FIC: The Mirror is the Wall by Basingstoke
Title: The Mirror is the Wall.
Author: basingstoke
Challenge: Alternate Lives
Rating: PG
Summary: Crossing AUs.
*
"I like this," Jack said. "Really using the engineering degree here, changing batteries..." He hit the stuck screw with the butt of the screwdriver in frustration.
"Yeah, well, my medical degree isn't exactly being used to the fullest either. Isn't this what Lisa is for?" Owen was holding up tubing while Jack tried to pry loose the battery in the display arm of the Rift machine. He'd thought the damn thing would last a good fifty years, but no, twenty and kaput. Cheap Io manufacture. And his time skipper was low too, so he couldn't just jump and get another; they could make do with the baby nuke if they kept it well shielded, so he was going to make it work.
The twenty-first century wasn't a bad time to live, but the technology was pathetic. There was only so much you could make yourself with the wrong metals, wrong tools, and no real help from anyone.
He fantasized briefly about skipping to 5217 and swiping a Generatomat off the Jup-Mart shelves. It was too big an anachronism to be safe, he knew, but it would be *nice* to say "twelve feet of malnium wire" or "four X-cell one-centimeter batteries" and have it just come spooling out as easy as you please.
Jack tried the screw again, really putting his back into it. It gave abruptly and he slammed his hand into the edge of the panel, right on the nail-less bed of his finger. "Oh--!" For a second it hurt too much to even shout. "Motherfucker! Mother... FUCKER!" He jammed his hand in his mouth and stamped his foot instead. His mouth filled with rich, bitter blood.
"Let me see. Better disinfect that, it's mucky as hell down here," Owen said. Jack waved his fist in pain and didn't let Owen at his finger yet; he wasn't sure he could let anyone else touch it just yet. He tried not to be prissy about his damaged hands, but right now, it just wasn't a good time.
Lisa came down with coffee. "What happened?"
"Jack hit his finger. You'll get tetanus if you don't let me look, you big girl," Owen said.
Jack took his finger out of his mouth. "Don't make me get out the war stories," he said. He shivered, blinking away the tears of pain. "God damn, that hurts. Coffee, please. You're a lifesaver," he told Lisa.
"You split open the nail bed," Owen said. "That's no picnic." He applied pressure at the base of Jack's finger and hauled him over to medical as Jack tried to focus on coffee instead.
Jack had had his nails on that hand torn out when he was a teenager, out on his first mission. Torture. They wanted to make his best friend talk, and his friend did talk because he couldn't stand watching Jack's pain, and then they killed his friend and made Jack watch. Because he was weaker, Jack lived. He told parts of that story as often as he could, trying to exorcise the demons, and it always made Owen green.
Owen patched him up efficiently. "Now can we go get a curry?" Owen asked. "The bloody machine will wait."
"No, it won't," Jack said. "But you can operate the screwdriver and I'll hold the tubes."
Owen groaned.
They managed to get the old battery out, but the new one didn't want to fit. Jack finally banished Owen to the hand-vac, sucking the metal filings away as Jack whittled the supports into the proper shape.
A temporal engineering degree come to this. Jack snorted to himself.
It wasn't as funny when he saw the fluid leak, though. He frowned and opened up another panel on the machine, exposing rows of organic circuitry. "What's wrong with you, then, girlie?" Jack muttered to himself. He touched the drip of fluid down the copper support.
There was a flash of light. The Hub changed around him. He lost his balance and fell back onto his ass into a puddle.
Okay, that was new. Puddle. Since when was there standing water in the Hub? Jack looked up at the central pillar, which--yeah, had water flowing down it. Why? What about the Rift machine? Where was it?
"Who the fuck are you!" Owen shouted.
"Owen? It's me--oh, hell," Jack said, realizing. He sat up and looked at Owen. "Captain Jack Harkness, leader of my Torchwood. But I'm thinking this isn't my Torchwood. Hi, Owen." He waved with his bandaged hand.
"You are not Jack, blondie," Owen said. He slapped his headset. "Everyone to the Hub, now! Emergency!" He hit a button on his computer and the lights over the doors changed from red to mauve.
"Good response. Can I get out of this puddle?" Jack said.
Owen's eyes flickered over him. "Yeah. Slowly."
Jack stood up slowly, wondering what Owen meant by that tone on "blondie." He'd always been blond. Granted, he was starting to go a little gray, but just a little; maybe he was older in this reality?
