What Happens In 100 Lifetimes, 1/4
Title: What Happens In a Hundred Lifetimes, Part I: Michael
Author:
jbs_teeth
Pairing: Jack/Ianto, Jack/Michael
Rating: R, but only just. Language, and some war-torn violence.
Genre: Well, a little angsty, actually. I've quite given up on trying to persuade myself that I don't love the melodrama. But, if you can believe it, it's angsty Jack, not Ianto.
Word Count: About 2500 to this part.
Summary: Ianto reminds Jack of someone else he knew, a long time ago.
Notes: There's much more Ianto/Jack than it appears at first glance, and the second installment has a lot more Janto interaction. One of four parts. Canon, though there are absolutely no references any events in the series, at least not in this part. (On principal, I now refuse to acknowledge anything past TTLM anyway.) Cross-posted (though I'm not quite sure why some people apologize for that).
Also, I'm not looking for a beta, but if some writerly type would be willing to thrash over a couple of things with me, I'd appreciate you dropping me a line (outside of comments).
What Happens In a Hundred Lifetimes, Part I: Michael
The first time it happens, it's not really the first time, but the first Jack will remember later, when he's realized what's going on. He'll vaguely recall remembering the other times before when he may have thought something similar, but the memory of prior remembering is too odd and absurd to count.
But in the future, when he does recall the first time, he'll be clear in this recollection; the memory of the moment is sharp enough to taste, so strong and clear was its content. One of the things he will remember is how ordinary it would have been, how easily it would have been forgotten if not for that split second, that throw-away touch that pushed everything outward.
He is sitting behind his desk, late in the afternoon on a particularly quiet day in April. Owen must be out, he thinks, because he has noticed how unusually calm the Hub is now, how the hum of their printers and computers and pumps can be almost overwhelming when no one is bitching about being left alone or money or some horrible decision being perpetrated on him by callous and short-sighted management.
He's drinking a glass of ordinary tap water, but quite cold, with ice, cold enough that a wet layer of condensation has collected on the outside of the glass. It makes a picture here, in black and white, as he picks up the water to drink, a wet ring made black on the dark gray corner of an otherwise empty surface. And, for some reason, his eye is caught and held by the smudgy outline of water on his cheap desktop for the few seconds it remains, before being wiped up by a white terry cloth and the efficient swipe of Ianto's left hand.
Michael could do that.
Michael could enter a room without being heard, without pushing the molecules of air into one another and then into him. It's an excellent skill to have, this defiance of simple physics, and something Jack has actually practiced over the years, to varying degrees of success. He was told once that he simply has too much presence to go unnoticed, and Jack accepts such compliments with both hands. He'd stopped trying ages ago.
Michael could do it, though, and so can Ianto.
His tongue is cool inside his mouth, cool enough to be felt inside his cheeks and to taste both the usual subtle saltiness of his own saliva and the vaguely metallic tang of the water at once.
“Michael could do that, too.” He says it out loud, but his gaze lags behind his voice for a few moments, watching the desktop change value beneath the rapidly contracting water mark. He has to drag his eyes up to Ianto's face, to look around a moment to locate him in the room.
“Could do what, sir?” Ianto is more curious about the name than whatever it was the name could do, but he's familiar enough with Jack's sparseness and drama when he uses that tone of voice. He crosses his arms and leans against the nearest wall, determined not to betray his eagerness for more information. Ianto thrives on information, and thrives on Jack, but the twain had yet to meet for all his subtle trying.
Looking into Ianto's placid eyes, the feeling hits him full force -- or, rather, it makes itself felt from the inside out, growing from that place in the back of his throat through the rest of his body, mapping out his limbs, flipping his stomach and speeding his heart. He shakes his head against it, and simply says, “Enter a room without being heard or sensed. You do it.”
He smiles, despite this misplaced wrongness. “Sneaky bastard.” Both of them.
Whatever it is that Jack's feeling is strong enough to push its way into Ianto, too, and he spares only a half smile before asking, “Are you ok, sir? Have you eaten today?”
“No. Nothing today.”
Ianto quickly crosses toward the door, pausing in his path to briefly put his hand on Jack's right shoulder. “I'll bring you something, Jack.” Ianto's pinky drags a half-inch across the part of Jack's neck that starts to become his shoulder, his tone so deep and rich it's almost a meal itself, and whatever it is, it's so true Jack thinks Ianto must know it, too.
