Title: Something Like Moebius
Author: Doyle
Rating: K
Notes: For the Jack Harkness Ficathon for fanelune who wanted Jack as a child and whether he'd ever been in love.
Summary: Eleven-year-old Jack has your typical possessed-alien-teacher experience.
Something was very wrong with the solar system. Asteroids zoomed across the sky and spun away into the Sun. Uranus' moons skittered around the planet in wild ellipses until two slammed into one another and careened off, way past the orbit of Xena and Pepsimax.
If you turned your head and looked at it just right, it looked like the planets formed the letters JH.
Jack leaned back in his chair and studied the ceiling, admiring his handiwork. Okay, so he'd gotten a little cocky in his reprogramming, hadn't stopped to think that signing his initials wasn't the best idea ever, but the holo was a lot more interesting now. After most of the afternoon trying to reset the display, or at least stop it from singing the colony's anthem every half-hour, the school's tech had thrown down his tools and announced he was quitting education in favour of something more relaxing. Lion taming, maybe.
"Sir, haven't lions been extinct since well before the ice age?" Jack had asked, all politeness and innocence, and was delighted when the tech called him a name he'd never heard an adult use.
The stunt had got him sentenced to a whole month spent like this, kicking his heels in the empty teachspace long after everyone else had gone home. The first few days Ms. Levenwix-B had assigned him extra work, boring research on the new Pluto colonies, but today she was acting weird; hunched over the data terminal at her desk, she had just snarled at him to get to his seat and stay quiet.
With nothing better to do, he passed the time imagining he was Time Agent Harkness, rescuing a beautiful princess and her equally beautiful brother from the dungeons of Magnus Greel's ice palace, shooting sonic blasts and clever quips at any fiends who got in his way. By the time he looked at the desk chron again more than an hour had gone by. Outside the windows, Jupiter was rising over the mountain rings. His teacher was still absorbed in whatever it was she was doing, sometimes stopping to hiss under her breath and hit the side of the screen.
"Ma'am?" Jack said. No reply. A little louder he said, "Ma'am? It's after five. My family's going to be expecting me home."
She didn't answer.
"I'm very sorry for what I did," he added dutifully. "Both the holo thing and everything else, including the stuff I don't think you know ab… let's just say I'm sorry for everything and I've learned a valuable lesson of some kind and I'll never do it again. Also, that thing you've done with your hair is very flattering."
"Shut up, boy."
He blinked. Not that she'd never told him to shut up before - it was less than a year since they'd reached an agreement that she wouldn't tell his parents about the explosion in the chemistry labs if he wouldn't tell the school board that she'd locked him in a transmat capsule out of sheer frustration - but her voice sounded wrong. Too deep, and strained, and with something underneath it that sounded almost like the scrape of metal.
"Ms Levenwix-B, are you all…"
"I - said - shut - UP!"
Jack shut up. Very quietly, he turned on his desk console and tapped the comms icon.
Nothing happened. He tapped it again, pressing the stylus hard against the screen, and when it still didn't work he tried the emergency symbol in the corner, hoping that colony security would choose to overlook the couple of times he'd pressed that button just for entertainment. That should have brought up a request for his ID code. Instead the screen flashed LOCKED OUT and flickered black. The lights had turned on automatically as it grew dark outside, but now they cut out, too. Power failure? There wasn't a storm, and he hadn't seen the techs post a warning.
"What are you doing?"
The teacher loomed over him. She was a big woman, not known for stealth, but he hadn't even heard her leave her desk. And she looked ill, he could see now; her skin was shiny with sweat and it was stretched too tight, as if her insides were suddenly too big for her outsides to contain them.
"I am trapped," she spat, "on this kralitz-forsaken moon, in this ridiculous bipedal body with its… thumbs. This building is under total lockdown until I can raise my ship. I wasn't planning on killing you until this host-body gave out but if you utter one more word I'll make the changeover early, is that clear, child?"
The bridge of her nose burst open. The skin beneath was slick and green. Jack found he couldn't look at anything else. "Okay," he meeped without thinking.
She roared. "What did I just say!"
He dived out of the door as the former Ms. Levenwix-B ripped a chair from its casings and hurled it at his head. It missed him by millimetres. The floor was slippery and he half-skidded to the end of the hall, scrambling for a second on all fours before he could right himself. From here, the hallway forked. Left went to the transmat, but if she'd cut off the power and the comms system, that could be down too, and that would leave him trapped in a dead end. The hall to the right led to the old disused library, the one that was technically off-limits; it was only ever used by the teenage students, and then only when the weather net malfunctioned and they couldn't make out outside behind the transport bays.
She'd be expecting him to go for the transmat. He veered right.
