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Paramagnetic - fic commentary
I needed to write this out for myself, so that I could make some of the concepts cohere, but if anyone wants a peek at how my brain works when I'm writing...this'll probably give you a fair picture :)
It might be fitting that I’m listening to ‘Every Story Is A Love Story’ from Aida at this exact moment – this story was very definitely supposed to be a love story, and it has been an endless source of hilarity-slash-despair to me that – going by the comments received so far – what I ended up writing instead was ensemble gen.
Starting at the beginning: upon first viewing the request and spending an hour or so merrily stalking my way up and down![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
calapine’s corner of the internet, I knew I wanted to include some kind of Jack/Suzie element, but I also wanted to focus on Toshiko. I had some excellent computer network/social network metaphors appearing in my head, but nothing quite seemed to click. And then…well, I’ll cover that as I go.
The official authors’ notes for the Yuletide archive bear repeating as well:
This was so frequently Jossed during the writing so as to cause enormous bouts of hair-pulling and loud wailing on the part of the author, but such is the curse of active canon. <-- DEAR GOD, YES. Everyone who knew what I was writing was privy to at least one bout of tremendous flailing about the horrible things that RTD was doing to my beautiful fic. This was obviously most significant after the airing of ‘They Keep Killing Suzie’, in which my antisocial, graceful, still-waters-run-deep Suzie was roundly retconned into a psychopath. WOOHOO. You’ll notice that my interpretation is still very sympathetic, because…well, I’d become attached to the girl by then. No matter what, I was keeping her likeable.
All secondary canon found on the official website has also been roundly ignored, and this - being backstory - is therefore likely to be at least partially AU as far as that's concerned. <-- HAHAHA. Oh, yeah. More on this later. (Confession: I have never really visited the website. Uh. I don’t know. I saw one or two pages there, got extremely frustrated by the fact that they read like third-rate fanfic, entertained a brief wish that I TOO could be paid to write fanfic, and then gave up and decided to take the show on face value.)
Enormous thanks are due to Sweeney, Mir and Ji for their comments and encouragements. <-- More specifically: Ji was the first person to tell me that it was very good, which means a hell of a lot to me coming from her. Mir fixed up some vagueness in my phrasing and made encouraging noises. Sweeney, bless her heart, picked on things that I’d never even have thought of and so improved the coherency of the fic no end. I’d also like to thankthe Academy boxchat, who bore the brunt of the aforementioned I GOT JOSSED wailing.
Maybe we should move onto the actual fic now.
Paramagnetic
You have no idea how many different titles this fic has had. For a very long time it was just ‘jewelry from a grave’, and then I developed the magnetism theme more and liked that as a more clinical, brutal introduction. And then I felt it was too clinical and needed to be softened with the poetry of a subtitle, so it was wankily named ‘Paramagnetic (jewelry from a grave)’ right up until the time came to upload, when I realised that I couldn’t have the subtitle on a second line, which, uh, it needed to be. Shush. So then I agonised at Sweeney for a while and finally came to the stunningly obvious conclusion that the epigraph provided enough poetry without my having to repeat a phrase from it. With a great sigh of relief, I cut it, leaving only the titular science.
Wow, I’m wordy. This is going to be one fucking long commentary. Bow out now if you’re short on time.
This iceberg cuts it facets from within
Like jewelry from a grave
it saves itself perpetually and adorns
only itself
- Elizabeth Bishop, ‘The Imaginary Iceberg’
I was on the hunt for a title when I came across this poem – the entirety is here, if you’re interested. I love it! And then I emailed it to Ji with a message along the lines of LOOK, HOW COOL!
Ji: …that was part of our SATs.
My buzz: *killed*.
Still. I kept it, because it said what I wanted it to, albeit very subtly: it’s the implications of shaping yourself (your team) from the inside, of every aspect being nothing but a reflection of the solipsism. Look: I got, like, a whole three paragraphs into the analysis before I used the word ‘solipsism’. Be proud.
* * *
One two and engine grease; one two three is the dance of Suzie Costello, in which three is the beat and two is her hand in Jack’s hand and one could be the partridge in the fucking pear tree for all he knows. One is the mystery. One is the mask.
I am obsessive about my endings and beginnings. I liked this one. I made sure to pull each thread here out later on: a beat of three (waltz), ‘her hand in Jack’s hand’, a brief mention of Christmas.
* * *
He has a memory all wrapped up in painful associations and the cold night air of wartime London: the Doctor’s voice, implacable and furious, shredding him to pieces for crashing a nominally empty ambulance into a nominally empty warzone. For the nanogenes that found a mangled body and thought it was an ideal; for the mindless Platovian efficiency with which they forced that ideal onto everything they encountered.
I figured that enough people would be familiar with Plato’s concept of the ‘world of ideals’ that this was not totally obscure.
Jack sits in his office chair through yet another sleepless night, throwing and catching a rubber ball, thinking about immortality. It’s almost a miracle he’s only got a single heartbeat; whatever fixed him had a pretty firm idea of what the ideal person should be, and that ideal person was the Doctor.
Jack Harkness rather resents this.
Remember how I said it was going to be all about Tosh? Yeah. This is the paragraph that threw THAT idea out on its ass. I loved this analogy, I was impossibly proud of it, and there was no way to include it without using Jack’s POV. So I scrapped everything except for this part and a few of the bits describing Suzie that I’d already written, and I began again, holding this at the forefront of my mind. And it just flowed.
* * *
Torchwood Three gets bumped into the spotlight after Canary Wharf; the Institute as a whole is doing its best to pretend, after the stunning disaster that followed the finding of him, that they never really cared all that much about the Doctor. Fighting aliens! the party line now reads, tinged with slightly desperate enthusiasm. That’s what we’re all about! Arming the human race! Jolly good! Carry on! And by the way, Cardiff, you’re next up to bat.
(Luckily, the British believe in cricket, and cricket does not believe in strikes. Three is not an important number.)
Because dude, not a word has been said about the Doctor at all in a professional context. I reckon they kind of shoved the old charter under the rug out of embarrassment.
Jack freezes in this spotlight – metaphorically, of course, he’s always worked well with an audience – and hides his metaphorical hands behind his metaphorical back and smiles in a way that nobody could mistake for any sort of metaphor. His smile is resonant and concrete.
I showed this paragraph toliminalliz and made oh, the cleverness of me! noises and was pleased enough that SHE picked up on the reference that I decided not to care if anyone else did. (Rose, I’m trying to resonate concrete.)
Jack is summoned to a meeting with Harriet Jones, PM, and realises very quickly that he’s going to have to start recruiting in earnest. His ‘team’ has been crumbling, degrading, and by now is little more than a taxation front. The idea of actually working with other people for the common good of the planet – ha! – is at first too trite to be taken seriously and then too familiar to be comfortable. A while ago he would have leapt at the chance, and a while before that his cynicism would have laughed the idea down; sometimes it seems as though his personality is a palindrome with its centre in one perfect but unmarked hour aboard the TARDIS when he let himself believe that the universe could align itself in shining, savage, moral ways. He’s changed since then. But Jack is intrigued, Jack is awakening despite himself, and though he’s never abandoned the first objective of Torchwood, he’s prepared to allow his activities in that area to become more subtle.
Blah blah blah exposition! This is where it first becomes obvious that I began writing this with NO clear idea of the timeline of Jack’s involvement with Torchwood, let alone the time frame in which the characters of the show became employed. So I decided to make shit up, because that is the kind of lazy person I am.
Okay, his personality is a palindrome: this is where Sweeney said “you can expand on this more and break the subtlety, or you can accept the fact that a lot of people won’t have a clue what you’re trying to say”. Being me, I chose style and elitism over accessibility (man, I am NEVER going to make a published author) and kept it as it was, because…well, I write fics that I would want to read. And to me the metaphor was clear. Jack as we see him in Torchwood has the brittle amorality and the subtle darkness that the Captain Jack Harkness we first encountered in ‘The Empty Child’ does. He only changed for the better once he was exposed to the Doctor and Rose. After their abandonment, their betrayal, he…reverted. Not quite. He kept moving, but into a much darkner place.
“Good to meet you, Captain Harkness.” Harriet Jones has a firm grip and Jack searches her face for the fatigue that rumour would sketch it with. She looks very poised for a woman whose popularity is slipping, he thinks, and gives her his best smile.
Once again I completely bullshit the timelines. Uh. Ten’s ‘six words’ are kind of at odds with Nine’s pronunciation that Harriet Jones was the architect of Britain’s Golden age, and even taking into account the whole multiple-versions-of-universes thing…I think Ms Jones has a bit more staying power than that.
“And you, Prime Minister.”
It’s not many official meetings that are held at Number Ten rather than at the PM’s daytime offices, but Torchwood has always needed to move between the cracks in the bureaucracy. Jack lowers himself into a plush armchair and accepts a cup of very good coffee from a silent man in a nice suit. Not tea, but coffee; he has found that the British tend to presuppose these kinds of things on the basis of his accent. It’s amusing. And he does prefer coffee, so there’s no harm in encouraging the stereotype.
“This is Ianto Jones. No relation.” The Prime Minister smiles as she lifts her own cup of tea from its saucer, and Jack finds himself exchanging nods with the suit. “We can speak quite freely in front of him; Ianto’s girlfriend was a member of Torchwood One.”
What is it with RTD and the surname Jones? Anyway. At this point Mir informed me that Ianto himself was a member of TW1 and I kind of ellipsed at her for a while and then hastily added the addendum about being AU to website canon to the author’s notes. Ugh.
Was. Jack saw some of what happened at Torchwood One before the CCTV cut out, and his next nod has a lot more sympathy in it.
Still – “Do you make a habit of recruiting household staff from agency widows, Prime Minister?”
