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find_rightbrainTitle: The Distance Between Yesterday and Tomorrow
Chapter: Stumbling Blocks (2/6)
Characters/Pairing: Rose/Jack, Gwen, Owen, Tosh and Ianto
Word Count: 1853
Rating: PG
Summary: Sometimes Jack can avoid his past, and sometimes parts of it land on his doorstep in exactly the wrong combination.
Notes: Written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bytheseaside for the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
available_very winter ficathon. Set (in the Doctor Who timeline) between "The Doctor Dances" and "Boomtown", and in the Torchwood timeline, in season one, between "Ghost Machine" and "Cyberwoman".
Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who or Torchwood, and I'm not making anything off this. Just for fun, guys.
<< Previous Chapter
"Gwen and Owen, I want the two of you with me." Jack pulled on his greatcoat, shrugged his shoulders to settle it, and glanced around the atrium, trying to think. How the hell was he supposed to find one of those things in Cardiff?
"Who'd have guessed?" Owen muttered under his breath, though in the way he did when he wanted everyone to hear him. It was not at all subtle, but then again, Jack never thought it was supposed to be.
Gwen paused in the middle of fixing her gun to her belt and looked up at him. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"You never noticed every time there's some spiky dog alien or something, it's always 'Owen and Gwen, go take care of it.'"
"Yeah," Jack said, striding past him, "I'm a horrible person for asking you to do your job." Before Owen could make some protest about being a doctor, probably just for the hell of it, Jack went on, "By the way, it's not a 'spiky dog alien.' Tosh, I need you to track it from here, keep us updated on its position. It's an alien creation, something someone made - there'll be a signal for its owners to find it."
Gwen had started to trail after him, but Jack heard her footsteps stop abruptly upon hearing that. "Its owners? Are we going to have to find them as well?"
Jack shook his head dismissively without turning to look at her. "No, they don't ever leave home. My guess is, the creature fell through the Rift, and it's just lost. Tosh, the signal?"
Tosh gestured at her computer screen, which displayed a map of Cardiff marked by scattered colored lights. "You do realize that 'signal' covers over a thousand possibilities?" she asked, turning in her chair to face him and eying him skeptically over the top of her glasses. "I've narrowed it down to those associated with alien activity, but that still leaves over a hundred."
Jack sighed and ran a hand through his hair, leaning in to look at the screen. "Alright, I can see where that might be a problem. Uh... see if you can go back to last night and pick up a signal anywhere even close to where Aston lived, cross-reference it with what you're coming up with now. It'll be fairly regular, once a minute at least, simple - no information attached, just a signal it transmits so you can pick up its location."
"I can try," she said, and started typing. The colored map of Cardiff vanished, and was replaced my a mass of scrolling data. "Why would a creature give off a signal like that?"
"You know how some people put a microchip in their pets in case they get lost?"
Gwen whistled softly. "In that case, I really don't want to meet the owners."
"Right there with you," Jack muttered, and took a step back. "Keep us updated, Tosh. I don't care how you do it, but find it. We've got to get out there before it attacks someone else."
That 'someone else', he had no doubt, would be one of three very specific someones. But as long as they could deal with it before it ever found them...
He wondered, briefly, how many times he got the chance to save his past self without his past self ever knowing. The answer quickly came back: far too often. Calling his attention back to the present (a subjective term today if ever there was one), Jack noticed Gwen and Owen had started walking towards the lift, and winced.
"Not that way." Gwen and Owen both looked askance at him, so he elaborated, "There's something on the lift; we're going to have to go out the back."
'There's something on the lift', he decided, sounded better than 'There's a big blue box that travels in space and time on the lift'.
Jack turned away, toward the door, Gwen and Owen trailing behind him like ducklings. Rather heavily armed ducklings, sure, but close enough...
Gwen murmured a brief explanation to Ianto as they passed, but Jack didn't stop to listen. Out the door, out of the Hub, to the SUV and somewhere away from here, all while trying not to so much as glance at the TARDIS.
"So," Gwen said as the door of the SUV slammed shut after she climbed in, behind the driver's seat. "What is this thing, Jack? I know you know."
He sighed a little, clenching his hands around the steering wheel. After a moment, he answered simply, "Time hound." Beside him, Owen snorted and asked, "So when I said 'spiky dog alien'..."
"Close to the truth," Jack allowed, "it just sounded stupid." He reached up to touch his earpiece with one hand, turning the key to start the engine with the other. "Tosh, what've you got?"
