It was fitting, he supposed, that it all began again on the gritty cement of a Cardiff car park. This occurred to him later, when he had time on his hands to consider what transpired. All he was aware of at the time was searing pain and the smack of his body hitting the ground. He had the presence of mind to lift his head to stop the impact from knocking him out, but the person tacking him anticipated this and grabbed a handful of his luscious hair.

"Calm," growled his captor. "I dun' wanna hurt you. Just take it easy."

He recognized the voice. This meant that his captor was someone important, because he didn't have the best memory for voices. Faces, yes. Bodies. Tender spots. But voices, not so much. There were only a handful of men whom he considered memorable with London accents like that, and all of them were dead except—"Mickey Smith?" he said to the concrete, as he realized that if he were in the correct time, Mickey Smith should be dead too.

Instead of slacking, the pressure on his body was increased. "How'd you know that, then? Some kind of telekinesis? We've seen species that can read minds before."

"Mickey, I never understood why he called you 'the idiot', but it's me, you idiot. Jack."

"Jack? Jack who? The only Jack I know left here a long time ago."

"Yeah. That'd be me." Jack grunted.

"Jack Harkness?" Incredulity dripped from the two words, and Jack tried to think of some way to prove himself with his face smashed into the ground. Hurrying footsteps interrupted him.

"Jack Harkness? Mickey, let him up, let me see!"

"Now that voice I'd know anywhere. Voice of an angel, Martha Jones." Jack grinned, as Mickey's weight was lifted off of his back. He pushed up onto all fours to take stock, and then stood to brush himself off. The dust of two planets trickled into the air. His Sector Nine medi-bay uniform was stained and ripped, something that the supervisors would not approve of. He would not be seeing them anytime soon, he assumed. The universe made other plans.

"Oh my God, it is you! What the hell happened, Buster?" Martha exclaimed, shoving herself in between him and Mickey.

Jack glanced around at the empty car park, noting the still-familiar sound of the rain outside. "Would you mind if I asked the questions? I have a hunch this is weirder for me than you. When am I? Where am I?"

"Cardiff, April 25th 2013," she said, and he nodded.

He had assumed that it wasn't too terribly long after he left, since Martha hadn't changed, except that she was wearing her hair shorter. Plus, the pink shirt she wore under her jacket had the Olympic rings on it, putting him somewhere around 2012

"What are you two doing in Cardiff? Better yet, what am I doing in Cardiff?"

"Usual answer: Rift activity. I guess you fell through," Mickey said, stepping out from behind Martha. He was waving a scanner up and down in front of Jack. "Yeah, major Rift spike."

"I became Rift junk?" Jack said, with a chuckle. "That's fitting. Don't suppose you've learned to control the shifts enough to send me back?" Mickey shook his head, and Martha's face fell. "I'm kidding," he assured her. "I think."

Martha shook her head, "Oh Jack!" she said, abandoning the collected demeanour she had maintained, and throwing her arms around him. "It's so good to see you."

He squeezed her for a long moment. She still wore the same lilac perfume, and it brought back memories that made him want to laugh and cry simultaneously. "You too, Martha."

"All right, hands off." Mickey clasped a hand on Jack's shoulder. "Though, I am glad to see you, mate. She's mine. And as for us, we're--."

Echoing footsteps cut him off. Martha and Mickey closed ranks in front of him. They spun to face the entrance to the car park, leaving Jack to follow their gazes over their shoulders. A figure was coming up the ramp, walking steadily as if she had a plan, and she wasn't in a hurry. Jack knew that silhouette.

"Word to the wise," Mickey muttered to him. "No sudden movements from you."

"We're Torchwood," the woman finished, coming to a stop in front of them crossing her arms in front of her chest. "What do you two think you're doing? Move." With quick looks at Jack, they stepped aside. She stepped forward into the light to peer at him. "And who or what--?" She stopped, her eyes focusing on his face. He was a little shabbier than the last time she had seen him. His hair was longer, and he hadn't shaved in a few days; the medibay had been busy. Still, he hadn't aged more than a year or two in the years he had been gone. Of course, neither had she.

