Captain Jack Harkness (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
captgreatcoat) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
ten_fwd2014-06-18 12:04 am
captgreatcoat) wrote in ten_fwd2014-06-18 12:04 am
Entry tags:
First entrance
[Torchwood Three, Cardiff, during episode 1.07, Greeks Bearing Gifts.]
Tosh is going to have to learn to believe in humanity herself. Nobody can instill that faith. However hard she's going to find it to learn, at least it won't be as hard -- or as costly -- as Jack's own lesson.
He shoves his hands into his coat pockets as he strides across Roald Dahl Plass, the breeze bringing the smell of the ocean in off the bay, ruffling in his hair and at the hem of his vintage RAF greatcoat.
Until suddenly, it isn't.
Jack's footsteps pause in mid-stride and he spins, hand going automatically to his holster to draw the Webley. The dim, warm light of the plaza at night is gone, just like the salt air and that playful little breeze. The sound of running water from the tower, the shape of the Millennium Centre with its hybrid verse spelled out in windows across its front.
Instead, he's in a bar.
A bar.
"What the hell?"
Tosh is going to have to learn to believe in humanity herself. Nobody can instill that faith. However hard she's going to find it to learn, at least it won't be as hard -- or as costly -- as Jack's own lesson.
He shoves his hands into his coat pockets as he strides across Roald Dahl Plass, the breeze bringing the smell of the ocean in off the bay, ruffling in his hair and at the hem of his vintage RAF greatcoat.
Until suddenly, it isn't.
Jack's footsteps pause in mid-stride and he spins, hand going automatically to his holster to draw the Webley. The dim, warm light of the plaza at night is gone, just like the salt air and that playful little breeze. The sound of running water from the tower, the shape of the Millennium Centre with its hybrid verse spelled out in windows across its front.
Instead, he's in a bar.
A bar.
"What the hell?"
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"Worth a shot, wasn't it?" she ho-hums, taking a bite out of the self-destruct button. "But now that you've put that thing away you might as well sit and 'ave tea like a civilized person."
It's entirely possible she's enjoying taking the piss out of him. Hey, without the Doctor around she gets bored.
"Citizen of Cardiff," she addresses him, over-emphasizing the words. "You sound like a Yank, has anyone ever told you that?"
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"You know, that's very British. Someone appears out of nowhere in front of you and you want to sit and have tea."
He generally feels entitled to get away with comments like that, as an invested outsider; maybe he's not from Britain originally, but he's lived there longer than not, much of that time in Cardiff.
Accent notwithstanding.
You'd think an RAF greatcoat would tip off at least some people.
"Actually, yeah. All the time. Doesn't change the facts."
So maybe he's sometimes a little liberal with what he calls a fact. She doesn't need to know that.
And it is a fact that he's lived in Cardiff far longer than most people who'd call themselves the same.
"And this isn't Cardiff. So where the hell am I?"
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He can be as liberal as he wants with the facts. Amy will treat him to the same. Rule number one: the Doctor lies, and so do his companions. Not as poorly, it should be said.
"You're in space, mate. And don't go all wobbly, it's perfectly safe. You're on a starship called the Enterprise, sometime in the twenty-forth century," she says.
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"How do you know that word?" he says, though he's sure there's only one way he could.
He knows who her friend must be, because there's only one Time Lord left.
The Doctor.
And meeting her is the closest he's been to finding the Doctor in years, after so long spent chasing rumors and Torchwood records that have nothing to do with his own work and cases, and waiting, waiting at the Rift.
He almost misses the other things she says, his thoughts caught in the possibilities of that one word.
Being in space in the wrong century suddenly seems far less important than it did.
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Suddenly he's looking exactly as wobbly as she told him not to. Men, they can never follow instructions. Frowning, she tries a few more.
"'Starship'? Well, I'm not exactly a homebody either. Enterprise is the name they gave me when I got here, and I ... "
That leaves just one thing. She peers at him with her mouth left open, hope turning messy somersaults in her stomach.
