose sank back into her thoughts, frowning. She should tell Jack, she knew. She really should. But how?
***
Jack hung up with Rose and shook his head in wonder. Sometimes it was almost like she could read his mind when he was thinking about her.
He was meant to be looking over some of the files UNIT had sent his way with an eye to sharing information between the two organisations—a goal he was definitely in favour of. But his mind kept drifting.
It had been nearly three months since André's cryptic warning to Rose, and they were still no closer to discovering what he'd meant, or what exactly had been possessing him when he'd spoken. The memory of his red eyes and the ancient, gravelly voice he'd used still sent shivers up Jack's spine.
In contrast, Rose had apparently moved on as though nothing at all out of the ordinary had occurred. Though he knew she still suffered from nightmares, he wasn't sure whether they were a result of the encounter with the thing that had possessed André, or a holdover from her time in the Rift, or something else entirely. He wished he knew. He wished she'd talk to him. She'd tell him about them when she was ready, or so he kept telling himself, but it was killing him to wake her from the throes of a nightmare and have her throw her arms around him, shivering in reaction—and not even know what it was about.
He shook himself, pulling his mind back to the present. He wasn't going to be able to concentrate on the UNIT stuff. Sighing, he closed the file and stood up, pulling his greatcoat off the coat tree. "I'm going for a walk," he told Tosh. "Need to clear my head. You'd better put your headset on; if something goes wrong, you're the only one here at the Hub until the others get back."
She glanced sideways at him, a little guiltily. "Sorry." She slid the earpiece over her right ear. "Keep forgetting Ianto's off today."
Jack rested a hand on the back of her chair and the other on the desk, looking at her monitors. "What are you working on?"
"A translation program, see if I can make sense of that weird stela thing we found last week." She flipped windows and her scan of the stela came up. "It looks like runes, Scandinavian runes, but none of the more common translation programs have been able to do much of anything with it. I'm trying to combine them now, see if maybe they're written in some sort of mixture of two languages."
"Still monitoring the Plass?"
"Of course." Tosh pointed to the lower right-hand-most of her four screens. "Quiet today, probably because it's been raining, but it seems to've cleared up." She blinked, then leaned forward. "Wait a minute. That's new. Where did that come from?"
Jack shifted so he could see the screen better. What he saw nearly made his heart stop. "Oh, my God," he breathed. It wasn't—it couldn't be—
"Stay here," he said, and sprinted for the door.
***
The food argument had eventually been decided in favour of Chinese, and Gwen and Owen were currently discussing which dishes they should buy for the group. Rose had caught a couple of sideways glances, as though they were judging whether they should interrupt her thoughts to include her in the conversation, but apparently they'd decided not to.
She'd tried so hard not to think too much about the Doctor these past three months, but it was nearly impossible, living and working in the city where she and her first Doctor had spent two of their adventures: one in 1869, just the two of them, and one in 2006, with Jack. She couldn't help remembering that the TARDIS had needed to refuel that last time, and the Rift had been the perfect petrol station. Would he stop there again? Or was it too soon, in absolute time, after Canary Wharf for him to risk it?
It didn't help that his metaphorical fingerprints were all over a few weird things that had happened recently: the draining of the Thames last Christmas; the London hospital that had apparently been transmatted wholesale to the moon and back; the Lazarus guy with his turn-back-the-clock jiggery-pokery. Doubtless there were others as well, scattered through space and time; he'd never been one to stay still for very long. He hadn't given up on the Earth, that was for certain—though she'd never really expected he would.
Did he miss her? she wondered. Did he still think about her? Had he found someone else to travel with? How long had it been for him?
And, of course, the big questions, the ones that had been on her mind since she'd found herself back in this world. If he did show up, would he want her back? And more importantly—would she want to go?
Yes, she thought decisively. Yes, she wanted to go…but only if Jack could come as well. The relationship she had built with him was too precious to destroy with a casual "see you later" and hop into the TARDIS. Besides, he had been waiting for the Doctor longer than she had, and with better reason; the Doctor had to be told that Jack was still alive, that both of them had been changed by the Vortex.
She loved the Doctor. She always had. She always would. But she loved Jack, too. She didn't really think the Doctor would force her to choose, of course; that wasn't like him. But if he did, she'd made her choice already. Jack was the one she woke up with every morning, the only other immortal on Earth, the one she could truly share her entire life with—and that meant more than anything she could imagine.
But there was really no point in thinking about this anyway, she reminded herself. The Doctor hadn't come, nor was he likely to anytime soon. With all of space and time at his fingertips, and several dozen other Rifts in the world to use as filling stations if he needed to, why would he come back to a city that held so many memories of companions he'd lost?