It was impossible to completely ignore the TARDIS, always at least a blue blur in the corner of his field of vision. He tried to distract himself by thinking of everywhere he and Rose had been or would be today, so he'd know all the places to avoid.
And it was only when he actually tried to think about it that he realized he had absolutely no solid memory of the day at all.
*
Rose sipped at her soda, staring out the restaurant's window at passersby. She'd only been to Cardiff - or Wales at all - that once, with the Doctor, and it seemed odd to see the streets not covered in snow, to see electric lights inside instead of gas. That was the trouble travelling with the Doctor. You went somewhere you'd never been before, and whatever the time period, it froze like that in your mind.
Somewhere along the line, Cardiff had become the place where Dickens still lived. Seeing it in her own time, or near enough, was like seeing another city entirely.
"You know," she said to Jack, "the last time I was here, I almost got killed by ghosts. Me and the Doctor."
Jack looked over at her, eyebrows raised. "You said the last time you were here you met Charles Dickens."
"Who says I couldn't do both?"
"Fair enough." He leaned forward against the table, arms braced against the edge, chin resting on folded hands. "Unfortunately, I'm not seeing any ghosts today."
"They were possessing corpses. How is a normal day unfortunate?"
"Well, it would be breaking a record..."
"What record?"
"Everywhere I go with you two-"
Rose snatched up a napkin from the table and balled it up to toss at Jack's head. He ducked, naturally, and it hit the man sitting at the table behind him. Somehow Rose managed to suppress a giggle and pretend it wasn't her, focusing very intently on Jack instead.
"Oi, you can't blame us. We could've had plenty of perfectly calm trips before you came along. You're the criminal here."
"Perfectly calm?" he asked, a smirk playing around the edges of his lips. She couldn't imagine why. Well, she had a couple guesses, but it was almost impossible to pin down why Jack was smirking at any given point in time.
"Yeah. It's your fault that-"
"Besides the ghosts?"
"I didn't say they were all-"
"And the end of the world? Exploding government buildings? I could go on."
Rose rolled her eyes and leaned back in her chair, arms folded over her chest, pretending to be annoyed. Hard to do, smiling like she was. "I don't know why I tell you anything, honestly, if you're just going to use it against me."
"Because I am just that charming, and you'll tell me absolutely anything I want to hear. Which, while nice, is really unnecessary, just in case you were wondering - you've already gotten me into bed."
Rose laughed and leaned forward to shove him back, one hand on his shoulder. It was only a gentle shove, but he fell against his chair back a bit over-dramatically, laughing in that open, fearless, full-throated way that made people turn in their chairs just to see what he was laughing at, that always made her hear jump a little, made her want to grab him and snog him senseless, even though it usually ended up happening the other way around.
"Don't make me hurt you, Jack Harkness!"
"I might like it," he said with a grin. He opened his mouth to say something more, but something caught his eye through the window behind her, and the smile dropped off his face immediately, leaving no trace behind. "And the record goes unbroken," he muttered softly.
Before Rose could speak, he pushed his chair back, got to his feet, and started toward the door. Rose stared after him for a second, turned to look out the window, and saw absolutely nothing there out of the ordinary.
"Jack!" she called before he reached the door. "We haven't paid yet." It wasn't really what she meant to say, but somehow it was the first thing that came to mind. It was always ridiculous things that came to mind, times like these.
He stopped, just short of the door, and turned to face her, his hands spread. "No money!" He turned again and walked quickly out of the door, at a pace clearly meant to leave her behind, and she caught the just the faintest glimpse of something on his face - uncertainty, concern, maybe even fear - before he vanished around the corner.
Rose growled in frustration and started digging through her pockets for money, muttering under her breath - mostly to herself, since there was no one else to hear or care. "'No money.' Between him and the Doctor... Might as well be travelling through space and time with a pair of five year olds, sometimes."
She finally located the pocket she'd put her money in (because at least she remembered these things when leaving the TARDIS), pulled out what she hoped would be enough, and tossed it on the table without counting it before running out the door after Jack. Once outside, looking up and down the street, she decided it was time to start plotting ways to kill him. How could he manage to disappear completely in less than a minute? Unless he used that stupid wristband... and she really would kill him if he did...
A movement out of the corner of her eye caught her attention, and she turned to see him striding down the street, away from her. Even from behind, she couldn't mistake him - nobody moved like Jack, strong and graceful, like some sort of great feline - though where he'd gotten that blue coat when he hadn't been wearing it before, she didn't know.
"Jack!" she shouted, and took off down the street after him. As if he could really just walk away from her that easily...
