Fic: Composed of Nows
Author:
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indiana_j Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters: Rose/Jack, Mickey, Pete, Jake, Jackie
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,488
Disclaimer: Doctor Who and the characters within, sadly, do not belong to me.
Summary: Sometimes it takes someone else to point out that forever is simply composed of nows.
A/N: Spoilers for all the way through Season Two of DW and sometime in Season One of Torchwood. Many, many thanks to my beta reader
aura_wolf who did a fantastic job despite the fact that I flailed at her. A lot. :D This was written for a ficathon and the prompt was fresh flowers. Yeah, I don’t really know how this came to be from the prompt but my head is a strange place. This will eventually get posted to more than my personal journal but not until tonight. This is, obviously, AU. :)Prompt: #27. Fresh Flowers
Pain.
~~
He came back to life exactly like every other time he came back to life - frantically gasping in that first breath of air into his lungs, feeling his heart spasm back to life in a painful gallop, groaning as limbs jerked with sudden electrical impulses. It hurt like hell each time, making him regret again that life he can't seem to shake, like an unwanted relative that kept coming back to ask for money.
At the same time, he can't bring himself to hate being alive again. There's a siren song about it that he can't deny, no matter how hard he tried. And there are moments that make him glad to be alive; those teasing events that make him realize that was what it was all about. This, however, was not one of those moments.
Finally, Jack managed to rouse himself enough to try and take stock of his state and where he had ended up. He was in a fair state of undress - his shirt and jacket were slightly worse for wear, though still in mostly one piece, but his pants had clearly gone to their maker. One shoe was completely missing and that irritated him more than the lack of pants issue.
As for where he was...
He sat up and a wave of dizziness washed over him, so he quickly sank back down to the ground. He seemed to be in some kind of flower field that was in full, spring-like bloom. A clear, blue sky passed by over head when he looked up and in the distance he could hear the surf break against a beach of some kind.
Somewhere near the sea, in a field...not, he decided, very helpful in the least. Though the flowers were pretty and he couldn't help but think they smelled slightly of one Rose Tyler. Or maybe it had been that Rose smelled slightly of them. For all that she had liked her makeup caked on, she had picked her scents very carefully due to a previous incident that involved too much perfume, an alien, and a sensitive nose. That sneeze, he was told, nearly started a revolution.
His body, though alive once more, was still exhausted from the fall, dying (probably more than once) and coming back to life. Jack fought against it, but was unable to stay awake for very much longer, his systems forcing him into a deep sleep so they could re-energize.
~~
The sound of voices speaking a language that was clearly human, but not one Jack knew, woke him up. Cracking an eye open, he found himself surrounded by two men and a young woman, the latter who was pointing at him frantically. When they finally realized he was awake, he quickly decided that feigning greater injury than what he really had was the best course of action. It was either that or try to explain why he really wasn't wearing any pants and have them jump to the conclusion that he'd done something untoward with the young woman.
When she smiled brightly at him, her face crinkling in a truly delightful way as her family helped him to his feet, he made a mental note to do something untoward to her at a later date.
~~
It turned out that he was in Norway of all places.
Katrine, the young woman that first found him, spoke fairly decent English, as did her mother and brother. Her father spoke only a smattering of English, most of them bizarre catchphrases like "What up, doc?" and a few he'd never heard before. However, Jorge was content to have the rest of his family translate for him. They were a family of fairly prosperous farmers and fishermen, and it was their land that he had fallen upon.
Of course, he left that part out of his story and claimed that he had no idea how he came to be in the field with no money and very little in the way of pants. In reality, it wasn't all that far from the truth.
They had all glanced at each other and nodded solemnly, muttering "Dårlig ulv stranden" to themselves. Jack frowned at the term - it was familiar and yet utterly alien at the same time, like a forgotten memory that kept wiggling about in the back of his head. Katrine quickly explained that it was a beach near their house and that weird things were known to happen there. To them he was now firmly entrenched as one of those "weird" events that just seemed to happen, but they seemed more amused by it than frightened or concerned.
The mother, Nora, was openly pleased to have a guest over for dinner and once he charmed his way into a pair of pants (and Katrine out of hers), they enveloped him in the family life for the evening.
