Apastron
ap'as'tron (n). that point in the orbit of a double star where the smaller star is farthest from its primary.
o-o-o
"Alright Jack," Suzie had sighed, "you've finally lost me. What's with the hand?" It had bubbled in its preservatory jar as if it were aware it was the subject of conversation in the Hub.
"It's nothing," Jack had said. It's everything, he'd thought.
"I'll tell you what it is, it's sodding creepy," Owen had grimaced as he stood from his station and put on his coat, ready to leave for the evening. "I keep feeling like it'll just leap out and grab me."
Jack had laughed from where he'd been leaning against the wall. "That's why I got it," he'd winked over the top of his mug of coffee, "keeps you on your toes."
They'd prodded him a little bit more about it but he'd evaded their questions with a practiced ease – for some inexplicable reason, it felt private. Like it were a very intimate secret he couldn't share with anyone, and he supposed it was. It was between him and a man far, far away shooting across the stars from wonder to wonder never stopping once, and never looking back.
Captain Jack Harkness was begging him to look back.
It had been a trial to obtain the hand, and one that had baffled his colleagues to no end. For over a century he'd been keeping his eyes peeled for any signs of a Doctor that might coincide with his timeline, and the further they dipped into the 21st century the more chance he knew he had of finding him – ears and northern accent to boot. So when the Sycorax ship had parked itself rather unceremoniously over London he knew he had to be there. He just had to be, and he'd hacked into every Torchwood One communication in the hopes of catching a whisper of that brilliant man.
He'd been right, he was there. But his face was different – or so he'd been told. Regeneration was an ability of the Time Lords that had always been just a rumour flying around the Agency, but Jack was beginning to suspect there was more truth to it than had ever been applied before. It would explain a lot of things, that was for sure. All the same, it had been frustrating that the Doctor had been so close and yet he hadn't been able to do a thing to get up there and help him. To just see him. But he'd been there, and so had Rose.
The Doctor and Rose.
When the events of the Christmas invasion had been described to him, that's exactly what they were – written across time, an unbeatable pair. He was just the man who'd been there for a little while, the one they'd left behind. The freelancer; the hitchhiker. In legends he didn't have a name, so he'd made his own in Torchwood.
Notice me, Doctor. Come for me.
The Hub was long since deserted, everyone having returned home by now but still Jack stayed, sat at his desk and stared across the room at the severed hand, floating in the deep blue jar.
There'd been talk of the Doctor losing that limb as he fought the leader of the Sycorax, and while many at Torchwood One had dismissed it as exaggerated rumour, the captain suspected otherwise. After siphoning a little rift energy into a small device he'd been working on in his spare time, he recalibrated the sensors to look for time energy – in his regeneration period the Doctor would've been a walking ball of intense energy, and Jack had hoped to hone in on that and find where the hand had fallen.
Why? He wasn't even sure.
It had been a constant vigil for three days, combing every single street. He didn't sleep and he couldn't remember eating although he must've, most likely offerings from the bemused members of his team who had hunted him down at various times throughout the second and third day to check he hadn't fallen over in exhaustion. When they asked him what he was looking for, he'd simply said it was time energy to do with the rift and they shouldn't worry, even while every single minute his heart had hammered and his spirits had lingered on the cusp of hope, but after all this time he wasn't sure he'd even wanted to grant himself that.
He found it in a dumpster near the Houses of Parliament and he'd been ecstatic – in retrospect he wasn't sure what he'd hoped to achieve. What he still hoped to achieve. Maybe he was just holding on to a part of his life where he'd had a real purpose, and a real connection to the rest of the Universe that the Doctor had given him. Torchwood Three was a way of passing the time, of snatching the debris that washed up in Cardiff and imagining what beautiful worlds they'd been part of once, and speculating whether Rose and the Doctor had been there.
He shut his eyes tight and leaned back in his chair, folding his arms.
They'd left him behind.
He didn't like to think about it; he liked to imagine that the Doctor had some wonderful reason for his desertion on Satellite Five, and that one day he'd be back. He'd be back to pick Jack up and they could be the Doctor and Rose and Captain Jack Harkness again – they could be amazing, the three of them together. They already were once, after all.
But the Doctor didn't need him. The Doctor had Rose.
And he had a sneaking suspicion that the Doctor knew.
