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?"
no subject
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.
no subject
"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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.