“Of course not.” She smiles her thanks to the man as he sets a plate of delicate biscuits on the table. “Ianto was also a high level clearance clerk in one of MI-5’s intelligence analysis departments.”
La la la making stuff up! Actually, he was going to have been an MI-5 agent and PM’s bodyguard, and I had this awesome line about him being able to kill Jack in five different ways before he could make it to the door (& the irony of Jack being unkillable…) and I tried desperately to hold onto the idea so that I could keep that line. And then I looked back at canon evidence, sighed deeply, and scrapped it.
“Regnum defende,” Ianto murmurs, and Jack hears the familiar Welsh cadences in his voice. “I am of use here.”
Regnum defende (defend the realm) is the motto of MI-5. A bit of useless trivia for you.
“As I’m sure you will be in Cardiff, Captain,” the PM says.
There’s probably a polite affirmation that should be inserted at this point. Instead Jack meets Ianto Jones’ friendly, unwavering smile with one of his own, and says, “I want him.”
She makes an amused sound and raises her eyebrows. “This isn’t like asking to have a chair for your office, Captain. He’s a human being and I can’t just order –”
“Excuse me, ma’am,” Ianto Jones says softly. He hasn’t looked away from Jack yet. “I would be interested in hearing Captain Harkness’s offer.”
Jack grins. “Would you, now.”
“I would. Excuse me a moment, ma’am.” Ianto gives something almost like a bow – it’s amazing, the manners these people have – and turns to take the tea tray back into the kitchen.
Harriet Jones fixes Jack with a hard look and then takes a sip of her tea. “Talk to MI-5 yourself,” she says calmly. “I’ve just got him on loan.”
So Jack does, and is pleasantly surprised by the cooperation he encounters there. They’ve clearly been well briefed on the importance of Torchwood; yes, Captain Harkness is welcome to employ Ianto Jones, and yes, Agent Jones will still have access to a certain amount of restricted information. Yes, they’ll have people transporting some of Torchwood One’s active projects over to Cardiff for him, yes, their utmost discretion is guaranteed, and is there anything else they can procure for him in the meantime?
“I want an underground lair,” Jack says, mostly joking.
“And a dinosaur,” he adds, completely joking.
Yeah, okay, that last part was kind of gratuitously funny – no, I don’t know how the hell MI-5 would get their hands on a dinosaur, but whatever, all’s fair in the name of art, right?
* * *
It takes him less than three days to discover that a) MI-5 can’t actually recognise jokes when they hear them, and b) Ianto Jones is going to be just as useful as he suspected.
* * *
(Flash forward: there are bodies lying cold in drawers in a room of cruel, lovely, claustrophobic architecture. Many bodies. Jack, who has no holes in his memory beyond the same-old, as-ever, tries to actively remember only the events relevant to people who are still breathing. It’s easier that way.)
This was inserted quite late in the writing process, when I realised that my screwing around with timelines to pander to the show was entirely understandable from a fandom standpoint but kind of unrealistic considering the number of employees that Jack must have gone through. Plus, I got to wax lyrical about the Room Of Drawers, which is still my favourite set.
I was also going to do more with the two missing years, but then…it didn’t fit. That’s not what this fic is about. And it isn’t, interestingly, really about the Doctor – inasmuch as anything connected to Jack Harkness can not be about the Doctor, which is not-really-at-all. I think that sentence has too many negatives in it. Hopefully it still makes sense: everything is about the Doctor, more or less, but this fic is on the…less…side of that spectrum.
(It’s actually about Suzie! the little voice of initial intent cries.)
* * *
And so: Toshiko Sato, who has darting eyes and a fast voice and a phenomenal IQ, is working in a tall grey building when Jack comes across her. Thinking for the government. It doesn’t take a lot – just a handful of pretty gadgets – to show her that he can offer her much, much more. Jack likes the way her face comes alive behind her glasses, and the way her fingers caress the metal with intelligence and respect.
She’s a little more idealistic than he thinks tends to think is best: “Fighting the good fight, are we?” she says when he feeds her the lines about arming the human race, reducing alien threat, etcetera.
“Something like that.”
Jack seems to find himself in wars, everywhere and everywhen. He’s yet to determine in which direction that particular causal link works.
Tosh deserves more, but I didn’t have time, and I have real trouble with her voice. Possibly because she doesn’t have much of one. GIVE TOSH MORE LINES, WRITERS.
* * *
“You’re not serious, sir,” Ianto says over the phone, and it’s a fair statement because Jack can be flippant at the most inappropriate of times. This time, however, he is serious.
“It’s just a cut, Ianto, but it’s a bad one. I’m taking Tosh to the ER to get it looked at, and we’ll get some tired doctor who is just as willingly blind to the existence of anything beyond their sphere of experience as the rest of the damn human race, and we won’t even have to alter anyone’s memory. I’m not having a computer expert who can’t type because we didn’t know a tendon got nicked.”
Blah blah cheap plot device! Um. I think one of Jack’s blind spots is his unconscious disdain for most humans, which is why he is constantly surprised by them. Again, shades of the Doctor.
Ianto sits through this minor rant with his usual stoicism. “All right, sir,” Ianto says, and you’d have to know him well to hear the deep dubiousness infusing his voice, so Jack pretends that he doesn’t and hangs up.
Toshiko looks like she might be about to say something as well, but she’s lost a lot of blood and she’s paler than usual and the protest never escapes past the expression on her face. Luckily, it’s a quiet night and they get ushered into a clinic room almost immediately, and a young doctor with a bored Cockney voice tells them that it’s deep but hasn’t damaged anything important. Tosh sits very still as his needle flashes – in, out, in, out – under the glaring clinic lights.
In my head, Owen was doing midnight clinic duty as punishment for Not Playing Well With Others. Like House!
“How’d you get this, anyhow?” the doctor asks as he’s bandaging over the stitches. “You don’t strike me as the type to be getting into knife fights. Though he does, a bit.” He jerks his chin in Jack’s direction.
“That’s none of your business,” Tosh says, sounding crabbier than usual. “Just fix me up.”
I really don’t think that Tosh would have liked Owen much at first sight. Something must have happened to change that – Mir and I have talked this over, and we think it’s more likely to be something to do with Tosh herself than anything that Owen displayed – but that’s another fic or seven right there. Back on track.
“Oh, fiddle-de-dee,” the doctor says, pulling the stretch gauze tight and tucking it under it with nimble fingers.
“Ow!” Tosh jerks her wrist out of his hands and glares. He glares back.
“Don’t be such a wuss.”
“Hell of a bedside manner you’ve got there,” Jack says, amused.
“I don’t like patients,” he says, and: “No offense, sweetheart,” to Toshiko.
Doctor Owen Harper may not like patients but he does like a mystery, which is why he bandages up Tosh’s arm and then asks her about the remnants of yellow gunk which were turning a really hideous shade of olive green where they reacted with her blood.
Tosh bites the inside of her cheek and looks to Jack for help and Jack thinks this is all very handy because his last pathologist was atomised by a ball of pink hyperstring, an incident which wasn’t nearly as funny as it sounds. Finding someone who lives with their eyes open can be difficult, and Owen’s an arse but he’s perfect; maybe a little too perfect, maybe a little too sharp, but he has a loose hungry manner that makes Jack fairly sure he could just fuck the man into distraction if he ever started suspecting anything.
I was so amused by the line about pink hyperstring that I had to add the addendum to stop myself from cracking up every time I read it. Seriously.
Me: SOMEONE DIED!
Me: HAHAH PINK STRING!
Me: DIED!
&c.
Anyway: with Jack’s dangerous job, I think there’d always be a danger that his doctor would pick up on the immortality. And Owen is, indeed, very sharp sometimes. I am also convinced that Jack and Owen have slept together. Probably only once. But Owen seems to be pretty damn easy for such a prickly character, and I’ll stop myself right there before my inner RPer goes off on a character analysis tangent. I was proud of the words ‘loose hungry manner’, because I think they...fit.
So: “It’s alien pus,” Jack says, watching him closely. “From a real alien. From another planet.”
“Jack!” Toshiko snaps.
“Oh,” Owen breathes, “well,” his fingers twitching with what Jack suspects is the urge to dissect.
This was actually the second line of this fic I ever wrote. I don’t know where it came from.
“Not him, Jack.”
“Yeah, ta very much, sweetheart.” Owen looks Jack straight in the eye. “A real alien?”
“Fancy a drink?” Jack asks, and the rest is history.
* * *
Suzie Costello’s apparent lack of any sense of humour is what prompts Jack, who knows his own blind spots, to name her his second-in-command. She smiles maybe twice in the whole interview – in stark contrast to Own, whose patent smirk fits perfectly around the rim of a half-pint glass, and Toshiko, whose nervous smile kept darting out to jab at him like a cat with a ball of string. And that is what Jack does: he dangles the impossible in front of their noses, isolation and danger baited with intellectual honey. As good as magnetic, to a certain type. The right kind of person won’t be able to resist, and Suzie Costello is the right kind of person. Machines love her. She’s antisocial and smart and has a tough skin on her, like leather. She won’t break.
One of my more metaphor-dense paragraphs, but I took out a few of the more pretentious words and I think it sits nicely. I particularly liked the line about Owen’s smirk.
Her drinks of choice are Guinness and Cosmopolitans, neither of which Jack can stand. He sips at water and takes her slowly through the interview, always aware of the small box of amnesia pills in the pocket of his coat.
“You seem to have had a lot of jobs,” Jack says, looking up from her file and making sure she hears the question.
He gets a neutral look in return, all opinion filtered out by her lashes. “I wasn’t fired. I resigned from them,” she says. “I got bored.”
