![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rosie_ruesTitle: From Swerve of Shore to Bend of Bay
Words:
Rating: PG-13ish for a few swears and a lot of deaths.
Characters: Jack, Jenny, various Torchwood members (eventually)
Spoilers: CoE, The Doctor's Daughter
Summary: Travelling the universe, saving planets, rescuing civilizations, defeating creatures, and doing an awful lot of running.
Author's note: Going on holiday in two minutes. Please forgive any typos.
One
“The end of the universe?” she echoes. Suddenly the night forest seems cold, and she can feel the vines sucking away her happiness. Every instinct in her is screaming no. There’s something bad at the end of days, something she can feel from here.
“That’s right.”
“I don’t even know when that is.”
“I do.”
“And do you know how to get back again?”
He turns away, lifting his head so that the moonlight illuminates his face. She doesn’t think that he even knows he’s seeking a pose. Then he says, “I’m not coming back this time.”
“Well that’s very nice for you,” she says, crossing her arms and lifting her chin. “But I’ve got things I want to do with my life. Look, it’s not like you’re going to die of old age. You’ll get there in the end.”
He tenses. “What do you mean?”
She rolls her eyes at him. “You can’t die. So what’s the rush?”
That gets a proper reaction, almost a double-take, and she laughs at him. “What? Sorry, was it supposed to be a secret?”
#
She had found him on Harpsichord Five, stone cold and dusted with the glitter of a recently erupted gas geyser. She’d been so startled to see anyone this deep into the gasfield, let alone a human, that it had taken her too long to run to his side and check for life.
One heart: stopped. One set of lungs: silent. One perfectly normal human face (albeit one with a rather nice underlying bone structure): being slowly corroded by the atmosphere. It only took a moment for her to decide that she really should drag his body back to her shuttle. Even suicidal idiots had friends who loved them.
Then he sat up, screaming for air.
Within a couple of minutes the atmosphere had poisoned him again, and her hearts had stopped pounding.
Then he did it again. And again.
She’d come to the planet to check out their long-abandoned mercury mines, but components for a time machine she didn’t yet know how to build were far less interesting than a man who could repeatedly come back from the dead.
After the sixth time, he went limp, so she dragged him back to the shuttle, and stowed him in the co-pilot’s seat. By the time he revived, they were on the outskirts of the solar system and heading for Arcan.
The first thing he said was, “You should have left me there.”
“Your overwhelming gratitude has been noted and appreciated.”
He groaned. “When am I?”
Interesting question, that. “Sixty-First Century.”
“Damn. Thought I’d come further than that.”
“What sort of time agent are you, if you don’t even know when you are?”
“Who said I was a time agent?”
She turned round to stare at him, eyes widening. “Did you steal the wristband, then?”
But he had passed out again.
#
Now he’s standing in front of a half-installed time engine, gawping at her as if she’s just announced her engagement to the Face of Boe. She rolls her eyes. “Oh, you didn’t really think it was a secret, did you? Give me some credit. Now, if I happen to get a bit closer to the end of time, I’m happy to drop you off, but I’m not going straight there. Can’t you wait until you get there naturally?”
“It will take too long,” he tells her, and she knows he’s trying to be sober and tragic, but his voice cracks with honest tears.
She rams the last connections into place and slams the engine cover shut. “Oh, for goodness sake! You’re immortal – couldn’t you come up with a less idiotic neurosis than a death wish?”
He looks genuinely stricken, and she feels guilty at once. “Sorry. I’m sorry. Look, how about we go somewhere where you can get that fixed? There are pills you can take for that kind of thing.”
“It’s not a neurosis,” he says, sounding and looking injured.
“Well, then, we’re go somewhere else. We’ve got the whole of history, Captain. We could go to Sparta, to the Crusades, to the Redoubt of Escalon!”
“Or we could go somewhere where there isn’t a war.”