“Michael.”
“Jack. Jack, are you ok?” Ianto should never worry his forehead with that expression, but he does much more often than Jack would like. He has stopped mid-stride, moved his hands to Jack's face to search for signs of illness or melancholy, maybe.
Jack shakes himself into semblance of normality. If only it weren't so ... utter. So complete.
Michael had been gone for almost a hundred years, actually. Ninety-one years, to be precise. He wants to remember Michael, really, but he'd also like the oddness to snap. Now.
“No, Ianto, I'm fine. But, you're right. I'm hungry. Please.” Puppy dog eyes done more for comic effect than encouragement; Ianto is thrilled to feed him, and Jack appreciates this more than he has said to him. Tell him this, out loud for once. Maybe this time he would.
Sometimes even Jack is unnerved by the sheer volume of ways he can go wrong. As Ianto all but sprints from the room to nourish him, Jack sighs to think how he fails Ianto every day by not regarding him as he should be regarded. He should be more thoughtful, just as he should be more vigilant in honoring Michael's memory.
Jack is momentarily panicked by the idea that his collection of people, of their memories, will grow unmanageably in the oncoming years, grow so large he won't be able to properly remember them all in one day. Ianto deserves to be thought of at least once every day, once every hour, even when he's millennia dead.
How will he move forward under the weight of all of them, even in only one hundred years time? It's his forward momentum that saves him, actually, and sometimes Jack believes in fate because he knows that truth for a fact.
Real self-awareness is something Jack has achieved only through vigorous practice, because he's had absurd amounts of time to do so. Which is perfect, really, in combination with immortality. Being propelled forward by action, narcissism, retarded inner growth: without these, he'd have done the bat-shit crazy thing much, much earlier. As it it was, it took as long as three of four regular lifetimes for it to happen (at least, the lifespans he was used to. People died young, in Jack's experience. So much danger in his life, from the moment he was born, and then before modern medicine. He hoped to keep Ianto longer than most of the others, if he could keep him safe enough.)
--
Later, after Ianto has come and gone again, Jack spends seventeen minutes watching the hands on the clock move around. Seventeen minutes of tracing the red second hand as it moves in circles, really watching the motion of it, looking at it, not thinking or judging or weighing. This clock ticks, which is incredibly satisfying to Jack, and it has hands. The numbers are large and clear, Arabic numbers, black, each minute marked further by black lines. A red hand that moves smoothly in and out of each second. It runs on batteries, it hangs just left of his line of sight, it is seven years old.
Sometimes, this is what he does with eternity.
It could be Thursday afternoon at 4:12... 4:13... 4:14:47... but it really doesn't matter. Unless something pulls him outside, into traffic, possibly. 4:15:03. He only knows it's afternoon because it's light outside.
He is a strange editor, he knows, as he somehow also knows that this seventeen minutes of nothing stands a good chance of making the cut.
As a movie, with him to edit it, his life would be a flop.
At 4:21:12, he remembers Michael properly. Not smoothly, like a well-cut film, but jerkily, his face front and center only for a half-second before it slides off to his inner peripheral vision. Michael, not the first time he had met him, but the first time he saw him.
Jack is standing in a tent in the middle of some goddamn field in France, staring holes into a map of the surrounding country; though, by this time, he's not really staring at the map itself but, rather, the far northeast corner of it. He's really staring through it, appreciating the texture of the paper, the undulating tones of the wood holding it up, the spread of the ink absorbed onto the page it imprinted. All of eight square inches, so close it's almost like he's leaning over, holding his face only one or two inches away from the tabletop. But he's not, he's standing up, and it's the oddest thing that suddenly there is a hand leaning on the table just there.
He doesn't start or physically betray his surprise, but he is surprised. While he does acknowledge he'd been slightly adrift, it was the hardly the first time someone had approached him unawares, and he always knows. It's how he'd lived the first 35 years of his life, relying on his senses and reflexes to keep him alive, safe, one step ahead.
