The two teams filed into the briefing room a few hours later, having bonded over coffee (Ianto, the Jacks, and Daniel), science stuff (Toshiko and Sam) or, in some cases, not at all (Owen, Gwen, and Teal'c).
Tosh and Sam were standing at one end of the long table, pointing at their calculations and muttering to each other quietly. Gwen took the seat nearest to them, with Owen next to her and Teal'c sitting opposite them. Daniel sat next to the Jaffa, and was (not unpleasantly) surprised to find Jack (not SG-1's Jack, the other one) only a few inches away, grinning widely.
Ianto watched his Captain flirting with the oblivious young scientist with a slight twinge of jealousy, and decided to stand in the back of the room rather than come any closer to the pair. To his surprise, SG-1's Jack (the new Jack, the Welshman thought of him privately) appeared next to him.
After a bit, Tosh and Sam began presenting their findings to the room. They would have been presenting to the people in the room, had any of them been listening. Teal'c and Daniel always tried to pay attention to Sam's briefings, but astrophysics really wasn't their specialty. Torchwood was even worse than SG-1 about these sorts of things (Ianto would have been better about paying attention, but he already knew everything and had to keep making more coffee). Owen was guzzling coffee and playing Space Invaders on his phone. Gwen was doing her nails. The Jacks took a remarkably similar tact to coping with boring meetings.
Poke. Ianto jumped almost imperceptibly. Poke. "Excuse me, Jack?" It felt weird to call someone other than Captain Jack Harkness "Jack", which was really weird considering Jack was a rather common name...
"Yeah?" The Jack standing next to him replied, trying to look innocent.
"What are you doing?"
"Poking you every time Sam says a word with a 't' in it, what does it feel like I'm doing?"
Poke. "She just said 'highway'. Where is there a 't' in highway?"
"That one was for being a smartass."
Ianto glared at Jack and wondered why on Earth (or not, as the case may be) Sam was talking about a highway. He might have known this if he was paying attention, but he wasn't.
Meanwhile, Daniel reached for his coffee and was startled to find it about half an inch away from where he was sure he had set it down. Ordinarily, he would have shrugged and assumed that he was going crazy (again), but this had happened at least three times during the meeting.
He looked suspiciously at the Jack sitting next to him, but the Captain just grinned innocently (and widely).
"Did you?" Daniel whispered, trailing off.
Jack raised his eyebrows. "Sorry?" he asked, his face a perfect mask of guiltless confusion.
"Never mind."
Sighing, Daniel took his glasses off and put them on the table next to his arm before turning around fully to (try to) pay attention to what Sam was saying now. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a slight flash as his glasses inched away from him. Turning quickly, he saw the Captain jerk back just a second too late for Daniel not to notice him moving the glasses.
"Ah-ha!" Daniel exclaimed.
"What?" Jack (Harkness) asked innocently.
"What do you mean 'what'?" demanded Daniel. "I saw you! Right there!"
"What are you two doing?" Sam snapped.
Poke. Poke.
"Sam, he was moving my stuff!"
"Daniel, we get transported to some secret base in Wales, I spend all afternoon working on how we got here and the implications thereof, and Tosh and I put together a nice presentation. Yet none of you - don't think I haven't been watching you too, sir - can even pretend to listen! At least Teal'c kel'no'reems silently!" It had been a long day for Sam. Three time-changes didn't help.
"Major Carter, perhaps you should get some rest." Teal'c was usually the one that had to carry Sam from wherever she'd collapsed to her quarters whenever she overworked herself. As a result, he'd learned to foresee such exhaustion weeks in advance and could tell she hadn't been sleeping enough lately.
Ianto took this opportunity to remove himself from easy poking-distance. "There are some guest rooms here in the HUB, if you'd like. It is getting rather late."
Sam sighed exhaustedly. "Alright," she agreed, although not without much reluctance. "We can finish this tomorrow."
