Someday The Waves
Title: Someday The Waves
Rating: PG
Characters: Jack, Sam, Ianto
Words: ~2,000
Spoilers: MAJOR for the Torchwood novel Trace Memory
Beta: pocky_slash, as ever.
Summary: When Jack pulls himself out of the water in 1967, it's Sam he goes to see, the seer from the museum. In 2008, the things Sam said start to make sense.
A/N: This was written for neifile7 for retconbookwrite. It picks up at the end of the 1967 (Hamilton's Sugar) portion of Trace Memory, and then again at the end of the 2008 portion. I hope you like it, neifile7! ♥
1967
“You’re soaked.”
Jack turned. The old man was there as if by magic, sitting a few tiers up on the museum steps, hands resting on his walking stick and his satchel before him. The morning washed him dull and grey, with the sun hidden behind an endless stretch of somber clouds. He was unsmiling. He knew. Of course he did.
“How’d you get there?” Jack asked.
“You were so far inside your own head, Jack, I could have danced and drawn a crowd without you noticing.” Sam held up a hand and curled the fingers back. Come.
Jack stood. His clothes were still wet. There was a round patch of dark concrete where his coat had soaked into the step. The sight of the imprint made something heavy drop into Jack’s chest. He dragged the coat off of his shoulders, dropped it, and started up towards Sam. When Sam patted the stair beside him, Jack sat.
They were silent for a moment, watching the pedestrians walk past the closed museum.
“You always come back,” Sam said. “You never ask your questions.”
Jack didn’t answer. He watched as the wind did its best to rustle the sleeves of his coat sprawled a few steps down. He could still feel the water in his shoes. He could still feel it plastering his hair to his scalp. He could still feel Michael’s arms around him, growing slacker as the sea grew darker.
“It’s unfair to an old man, to make him ask the questions and answer them.”
“I’m older than you,” Jack murmured.
“Talk to me when you can count your teeth on one hand.”
Jack ran his fingers through his damp hair. “You might have to wait a while.”
“If I had that long to wait, I’d be as sad as you.”
Jack glanced at him. Sam was still looking out over the stairs, over the street. Jack couldn’t think of what he saw there. People. Cars. Little stories, little futures, but nothing worth knowing. “We wouldn’t want that.”
Sam finally looked at him, turning his head to stare with one hoary eye.
“You always come back,” he repeated.
Jack looked away. “You’re always right, so I always come back.”
Sam sighed. “I did know. You can’t blame me for not telling you.”
“I don’t.”
“It’s everyone’s destiny to die, Jack. Even you, someday.”
Jack stared down at his arms slung across his knees. “Have you seen that?”
Sam paused. “I haven’t,” he conceded. “But I can feel it. Somewhere very strange and very far away.”
Jack let out a long breath. “Should I go looking for it?”
“It will find you.”
“I want it faster than that.”
“It will come in its own time. No one hurries death, Jack. It comes when it wants. The suicidal and the terminally ill know that better than anyone.”
Jack tilted his head back. The clouds were unbroken, stretching in all directions, one great mass leeching colour out of the world, making it monochrome, like a dystopian novel.
“I’m sorry about the lad,” Sam said. “He was doomed from the start.”
Jack smiled without humor. Just hard bared teeth. “You know just what to say.”
“I’m no psychologist, no matter how often you seem to think I am, when things don’t go the way you want them to.”
A few pigeons landed near Jack’s coat. They hopped closer, curious, cocking their heads one way and then the other. They pecked at the wet hem and at the cuff of a sleeve. “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.”
“Did you ever?”
Jack was silent. He watched the birds.
Sam turned his walking stick in his hands, back and forth. “You live in the shallows, Jack. You stand there with the water up to your shins, staring out at the sea, wondering if it’s possible for you to go any deeper.”
“I’m waiting,” Jack said. “This isn’t permanent.”
“There’s your problem.” Sam leveled his gaze on Jack, though Jack refused to meet it. “I’ve known you now for sixty-five years, and not one of those days have you actually lived. You pace around as if you’re certain the second you sit down, someone will ask you to get up again. You’re always moving. You’re afraid to connect. The only things you can connect with are the things you know you’ll lose.”