She stops, feeling the excitement clog in her throat, almost choking her. She hadn’t even thought about it. War still comes to her too naturally.
“Or,” she says, wetting her lips and trying to keep her voice steady. “We could go to Barcelona. I’ve been wanting to for ages.”
“The city or the planet.”
“The planet, silly.”
He visibly dredges up the ghost of a smile. “I recommend the forty-third century. Early forty-third century, actually. I was there in the middle of the century and it might be better if I don’t run into anyone I know. There were these triplets, all double-jointed, and how was I supposed to know their father was a senator-”
She’s caught up in the whirl of the story before she can help herself, giggling and blushing as she sinks into the pilot’s seat and sets the coordinates. It not until the whirl of space and time is flashing around them that she realises that he’s distracted her from asking him why he’s so desperate to end his existence.
#
Barcelona is surprisingly fabulous, beyond all her expectations. The markets shimmer and float above the clear oceans, their sails fat-bellied as they coast over silver waves. When they make landfall, the beaches are bright with soft purple sand that sprays up between her toes and warms her to her core. She’s so delighted at the colour and feel of them that she’s still laughing after three whole days, and he seems relieved and a little less burdened.
Jenny buys her very first bikini (scarlet synthsilk which strokes her bare skin like a lover) and discovers the joys of ice cream and the perils of sunburn. On the second day, she persuades the Captain to leave his coat in the shuttle, and suddenly he strips off, so unselfconscious in his nudity that she can’t help wondering why he usually wears so many layers.
They look good, the pair of them, she knows it, and they attract a retinue of admirers. It takes the advent of indignant parents on the fifth day before she realises that the ardent promises of eternal service she has been collecting are legally binding. The Captain lounges on the sand beside her, his head thrown back as he roars with laughter, and she can’t stop herself from kicking him in the side as she remonstrates with the local police force (it really doesn’t help the situation when several of the parents pledge themselves to him halfway through the negotiation).
It’s all sorted out in the end, with an apology from her and some stern words from the parents and a polite suggestion from the local force that they sunbathe on a more deserted beach for a few weeks. That’s fine with her, so she drags the Captain along the coast with her until they find a quiet cove where the mirthseals dance and hoot over the water and the cliffs sway with flowers that sing under the touch of the breeze.
There, at last, he says, “It’s not a neurosis.”
“No?” she says, pouring lilac sand onto his bare shoulder.
“I waited for him. Over a hundred years I waited, and then when he did come we ended up at the end of the world, and it all went so very wrong. It was terrible, but he saved the world, him and Martha-”
“I think I met Martha,” Jenny says idly. “Very brave.”
“That’s her,” he whispers and goes quiet. She sits up a little, propping herself on her elbow so that she can see his face. He’s closed his eyes, and there are tears soaking the sand beside his jaw. She wipes them away with her fingertips, as tenderly as she can.
“And he took me home, and I thought it would really be home this time, because my team were there. My beautiful team.”
He’s rolled over now, his face pressed against her bare thigh, and all this is being whispered into the crook of her knee. She strokes his hair and whispers, “What happened?”
“They started dying so fast. Owen, Tosh, Owen again. My brother. You were right. Wait long enough and there’s cure for everything. He was frozen down there, and then they blew me up and destroyed everything.”
“They did what?”
“Bomb. Inside me. Even that couldn’t kill me.”
She was bred for battle, but this disgusts her. She rubs circles on his sun-warmed back, hoping he won’t feel the way her hand is trembling.
“And I fought and I fought, but then Ianto died.” His tears burn her skin. “So I stopped fighting. I stopped caring. I did what they wanted. And I looked into my grandson’s eyes as I killed him, and he trusted me even when he started screaming.”