Without warning, Ianto found himself being ninja-poked. Twice.
Sam, predictably, did not sleep at all. Instead, she refined her theory slightly, and was working on a way to get home. The next morning Gwen barely got a nod when she tried to start a conversation with her, and Ianto's offering of coffee might have been all that saved his life when he interrupted her. Toshiko, on the other hand, was welcomed enthusiastically and promptly disappeared into the makeshift lab, buried under calculations that they were probably the only ones to understand.
Teal'c had passed the night kel'no'reeming peacefully, while the Jack most often referred to in conjunction with he and Sam slept most of the time, passing his waking hours musing on the Torchwood team, especially a certain handsome young man who certainly wasn't Owen. Owen, as the narration has previously suggested, looked like a fish.
And Daniel, unfortunately, did not sleep at all, because his blood is 75% caffeine. (It is also 20% awesome, which leaves only 5% for actual blood. This might have something to do with why he doesn't die like normal humans.)
Luckily for him, there was someone else around who doesn't sleep or die like normal humans.
Not only did Daniel have insomnia, but his travel-related allergies were acting up with a vengeance. Hearing a crash on the main floor, Harkness had rushed down, only to find Daniel on the ground, entangled in a desk chair and sneezing uncontrollably.
"You'd better not be carrying some evil flu."
Great, thought Daniel, no matter where I end up, there's always a snarky Jack. "Tissue?" He managed to get out, in between sneezes. Jack handed him a box, which was gratefully accepted. After the sneezing died down, Daniel explained, "My allergies act up when I travel. They've gotten better, but new modes of transportation always set me off until I get used to them."
"You need me to show you back to your room?" Please say yes, please say yes... Captain Jack Harkness was really beginning to like this man.
"I couldn't sleep. Which is another reason I thought I'd come up here and wrestle a chair."
His interest perked at the thought of a fellow insomniac, the only Jack in this scene suggested one of his favorite nighttime activities.
"Wow," Daniel breathed. "It's amazing, and huge! I can see why you love this so much."
Both men stood on the roof of the Millennium Centre, overlooking the Plas and all of Cardiff.
"The view's even better if you look up." The stars over Cardiff were inexplicably immune to light pollution, and that's the way the Captain liked it.
"No matter how many I've been to, the stars never cease to amaze me."
"You go to other planets?" Jack was shocked. Humanity wasn't supposed to start doing that for another hundred years. And the Japanese were supposed to start it, not the American Air Force...
"Through the Star..." Daniel stopped quickly, realizing that he probably wasn't supposed to be telling the Jack who didn't already know this. "Never mind."
"No, I want to know," Jack persisted. "You came through the Rift, I assumed you'd just accidentally wandered through, but was it on purpose?"
"No!" Daniel was defensive. "I'd thought you'd brought us here. I wouldn't lie to you."
He looked genuinely hurt by the implication. Jack sighed. "Sorry," he allowed.
Then a thought occurred to him. No matter what Owen might say, this wasn't exactly a novel occurrence, but this particular thought was so strange that Jack narrowed his eyes slightly. "Daniel," he asked suddenly, "What year is it?"
"Uh..." The archeologist was caught slightly off guard. "2004?"
"2006,"Jack corrected him. He paused and thought about that for a moment. "The time's still off, though," he muttered.
"Of course it is!" Daniel exclaimed. "I don't think the time change between Colorado Springs and Cardiff is two years."
"It's not," Jack replied distractedly. "I was thinking that maybe you had traveled back in time, because humans aren't supposed to start space travel for at least a century. But you didn't seem temporally out of place; your clothes and the way you reacted to simple objects weren't much different than someone from 2006."
Daniel frowned, considering this. "We traveled forward in time?" he pondered. "But how do you know what's going to happen a century from now?"
Conspicuously not answering that question, Jack continued his musings. "There's no way, though... I'd have known if humans were going into space by 2004." He frowned again. "Unless..."