“Well, you’re in luck.” Jack made his decision ten minutes ago, but he changes the angle of his chin and smiles as though he’s about to make all of her dreams come true. (He used to practise this smile; in front of a mirror, no less. It’s still available and effortless to the muscles of his face.) “This is the one job you can never quit.”
A few gems arose from the mess of necessary rewriting that followed ‘They Keep Killing Suzie’, and this line was one of them. Sometimes canon hands you things that are ambiguous enough that you can stick them in your own context and then beam at the air of authenticity they convey.
Her face changes and all of a sudden he finds her beautiful in a way that has no immediate connection to sex; she’s luminous, but in a stained-glass way that denies him such a presumption. “Is that a guarantee?”
The first sentence was originally just Her face changes and all of a sudden he finds her beautiful, but Sweeney pointed out that there HAD to be a contrast between how someone like Jack, who is canonically less than discerning as to sexual partners, saw Suzie (every story is a love story) and how he saw, for example, Owen. It took me a long time to find a way to express this in words that I liked. The word luminous was the breakthrough, and luckily I had already written the section about the rose window below, so the mention of stained glass would create a nice repetitive effect.
* * *
Months, and more months. One evening Jack looks up from his paperwork and frowns at Suzie, working overtime at her bench, soldering a shattered set of tiny cogs in dim light.
“You’ll ruin your eyes, doing that,” he says.
“They’re already a bit bollocksed.” She looks up and gives him a half-smile.
“Don’t you have any hobbies?” he asks. “Real hobbies, things you do for fun.”
“I find my job fun, Jack.” She puts down the soldering iron and stretches her arms above her head. “You know that.”
“Come on.” He leans back in his chair, chews on the tip of his pen, and grins. “Surely there’s something. Amateur theatre? Kickboxing? Knitting?” And then, because he’s never been able to resist showing off and because it’s good to give Suzie Costello a jolt, sometimes: “Dancing?”
Something like humour comes to life in her eyes; something like dignity, something like a candle flame. “That’s in my file, is it?”
That was the first sentence I ever wrote of this fic. Ever. Something coming to life in Suzie’s eyes, something to do with dancing.
Jack nods. Before she gained a degree in engineering, Suzie Costello spent two years ballroom dancing on the lower echelons of the professional circuits. Useless information, but Jack will take what he can get when it comes to this woman. Her rose window is more steel than glass; when colour shines through, it’s rare enough to give pause.
Suzie – and maybe it’s just Indira Varma’s poise, but it’s there – has always struck me as the type to dance. Not in public. Swaying to jazz in her own living room. I just took that idea and pulled on it until it reached the edges of plausibility, and then left it there.
“So what was it you were you wanting, Captain? A demonstration?”
“Yeah, sure,” Jack says, hits a few buttons on his wrist transducer, and stands up. One of the highest ceiling lights flickers transiently, off to his left and Suzie’s right, as he walks over and pulls her out of her chair by the forearms. Shadows skitter across her face.
“Jack, come on,” she begins, and then the music starts – soft – and her mouth quirks and she stops pulling away, lets her warmth remain within his personal space.
Nevertheless, her hand wavers a moment before falling to rest on his shoulder. Jack is not sure when his manner, which used to bespeak effortless affection and the dark heat of the body’s crevices, ran so assuredly to the discouragement of touching him. It’s disappointing.
I wasn’t sure about this – Jack still touches people, certainly, and (thank you, canon) almost certainly sleeps with them, but…to me, it’s all very deliberate and a far cry from the Jack that Nine and Rose travelled with. Other people might disagree and I’m perfectly okay with that: this is, as needs be, Jack through my eyes.
But after the smallest of intervals her palm is steering him gently forward a few steps and his own is at her waist and the others are clasped correctly, her hand in Jack’s hand. Jack hasn’t danced this way in a long time. Suzie is wearing grease-smudged overalls and flat boots, but she moves in such a way as to render this fact irrelevant; precise, sinuous, graceful. Jack notices quite abruptly as she passes under the line of his arm that her hair is tied back with a red lace ribbon, incongruous with the rest of her outfit, but suiting the music. He hooks his little finger in it as she completes the spin, and smiles.
‘Her hand in Jack’s hand.’
Their waltz is slow and sure; there’s no hurry. And they make a neat couple, fitting together like charisma and composure, grins and gravity, lines and lace.
Hand and glove.
*looks pathetic* You all saw what I did there, right? Hand and glove? Hand? And…glove? Yeah? Okay. Please to also be noticing my pathetically Anglo-Saxon adherence to alliteration in the penultimate line.
I am very fond of this quiet, musical image of them dancing. The aesthetics of Jack and Suzie as a couple really appeal to me: if you’re just tuning in, aesthetics steer a large portion of my psyche.
* * *
Three is not an important number, but five feels right. Jack ignores the pointed hints drifting in his direction from London and keeps his team constant at this amount.
*fanwanks it up* Torchwood One was a massive operation. Jack has a large base. Jack can command a large amount of people. He could be recruiting far more than he is. Besides, I wanted to link the cricket metaphor in again. I am a total sucker for constantly creating parallels within my own self-contained pieces.
“Smaller groups are more loyal,” he tells the Prime Minister.
“You seem to be highly capable of attracting loyalty, Captain,” she says, in tones that tell him she’s not buying that excuse for a second but she hasn’t got a good enough reason to argue it out.
“What can I say.” Jack grins into the phone. “I’m magnetic.”
A warning for those straying within the magnetic field of Captain Jack Harkness: extended proximity may cause dysfunction of one’s moral compass. Perhaps the disappearance of his touch me aura has less to do with self-punishment, as he was beginning to suspect, and is rather something along the lines of an unconscious warning beacon. Nevertheless, they’re changing; Jack has never needed to touch someone to win them. He watches them draw ever closer, gone to spinning needles and shades of grey, and wonders if he should be doing more to prevent this.
I am disgustingly fond of that paragraph. Disgustingly. Tell me you like it and I’ll purr like a kitten. (Maybe. I am not very kittenish.) To me, this is one of the overriding themes of Torchwood – the fact that good people (Gwen) get drawn into this fight, and we think oh, yes, they’ll teach the jaded alien hunters some humanity, how predictable, and instead…the humanity is what gets shattered. Degraded. It’s the opposite to Doctor Who’s message, it’s not Jack-the-cowardly-conman-gets-taught-courage, it’s Jack the bitter time-traveller gets to infuse a whole lot of other people with that same bitterness. CHARMING. I mean, fuck, I love it, I think it’s fantastically cynical telly and that’s why I watch it, but I really think fandom should acknowledge this a little more without diving straight into the over-done emotion.
Also please note how in this fic the overriding metaphor manages to escape being medical (see also: Suture) but is still scientific. I will never escape my education.
* * *
This is her dance: engine grease and ballistics, which can be defined as the mechanical art of unstoppable motion. Once begun, the momentum will carry it through to the end.
While we’re on the topic of my education…this line, and the section that it parallels at the very end of the fic, can be blamed on the advanced neuroscience course that I did last semester. We covered a lot about saccades – automatic eye movements – involving the fact that they are ballistic (unstoppable once begun). I don’t know if the word means the same thing in any context outside the scientific, but it’s good enough for me :)
Jack likes to talk to each member of his team on a regular basis, to monitor their reactions to particularly intense incidents and gauge the graceful degradation of their systems. It’s an engineering term, that one: little by little they lose themselves, but it doesn’t affect their function. Not too much.
*coughs* Sciencesciencescience. Though not without reason: Suzie’s an engineer.
(Jack tries not to imagine them cold in drawers before it has actually happened, even though he knows that someday it will. He wonders if this is how the Doctor lives, has always lived: seeing people’s corpses overlaid onto their breathing selves.) Suzie, however, never wants to talk. She shrugs and claims that she has no need to chew her work over with someone connected to that work, and maybe if it were Tosh or Owen then Jack would argue the point but Suzie has never been quite as easy to push.
This part I had to work at for a while: in TKKS we learn that she talked about her work with someone outside of it, to whom she then gave retcon.
“No, Jack,” she says. “Let’s just dance. We’re good at that.”
So they do, and they are, but Jack is starting to feel the inertia of what they are becoming, so when their heads dip close together he leans in and kisses her as though he has every right in the world to do so. Suzie stops the dance and her face settles into something warm; warm, but distant. “I don’t get involved with people at work,” she says, as though she’s practiced it.
“Really?” Jack murmurs.
“Well,” she qualifies with a half-smile. “Not the ones I like, anyhow.”
KLADGHASN STUPID OWEN. I mean. Stupid RTD. I was so pleased with my Suzie who didn’t sleep with anyone and then…blah. I tore my hair out for a while and then hit on this line, which I was very happy with because I’d already written the line about everyone liking/not liking Owen. I was very, very close to cementing the parallel by adding (Nobody likes Owen) after the line, but decided to err on the side of subtlety.
Jack may be many things but he is also a man who knows when to let something go. He nods, loosens his grip on her fingers, and gives a smile that isn’t awkward in the slightest. “Fair enough.”
* * *
A paramagnetic material increases the strength of a magnetic field simply by existing within it. Existence can be a powerful thing, all on its own.
Blah blah blah SCIENCE! I do think that the metaphor works, though: Jack’s corrupting influence is, if anything, accelerated by the presence of someone as ambiguous (and, as it turns out, prone to SERIAL KILLING) as Suzie.
* * *
The Hub stinks of cardamon and generic curry; lately they’ve been working ridiculous hours to locate some scattered debris that might be radioactive or might be messing with the human grasp on temporal logic or might give off waves of peace and fucking joy; hell, it’s only a month until Christmas, and anything’s possible. But they don’t know because they can’t get enough samples together for long enough to study before they disintegrate and they’re running into dead ends left right and centre, and Jack is on edge, and Suzie got to choose the takeaway and she chose Indian and Jack is not overfond of Indian.