Jack had stilled halfway through wiping his hair out of his eyes. When Sam was finished, Jack slowly, very slowly, lowered his hand, then turned his head to look at the old man. “For someone who isn’t a psychologist,” he said. He left it at that, not knowing how to continue.
“You pick up a few things, people-watching,” Sam said. He cracked a gummy smile, eyes crinkling into deep lines of crow’s feet.
Jack shook his head. He looked back to his coat when the pigeons took off, satisfied that there was nothing in his pockets but more water. “He’s coming for me,” Jack said. “He’ll fix me. I’ll be able to die.”
“So you’ll be able to live again,” Sam said, skeptical. He frowned. “It’s isn’t clear, Jack. I’m too old to be very accurate anymore. But I think you’re wrong.”
Jack froze. He set his jaw. “I’m not wrong.”
“Whatever you say,” Sam sighed. “But this thing that you’re doing, keeping your distance from everything, not wading in - it’s tearing the soul out of you. You’re a lover, Jack. You grew up one. Every time you back away, you’re denying something that’s written right into your bones. You’re making yourself a monster, and you know it.”
Jack stood. He looked down at Sam with a mix of pain and sadness and fear on his face that made him look so young, and so incredibly lost. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a thick money clip. “Here,” he said, and offered it out to Sam.
Sam frowned at the money, then up at Jack. “No. I’ve told you before. The minute you give me money is the minute this friendship ends.”
Jack’s frown deepened. “I know,” he said quietly.
Sam closed his eyes. He let out a breath. Then he reached out and took the money. “I understand.”
Jack turned to start back down the stairs, but Sam caught his hand. Jack looked down at his light, pinkish skin against Sam’s, creased and aged.
Sam waited until their eyes were locked.
“There will be people, in the future,” he said. “You’ll love them. You’ll let yourself be part of them. You’ll overreach. You’ll hurt them. They’ll hurt you. But you’ll learn. That’s the important part. You’ll learn how to be a person again.”
Jack nodded, almost imperceptibly small. He squeezed Sam’s hand. Then he let go, turned, and walked down the stairs, sweeping his coat into his arms as he went.
2008
Ianto was asleep in the tourist office when Jack returned from dropping the orb into the sea. He had his bare feet up on the counter, the chair tilted dangerously back, his head dropped backwards over the headrest. His eyebrows were furrowed, his mouth twisted into a mild frown. The credits for the movie playing on the computer had long ago ended, and the screen was blank. The only other light fell in from the bead-curtained back room and over Ianto's chair. Jack sat down on the edge of the desk facing Ianto, then reached out to shake his shoulder lightly.
“Hey, Tiger Pants,” Jack murmured. “Wake up.”
Ianto pushed Jack’s hand away with a grunt and rubbed his face with both hands. “I think I preferred ‘Sport’.” He blinked down at his watch, trying to make it come into focus. “And what sort of time do you call this?”
“Late.”
“Or early, depending.” Ianto sat up, rolling his neck.
Jack smiled slightly. “You fell asleep watching your James Bond movies.”
“I noticed.” He reached out and turned off the softly glowing monitor. What little light it gave was extinguished, leaving only the light through the bead curtain. “They’ve all gone, haven’t they?”
“A long time ago, probably.” Jack swung his legs under the desk. “You could have gone, too, you know.”
The corners of Ianto’s mouth lifted. “I like the Hub,” he said. He was still slumped in the chair, his head angled to look up at Jack. “I didn’t think you’d mind.”
“I don’t,” Jack said.
They fell into silence, Jack’s legs swinging with a rhythmic sound, Ianto gazing out beyond him at the dark tourist office.
“Your friend at the museum,” Ianto said suddenly. “Did you ever visit him again?”