That’s the point at which he breaks, and she pats his back desperately. She feels completely inadequate. She knows, in theory, what a grandson is, but the only family term she understands is ‘Dad’ and that’s a mess of dazzling pride and soaring ideals. She doesn’t understand this enough to give him forgiveness or absolution, but she can cradle him in her arms, and murmur into his hair, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
#
After that, things change. He’s less of a passenger now. They dance across time and space, though she’s careful never to go too far forward. They’re on Atrios for the eruption of the Trifold Volcano of Kast, and help evacuate the ash miners whilst the rich of the solar system watch and applaud from their heat-proof pods. On Haley VI they rescue a child from an escaped klabear, which somehow leads to uncovering a whole conspiracy of black market alien trading and arena fighting (which itself leads to an awful lot of running). In the middle of the Trachiki Spiral, they somehow stop a star from going supernova, though neither are quite sure how.they pulled that one off.
In the Ninety-Ninth century, on Milennium XII, he propositioned her for the first time. She turned him down.
“You don’t know what you’re missing,” he promises, grin quirking.
“Technically, I’m still seven years old, and you get misty-eyed every time you mention my father.”
“Hey,” he protests as she starts to walk away. “Who said kinky was bad?”
“Keep it in your pants, Captain.”
“Now this feels familiar,” he mutters and she chooses to ignore him.
Three weeks later and ten centuries earlier, there’s a thing with a blartworm and a rogue Sontoran and they end up dripping green guts and smelling like chlorine. Jenny washes her hair three times, but the stink still lingers. It seems like a good night to go drinking, and she’s never seen cocktails that actually sing before, so when the Captain strolls off with half the waiting staff in a tangle of murmured innuendo and blushing tentacles, she just waves and wishes him luck.
Of course, twelve hours later, when he still hasn’t shown up, she begins to worry. A few short and possibly painful (for someone else) enquiries later, she’s kicking down a door.
He’s partially disgested, a blissful smile on his face. She sighs and kicks the still-feeding alien off his right thigh. Obviously, he’s not getting over it quite as fast as she’d hoped.
He comes back with a howl this time.
“Hurts, does it?” she asks acidly.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“It would have served you right if I waited until they swallowed you whole.”
“I’ve never had a problem with being swallowed whole,” he rasps.
“Shut up, Captain. Look, I get that you think you need to do penance, but sex, booze and stomach acid is never going to work-”
“Works just fine for me.”
“Shut up! Give it up. If you want to make amends, go and fix something broken. Do something useful. Dying is just a bit pointless. And I swear to you, if this doesn’t stop, I will take this ship as far back in time as I can get it to go and I will leave you there to try hopping your way back to the end of days a decade at a time.”
He pouts, and tries to change the subject with comment about not being able to feel his toes.
“That’s because you don’t currently have toes,” Jenny snaps, and doesn’t speak to him for a week.
#
A month later, he steals her timeship. She sits herself down a nearby rock and waits until it remateralises.
Later on, the expression on his face will be worth relishing, but for the moment she just folds her arms and says, “I’m not stupid. I modified the controls so that she comes straight back to me if anyone else tries to fly her.”
He doesn’t take that well, so she hits him over the head and flies them out to a gap between galaxies. She’s got a pile of books to read and she’s been meaning to learn Raxacoricofallapatorian for ages.
He has a month long tantrum in the back of the shuttle, but he eventually gives up trying to brain himself on the console (she makes him clean it up, and domestic chores are really not his forte).
#
On Tirameen, in the middle of a mess created by a Nestene Consciousness, a weevil colony and a troop of privateers, she kills a man without thinking about it. The gun’s warm in her hand, and the shot’s as natural as breathing. By the time she even realises what she’s done, the battle’s over and it’s too late to put it right.
She’s gone seven years without killing, controlling every impulse she was born with, and now she’s failed.
He gets her out of there, and she clings to him as he punches coordinates into the ship and puts her hands on the controls. He tumbles her out of the ship onto a grassy headland, and holds her tight as she screams and rages. She was supposed to be more than this, more than what they made her.