So he holds his paper plate in one hand as he wanders around, restless, moody, wiping up the remains of some lethal vindaloo with his last scrap of naan and seeking out the weak points in their investigation with merciless eyes.
“I wanted those tissue cultures done yesterday, Owen.”
“Getting to it.” Owen shovels rice into his mouth.
“Get to it now,” Jack snaps.
“A’m eahfig,” Owen says, swallows, and gives Jack one of his most annoyingly smug glances. “It’s not like I’m just dicking around. Need to keep my blood sugar up, you know, or my IQ might drop below the official genius levels.” He waves his fork and a lump of butter chicken falls off it and leaves a tumbling orange smear down his lab coat. Owen looks down at it and frowns. “Bugger.”
I rewrote that damn paragraph about eight times. It’s not even a key paragraph. Can we say ‘unreasonable perfectionist?’
Jack gives up on him and strides irritably over to Toshiko’s workstation, pulls a chair out, and collapses in it with enough force to roll it backwards almost a foot.
“Owen,” he announces.
Toshiko doesn’t move her eyes from the screen. “Yep.”
“He’s such a…” Jack stares at the ceiling, searching for his vocabulary.
“Git,” Tosh supplies, and holds out a paper bag rendered translucent by grease. “Samosa?”
Yeah, I got nothing. I love that scene. It doesn’t do anything particularly important. It’s not profound. But OWEN. And I did want to set up the semi-sibling, confidante vibe that exists between Tosh and Jack.
* * *
Ianto Jones, unlike most beings that Jack has had dealings with, dons an extra layer of complexity for each layer of clothing that is removed. The man has emotional barriers like silk; pretty, but sturdier than is immediately apparent. Ianto provides them with information from sources at MI-5 – occasionally useful, often not – and seems content to quietly organise the food and clean up their messes (in every sense of the word). On a rare occasion he’ll see some real danger, and he knows how to handle a gun. Jack relies on him absolutely and tries not to read too much into the trust that implies.
They’re dancing, just as surely, a quiet respectful dance. Ianto’s feet make no noise.
*sighs* Jack/Ianto being canonized in such an obvious manner, I figured I had to make some deference to it. The only line I am really fond of is the final one.
* * *
And so it goes, the life of Captain Jack Harkness. Some days are easier than others, sometimes his chest won't seize up when he sees a throbbing blue light, sometimes he can go a whole week without remembering what it feels like to die. Distractions help. His life has never flashed before his eyes, not once, but it glides sometimes in the in-between hours when Ianto is rebuttoning his shirt or the lights of Cardiff are spread out below him or he's dancing with Suzie. Gliding like ice on glass and spinning like a needle.
I am yet to be able to write a fic in this universe that doesn’t talk about the TARDIS. I think if you watch Doctor Who for any amount of time then you get a visceral reaction of one sort or another to the sound it makes, and the sight of it fading into or out of view. You can see it in the character’s faces; Jackie’s, when she hears it approaching, and Jack’s, when he hears it leaving. That’s his emotional link to the stimulus. Being left behind. A somatic marker like that could be staggeringly disabling. (Uh, pretend that I didn’t just waltz off into psychobabble again there. Smile and nod.)
“Pas de deux,” Suzie says with mock severity, and of course been she’s classically trained, it’s in her cheekbones, in the discipline that stiffens her spine.
“Step of two.” Jack grins. “Two-step,” and he demonstrates, finding muscle memory from God knows how many years ago by his mode of reckoning.
Yes, as well as being a science geek, I can be a dance geek. I don’t think anyone can really write anything of substance without betraying something of themselves. Suzie probably wouldn’t be a dancer if I wasn’t a dancer.
Suzie’s mouth edges towards a smile. “You can be such a clown, Jack.”
Maybe so. Making her laugh is certainly rewarding, as hobbies go.
* * *
Toshiko, he discovers, is a right gossip in her own reserved way. And her idealism is crumbling, changing, losing its polarity. They take to sending each other emails, silly ones, bitching about dead-end cases and the latest royal scandals and how much of an arse Owen is being about the tests on this new organic compound and how much easier it would be to hate him if he were wrong. Nobody likes Owen. Everybody likes Owen. It’s a paradox, but they’re all getting quite used to surrounding themselves with paradoxes.
Tosh: he’s hard to stay mad at
Jack: I don’t know why I don’t fire him, some days
Tosh: of course you do, Jack
And she’s right, of course he does: even leaving aside the ghastly amnesial logistics that would be required if anyone were to leave this job through such a conventional channel, Jack sees just enough of himself in Owen that he can’t pull back, and this fascination generalises to the others as well. They are the house that Jack built, and they reflect the flaws of their architect. From the outside the arrangement might look eclectic, unstable, and perhaps he could have chosen for greater efficacy, but to Captain Jack Harkness these people are ideal because they are the extension of his own personality. No conman can ever quite trust anyone but himself, flaws and all, and Jack – faced with the necessity of teamwork, and not all that far from the cocky brat of a man who once spent two days painting a Tuu’la ambulance mauve – is employing his flaws. The distribution and dilution of his own sins.
That’s it: the house that Jack built. That’s the centre of this fic. That’s the line that I forgot to quote as a summary but everyone quoted back at me anyway. And the plausibility only really struck me once I got past smiling at the cleverness of it – the Torchwood team, as many have pointed out, are not particularly…effective. And Jack isn’t stupid. And…there’s no use rehashing it, it’s in the fic, but I’d be very interested to hear what other people think of this beyond ‘it makes for a neat piece of fanfic’.
Ianto is his effortless appeal, his ability to talk his way into or out of anything. Owen is his arrogance and cleverness; his conviction, muted (thanks to a certain blonde girl with a fragrant name and a stubborn heart) but still partly ingrained, that intelligence confers the right to bend the rules. Tosh is his blindness to consequence in the face of novelty, curious to a damned fault.
He is not sure what Suzie is, which makes him a little nervous – he can manage the others because he can manage himself, if he has to – but she must be something. Perhaps that why he watches her, sometimes, following her everyday dance from room to room; he is trying to recognise a reflection of a personal failing.
* * *
“Oh, wonderful,” Owen says when they find the glove. “Now we’re going to have to find the rest of a dismembered body. This is exactly what I wanted to do with my evening.”
“Don’t be in a hurry to be dredging the entire bay,” Suzie says, turning it over in her hands. “It looks more like a gauntlet, and I don’t think there are any signs of organic tissue in it. I’ll just check –”
Owen watches her slide her hand up into the thing and frowns. “Suze, I don’t think that’s –”
Blue light shoots through the cracks of the metal and Suzie takes a sharp breath in, and Jack spends two awful seconds worrying if this is the beginning of the end and if he’ll be losing another employee tonight, losing her. Nothing more happens, though, and he pushes away the most immediate panic.
Plz notice irony yes thnx. Beginning of the end.
“Hello,” Suzie says; wondering, curious, as though greeting a new acquaintance. Her stare falls short of both of them.
“– a good idea,” Owen finishes to no one in particular. “Bollocks. What’s she looking at?”
“I think I should…” Suzie’s voice is still vague. She starts to look around her as though searching for something. “I should find…” Her ungloved hand comes down hard and fast on a crawling insect, but before Jack or Owen can react she touches the dead thing with the glove and gasps raggedly. The blue lights flicker.
The insect shivers and starts to move.
Oh God, Jack thinks, God, except of course he means Doctor and he’s about as terrified as he’s ever been.
Torchwood, when you get right down to it, is about death. Look past the huge amounts of snogging and humour and fast violence and gore and actually think about the enormity of what happened to Jack without playing it for angst…yup, morbid as fuck.
“Jack,” Owen says in an odd voice, “did you see that? That wasn’t just me going nuts, right?”
Jack shoves it all down and stares at the insect, but it’s stopped moving and once again looks well and truly squished. “No, I saw it,” he says slowly. “Suzie, how did you know to do that?”
Suzie finally looks at him, and then she pulls the glove off with shaking hands. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t. It just felt…oh, God, Jack, the energy. The energy.”
“Toshiko,” Jack says into his phone. “We’re coming back to the Hub.”
I’m such a hypocrite. Leaving Tosh at the Hub to do nothing. I’M SORRY, TOSH. I’m sure you were doing something fantastically useful, like hacking into the CIA website.
“What’s happened, Jack?” Tosh asks. “Did you find anything interesting?”
“Yeah.” Jack waves two fingers at Suzie in a wrap that thing up kind of motion, and tries not to look at the insect. “Yeah, you could say that.”
Three hours later they’ve laid out the ground rules, or rather the glove has revealed them: only Suzie can get the thing to work, only a recent and violent death can be reversed, and the resurrection only lasts a few seconds.
“I think I can get it longer,” she says, “if I work on it.” Jack thinks that her eyes are a little too bright, and orders Owen to run a whole battery of medical tests on her to make sure it hasn’t caused some kind of permanent damage.
“A close runner-up in the list of things I wanted to do with my evening,” Owen says, rolling his eyes, but he goes to get his kit.
“How many blood tests do you need to run, Owen?” After a while, Suzie is starting to sound woozy.
“All of them.” Owen shoots Jack a dirty look. “Apparently. Hold still, I need two more vials, and then you should get something to eat.”
“I don’t want to…I need to try again, Jack,” Suzie says, and for the first time in Jack’s memory there is a note almost like hysteria in her voice. He sits down and puts an arm around her.
“Ianto,” he says quietly. “Some food and coffee?”
Ianto nods and disappears. Jack rubs Suzie’s upper arm. “Well, this is certainly something I haven’t seen before,” he tells her, and wonders how much of that is a lie. Suzie’s head is warm on his shoulder, the tired rhythm of her breath very close to his ear.
