The Other Side of Human
Set - The night after 'Day One' Somewhere under the Millennium Centre
Disclaimer – All characters and settings are © BBC and I am making no profit from their use
A/N – I wrote this so long ago…Can't remember when or why, except that I always loved Jack and maybe I was a bit of a drama queen when I was younger. Pulled from the depths of my hard-drive this morning, shoved through a spell check and posted, maybe 8 years from when I last touched it? Merrily contradicts most of the later Torchwood seasons and probably episodes.
He envies Gwen. God, how he envies Gwen. Younger than he is, with a partner to love instead of someone to shag, with all the mysteries of the universe still to uncover, and most of all, mortal. She can see her end, her ultimate freedom from the world they have to live in. How lucky for her to have all those things he doesn't.
So Jack Harkness sits alone in Torchwood's offices under the Millennium Stadium, after all the rest of them have gone home, and outside the rain comes down like tears. Mentally, he times her journey back home and her evening, factoring in dinner, an argument - because she's upset and wants to hurt someone - and a fuck because she wants to realise she is alive, unlike all those who died today. What'd he'd be doing in her position. And that's why he's jealous, because he isn't and never will be again.
Days in his previous life, he would have killed for what he now has. Flying the Tula warship, standing there against the Daleks until his gun stuttered and went dry, he would have chosen any life over death. Now he's tasted both, and he isn't sure. He isn't hungry; a few hours back, his team sat here and laughed, eating Chinese. The black greatcoat slung over his shoulders keeps him warm and hides whatever he's carrying, and the others like his body when they come to his bed - he still doesn't need Owen's spray-can for that, it's the one talent he hasn't lost. His wages are there if he can find anything to spend them on, which he can't because the only two people who he valued are gone. What matter a house or something, when home isn't there anymore? Everything he ever thought he wanted doesn't make a life.
For something to do except sit there and think about everything Gwen has, he gets up and walks over to the cells. Everything safe in its pen, locked in and forced to stay close to him. Like his team, who are forced to stay alongside him, and never turn away from the battle. He will fight freely, and they'll follow him. Part of him, he knows, wants them to get hurt to prove their loyalty; to see them die for him like he did for the man he loved.
Snarling, the Weevil rushes to the glass with fangs bared, and he snarls back at it, animal-like, with such viciousness that it retreats. Jack greets its surrender with an inarticulate yell that makes the thing cower down. His blood burning with hate for this - because it's alien and everything alien links in his mind to those who killed him, which is why he does this job; to hurt them, to kill them - he actually opens the cell and goes in, still shouting, and the Weevil backs into the far corner and then drops to the floor.
Something in it's begging reminds him that he once lay like that and screamed, and he knows he hated doing it but being on the other side of this pleases him; an animal savagery like he feels when he makes love. ( Not love, is it; maybe the French had it right, because it is like dying - he should know, he's done both - it's just something that makes him feel.)
Then he recalls a blue-eyed man, who would hate the sight of the thing on the floor even if it is a killer, and Jack Harkness backs out of the cage. Of course, that man is gone and what he would have thought doesn't matter, but it is a form of authority. Because Torchwood is beyond the laws, sometimes Jack needs help to know what they ought to be. He doesn't understand mercy or forgiveness, but they would have expected him to show those qualities if he could, so he does and lets the thing live for today. For tomorrow, the pistol rides in a holster against his bare skin, the one weapon on Earth that never goes out of fashion.
He pauses by the next cell, the one where all the excitement was today and wonders about his own reaction to it all. He'd wanted to catch the alien, to have it in his restraints until it took control or died, and sod the girl. He admits to himself, with shame, and that is unusual for Jack Harkness, that he would have slept with it. Whether he died or whatever, he can't imagine what might have happened, he wouldn't have cared. The girl would have died as he danced with the parasite thing, but one life in a city and a time that isn't his own - he considers it would have been a fair trade, and so do the rest of the gang (but remember they only follow him because they have to) and Gwen wouldn't let them do it. She cares, and now he'll have to care as well.
She cared about the murders, about those people who'd died today. Jack remembers the quip he'd made as he watched the CCTV, about the man who came and went at the same time, and the memory makes him snigger, then he knows that Gwen didn't find it amusing. Almost, it embarrasses him and that odd feeling leaves him feeling alien even to himself.
As out of place as the Weevil still cowering behind him, as alien as the piles of black dust they scrapped up earlier and put in one of the long drawers next to Suzie's body (unburied, because on the records they all died years ago, except for him, as Jack Harkness disappeared while the Nazi bombs still flew over London Town.) He stands there in a human city and feels as alien as his beloved Timelord ever was.
That second is enough for him to realise that Gwen was right. He's forgotten what it means to be human; forgotten what it means to be anything, because leaving Carys to die so that he could watch the alien has to be wrong in any morality, not just man's. So, he thinks about it. Being here, what does it mean to him, to be a man in Cardiff centuries and continents away from where he was born?