Assuming he was American - and with good reason; how could he explain that in the 51st century, accents had broadened and changed some? - they treated him to a traditional meal and he pleased Nora even more with his appetite. The process of coming back to life always made it seem like he had an empty cavern to fill instead of simply one stomach. And he used the friendly banter and chatter at the table to gather information.
As a former Time Agent, he knew enough about alternate realities to realize that was probably what he had fallen through to courtesy of the Rift. It felt off, slightly wrong, a feeling in the back of his head that he couldn't quite put his finger on. Combine that with the gossip he was hearing and it made sense, in its own time-warped way. At least he didn't have to worry about running into an alternative him, he thought, since he wouldn't be born until the 51st century.
If, of course, the time lines still worked roughly the way they did back home.
"Where will you go from here?" Katrine asked as her mother prepared the dessert. "Back to America?"
He shook his head. "First to London, I think, and then to Cardiff." No matter where or when he was, Cardiff was always a good stopping place though he had no idea if there was a version of the Doctor in this world or if Cardiff was still a hotspot of alien activity of any kind. But he knew he'd been in Cardiff when he had been spat out into this different Norway and if he played his cards right, he might be able to reverse it from there.
Nora giggled suddenly. "Maybe he catch good glance of the lovely, young heiress," she said, laughing.
This caught Jack's attention and he grinned. "Is there a lovely, young heiress in London?" he asked. "I can see that Norway has its share." Both women giggled and the men rolled their eyes good naturedly.
"They actually came to visit Darlig ulv stranden," Katrine explained after a moment, "a few years back. They have big companies all over, not just in London."
"Not to mention running Torchwood," the brother chimed in as he stole another slice of bread.
Jack was suddenly paying full attention.
"Ah, yes yes. I hear the daughter, the heir, is a bit of a handful and works with Torchwood as well." Nora frowned at Katrine. "Not proper behavior for such a young woman."
"Yes, mama," she sighed.
He was certainly going to have to take a look see at this other Torchwood, Jack decided, and make sure this place wasn't anything like how his used to be run. And where there was Torchwood, there was alien technology - which meant it might be easier to get himself home than he feared.
"Would our American friend like some more?" Nora offered and he happily handed over his plate.
~~
Zeppelins. Jack openly stared, neck craned back as far as it could go, in wonder. Back in his own world, the crafts had been almost forgotten outside of history lessons, but here they were the only way to fly, literally. There were no such things as planes, zeppelins being the only thing in the air space. A bit of an oddity in a world that was, apparently, so far advanced than the one he'd left behind.
Always a bit of a flyboy, Jack couldn't keep his eyes on the ground after that.
And if he happened to glance at the underside of the zeppelin for a line and a blond with a Union Jack, he just let the moment pass.
~~
London, Jack was happy to find out, was the same old, smelly, gorgeous London that he was used to. With a few changes, of course - President Harriet Jones, for one. And he was pretty stunned to hear that Torchwood was a name chatted about on street corners as if it was nothing out of the ordinary - just another arm of the police, as it were.
He shook his head and paid for his newspaper (the owner of the bookstall had been pleased to find someone who was interested in the old way of doing things. How he had said it made Jack decide to research that). The family he left back in Norway had pressed some money on him when he left and he had managed all right between there and England. Somehow, he'd even managed to charm his way into a flat.
Grinning at the memory, he flipped through the pages almost randomly as he walked along, scanning for mentions of Torchwood or anything else that was interesting.
And then he very nearly ran right into a trashbin.
The gossip section and not even buried, but the first article.
"Rose Tyler: Party Girl or Torchwood Obsessed?"
The smile was the same, the eyes - the rude gesture was familiar, too. The last time he seen her do that was when the Uriana Queen had demanded that Rose become one of her consorts - in the afterlife.
"Well, shit."
~~
The woman who had set him up in the nice, little flat in the heart of London had little desire for anything more than a handsome rogue paying her compliments and keeping her company. A widow with sons and daughters grown, she was amused to be seen in the company of a much younger man (oh, if she had only known) and Jack had been content enough.
