Title: The Thing About Immortality
Summary: Alice contemplates her newfound immortality, her relationship with her father, and Torchwood several years post-Miracle Day.
Rating: T for references to violence and death
Word Count: 1155
Other Chapters: No.
Disclaimer:The British Broadcasting Corporation owns Torchwood and all related characters, settings, and trademarks. I do not profit in any way from this material.
Pairings: References to Jack/Gwen/Rhys; references to Martha/Mickey
Contains: non-canon offspring;
Warnings: talk of death, vague references to suicide, mentions of violence
Alice really should have just punched her father in the face for asking. Instead she'd agreed.
Or had she agreed? Had he really even asked? Things had happened quickly, and she couldn't really have said no anyway, could she have? What was she going to do, lock herself in her bedroom and let a couple of primary school girls get themselves sick on sweets and ignore all of their coursework until their parents got back? To spite a man who not only wasn't either of the girls themselves, but wasn't even either of their father?
Alice was plenty spiteful, but she wasn't that petty, and her father knew that.
Still, he also must have realized there was something deeply cruel and disgusting in asking her to babysit for his friends. He'd been sensible enough to look ashamed while he explained the situation to her.
Anwen Williams and Lily Smith were good kids. Anwen was eleven, and the daughter of two people whom Alice's father was definitely fucking. Lily would turn nine in this bunker, if their parents didn't get this mess sorted out within the next four days, and she was the daughter of Martha Jones and Mickey Smith, whom Alice was reasonably certain that her father was not fucking. That was good. Alice was a little bit tired of meeting people younger than herself whom her father was fucking. She was already sick of it, and it was starting to look as though it was going to drag on forever.
It had been ten years, and she still didn't have the vocabulary to talk about her life before and after the Miracle Day. Fine? Normal? Mortal? She hadn't been the first two things, and she didn't like that last word. She'd been able to die before the Miracle Day. Or at least she thought she had been. She'd never actually tested it. During the Miracle Day, she didn't know what was happening. Her father had supposedly been the only mortal man on Earth during the Miracle Day, but... well, again, Alice hadn't tested it. It was after the Miracle Day that Alice noticed that things had changed. She nicked herself chopping vegetables one night. She saw blood, sucked her finger, tasted blood, and pulled her finger out of her mouth completely uninjured. She'd shrugged that one off and told herself she'd imaged the blood. Then, a few months later, she'd slipped on a patch of ice, rolled her trousers up to see the damage, and watched the bruise disappear.
Then she'd gotten curious. She'd cut herself. She'd watched herself bleed and watched herself heal. She'd done it dozens of times, sometimes rather deeply so there could be no doubt, and every single time she'd gotten the same result.
She'd cried. She didn't think she could justify those tears to anyone but herself, but she had cried, and then she'd done something she'd promised herself she'd never do.
She'd gone looking for her father.
He wasn't hard to find. She went back to Cardiff, dropped his name in a few gay bars and asked a dozen people on the street if they knew where she could find Torchwood. She got a little bit of information from a lot of people, and finally ended up at the police station, convincing Sargent Andy Davidson that she was in fact Jack Harkness' daughter and that if he had Jack Harkness' personal cell phone number, he needed to give it to her immediately. She'd convinced him. She'd contacted her father with no idea what she wanted out of the relationship. He'd given her the few answers he'd had and called his Doctor. Alice had bit down a thousand sarcastic remarks about how shocked she was that the Doctor looked like an attractive twenty-something human male, and calmly let the Doctor examine her. She was pretty sure he knew within five seconds, but he ran additional tests to make her and her father feel better before he officially broke the news to them.
Alice was immortal now.
She'd cried again, and she'd realized when she finally stopped that her father was crying too. He said he was sorry about a thousand times, and she'd accepted his apologies for this, because it wasn't really his fault. Other things were his fault, and he'd never apologized for those things, because she'd never have accepted the apologies.
They'd stayed in contact, after that. Adjusting to immortality was more difficult than it sounded, and she'd needed constant support to stop herself from drinking her way through the twenty-first century.
So, when the Family became active again, her father had immediately made her move into the bunker that was serving as Torchwood's new base. She was immortal now, and the Family probably didn't know that, and with any luck at all didn't even know that Jack Harkness had a daughter, but Alice's father wasn't taking any chances. It was probably more to protect the world from what might happen if Alice's blood fell into the wrong hands than it was to protect Alice herself. Alice knew all too well that her father would always choose his job over his family. She still hated him for it. She'd come back to him, but she'd come back because she needed him. She was entirely capable of hating him and needing him at the same time.
Torchwood wasn't what it had been when Alice was growing up. With Martha and Mickey on the team, they were down to four people, andsometimes (like now) Rhys, protecting the entire United Kingdom. Anwen and Lily had brought homework with them to the bunker. Apparently being pulled out of school for a few days—and rarely a couple of weeks—at a time was a normal part of the girls' lives, at this point. Their teachers expected it, and as long as they kept up with their homework, no one made much of a fuss. No one wanted the world to end because Gwen Cooper and Mickey Smith had to put their kids to bed.
It was unfair. Alice was watching them get bored of a limited supply of video-games and miss their parents more by the day, and Alice understood the profound unfairness of it, but there was nothing she could do to bring their parents back, and she really couldn't let the girls go out because she knew that as long as their parents were in conflict with the Family, the Family would be after the children. They all had to lie low.
Alice felt a bit like she was stuck at the kids' table at a family reunion she hadn't wanted to go to. She really just wanted it all to go away, so that she could go back to hiding from her father and pretending that her life would ever be okay again without her son.
It wouldn't go away, though. Not ever. That was the thing about immortality.