"Gallifreyan?" she says, carefully neutral.
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And he waits. Because apparently she's playing some sort of a game trying to be vague with him and his patience with it is running low.
But he can't be too frustrated, too testy, too annoyed by it, because there's hardly anyone who'd be calling him a Yank who should know that word. That word that means so much across time and space but only to those in the know.
"Gallifreyan," he repeats. "There's only one Time Lord left, and I'm going to bet both you and I know who that is."
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She may be testing him, but only because she isn't used to other people recognizing things to do with the Doctor. Can't be too careful, and can't be too hopeful, even though she knows the second he narrows his eyes at her that this is different. He's different.
He knows.
Jack's words send her to her feet, eyes wide and bright, and red locks whipping around her face like small tornadoes. She doesn't want to smile, to hint at anything like familiarity, but it's hard not to do when someone's just plucked her heart straight out of her chest.
"Maybe," she breathes, wary as ever. "Who's asking?"
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No, this is far more personal. Because she jumps to her feet, her hair swirling, her eyes suddenly alight, caught in the light of adventure that the Doctor inspires in those he takes along on his travels. Like Rose. Like Jack. The love of him and what he does that kindles in them and is so impossible to erase that Jack still feels its ache deep in his chest after well over a century.
"Captain Jack Harkness," he says, with his customary lean forward towards her and easy grin.
(If the Doctor had been here, he'd have said something about that smile.)
"Former companion of the Doctor."
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The Doctor, clearly, doesn't need to be here. Not that she minds the lean-in, but ... no.
"Amy Pond. Current companion of the Doctor," she says, crossing her arms and maintaining her cool, even as her heart is turning somersaults.
Oh, who is she kidding?
"You travelled with the Doctor? Really?" she enthuses, and then goes altogether serious. "But you're a boy."
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But, okay. He knows how to take a hint.
"And you're a redhead," he says, doing his best to sound mildly offended. Because it's true that from Jack's experience and from what Torchwood knows about the Doctor, there have been more women than men among his companions.
"It happens. I met him over a little misunderstanding with some alien tech in London, he saved me from an exploding spaceship."
It was a beautiful friendship. Until the end. And he still can't quite manage to be just as lighthearted and teasing about it all as he'd wish.
Some things take more lifetimes than even Jack has to forgive.
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"So he does travel with blokes," she says, hardly believing it even with the evidence standing right in front of her. "Wait till I get my hands on 'im, he'll never hear the end of it."
Assuming she gets her hands on him again. It sobers her a little, but she has faith the Doctor's coming for her. He just never can get his timing right.
"Jack," she repeats, nodding slowly.
The name does sound familiar, though the Doctor doesn't always like to open up about what's happened before. It takes persistence, which he learned right off that Amy has in spades, but there are some things even she doesn't know yet. May never know. But not if she has her way.
"How long since you last saw him?" she asks.
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MouseSmith, though he hadn't gone traveling with them."Living proof," Jack says, grinning in reply to Amy's sudden, pretty laughter. "You can't always believe him."
He even still has his TARDIS key, kept close and safe for all these years and now a part of the huge jangling set of keys he carries as the head of Torchwood Three.
Of all the people to run into in a place like this, he's found one of the Doctor's companions. It couldn't have been the Doctor himself, the man he's been waiting lifetimes to find. It had to be a companion. Someone still traveling with him.
Someone who hasn't been abandoned on a space station full of Dalek dust and left to fend for himself. After he'd died for him.
"Too long."
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She can't help the little flirty aside in the middle. It's harmless, really; she's happily married, and Rory's big pouting face follows her from planet to planet any time she gets cheeky with a local boy. But captain, well. Captain of what, she wonders?
His next words deflate a little more of her enthusiasm, but she was half-expecting that anyway.