Next Chapter >>
Chapter: Stumbling Blocks (2/6)
Characters/Pairing: Rose/Jack, Gwen, Owen, Tosh and Ianto
Word Count: 1853
Rating: PG
Summary: Sometimes Jack can avoid his past, and sometimes parts of it land on his doorstep in exactly the wrong combination.
Notes: Written for
bytheseaside for the available_very winter ficathon. Set (in the Doctor Who timeline) between "The Doctor Dances" and "Boomtown", and in the Torchwood timeline, in season one, between "Ghost Machine" and "Cyberwoman".Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who or Torchwood, and I'm not making anything off this. Just for fun, guys.
<< Previous Chapter
A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.
-Edward de Bono
"Gwen and Owen, I want the two of you with me." Jack pulled on his greatcoat, shrugged his shoulders to settle it, and glanced around the atrium, trying to think. How the hell was he supposed to find one of those things in Cardiff?
"Who'd have guessed?" Owen muttered under his breath, though in the way he did when he wanted everyone to hear him. It was not at all subtle, but then again, Jack never thought it was supposed to be.
Gwen paused in the middle of fixing her gun to her belt and looked up at him. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"You never noticed every time there's some spiky dog alien or something, it's always 'Owen and Gwen, go take care of it.'"
"Yeah," Jack said, striding past him, "I'm a horrible person for asking you to do your job." Before Owen could make some protest about being a doctor, probably just for the hell of it, Jack went on, "By the way, it's not a 'spiky dog alien.' Tosh, I need you to track it from here, keep us updated on its position. It's an alien creation, something someone made - there'll be a signal for its owners to find it."
Gwen had started to trail after him, but Jack heard her footsteps stop abruptly upon hearing that. "Its owners? Are we going to have to find them as well?"
Jack shook his head dismissively without turning to look at her. "No, they don't ever leave home. My guess is, the creature fell through the Rift, and it's just lost. Tosh, the signal?"
Tosh gestured at her computer screen, which displayed a map of Cardiff marked by scattered colored lights. "You do realize that 'signal' covers over a thousand possibilities?" she asked, turning in her chair to face him and eying him skeptically over the top of her glasses. "I've narrowed it down to those associated with alien activity, but that still leaves over a hundred."
Jack sighed and ran a hand through his hair, leaning in to look at the screen. "Alright, I can see where that might be a problem. Uh... see if you can go back to last night and pick up a signal anywhere even close to where Aston lived, cross-reference it with what you're coming up with now. It'll be fairly regular, once a minute at least, simple - no information attached, just a signal it transmits so you can pick up its location."
"I can try," she said, and started typing. The colored map of Cardiff vanished, and was replaced my a mass of scrolling data. "Why would a creature give off a signal like that?"
"You know how some people put a microchip in their pets in case they get lost?"
Gwen whistled softly. "In that case, I really don't want to meet the owners."
"Right there with you," Jack muttered, and took a step back. "Keep us updated, Tosh. I don't care how you do it, but find it. We've got to get out there before it attacks someone else."
That 'someone else', he had no doubt, would be one of three very specific someones. But as long as they could deal with it before it ever found them...
He wondered, briefly, how many times he got the chance to save his past self without his past self ever knowing. The answer quickly came back: far too often. Calling his attention back to the present (a subjective term today if ever there was one), Jack noticed Gwen and Owen had started walking towards the lift, and winced.
"Not that way." Gwen and Owen both looked askance at him, so he elaborated, "There's something on the lift; we're going to have to go out the back."
'There's something on the lift', he decided, sounded better than 'There's a big blue box that travels in space and time on the lift'.
Jack turned away, toward the door, Gwen and Owen trailing behind him like ducklings. Rather heavily armed ducklings, sure, but close enough...
Gwen murmured a brief explanation to Ianto as they passed, but Jack didn't stop to listen. Out the door, out of the Hub, to the SUV and somewhere away from here, all while trying not to so much as glance at the TARDIS.
"So," Gwen said as the door of the SUV slammed shut after she climbed in, behind the driver's seat. "What is this thing, Jack? I know you know."
He sighed a little, clenching his hands around the steering wheel. After a moment, he answered simply, "Time hound." Beside him, Owen snorted and asked, "So when I said 'spiky dog alien'..."
"Close to the truth," Jack allowed, "it just sounded stupid." He reached up to touch his earpiece with one hand, turning the key to start the engine with the other. "Tosh, what've you got?"