It had to be a different reality, not just a different time. That was cortex fluid on his fingers; it was possible. He'd probably jumped sideways right through the Rift.
Jack looked around for their Rift machine, and found it... a tiny, mechanical thing, no organic parts at all. "Shit," he muttered. He rubbed the back of his neck. That was just barely enough to keep the Rift held together. No time-skip base, no reality stabilizer... shit. No way home from here.
Gwen came pelting up the stairs. "Who the hell is that?" she asked Owen.
"He claims to be Captain Jack Harkness," Owen said.
"I can talk," Jack said. "I'm right here."
"Well, you're an intruder!" Owen snapped.
"Nice to know some things never change. You're looking well, Gwen. I like the sweater."
Gwen blanched.
"It's just a little alternate reality," Jack said.
The main door rolled open and Tosh ran through, followed by a young man Jack didn't realize--until of course he did; that was Lisa's Cyberman boyfriend, who had been hidden in their basement, and it was strange to actually see him in clothes--and then an older man, about Jack's age, dark-haired and gorgeous, in an RAF greatcoat.
The older man looked familiar. Jack frowned, trying to place him--
"Jack, this guy says he's you," Owen said.
They looked at each other. So familiar. But not in this setting, from a long time ago--
"Sleet?" the other man said.
Jack's mind reeled. Subtract the years, the clothes, the strangeness, and you were left with those eyes, that mouth, that smile that Jack knew better than he knew himself. "Yabi," he said.
Yabi crossed the room and grabbed his arms, then hugged him close, hard. Jack pressed his face to Yabi's neck, because the pain in his hand made it feel like yesterday; he could still see him dying behind his eyes. He breathed in, hard, and the scent was unfamiliar but real. This was Yabi, alive and grown.
"Gay, I told you," Owen said to someone. Yabi laughed into Jack's neck.
Jack kissed him, because he'd been wanting to do that for forty years. Yabi returned it, just like forty years ago.
"Jack, who is he?" Gwen asked.
"He's--" Jack started to say, just as Yabi said "Sleeten--" They pulled apart and looked at each other.
"That's some coincidence," Yabi said.
"I was doing some work in the 1940s, so I took this name and it stuck," Jack said.
"Same," Yabi said. "But..."
"Something about him reminded me of you." Jack chucked him under his chin. He had six weeks on Yabi and never let him forget it.
"Jack." Gwen was hovering beside them. "What do you mean, took that name? How can you both be Jack Harkness?"
Yabi shot her a sideways look. "I'll tell you later."
"No you won't," she said, and Jack laughed.
"His name was Yabi," Jack told her. "Mine was Sleet."
"My name isn't Yabi, either," Yabi said.
"His nickname is Yabi." Jack grinned.
"This really is not helping--" Gwen said, so agitated she was going up on her toes.
Yabi took her by the arms and she shut up, glaring up at him. "I'll tell you later," he said.
"Yabi means cocksucker," Jack tossed in.
Yabi let Gwen go and punched Jack in the arm. Jack laughed, bouncing backwards across the metal floor with his fists raised, stomping at Yabi's feet with his heavier boots. "Pikvar," Yabi swore at him. Jack grinned. If you couldn't tell your team about your embarrassing childhood nicknames, who could you tell? Jack found himself backed up against a desk, so he put his hands down in surrender.
Yabi gave him a very hard look, then threw his arm around Jack's shoulders. "Ianto, can you get Sleet something dry?"
Ianto nodded. His eyes flickered over Jack and he disappeared down the stairs to the locker room.
"So why are you alive?" Yabi asked him in their native language. He was still smiling, but there was a distance in his eyes. "Because for me, you've been dead for a very long time."
"I came through the Rift. And same for me, kid," Jack said. God, it had been a long time since he'd spoken this tongue. "The raid on Xolhan--" Yabi's eyes dropped to Jack's hands. Jack ran his thumb over the missing nails. "They wanted you to talk, because you had the plans," Jack said.
"And I didn't."
"You did, so they killed you."
There it was. A small event in a big war; one boy dead, one boy alive, neither old enough for what they had got into. Jack hugged Yabi again. Yabi held him like his skin was thirsty and Jack was glacier water.
"So," Owen said, "cocksucker as in prat, or cocksucker as in guy who sucks cocks a lot? Because I'm using that from now on, and I'd like to know exactly what I'm saying."
