CHAPTER TWO
Cybermen. The Master. Two of Jack's least favourite world-ending scenarios, together at last. All he needs now is Daleks, except that might leave him curled up in the corner gibbering. Or maybe child-controlling aliens; that has entered the hellish roll-call of his nightmares. Losing Ianto to his own overconfident stupidly, then murdering Steven outright left an emotional scar at least as deep as losing Rose and the Doctor had. And the Master… Jack never quite recovered from his year with the Master.
Ianto was the only reason he managed at all, after. It was Ianto who held him through the flashbacks, who listened when he needed to talk without asking questions Jack was too damaged to answer. Ianto, who was brilliant and beautiful and loyal. Ianto, whom he betrayed with his careless Don't. How Jack wishes he could take it back, take it all back, everything he'd done to hurt Ianto. Take back the lies and half-truths. Undo leaving with the Doctor without a word. Change every moment he'd turned to someone else. Even, or perhaps especially, redo all the faffing about with Gwen Cooper and push her away. There had never been a future for him and Gwen, and there could have been with Ianto. If he hadn't fucked it up in Thames House, that is. And it wasn't like he didn't know how it would feel to see Ianto die, he'd watched him eviscerated by the Master during the Year when Ianto had been found working with the Resistance. Jack always knew what Ianto meant to him, yet he wasted so much precious time.
The Master was killed on the Valiant, though. Right in front of Jack, and refused to regenerate (and the less said of the Doctor's gut-wrenching reaction to that the better), but regenerate he had. Or she had, proving that gender is not fixed in Time Lords. Then that latest incarnation of the Master was reported killed by one of the Cyberconverted. Jack doesn't believe it for a second, and neither does his source. Which means he has to get back to Earth to find out what really happened, and to help if he can. And whether he's ready or not, to face his past.
It's been five years since Ianto's death drove him away. He's been back to Earth a few times, always leaving when the memories got to be too much, but staying close, keeping an eye on things just in case he is needed. It only takes a few small favours called in to get himself to London. It's as good a place to start as any.
London hasn't changed much. One Canada Square, the former site of Torchwood One, has been rebuilt with a generic office building and a memorial, but Torchwood London remains absent, as is Torchwood Three. Archie at Torchwood Two stopped responding to anyone years ago, the branch is assumed defunct, and Torchwood Four is still MIA, leaving UNIT as his best source of information. Sadly, his best contact and close friend Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart died years ago, but Alastair's daughter Kate (fine woman, she doesn't even seem to hold their brief affair against him) has remained in contact. It was she who informed him of the Master's recent return.
When he met her for coffee immediately on arrival, she was shockingly forthcoming given his past interaction with UNIT. She shared a debriefing of the Doctor's companion, including the recitation of an impassioned speech given by a rogue Cyberman, Danny Pink- the soldier who outdid the Doctor. Jack feels a kinship with the man and wishes he could have met him; he thinks they might have got on. And from the pre-Cyberman pictures, he was hot. Also hot: the Doctor's companion, Clara. No surprise there, the Doctor does tend toward attractive young women. Not hot at all, though, is the newest incarnation of the Master. Oh, she might be attractive enough, but her twisted expression curdles Jack's stomach.
Kate has also given him some information- but oddly, no photo- on the newest incarnation of the Doctor. Older and somewhat abrasive, he's more like Jack's Doctor than the zany pinstriped or the loopy bow-tie-wearing versions. Also, he's said to be making up for past wrongs, not that Jack has heard a word from him. It stings.
Now Jack's standing in the graveyard where the Master's so-called final showdown occurred, as he suspects was UNIT's intention. There's no footage of the event, but he's been told where to start; the first breadcrumb on his search for the demented gingerbread house that is his old nemesis. While his damaged Vortex Manipulator may be utterly useless at manipulating the Vortex, it can still scan for energy signatures, so that's what he does. What he finds confirms his suspicions. There's a spot where the grass is slightly singed with the characteristic blast of a Cyberman's weapon. When scanned with Jack's Vortex Manipulator, there's the expected high-powered energy signature, which almost obscures the tiny blip of Vortex travel. The Master escaped.
Jack is hoping that the energy surge overloaded the transport, leaving the Master stranded wherever she went (Jack has some experience with this.) The Vortex surge wasn't strong enough for a time hop or a long teleport, so if luck holds, the Master is still somewhere in London. Somewhere Jack can find her and end this as he knows the Doctor never could.
The problem he's having now is that the Doctor's innumerable Tardis visits have left Vortex energy all over London, everywhere he's ever landed since the first visit he made. Sure, Jack can distinguish a VM trace from the Tardis, but separating signal from noise is a non-trivial challenge, like trying to hear a whisper in a dance hall. In the end he resorts to a brute force approach: dividing the city into sections and crisscrossing each in a roughly grid-like pattern that corresponds to the London Underground, then graphing the readings from his VM. Bit by bit, he's creating a map of the city overlain with spikes of energy, one for every Vortex event. Patterns emerge, clean spikes and troughs where the Doctor has visited, with some spots so thick with Vortex that the Doctor must landed there several times. The great, dark nova of void that had been Canary Wharf. Odd wobbles here and there, and some jagged spots where he knows he had come and gone back when his Manipulator worked. So that's what he's looking for- one of the jagged spots identifying a non-Tardis time travel device.