Lonely. That thought is there immediately; it's true. They left him, the two he thought were his friends and so he's never tried to replace them. The sense of being outcast; for something that was accepted in his own time - do they all think that he is unaware of the gossip about his sexuality? And always, the jealousy that he lives a crap life so that those around him - those he'll never know, or those who yell and jeer when they see him with his lips pressed against those of another man - that lot, can have any sort of life. For a minute, he wonders about the benefits of letting the Weevil go again, sending it out into Cardiff to the people who don't believe in aliens or Torchwood, and would have no time for him if they did know him, and then he wonders what the Doctor would have done.
He can't think, he's never been able to think like the Doctor, but he knows releasing a killer on a city of people just to hurt them wouldn't be his solution. But, oh God, he wants them to hurt like he is right now. Hurt. That's what being human here boils down to for him, and he wonders why the others are surprised that he finds it hard to care for an individual; how Gwen could have been so shocked that he wasn't interested in solving the murders. Being human isn't enough to make him care about the rest of them.
Then he wonders how much of that is strictly true. How much of humanity still applies to a man who can't die? They'd joked, him and the Doctor and Rose, that he was immortal because he'd always came through whatever they were doing. He'd known he could die, but he'd never been afraid of it. So, when the time had finally come, he'd kissed the Doctor goodbye and marched out into the corridor; stood there calmly, enjoying the featureless feel of the gun in his bare hands, acutely aware of how sweet even the recycled satellite air was in his lungs - how good it was to be alive and fighting for something that was worth defending. He'd realised in the last few seconds of his life as a normal man, that life boiled down to that; being aware that it was precious.
And now he has life again, by some miracle he doesn't understand - he recalls asking the poor bastard Suzie had killed what he'd seen when he died, in case that reminded Jack of what had happened to him - he doesn't want it. Oh, he won't kill himself. He knows that; he's not sure why but he just can't imagine himself doing it. But he hadn't ducked as the bullet tore his skull apart, or shivered as he kissed Carys and her alien parasite, because a little part of him (and more than that voice that whispers 'jump' on top a cliff) had wanted it to kill him.
He doesn't think the others had noticed him as Suzie died. Or had they blamed his tears on her death? He'd cared, a bit, but she'd only been an employee - and she'd chosen to die. His attitude to that is from the century he was born in; he would never grieve for a suicide because it was their choice to escape. And his tears hadn't been from pain; the bullet had been an unusual feeling, the idea of the possible pain had terrified him, but it hadn't hurt.
No, he'd cried because for a second, he'd known that blankness which is the ultimate right of all humans and then it'd been taken away from him again. That thought reminds him of something, and he wanders back across his underground complex to his desk and the glass jar that's there. He lets one hand rest lightly against it, aligned with the contents and watches without seeing as the fingers flex in response. He fears it and cherishes it at once; loving the fact that it is a link to the two people (the only two, his family never counted) who held his hands in the dark and afraid that it means one of them had gone into that endless blankness and not come back, as he did.
For a while, sprawled across the hard chair, stretching so that his hand never leaves the glass (yes, they were right; this is more important to him than capturing any renegade alien or saving a life ) Jack dozes. Torchwood's offices are silent as they never normally are, but he sleeps nearby anyway, so it doesn't bother him. The ghosts that come into his sleep aren't from the building, but from his past. They always come in the night, would do if the rest of them were here or not.
He's not good at forgetting. Why else had he invented and made up that amnesia pill? Oh, the rest of them thought it was alien technology and that he used it to tidy up after his cases, but...The first batch, he'd made up using the TARDIS lab, and they were for him. He uses them too much now, doesn't really care. Some things, he's found, are too powerful to be blocked out, and they don't work on dreams anyway.
He keeps record, detailed ones, on sheets of paper that litter the office - not computers because they're too easy to hack into and alter - he should know, he's done it thousands of times - records of every single case he's ever worked. Some of the others do the same but not to the extent Jack does. He writes his notes of an evening when he alone is there, listening to the night above and outside the building, and he can't sleep. Maybe one in fifteen-twenty are marked D-O in the top right corner.
None of the others see his notes, so they wouldn't query it. But if they did, he has his lies prepared. He's Jack Harkness after all, the conman and fraudster - he can always think of something to say. At the crisis point, he's sure he'd think of something. But it stands for drugged over, a constant tally of how many times he's taken his own drug even if him and the Doctor never did work out how safe it would be to use it repeatedly. What can harm him, after all? He's immortal. And because he still has the notes and flashes of memory, he knows he'll always have details of the case if he needs them. He's found that he can be quite painstaking about this work.
Their influence, maybe. If you do something, do it as well as you can, until you die doing it. That's what he hopes for - and maybe they'll be proud of him for it.