It gave him a base of operations and an ability to start saving up the currency used in that world. It wasn't completely different from the pound back in the other England, but it was different enough that he couldn't use what little he'd had on him.
It had been a few months since he'd been tossed through, enough to get him settled and comfortable. He hadn't moved onto Cardiff yet because...
Well, he had a thousand different good reasons, but they all started with R and ended with osetyler.
He'd been pulling as many public records of her as he could, but it was only recently that he was finally getting past the gossip rags and into the interesting tidbits.
Current head of Torchwood, Pete Tyler, finds missing wife alive and well.
Pete Tyler's long lost daughter - believed to have originally died at birth - has returned to England.
Jack sat back from the vidscreen and crossed his arms, rolling things over in his mind. A never heard from before daughter to Pete Tyler suddenly appeared - he did the math quickly - right after the invasion of the Cybermen and Daleks that had invaded both worlds. After about three months back home, she started working with 'war heroes', Jake Simmons and one Rickey Smith (Jack had laughed himself sick at the first goofy picture he'd found of Rickey. Neither version, apparently, matured past goofball, war hero or no.).
And then suddenly he was remembering...
"Sir, the reports you wanted to see?" Ianto said, interrupting Jack's private musings. A thick - far too thick - folder was placed carefully on the desk alongside a steaming mug of tea.
"Thanks, Ianto."
"Is there..."
"No, nothing else." He waited until Ianto had left the room before picking it up and flipping through it. The names of the dead had been placed alphabetically by last name and he found himself quickly at the 'T' section.
Tyler, Jacqueline
Tyler, Rose
He sat for hours in the Hub and stared at nothing, trying to pretend he wasn't imagining her screams in his mind.
Jack's Rose, the vibrant young woman that he'd kissed on Satellite Five, was gone. This Rose wasn't his, couldn't be his, but what she was...
She was a mystery.
And simply put, Captain Jack Harkness had nothing better to do.
~~
The problem with the public information was that it was public and not very helpful. And with the exception of one Sarah Jane Smith - who he hoped from the bottom of his black heart was giving this Torchwood just as much grief - there was very little published about the Tyler family outside of the normal vein. The others wrote about Pete's business with Torchwood and public works; how Jackie had been seemingly changed for the better by the escape from the Cybermen; what Rose was wearing (and in one case, what she wasn't wearing. Jack firmly approved and added that to his growing folder. For scientific reasons, of course).
However, from the looks of it, Sarah Jane had managed to befriend Rose and become the unofficial family reporter. She was just as sharp with them if she hadn't been friends but she published a great deal more meaty works.
None of which was all that helpful, but Jack knew that for everything that was put to print, there was a great deal of information that would never see the light of day. Information that could prove valuable in finding out more about this Rose Tyler before he did anything rash.
~~
Well, doing something rash was relative, he thought from his perch in a tree as he watched Sarah Jane's house. This kind of rash was only likely to get him hurt physically.
After all, what was the point of never being able to die if you didn't live a little?
~~
One black eye, a pair of torn trousers and wounded pride later, the only thing Jack Harkness had managed to come away with was the knowledge to never, ever mess with Sarah Jane Smith. Especially in her own home.
Shaking his head wryly, he gazed at his reflection in the mirror. "Time to bite the bullet, Jack," he told himself and forced a grin on his face. The reflection looked sickly. "What's the worst that can happen? She turns out to be a bubble-headed blond, we have a little fun, I go back to Cardiff. No harm, no foul."
Right.
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*giggles* SJS amuses me so very much and I didn't even have to think about how she would handle him when he broke in. Of course she kicked his butt. Thanks again! The next piece will be up tomorrow. :D
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Next part is now up. :D
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At first, I thought this fic was going to be too similar to
Nevertheless, I think you distinguished this story enough, since
My favorite bit:
what Rose was wearing (and in one case, what she wasn't wearing. Jack firmly approved and added that to his growing folder. For scientific reasons, of course).
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*grins* I think I was snickering to myself when I wrote that paragraph because, really, it's Jack. Even dark and slightly emo-Jack is still Jack. :D
I'm glad you liked it!
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