"Sucks cocks a lot," Jack informed him.
"What language is that?" Gwen asked.
Jack looked at all of them. "You're exactly the same," he said. "What a funny old world."
Lisa's boyfriend--Ianto, right, and he was a somber and beautiful boy out of all that metal--handed him a towel. "Thank you," Jack said.
"Sleeten Harborest," Yabi said. He stepped back and watched as Jack toweled his hair dry.
"Jack Harkness for a long time, though." Jack looked at Gwen. "That's Galactic New Language. Like Esperanto, but modern, and it actually caught on. All those races needed something to speak to each other, and nobody's home language really fit."
"I knew it! I knew you were an alien. Fifty quid," Owen said, holding his hand out to Tosh. Tosh didn't even look at him.
"We're both human," Yabi said.
"Born in Somerset Moon Colony," Jack said. "You never told them?"
Yabi shrugged.
"We're from the future! Your future! Humans do great things!" Jack said, spreading his arms like a prophet. God, he loved doing this! He couldn't imagine that Yabi didn't. "Humans colonize ten galaxies! At last count--I mean, last one before I came back to the twenty-first century--there were five hundred billion of us! The twenty-first century is the turning point. I had to see it. It's fantastic! Yabi, why didn't you tell them this?"
The team were all in shock, the girls beaming and the boys standing up straight and tall. Yabi wore half a smile, the same kind of smile he used to have when Jack talked about surfing solar flares. Fun for you, maybe, but not for me.
"Anyway, my team will be working on getting me back, I'm sure," Jack said. "Our machine is much bigger. Yabi, this is pathetic."
"Hey! I did my best. You're the engineer, I was never any good at xhican maths," Yabi protested.
"You built the Rift machine?" Toshiko asked. She sounded amazed, and no wonder. Yabi's talents lay elsewhere.
"I helped," Yabi said.
Toshiko turned to Jack. "Anything you could tell me would help. If we don't have much time--" She ran over with her laptop.
Could he help them? He thought so, maybe. "Yabi, what did you do after the war?"
"I was a Time Agent."
"Do you know Gallifrey script?"
"Yes."
Jack grinned, set the computer on a nearby desk, and opened a graphics program. You couldn't transliterate Gallifrey script, it was hopeless, but it was the only way xhican maths made any sense in two dimensions. Jack drew out the Rift mechanics swiftly in circles and arcs, giving them the tensions and flows and points of pressure. "You should have studied harder," Jack told Yabi.
"I had my mind on other things."
"Hindsight," Jack said. "It's a bitch."
"Were you a Time Agent?"
"Yes."
"I always wondered what would happen if I tripped that wire, stopped the ambush," Yabi said.
"That reality collapses in a tangle of paradox and you may or may not survive." Jack considered his diagram and drew a second explaining the reality stabilizer.
"You could stay," Yabi said in their native language.
Jack looked up at him, into his eyes, for a long moment. They always loved each other, since they were in diapers. Forty years might as well be forty minutes. And Yabi's eyes were so sad. He looked so alone, so marked as a man out of time, far more than Jack did. Could he even time-skip? Jack doubted it. He didn't see the machinery for it.
And it wouldn't be a paradox. They had converged on the same man, the same time, the same place, but they weren't the same person. Maybe it was fate.
"You're thinking about it," Yabi said, for him and him alone.
"I've loved you since we were knee high," Jack said. "But the other world, my Earth..."
"Can't we be selfish for once?"
Jack looked down at the computer. He finished the diagram of the reality stabilizer with a mirror-diamond series and a fourth half-progression arc. He felt Yabi's hand on his face, and Yabi said, "I'll be selfish," as he leaned in for a long kiss.
And the world exploded into light. "Count of fifteen! Fourteen! Thirteen!" Toshiko yelled. Jack looked up and saw a strange double image, both his team and Yabi's in the same space. The walls overlapped perfectly, but the reality pulsed back and forth. The tower in the center of the room streamed with water, then didn't. His Owen, in black jeans with a smear of oil on his cheek, was more solid than Yabi's, in his lab coat, and then he faded away again. His Toshiko was counting down. Yabi's Toshiko was standing in front of them.
"Twelve! Eleven!"
"Come on!" Owen shouted. He reached out his hand. Jack touched Yabi's neck--I love you, I can't stay, you know why--and he didn't have to say anything, because the look on his face was the same as the look on his own.