Looking at his own jumps, he can see that they appear to correspond to the time or distance travelled, negative for departures, positive for arrivals. Some are in matched sets perfectly mirroring each other. He knows where the Master was when her device was triggered, so that's what he is looking for now: an arrival spike that matches the departure in the graveyard.
London is big. Really big; from the surge, the Master could have gone as far as Harrow. And that was days ago, she could be nearly anywhere by now, but Jack is betting that she stayed in London as the most likely place to encounter the Doctor. In any case, he needs to know where she arrived to figure out where she went, and mapping London, as daunting a prospect as it is, is the only way. Not for the first time, he misses his old team. Between them, Tosh and Ianto would have come up with an elegant, efficient way to scan the city, but Jack can't imagine what it would have been. He's stuck with the brute force approach. His VM scans a radius of nearly a kilometer, which means he can cover eighty percent of the city just riding the Tube, so if he's lucky he'll find what he's looking for without having to go out on foot. Every few hours he stops, uploads the data onto the MacBook Kate gave him (it's bugged and he knows it), and hopes.
He never does find the corresponding spike to the trough of the Master's disappearance. What he does find, almost due west of the Vauxhall station, is an area where there's no Vortex activity at all. None. Not even the natural background fluctuations of undisturbed time. There's something there, and Jack can't imagine anyone more likely to consume time itself than the Master.
Jack is regretting his choices. In an extra-long lifetime of extremely poor decision-making, searching for the Master in an abandoned underground industrial estate with no plan or backup whatsoever easily ranks in the top ten. Not as bad as walking into Thames House with guns to threaten an alien in bulletproof glass, perhaps, but only because in this case no one else was endangered by his his recklessness. Duct taped to the massive condenser cooling pipes, Jack is thankful for that small mercy. He's also very glad that he's on the intake pipe, as the out-of-commission Battersea Power Station is apparently running at full capacity. Even so, the air is cooler than it ought to be in a coal fired power plant.
The Master swooshes in with her clicking heels and prim Edwardian riding suit. Jack saw her only for a moment when she surprised him from behind then hit him with a length of pipe. He's still feeling a tender spot on his skull; the blow knocked him out but didn't kill him. He's sure this is deliberate; the Master knows through extensive experimentation not only exactly what it takes to injure rather than kill, but how long it takes to recover from each. Now she's cupping a saucer in one hand and sipping from a delicate teacup with a mocking smirk so reminiscent of her previous regeneration that Jack's blood runs cold.
"Hello, pet. I must say, I didn't expect to see you again."
Jack tries to retort, only to find his mouth covered with tape. The Master smiles.
"Manners, dear. I'd forgotten how poor yours are, showing up unannounced, and outside of visiting hours without even a hostess gift! Other than your lovely self, of course. I hadn't realized last time how very lovely you are." She balances her teacup on the safety railing, looking him up and down appraisingly in a way Jack remembers all too well. She trails a short manicured nail across his cheek before ripping the tape away.
"Isn't duct tape just the most wonderful thing? I don't even need to keep you quiet, there's no one to hear, but it's just such fun to take it off. And oh, I've forgotten to offer you a cuppa. How terribly rude of me."
Insane, Jack thinks. Still insane, but an entirely different flavor; saccharine sweet rather than outright sociopathic, though Jack's sure she's every bit as warped and ruthless as her previous self. She's reaching for the teacup and raising it to his lips, then pouring the scalding hot liquid too quickly for him to swallow. It burns down his chin and neck leaving a blistering red trail from lip to collarbone. The Master rubs at his injury with a handkerchief she's kept in her sleeve, doing more damage than if she'd simply let it be. He won't give her the satisfaction of flinching. It's only pain, and he's used to it.
"There now. What a mess you've made, poppet. Barely housebroken. Sometimes I wonder why the Doctor keeps you at all, but then he doesn't really, does he? Uses you and dumps you as soon as he can. Calls you wrong. Tch. I've never minded, but then I've always enjoyed a little... discomfort."
At the mention of the Doctor, Jack turns away as much as his restraints will allow. The truth is, he hasn't heard from his old friend -once crush- in years. Not since the Doctor's misguided attempt to set Jack up with that young man from Sto. As if she's listening in, she asks if he's seen the Doctor since his most recent regeneration.
"Not lately," he says, feigning disinterest. The Master isn't fooled.
"Hurts, doesn't it? And his latest look- that will be even worse."
Jack has no idea what she's talking about, and isn't going to ask. She's clearly prodding for a response and he refuses to give it to her. It's not just the Master, though; there's clearly something unusual about the Doctor's most recent face. When Kate hadn't shown him pictures, he'd thought it strange, but in light of the Master's glee, it's downright suspicious. He vows to get to the bottom of it. Later. When he's not quite so tied up.
The Master isn't giving up on it. "Oh, to be there when you see who he's become!" Now she's bouncing on her toes like an excited child. "Oh, please say I can be there? Please? You'll be absolutely crushed, darling. Delicious."
Insane. Cruel. Manic. Obsessed with the Doctor. Business as usual for the Master. Jack tunes out, only listening to the cadence of her ranting so he can nod at appropriate moments. It goes on until she realizes that he's not listening.
"You're no fun at all, Jack Harkness," she says with a churlish stamp of her foot. "But I'm sure I can remember how to entertain you. Go on, say something nice. No. Don't bother."
Then she shoots him.
Author's Note: I'm really having a ton of fun with this, and it means a lot to hear that you are too. Thanks! And of course, lots of gratitude to Gmariam, who frequently points out when I need to actually explain things.