But no, he simply follows the line from the hand on the table, up an arm in a sleeve, slightly dirty, frayed hole above the soft inner elbow, over a shoulder, across a chest, forward again along the arm stretched out toward him. Jack notes the paper held out to him, retraces that arm with his gaze, finding the skin beyond the neckline of uniform, again, dusty, then a pleasingly rounded jaw, a stubbled cheek, the corner of a lip-cracked mouth, a firm nose, black, black eyes. The trip takes forever, but, as Jack sees it now, it jumps: it's quick, almost quantum. The images loop through, jagged and out of sequence, and he can't quite grab onto a steady picture of Michael's face. He thinks, sometime during the loud and expensive height of the Great War, “How does he do that?” It's Michael Something, the messenger, with a message.
In the firelight, he is divided again, Michael's uncovered body parts separate and equal in tone, in texture and in taste. Jack is often surprised - again -- that each piece blends seamlessly into a whole, single person. Each part is so interesting on its own, abstractly. It is about the time in his life that he stopped seeing things as beautiful or not, a trait that no one notices or would believe, but one that remains definitely true.
“Sir, the Major has asked that you provide reinforcements. He needs at least 300 troops, as quickly as possible.”
Michael's voice is silk, it glides easily along surfaces, educated. Jack's always a sucker for a voice like that, something most people have noticed about him.
He'd gone himself, of course, and, in the end, hadn't bothered with any kind of seduction at all. Not intentionally. In the right moment, when it's quiet and cold outside, he says, “Now, Michael. I want you.”
Michael says, “yes,” and although Jack has no idea if this Michael's first time for anything, there is no hesitation in him as he takes off his uniform, boots, socks, bandana. Afterward, on the verge of sleep, Michael says, “The way you look at me, Jack. You see me.” Not really a question, certainly not an answer to a question Jack doesn't bother to ask.
Or maybe they're dressed and Michael shouts it to make himself heard over the rain and explosions outdoors. Over the confusion of the trenches and engagement, but this seems less true to Jack. Surely, surely if there were bombs, shrapnel, confusion, he'd be outside, in it.
Jack does not remember the fighting like a movie either, but as entirely plausible. It's been like this his whole life, the screaming and the moving, and his mind makes room for it because it's clearly happening to him. And that doesn't change because Jack still isn't a thinker on the inside, for all the practice he has had.
There are other times with him, easy to catch in the tunnels and the fear, and every time Jack thinks of Michael, whom he loved, loves still, he is afraid that he does not do proper justice to the individual moments, as they deserve.
--
In November, they are outside, and it's war out here, certainly. Jack hears both the sound of the ticking clock and the artillery exploding as they hit the ground. It's muddy and it's wet, which Jack knows must be right because it was never not those things. It's so loud he feels it in his teeth, feels it now and in front of the clock. Michael is 22 years old, and Jack is 70 and 161.
“Take this to McFadden, now.” He presses a note into Michael's hand, and he nods and takes off directly. Jack yells to make himself heard above the din. “Gentlemen, we go on the offensive. We are marching north, and we are doing it right now. Get your heads out of your asses and MOVE.” About thirty yards from where Jack is directing his regiment, something falls out of the sky and catches Michael's shoulder, causing his mouth to drop in shock, making his right leg buckle in pain, bringing him to his knees. Jack watches as he kneels there for several seconds, the shock written clearly on his face as he feels the blood and bone and bits of muscle that have been ripped away from him. Whatever it was that has landed does not explode right away, but Jack knows it will, sees that Michael is about to die in the muck in France, in 1916, three thousand fucking years before Jack was ever born.
He keeps marching forward, though, does not bother to send the medic or go himself, although he is perfectly aware that if he were just to sprint forward quickly enough, he could save Michael, take the cost himself. Jack goes north, with the rest of his troops and his head up his ass, and he relives the moments in which Michael dies three, four, five times, in vivid slow motion.
No, that's not right, either. He knows for certain he did not see Michael die, because that part is too slow and real and in order to be genuine. Someone had told him about it two days later, with regret because everyone loved Jack, and everyone knew Jack liked Michael.
Jack had cried out loud, for awhile, and to this moment he still doesn't know if anyone else was in the room to see him do it.
--
At 5:03 and a 161 years old, Jack gets up from his desk, picks up his dirty dishes and walks downstairs to find Ianto. He has forgotten again to tell him how much he is appreciated, and this evening that does not sit well with him. Jack will take him outside, somewhere, so he can think of Ianto in the proper sunlight, for once, and 28 years old.