"Ten! Nine!"
He knew what to do. He unbuckled his wrist computer--too tight, hard to manage with the bandage on his hand--
"Eight!"
--and he stuffed it in Yabi's pocket. His time skipper, run down, but with ten or eleven skips remaining. He hoped that would take some of the sorrow out of Yabi's eyes.
"Seven!"
"Ianto!" Lisa suddenly cried. He looked up and saw her standing, wavering in and out of reality, by Toshiko.
"Lisa!"
"Six!"
"Jack!"
Jack pressed his lips to Yabi's one more time, and Yabi cupped his face with a grip that was strong enough to keep him there, prevent him from coming back, but his hands relaxed and he let Jack go. He let Jack take Owen's hand and cross back over.
"I have him!" Owen said.
The light collapsed. Reality, his reality, returned.
"Oh, fuck," Owen groaned. Jack turned and found that Lisa was kissing Ianto.
Jack closed his eyes.
"Don't you have any brains?" Owen said to them.
"No," Ianto replied.
"My sweet baby, I can't believe it," Lisa said, and they were kissing again.
"Just remember that Romeo and Juliet both died in the end," Jack said. He stalked back to his office, feeling... drained.
Maybe he'd watched too many blockbusters. Was there only one way to be a hero? Had he done his piece, had he done enough in this world, could he have stayed?
Did he play the story out wrong? Was it a romance instead, and he was supposed to stay, change places with Lisa's boy, be Yabi's love, take the shadow from his eyes?
Too late now. You didn't mess with the Rift, and even if he wanted to try to open that door again--well, he supposed he could triangulate off Ianto, trace his path back to where he belonged...
"Jack, please," Lisa said, rushing into his office. "He's the same man--and I love him so much--you know I do, you know it! You couldn't kill me then, but it would kill me now--"
"You can keep him," Jack said without looking up.
"You don't know what this means to us," Ianto said.
Jack shooed them out with a gesture. His bandage was grubby and his clothes were damp but he sat there for long minutes, his hands folded together, his forehead resting on his knuckles.
Yabi. "Yevin Milhos Lisserd," Jack whispered under his breath, and there; his name was spoken, like a stone on his grave, and Jack remembered him.
The end.
Author: basingstoke
Challenge: Alternate Lives
Rating: PG
Summary: Crossing AUs.
*
"I like this," Jack said. "Really using the engineering degree here, changing batteries..." He hit the stuck screw with the butt of the screwdriver in frustration.
"Yeah, well, my medical degree isn't exactly being used to the fullest either. Isn't this what Lisa is for?" Owen was holding up tubing while Jack tried to pry loose the battery in the display arm of the Rift machine. He'd thought the damn thing would last a good fifty years, but no, twenty and kaput. Cheap Io manufacture. And his time skipper was low too, so he couldn't just jump and get another; they could make do with the baby nuke if they kept it well shielded, so he was going to make it work.
The twenty-first century wasn't a bad time to live, but the technology was pathetic. There was only so much you could make yourself with the wrong metals, wrong tools, and no real help from anyone.
He fantasized briefly about skipping to 5217 and swiping a Generatomat off the Jup-Mart shelves. It was too big an anachronism to be safe, he knew, but it would be *nice* to say "twelve feet of malnium wire" or "four X-cell one-centimeter batteries" and have it just come spooling out as easy as you please.
Jack tried the screw again, really putting his back into it. It gave abruptly and he slammed his hand into the edge of the panel, right on the nail-less bed of his finger. "Oh--!" For a second it hurt too much to even shout. "Motherfucker! Mother... FUCKER!" He jammed his hand in his mouth and stamped his foot instead. His mouth filled with rich, bitter blood.
"Let me see. Better disinfect that, it's mucky as hell down here," Owen said. Jack waved his fist in pain and didn't let Owen at his finger yet; he wasn't sure he could let anyone else touch it just yet. He tried not to be prissy about his damaged hands, but right now, it just wasn't a good time.
Lisa came down with coffee. "What happened?"
"Jack hit his finger. You'll get tetanus if you don't let me look, you big girl," Owen said.
Jack took his finger out of his mouth. "Don't make me get out the war stories," he said. He shivered, blinking away the tears of pain. "God damn, that hurts. Coffee, please. You're a lifesaver," he told Lisa.
