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find_rightbrainTitle: The Distance Between Yesterday and Tomorrow
Chapter: Cross Step (3/6)
Characters/Pairing: Rose/Jack, Gwen, and Owen
Word Count: 2523
Rating: PG-13
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
"Jack!"
He thought the shout was in his head at first, something he imagined. A memory, or the echo of one, coming back. Actually, he hoped it was a memory coming back, because any memory of today would be better than none at all. Funny thing about memory - you never knew what large chunks could be missing until you went looking for them specifically. And then it could get a little frightening.
"Jack!" Louder, more annoyed, and closer, and now he realized it definitely wasn't in his head - no mistaking that he'd actually just heard that. He stopped and turned quickly, coat fanning out behind him with the sudden movement. She'd almost caught up by then, and he had time only to register blonde hair, a pink shirt or jacket, and a very annoyed expression before her momentum carried her straight into him, thumping against his chest before she could slow down, much less stop.
Jack reached out instinctively to steady her, hands on both her shoulders, and this was familiar, he remembered this. Not specifically, from one day, one trip, but a hundred different times, holding her gently upright even when she might not need it, the automatic tilt of his head to try and catch her eye, to verify that she was alright.
Rose took a step back and brushed her hair back from her face, laughing as she looked up at him. "What in the world was that for?"
His heart plummeted to his stomach and stayed there, an acrid taste rising in his throat at the same time. He remembered this. He remembered her. But this wasn't a memory, she was standing right in front of him, grinning like she always used to, so terribly young.
He also remembered looking through reports of the dead at Canary Wharf, and seeing the one name that mattered: ROSE TYLER.
He was standing here looking at a dead girl.
He ought to say something, he knew, but somehow the words wouldn't come. At least, not until Rose raised her eyebrows at him, uncertainty creeping in. Jack knew exactly the expression she'd make before she made it, chin ducked slightly, lips pressed together, brows just slightly furrowed.
"Seriously, you can't just run off out of nowhere, make me pay, and then not say anything." She tried for a light tone, but worry tainted it, like blood in clear water, and he couldn't possibly miss it.
This would all be so much easier if he could remember what the hell he did today. He reached for the memory, and it sidled away, just out of reach. "Sorry, I was just-"
Something else sidled into his field of vision, just in the corner of his eye, and out again just as quickly. Gray and blurred, maybe imagined, but it cut him off as he whirled to look down a mostly empty street, just one car calmly cruising past. There was a possibility it wasn't there at all, but if it looked like a Time Hound...
If it looked like a Time Hound, chances were the nearest two people out of their proper timeline should get the hell out of Dodge. Or to the nearest safe place, which right now meant the Hub, or...
"We need to get you back to the TARDIS," he said, taking her lightly but firmly by the arm, pulling her down the street and praying to whatever powers that might exist that she wouldn't argue.
Clearly, he'd been away from Rose for far too long if that possibility even crossed his mind. She planted her feet and stopped walking. He managed to pull her a few more steps out of momentum, but she always did have the most amazing ability to fix herself to one spot and make absolutely certain she wasn't moved without a level of force Jack wasn't entirely comfortable with when it came to her. Still holding her arm, he pivoted to face her. "What?"
"You can't just swan off and leave me on my own one minute, and then suddenly decide it's so important that we go back to the TARDIS, and still not tell me what's going on! So I'm standing here until you explain it to me, and then maybe I'll go back."
The maybe in that sentence worried him. Not as much as the part before it, though. Why the hell did I try to leave her alone? In Cardiff? I couldn't have been that stupid even then...
He released her arm, but only so he could gesture pointedly at her, as if being extra emphatic was going to get his point across. "There's something here. A... something that fell through the Rift, from another planet. And it's really not safe for you to be out there with that thing on the loose. I'll tell you more when we get back to the TARDIS."
No, he wouldn't, he'd just wait until she got inside and then disappear as quickly as possible, but whatever it would to take to get her there...
"An alien?" Rose asked, frowning a little. Her expression didn't change beyond that. Not a good sign.
"If you want to call it that, sure. An alien that's going to want to kill us. So can we go now?"
"And what, just leave an alien to run around Cardiff?"
Jack growled, resisting the urge to pick her up and just carry her. That wouldn't go over well, though if it came down to it... "It's not going to hurt anyone except us!" And the other version of him, and the Doctor, and anyone else who'd ever travelled in time, but that didn't seem quite as important at the moment.
Rose studied his face silently for a moment, and then folded her arms over her chest. Internally, Jack groaned.