The clamouring rain was all he heard, aside from his own heavy breathing, as her face changed. Recognition had flashed in her eyes. After another breath this was followed by shock, and then her eyes narrowed. He was surprised for a moment, remembering her tears when he had left. On that hilltop, though, he sensed that she had been sure that he would return. Enough time must have passed to make her decide he would not. The emotion next to sadness was often anger. If anyone understood the connection between the two, it was Jack.

He bit his lip as her features formed into stone. A glance down was enough to revel that her hand had closed over the hilt of the gun at her belt.

"Look who fell through the Rift, Gwen," Martha said, stepping between them enough to block Gwen's aim were she to raise the gun. The false note in her voice reverberated against the walls. "What shall we do with him?"

Gwen's gaze did not leave Jack's face, and he had to clench his fist to resist the urge to feel his chin for a hole bored by the laser in her eyes. "That'll be up to you Martha, because if the decision were left up to me, I'd bloody well lock him in the vaults, and never let him out." Her voice was steady as she proclaimed this, and once the sentence was punctuated she spun on her heel. Her departing footsteps echoed as steadily on her way back to the street as they had when she approached.

Jack had not encountered many silences without being able to break them, but when the sounds of her boots disappeared he found that his throat had gone drier than the week he had spent wandering around a Saharan desert planet.

"Well," Mickey said, apparently less fazed than Jack, or perhaps less afraid of Gwen. "You can kip at ours, for tonight at least." Jack and Martha exchanged a look, and then turned to stare at him. He shrugged. "It's the only suggestion I've got."

"It's something at least," Martha agreed. She rested her hand gently on Jack's shoulder. "She'll come 'round, Jack. They've been a hard few years." He nodded, and followed them to the lone car in the car park. He was suddenly too tired to point out that only half of her statement sounded as though she believed what she said.

***

The dew coated him as thoroughly as it coated the grass, but he didn't stir. Maybe it was that trans-universal-temporal travel triggered the worst jetlag he had ever encountered, or the stiffness of Martha's couch, but insomnia had him in its clutches. He considered the streets of Cardiff, reacquainting himself with them, but instead he'd looked up the address in Martha's phone. He had begun his journey before the streetlamps turned off.

Now the birds were singing their hellos, and he opened his lungs to the air as much as he could, enjoying the heady scents that only a spring on Earth could produce. There were entire planets captured in never-ending printemps that could not rival the perfume. He inhaled once more before his attention was stolen away from the flowers by movement behind the window that he had been staring at for hours. The curtain flickered an inch or so, and he braced himself, expecting to see Rhys Williams emerge in the doorway, armed with a rifle.

Wrong on both counts. The door opened, and Gwen stepped out, holding her handgun in a casual grasp, as though it were the coffee mug she would normally be clutching at this hour. As a matter of fact, her other hand did hold a coffee mug, which she sipped from. One eye remained focused on him steadily enough to aim and blow his brains out if she chose. Adding to the effect, she was still wrapped in her bright pink dressing gown, with her feet covered in matching bedroom slippers.

"When I taught you how to use that thing I wasn't anticipating this." The statuesque silence of her stare from the night before had not dissipated, and he continued, hoping to get a chink in. "I still can't die, Gwen."

"I imagined so, but I think it would be satisfying to lodge a bullet into your head over, and over, and over again."

He searched her words for pain, but all he detected was calm assuredness. That was the voice that came from hate. He despised himself for allowing the day to come when Gwen Cooper used that tone with him. "I've travelled for eons, Gwen," he said, ears straining for the sound of the gun being cocked. "Across the universe and through time. I flitted from planet to planet, drawing life from it like a bee drawing nectar from a flower, and then jumping to the next one without retuning to the hive. And just like a bee, the hive was calling to me. I've had lovers, Gwen. I've made mistakes. But Ianto and Steven's faces would never leave my mind. Why them? I wondered. Why that mistake?"