“I think there’s something amazing out there,” she says. “Maybe we haven’t found it yet, but…something amazing.”
Jack turns to kiss the top of her head – friendly, comforting, no more and no less – and hides the bitterness of his smile in the late-night mess of her curls.
“I know there is,” he says.
Lots of this was just exposition for the sake of exposition, but I’m pleased with the way it came out. Bitterness is a word that I had to fight not to overuse, because it’s Torchwood’s Jack Harkness to the core.
* * *
The magnetic susceptibility of a material is dimensionless. You cannot capture it in units, you cannot pin it to a scale. It is a relationship.
(Jack thinks: this could be important.)
Jack’s a fool. This is gratuitous science. Wow, now you’re all disappointed. You thought that was something really deep, didn’t you?
No, I kid. It’s a true scientific fact, and the concept of being undefined is linked to Jack’s failure to recognize which of his flaws Suzie represents, and the tentative, ambiguous nature of their relationship.
* * *
Jack goes walking one night and sleeps with a married man
There’s a ring on my finger, the guy says feebly, when his shirt is already half-undone and Jack’s neck is covered with fierce hickeys that will be gone by the morning.
That is my favourite sentence in the whole fic. I feel this is worth mentioning.
And bells on my toes, Jack says in return, closing his own fingers over the slim band of metal. Come on.
Jack Harkness will have music (wherever he goes), and he will dance; and they do, and it’s good, but it’s not quite what he was looking for.
I love this part ridiculously. I had to sound out the predominantly-American boxchat for recognition of the nursery rhyme (ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross) so that it didn’t sound completely random. Jack’s the type to seek distraction. There is NO way he wasn’t sleeping his way across Cardiff, occasionally.
* * *
As is the way of their work, one new crisis or shiny novelty arises after another, and soon the glove is just one of those things that is somewhere at the back of everyone’s minds but never really comes to light. Every so often Suzie tells them that she’s extended the time by another ten seconds, but for the most part she doesn’t discuss it, and maybe she’s a bit distracted but she’s never really been one for talking. It doesn’t seem odd.
She also starts working late with greater regularity, but Jack can hardly call her out on it. They exchange a few surprised glances and then come to a silent agreement not to talk about it, and to stick to their private circles of light within the huge, silent room.
Sometimes – though less and less, as the weeks go by – they emerge from their spheres and dance.
Mumble mumble exposition. Filling this chronological gap was the hardest thing to do. I wrote it last and I’ll never be quite happy with it.
One day Suzie breaks out of her own choreography and does the opposite: she begs important personal business and leaves work early. Her shoulder bag seems to weigh her down more than usual, some new ragged thing presenting itself to Jack’s eyes, etched into the tension of her shoulders. Jack can’t quite stop his own gaze from heating up with concern and a few other emotions that crowd his thoughts in. Too late, too late, these thoughts rage.
Tosh follows his eyes and shoots him a knowing look from behind her glasses. “She doesn’t get involved with people at work,” she says with suspicious immediacy.
“I know,” says Jack.
“Are you sure?” says Owen.
Tosh totally tried to sleep with Suzie as well. You know this to be true. Granted, she probably didn’t try very HARD – she strikes me as the type to shy away quickly from even the gentlest of rejections – but she tried.
* * *
Later he will hate himself for the fact that when Suzie says, “Jack, I think…Jack, could we talk?” he’s running late for a phone conference with the PM, and angry at the local cops for screwing up a crime scene and with himself because someone reported seeing a blue police box just outside of Dublin but he can’t find any solid leads, so he just frowns and asks her if it can’t wait until morning.
Continuing the first objective of Torchwood. Maybe the writers have forgotten (for the moment) but Jack sure as hell hasn’t.
“I’m sure it can. I have plans for tonight anyway,” Suzie says, and walks out of the door. There’s an odd note in her voice that almost makes Jack think better of it and call her back, but she’s gone and he’s got too much on his mind to make the effort. It can wait until morning. It can wait until morning.
But the next morning, Suzie walks in and –
“No,” Jack says before anyone can so much as greet her, striding towards her and waving his hands. “No, no, no. Go home and sleep it off, whatever it is.”
“You do look a bit rough, Suze,” Toshiko says.
Suzie’s eyes are far too bright, glittering like fragile wealth behind her glasses and above the smudges of fatigue. For a moment Jack suspects she’s going to argue, and almost hopes that she will, but then the angle of her shoulders changes abruptly and the fight diffuses out of her body.
“Right,” she says. “Sorry. Right,” and then she’s turning around and Jack is watching her walk away for the second time in twelve hours.
Personally I find it difficult to believe that nobody would have noticed anything, but see also: not the best investigative team in the world. And Jack can be remarkably self-absorbed. This is…the beginning of the end of the end. I like to think that there are moments like that. Not just slow transitions, but moments of change. I write a lot of moments.
* * *
Later that week there’s news of a violent stabbing.
Suzie says: “I think I’m ready to test the glove out on humans.”
So they do.
* * *
Gwen Cooper’s burnout is written in the lines of her face, in the way she cares, so automatically and pugnaciously. Jack looks at her and sees the short decades that she has left before the job grinds her down. He sees the ideals she once had, he sees their edges already blunted by the pragmatism of her present self, and he sees the mundanely depressing fate of every good person who volunteers to face up to the ugliness of life on a daily basis.
Past and present and future. He doesn’t like seeing the universe this way; no suspense, no joy, no fucking fun. One more complaint to add to his list of symptoms.
Seriously. Jack used to live on thrills and uncertain futures, and now he feels the world turning. He’s the least suited personality archetype to immortality that I can imagine. Ergo, bitterness up the wazoo.
Slipping the pill into Gwen’s drink is easy, harmless, but it still feels like murder.
Despite everything I think Jack still has the urge to save. It’s a very fictional kind of irony, as well as the fact that he is still searching for someone to step into the Doctor’s shoes and save him – this being his own selfishness, of course – that pushes him and Gwen in the opposite direction.
* * *
“I’ve got to,” says Suzie, “I’m sorry, I’ve got to,” and through the searing pain in his forehead Jack’s wondering when it all went so terribly wrong, wondering how he missed the signs. Gwen is close to tears and even closer to breaking through the amnesia, her degradation not graceful at all. Time to end this.
All right, I confess, I stole the ‘graceful degradation’ and this sewing-up of the trope from an original story of mine, but I think it fits this one better.
He stands up.
“Put the gun down,” he says, and says some more things without really hearing the sound of his own voice, and holds out a hand – let me cut in?
But she is lifting her own hand in a swift arc, the gun is turning, beautiful and ballistic. And by the time Jack recognises Suzie Costello for what she is – his obsession, his self-destruction – the bullet is already halfway home.
Yes, there’s a triple meaning to ‘self-destruction’ there – his own desire to push the boundaries of immortality, her suicide, and her shooting him in the head. It was hard to dance around the revelation and rely on Jack’s own obliviousness when it’s obvious to ME how similar he and Suzie are. Their easy, consuming addiction to the pursuit of an idea. A selfishness that doesn’t recognize itself because it’s underlaid by massive insecurity.
Anyway, that’s all that’s been sparked off by reading the fic, but if anyone has any questions or further comments or wants to start a ridiculously in-depth meta discussion with me, go right ahead.
It might be fitting that I’m listening to ‘Every Story Is A Love Story’ from Aida at this exact moment – this story was very definitely supposed to be a love story, and it has been an endless source of hilarity-slash-despair to me that – going by the comments received so far – what I ended up writing instead was ensemble gen.
Starting at the beginning: upon first viewing the request and spending an hour or so merrily stalking my way up and down
calapine’s corner of the internet, I knew I wanted to include some kind of Jack/Suzie element, but I also wanted to focus on Toshiko. I had some excellent computer network/social network metaphors appearing in my head, but nothing quite seemed to click. And then…well, I’ll cover that as I go.The official authors’ notes for the Yuletide archive bear repeating as well:
This was so frequently Jossed during the writing so as to cause enormous bouts of hair-pulling and loud wailing on the part of the author, but such is the curse of active canon. <-- DEAR GOD, YES. Everyone who knew what I was writing was privy to at least one bout of tremendous flailing about the horrible things that RTD was doing to my beautiful fic. This was obviously most significant after the airing of ‘They Keep Killing Suzie’, in which my antisocial, graceful, still-waters-run-deep Suzie was roundly retconned into a psychopath. WOOHOO. You’ll notice that my interpretation is still very sympathetic, because…well, I’d become attached to the girl by then. No matter what, I was keeping her likeable.
All secondary canon found on the official website has also been roundly ignored, and this - being backstory - is therefore likely to be at least partially AU as far as that's concerned. <-- HAHAHA. Oh, yeah. More on this later. (Confession: I have never really visited the website. Uh. I don’t know. I saw one or two pages there, got extremely frustrated by the fact that they read like third-rate fanfic, entertained a brief wish that I TOO could be paid to write fanfic, and then gave up and decided to take the show on face value.)
Enormous thanks are due to Sweeney, Mir and Ji for their comments and encouragements. <-- More specifically: Ji was the first person to tell me that it was very good, which means a hell of a lot to me coming from her. Mir fixed up some vagueness in my phrasing and made encouraging noises. Sweeney, bless her heart, picked on things that I’d never even have thought of and so improved the coherency of the fic no end. I’d also like to thank
Maybe we should move onto the actual fic now.
