Fic: 1941 Redux (Whoniverse)
Ages ago I began a fic project that was way too ambitious. Wait, that describes nearly everything I've ever written This one was a Torchwood/extended Whoniverse collection of ficlets loosely connected by the theme, which was also the title: "Sitting With the Dead." It started with a story about Gwen and Ianto sitting with Jack's body in the last episode of TW series 1, then got out of hand...
I'm giving it up. Long overdue. Over the next couple of weeks, as I get my editing-fu on, expect several standalone TW fics split up from the original cancerous mass. (Also: I can't use prewritten material for HC Bingo, but going back to the SWtD project gave me some ideas, and those will be bingo fills. Basically, expect a lot of TW when I finish this bingo.)
Title: 1941 Redux
Author: ravenclaw42
Fandom: Whoniverse (Jack should count as his own fandom)
Rating: PG
Summary: Who knows how many Jack Harknesses there are on Earth in 1941, really? These are the ones we know of.
Disclaimer: I make no profit. I think everyone would agree that Jack Harkness belongs to the universe and would do anything for free.
------
1941 Redux
------
Thousands of kilometers above the Earth, there is a man poking absently at a console in his spaceship, scanning for a potential identity. The easiest will be to choose from the pool of the recent war dead. War makes his job so easy. He’s looking forward to the game with the same old effervescent warmth in his gut.
He picks the name Jack Harkness. It has a ring to it that he likes, a presence. A plosive finality.
Mentally he runs through some conversational English to brush up on his classical languages. He’d taken American English as a dead language at academy -- to stalk a girl who had been studying paleolinguistics, actually, though she had not ended up being the dream lay he’d wished for -- and it had been the best spontaneous decision he’d ever made. He had only once been to the hundred-thousand-year-long era when Mandarin Chinese had been the dominant language of the human colonies. English had proved infinitely more useful.
Most of the time he sticks to 20th century Earth, those paranoid pre-first contact Dark Ages where so many gullible apes would line up to pay good money to drink piss if you stood on a space hopper, stuck antennae on your head, and told them it was an alien miracle cure-all. The further back he goes, the more godlike he becomes.
Alias Jack Harkness punches the mauve emergency broadcast, checks on the progress of his payload, and begins to make his descent towards London.
------
Three thousand feet above Dresden, a man posing as American volunteer RAF Group Captain J. M. Harkness has been hit by enemy fire in his belly and his left wing. His gunner is dead and he’s leaking fuel too fast for it to catch fire on the superheated metal fuselage of the plane.
Not burning to death won’t matter in a few minutes. The three thousand feet of air are passing faster than seconds.
He thinks of Estelle, closes his eyes and tilts the nose of the bomber into a nearly vertical dive. The faster it’s over, the better.
-----
The dance hall is only a few meters above sea level, like the rest of Cardiff, but its foundation raises it higher than the street level in order to make room for the bomb shelter in the basement. It’s here that Alias Jack Harkness, imposter, meets American volunteer RAF Group Captain J. M. Harkness, who is going to take a nosedive from three thousand feet tomorrow afternoon, and who isn’t going to walk away from it the way his imposter is going to after a repeat performance over Dresden a few weeks from now.
Jack kisses Jack thank you and goodbye, and steps down from the dance floor to a tarmac street sixty-odd years in the future.
-----
A bomb impacts on the ground just outside the city of Cardiff, shaking the dance hall a couple of miles away. Twenty feet beneath the ruined field, Alias Jack Harkness should be dead and buried. But it’s 1941 and he isn’t there anymore. He hasn’t been there for a few decades.
He’s moving up in the world.
-----
I'm giving it up. Long overdue. Over the next couple of weeks, as I get my editing-fu on, expect several standalone TW fics split up from the original cancerous mass. (Also: I can't use prewritten material for HC Bingo, but going back to the SWtD project gave me some ideas, and those will be bingo fills. Basically, expect a lot of TW when I finish this bingo.)
Title: 1941 Redux
Author: ravenclaw42
Fandom: Whoniverse (Jack should count as his own fandom)
Rating: PG
Summary: Who knows how many Jack Harknesses there are on Earth in 1941, really? These are the ones we know of.
Disclaimer: I make no profit. I think everyone would agree that Jack Harkness belongs to the universe and would do anything for free.
------
1941 Redux
------
Thousands of kilometers above the Earth, there is a man poking absently at a console in his spaceship, scanning for a potential identity. The easiest will be to choose from the pool of the recent war dead. War makes his job so easy. He’s looking forward to the game with the same old effervescent warmth in his gut.
He picks the name Jack Harkness. It has a ring to it that he likes, a presence. A plosive finality.
Mentally he runs through some conversational English to brush up on his classical languages. He’d taken American English as a dead language at academy -- to stalk a girl who had been studying paleolinguistics, actually, though she had not ended up being the dream lay he’d wished for -- and it had been the best spontaneous decision he’d ever made. He had only once been to the hundred-thousand-year-long era when Mandarin Chinese had been the dominant language of the human colonies. English had proved infinitely more useful.
Most of the time he sticks to 20th century Earth, those paranoid pre-first contact Dark Ages where so many gullible apes would line up to pay good money to drink piss if you stood on a space hopper, stuck antennae on your head, and told them it was an alien miracle cure-all. The further back he goes, the more godlike he becomes.
Alias Jack Harkness punches the mauve emergency broadcast, checks on the progress of his payload, and begins to make his descent towards London.
------
Three thousand feet above Dresden, a man posing as American volunteer RAF Group Captain J. M. Harkness has been hit by enemy fire in his belly and his left wing. His gunner is dead and he’s leaking fuel too fast for it to catch fire on the superheated metal fuselage of the plane.
Not burning to death won’t matter in a few minutes. The three thousand feet of air are passing faster than seconds.
He thinks of Estelle, closes his eyes and tilts the nose of the bomber into a nearly vertical dive. The faster it’s over, the better.
-----
The dance hall is only a few meters above sea level, like the rest of Cardiff, but its foundation raises it higher than the street level in order to make room for the bomb shelter in the basement. It’s here that Alias Jack Harkness, imposter, meets American volunteer RAF Group Captain J. M. Harkness, who is going to take a nosedive from three thousand feet tomorrow afternoon, and who isn’t going to walk away from it the way his imposter is going to after a repeat performance over Dresden a few weeks from now.
Jack kisses Jack thank you and goodbye, and steps down from the dance floor to a tarmac street sixty-odd years in the future.
-----
A bomb impacts on the ground just outside the city of Cardiff, shaking the dance hall a couple of miles away. Twenty feet beneath the ruined field, Alias Jack Harkness should be dead and buried. But it’s 1941 and he isn’t there anymore. He hasn’t been there for a few decades.
He’s moving up in the world.
-----