She was still staring at him; she had not shot, nor had she gone back inside. He continued, hoping that pouring all of this out would scab over a wound it was too late to stitch closed.

"I saw the Doctor a few times. The version of him that'd be turning up in this year has some hair, I can tell you that." He smiled a little, feeling the way Perseus might have felt had he attempted to smile with confidence at the reflection of Medusa. "I saw your—our Doctor a few light-years from here. In a bar; it's a place where no Earth humans had got to yet."

"Oh, so there are other humans, are there?" she broke in.

He grinned at the look of wide-eyed doubt that bled through her frosted look. It was as though he were peeling paint from a canvas that had been painted over. He proceeded carefully, so as not to rip the print.

He had loved that look, had thrived on it from their first conversation at the bar. It was the gaze that made him want to show her everything magical about the world. And what had he done to her instead?

"Ever wonder what happened to Amelia Earhart?" he quipped.

The side of her mouth flicked up, a fraction of a centimetre, but it was enough to give him the self-assurance to lift one foot up and place it further forward on the ground. The dewy mud squelched under his boot, and they both looked down. The beat that passed made his heart sink. The air around them had grown cold again.

"So anyway, I'm there with this man who saved the Earth, and all I can think of are the other people I knew who had done the same thing. I wanted to come be with them again, with you again."

"But you didn't," she snapped. "You fell through the Rift. Huge difference."

"I know," he murmured. "I guess the universe was braver than I was."

She laughed, but it wasn't the deep chuckle he adored. It was a biting laugh, flowing from a deep vein of bitterness. "You believe in fate now, Jack? That's rich."

"Yeah, I do." He raised his voice, meeting her eyes and speaking firmly. "I do, and you wanna know why?"

"This'll be good." She crossed her arms, and he exhaled. The gun was pointed down to the step below her.

He swallowed. He didn't want her to take the dark journey into his emotions. He rarely did it himself; and, her eyes were devoid of the compassion he had hired her for, a compassion that once might have let him tell her this truth without feeling vulnerable. Sometime over the past millennia he had learned that maybe vulnerability was what he needed to show.

"Because believing in chaos is too damn frightening."

Their eyes locked after he said this. Time stopped; the birds went silent, and it was just them. He saw the decision she was making, traced her gaze as it flowed between him and the intact wrist-strap on his arm. After all the time, and no time at all, he still knew her better than anyone. He hung his head before she opened her mouth.

"It's not enough, Jack. I cannot just let you in again. Not if knowing everything you were avoiding was enough to keep you away from the damned hive."

As the door slammed behind her, he kicked himself for using such a stupid metaphor. He blamed the flowers that were beginning to bud on the bushes next to her front step. As he eyed them, a bee zipped in to nip from a partially open nasturtium.

***

"I'm not you, and you're not Ianto," she said the next morning, coming out of her house with a little boy in her arms.

The child watched him steadily, though except for that utterance his mother ignored this man in their garden. "Mummy, that's Uncle Jack. He in the pictures!" The boy pointed, obviously thinking that her mother had missed the unusual occurrence of pictures becoming alive.

"Yes sweetheart. But the man in the pictures is Good Uncle Jack. This isn't."

"Bad Jack?" the child asked, as Jack stepped forward, meeting the toddler's solemn black eyes.

"If your mother says so," he agreed. "What's your name, little man?" The boy buried his face in Gwen's shoulder.

"It's Evan," she answered.

"Another form of John? Like Owen, and Ianto." And Jack, he thought, but didn't say. "You're speaking to me," he added, turning his full attention to Gwen. She still had not looked directly at him, though she wasn't moving either.

"I was never not speaking to you. Not even when you weren't here. There were times over the years that I bloody well prayed to you. You weren't there to listen." She threw open the back car door, and busied herself putting her hand bag down on the floor. She set the child down to climb in himself.