-- End, Part I --
Part II: Elizabeth
Author:
jbs_teeth
Pairing: Jack/Ianto, Jack/Michael
Rating: R, but only just. Language, and some war-torn violence.
Genre: Well, a little angsty, actually. I've quite given up on trying to persuade myself that I don't love the melodrama. But, if you can believe it, it's angsty Jack, not Ianto.
Word Count: About 2500 to this part.
Summary: Ianto reminds Jack of someone else he knew, a long time ago.
Notes: There's much more Ianto/Jack than it appears at first glance, and the second installment has a lot more Janto interaction. One of four parts. Canon, though there are absolutely no references any events in the series, at least not in this part. (On principal, I now refuse to acknowledge anything past TTLM anyway.) Cross-posted (though I'm not quite sure why some people apologize for that).
Also, I'm not looking for a beta, but if some writerly type would be willing to thrash over a couple of things with me, I'd appreciate you dropping me a line (outside of comments).
What Happens In a Hundred Lifetimes, Part I: Michael
The first time it happens, it's not really the first time, but the first Jack will remember later, when he's realized what's going on. He'll vaguely recall remembering the other times before when he may have thought something similar, but the memory of prior remembering is too odd and absurd to count.
But in the future, when he does recall the first time, he'll be clear in this recollection; the memory of the moment is sharp enough to taste, so strong and clear was its content. One of the things he will remember is how ordinary it would have been, how easily it would have been forgotten if not for that split second, that throw-away touch that pushed everything outward.
He is sitting behind his desk, late in the afternoon on a particularly quiet day in April. Owen must be out, he thinks, because he has noticed how unusually calm the Hub is now, how the hum of their printers and computers and pumps can be almost overwhelming when no one is bitching about being left alone or money or some horrible decision being perpetrated on him by callous and short-sighted management.
He's drinking a glass of ordinary tap water, but quite cold, with ice, cold enough that a wet layer of condensation has collected on the outside of the glass. It makes a picture here, in black and white, as he picks up the water to drink, a wet ring made black on the dark gray corner of an otherwise empty surface. And, for some reason, his eye is caught and held by the smudgy outline of water on his cheap desktop for the few seconds it remains, before being wiped up by a white terry cloth and the efficient swipe of Ianto's left hand.
Michael could do that.
Michael could enter a room without being heard, without pushing the molecules of air into one another and then into him. It's an excellent skill to have, this defiance of simple physics, and something Jack has actually practiced over the years, to varying degrees of success. He was told once that he simply has too much presence to go unnoticed, and Jack accepts such compliments with both hands. He'd stopped trying ages ago.
Michael could do it, though, and so can Ianto.
His tongue is cool inside his mouth, cool enough to be felt inside his cheeks and to taste both the usual subtle saltiness of his own saliva and the vaguely metallic tang of the water at once.
“Michael could do that, too.” He says it out loud, but his gaze lags behind his voice for a few moments, watching the desktop change value beneath the rapidly contracting water mark. He has to drag his eyes up to Ianto's face, to look around a moment to locate him in the room.
“Could do what, sir?” Ianto is more curious about the name than whatever it was the name could do, but he's familiar enough with Jack's sparseness and drama when he uses that tone of voice. He crosses his arms and leans against the nearest wall, determined not to betray his eagerness for more information. Ianto thrives on information, and thrives on Jack, but the twain had yet to meet for all his subtle trying.
Looking into Ianto's placid eyes, the feeling hits him full force -- or, rather, it makes itself felt from the inside out, growing from that place in the back of his throat through the rest of his body, mapping out his limbs, flipping his stomach and speeding his heart. He shakes his head against it, and simply says, “Enter a room without being heard or sensed. You do it.”
He smiles, despite this misplaced wrongness. “Sneaky bastard.” Both of them.
Whatever it is that Jack's feeling is strong enough to push its way into Ianto, too, and he spares only a half smile before asking, “Are you ok, sir? Have you eaten today?”
“No. Nothing today.”
Ianto quickly crosses toward the door, pausing in his path to briefly put his hand on Jack's right shoulder. “I'll bring you something, Jack.” Ianto's pinky drags a half-inch across the part of Jack's neck that starts to become his shoulder, his tone so deep and rich it's almost a meal itself, and whatever it is, it's so true Jack thinks Ianto must know it, too.
