:Okay, I was suffering a bit of writer's block on Tripping the Rift, partly because I was distracted by how I would present the story of the Tenth Doctor's companion in that story, Kyhl, and his relationship to Jack. I figured I'd go ahead and get this story out of the way, since it's a one-off, and then I could get back to Tripping the Rift before I got frustrated. Here's hoping it works and here's hoping it explains why Jack is gobsmacked when he hears Kyhl's name dropped by the Doctor.:
My Torchwood fics
Deus Ex Machina (not yet published)
Oberon's Wild Night
Tripping the Rift
Kyhl's Story
Archives of the Time Agency
My name is Kyhl Davies.
Wait, that's not accurate. My identity is Kyhl Davies, Director of the Time Agency. Kyhl Ifan Davies the Fifth, born August 19th, 4985, in New Cardiff, West California. Citizen five-eight-three-five-dash-four-six-zero-six-dash-five-five-eight-one-zero. If you check my records you'll see a slightly better than average but not stellar academic career through secondary school, followed by degrees in engineering and history at UWC. Getting something from a more prestigious off-world university might arouse suspicions. People look at a degree from a more selective school like Europa or Mars and start asking if you knew Professor So-and-So or if Doctor Whatsername is still a stickler for formatting. A large public school allows for comfortable anonymity. Anonymity is key to passing off an identity.
A genealogical search will show an ancestral lineage of namesakes of similar merit and education, but not immediately successive. A good identity can be stretched for far longer than a single generation if you take care to fly under the radar. Flying under the radar happens to be one of my natural talents. The way to do it most easily is to find a larger-than-life personality to attach yourself to. Someone who impresses people, someone who enjoys attention. Get close to that person, make yourself indispensable and yet invisible to everyone around them. Administrative assistant is the perfect role. Nobody ever notices the personal secretary, the efficient social manager, the tea-boy, so to speak. Knowing how to make a good cup of tea, or coffee, if that's the preferred beverage, is crucial to making yourself indispensable, by the way. Then all you need is the skill to get into the record keeping systems and forge a few documents, insert a believable pedigree, and stay out of trouble.
You might wonder why, if I stay out of trouble, I need to be so good at identities. Most people would never even think about it. Most people don't have to. Most people can live their natural lives without creating suspicion. It doesn't work that way when you've been forgotten by Time. You have a blank look, so I'm guessing you don't get what I mean. I'll put it bluntly. I'm immune to Time. I don't age. How old am I? Well, I do know a couple, just a couple of people who are older than me. Let's just say for now that I count centuries, not years. Yup, that old. Can I die? I think so, but it's never been tested fairly.
It's a bit ironic, because one of those people I know who's older than me has the opposite problem. He can't die, no matter how many times he gets killed, but, even though it's happening very slowly, he's getting older. I've known him since I was so young it's laughable now, younger than you are, even, but the changes are starting to show up. There's a touch of grey in his hair, just at the temples, and the lines that used to show around his eyes only when he laughed are there all the time. He can be quite vain about it, really. He'll wake me in the middle of the night just to ask me if I still find him attractive. I do, of course, very much. What? Yes, we're lovers. Three millennia and I still love him.
You're surprised love can last that long? I suppose for the sake of romanticism I should just say true love is forever, but honesty forces me to admit we've had more than our share of rocky times. Sometimes we go years without seeing each other, without even knowing where the other one is. Then one day we'll run into each other and not have to say a word to know it's been long enough and we need to be together again. He'll pull me into his arms and kiss me and it will feel as special as it did the first time.
I hadn't meant to delve into such personal details. I suppose if I'm going to tell you my story, though, I have no reason to hold back information, especially when you're obviously so eager for me to go on. I tell you I'm over three thousand years old and you show more interest in my romantic history? I suppose it's easier to deal with, easier to relate to, and therefore more fascinating. It's either that or you're just after the salacious bits. Fine, but you have to realize that when we met it was a different time, practically a different world than you know today.