Jack looked up at the grey sky, and addressed it. "Well, I'm here now."

"And I'm done praying. What do you want?" She leaned into the car, fastening the boy into a child seat, and tenderly placing a stuffed rabbit in his lap. The boy kept gaping at Jack through the window once his door was closed.

"I want a reason to be here."

"So everything you missed so much isn't reason enough?" she demanded, leaning back against the car. Her eyes were fixed over his shoulder, squinting at the sun that rose at the edge of her street.

He stepped to the side, blocking her view of everything that wasn't him. "Everything I missed so much is dead, blown up, or treating me like I'm Satan taking on human form."

She finally looked at him, eyeing him up and down. He crossed his arms, aware that her penetrating stare made him far more nervous than he should, particularly because he knew that her reaction to his outfit would make or break him. He had taken a page out of Ianto's book and headed to the military surplus shop. He looked like his old self, and judging from the way Martha and Mickey avoided bringing her up in front of him, she wasn't too fond of his old self these days.

She settled her gaze on his face, and cocked her head to give the impression of an innocent questioner. "Aren't you?"

He sighed and tilted his head back with a scowl. She smirked.

"All right, I get it, you hate me. Just, give me a job, please, Gwen?"

"Oh, is Jack Harkness begging? That's a new one," she snapped, but she was jiggling her keys in her hand. The gesture meant that she was considering his words, even as she berated him. The day before he might have considered asking to be a formality, but their conversation demonstrated that showing up unannounced at the Hub would be a poor decision.

Martha had told him that Torchwood had just officially got funding back from the crown, after the time it had taken to clear out and rebuild the Hub. They were still shifting out of their temporary offices in an abandoned warehouse. Aside from herself and Mickey, Lois Habiba was the only other employee.

There was a time when Jack was Torchwood. Judging from the way she commanded Martha and Mickey in the car park, Gwen was now the face of his favorite secret organization. As such, she would have to put her personal feelings aside. If she could see that it would be mad not to hire him, then it would show him that she could finally separate her heart from her work.

"Fine," she said steadying the keys. She reached behind her and threw open the passenger door. "Get in the car."

As he slid in, he admitted that the only thing that made him feel safe with her in the driver's seat was the happily babbling child behind him. She would not risk their lives with him there.

"Good Jack, Bad Jack," the child said, in a sing-song voice. "Man in the pictures, people in the pictures. Mummy and Daddy and Uncle Jack, and Uncle Ianto. People in pictures, people in pictures. Uncle Owen, Aunt Tosh, Uncle Ianto, Daddy, Good Jack, Bad Jack, people in pictures." For the entire ride to the crèche, the little kept up this chant. When he had been handed over to a teacher the rest of the ride to the Bay was silent, until they pulled up to the Millennium Centre.

Gwen parked the car, but when Jack pulled the door handle it wouldn't budge. He raised an eyebrow, but Gwen was facing forward so didn't see it. She stared out at the bay in front of them, watching a gull dive down out of view.

"There will be rules," she said. Jack crossed his arms, waiting for her decree. "If you hadn't noticed, you left an important position open in Torchwood. I'm in charge now, and not just bumbling along the way we did the first time you abandoned us. You're not to come in and think you can give orders left and right. You have seniority, but not over me.

"The others know what they're doing. Even Lois can hold her own, and you're not to go in condescending. In a pinch, defer to them unless it's something they haven't seen before and they ask for your opinion. Understand?"

Hesitation would be fatal, and he nodded. "I can work my way up the ranks," he assured her. Internally, he contended that two centuries of Torchwood would mean that he was more equipped to deal with anything than Lois Habiba, but he was willing to trust Martha. She had walked the Earth to search for answers too, after all. Even Mickey Smith had saved universes.

"You have a good team." The words escaped him as he considered their merit.

"Damn right," Gwen agreed. "Now let's go, before I think better of this."