When she’s calm enough to talk, his lips are pressed to her forehead, and he’s rocking her. She believes then that he’s been a father.
“On Messaline,” she says, “where they made me, they’re creating a world around the idea that there’s a man who will not kill.”
“I guess I know where that philosophy started.”
“I was dead when he said it.”
He stiffens at that, and she looks up, trying to summon her brightest, boldest smile and offers, “I got better.”
She’s not sure why he finds that quite so funny, but she laughs with her, her breath catching in her throat.
#
After that, things do get better. There are still times when he’s broken. Neither of them have much a gift for avoiding trouble, and there’s a few times when she finds herself really hoping she can work out how to regenerate on purpose. But she survives and he revives, and they’re busy, travelling the universe, saving planets, rescuing civilizations, defeating creatures, and doing an awful lot of running.
Then, on what should have been a routine hop across a mere two centuries, everything goes mad. The ship’s spinning and every alarm’s flaring, and Jenny’s too busy trying to keep her dinner in to hold on to anything as she’s thrown from her seat, which is probably while she finds herself head down and stuck under the console when everything finally goes still.
Even the alarms are dead, and she drags herself out, gasping, “Where are we?”
He’s not dead, but he’s very still, in a way he hasn’t been for too long. Then he says, very softly, “Earth.”
“Really?” She scrambles up to stand beside him, staring at the blue and white planet below. “When?”
He doesn’t even glance at the dials. “Twenty-first century.”
“Where it begins!” Jenny says, thrilled. “Can we-”
His wristband beeps.
“Wait,” she says. “That never-”
Then there’s a flash and fan of light, and a hologram floating in the cabin between them. Red coat and lots of weapons, disreputable but kind of sexy. Nice.
“Hello, Jack,” he says, with a little smirk and strut. “If you’re seeing this, I guess you’re back. You’d better hurry home. We need you.”
“No,” he breathes.
“The rift’s open,” Mr Hot Hologram says. “Hurry.”
Next Chapter: They’re all gorgeous, and maybe that explains why the Captain likes this planet so much.
Words:
Rating: PG-13ish for a few swears and a lot of deaths.
Characters: Jack, Jenny, various Torchwood members (eventually)
Spoilers: CoE, The Doctor's Daughter
Summary: Travelling the universe, saving planets, rescuing civilizations, defeating creatures, and doing an awful lot of running.
Author's note: Going on holiday in two minutes. Please forgive any typos.
One
“The end of the universe?” she echoes. Suddenly the night forest seems cold, and she can feel the vines sucking away her happiness. Every instinct in her is screaming no. There’s something bad at the end of days, something she can feel from here.
“That’s right.”
“I don’t even know when that is.”
“I do.”
“And do you know how to get back again?”
He turns away, lifting his head so that the moonlight illuminates his face. She doesn’t think that he even knows he’s seeking a pose. Then he says, “I’m not coming back this time.”
“Well that’s very nice for you,” she says, crossing her arms and lifting her chin. “But I’ve got things I want to do with my life. Look, it’s not like you’re going to die of old age. You’ll get there in the end.”
He tenses. “What do you mean?”
She rolls her eyes at him. “You can’t die. So what’s the rush?”
That gets a proper reaction, almost a double-take, and she laughs at him. “What? Sorry, was it supposed to be a secret?”
She had found him on Harpsichord Five, stone cold and dusted with the glitter of a recently erupted gas geyser. She’d been so startled to see anyone this deep into the gasfield, let alone a human, that it had taken her too long to run to his side and check for life.
One heart: stopped. One set of lungs: silent. One perfectly normal human face (albeit one with a rather nice underlying bone structure): being slowly corroded by the atmosphere. It only took a moment for her to decide that she really should drag his body back to her shuttle. Even suicidal idiots had friends who loved them.
Then he sat up, screaming for air.
Within a couple of minutes the atmosphere had poisoned him again, and her hearts had stopped pounding.
Then he did it again. And again.