“Michael.”
“Jack. Jack, are you ok?” Ianto should never worry his forehead with that expression, but he does much more often than Jack would like. He has stopped mid-stride, moved his hands to Jack's face to search for signs of illness or melancholy, maybe.
Jack shakes himself into semblance of normality. If only it weren't so ... utter. So complete.
Michael had been gone for almost a hundred years, actually. Ninety-one years, to be precise. He wants to remember Michael, really, but he'd also like the oddness to snap. Now.
“No, Ianto, I'm fine. But, you're right. I'm hungry. Please.” Puppy dog eyes done more for comic effect than encouragement; Ianto is thrilled to feed him, and Jack appreciates this more than he has said to him. Tell him this, out loud for once. Maybe this time he would.
Sometimes even Jack is unnerved by the sheer volume of ways he can go wrong. As Ianto all but sprints from the room to nourish him, Jack sighs to think how he fails Ianto every day by not regarding him as he should be regarded. He should be more thoughtful, just as he should be more vigilant in honoring Michael's memory.
Jack is momentarily panicked by the idea that his collection of people, of their memories, will grow unmanageably in the oncoming years, grow so large he won't be able to properly remember them all in one day. Ianto deserves to be thought of at least once every day, once every hour, even when he's millennia dead.
How will he move forward under the weight of all of them, even in only one hundred years time? It's his forward momentum that saves him, actually, and sometimes Jack believes in fate because he knows that truth for a fact.
Real self-awareness is something Jack has achieved only through vigorous practice, because he's had absurd amounts of time to do so. Which is perfect, really, in combination with immortality. Being propelled forward by action, narcissism, retarded inner growth: without these, he'd have done the bat-shit crazy thing much, much earlier. As it it was, it took as long as three of four regular lifetimes for it to happen (at least, the lifespans he was used to. People died young, in Jack's experience. So much danger in his life, from the moment he was born, and then before modern medicine. He hoped to keep Ianto longer than most of the others, if he could keep him safe enough.)
--
Later, after Ianto has come and gone again, Jack spends seventeen minutes watching the hands on the clock move around. Seventeen minutes of tracing the red second hand as it moves in circles, really watching the motion of it, looking at it, not thinking or judging or weighing. This clock ticks, which is incredibly satisfying to Jack, and it has hands. The numbers are large and clear, Arabic numbers, black, each minute marked further by black lines. A red hand that moves smoothly in and out of each second. It runs on batteries, it hangs just left of his line of sight, it is seven years old.
Sometimes, this is what he does with eternity.
It could be Thursday afternoon at 4:12... 4:13... 4:14:47... but it really doesn't matter. Unless something pulls him outside, into traffic, possibly. 4:15:03. He only knows it's afternoon because it's light outside.
He is a strange editor, he knows, as he somehow also knows that this seventeen minutes of nothing stands a good chance of making the cut.
As a movie, with him to edit it, his life would be a flop.
At 4:21:12, he remembers Michael properly. Not smoothly, like a well-cut film, but jerkily, his face front and center only for a half-second before it slides off to his inner peripheral vision. Michael, not the first time he had met him, but the first time he saw him.
Jack is standing in a tent in the middle of some goddamn field in France, staring holes into a map of the surrounding country; though, by this time, he's not really staring at the map itself but, rather, the far northeast corner of it. He's really staring through it, appreciating the texture of the paper, the undulating tones of the wood holding it up, the spread of the ink absorbed onto the page it imprinted. All of eight square inches, so close it's almost like he's leaning over, holding his face only one or two inches away from the tabletop. But he's not, he's standing up, and it's the oddest thing that suddenly there is a hand leaning on the table just there.
He doesn't start or physically betray his surprise, but he is surprised. While he does acknowledge he'd been slightly adrift, it was the hardly the first time someone had approached him unawares, and he always knows. It's how he'd lived the first 35 years of his life, relying on his senses and reflexes to keep him alive, safe, one step ahead.
