Biding Time (Doctor Who/Torchwood)

A Gift From The Rift

(Author's Note) Hello again!  Sorry to have taken so long to upload the second part.  Thanks for all the encouragement and positive comments.  I hope the second part is as enjoyable as the first!  

Jack felt his body tighten and lurch as the blanket slipped from him to pool on the floor.  He gasped, taking in a breath as he surfaced from the place of haunted reverie that claimed his consciousness whenever he tried to sleep.  Whatever he had seen or felt flew from his grasp and scurried back into the blackness the moment his eyes opened and registered his surroundings  He was grateful to be 'awake' again, and cursed the madness that kept him trying to find any measure of relief in sleep.  He remembered a time when sleep had been a blissful release... but that had been centuries ago, or centuries yet to come.  He wasn't sure anymore.  Time didn't work quite the same way for him as it did for most people.  He smirked at that thought, and ran a shaking hand through his hair.  Noting the physical response to whatever terror had touched him in the darkness, he cursed, and bounded up from the worn couch to find a cup of coffee. 

Padding quietly to Ianto's stash of varying machines, steamers, cups, and vacuum-sealed bags, he felt the cool air licking at his sweat-soaked limbs.  He shivered, grabbed a mug and rinsed it.  Pouring himself a cup from the pot on the burner, he made his way back to the couch long enough to grab the blanket and tuck it around his hips.  He looked at the digital clock, took a sip, and decided clothes wouldn't be a necessity, yet.  Ianto wouldn't be in for another two hours.  Even then, Jack grinned to himself, clothes wouldn't necessarily be a requirement... but he squelched the urge to let his mind wander into those realms, for the moment.  Surely there was something practical he could be doing, instead.  Wasting the remainder of the dark hours seemed such an irresponsible choice, for a Torchwood team leader. 

Jack sighed.  There were nights... days... entire months, even, when he didn't want this job.  Yet, it was as much a part of him as breathing.  He grinned to himself, again.  If this job was as natural to him as each breath he took, then he was destined to do it endlessly.  Which meant that Gwen, Tosh, Owen and Ianto would one day be just four more names among the hundreds, or even thousands he had lost along the way.  He steeled himself against the twisting of his stomach that always came with such admissions.  After this many lifetimes, surely he should have been long since accustomed, even hardened to that reality.  But he wasn't.  And there was a part of him, a shadowy, sheltered piece of his heart, that hoped he never would be.  As long as the twisting came, as long as it hurt to think of the losses - the faces - he was still 'human'.  Still, there were some losses that stayed with him more vividly than others.  Some losses that he foolishly let his thoughts stray toward too often, transforming the pain of his memories into the fuel he required to keep moving forward... or was it backward? 

"I have to find something to do," Jack announced to the emptiness around him.  "And now," he added, with disgust, "I'm talking to myself."

Pulling his weight up from the couch, he walked the familiar path to Tosh's workstation.  Settling himself into her chair, he gave cursory attention to each of the monitors that fanned themselves around her desk, suspended at both eye level and above.  Each was a kaleidoscope of flashing colour or scrolling text, steadily streaming information into the databases.  She meticulously monitored every source of updated information that it was possible to gain access to, whether by legal or illegal means.  The diagrams, maps, images and languages that animated her screens were life's blood to the team.  He understood some of it, skimmed over other parts, and was often mystified by the remainder.  But then, it wasn't his job to know every detail of how it worked.  It was his job to point her skills in the right direction, and then let her fine-tune the system to get what was needed.  And truthfully, no one had ever done that better than Toshiko. 

He perused the ongoing results of the new diagnostic program she was running on the Hub's security system, and shook his head in wonder.  Torchwood had come a long way since the days of Queen Victoria.  They were the first-line, and last-line of defense against alien threats, and a fantastic repository of scavenged technology.  In fact, there was only one other defense mechanism for Earth that trumped it... and he wasn't a system.  He was a force of.... nature?  No.  A force of super-nature.  A force of time, space, matter and energy... a manipulator of all the rules and systems in existence, earthly or otherwise.

Jack's insides flipped, and his pulse quickened, involuntarily.  He had tasted that force; pressed his lips next to it,  drawn life, warmth and purpose from it.  He had watched it be bound, chained, pinioned and restricted; then he had seen it grow, adapt, manoeuvre and slip from its captivity to be even stronger and brighter than before.  He had felt the heat in the eyes of the one who contained that force, whose veins carried it, and whose two hearts pumped it relentlessly into the limbs and mind that had repeatedly triumphed over the Universe's would-be dictators.  He had been burned by those eyes; measured, marked, known, set on fire, and then reborn, in those eyes.  He loved those eyes, no matter what colour they might be, at any given point.  And in the darkest hours of the night, in the deepest caverns of his being, he ached to feel those eyes branding him, again.  

He gritted his teeth, and forced himself to push the rush of emotion back into its compartment within.  That was another life.  A parallel one, perhaps, or maybe the strange and twisted genus of this one, but a dangerous place to let himself wander, nonetheless.  No one here had known that Force.  At least, not yet.  Maybe one day, he would tell them the story.  But not today. 

Then he heard the ping.

He scanned the monitors, searching for the blinking light that would indicate some change in whatever the normal range of madness was that these programs kept tabs on.  His eyes went to the Rift energy readings, first.  And there it was.  A flashing dot, marking a brief spike in the pattern. 

"Well hello, again."  Jack whispered, softly, leaning in closer.  He hit a few familiar keys, without even looking at them, and froze the image.  He increased the magnification, and smiled.  Finally, something to put an end to the silence and the brooding.  He leapt from the chair, losing his blanket in the process, and headed straight for the base of the waterfall...