She’d come to the planet to check out their long-abandoned mercury mines, but components for a time machine she didn’t yet know how to build were far less interesting than a man who could repeatedly come back from the dead.
After the sixth time, he went limp, so she dragged him back to the shuttle, and stowed him in the co-pilot’s seat. By the time he revived, they were on the outskirts of the solar system and heading for Arcan.
The first thing he said was, “You should have left me there.”
“Your overwhelming gratitude has been noted and appreciated.”
He groaned. “When am I?”
Interesting question, that. “Sixty-First Century.”
“Damn. Thought I’d come further than that.”
“What sort of time agent are you, if you don’t even know when you are?”
“Who said I was a time agent?”
She turned round to stare at him, eyes widening. “Did you steal the wristband, then?”
But he had passed out again.
Now he’s standing in front of a half-installed time engine, gawping at her as if she’s just announced her engagement to the Face of Boe. She rolls her eyes. “Oh, you didn’t really think it was a secret, did you? Give me some credit. Now, if I happen to get a bit closer to the end of time, I’m happy to drop you off, but I’m not going straight there. Can’t you wait until you get there naturally?”
“It will take too long,” he tells her, and she knows he’s trying to be sober and tragic, but his voice cracks with honest tears.
She rams the last connections into place and slams the engine cover shut. “Oh, for goodness sake! You’re immortal – couldn’t you come up with a less idiotic neurosis than a death wish?”
He looks genuinely stricken, and she feels guilty at once. “Sorry. I’m sorry. Look, how about we go somewhere where you can get that fixed? There are pills you can take for that kind of thing.”
“It’s not a neurosis,” he says, sounding and looking injured.
“Well, then, we’re go somewhere else. We’ve got the whole of history, Captain. We could go to Sparta, to the Crusades, to the Redoubt of Escalon!”
“Or we could go somewhere where there isn’t a war.”
She stops, feeling the excitement clog in her throat, almost choking her. She hadn’t even thought about it. War still comes to her too naturally.
“Or,” she says, wetting her lips and trying to keep her voice steady. “We could go to Barcelona. I’ve been wanting to for ages.”
“The city or the planet.”
“The planet, silly.”
He visibly dredges up the ghost of a smile. “I recommend the forty-third century. Early forty-third century, actually. I was there in the middle of the century and it might be better if I don’t run into anyone I know. There were these triplets, all double-jointed, and how was I supposed to know their father was a senator-”
She’s caught up in the whirl of the story before she can help herself, giggling and blushing as she sinks into the pilot’s seat and sets the coordinates. It not until the whirl of space and time is flashing around them that she realises that he’s distracted her from asking him why he’s so desperate to end his existence.
Barcelona is surprisingly fabulous, beyond all her expectations. The markets shimmer and float above the clear oceans, their sails fat-bellied as they coast over silver waves. When they make landfall, the beaches are bright with soft purple sand that sprays up between her toes and warms her to her core. She’s so delighted at the colour and feel of them that she’s still laughing after three whole days, and he seems relieved and a little less burdened.
Jenny buys her very first bikini (scarlet synthsilk which strokes her bare skin like a lover) and discovers the joys of ice cream and the perils of sunburn. On the second day, she persuades the Captain to leave his coat in the shuttle, and suddenly he strips off, so unselfconscious in his nudity that she can’t help wondering why he usually wears so many layers.
They look good, the pair of them, she knows it, and they attract a retinue of admirers. It takes the advent of indignant parents on the fifth day before she realises that the ardent promises of eternal service she has been collecting are legally binding. The Captain lounges on the sand beside her, his head thrown back as he roars with laughter, and she can’t stop herself from kicking him in the side as she remonstrates with the local police force (it really doesn’t help the situation when several of the parents pledge themselves to him halfway through the negotiation).