But no, he simply follows the line from the hand on the table, up an arm in a sleeve, slightly dirty, frayed hole above the soft inner elbow, over a shoulder, across a chest, forward again along the arm stretched out toward him. Jack notes the paper held out to him, retraces that arm with his gaze, finding the skin beyond the neckline of uniform, again, dusty, then a pleasingly rounded jaw, a stubbled cheek, the corner of a lip-cracked mouth, a firm nose, black, black eyes. The trip takes forever, but, as Jack sees it now, it jumps: it's quick, almost quantum. The images loop through, jagged and out of sequence, and he can't quite grab onto a steady picture of Michael's face. He thinks, sometime during the loud and expensive height of the Great War, “How does he do that?” It's Michael Something, the messenger, with a message.
In the firelight, he is divided again, Michael's uncovered body parts separate and equal in tone, in texture and in taste. Jack is often surprised - again -- that each piece blends seamlessly into a whole, single person. Each part is so interesting on its own, abstractly. It is about the time in his life that he stopped seeing things as beautiful or not, a trait that no one notices or would believe, but one that remains definitely true.
“Sir, the Major has asked that you provide reinforcements. He needs at least 300 troops, as quickly as possible.”
Michael's voice is silk, it glides easily along surfaces, educated. Jack's always a sucker for a voice like that, something most people have noticed about him.
He'd gone himself, of course, and, in the end, hadn't bothered with any kind of seduction at all. Not intentionally. In the right moment, when it's quiet and cold outside, he says, “Now, Michael. I want you.”
Michael says, “yes,” and although Jack has no idea if this Michael's first time for anything, there is no hesitation in him as he takes off his uniform, boots, socks, bandana. Afterward, on the verge of sleep, Michael says, “The way you look at me, Jack. You see me.” Not really a question, certainly not an answer to a question Jack doesn't bother to ask.
Or maybe they're dressed and Michael shouts it to make himself heard over the rain and explosions outdoors. Over the confusion of the trenches and engagement, but this seems less true to Jack. Surely, surely if there were bombs, shrapnel, confusion, he'd be outside, in it.
Jack does not remember the fighting like a movie either, but as entirely plausible. It's been like this his whole life, the screaming and the moving, and his mind makes room for it because it's clearly happening to him. And that doesn't change because Jack still isn't a thinker on the inside, for all the practice he has had.
There are other times with him, easy to catch in the tunnels and the fear, and every time Jack thinks of Michael, whom he loved, loves still, he is afraid that he does not do proper justice to the individual moments, as they deserve.
--
In November, they are outside, and it's war out here, certainly. Jack hears both the sound of the ticking clock and the artillery exploding as they hit the ground. It's muddy and it's wet, which Jack knows must be right because it was never not those things. It's so loud he feels it in his teeth, feels it now and in front of the clock. Michael is 22 years old, and Jack is 70 and 161.
“Take this to McFadden, now.” He presses a note into Michael's hand, and he nods and takes off directly. Jack yells to make himself heard above the din. “Gentlemen, we go on the offensive. We are marching north, and we are doing it right now. Get your heads out of your asses and MOVE.” About thirty yards from where Jack is directing his regiment, something falls out of the sky and catches Michael's shoulder, causing his mouth to drop in shock, making his right leg buckle in pain, bringing him to his knees. Jack watches as he kneels there for several seconds, the shock written clearly on his face as he feels the blood and bone and bits of muscle that have been ripped away from him. Whatever it was that has landed does not explode right away, but Jack knows it will, sees that Michael is about to die in the muck in France, in 1916, three thousand fucking years before Jack was ever born.
He keeps marching forward, though, does not bother to send the medic or go himself, although he is perfectly aware that if he were just to sprint forward quickly enough, he could save Michael, take the cost himself. Jack goes north, with the rest of his troops and his head up his ass, and he relives the moments in which Michael dies three, four, five times, in vivid slow motion.
No, that's not right, either. He knows for certain he did not see Michael die, because that part is too slow and real and in order to be genuine. Someone had told him about it two days later, with regret because everyone loved Jack, and everyone knew Jack liked Michael.
Jack had cried out loud, for awhile, and to this moment he still doesn't know if anyone else was in the room to see him do it.
--
At 5:03 and a 161 years old, Jack gets up from his desk, picks up his dirty dishes and walks downstairs to find Ianto. He has forgotten again to tell him how much he is appreciated, and this evening that does not sit well with him. Jack will take him outside, somewhere, so he can think of Ianto in the proper sunlight, for once, and 28 years old.
-- End, Part I --
Part II: Elizabeth