She suddenly realised the car was silent. Owen sat in the passenger seat with his elbow on the windowsill, staring out at the mountain scenery with a distant look in his eye. Gwen, she could see in the rear view mirror, mirrored his posture almost exactly on the opposite side of the car, probably without even realising it. We're all pensive today, Rose thought. It might be the weather, which, true to Great Britain, was grey and overcast, but she thought it was more likely to be the general frustration of the job recently. Nobody was making much progress on anything, and they were all on the verge of becoming discouraged.
Time to pull us out of this grump—myself especially. "All right," Rose said suddenly. The others startled. "I've been dying to get some of the team together without Jack, at a time when we're not in the middle of fighting for our lives. Now's my chance." She grinned, first at Owen, then at Gwen in the mirror. "All the embarrassing stories about Jack. Come on, spill. You've got to have something good on him."
"You've got more of those than we do," Gwen said.
"Yeah, but that was from years back. You'd been working with him a long time before I arrived; I know there's something you can tell me." Gwen looked pained, and Rose added, "Oh, go on. You know I won't tell him who told. Besides, we've still got a good twenty miles to Cardiff."
"Well," Owen said thoughtfully, "there was that time with that slug creature…"
"Oh, God," Gwen groaned, and laughed, covering her face. "That was awful!"
"…and he had to leave a trail for it," Owen went on. "You'll never guess what the trail was made of."
"Knowing Jack, I probably can," Rose said dryly, and they all laughed.
***
It was him.
Jack slowed to a cautious walk as the TARDIS came into view. She sat three concrete squares away from the invisible lift, silent and heartbreakingly familiar. He ached to touch her again, but he didn't quite dare before he had more information. He'd learned a bit about the Doctor's history in the years he'd worked for Torchwood, enough to be wary. What if this was an earlier version of him, an incarnation who hadn't met Jack yet? It might be one who had lived before the Time War, before the destruction of the Doctor's planet.
He'd have to be very careful.
The door to the TARDIS opened and a young man stepped out. Thick brown hair, blue suit, red Converse, brown trench coat. He matched the pictures of the Doctor that had been salvaged from Canary Wharf, Jack thought with relief; he hadn't regenerated again. The right sort of Doctor, Jack thought with some irony, remembering his words to Gwen so long ago.
The Doctor closed the TARDIS door and started off in the opposite direction from Jack, hands in pockets, whistling. He looked like the very picture of careless sightseeing, but even in this unfamiliar body, Jack knew better, could read it in his body language; the Doctor was looking for something.
Or someone?
Jack had thought that when he found the Doctor again—and it had always been a when in his mind, not an if—he'd know exactly what he wanted to say. He'd lost count of the number of different scenarios he'd come up with over the century and more that he'd spent waiting and watching. It had never crossed his mind that he'd be standing here, watching the Doctor sauntering away from him, and feel his throat close up with a complete inability to speak. After all these years, here was his chance to confront the man who had left him behind, to find out once and for all whether the Doctor knew that he'd survived—and that he couldn't die.
And neither could Rose.
The thought of Rose galvanised him—though his own emotions were in utter turmoil, he knew that Rose wanted, needed, to see him. He took a long shaky breath, then broke into a run again. "Doctor!" he called. "Doctor!"
The Doctor swung around, brows furrowed as he looked for the owner of the voice calling his name. When he saw Jack, though, the frown became slack-jawed shock, and he stared. "Jack?" he managed. "Jack Harkness?"
And as Jack jogged the last couple of steps, the shock turned into a grin that could illuminate the whole of Cardiff, and he pulled Jack to him in a bone-crushing hug. Jack hesitated for a moment, then threw caution to the winds and returned the embrace. The Doctor was skinnier, certainly, than he'd been before, but there was something about him, something about this hug, that reminded Jack of the man he had known. Jack's eyes misted up slightly, and he had to blink to clear them.
"I came to find you!" the Doctor said, finally breaking the hug and clasping Jack's shoulders affectionately. "I'd just started off to look for you, thinking I'd have to spend days at it, and you just came running up to me!"
"You knew I was here?" Jack asked, disappointment curling in the pit of his stomach. So he had known that Jack had survived the game station. Why had it taken him so long to come, then?
"Oh, well, you know, there I was, looking for a place to go next, and suddenly, wham, there were all these anomalous readings coming from the Rift. I started looking into them, and imagine my surprise when your name came up. And so I thought, blimey, I could go find Jack again! And of course I had to do it." That smile was back, a thousand watts and more, nearly blinding in its intensity. "And so here I am. And here you are! Oh, it's good to see you, Jack."
So many things he should tell him—so many things he's wanted to say. He knew from talking to Rose that they'd believed he was dead on Satellite Five, and that the Doctor's regeneration followed so close on the heels of her rescue that they'd disappeared immediately, so the Doctor could get somewhere relatively safe while he recovered. But still the questions lingered. Why didn't you try to recover my body? Why did you just leave me to rot on a station full of corpses? Why didn't you find me sooner? Why didn't you ever look? And of course, the all-important: Can you cure me of immortality? But he couldn't force himself to say any of them. Not now—not yet. Not when the Doctor's joy at the reunion was still so high—and so was his own, he admitted. For himself, and for Rose's sake.