Paramagnetic
You have no idea how many different titles this fic has had. For a very long time it was just ‘jewelry from a grave’, and then I developed the magnetism theme more and liked that as a more clinical, brutal introduction. And then I felt it was too clinical and needed to be softened with the poetry of a subtitle, so it was wankily named ‘Paramagnetic (jewelry from a grave)’ right up until the time came to upload, when I realised that I couldn’t have the subtitle on a second line, which, uh, it needed to be. Shush. So then I agonised at Sweeney for a while and finally came to the stunningly obvious conclusion that the epigraph provided enough poetry without my having to repeat a phrase from it. With a great sigh of relief, I cut it, leaving only the titular science.
Wow, I’m wordy. This is going to be one fucking long commentary. Bow out now if you’re short on time.
This iceberg cuts it facets from within
Like jewelry from a grave
it saves itself perpetually and adorns
only itself
- Elizabeth Bishop, ‘The Imaginary Iceberg’
I was on the hunt for a title when I came across this poem – the entirety is here, if you’re interested. I love it! And then I emailed it to Ji with a message along the lines of LOOK, HOW COOL!
Ji: …that was part of our SATs.
My buzz: *killed*.
Still. I kept it, because it said what I wanted it to, albeit very subtly: it’s the implications of shaping yourself (your team) from the inside, of every aspect being nothing but a reflection of the solipsism. Look: I got, like, a whole three paragraphs into the analysis before I used the word ‘solipsism’. Be proud.
* * *
One two and engine grease; one two three is the dance of Suzie Costello, in which three is the beat and two is her hand in Jack’s hand and one could be the partridge in the fucking pear tree for all he knows. One is the mystery. One is the mask.
I am obsessive about my endings and beginnings. I liked this one. I made sure to pull each thread here out later on: a beat of three (waltz), ‘her hand in Jack’s hand’, a brief mention of Christmas.
* * *
He has a memory all wrapped up in painful associations and the cold night air of wartime London: the Doctor’s voice, implacable and furious, shredding him to pieces for crashing a nominally empty ambulance into a nominally empty warzone. For the nanogenes that found a mangled body and thought it was an ideal; for the mindless Platovian efficiency with which they forced that ideal onto everything they encountered.
I figured that enough people would be familiar with Plato’s concept of the ‘world of ideals’ that this was not totally obscure.
Jack sits in his office chair through yet another sleepless night, throwing and catching a rubber ball, thinking about immortality. It’s almost a miracle he’s only got a single heartbeat; whatever fixed him had a pretty firm idea of what the ideal person should be, and that ideal person was the Doctor.
Jack Harkness rather resents this.
Remember how I said it was going to be all about Tosh? Yeah. This is the paragraph that threw THAT idea out on its ass. I loved this analogy, I was impossibly proud of it, and there was no way to include it without using Jack’s POV. So I scrapped everything except for this part and a few of the bits describing Suzie that I’d already written, and I began again, holding this at the forefront of my mind. And it just flowed.
* * *
Torchwood Three gets bumped into the spotlight after Canary Wharf; the Institute as a whole is doing its best to pretend, after the stunning disaster that followed the finding of him, that they never really cared all that much about the Doctor. Fighting aliens! the party line now reads, tinged with slightly desperate enthusiasm. That’s what we’re all about! Arming the human race! Jolly good! Carry on! And by the way, Cardiff, you’re next up to bat.
(Luckily, the British believe in cricket, and cricket does not believe in strikes. Three is not an important number.)
Because dude, not a word has been said about the Doctor at all in a professional context. I reckon they kind of shoved the old charter under the rug out of embarrassment.
Jack freezes in this spotlight – metaphorically, of course, he’s always worked well with an audience – and hides his metaphorical hands behind his metaphorical back and smiles in a way that nobody could mistake for any sort of metaphor. His smile is resonant and concrete.
I showed this paragraph to
liminalliz and made oh, the cleverness of me! noises and was pleased enough that SHE picked up on the reference that I decided not to care if anyone else did. (Rose, I’m trying to resonate concrete.)Jack is summoned to a meeting with Harriet Jones, PM, and realises very quickly that he’s going to have to start recruiting in earnest. His ‘team’ has been crumbling, degrading, and by now is little more than a taxation front. The idea of actually working with other people for the common good of the planet – ha! – is at first too trite to be taken seriously and then too familiar to be comfortable. A while ago he would have leapt at the chance, and a while before that his cynicism would have laughed the idea down; sometimes it seems as though his personality is a palindrome with its centre in one perfect but unmarked hour aboard the TARDIS when he let himself believe that the universe could align itself in shining, savage, moral ways. He’s changed since then. But Jack is intrigued, Jack is awakening despite himself, and though he’s never abandoned the first objective of Torchwood, he’s prepared to allow his activities in that area to become more subtle.
Blah blah blah exposition! This is where it first becomes obvious that I began writing this with NO clear idea of the timeline of Jack’s involvement with Torchwood, let alone the time frame in which the characters of the show became employed. So I decided to make shit up, because that is the kind of lazy person I am.
Okay, his personality is a palindrome: this is where Sweeney said “you can expand on this more and break the subtlety, or you can accept the fact that a lot of people won’t have a clue what you’re trying to say”. Being me, I chose style and elitism over accessibility (man, I am NEVER going to make a published author) and kept it as it was, because…well, I write fics that I would want to read. And to me the metaphor was clear. Jack as we see him in Torchwood has the brittle amorality and the subtle darkness that the Captain Jack Harkness we first encountered in ‘The Empty Child’ does. He only changed for the better once he was exposed to the Doctor and Rose. After their abandonment, their betrayal, he…reverted. Not quite. He kept moving, but into a much darkner place.
“Good to meet you, Captain Harkness.” Harriet Jones has a firm grip and Jack searches her face for the fatigue that rumour would sketch it with. She looks very poised for a woman whose popularity is slipping, he thinks, and gives her his best smile.
Once again I completely bullshit the timelines. Uh. Ten’s ‘six words’ are kind of at odds with Nine’s pronunciation that Harriet Jones was the architect of Britain’s Golden age, and even taking into account the whole multiple-versions-of-universes thing…I think Ms Jones has a bit more staying power than that.
“And you, Prime Minister.”
It’s not many official meetings that are held at Number Ten rather than at the PM’s daytime offices, but Torchwood has always needed to move between the cracks in the bureaucracy. Jack lowers himself into a plush armchair and accepts a cup of very good coffee from a silent man in a nice suit. Not tea, but coffee; he has found that the British tend to presuppose these kinds of things on the basis of his accent. It’s amusing. And he does prefer coffee, so there’s no harm in encouraging the stereotype.
“This is Ianto Jones. No relation.” The Prime Minister smiles as she lifts her own cup of tea from its saucer, and Jack finds himself exchanging nods with the suit. “We can speak quite freely in front of him; Ianto’s girlfriend was a member of Torchwood One.”
What is it with RTD and the surname Jones? Anyway. At this point Mir informed me that Ianto himself was a member of TW1 and I kind of ellipsed at her for a while and then hastily added the addendum about being AU to website canon to the author’s notes. Ugh.
Was. Jack saw some of what happened at Torchwood One before the CCTV cut out, and his next nod has a lot more sympathy in it.
Still – “Do you make a habit of recruiting household staff from agency widows, Prime Minister?”
“Of course not.” She smiles her thanks to the man as he sets a plate of delicate biscuits on the table. “Ianto was also a high level clearance clerk in one of MI-5’s intelligence analysis departments.”
La la la making stuff up! Actually, he was going to have been an MI-5 agent and PM’s bodyguard, and I had this awesome line about him being able to kill Jack in five different ways before he could make it to the door (& the irony of Jack being unkillable…) and I tried desperately to hold onto the idea so that I could keep that line. And then I looked back at canon evidence, sighed deeply, and scrapped it.
“Regnum defende,” Ianto murmurs, and Jack hears the familiar Welsh cadences in his voice. “I am of use here.”
Regnum defende (defend the realm) is the motto of MI-5. A bit of useless trivia for you.
“As I’m sure you will be in Cardiff, Captain,” the PM says.
There’s probably a polite affirmation that should be inserted at this point. Instead Jack meets Ianto Jones’ friendly, unwavering smile with one of his own, and says, “I want him.”
She makes an amused sound and raises her eyebrows. “This isn’t like asking to have a chair for your office, Captain. He’s a human being and I can’t just order –”
“Excuse me, ma’am,” Ianto Jones says softly. He hasn’t looked away from Jack yet. “I would be interested in hearing Captain Harkness’s offer.”
Jack grins. “Would you, now.”
“I would. Excuse me a moment, ma’am.” Ianto gives something almost like a bow – it’s amazing, the manners these people have – and turns to take the tea tray back into the kitchen.
Harriet Jones fixes Jack with a hard look and then takes a sip of her tea. “Talk to MI-5 yourself,” she says calmly. “I’ve just got him on loan.”
So Jack does, and is pleasantly surprised by the cooperation he encounters there. They’ve clearly been well briefed on the importance of Torchwood; yes, Captain Harkness is welcome to employ Ianto Jones, and yes, Agent Jones will still have access to a certain amount of restricted information. Yes, they’ll have people transporting some of Torchwood One’s active projects over to Cardiff for him, yes, their utmost discretion is guaranteed, and is there anything else they can procure for him in the meantime?
“I want an underground lair,” Jack says, mostly joking.
“And a dinosaur,” he adds, completely joking.
Yeah, okay, that last part was kind of gratuitously funny – no, I don’t know how the hell MI-5 would get their hands on a dinosaur, but whatever, all’s fair in the name of art, right?
* * *
It takes him less than three days to discover that a) MI-5 can’t actually recognise jokes when they hear them, and b) Ianto Jones is going to be just as useful as he suspected.
* * *
(Flash forward: there are bodies lying cold in drawers in a room of cruel, lovely, claustrophobic architecture. Many bodies. Jack, who has no holes in his memory beyond the same-old, as-ever, tries to actively remember only the events relevant to people who are still breathing. It’s easier that way.)