Jack had long ago given up on wondering whether Ianto was vaguely psychic. Working in such close proximity, and with the sort of work they did requiring an incredible amount of innate knowledge of each other, Torchwood employees tended to fall into a rhythm wherein they could guess one another’s thoughts without much difficulty. Once, it had creeped Jack out. Now it only amused him. Most of the time.
“I did,” he said. “One more time.”
“Did he ever tell you why he always went to the museum?”
It was a strange question, but completely unsurprising from Ianto.
“I asked him that when he started going there,” Jack said. He kept swinging his legs, looking down at his knees, shifting in and out of the dark. “He said that it was easier to relax when he was surrounded by old things. History wasn’t as loud as the future. He’d spent his whole life with the future shouting at him every time he left his house. I think he was relieved to find a place where people thought less about what would happen to them and more about what had happened before. He didn’t have to concentrate as much on making everything quiet. He was a hermit before he started going. I think it was good for him.”
Ianto nodded. “It makes sense,” he said.
Jack smiled. “You aren’t going to ask me how it’s possible that someone can know the future?”
“I think I’ve been working here too long to find that sort of thing strange,” Ianto sighed. “Sorry to disappoint.”
Jack shook his head. “Not disappointed.”
He watched as Ianto closed his eyes and leaned his head back again. He could tell Ianto wasn’t resting; he was thinking, and trying to disguise it. All of his little tells -- fingers tapping against the arm rest, the forced neutrality of his expression.
“What?” Jack asked.
Ianto opened his eyes. He smiled, hesitant, and sat up again, leaning a little closer to Jack. “You saw him one more time,” Ianto said. “What did he tell you then?”
Jack trailed his eyes over the posters on the wall behind Ianto, half-smiling. “He said that I was standing in the shallows with the sea up to my shins, wondering if I could go any deeper.”
“Is that supposed to make any sense to me?”
“Probably not, no.”
Ianto smirked at the easy answer. “Did it make sense to you?”
Jack looked at Ianto for a moment. He thought of Torchwood’s psychic thing. He thought of how it never used to involve him. He thought of Gwen sitting on his desk at one in the morning, talking to him about ridiculous things, asking him questions, smiling, unafraid to challenge him and win. He thought of Owen fighting with him even when he knew he would lose. He thought of Toshiko, coming to him with her hands cupped around some tiny new piece of alien technology, smiling -- glowing, showing him how she figured it out.
Ianto, sitting in a chair in front of him, his knee against Jack’s as he waited patiently for whatever answer would come.
“I understand it now,” Jack said.
Ianto smiled as though he’d won something. Then he yawned.
“You want to stay here tonight?” Jack asked.
Ianto shrugged. “Sure.” He stood up, rolling his shoulders back with a blissful expression as there was a soft pop. “That chair is amazingly uncomfortable.”
“You could have gone to my bed in the first place.”
“No television. No Bond.”
Jack knew the real reason. He knew why Ianto would sleep in a chair in the tourist office while Jack was gone, instead of sleeping in a bed he knew he had a right to. But he only sighed. “Always with the Bond tonight.”
“The man men want to be and women want to be with, Jack.”
“We’re talking about me now?”
“You’ll kindly shut up.”
Jack jumped off of the desk and caught Ianto before he made it to the button for the hidden door. He wrapped his arms around Ianto’s waist, pressed pleasantly chest to chest, and kissed him.
Ianto laughed when the kiss ended. “That was nice,” he said.
“Much more where that came from.” Jack grinned.
Ianto rolled his eyes, but he paused and, strangely, blushed slightly, when he noticed that Jack didn’t let go. “Will we be moving toward the Hub and, one hopes, toward your bed at some point in the near future?”
“Yes,” Jack said. But he kissed Ianto again instead, and Ianto kissed back. And after a moment, it was no longer the sweet, smiling sort of kissing it had started out as. It morphed, slowly, almost imperceptibly, into something needy. Not desperate, not that, but - present. Ianto’s hands on his neck and through the fine hairs at the base of his skull. Ianto’s eyes closed, his eyebrows raised.
He paused to huff a laugh against Jack’s lips. “How’s the water treating you?”