"'Too long' seems to be the song of the day," she sighs, leaning back. "I haven't seen him since I was brought here. He is, as usual, running late."
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"Oh, Amy Pond, I'm rarer than you know."
He doesn't know the extent of the Doctor's past -- who does? Nor is he quite sure just how much of a rarity it is to be a guy who travels with him. He just knows that, in the end, he wasn't important enough to wait around for on the Game Station.
Which ... yeah. She's definitely right about the frequency of 'too long' as a time between seeing the Doctor. He'd been told, once, a long time ago, that it would take more than a century. He still doesn't know how long it will be. He doesn't always believe the prophecy, though ...
Well. He'd have reason to. The girl's prophecies are usually right.
"Guess he hasn't learned punctuality in the time since I saw him last."
Yeah. Like that was ever going to happen.
The Doctor probably doesn't even want to find Jack again. After all, he was the one who did the abandoning.
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She likes it.
"No," she scoffs, swirling her drink around in its glass. "No, he has not."
She takes a pointed gulp, and waves a hand.
"So what's your story, then? Got tired of the ol' Blue Box?" she asks, already knowing the answer to that one (No). "Or too busy with your captainy things? You know, he doesn't talk much about what happens to his old friends, once you stop travellin' together."
And Amy is, above all else, a curious creature.
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It sobers, somewhat, at her next question. It's the sort of thing his team prod at, though none of them ever got enough out of him to know enough to phrase the question.
None of them know more than that he's been waiting for the right kind of Doctor, that wistful phrase that he can so very rarely make as flippant as he'd like it to be.
For Amy, though, for a companion, someone who knows the sheer giddy intoxication of travelling with the Doctor, that joke won't work. Especially since she seems to have had some sort of experience with the Doctor's inability to be where he's meant to be when he's meant to be.
He'd never have wanted to leave.
"He left me behind. Ditched me on a space station in the year 200,100."
He tries not to sound bitter. It doesn't work.
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"No," she says inside a mirthless chuckle, starting to shake her head and then aborting the movement.
She stares at him.
"No, not the Doctor. He would never do that," she says, nearly reverently.
Not because she holds the Doctor on the same pedestal she once did, not really, but because she trusts him, and because-- because he wouldn't leave his friends behind. Not on some space station or some ship floating out in space.
He wouldn't.
He couldn't.
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How could Jack have come back to life but for an intervention by the Doctor? Nothing else makes sense. And then the Doctor left him, alone on a space station full of the remains of Dalek and human defender alike, and he's been looking for him ever since.
And here's this girl, so young, so convinced she knows the Doctor. Like he was once. So full of faith in him.
"Maybe one day I'll get a chance to prove that."
He hasn't seen him in more than a very long century.
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Because if she allows herself to believe the Doctor could do that, that he could ever do that, then she'd have to allow herself to wonder if he'll ever come for her at all.
That maybe she'll be stuck here. For good.
"There must be some other explanation," she says, red hair flailing around her cheeks as she shakes her head.
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He's wanted to believe it for a long, long time. That's the thing about the Doctor: he inspires this sort of unshakeable faith, where you can't believe anything truly bad could really happen, because the Doctor will stop it. The Doctor will be there.
The Doctor will protect you.
How long had he believed it? And doesn't he really believe it still, with all his talk of what will happen when he finds the right kind of Doctor?
He doesn't want to strip away that faith from her, but it can be dangerous, too, to believe too much of one man.
It's just that when the man's the Doctor, it's almost impossible not to believe anything of him.
"I've just never had a chance to find out what it was. But I will."
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And he never did.
(And she waited.)
But since then, she's begun to trust him — and herself — again. They've been through too much together for her to believe he'd really do that.
"He'll come for us," she says, though not as sure as she was a moment ago; "an' when he does, you can ask him. An' if he won't tell you, I'll get the information out of him myself."
Looking at her, you'd believe she could, too.