For a few hours, he slips between past and present, the TARDIS and Torchwood, men and women he once knew or slept with and his team here. Almost fever dreams, confusing and unrelenting. They all come with their own messages, own curses for the man they'd known. They cast doubt on his humanity; the Doctor stared at the caged Weevil and the pterodactyl, at Jack kissing Carys until she died and told him he was no better than the monsters he was supposed to hunt, Rose cried because she remembered him as the dancer with the stolen spaceship and his hands light on her hips as they watched the stars, not as he was now.
He jerks fully awake at the image of Rose crying, to the realisation that it's halfway through the night and his body aches from stretching across the desk. (But not as much, God nowhere near as much, as his heart aches from that memory of dancing with Rose.) Stiffly, he stands and moves sure-footed in the dark, towards one of the locked doors, the one that he keeps locked.
He folds his arms across his chest as he walks, right hand gripping his left upper arm, left hand resting on his ribs. Yes, that's almost how it feels, having someone hold him. Almost like Rose, resting her head against his chest as they listened to Moonlight Serenade and danced high above London, looking down at the fires below, but not quite. A painful pleasure that feeling, but it doesn't last long because he has to use the wrist blaster to open the double-locked door, kept like that because he wants no-one else to ever know of this room.
What do they think of him? Unethical, deviant, mad...gorgeous, brave, a hero... He isn't sure which of those he is, if any, but he knows this room would make them change their views. If they've ever thought about his home, he's sure that wouldn't have it pitched as this, because it would have destroyed their images. He recoils at the sparseness of it, even though it's all familiar, and he's been here too long already - he found Torchwood or they found him, just before Christmas. He pulled the launch trigger on the ships from in here, but other than that, he keeps work on the other side of the door.
There's a bed, stained from a few lonely nights - he never brings anyone back here, he even furnished it by himself, late one night, but he does have a vivid imagination. Beyond that, clothes and a shower, nothing else. No possessions, because if he doesn't have them, he can't loose them. No photographs or music, anything that might remind him of anything. He knows, from observation, that his bedroom is unusual but he doesn't care. This place is a bolthole, an animal's lair, unrelated to what humans would normally have and that makes him feel better. He doesn't want to be linked to humans.
Keeping that thought, he strips naked and crawls into bed, knowing that it will take him precious seconds longer to respond to any threat if he has to dress first. But he forces himself to do it, knowing the squad will be there if there's any threat; that they'll be there soon anyway, because they're all too obsessed with this job to live outside it.
And he's the worst, because they've only ever seen the flotsam and jetsam that washes up in Cardiff, the dregs of the universe, and the damage it causes. He lived with and loved the Timelord of Gallifrey, walked on alien planets, and in times that weren't his own - he knows that alien life can be beautiful. Is that a curse or a blessing? Jack doesn't know, except that he is sure that he'd never have exchanged those few months for anything, because even now he's sure that the next alien in Cardiff will be the Doctor. The next strange noise will be the TARDIS landing. He can hope, unlike them; this job, this whole institute runs because he is addicted to that hope, because maybe the Doctor will come back here and let him come when he leaves again.
This time he does sleep, without the distraction of dreams, as if someone is watching over him. And somehow, when he wakes, he's no longer jealous of Gwen. Everything he suffered last night, she'll come to. She'll lose the boyfriend as he lost the Doctor and Rose, lose her nerve and courage (turn to the drugs like he has, maybe). She will hurt like he does, and he's pleased even as he thinks how revolted they'd be with him.
Still, he grins abashedly as he showers and dresses in the privacy of the room that is the one thing he owns. Torchwood is a team; teams only work if all members experience the same thing and she will. Oh, will she.
The clothes are easy to chose, white vest, black suit trousers and shirt, braces; he knows Owen's opinion on the style and why he wears it, but it's far less complicated than that. This was what he wore during the Blitz, the one time when he felt at home on Earth, and it marks him apart from the rest of the city. He still doesn't want to be one of them, human like them. Last, he slips on the black coat with the old rank badges, and it settles over his shoulders like a lover's arms - the nearest he suspects he'll ever get to that sensation ever again, because for all his partners, he doesn't take lovers. Not in both senses of the word, anyway.
But the feeling, the memories, give him comfort and he strides out of the cell-like room. Yes, this is enough. It's his life, mired in 21st century Cardiff, but parts of it may be good. It's Gwen who will have to adapt; not him. He is coping with all this.
When Ianto, the first of the team, arrives, Jack's lounging at his desk drinking coffee and glad that none of last night's ghosts have followed him into reality. By the time Gwen breezes in, he's involved in his work and so sure that he's longer jealous of her that only two people in the universe would have known he was fooling himself. And they left him alone long ago, to be human as best as he could, and that's what he's doing. So far away from human morality that maybe he's approaching it from the other side.