Jack smiled. “The water’s fine.”
Rating: PG
Characters: Jack, Sam, Ianto
Words: ~2,000
Spoilers: MAJOR for the Torchwood novel Trace Memory
Beta: pocky_slash, as ever.
Summary: When Jack pulls himself out of the water in 1967, it's Sam he goes to see, the seer from the museum. In 2008, the things Sam said start to make sense.
A/N: This was written for neifile7 for retconbookwrite. It picks up at the end of the 1967 (Hamilton's Sugar) portion of Trace Memory, and then again at the end of the 2008 portion. I hope you like it, neifile7! ♥
1967
“You’re soaked.”
Jack turned. The old man was there as if by magic, sitting a few tiers up on the museum steps, hands resting on his walking stick and his satchel before him. The morning washed him dull and grey, with the sun hidden behind an endless stretch of somber clouds. He was unsmiling. He knew. Of course he did.
“How’d you get there?” Jack asked.
“You were so far inside your own head, Jack, I could have danced and drawn a crowd without you noticing.” Sam held up a hand and curled the fingers back. Come.
Jack stood. His clothes were still wet. There was a round patch of dark concrete where his coat had soaked into the step. The sight of the imprint made something heavy drop into Jack’s chest. He dragged the coat off of his shoulders, dropped it, and started up towards Sam. When Sam patted the stair beside him, Jack sat.
They were silent for a moment, watching the pedestrians walk past the closed museum.
“You always come back,” Sam said. “You never ask your questions.”
Jack didn’t answer. He watched as the wind did its best to rustle the sleeves of his coat sprawled a few steps down. He could still feel the water in his shoes. He could still feel it plastering his hair to his scalp. He could still feel Michael’s arms around him, growing slacker as the sea grew darker.
“It’s unfair to an old man, to make him ask the questions and answer them.”
“I’m older than you,” Jack murmured.
“Talk to me when you can count your teeth on one hand.”
Jack ran his fingers through his damp hair. “You might have to wait a while.”
“If I had that long to wait, I’d be as sad as you.”
Jack glanced at him. Sam was still looking out over the stairs, over the street. Jack couldn’t think of what he saw there. People. Cars. Little stories, little futures, but nothing worth knowing. “We wouldn’t want that.”
Sam finally looked at him, turning his head to stare with one hoary eye.
“You always come back,” he repeated.
Jack looked away. “You’re always right, so I always come back.”
Sam sighed. “I did know. You can’t blame me for not telling you.”
“I don’t.”
“It’s everyone’s destiny to die, Jack. Even you, someday.”
Jack stared down at his arms slung across his knees. “Have you seen that?”
Sam paused. “I haven’t,” he conceded. “But I can feel it. Somewhere very strange and very far away.”
Jack let out a long breath. “Should I go looking for it?”
“It will find you.”
“I want it faster than that.”
“It will come in its own time. No one hurries death, Jack. It comes when it wants. The suicidal and the terminally ill know that better than anyone.”
Jack tilted his head back. The clouds were unbroken, stretching in all directions, one great mass leeching colour out of the world, making it monochrome, like a dystopian novel.
“I’m sorry about the lad,” Sam said. “He was doomed from the start.”
Jack smiled without humor. Just hard bared teeth. “You know just what to say.”
“I’m no psychologist, no matter how often you seem to think I am, when things don’t go the way you want them to.”
A few pigeons landed near Jack’s coat. They hopped closer, curious, cocking their heads one way and then the other. They pecked at the wet hem and at the cuff of a sleeve. “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.”
“Did you ever?”
Jack was silent. He watched the birds.
Sam turned his walking stick in his hands, back and forth. “You live in the shallows, Jack. You stand there with the water up to your shins, staring out at the sea, wondering if it’s possible for you to go any deeper.”
“I’m waiting,” Jack said. “This isn’t permanent.”
“There’s your problem.” Sam leveled his gaze on Jack, though Jack refused to meet it. “I’ve known you now for sixty-five years, and not one of those days have you actually lived. You pace around as if you’re certain the second you sit down, someone will ask you to get up again. You’re always moving. You’re afraid to connect. The only things you can connect with are the things you know you’ll lose.”