This was inserted quite late in the writing process, when I realised that my screwing around with timelines to pander to the show was entirely understandable from a fandom standpoint but kind of unrealistic considering the number of employees that Jack must have gone through. Plus, I got to wax lyrical about the Room Of Drawers, which is still my favourite set.
I was also going to do more with the two missing years, but then…it didn’t fit. That’s not what this fic is about. And it isn’t, interestingly, really about the Doctor – inasmuch as anything connected to Jack Harkness can not be about the Doctor, which is not-really-at-all. I think that sentence has too many negatives in it. Hopefully it still makes sense: everything is about the Doctor, more or less, but this fic is on the…less…side of that spectrum.
(It’s actually about Suzie! the little voice of initial intent cries.)
* * *
And so: Toshiko Sato, who has darting eyes and a fast voice and a phenomenal IQ, is working in a tall grey building when Jack comes across her. Thinking for the government. It doesn’t take a lot – just a handful of pretty gadgets – to show her that he can offer her much, much more. Jack likes the way her face comes alive behind her glasses, and the way her fingers caress the metal with intelligence and respect.
She’s a little more idealistic than he thinks tends to think is best: “Fighting the good fight, are we?” she says when he feeds her the lines about arming the human race, reducing alien threat, etcetera.
“Something like that.”
Jack seems to find himself in wars, everywhere and everywhen. He’s yet to determine in which direction that particular causal link works.
Tosh deserves more, but I didn’t have time, and I have real trouble with her voice. Possibly because she doesn’t have much of one. GIVE TOSH MORE LINES, WRITERS.
* * *
“You’re not serious, sir,” Ianto says over the phone, and it’s a fair statement because Jack can be flippant at the most inappropriate of times. This time, however, he is serious.
“It’s just a cut, Ianto, but it’s a bad one. I’m taking Tosh to the ER to get it looked at, and we’ll get some tired doctor who is just as willingly blind to the existence of anything beyond their sphere of experience as the rest of the damn human race, and we won’t even have to alter anyone’s memory. I’m not having a computer expert who can’t type because we didn’t know a tendon got nicked.”
Blah blah cheap plot device! Um. I think one of Jack’s blind spots is his unconscious disdain for most humans, which is why he is constantly surprised by them. Again, shades of the Doctor.
Ianto sits through this minor rant with his usual stoicism. “All right, sir,” Ianto says, and you’d have to know him well to hear the deep dubiousness infusing his voice, so Jack pretends that he doesn’t and hangs up.
Toshiko looks like she might be about to say something as well, but she’s lost a lot of blood and she’s paler than usual and the protest never escapes past the expression on her face. Luckily, it’s a quiet night and they get ushered into a clinic room almost immediately, and a young doctor with a bored Cockney voice tells them that it’s deep but hasn’t damaged anything important. Tosh sits very still as his needle flashes – in, out, in, out – under the glaring clinic lights.
In my head, Owen was doing midnight clinic duty as punishment for Not Playing Well With Others. Like House!
“How’d you get this, anyhow?” the doctor asks as he’s bandaging over the stitches. “You don’t strike me as the type to be getting into knife fights. Though he does, a bit.” He jerks his chin in Jack’s direction.
“That’s none of your business,” Tosh says, sounding crabbier than usual. “Just fix me up.”
I really don’t think that Tosh would have liked Owen much at first sight. Something must have happened to change that – Mir and I have talked this over, and we think it’s more likely to be something to do with Tosh herself than anything that Owen displayed – but that’s another fic or seven right there. Back on track.
“Oh, fiddle-de-dee,” the doctor says, pulling the stretch gauze tight and tucking it under it with nimble fingers.
“Ow!” Tosh jerks her wrist out of his hands and glares. He glares back.
“Don’t be such a wuss.”
“Hell of a bedside manner you’ve got there,” Jack says, amused.
“I don’t like patients,” he says, and: “No offense, sweetheart,” to Toshiko.
Doctor Owen Harper may not like patients but he does like a mystery, which is why he bandages up Tosh’s arm and then asks her about the remnants of yellow gunk which were turning a really hideous shade of olive green where they reacted with her blood.
Tosh bites the inside of her cheek and looks to Jack for help and Jack thinks this is all very handy because his last pathologist was atomised by a ball of pink hyperstring, an incident which wasn’t nearly as funny as it sounds. Finding someone who lives with their eyes open can be difficult, and Owen’s an arse but he’s perfect; maybe a little too perfect, maybe a little too sharp, but he has a loose hungry manner that makes Jack fairly sure he could just fuck the man into distraction if he ever started suspecting anything.
I was so amused by the line about pink hyperstring that I had to add the addendum to stop myself from cracking up every time I read it. Seriously.
Me: SOMEONE DIED!
Me: HAHAH PINK STRING!
Me: DIED!
&c.
Anyway: with Jack’s dangerous job, I think there’d always be a danger that his doctor would pick up on the immortality. And Owen is, indeed, very sharp sometimes. I am also convinced that Jack and Owen have slept together. Probably only once. But Owen seems to be pretty damn easy for such a prickly character, and I’ll stop myself right there before my inner RPer goes off on a character analysis tangent. I was proud of the words ‘loose hungry manner’, because I think they...fit.
So: “It’s alien pus,” Jack says, watching him closely. “From a real alien. From another planet.”
“Jack!” Toshiko snaps.
“Oh,” Owen breathes, “well,” his fingers twitching with what Jack suspects is the urge to dissect.
This was actually the second line of this fic I ever wrote. I don’t know where it came from.
“Not him, Jack.”
“Yeah, ta very much, sweetheart.” Owen looks Jack straight in the eye. “A real alien?”
“Fancy a drink?” Jack asks, and the rest is history.
* * *
Suzie Costello’s apparent lack of any sense of humour is what prompts Jack, who knows his own blind spots, to name her his second-in-command. She smiles maybe twice in the whole interview – in stark contrast to Own, whose patent smirk fits perfectly around the rim of a half-pint glass, and Toshiko, whose nervous smile kept darting out to jab at him like a cat with a ball of string. And that is what Jack does: he dangles the impossible in front of their noses, isolation and danger baited with intellectual honey. As good as magnetic, to a certain type. The right kind of person won’t be able to resist, and Suzie Costello is the right kind of person. Machines love her. She’s antisocial and smart and has a tough skin on her, like leather. She won’t break.
One of my more metaphor-dense paragraphs, but I took out a few of the more pretentious words and I think it sits nicely. I particularly liked the line about Owen’s smirk.
Her drinks of choice are Guinness and Cosmopolitans, neither of which Jack can stand. He sips at water and takes her slowly through the interview, always aware of the small box of amnesia pills in the pocket of his coat.
“You seem to have had a lot of jobs,” Jack says, looking up from her file and making sure she hears the question.
He gets a neutral look in return, all opinion filtered out by her lashes. “I wasn’t fired. I resigned from them,” she says. “I got bored.”
“Well, you’re in luck.” Jack made his decision ten minutes ago, but he changes the angle of his chin and smiles as though he’s about to make all of her dreams come true. (He used to practise this smile; in front of a mirror, no less. It’s still available and effortless to the muscles of his face.) “This is the one job you can never quit.”
A few gems arose from the mess of necessary rewriting that followed ‘They Keep Killing Suzie’, and this line was one of them. Sometimes canon hands you things that are ambiguous enough that you can stick them in your own context and then beam at the air of authenticity they convey.
Her face changes and all of a sudden he finds her beautiful in a way that has no immediate connection to sex; she’s luminous, but in a stained-glass way that denies him such a presumption. “Is that a guarantee?”
The first sentence was originally just Her face changes and all of a sudden he finds her beautiful, but Sweeney pointed out that there HAD to be a contrast between how someone like Jack, who is canonically less than discerning as to sexual partners, saw Suzie (every story is a love story) and how he saw, for example, Owen. It took me a long time to find a way to express this in words that I liked. The word luminous was the breakthrough, and luckily I had already written the section about the rose window below, so the mention of stained glass would create a nice repetitive effect.
* * *
Months, and more months. One evening Jack looks up from his paperwork and frowns at Suzie, working overtime at her bench, soldering a shattered set of tiny cogs in dim light.
“You’ll ruin your eyes, doing that,” he says.
“They’re already a bit bollocksed.” She looks up and gives him a half-smile.
“Don’t you have any hobbies?” he asks. “Real hobbies, things you do for fun.”
“I find my job fun, Jack.” She puts down the soldering iron and stretches her arms above her head. “You know that.”
“Come on.” He leans back in his chair, chews on the tip of his pen, and grins. “Surely there’s something. Amateur theatre? Kickboxing? Knitting?” And then, because he’s never been able to resist showing off and because it’s good to give Suzie Costello a jolt, sometimes: “Dancing?”
Something like humour comes to life in her eyes; something like dignity, something like a candle flame. “That’s in my file, is it?”
That was the first sentence I ever wrote of this fic. Ever. Something coming to life in Suzie’s eyes, something to do with dancing.
Jack nods. Before she gained a degree in engineering, Suzie Costello spent two years ballroom dancing on the lower echelons of the professional circuits. Useless information, but Jack will take what he can get when it comes to this woman. Her rose window is more steel than glass; when colour shines through, it’s rare enough to give pause.
Suzie – and maybe it’s just Indira Varma’s poise, but it’s there – has always struck me as the type to dance. Not in public. Swaying to jazz in her own living room. I just took that idea and pulled on it until it reached the edges of plausibility, and then left it there.
“So what was it you were you wanting, Captain? A demonstration?”
“Yeah, sure,” Jack says, hits a few buttons on his wrist transducer, and stands up. One of the highest ceiling lights flickers transiently, off to his left and Suzie’s right, as he walks over and pulls her out of her chair by the forearms. Shadows skitter across her face.