With the power down he had to use the manual override on the doors. For a stomach-churning moment the lever wouldn't budge. Jack wrapped both hands around it and pulled down with all his strength. His arms ached and it felt like the skin on his fingers was tearing and any second now he would hear the alien thing behind him -
The doors slid open. He fell inside, landing gracelessly on his elbows, and quickly crawled forward to give the doors space to close. He tried to listen for sounds from the hallway, but he couldn't hear anything but his own breathing, harsh and fast, like a wounded animal.
Think, Jack, think.
The school, like most of the colony's public facilities, had been there since the settlement was founded, built out of and sometimes right on top of other buildings. His grandfather had told him once that when he was Jack's age the school's labs and the old library had been a storm shelter, back when the terraforming was barely finished, the weather still unstable.
He was sure he remembered something about how the shelters locked from the inside, the mechanism powered on a different circuit to the lights and the transmat.
On his knees, he groped blindly in the dark until he found a panel to one side of the door. There was only one button and he pressed it as hard as he could. Ms. Levenwix-B pounded on the door, and Jack cried out and curled his arms over his head, and for the second time in under a minute he was sure he was going to die.
Then the locks slid home.
"Do you really think that will keep me out?"
He just wished the room was soundproof as well as storm-proof. A tiny bit braver with a locked door between them he shouted back, "Yeah, well, somebody's gonna come looking for me. And they'll have sonic blasters and, and… stuff."
"Will they?" The voice was still like a rusty shuttle engine but now it oozed false concern. He shuddered. "I've been here for hours, child, long enough to absorb the data on this education facility's primitive data system. Your mother's off-world, isn't she? Away at the Senate, not expected back for days. Father dead, older siblings away at school, extended family scattered all over the system - oh, dear, they can't think very much of you to leave a little boy all alone."
"I'm not little, I'm almost twelve," he said, but the words came out quieter than he'd meant and she probably didn't hear.
"I'm afraid it doesn't matter either way." She sighed, as if this was a terrible job but somebody had to do it, something the real Ms. Levenwix-B had told him more than once whenever she felt like warning him off teaching as a career choice. "I do need a new host body, and I'm afraid yours is the only one available. It's a little smaller than I'd like, but perhaps I can get rid of the legs, let the torso out. Oh, you might start to notice that you're getting light-headed. That'll be the lack of oxygen. I reversed the air pumps when I turned off the lights. Not a very quick death but I'm told it's relatively…"
Jack was never sure what happened after that. She was right about the dizziness, and as she'd talked he'd been clutching at the ground, trying to make it stop spinning, but then she suddenly cut off, words turning into a meaningless scream of fury. And then he could hear people running, and voices, and as the world spun faster he heard someone call through the door, "Jack, it's okay. It's gone. Hang in there, we'll have you out in a second." A man, with an accent like Jack's and a familiar voice, and for a dazed moment he thought Dad?
When the door opened - how had they done that? It was only supposed to open from the inside - he was too light-headed and too dazzled by the sudden light to see his rescuers clearly. Three people, he could make out that much, two men and a woman, and as one of the guys stepped towards him the other said, "No, you can't touch him."
"Wasn't planning on. Believe it or not, I was there the day they taught Blinovitch in Time Agent school, Doctor."
"And what were you doing the day they taught making sure you don't meet somebody before you're meant to? No real names, Captain John Smith."
"I thought you were John Smith?"
"Oh, who cares if we're all John Smith, just help him, for God's sake." That was the girl. He decided he liked her.
They were Time Agents. Real live undercover Time Agents. Here. Saving his life. That was almost worth being an alien's intended lunch for, he thought, and then he remembered that a teacher he'd sometimes liked was dead, and he felt sorry for thinking it.
"I'm okay," he tried to say as he felt himself being lifted.
"Course you are. We've turned the air back on, got the power back - tough little kid like you, you'll be right as rain in a couple of minutes."
He tried to look up at the man holding him, but his eyelids felt as heavy as planets.
"You go to sleep, Jack," he said. "Everything's all right now." And his voice was so warm and so certain that Jack couldn't help but believe him.
He woke up to a whispered argument. From the smell of antiseptic and derma-spray, he guessed he was on one of the beds in the school infirmary.
"Why have they always got to explode?" The woman, sounding peeved. "Look at that, that's never going to come out."
"Never mind your jeans, he's coming around. Time to make ourselves scarce."
"Aw, but he's so sweet." He held his breath as he felt someone lean over him, long hair tickling his nose. "Mini-Jack. He will be all right, won't he?"
"You already know he will. We wouldn't be here otherwise, would we?"
"I'm not even going to try and make sense of that," she said. Jack was relieved it wasn't just him. It was hard pretending to sleep when she bent down and kissed him on the forehead. "See you in 1941," she said, and he held his breath until he heard the door close.
"Okay, I know you're awake."
