Author's Note: Thanks to Babybluepineapple, Strange and Sad Angel and Omniac for your reviews - whew, you people are sharp, it's starting to get difficult to keep ahead of you, lol!

Also, big welcome back to soro1010 - lovely to have you on board for another trip, yee haa :0) ! Thanks for your review!


CHAPTER NINE

Carefully balancing a tray laden with mugs and a coffee pot, Amy left the kitchen and walked out into the main area of the Hub.

"Coffee's made!" she called out, making her way towards the stairs leading up to Jack's office.

The Doctor merely shook his head absent-mindedly and returned to the circuitry he was working on. The Master ignored her altogether, not even bothering to look up.

Feeling sorry for her, Tejana went over to help, taking the coffee pot from her. "Come on, let's go upstairs. I could do with a cup."

Jack and Martha looked up guiltily as they entered, breaking their conversation off abruptly. Tejana sighed inwardly, guessing that they had been discussing her relationship with the Master. It was too much to hope that Martha would just let it be, even in the face of the overwhelming threat posed by the return of Rassilon. Tejana was not particularly surprised. Martha had always been stubborn – once she got hold of something, she was like a dog with a bone – and her hatred of the Master was still all-consuming.

"Oh, coffee! Thanks, Amy," Martha exclaimed in a falsely cheerful voice, shooting Jack a significant look. "Are you going to have a cup, Tejana?"

"Yes, thanks," Tejana replied.

"So, are you getting anywhere down there?" Jack asked, distracting her attention for a moment, while Amy started pouring the coffee and Martha bustled around handing out the full mugs.

"The sensor device is almost complete. But then we'll have to wait, " Tejana answered dispiritedly. "It's so frustrating...we know Rassilon's going to do something, but until he does it, we don't know where he is, and by then it might be too late."

"Here," Martha said, passing her a brimming cup. "Have your coffee. I'm sure it will make you feel better."

All of a sudden, Tejana had a weird feeling. Jack and Martha seemed to be staring at her, as though they were waiting for something. She shot a sharp, assessing look at Jack, who hurriedly took a gulp of his own coffee.

"Good coffee, Amy," he said. Then, as though the taste had just hit him, he added appreciatively, "Actually, great coffee! Wow, not many people can make it the way I like it!"

"Yeah, I know, industrial strength," Amy smiled. "Can't take the credit, I'm afraid. Ianto showed me what to do."

To her amazement, the reaction to her casual words was completely electric. Jack nearly choked on his mouthful of coffee, while Tejana and Martha both visibly flinched as though she had struck them.

"What?" she demanded urgently. "What did I say?"

"What do you mean, Ianto showed you?" Jack snarled. "Is this your idea of a sick joke?"

"N...n...no," Amy stammered, bewildered by the aggressive look on his face. "I was in the kitchen and I couldn't get the machine to work and he came in and helped me. Why? Is there some reason I shouldn't be speaking to him?"

As soon as the words left her mouth, Jack was on his feet, running for the door.

"Jack, wait!" Tejana cried, putting down her untouched coffee and leaping after him. "Jack!"

He clattered down the stairs, taking them three at a time, disappearing into the kitchen, with Tejana close behind.

The Master glanced up, his eyes dark with loathing. "What's wrong with Captain Freak?"

"Martha? Amy? What's going on?" the Doctor echoed, as the two women appeared at the top of the stairs.

"Amy says Ianto Jones helped her make the coffee," Martha answered, her voice quivering.

"So what?" Amy snapped angrily. "I wish someone would explain what's going on! Why shouldn't he help me? He seemed like a perfectly nice guy to me!"

"He was," Martha responded bleakly.

"Was?"

"Ianto Jones has been dead for just over three years," the Doctor said quietly.

"Dead!" Amy exclaimed, the colour leaching from her face. "I was talking to a ghost?"

"Not a ghost, a temporal anomaly," he replied. "The past briefly intersecting with the present, the same thing that happened with Martha's megalosaurus. Two pieces of Time which should never touch - which is contrary to the Laws of Time and shouldn't be happening."


In the kitchen, Jack was staring around an empty room. "He's not here," he said, the desolate ache bleeding through his voice.

Tejana grabbed on to the door frame to steady herself. The swirl of temporal distortion in the room was overwhelming, almost like a hallucination, a twisting, turning mirage which appeared to both focus on and gravitate around Jack. For a brief moment, an eerie impression flashed into her mind, a chimera of Jack standing at the heart of the Universe, the threads of Time spinning and swirling around him in a fantastic, spherical dance, eternally anchored by his very presence. Then she blinked and the strange apparition vanished, to be replaced once more by the grubby Torchwood kitchen. She shook her head dizzily, trying to clear the preternatural sensation from her mind.

"I'm so sorry, Jack," she managed to say. "He was just a blip in the causal nexus - an echo from the past, a temporal aberration."

Jack's blue eyes sharpened with pain. "Not to me," he said bitterly. "Never to me. I wouldn't have cared how it happened if it meant I could have held him one more time!"

"Come and finish your coffee," she entreated softly. "Temporal anomaly or not, he still made it for you. It's a gift. Don't waste it."

He hesitated, as if reluctant to leave the room where Ianto had so fleetingly made a return to the world of the living, only to quietly slip away again. Then he nodded and made to follow her from the room.

But before he reached the door, he paused and looked back, his attention caught by something behind him.

"Wait...what's that?" he muttered, sounding abstracted, almost as if talking to himself rather than to Tejana. "It's...beautiful."

The Time Lady turned around, to see him stretching out his hand as though mesmerised, reaching towards a glimmer of intense blue-white light glowing lambently into the room from a tiny, ragged crack in the wall.