It’s all sorted out in the end, with an apology from her and some stern words from the parents and a polite suggestion from the local force that they sunbathe on a more deserted beach for a few weeks. That’s fine with her, so she drags the Captain along the coast with her until they find a quiet cove where the mirthseals dance and hoot over the water and the cliffs sway with flowers that sing under the touch of the breeze.
There, at last, he says, “It’s not a neurosis.”
“No?” she says, pouring lilac sand onto his bare shoulder.
“I waited for him. Over a hundred years I waited, and then when he did come we ended up at the end of the world, and it all went so very wrong. It was terrible, but he saved the world, him and Martha-”
“I think I met Martha,” Jenny says idly. “Very brave.”
“That’s her,” he whispers and goes quiet. She sits up a little, propping herself on her elbow so that she can see his face. He’s closed his eyes, and there are tears soaking the sand beside his jaw. She wipes them away with her fingertips, as tenderly as she can.
“And he took me home, and I thought it would really be home this time, because my team were there. My beautiful team.”
He’s rolled over now, his face pressed against her bare thigh, and all this is being whispered into the crook of her knee. She strokes his hair and whispers, “What happened?”
“They started dying so fast. Owen, Tosh, Owen again. My brother. You were right. Wait long enough and there’s cure for everything. He was frozen down there, and then they blew me up and destroyed everything.”
“They did what?”
“Bomb. Inside me. Even that couldn’t kill me.”
She was bred for battle, but this disgusts her. She rubs circles on his sun-warmed back, hoping he won’t feel the way her hand is trembling.
“And I fought and I fought, but then Ianto died.” His tears burn her skin. “So I stopped fighting. I stopped caring. I did what they wanted. And I looked into my grandson’s eyes as I killed him, and he trusted me even when he started screaming.”
That’s the point at which he breaks, and she pats his back desperately. She feels completely inadequate. She knows, in theory, what a grandson is, but the only family term she understands is ‘Dad’ and that’s a mess of dazzling pride and soaring ideals. She doesn’t understand this enough to give him forgiveness or absolution, but she can cradle him in her arms, and murmur into his hair, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
After that, things change. He’s less of a passenger now. They dance across time and space, though she’s careful never to go too far forward. They’re on Atrios for the eruption of the Trifold Volcano of Kast, and help evacuate the ash miners whilst the rich of the solar system watch and applaud from their heat-proof pods. On Haley VI they rescue a child from an escaped klabear, which somehow leads to uncovering a whole conspiracy of black market alien trading and arena fighting (which itself leads to an awful lot of running). In the middle of the Trachiki Spiral, they somehow stop a star from going supernova, though neither are quite sure how.they pulled that one off.
In the Ninety-Ninth century, on Milennium XII, he propositioned her for the first time. She turned him down.
“You don’t know what you’re missing,” he promises, grin quirking.
“Technically, I’m still seven years old, and you get misty-eyed every time you mention my father.”
“Hey,” he protests as she starts to walk away. “Who said kinky was bad?”
“Keep it in your pants, Captain.”
“Now this feels familiar,” he mutters and she chooses to ignore him.
Three weeks later and ten centuries earlier, there’s a thing with a blartworm and a rogue Sontoran and they end up dripping green guts and smelling like chlorine. Jenny washes her hair three times, but the stink still lingers. It seems like a good night to go drinking, and she’s never seen cocktails that actually sing before, so when the Captain strolls off with half the waiting staff in a tangle of murmured innuendo and blushing tentacles, she just waves and wishes him luck.
Of course, twelve hours later, when he still hasn’t shown up, she begins to worry. A few short and possibly painful (for someone else) enquiries later, she’s kicking down a door.
He’s partially disgested, a blissful smile on his face. She sighs and kicks the still-feeding alien off his right thigh. Obviously, he’s not getting over it quite as fast as she’d hoped.
He comes back with a howl this time.
“Hurts, does it?” she asks acidly.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“It would have served you right if I waited until they swallowed you whole.”