"So this alien that wants to kill just us. Tell me about it."
*
One useful thing about being a former Time Agent - one of the useful things that didn't make the Doctor look at Jack like he was a dog that might need to be put down - was that Jack knew well just about every creature that preyed on paradoxes, anomalies in time, people out of their proper timeline. This one... not as bad as reapers, but not the sort of thing you expected to see running around twenty-first century Cardiff. Not the sort of thing you expected to see anywhere off their home world, and wasn't that the point?
Jack jogged down the street, not fast enough to draw too much attention to himself, more than fast enough to outdistance Rose. If one of them was going to be attacked, at least it would be him... which wasn't really that much of a comfort, come to think of it. Still, what the Doctor would do to him if it attacked Rose...
He checked his belt for his sonic blaster - still there, so at least the Doctor hadn't seen fit to steal it before Jack walked out of the TARDIS... That would make this easy. Not so hard to kill, time hounds, provided they didn't surprise you and you had the proper weaponry, though how he was going to hide the body afterwards... well, that was what teleports were for. His hand moved to his wristband next, flipping it open and setting up a quick scan - not necessarily for alien tech, but there should at least be a signal...
"Jack!"
Not a voice he recognized. Not at all a familiar voice, and unfamiliar voices calling his name always did put him on edge since he left the Time Agency. Then again, it was the wrong name if that was the explanation.
Jack flipped the cover of his wristband shut and spun around to see two people coming down the pavement toward him, a man and a woman, both armed, he can tell at a glance, though they've got the weapons concealed. No immediate signs of being Time Agents - the clothes all match the time period, no wristbands, and he's tempted to scan them, but there's no way to do that right now without being obvious. Most importantly, no one he recognizes, no one who should know his name, especially this name, when he's only been using it since World War II...
He put on a bright, false smile and let his hand fall away from his wrist, conveniently now at the level of his sonic blaster, not that they would notice that unless they were as adept at picking up that sort of thing as he was. Few people were. "What?" Safer question than most others he could ask, probably better than trying to tell them they had the wrong person, definitely better than asking who they were.
He just managed to shove back the annoyed thought that he didn't have time for this.
"What," the man repeated in disgust, in an accent very definitely not Welsh. "Drags us out here, runs off, and now he says what." Jack got the impression this was the sort of man who spoke just because he didn't like the sound of silence. Also that he'd better say something now, or this might go on.
"I'm sorry." He didn't know what he was apologizing for, of course, but they seemed to think they knew him, so chances were an older or younger version of himself had something to apologize for.
"That's a change," the man snorted, and Jack raised an eyebrow. Maybe apologies weren't the way to go, and his guess was starting to lean toward "younger him". Great. In the way that could very easily end in disaster and a paradox swallowing them all.
Or maybe just him.
"You could have waited until we got out of the SUV," the woman scolded, stopping in front of Jack and giving him a reproving look. "What, did you see the time hound?"
Jack stiffened, not quite visibly, and revised a few initial judgments. Maybe they were Time Agents after all, but the lack of wristbands, the name they called him by, the way they spoke, the way they moved was all wrong. Names, he decided, might help. Not a lot, but it would give him something.
"Yeah. Lost it, though - moved too fast. You picked up anything on scans?"
The man reached up to touch an earpiece and asked, "Tosh, anything?" There were more of them. Better and better.
The woman was still watching him in a way that couldn't help but make him nervous, big dark eyes suspicious from underneath her bangs. "What happened to your coat? Weren't you wearing it when we left the Hub?"
Damn. What the hell is a Hub? "Left it in the car. Hard to run in, especially in this weather." He tried a smile that worked to distract people from the obvious questions maybe fifty, sixty percent of the time on a good day - it had worked on Rose, after all, in World War II. The way the woman was still looking at him oddly... this seemed to be a different case.
Jack considered for a second, whether he should say something more or let it drop and hope she would too. "Well," he said finally, deciding a change of subject was the way to go, "we're not getting anything done standing around here. I'll track the time hound with my wristband, and the two of you can–"
"Wait!" the man said sharply, one hand still to his earpiece. Jack glared half-heartedly, somewhat annoyed to be interrupted, but at least it distracted the woman from watching him like she was trying to divine his deepest secrets from simple visual cues. He found it... more than a little disconcerting, not least because he wasn't entirely certain she couldn't.