"You split open the nail bed," Owen said. "That's no picnic." He applied pressure at the base of Jack's finger and hauled him over to medical as Jack tried to focus on coffee instead.
Jack had had his nails on that hand torn out when he was a teenager, out on his first mission. Torture. They wanted to make his best friend talk, and his friend did talk because he couldn't stand watching Jack's pain, and then they killed his friend and made Jack watch. Because he was weaker, Jack lived. He told parts of that story as often as he could, trying to exorcise the demons, and it always made Owen green.
Owen patched him up efficiently. "Now can we go get a curry?" Owen asked. "The bloody machine will wait."
"No, it won't," Jack said. "But you can operate the screwdriver and I'll hold the tubes."
Owen groaned.
They managed to get the old battery out, but the new one didn't want to fit. Jack finally banished Owen to the hand-vac, sucking the metal filings away as Jack whittled the supports into the proper shape.
A temporal engineering degree come to this. Jack snorted to himself.
It wasn't as funny when he saw the fluid leak, though. He frowned and opened up another panel on the machine, exposing rows of organic circuitry. "What's wrong with you, then, girlie?" Jack muttered to himself. He touched the drip of fluid down the copper support.
There was a flash of light. The Hub changed around him. He lost his balance and fell back onto his ass into a puddle.
Okay, that was new. Puddle. Since when was there standing water in the Hub? Jack looked up at the central pillar, which--yeah, had water flowing down it. Why? What about the Rift machine? Where was it?
"Who the fuck are you!" Owen shouted.
"Owen? It's me--oh, hell," Jack said, realizing. He sat up and looked at Owen. "Captain Jack Harkness, leader of my Torchwood. But I'm thinking this isn't my Torchwood. Hi, Owen." He waved with his bandaged hand.
"You are not Jack, blondie," Owen said. He slapped his headset. "Everyone to the Hub, now! Emergency!" He hit a button on his computer and the lights over the doors changed from red to mauve.
"Good response. Can I get out of this puddle?" Jack said.
Owen's eyes flickered over him. "Yeah. Slowly."
Jack stood up slowly, wondering what Owen meant by that tone on "blondie." He'd always been blond. Granted, he was starting to go a little gray, but just a little; maybe he was older in this reality?
It had to be a different reality, not just a different time. That was cortex fluid on his fingers; it was possible. He'd probably jumped sideways right through the Rift.
Jack looked around for their Rift machine, and found it... a tiny, mechanical thing, no organic parts at all. "Shit," he muttered. He rubbed the back of his neck. That was just barely enough to keep the Rift held together. No time-skip base, no reality stabilizer... shit. No way home from here.
Gwen came pelting up the stairs. "Who the hell is that?" she asked Owen.
"He claims to be Captain Jack Harkness," Owen said.
"I can talk," Jack said. "I'm right here."
"Well, you're an intruder!" Owen snapped.
"Nice to know some things never change. You're looking well, Gwen. I like the sweater."
Gwen blanched.
"It's just a little alternate reality," Jack said.
The main door rolled open and Tosh ran through, followed by a young man Jack didn't realize--until of course he did; that was Lisa's Cyberman boyfriend, who had been hidden in their basement, and it was strange to actually see him in clothes--and then an older man, about Jack's age, dark-haired and gorgeous, in an RAF greatcoat.
The older man looked familiar. Jack frowned, trying to place him--
"Jack, this guy says he's you," Owen said.
They looked at each other. So familiar. But not in this setting, from a long time ago--
"Sleet?" the other man said.
Jack's mind reeled. Subtract the years, the clothes, the strangeness, and you were left with those eyes, that mouth, that smile that Jack knew better than he knew himself. "Yabi," he said.
Yabi crossed the room and grabbed his arms, then hugged him close, hard. Jack pressed his face to Yabi's neck, because the pain in his hand made it feel like yesterday; he could still see him dying behind his eyes. He breathed in, hard, and the scent was unfamiliar but real. This was Yabi, alive and grown.
"Gay, I told you," Owen said to someone. Yabi laughed into Jack's neck.
Jack kissed him, because he'd been wanting to do that for forty years. Yabi returned it, just like forty years ago.
"Jack, who is he?" Gwen asked.
"He's--" Jack started to say, just as Yabi said "Sleeten--" They pulled apart and looked at each other.
"That's some coincidence," Yabi said.
"I was doing some work in the 1940s, so I took this name and it stuck," Jack said.