A familiar SUV pulled up in front of the Chinese place a hundred or so yards up the street, and Jack blessed Rose's timing. Funny, he'd always thought there would be something cleansing about telling the Doctor his story. Perhaps there would be, but he didn't have the courage for it yet. "There's someone else it'll be good for you to see, too," he said, allowing a corner of his mouth to quirk upward.
"Someone else?" The Doctor looked over Jack's shoulder, as though expecting a familiar face to come trotting up behind him. "Good God, you've not dragged Alistair out of retirement to work for you, have you?"
"Not exactly." Jack turned the Doctor gently around. "Look at who's getting out of the black four-by-four."
The Doctor peered, then his jaw dropped for a second time and he went very, very still. "Rose," he whispered hollowly, and glanced back at Jack for confirmation, hope rising in his eyes—hope and the terror of being disappointed yet again. "Is it? Is it Rose? But—how?"
Jack smiled. "Go catch her."
The Doctor hesitated for the briefest of seconds, then with a soft sound from deep in his throat, broke into an all-out sprint. "Rose!" he bellowed, earning him strange looks from passers-by. "Rose! It's me!"
She spun on her heel, and Jack could tell the exact instant she caught sight of him, running toward her with the TARDIS in the background. Her face lit up. "Doctor!" she exclaimed, and took off towards him.
Jack would forever remember the next few moments as being among the longest of his life. As the Doctor and Rose ran for each other in a scene right out of a sappy romance novel, an enormous bat-winged creature, apparently formed of smoky-black mist with red glowing eyes, swept up through the concrete of the Plass directly between them and hovered there, blocking their paths. The Doctor and Rose skidded to a halt, staring up at it.
Heart in his throat, Jack drew his weapon and pelted towards them through the mass of shrieking, running pedestrians, though he wasn't sure what good bullets would do against a creature that seemed to be made out of smoke. He noticed Gwen and Owen had drawn their guns as well and were advancing cautiously from the opposite direction. Rose's gun was still in its holster.
The creature's head turned to look at Rose, then back to face the Doctor. We meet again, slayer of our kin, it said in a mind-voice loud enough to make everyone wince except the Doctor.
"What do you mean again?" the Doctor demanded. "When have we met before?"
When dragons ruled the far North. We were the ultimate predators then. Now we are merely the stuff of nightmares, barely surviving in the shadows between worlds. Until this one— It swung its head around to survey Rose again, who took a half-step backwards but did not look away. —crossed the Void, bringing immortal Time with her. It turned back to the Doctor. Only then were we able to slip our bonds with her power, following her path through the darkness and into the light of this Time."
Jack was close enough to touch the Doctor now, but the Time Lord held out a hand, keeping him back. He was close enough to hear Rose say in sudden comprehension, "That was you in my nightmares! That thing that was always following me—it was you!"
Its focus came back to her. No nightmare, Child of Time, but reality. When you escaped the Rift, we searched for you, but were unable to find you again. Until now, when you and the Heart which gave you birth are so close. It turned fully, facing her, and she stepped back another pace, this time drawing her gun. Gwen and Owen flanked her, all three of their weapons pointed steadily at the creature.
"I know you," the Doctor said in a voice that was suddenly flat and hard as diamond. "I name you." He reached into his pocket and pulled out the sonic screwdriver, holding it at the ready in his right hand. "Time Wraith."
The name meant nothing to Jack, but Rose's expression showed that she certainly recognised it. "You mean, from Aeswulf's time?" she asked, though her attention never wavered from the creature.
"Yes." The Doctor stepped forward. "I warn you, Time Wraith. We imprisoned you before, Rose and I. We can do it again. Leave now, and I will let you slip back into the shadows."
Ah, but all we need to be freed is her. Or rather, the Heart she carries. The Wraith looked over its smoky shoulder at the Doctor. Stop us if you can, Time Lord.
The Doctor rushed forward before Jack could stop him, holding his sonic screwdriver out like a weapon, but Jack had a horrible feeling that it would take more than that to bring this creature down.
"I lost her once before!" he yelled at the creature. "I'm not letting anything take her away again! Harm her, and I swear I will destroy you!"
With a snarl of triumph, the Time Wraith folded itself forward over Rose, Gwen, and Owen. "Nooooo!" Jack screamed, pelting toward his people, toward Rose, vaguely aware of the Doctor's own scream of protest. Ignoring them all, the smoky figure slipped back down through the stones of the Plass, disappearing utterly in the blink of an eye.
And to Jack's horror, it took Rose with it.
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Date: 2007-06-21 12:46 am (UTC)Glad you're enjoying the fic--thanks for reviewing!