The planet was crowded, although we didn't seem to notice that much. Seven billion humans and we huddled together in cities for the most part. We were practically crawling over each other, but that didn't mean we were any good at connecting with each other. Society had a lot of rules about relationships, and one of the unspoken rules was that you shouldn't talk openly about the most crucial parts of forming them. Don't laugh. I know it makes no sense now, but then it was just how it was. Some of those rules would have you shocked at our archaic thinking, but you're going to have to understand them eventually, so I'll go ahead and shock you. One of the big ones was that proper people should have relationships only with the opposite sex, and if you happened to want to sleep with someone of the same sex, you should keep your feelings hidden as if there was something shameful or offensive about it.
I know, I know. Primitive thinking. We were just taking the first baby steps toward understanding our own sexual minds, you have to understand. We used words like 'straight' and 'gay' and thought of them as two different types of people in safe, neat little categories. Good straight boys didn't look at other boys or they were gay, and gay meant being weak and emasculated. You can't imagine the confusion that caused us. Everyone pretended they didn't get crushes on other men, or other women, depending. Those who admitted their feelings were subject to teasing or even attack from the ones who were trying to uphold the tradition of repression. If you went so far as to admit you were bisexual, most people just assumed you were some kind of sex addict who needed gratification from whatever held still long enough for a shag.
That's the sort of environment I grew up in. I have to give credit to my parents. They never put any pressure on me to conform to those kind of standards, but it was ubiquitous in society, in the schools, in the media, definitely in the church. And being someone who avoided trouble by nature, I obeyed the silent dictate. In public I looked only at girls. I went so far as to do my best to live up to it in private. I'd sneak looks at photos of men, but I'd feel ashamed of it immediately and wonder why I, a good straight boy, was crossing the line into gay territory, as if the two were mutually exclusive. Once, to satisfy my concerns about my sexual identity, I slept with the only openly gay man I knew at the time, an older friend of my parents. It was.. well, let's just say there wasn't any basis for attraction and his interest was more in having a young boy for his first time than in how I might enjoy it, so I truly didn't. After that, I stuck to girls and, if I was ever tempted by a good-looking man, thought of that night with Howell and got over it quickly.
After I graduated school, I got a job in London at Torchwood. Yes, that Torchwood. Well, the one in London, at least, Torchwood One. There were eight hundred and twenty-three employees at that branch, so flying under the radar was a breeze. The only one who really noticed me was this beautiful girl who worked on the next floor up from mine, Lisa. It didn't take long before we flirted and found out we got along well, and next thing I knew, we were dating. I was completely happy and head-over-heels in love.
... Sorry. I haven't spoken about this for a long time. I didn't think the emotions, the pain would still exist. I'm fine now, I can go on. I'll skip the minutia, so suffice it to say that Torchwood One was destroyed in a battle with the cybermen and Lisa was a casualty. A partial conversion. I was so in love I couldn't accept that her condition was irreversible, but I knew for a fact I needed to hide her away, and for that I needed a Torchwood facility. The only one still viable at that time was Torchwood Three. Yes, that's the one that sat under the Cardiff Rift. I stored her in the last working cryochamber in London and set out to get myself into Cardiff before the power was cut at the London building.
You know, it was a lot harder than I thought it would be. I followed the team leader when he appeared outside the headquarters to hunt down a weevil and helped him knock it out. Didn't impress him at all. I tried coffee. One of the few times when that didn't work outright. He had an issue with Torchwood One so I was at a disadvantage. Finally I got his attention when I tracked down a pterodactyl in a warehouse and helped him catch it. I had a feeling it wasn't the pterodactyl, though. While we were after it, we fell together and I wound up laying on top of him. All my years of self-repression failed me when I looked into his eyes. I could tell he felt my physical reaction, and it wasn't like he could have avoided noticing it. I was laying right on him, sporting the erection of my life. I certainly didn't have any problems feeling him having the same response.
In this day and age, I might have understood my feelings, but even if I had been able to accept same sex attraction at that point, I still had Lisa to save. I thought of her and got off of him, feeling like I had cheated on her when I hadn't done anything other than accidentally land on him in a sprawl. He graciously didn't press the matter, but he did offer me the job I needed. I thought of Howell and managed to get out of the building with my mind back on my goal of reversing Lisa's conversion and not on what might have been. Over the next several months I transfered her secretly to the basement of Torchwood Three and researched every avenue I could find to bring her back to the woman I'd fallen in love with. There was so little information at the time that I didn't realize it was doomed to fail.. nor that it was deadly dangerous.