"Same," Yabi said. "But..."
"Something about him reminded me of you." Jack chucked him under his chin. He had six weeks on Yabi and never let him forget it.
"Jack." Gwen was hovering beside them. "What do you mean, took that name? How can you both be Jack Harkness?"
Yabi shot her a sideways look. "I'll tell you later."
"No you won't," she said, and Jack laughed.
"His name was Yabi," Jack told her. "Mine was Sleet."
"My name isn't Yabi, either," Yabi said.
"His nickname is Yabi." Jack grinned.
"This really is not helping--" Gwen said, so agitated she was going up on her toes.
Yabi took her by the arms and she shut up, glaring up at him. "I'll tell you later," he said.
"Yabi means cocksucker," Jack tossed in.
Yabi let Gwen go and punched Jack in the arm. Jack laughed, bouncing backwards across the metal floor with his fists raised, stomping at Yabi's feet with his heavier boots. "Pikvar," Yabi swore at him. Jack grinned. If you couldn't tell your team about your embarrassing childhood nicknames, who could you tell? Jack found himself backed up against a desk, so he put his hands down in surrender.
Yabi gave him a very hard look, then threw his arm around Jack's shoulders. "Ianto, can you get Sleet something dry?"
Ianto nodded. His eyes flickered over Jack and he disappeared down the stairs to the locker room.
"So why are you alive?" Yabi asked him in their native language. He was still smiling, but there was a distance in his eyes. "Because for me, you've been dead for a very long time."
"I came through the Rift. And same for me, kid," Jack said. God, it had been a long time since he'd spoken this tongue. "The raid on Xolhan--" Yabi's eyes dropped to Jack's hands. Jack ran his thumb over the missing nails. "They wanted you to talk, because you had the plans," Jack said.
"And I didn't."
"You did, so they killed you."
There it was. A small event in a big war; one boy dead, one boy alive, neither old enough for what they had got into. Jack hugged Yabi again. Yabi held him like his skin was thirsty and Jack was glacier water.
"So," Owen said, "cocksucker as in prat, or cocksucker as in guy who sucks cocks a lot? Because I'm using that from now on, and I'd like to know exactly what I'm saying."
"Sucks cocks a lot," Jack informed him.
"What language is that?" Gwen asked.
Jack looked at all of them. "You're exactly the same," he said. "What a funny old world."
Lisa's boyfriend--Ianto, right, and he was a somber and beautiful boy out of all that metal--handed him a towel. "Thank you," Jack said.
"Sleeten Harborest," Yabi said. He stepped back and watched as Jack toweled his hair dry.
"Jack Harkness for a long time, though." Jack looked at Gwen. "That's Galactic New Language. Like Esperanto, but modern, and it actually caught on. All those races needed something to speak to each other, and nobody's home language really fit."
"I knew it! I knew you were an alien. Fifty quid," Owen said, holding his hand out to Tosh. Tosh didn't even look at him.
"We're both human," Yabi said.
"Born in Somerset Moon Colony," Jack said. "You never told them?"
Yabi shrugged.
"We're from the future! Your future! Humans do great things!" Jack said, spreading his arms like a prophet. God, he loved doing this! He couldn't imagine that Yabi didn't. "Humans colonize ten galaxies! At last count--I mean, last one before I came back to the twenty-first century--there were five hundred billion of us! The twenty-first century is the turning point. I had to see it. It's fantastic! Yabi, why didn't you tell them this?"
The team were all in shock, the girls beaming and the boys standing up straight and tall. Yabi wore half a smile, the same kind of smile he used to have when Jack talked about surfing solar flares. Fun for you, maybe, but not for me.
"Anyway, my team will be working on getting me back, I'm sure," Jack said. "Our machine is much bigger. Yabi, this is pathetic."
"Hey! I did my best. You're the engineer, I was never any good at xhican maths," Yabi protested.
"You built the Rift machine?" Toshiko asked. She sounded amazed, and no wonder. Yabi's talents lay elsewhere.
"I helped," Yabi said.
Toshiko turned to Jack. "Anything you could tell me would help. If we don't have much time--" She ran over with her laptop.
Could he help them? He thought so, maybe. "Yabi, what did you do after the war?"
"I was a Time Agent."
"Do you know Gallifrey script?"
"Yes."