He waited a moment, impatiently, for whatever communication happened to be coming over the headset to finish, and finally asked, "If you're done–"
The man's head jerked up, gaze fixing on something behind Jack, and Jack cut himself off. The man's hand dropped, moving for his gun. Assuming the intention wasn't to shoot him and hoping he was right, Jack spun around.
He'd never actually seen a time hound before, in person. Just pictures and holographic recordings. None of that completely conveyed the unsettling way they moved, like a set of bones loosely arranged and unconnected inside a sack of skin. Of course, that mattered less than how fast they were when one of them was lunging at his face.
Jack dropped instinctively into a crouch, because when it came to time hounds, rule number one was get out of their way. It tried to turn mid-leap, and mostly failed, though a claw tore through his shirt and raked a gash in his back. Great.
He rolled onto his back, ignoring the pain, before the creature could regroup, reached for his sonic blaster - and then noticed both of the maybe Time Agents reaching for guns. Which immediately negated any chance that they might actually be Time Agents, because... really? Guns? Jack whipped his blaster up and snapped, "Don't!", hoping he'd get off a shot before the idiot twins managed to.
Of course, in the typical way of his life since he met the Doctor, he didn't.
Two gunshots rang out, one a deep roar, the other one not quite as loud but very distinct. Stupid. One missed completely, as the time hound writhed, serpentine, out of the way. The other ricocheted off armored skin, clipped Jack in the shoulder, and just made the thing angrier. It turned its attention from Jack to the not-Time Agents, sprang with hooked teeth bared...
A sonic blast knocked it away before it reached either of them, sent it tumbling as Jack struggled to his feet. Not enough to kill or even stun, no time to change the settings, but enough to hurt, at least. The time hound skidded on its side, jumped up while Jack fought to find a setting on his blaster that would kill the thing... and it was gone.
"Fuck." Of course it would run away. At least three temporal anomalies here, counting the Doctor, not counting the TARDIS, why not go for the ones that weren't going to shoot it? Jack clapped a hand to his shoulder, determined the wound wouldn't kill him even if it hurt like hell, hooked his blaster back on his belt, and glanced to the two kids - both looking at him like they expected instructions. Why did things always have to get complicated?
But at least one of them could track the thing...
"You two," he said, already turning down the street while the muscles in his back and shoulder screamed, "put those away and come with me."
Next Chapter >>
Chapter: Cross Step (3/6)
Characters/Pairing: Rose/Jack, Gwen, and Owen
Word Count: 2523
Rating: PG-13
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
Tell me with whom you go and I'll tell you what you do.
-William Blake
"Jack!"
He thought the shout was in his head at first, something he imagined. A memory, or the echo of one, coming back. Actually, he hoped it was a memory coming back, because any memory of today would be better than none at all. Funny thing about memory - you never knew what large chunks could be missing until you went looking for them specifically. And then it could get a little frightening.
"Jack!" Louder, more annoyed, and closer, and now he realized it definitely wasn't in his head - no mistaking that he'd actually just heard that. He stopped and turned quickly, coat fanning out behind him with the sudden movement. She'd almost caught up by then, and he had time only to register blonde hair, a pink shirt or jacket, and a very annoyed expression before her momentum carried her straight into him, thumping against his chest before she could slow down, much less stop.
Jack reached out instinctively to steady her, hands on both her shoulders, and this was familiar, he remembered this. Not specifically, from one day, one trip, but a hundred different times, holding her gently upright even when she might not need it, the automatic tilt of his head to try and catch her eye, to verify that she was alright.
Rose took a step back and brushed her hair back from her face, laughing as she looked up at him. "What in the world was that for?"
His heart plummeted to his stomach and stayed there, an acrid taste rising in his throat at the same time. He remembered this. He remembered her. But this wasn't a memory, she was standing right in front of him, grinning like she always used to, so terribly young.
He also remembered looking through reports of the dead at Canary Wharf, and seeing the one name that mattered: ROSE TYLER.
He was standing here looking at a dead girl.
He ought to say something, he knew, but somehow the words wouldn't come. At least, not until Rose raised her eyebrows at him, uncertainty creeping in. Jack knew exactly the expression she'd make before she made it, chin ducked slightly, lips pressed together, brows just slightly furrowed.
"Seriously, you can't just run off out of nowhere, make me pay, and then not say anything." She tried for a light tone, but worry tainted it, like blood in clear water, and he couldn't possibly miss it.