Jack had stilled halfway through wiping his hair out of his eyes. When Sam was finished, Jack slowly, very slowly, lowered his hand, then turned his head to look at the old man. “For someone who isn’t a psychologist,” he said. He left it at that, not knowing how to continue.
“You pick up a few things, people-watching,” Sam said. He cracked a gummy smile, eyes crinkling into deep lines of crow’s feet.
Jack shook his head. He looked back to his coat when the pigeons took off, satisfied that there was nothing in his pockets but more water. “He’s coming for me,” Jack said. “He’ll fix me. I’ll be able to die.”
“So you’ll be able to live again,” Sam said, skeptical. He frowned. “It’s isn’t clear, Jack. I’m too old to be very accurate anymore. But I think you’re wrong.”
Jack froze. He set his jaw. “I’m not wrong.”
“Whatever you say,” Sam sighed. “But this thing that you’re doing, keeping your distance from everything, not wading in - it’s tearing the soul out of you. You’re a lover, Jack. You grew up one. Every time you back away, you’re denying something that’s written right into your bones. You’re making yourself a monster, and you know it.”
Jack stood. He looked down at Sam with a mix of pain and sadness and fear on his face that made him look so young, and so incredibly lost. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a thick money clip. “Here,” he said, and offered it out to Sam.
Sam frowned at the money, then up at Jack. “No. I’ve told you before. The minute you give me money is the minute this friendship ends.”
Jack’s frown deepened. “I know,” he said quietly.
Sam closed his eyes. He let out a breath. Then he reached out and took the money. “I understand.”
Jack turned to start back down the stairs, but Sam caught his hand. Jack looked down at his light, pinkish skin against Sam’s, creased and aged.
Sam waited until their eyes were locked.
“There will be people, in the future,” he said. “You’ll love them. You’ll let yourself be part of them. You’ll overreach. You’ll hurt them. They’ll hurt you. But you’ll learn. That’s the important part. You’ll learn how to be a person again.”
Jack nodded, almost imperceptibly small. He squeezed Sam’s hand. Then he let go, turned, and walked down the stairs, sweeping his coat into his arms as he went.
2008
Ianto was asleep in the tourist office when Jack returned from dropping the orb into the sea. He had his bare feet up on the counter, the chair tilted dangerously back, his head dropped backwards over the headrest. His eyebrows were furrowed, his mouth twisted into a mild frown. The credits for the movie playing on the computer had long ago ended, and the screen was blank. The only other light fell in from the bead-curtained back room and over Ianto's chair. Jack sat down on the edge of the desk facing Ianto, then reached out to shake his shoulder lightly.
“Hey, Tiger Pants,” Jack murmured. “Wake up.”
Ianto pushed Jack’s hand away with a grunt and rubbed his face with both hands. “I think I preferred ‘Sport’.” He blinked down at his watch, trying to make it come into focus. “And what sort of time do you call this?”
“Late.”
“Or early, depending.” Ianto sat up, rolling his neck.
Jack smiled slightly. “You fell asleep watching your James Bond movies.”
“I noticed.” He reached out and turned off the softly glowing monitor. What little light it gave was extinguished, leaving only the light through the bead curtain. “They’ve all gone, haven’t they?”
“A long time ago, probably.” Jack swung his legs under the desk. “You could have gone, too, you know.”
The corners of Ianto’s mouth lifted. “I like the Hub,” he said. He was still slumped in the chair, his head angled to look up at Jack. “I didn’t think you’d mind.”
“I don’t,” Jack said.
They fell into silence, Jack’s legs swinging with a rhythmic sound, Ianto gazing out beyond him at the dark tourist office.
“Your friend at the museum,” Ianto said suddenly. “Did you ever visit him again?”