The entire time, I had to look at him every day and pretend I wasn't doing anything more devious than fetching him coffee, which he was falling for in a big way, and cleaning up the bodies that tended to pile up behind Torchwood operations. Everyone else in the office just assumed I was nobody worth noticing, the tea-boy the boss kept around because he looked good in a suit and didn't get in trouble. I ate lunch with them every day, made small talk, showed up when their fun was over and put the gloves on to get things bright and shiny again, and they never thought to ask me if I even had any hobbies. None of them ever came around my flat to see if I wanted to go to the pub or called me up with tickets to the rugby match. I kept it that way for the sake of Lisa, but it ate at me every time I looked at him and wondered if he might be thinking of that night back in the warehouse. He spent all his time with them and left me alone, and part of me wished he wouldn't.
It's all obvious now, of course. I resented his giving me space because I was angry at myself for being distracted from Lisa. He gave me space because he was being a gentleman. Inevitably, of course, Lisa's condition proved to be not only irreversible, but violent and threatening. She killed two innocent people. No, it wasn't her fault. I killed them by bringing her there in the first place. The rest of Torchwood of course found out my terrible secret, but I couldn't do what needed to be done. I tried to stop them from stopping her, choosing to defend her even if it meant betraying them, betraying him. It was useless, of course. She wasn't my Lisa anymore and she couldn't understand what love was. That was when she killed me.
Yes, I did say that. I also said it hadn't been fairly tested. She threw me across the Torchwood Hub. I don't actually remember hitting anything, but I know I must have been in the water at some point because I was soaked later on. I just felt myself sinking into darkness. It was terrifying. I felt nothing, I saw nothing, but I was afraid. Alone. All I could cling to was that Lisa didn't have to experience that yet. I had purchased with my life a few moments more for her to avoid this fate. The next thing I knew, I felt my body around me again. Every part of me felt like it was on fire, but it wasn't painful. That was when I realized he was kissing me. I felt the life surging from his mouth to mine. He was giving me a gift so precious, so unique, it was completely outside my comprehension. You'd think I'd show some gratitude, but all I could think of was saving Lisa. It wasn't possible, of course. He gave me every chance to take responsibility for what I had done, to end Lisa's life, but I failed. I couldn't send her to death after I had seen what it was like. Finally, he had to do it for me and let me hate him if I had to. I almost did. I wanted to, so much I ached. But deep down inside, I knew I had been wrong, so wrong I had no right to hate anyone but myself. For a while I did that, and he let me.
As time went on, I started to understand just what kind of gift he'd imparted to me. I don't think even he knew at that point, though. He knew something different had happened, I'm sure of that. He's lived a long time, and he's kissed a lot of corpses over the ages, but none of them came back. Since then we've tried to analyze it. You see, just before he kissed me back to life, Lisa had shocked him with a massive amount of energy. Twice. More than enough to kill him both times, but thanks to his problem with staying dead, he came back and then kissed me. Maybe that surge was still inside him, or maybe it was the residual resurrection energy from his coming back from the dead twice in rapid succession, but somehow he passed part of his life force into me, enough to stop the clock, enough to make Time pass me by.
There was one other aspect to his gift to me that day. It was as if he had passed on to me a small fragment of his soul as well. I'd scored fairly high on the empathic section of the psionic test Torchwood administered to all their employees, but after he brought me back, I was able to just look at him and sense things that couldn't be put into words. We could look at each other and communicate on a level deeper than words if we were willing to let our guards down. Believe me, it's a frightening thing to trust someone enough to do that, but it's also the most beautiful connection two people can make. So you see, it's more than just being two practical immortals that keeps us coming back to each other. We are, for better or worse, soulmates.
My name? What, my real name? I suppose I can tell you. The Retcon I slipped into your coffee will make it a moot point anyhow. My name is Ianto Jones.