"JACK, NO!" she screamed, instinctively seizing the back of his greatcoat and pulling with all her strength. For a horrific second, she thought it wasn't going to be enough, as thin tendrils of radiance surged from the crack, extending towards him like hungry, grasping fingers. But then he lost his balance and fell backwards with a heavy crash on to the floor. The shining trails of light retreated rapidly, withdrawing furtively into the almost-imperceptible fissure in the wall. Without warning, there was an unpleasant grinding noise and the crack snapped shut, the incandescent glow winking out like an extinguished candle flame.

"What the hell was that?" Jack demanded, abruptly released from his trance-like state.

"Time-fire," Tejana answered tremulously. "A field of pure time energy created by the time slip. If you'd touched it...oh gods, Jack, you would have been erased, completely wiped out of Time itself."

Climbing to his feet, he looked bleakly into her face. "You mean I would have died?"

"Worse than that," she retorted. "You never would have existed at all."

"So, Captain Jack Harkness, the man who can never die, would have ceased to exist," he said savagely. "Maybe you should have just let it happen."

She gazed at him steadily, her eyes full of compassion. She knew that sometimes Jack's immortality was a heavy burden for him to bear, especially when everyone he cared for seemed to slip away from him. As a Time Lord, she understood very well how he felt.

"You don't mean that."

"Don't I?" he returned harshly, before walking out the door.


Pushing past Martha and Amy, Jack climbed the stairs back up to his office, swallowing back the despair which threatened to break him every time he allowed himself to think of Ianto.

Time healed all wounds, or so they said. And maybe that was true, for the ordinary, ephemeral human living out his allotted life span upon the Earth. But not for him. Not for Captain Jack Harkness. Time was his wound, the poisonous sting of his immortality thrust into his soul, driven deeper every day by the weight of his sorrow and loss, his loneliness and regret. And the guilt, oh God, the never-ending guilt.

Once he had thought it a blessing, a precious gift Rose had given him, albeit inadvertently. Once he had laughed in the face of Death, over and over again, revelling in it. He had thought that it made him special, made him count, made him invincible. He knew better now. The Master had been right, all those years ago. Handsome Jack was nothing but a freak.

He knew it wasn't fair to take it out on Tejana, but he couldn't help it. After all, he had lost her too, just like everything else he had ever cared about. After the 456 incident, after Stephen and Ianto had died, she had been the only thing that had made him want to keep on going. She had found him on Zog, a rancid rat-hole of a planet where he had been slowly sinking into a putrid mire of alcohol and meaningless sex, desperately trying to forget. She had picked him up, helped him to start over, taught him to care again. And then she had just walked away, into the arms of his most hated enemy.

The door to his office opened and he looked up to see her standing there uncertainly, a pleading expression on her face. "I know you're angry with me, Jack."

"Angry? No, really, why would I be angry?" Jack shot back sarcastically, suddenly needing to hurt her as she had hurt him. "You Time Lords are just so bloody arrogant. You have absolutely no idea what you do to people, do you? Or, if you do, you just don't give a damn! You sweep into their lives, change everything and then just walk away, without a backward glance. You pick people up and then discard them on a whim, like little playthings."

"That's not true!" she protested.

"Oh yeah?" he sneered. "The Doctor left me to rot on Satellite Five, among the dead and the dying, and just waltzed off with Rose and never gave me another thought. Out of sight, out of mind, right? And then there was you! Do you think I came back to Earth after Ianto and Stephen died out of a sense of duty? Because I wanted to be a hero? I came back for you, because you asked me to, because I loved you. But you even went one better than the Doctor, didn't you? Because when you waltzed off with someone else, it was the biggest bastard in the Universe, the man who tortured me for a full year just for kicks! So really, Tejana, why the hell would I be angry with you?"

Tejana took an entreating step towards him, her eyes glistening with tears. "Jack!"

But before she could say anything else, Martha and Amy appeared in the doorway behind her.

"Oh," Amy said uncomfortably, immediately sensing the tension in the room. "Sorry. Are we interrupting something?"

"No, you're not," Jack replied shortly. "I think we've said all there is to say. Haven't we, Tejana?"

He saw her face tighten in pain. Then her usual calm, emotionless mask slipped back into place and she nodded stiffly. "You're right. There's nothing else to say."

"Well...um...we thought we should all finish our coffee, before it gets cold," Martha said brightly. "Since Amy went to all the trouble of making it."

She cast a sideways glance at Jack before picking up Tejana's cup and handing it to her. Tejana took it without comment and moved over to the glass wall overlooking the floor of the Hub, gazing unhappily down at the Doctor and the Master working together on the rhondium sensor, her back to her friends. Jack watched her intently, willing her to raise the cup to her lips, all his scruples regarding Martha's plan having vanished in the face of an overwhelming wave of anger and resentment.

Come on, Tejana, drink it, he urged silently. Then we'll see if that bastard gets the last laugh!

At last, deep in thought, almost as if she was unaware of her action, she took a large swallow of the drug-laced coffee. Martha and Jack nodded triumphantly at each other, waiting for the sudden onset of drowsiness which always followed a large dose of Ret-Con. However, to their alarm, Tejana's reaction was far more unexpected and far more dramatic. Her hands grabbed frantically at her throat, her pale skin flushing with bright colour as she began to wheeze, desperately struggling for breath, her lips already turning blue. Turning, her eyes flew incredulously to Jack's horrified face.

"What...have...you...done?" she gasped, falling weakly to her knees.

"Oh my God!" Martha cried, rushing across to her. "We've poisoned her!"

Jack leapt for the door and tore it open. "DOCTOR!"