Eyes snapped open, he sat up on the bed. Only one of the Agents was still in the room, the one who sounded like his father, who'd first spoken to him through the door - Captain Smith, he remembered. He was tall, about thirty, dark-haired, wearing some kind of dark blue uniform with a long grey coat; Jack had once heard his sister refer to some pretty Earthpop singer as 'devastatingly gorgeous' and he thought, yep, that was about right. Something about the eyes and the grin reminded him of his older brother, but he cheerfully pushed away any gross implications of that thought.
"Hi," he said, unconsciously running his hand through his hair. "Uh. Thanks for saving me."
"Trust me, glad to do it." He seemed to hesitate. "Something similar happened to me when I was your age. When I say similar I mean… identical."
Jack stared at him. "An alien took over your teacher and tried to eat your brains? Does that kind of stuff happen a lot?"
Captain Smith made a wavy motion in the air. "Well, more than you'd think. You'll understand when you're older. Anyway, my friend - the girl who kissed you, I know that's made an impression - she wanted to see where I grew up, so we stopped off here. Only it turns out our ship had picked up a hitchhiker."
"The alien."
"An Akathelian. Dragged out of her own timestream and dumped here. She was terrified and desperate, and Ms. Levenwix-B was the first host she came across."
He tried to remember the real person, what he'd said to her last of all as he left school the day before. Had she been mad at him? Irritated at having to stay late to watch him, again? He couldn't remember.
"I'm sorry," Captain Smith said, sounding like he was unhappy, too. "I know you liked her."
"Yeah." He'd come in early tomorrow, he thought. The school would be closed for the burial service, but he knew the override codes for the transmat. He'd fix the solar system for her. She would have liked that.
Smith was on his feet. "Time to go," he said. "People to see, planets to save, damsels to de-stress." He reached out, as if he was going to ruffle Jack's hair, and then pulled his hand back. "A couple of the teachers are outside. They'll want to ask you questions, but my friends already talked to them so you should be okay. Tell them to call Mo... tell them to call your mother."
"She's busy at the…"
"Call her, Jack. She'll get the first shuttle out. You know she will."
"Yes, sir."
The Captain grinned. "I feel like I should be giving you wise advice for the future, but I guess if I was supposed to I'd already know what it was. Have fun. Be seeing you."
One of the first things they taught you in Time Agent basic training was how to deal with meeting yourself. Firstly, they said, just don't do it. Secondly, if you couldn't avoid it, under no circumstances should you touch your past or future self.
All his opportunities for fun gone, Jack had zoned out after that, but he'd grasped the main principles. He'd also worked out a few things about exactly what had happened that day at his school - either two hours or twenty ago, now, depending on how he wanted to look at it.
Fifty-first century Callisto was a couple of galaxies behind them. He and Rose had voted for lunch and a theatre trip, and the Doctor had claimed that you hadn't really seen Shakespeare in the Park till you'd seen it on Purpline XIV. They were part way through Act II and so far Jack was impressed with the guy playing Hamlet, even if his second head kept corpsing during the soliloquies.
"So, let me see if I've got this right." Rose lounged back on the garden bench, head in the Doctor's lap and her legs across Jack's thighs. Resting his hand on her knee, he decided he had the better side of the deal. "You became a Time Agent because when you were a little kid a Time Agent saved your life. And because you thought he was cool and gorgeous and everything."
"Mostly the cool and gorgeous part, but yep, that's it."
"And this Time Agent… was you."
"The first person Jack ever loved was himself," the Doctor said. "I'm not sure if that's sweet or narcissistic, but I can't say I'm all that surprised."
"Was it weird?" Rose wanted to know. "Seeing it all again. Seeing yourself."
"I was shorter than I remembered," he said thoughtfully.
"You were eleven."
"Yeah, but I remember being tall for eleven."
"I used to think some of my teachers were aliens."
"Some of my teachers were aliens," Jack said. "Harmless, though you didn't want to go swiping their lunches in the cafeteria. Most of them didn't try to turn me into their host-body." That part had been the worst, seeing the Akathelian burst out of his old teacher's body; he'd only seen the beginning of that the first time round. It'd be a while before he forgot that noise of ripping skin.
He shook his head. Long time ago. That was the great thing about time travel. Go far enough, and everything you'd rather forget became ancient history.
Rose spread her fingers in front of her face, like she was preparing to count on them. "The alien, the Akathelian, it landed there with us, right? And we only went there 'cause I wanted to see where you come from."
"Reasonable enough, we're nipping off to visit your nearest and dearest every other week, might as well give Jack's planet a go..."
"So we only met you in the first place because of something we did because we'd met you." She dropped her hands. "I give up. Hamlet makes more sense than this."
Jack stroked her ankle, stretched his arm around the Doctor's shoulders as an actor slithered off the stage and a ripple of applause passed through the crowd. "But the lead actor's less pretty," he pointed out, and was pleased when neither of them disagreed.