This would all be so much easier if he could remember what the hell he did today. He reached for the memory, and it sidled away, just out of reach. "Sorry, I was just-"
Something else sidled into his field of vision, just in the corner of his eye, and out again just as quickly. Gray and blurred, maybe imagined, but it cut him off as he whirled to look down a mostly empty street, just one car calmly cruising past. There was a possibility it wasn't there at all, but if it looked like a Time Hound...
If it looked like a Time Hound, chances were the nearest two people out of their proper timeline should get the hell out of Dodge. Or to the nearest safe place, which right now meant the Hub, or...
"We need to get you back to the TARDIS," he said, taking her lightly but firmly by the arm, pulling her down the street and praying to whatever powers that might exist that she wouldn't argue.
Clearly, he'd been away from Rose for far too long if that possibility even crossed his mind. She planted her feet and stopped walking. He managed to pull her a few more steps out of momentum, but she always did have the most amazing ability to fix herself to one spot and make absolutely certain she wasn't moved without a level of force Jack wasn't entirely comfortable with when it came to her. Still holding her arm, he pivoted to face her. "What?"
"You can't just swan off and leave me on my own one minute, and then suddenly decide it's so important that we go back to the TARDIS, and still not tell me what's going on! So I'm standing here until you explain it to me, and then maybe I'll go back."
The maybe in that sentence worried him. Not as much as the part before it, though. Why the hell did I try to leave her alone? In Cardiff? I couldn't have been that stupid even then...
He released her arm, but only so he could gesture pointedly at her, as if being extra emphatic was going to get his point across. "There's something here. A... something that fell through the Rift, from another planet. And it's really not safe for you to be out there with that thing on the loose. I'll tell you more when we get back to the TARDIS."
No, he wouldn't, he'd just wait until she got inside and then disappear as quickly as possible, but whatever it would to take to get her there...
"An alien?" Rose asked, frowning a little. Her expression didn't change beyond that. Not a good sign.
"If you want to call it that, sure. An alien that's going to want to kill us. So can we go now?"
"And what, just leave an alien to run around Cardiff?"
Jack growled, resisting the urge to pick her up and just carry her. That wouldn't go over well, though if it came down to it... "It's not going to hurt anyone except us!" And the other version of him, and the Doctor, and anyone else who'd ever travelled in time, but that didn't seem quite as important at the moment.
Rose studied his face silently for a moment, and then folded her arms over her chest. Internally, Jack groaned.
"So this alien that wants to kill just us. Tell me about it."
One useful thing about being a former Time Agent - one of the useful things that didn't make the Doctor look at Jack like he was a dog that might need to be put down - was that Jack knew well just about every creature that preyed on paradoxes, anomalies in time, people out of their proper timeline. This one... not as bad as reapers, but not the sort of thing you expected to see running around twenty-first century Cardiff. Not the sort of thing you expected to see anywhere off their home world, and wasn't that the point?
Jack jogged down the street, not fast enough to draw too much attention to himself, more than fast enough to outdistance Rose. If one of them was going to be attacked, at least it would be him... which wasn't really that much of a comfort, come to think of it. Still, what the Doctor would do to him if it attacked Rose...
He checked his belt for his sonic blaster - still there, so at least the Doctor hadn't seen fit to steal it before Jack walked out of the TARDIS... That would make this easy. Not so hard to kill, time hounds, provided they didn't surprise you and you had the proper weaponry, though how he was going to hide the body afterwards... well, that was what teleports were for. His hand moved to his wristband next, flipping it open and setting up a quick scan - not necessarily for alien tech, but there should at least be a signal...
"Jack!"
Not a voice he recognized. Not at all a familiar voice, and unfamiliar voices calling his name always did put him on edge since he left the Time Agency. Then again, it was the wrong name if that was the explanation.
Jack flipped the cover of his wristband shut and spun around to see two people coming down the pavement toward him, a man and a woman, both armed, he can tell at a glance, though they've got the weapons concealed. No immediate signs of being Time Agents - the clothes all match the time period, no wristbands, and he's tempted to scan them, but there's no way to do that right now without being obvious. Most importantly, no one he recognizes, no one who should know his name, especially this name, when he's only been using it since World War II...
He put on a bright, false smile and let his hand fall away from his wrist, conveniently now at the level of his sonic blaster, not that they would notice that unless they were as adept at picking up that sort of thing as he was. Few people were. "What?" Safer question than most others he could ask, probably better than trying to tell them they had the wrong person, definitely better than asking who they were.
He just managed to shove back the annoyed thought that he didn't have time for this.