Jack grinned, set the computer on a nearby desk, and opened a graphics program. You couldn't transliterate Gallifrey script, it was hopeless, but it was the only way xhican maths made any sense in two dimensions. Jack drew out the Rift mechanics swiftly in circles and arcs, giving them the tensions and flows and points of pressure. "You should have studied harder," Jack told Yabi.
"I had my mind on other things."
"Hindsight," Jack said. "It's a bitch."
"Were you a Time Agent?"
"Yes."
"I always wondered what would happen if I tripped that wire, stopped the ambush," Yabi said.
"That reality collapses in a tangle of paradox and you may or may not survive." Jack considered his diagram and drew a second explaining the reality stabilizer.
"You could stay," Yabi said in their native language.
Jack looked up at him, into his eyes, for a long moment. They always loved each other, since they were in diapers. Forty years might as well be forty minutes. And Yabi's eyes were so sad. He looked so alone, so marked as a man out of time, far more than Jack did. Could he even time-skip? Jack doubted it. He didn't see the machinery for it.
And it wouldn't be a paradox. They had converged on the same man, the same time, the same place, but they weren't the same person. Maybe it was fate.
"You're thinking about it," Yabi said, for him and him alone.
"I've loved you since we were knee high," Jack said. "But the other world, my Earth..."
"Can't we be selfish for once?"
Jack looked down at the computer. He finished the diagram of the reality stabilizer with a mirror-diamond series and a fourth half-progression arc. He felt Yabi's hand on his face, and Yabi said, "I'll be selfish," as he leaned in for a long kiss.
And the world exploded into light. "Count of fifteen! Fourteen! Thirteen!" Toshiko yelled. Jack looked up and saw a strange double image, both his team and Yabi's in the same space. The walls overlapped perfectly, but the reality pulsed back and forth. The tower in the center of the room streamed with water, then didn't. His Owen, in black jeans with a smear of oil on his cheek, was more solid than Yabi's, in his lab coat, and then he faded away again. His Toshiko was counting down. Yabi's Toshiko was standing in front of them.
"Twelve! Eleven!"
"Come on!" Owen shouted. He reached out his hand. Jack touched Yabi's neck--I love you, I can't stay, you know why--and he didn't have to say anything, because the look on his face was the same as the look on his own.
"Ten! Nine!"
He knew what to do. He unbuckled his wrist computer--too tight, hard to manage with the bandage on his hand--
"Eight!"
--and he stuffed it in Yabi's pocket. His time skipper, run down, but with ten or eleven skips remaining. He hoped that would take some of the sorrow out of Yabi's eyes.
"Seven!"
"Ianto!" Lisa suddenly cried. He looked up and saw her standing, wavering in and out of reality, by Toshiko.
"Lisa!"
"Six!"
"Jack!"
Jack pressed his lips to Yabi's one more time, and Yabi cupped his face with a grip that was strong enough to keep him there, prevent him from coming back, but his hands relaxed and he let Jack go. He let Jack take Owen's hand and cross back over.
"I have him!" Owen said.
The light collapsed. Reality, his reality, returned.
"Oh, fuck," Owen groaned. Jack turned and found that Lisa was kissing Ianto.
Jack closed his eyes.
"Don't you have any brains?" Owen said to them.
"No," Ianto replied.
"My sweet baby, I can't believe it," Lisa said, and they were kissing again.
"Just remember that Romeo and Juliet both died in the end," Jack said. He stalked back to his office, feeling... drained.
Maybe he'd watched too many blockbusters. Was there only one way to be a hero? Had he done his piece, had he done enough in this world, could he have stayed?
Did he play the story out wrong? Was it a romance instead, and he was supposed to stay, change places with Lisa's boy, be Yabi's love, take the shadow from his eyes?
Too late now. You didn't mess with the Rift, and even if he wanted to try to open that door again--well, he supposed he could triangulate off Ianto, trace his path back to where he belonged...
"Jack, please," Lisa said, rushing into his office. "He's the same man--and I love him so much--you know I do, you know it! You couldn't kill me then, but it would kill me now--"
"You can keep him," Jack said without looking up.
"You don't know what this means to us," Ianto said.
Jack shooed them out with a gesture. His bandage was grubby and his clothes were damp but he sat there for long minutes, his hands folded together, his forehead resting on his knuckles.
Yabi. "Yevin Milhos Lisserd," Jack whispered under his breath, and there; his name was spoken, like a stone on his grave, and Jack remembered him.
The end.