Why else would he avoid him for so long? It would take only seconds out of their lives to collect him, and it wasn't as if he'd been unhelpful. He'd died for them. More than once, if he thought about the amount of times Torchwood had tried to kill him because of his connection to the Doctor. God, he missed that connection. Stuck in Cardiff he felt cut off from everything, and it was an awfully lonely way to live. Once the Doctor took your hand and showed you the most amazing things in the Universe, it was difficult to let go and let yourself be consigned to oblivion – in more ways than one, Jack was still trying desperately to cling to that hand.
The forefinger of the severed hand in the jar twitched, and Jack's eyes opened.
Realisation came like the crystalline light that burst across the sky of Tarqwon Four every fifty years. If he wanted answers and the Doctor refused to find him, he'd have to start looking himself – and this time, he had something to help him.
o-o-o
Daniel Johnson was about as normal as they came – normal family, normal neighbourhood, mid-way through a normal degree at a normal university. Economics. It hadn't even interested him that much, but it looked like one that would lead to a steady job so he could support his Dad, and that was what was important to him. In his free time he enjoyed going down the pub with a few mates and catching the latest game, cheering for the Blues and booing the Swans at the appropriate moments. The point was, Daniel Johnson was normal and he liked being normal, but on the eve of his 20th birthday all that changed. Transformed as quickly as the click of a key in a lock and being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He'd been coming back from class with his books tucked under one arm when an odd noise from the IT suite caught his attention. Sort of like a scraping sound, like metal nails dragging painfully down a chalkboard and he winced involuntarily – he wanted to ignore it, but instinct pushed him back the way he'd come.
The door was locked but his Professor had let him borrow the key that morning so he could complete his term paper undisturbed (like he would be in the library) and had then insisted that he use the suite to catch up on any other work he needed finishing and give the key back to him tomorrow. So he simply jammed it in the lock and turned, nearly dropping it at what he saw inside.
A blue box, huge and no more than two meters in diameter sat slap bang in the middle of the room, in plain sight. It certainly hadn't been there that morning, and it looked ridiculously heavy – did someone carry it there? Pondering what sort of prank it might be, Daniel stepped closer into the room to examine it. Along the top it read "police box" and although he'd never seen one before he'd been to the British Museum once and he reckoned it was some antique from the 20th century. What it was doing in the middle of the IT suite at a university in the middle of Cardiff was beyond him.
Then suddenly, one of the doors opened.
"Here we are!" A man's voice sang, although it was muffled as if he were facing the other way. "The Tudor—" Daniel only had time to spot the pinstriped suit and the long metal pole the man was (impossibly) carrying out of the box before he turned abruptly and it thwacked him in the head, knocking him to the ground. He didn't remember much after that. "—Period?" Realising what he'd done, the man in the suit winced and put his lance – a tool traditionally used for medieval jousting – carefully on the floor. "Whoops."
He stepped outside the box and crouched on the ground, examining the young man he'd knocked out. Before he could completely finish his assessment, a blonde woman not much older than the man on the floor appeared in the doorway, sporting a rather elaborate and unconventional dress for the period she'd walked into. "Doctor? Hang on a sec, this looks nothin' like – what have you done now?" She asked exasperatedly, taking in the scene before her.
"Boshed him on the head, I think. Maybe my jousting technique's a little... rusty."
"So instead of keepin' the door open for me so I can actually walk in this ridiculous dress, you're stabbing men with your pole before you're even out the TARDIS." The man grinned sheepishly. "Who says chivalry is dead?"
"He's only unconscious," the man said, but he had the good grace to look guilty. Too soon though his expression morphed into something else she knew well – curiosity. His thick-rimmed spectacles were rammed on and he continued his inspection. "What's odd, though, is that he looks like he was checking us out."
"So? Big blue box in a big... really not Tudor room, Doctor, 's a bit suspicious."
He frowned and rubbed his chin. "Even in an enclosed space like this the perception filter should work – not many people can see through that."
The girl shrugged by way of response. "Maybe he's just one of them?"
"Maybe," the man said thoughtfully.
o-o-o
Jack was running.
The hand had been sitting in the Hub for a few weeks now, when suddenly it had started to glow – he didn't know what it meant but after a burst of inspiration he'd pulled out the old device he'd used for tracking it down, messed around with its settings (with a speed his old friend might be proud of) and before he knew it he had a tracking device. A Doctor Detector, if you will. He'd mobilised the team even while giving them minimum instructions about what they were looking for and they'd piled into the SUV, taking off at breakneck speed.