It was impossible to completely ignore the TARDIS, always at least a blue blur in the corner of his field of vision. He tried to distract himself by thinking of everywhere he and Rose had been or would be today, so he'd know all the places to avoid.
And it was only when he actually tried to think about it that he realized he had absolutely no solid memory of the day at all.
Rose sipped at her soda, staring out the restaurant's window at passersby. She'd only been to Cardiff - or Wales at all - that once, with the Doctor, and it seemed odd to see the streets not covered in snow, to see electric lights inside instead of gas. That was the trouble travelling with the Doctor. You went somewhere you'd never been before, and whatever the time period, it froze like that in your mind.
Somewhere along the line, Cardiff had become the place where Dickens still lived. Seeing it in her own time, or near enough, was like seeing another city entirely.
"You know," she said to Jack, "the last time I was here, I almost got killed by ghosts. Me and the Doctor."
Jack looked over at her, eyebrows raised. "You said the last time you were here you met Charles Dickens."
"Who says I couldn't do both?"
"Fair enough." He leaned forward against the table, arms braced against the edge, chin resting on folded hands. "Unfortunately, I'm not seeing any ghosts today."
"They were possessing corpses. How is a normal day unfortunate?"
"Well, it would be breaking a record..."
"What record?"
"Everywhere I go with you two-"
Rose snatched up a napkin from the table and balled it up to toss at Jack's head. He ducked, naturally, and it hit the man sitting at the table behind him. Somehow Rose managed to suppress a giggle and pretend it wasn't her, focusing very intently on Jack instead.
"Oi, you can't blame us. We could've had plenty of perfectly calm trips before you came along. You're the criminal here."
"Perfectly calm?" he asked, a smirk playing around the edges of his lips. She couldn't imagine why. Well, she had a couple guesses, but it was almost impossible to pin down why Jack was smirking at any given point in time.
"Yeah. It's your fault that-"
"Besides the ghosts?"
"I didn't say they were all-"
"And the end of the world? Exploding government buildings? I could go on."
Rose rolled her eyes and leaned back in her chair, arms folded over her chest, pretending to be annoyed. Hard to do, smiling like she was. "I don't know why I tell you anything, honestly, if you're just going to use it against me."
"Because I am just that charming, and you'll tell me absolutely anything I want to hear. Which, while nice, is really unnecessary, just in case you were wondering - you've already gotten me into bed."
Rose laughed and leaned forward to shove him back, one hand on his shoulder. It was only a gentle shove, but he fell against his chair back a bit over-dramatically, laughing in that open, fearless, full-throated way that made people turn in their chairs just to see what he was laughing at, that always made her hear jump a little, made her want to grab him and snog him senseless, even though it usually ended up happening the other way around.
"Don't make me hurt you, Jack Harkness!"
"I might like it," he said with a grin. He opened his mouth to say something more, but something caught his eye through the window behind her, and the smile dropped off his face immediately, leaving no trace behind. "And the record goes unbroken," he muttered softly.
Before Rose could speak, he pushed his chair back, got to his feet, and started toward the door. Rose stared after him for a second, turned to look out the window, and saw absolutely nothing there out of the ordinary.
"Jack!" she called before he reached the door. "We haven't paid yet." It wasn't really what she meant to say, but somehow it was the first thing that came to mind. It was always ridiculous things that came to mind, times like these.
He stopped, just short of the door, and turned to face her, his hands spread. "No money!" He turned again and walked quickly out of the door, at a pace clearly meant to leave her behind, and she caught the just the faintest glimpse of something on his face - uncertainty, concern, maybe even fear - before he vanished around the corner.
Rose growled in frustration and started digging through her pockets for money, muttering under her breath - mostly to herself, since there was no one else to hear or care. "'No money.' Between him and the Doctor... Might as well be travelling through space and time with a pair of five year olds, sometimes."
She finally located the pocket she'd put her money in (because at least she remembered these things when leaving the TARDIS), pulled out what she hoped would be enough, and tossed it on the table without counting it before running out the door after Jack. Once outside, looking up and down the street, she decided it was time to start plotting ways to kill him. How could he manage to disappear completely in less than a minute? Unless he used that stupid wristband... and she really would kill him if he did...
A movement out of the corner of her eye caught her attention, and she turned to see him striding down the street, away from her. Even from behind, she couldn't mistake him - nobody moved like Jack, strong and graceful, like some sort of great feline - though where he'd gotten that blue coat when he hadn't been wearing it before, she didn't know.
"Jack!" she shouted, and took off down the street after him. As if he could really just walk away from her that easily...
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