“I’ve never had a problem with being swallowed whole,” he rasps.
“Shut up, Captain. Look, I get that you think you need to do penance, but sex, booze and stomach acid is never going to work-”
“Works just fine for me.”
“Shut up! Give it up. If you want to make amends, go and fix something broken. Do something useful. Dying is just a bit pointless. And I swear to you, if this doesn’t stop, I will take this ship as far back in time as I can get it to go and I will leave you there to try hopping your way back to the end of days a decade at a time.”
He pouts, and tries to change the subject with comment about not being able to feel his toes.
“That’s because you don’t currently have toes,” Jenny snaps, and doesn’t speak to him for a week.
A month later, he steals her timeship. She sits herself down a nearby rock and waits until it remateralises.
Later on, the expression on his face will be worth relishing, but for the moment she just folds her arms and says, “I’m not stupid. I modified the controls so that she comes straight back to me if anyone else tries to fly her.”
He doesn’t take that well, so she hits him over the head and flies them out to a gap between galaxies. She’s got a pile of books to read and she’s been meaning to learn Raxacoricofallapatorian for ages.
He has a month long tantrum in the back of the shuttle, but he eventually gives up trying to brain himself on the console (she makes him clean it up, and domestic chores are really not his forte).
On Tirameen, in the middle of a mess created by a Nestene Consciousness, a weevil colony and a troop of privateers, she kills a man without thinking about it. The gun’s warm in her hand, and the shot’s as natural as breathing. By the time she even realises what she’s done, the battle’s over and it’s too late to put it right.
She’s gone seven years without killing, controlling every impulse she was born with, and now she’s failed.
He gets her out of there, and she clings to him as he punches coordinates into the ship and puts her hands on the controls. He tumbles her out of the ship onto a grassy headland, and holds her tight as she screams and rages. She was supposed to be more than this, more than what they made her.
When she’s calm enough to talk, his lips are pressed to her forehead, and he’s rocking her. She believes then that he’s been a father.
“On Messaline,” she says, “where they made me, they’re creating a world around the idea that there’s a man who will not kill.”
“I guess I know where that philosophy started.”
“I was dead when he said it.”
He stiffens at that, and she looks up, trying to summon her brightest, boldest smile and offers, “I got better.”
She’s not sure why he finds that quite so funny, but she laughs with her, her breath catching in her throat.
After that, things do get better. There are still times when he’s broken. Neither of them have much a gift for avoiding trouble, and there’s a few times when she finds herself really hoping she can work out how to regenerate on purpose. But she survives and he revives, and they’re busy, travelling the universe, saving planets, rescuing civilizations, defeating creatures, and doing an awful lot of running.
Then, on what should have been a routine hop across a mere two centuries, everything goes mad. The ship’s spinning and every alarm’s flaring, and Jenny’s too busy trying to keep her dinner in to hold on to anything as she’s thrown from her seat, which is probably while she finds herself head down and stuck under the console when everything finally goes still.
Even the alarms are dead, and she drags herself out, gasping, “Where are we?”
He’s not dead, but he’s very still, in a way he hasn’t been for too long. Then he says, very softly, “Earth.”
“Really?” She scrambles up to stand beside him, staring at the blue and white planet below. “When?”
He doesn’t even glance at the dials. “Twenty-first century.”
“Where it begins!” Jenny says, thrilled. “Can we-”
His wristband beeps.
“Wait,” she says. “That never-”
Then there’s a flash and fan of light, and a hologram floating in the cabin between them. Red coat and lots of weapons, disreputable but kind of sexy. Nice.
“Hello, Jack,” he says, with a little smirk and strut. “If you’re seeing this, I guess you’re back. You’d better hurry home. We need you.”
“No,” he breathes.
“The rift’s open,” Mr Hot Hologram says. “Hurry.”
Next Chapter: They’re all gorgeous, and maybe that explains why the Captain likes this planet so much.