The whole way there he'd been barely able to control himself to the point where Suzie was getting antsy and asking if he'd prefer it if she drove, and he waved her off with a laugh. Tried to make it seem like another day at the office – but it was so much more than that. This was the Doctor, his Doctor, or one of them.
When they pulled up to the university building Jack sent Tosh, Owen and Gareth through the back while he and Suzie made for the front.
"A man in a brown coat – and a blonde girl. And a damn fantastic blue box!" He'd yelled at them as they sprinted into the building. The hand shimmered brighter in the container on his back and he tried to stop himself from bursting out into ecstatic laughter. He was here – this was it.
o-o-o
The man stood up again and brushed some imaginary dust with his coat before inspecting their surroundings. "Anyway, we seem to have veered off course a bit – quite magnificently, actually." He dropped his glasses back into one of his huge pockets as he tapped the monitor of one of the computers in the suite. "Twenty-first century. There's always something about this place, hm?"
"Told you we should've turned left after that fuzzy vortex bit thingy," his companion teased, poking her tongue out between her teeth.
The man grinned. "Well next time, Miss Tyler, you can drive."
o-o-o
"If it is them, should we wait for Jack?" Gareth asked from where they stood around the corner, listening to voices on the other side – a man and a woman, just like who Jack had told them to look out for. They'd been in the other room for a minute or so already, and there was no sign of a blue box but it could well be further inside. They didn't know whether to just charge in or not.
Owen loaded his gun. "I reckon we just go in and get this over with. I had a good game of online poker I was in the middle of before Jack started rambling on." He made to charge forward, but a hand pulled him back.
"No, Gareth's right—we'll wait and guard the door so they can't get out," Toshiko Sato looked at him pointedly.
"You're such a killjoy, you know that?"
Before she could think of a comeback the three of them were shoved to the wall as someone thundered around the corridor just in front of them, without a second thought to his team and a crazed look in his eye like all the hounds of Hell were on his heels.
"Doctor!"
o-o-o
"At least I might get us a couple hundred years closer," the girl remarked, before a shout had them both staring at the door.
"Doctor!"
The girl recognised that voice – smooth, distinctive – American?
"Oh my god," she said, a hesitant smile breaking out as she looked hopefully at her friend, but he barely even spared her a glance. Every single cell within him was screaming for him to run, to get out of there and not take even a second to look back just as he'd done on Satellite Five. It was something fixed, something terrifyingly still like the eye in a storm that'd never really go away.
He grabbed the girl's hand, turned for his blue box and ran.
o-o-o
"Doctor! Doctor it's me!"
His voice was only an echo on wood as the door had already shut.
Captain Jack Harkness had burst into the room just as the TARDIS was vanishing into the vortex.
He watched it fade, could feel the breeze of another world blowing his hair from his forehead and he knew with an irritating certainty that if he'd been a second earlier he might've been able to touch it. As it was, that wonderful man had left him nothing behind except an unconscious teenager on the floor.
Jack let out a string of expletives that had his team looking awkwardly at the ground, and he threw his small handheld Doctor Detector across the room in frustration. "Pick him up," he said, gesturing to the man on the floor. Whoever he was, he might know something about what had just happened. "Get him back to the Hub." Owen and Gareth moved tentatively forward, sensing the sombre mood of their team leader, slung Daniel Johnson over their shoulders and left. Toshiko and Suzie followed after them.
Jack tried to stop the ache clenching painfully at his heart – it was so clear the Doctor didn't want him and all his enigma.
Then why couldn't he stop holding onto that hand?
o-o-o
Da-daaah! New story. Imagine Jack finding the Doctor before Utopia? So I'm going through a bit of a Doctor Who phase right now and I guess we'll just see how this turns out. I'm sorry there wasn't a lot of dialogue, but consider this more like a prologue than anything else. It's Doctor Who first and foremost, although Torchwood will feature (this is obviously pre-Gwen Cooper and pre-Ianto Jones because the whole fiasco at Torchwood One hasn't happened yet. Gareth is a character of my own creation).This is more of a test, too - please let me know your thoughts and if there's enough interest I'll definitely continue! Reviews are muchly and wonderfully welcome.
~MyWhitelighter