The doors of the car unlocked with a click. Jack pulled on the door handle, but did not step out. "Hold on a second. You're piecing together a team to rebuild this place, why not get Rhys on board?"

Gwen pushed her own door open, and swung one leg out before stopping to glare at him. "I did," she said, and then stood.

Curiosity washed over him, and if he was not so eager to become a member of Torchwood again he might have asked for more information. He assumed that either Rhys had not been cut out for the day-to-day work of Torchwood, or they had decided that one parent should have a mundane job to be around for Evan if anything happened. It was a wise choice, and one day he hoped to tell her that. At the moment, he had to get out of the car and catch up with her before she left him alone with the tourists wandering around the Centre.

Stepping out onto Roald Dahl Plass took his breath away. With each step his chest constricted a little more. His mind knew that he would not find piles of rubble, would not feel his body being torn into millions of pieces before blackness took over. He would not see the destruction that had been ravaged on the place that had been his home. He had tunnelled out so much of it himself, and his mark was on every piece of it. The knowledge that an outsider had destroyed it haunted him almost as much as any of the rest of it when he slept.

He had never even seen the rubble, and had been there when the Hub was present far less than when it wasn't. It didn't make sense that he was having this visceral reaction to going back. He supposed that that was what thousands of years of seeing it in his mind's eye did.

Gwen still didn't speak, but she kept in step with him, even though each movement of his foot felt like dragging lead across the pavement. She led him to the emergency lift, rather than the tourist information entrance. He thought that she did not want him to have to see someone else at Ianto's desk, but maybe he only wished this was her reasoning.

He also wished his last association to this lift were not of sending her away.

The new Hub was impressive in its similarities to the old one, as well as its differences. There was a cleaner, more efficient feel to it. There were charts on the walls, and rotas. There were also sticky notes with messages written on them, and several prominently displayed drawings signed by Evan. The medical bay was in the same place, with several more cabinets of instruments surrounding it, and a lift labeled "morgue lift" off to the side. There were signs pointing to "archives" "vaults" and "toilets", and in one corner a collage of photographs. "Never Forget" said a banner above them, in Gwen's careful handwriting.

"All right?"

He was so busy absorbing the sights that it took him a second to realize that she had addressed him in a tone that could almost be considered caring, if one squinted. By the time he heard it, she had stepped off the stone and strolled into the room. Mickey and Martha, who were at desks facing them, were both gawping at them in disbelief.

"Martha? Show Jack around; tell him about the new stuff. Asylum and all that. Then put him to work sorting out the junk pile. He has a good eye for alien shite. I'll be upstairs reading through the report we got from UNIT last night, hoping against hope that it explains their stupidity."

"All right," Martha said, standing up and watching Gwen's retreat warily. "Did she shoot you yet?" she demanded of Jack, when they had heard a door closing upstairs.

"Not yet," he said dryly. "Give her time. What's Asylum? We had a policy called that just before I left, but--."

"It's Gwen's brainchild," Martha explained, coming around the desk to lean on it while she spoke. "While they were rebuilding the Hub she needed more to do than try and recruit us, so she began it. Basically, we run a halfway house and rehabilitation program to integrate aliens into Earth society. The Rift has been going mad, and we've had a fair few landings that haven't been violent, so haven't violated the treaty the Doctor helped UNIT forge when it became clear that it was time for Earth to become a universally-aware planet. Gwen was in on it, and convinced them to fund Asylum Agencies all over the UK. We run the Cardiff branch, and have ties with similar programs all over the globe. It's truly incredible."

Jack looked up to the second level of the Hub. There were still glass walls boxing in the upstairs offices, and he could see Gwen leafing through a print-out. Her boots were propped on the desk, and she leaned back in a self-assured fashion he once would have associated with himself.

So she still had that compassion after all. Towards aliens, at least. He wondered what had left her so cold towards humans.

Maybe not all humans, he considered, as Martha waved at him to follow her across the Hub. Maybe just him.