Jack had long ago given up on wondering whether Ianto was vaguely psychic. Working in such close proximity, and with the sort of work they did requiring an incredible amount of innate knowledge of each other, Torchwood employees tended to fall into a rhythm wherein they could guess one another’s thoughts without much difficulty. Once, it had creeped Jack out. Now it only amused him. Most of the time.
“I did,” he said. “One more time.”
“Did he ever tell you why he always went to the museum?”
It was a strange question, but completely unsurprising from Ianto.
“I asked him that when he started going there,” Jack said. He kept swinging his legs, looking down at his knees, shifting in and out of the dark. “He said that it was easier to relax when he was surrounded by old things. History wasn’t as loud as the future. He’d spent his whole life with the future shouting at him every time he left his house. I think he was relieved to find a place where people thought less about what would happen to them and more about what had happened before. He didn’t have to concentrate as much on making everything quiet. He was a hermit before he started going. I think it was good for him.”
Ianto nodded. “It makes sense,” he said.
Jack smiled. “You aren’t going to ask me how it’s possible that someone can know the future?”
“I think I’ve been working here too long to find that sort of thing strange,” Ianto sighed. “Sorry to disappoint.”
Jack shook his head. “Not disappointed.”
He watched as Ianto closed his eyes and leaned his head back again. He could tell Ianto wasn’t resting; he was thinking, and trying to disguise it. All of his little tells -- fingers tapping against the arm rest, the forced neutrality of his expression.
“What?” Jack asked.
Ianto opened his eyes. He smiled, hesitant, and sat up again, leaning a little closer to Jack. “You saw him one more time,” Ianto said. “What did he tell you then?”
Jack trailed his eyes over the posters on the wall behind Ianto, half-smiling. “He said that I was standing in the shallows with the sea up to my shins, wondering if I could go any deeper.”
“Is that supposed to make any sense to me?”
“Probably not, no.”
Ianto smirked at the easy answer. “Did it make sense to you?”
Jack looked at Ianto for a moment. He thought of Torchwood’s psychic thing. He thought of how it never used to involve him. He thought of Gwen sitting on his desk at one in the morning, talking to him about ridiculous things, asking him questions, smiling, unafraid to challenge him and win. He thought of Owen fighting with him even when he knew he would lose. He thought of Toshiko, coming to him with her hands cupped around some tiny new piece of alien technology, smiling -- glowing, showing him how she figured it out.
Ianto, sitting in a chair in front of him, his knee against Jack’s as he waited patiently for whatever answer would come.
“I understand it now,” Jack said.
Ianto smiled as though he’d won something. Then he yawned.
“You want to stay here tonight?” Jack asked.
Ianto shrugged. “Sure.” He stood up, rolling his shoulders back with a blissful expression as there was a soft pop. “That chair is amazingly uncomfortable.”
“You could have gone to my bed in the first place.”
“No television. No Bond.”
Jack knew the real reason. He knew why Ianto would sleep in a chair in the tourist office while Jack was gone, instead of sleeping in a bed he knew he had a right to. But he only sighed. “Always with the Bond tonight.”
“The man men want to be and women want to be with, Jack.”
“We’re talking about me now?”
“You’ll kindly shut up.”
Jack jumped off of the desk and caught Ianto before he made it to the button for the hidden door. He wrapped his arms around Ianto’s waist, pressed pleasantly chest to chest, and kissed him.
Ianto laughed when the kiss ended. “That was nice,” he said.
“Much more where that came from.” Jack grinned.
Ianto rolled his eyes, but he paused and, strangely, blushed slightly, when he noticed that Jack didn’t let go. “Will we be moving toward the Hub and, one hopes, toward your bed at some point in the near future?”
“Yes,” Jack said. But he kissed Ianto again instead, and Ianto kissed back. And after a moment, it was no longer the sweet, smiling sort of kissing it had started out as. It morphed, slowly, almost imperceptibly, into something needy. Not desperate, not that, but - present. Ianto’s hands on his neck and through the fine hairs at the base of his skull. Ianto’s eyes closed, his eyebrows raised.
He paused to huff a laugh against Jack’s lips. “How’s the water treating you?”
Jack smiled. “The water’s fine.”