"What," the man repeated in disgust, in an accent very definitely not Welsh. "Drags us out here, runs off, and now he says what." Jack got the impression this was the sort of man who spoke just because he didn't like the sound of silence. Also that he'd better say something now, or this might go on.
"I'm sorry." He didn't know what he was apologizing for, of course, but they seemed to think they knew him, so chances were an older or younger version of himself had something to apologize for.
"That's a change," the man snorted, and Jack raised an eyebrow. Maybe apologies weren't the way to go, and his guess was starting to lean toward "younger him". Great. In the way that could very easily end in disaster and a paradox swallowing them all.
Or maybe just him.
"You could have waited until we got out of the SUV," the woman scolded, stopping in front of Jack and giving him a reproving look. "What, did you see the time hound?"
Jack stiffened, not quite visibly, and revised a few initial judgments. Maybe they were Time Agents after all, but the lack of wristbands, the name they called him by, the way they spoke, the way they moved was all wrong. Names, he decided, might help. Not a lot, but it would give him something.
"Yeah. Lost it, though - moved too fast. You picked up anything on scans?"
The man reached up to touch an earpiece and asked, "Tosh, anything?" There were more of them. Better and better.
The woman was still watching him in a way that couldn't help but make him nervous, big dark eyes suspicious from underneath her bangs. "What happened to your coat? Weren't you wearing it when we left the Hub?"
Damn. What the hell is a Hub? "Left it in the car. Hard to run in, especially in this weather." He tried a smile that worked to distract people from the obvious questions maybe fifty, sixty percent of the time on a good day - it had worked on Rose, after all, in World War II. The way the woman was still looking at him oddly... this seemed to be a different case.
Jack considered for a second, whether he should say something more or let it drop and hope she would too. "Well," he said finally, deciding a change of subject was the way to go, "we're not getting anything done standing around here. I'll track the time hound with my wristband, and the two of you can–"
"Wait!" the man said sharply, one hand still to his earpiece. Jack glared half-heartedly, somewhat annoyed to be interrupted, but at least it distracted the woman from watching him like she was trying to divine his deepest secrets from simple visual cues. He found it... more than a little disconcerting, not least because he wasn't entirely certain she couldn't.
He waited a moment, impatiently, for whatever communication happened to be coming over the headset to finish, and finally asked, "If you're done–"
The man's head jerked up, gaze fixing on something behind Jack, and Jack cut himself off. The man's hand dropped, moving for his gun. Assuming the intention wasn't to shoot him and hoping he was right, Jack spun around.
He'd never actually seen a time hound before, in person. Just pictures and holographic recordings. None of that completely conveyed the unsettling way they moved, like a set of bones loosely arranged and unconnected inside a sack of skin. Of course, that mattered less than how fast they were when one of them was lunging at his face.
Jack dropped instinctively into a crouch, because when it came to time hounds, rule number one was get out of their way. It tried to turn mid-leap, and mostly failed, though a claw tore through his shirt and raked a gash in his back. Great.
He rolled onto his back, ignoring the pain, before the creature could regroup, reached for his sonic blaster - and then noticed both of the maybe Time Agents reaching for guns. Which immediately negated any chance that they might actually be Time Agents, because... really? Guns? Jack whipped his blaster up and snapped, "Don't!", hoping he'd get off a shot before the idiot twins managed to.
Of course, in the typical way of his life since he met the Doctor, he didn't.
Two gunshots rang out, one a deep roar, the other one not quite as loud but very distinct. Stupid. One missed completely, as the time hound writhed, serpentine, out of the way. The other ricocheted off armored skin, clipped Jack in the shoulder, and just made the thing angrier. It turned its attention from Jack to the not-Time Agents, sprang with hooked teeth bared...
A sonic blast knocked it away before it reached either of them, sent it tumbling as Jack struggled to his feet. Not enough to kill or even stun, no time to change the settings, but enough to hurt, at least. The time hound skidded on its side, jumped up while Jack fought to find a setting on his blaster that would kill the thing... and it was gone.
"Fuck." Of course it would run away. At least three temporal anomalies here, counting the Doctor, not counting the TARDIS, why not go for the ones that weren't going to shoot it? Jack clapped a hand to his shoulder, determined the wound wouldn't kill him even if it hurt like hell, hooked his blaster back on his belt, and glanced to the two kids - both looking at him like they expected instructions. Why did things always have to get complicated?
But at least one of them could track the thing...
"You two," he said, already turning down the street while the muscles in his back and shoulder screamed, "put those away and come with me."
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