“Jack, come on,” she begins, and then the music starts – soft – and her mouth quirks and she stops pulling away, lets her warmth remain within his personal space.
Nevertheless, her hand wavers a moment before falling to rest on his shoulder. Jack is not sure when his manner, which used to bespeak effortless affection and the dark heat of the body’s crevices, ran so assuredly to the discouragement of touching him. It’s disappointing.
I wasn’t sure about this – Jack still touches people, certainly, and (thank you, canon) almost certainly sleeps with them, but…to me, it’s all very deliberate and a far cry from the Jack that Nine and Rose travelled with. Other people might disagree and I’m perfectly okay with that: this is, as needs be, Jack through my eyes.
But after the smallest of intervals her palm is steering him gently forward a few steps and his own is at her waist and the others are clasped correctly, her hand in Jack’s hand. Jack hasn’t danced this way in a long time. Suzie is wearing grease-smudged overalls and flat boots, but she moves in such a way as to render this fact irrelevant; precise, sinuous, graceful. Jack notices quite abruptly as she passes under the line of his arm that her hair is tied back with a red lace ribbon, incongruous with the rest of her outfit, but suiting the music. He hooks his little finger in it as she completes the spin, and smiles.
‘Her hand in Jack’s hand.’
Their waltz is slow and sure; there’s no hurry. And they make a neat couple, fitting together like charisma and composure, grins and gravity, lines and lace.
Hand and glove.
*looks pathetic* You all saw what I did there, right? Hand and glove? Hand? And…glove? Yeah? Okay. Please to also be noticing my pathetically Anglo-Saxon adherence to alliteration in the penultimate line.
I am very fond of this quiet, musical image of them dancing. The aesthetics of Jack and Suzie as a couple really appeal to me: if you’re just tuning in, aesthetics steer a large portion of my psyche.
* * *
Three is not an important number, but five feels right. Jack ignores the pointed hints drifting in his direction from London and keeps his team constant at this amount.
*fanwanks it up* Torchwood One was a massive operation. Jack has a large base. Jack can command a large amount of people. He could be recruiting far more than he is. Besides, I wanted to link the cricket metaphor in again. I am a total sucker for constantly creating parallels within my own self-contained pieces.
“Smaller groups are more loyal,” he tells the Prime Minister.
“You seem to be highly capable of attracting loyalty, Captain,” she says, in tones that tell him she’s not buying that excuse for a second but she hasn’t got a good enough reason to argue it out.
“What can I say.” Jack grins into the phone. “I’m magnetic.”
A warning for those straying within the magnetic field of Captain Jack Harkness: extended proximity may cause dysfunction of one’s moral compass. Perhaps the disappearance of his touch me aura has less to do with self-punishment, as he was beginning to suspect, and is rather something along the lines of an unconscious warning beacon. Nevertheless, they’re changing; Jack has never needed to touch someone to win them. He watches them draw ever closer, gone to spinning needles and shades of grey, and wonders if he should be doing more to prevent this.
I am disgustingly fond of that paragraph. Disgustingly. Tell me you like it and I’ll purr like a kitten. (Maybe. I am not very kittenish.) To me, this is one of the overriding themes of Torchwood – the fact that good people (Gwen) get drawn into this fight, and we think oh, yes, they’ll teach the jaded alien hunters some humanity, how predictable, and instead…the humanity is what gets shattered. Degraded. It’s the opposite to Doctor Who’s message, it’s not Jack-the-cowardly-conman-gets-taught-courage, it’s Jack the bitter time-traveller gets to infuse a whole lot of other people with that same bitterness. CHARMING. I mean, fuck, I love it, I think it’s fantastically cynical telly and that’s why I watch it, but I really think fandom should acknowledge this a little more without diving straight into the over-done emotion.
Also please note how in this fic the overriding metaphor manages to escape being medical (see also: Suture) but is still scientific. I will never escape my education.
* * *
This is her dance: engine grease and ballistics, which can be defined as the mechanical art of unstoppable motion. Once begun, the momentum will carry it through to the end.
While we’re on the topic of my education…this line, and the section that it parallels at the very end of the fic, can be blamed on the advanced neuroscience course that I did last semester. We covered a lot about saccades – automatic eye movements – involving the fact that they are ballistic (unstoppable once begun). I don’t know if the word means the same thing in any context outside the scientific, but it’s good enough for me :)
Jack likes to talk to each member of his team on a regular basis, to monitor their reactions to particularly intense incidents and gauge the graceful degradation of their systems. It’s an engineering term, that one: little by little they lose themselves, but it doesn’t affect their function. Not too much.
*coughs* Sciencesciencescience. Though not without reason: Suzie’s an engineer.
(Jack tries not to imagine them cold in drawers before it has actually happened, even though he knows that someday it will. He wonders if this is how the Doctor lives, has always lived: seeing people’s corpses overlaid onto their breathing selves.) Suzie, however, never wants to talk. She shrugs and claims that she has no need to chew her work over with someone connected to that work, and maybe if it were Tosh or Owen then Jack would argue the point but Suzie has never been quite as easy to push.
This part I had to work at for a while: in TKKS we learn that she talked about her work with someone outside of it, to whom she then gave retcon.
“No, Jack,” she says. “Let’s just dance. We’re good at that.”
So they do, and they are, but Jack is starting to feel the inertia of what they are becoming, so when their heads dip close together he leans in and kisses her as though he has every right in the world to do so. Suzie stops the dance and her face settles into something warm; warm, but distant. “I don’t get involved with people at work,” she says, as though she’s practiced it.
“Really?” Jack murmurs.
“Well,” she qualifies with a half-smile. “Not the ones I like, anyhow.”
KLADGHASN STUPID OWEN. I mean. Stupid RTD. I was so pleased with my Suzie who didn’t sleep with anyone and then…blah. I tore my hair out for a while and then hit on this line, which I was very happy with because I’d already written the line about everyone liking/not liking Owen. I was very, very close to cementing the parallel by adding (Nobody likes Owen) after the line, but decided to err on the side of subtlety.
Jack may be many things but he is also a man who knows when to let something go. He nods, loosens his grip on her fingers, and gives a smile that isn’t awkward in the slightest. “Fair enough.”
* * *
A paramagnetic material increases the strength of a magnetic field simply by existing within it. Existence can be a powerful thing, all on its own.
Blah blah blah SCIENCE! I do think that the metaphor works, though: Jack’s corrupting influence is, if anything, accelerated by the presence of someone as ambiguous (and, as it turns out, prone to SERIAL KILLING) as Suzie.
* * *
The Hub stinks of cardamon and generic curry; lately they’ve been working ridiculous hours to locate some scattered debris that might be radioactive or might be messing with the human grasp on temporal logic or might give off waves of peace and fucking joy; hell, it’s only a month until Christmas, and anything’s possible. But they don’t know because they can’t get enough samples together for long enough to study before they disintegrate and they’re running into dead ends left right and centre, and Jack is on edge, and Suzie got to choose the takeaway and she chose Indian and Jack is not overfond of Indian.
So he holds his paper plate in one hand as he wanders around, restless, moody, wiping up the remains of some lethal vindaloo with his last scrap of naan and seeking out the weak points in their investigation with merciless eyes.
“I wanted those tissue cultures done yesterday, Owen.”
“Getting to it.” Owen shovels rice into his mouth.
“Get to it now,” Jack snaps.
“A’m eahfig,” Owen says, swallows, and gives Jack one of his most annoyingly smug glances. “It’s not like I’m just dicking around. Need to keep my blood sugar up, you know, or my IQ might drop below the official genius levels.” He waves his fork and a lump of butter chicken falls off it and leaves a tumbling orange smear down his lab coat. Owen looks down at it and frowns. “Bugger.”
I rewrote that damn paragraph about eight times. It’s not even a key paragraph. Can we say ‘unreasonable perfectionist?’
Jack gives up on him and strides irritably over to Toshiko’s workstation, pulls a chair out, and collapses in it with enough force to roll it backwards almost a foot.
“Owen,” he announces.
Toshiko doesn’t move her eyes from the screen. “Yep.”
“He’s such a…” Jack stares at the ceiling, searching for his vocabulary.
“Git,” Tosh supplies, and holds out a paper bag rendered translucent by grease. “Samosa?”
Yeah, I got nothing. I love that scene. It doesn’t do anything particularly important. It’s not profound. But OWEN. And I did want to set up the semi-sibling, confidante vibe that exists between Tosh and Jack.
* * *
Ianto Jones, unlike most beings that Jack has had dealings with, dons an extra layer of complexity for each layer of clothing that is removed. The man has emotional barriers like silk; pretty, but sturdier than is immediately apparent. Ianto provides them with information from sources at MI-5 – occasionally useful, often not – and seems content to quietly organise the food and clean up their messes (in every sense of the word). On a rare occasion he’ll see some real danger, and he knows how to handle a gun. Jack relies on him absolutely and tries not to read too much into the trust that implies.
They’re dancing, just as surely, a quiet respectful dance. Ianto’s feet make no noise.
*sighs* Jack/Ianto being canonized in such an obvious manner, I figured I had to make some deference to it. The only line I am really fond of is the final one.
* * *
And so it goes, the life of Captain Jack Harkness. Some days are easier than others, sometimes his chest won't seize up when he sees a throbbing blue light, sometimes he can go a whole week without remembering what it feels like to die. Distractions help. His life has never flashed before his eyes, not once, but it glides sometimes in the in-between hours when Ianto is rebuttoning his shirt or the lights of Cardiff are spread out below him or he's dancing with Suzie. Gliding like ice on glass and spinning like a needle.
I am yet to be able to write a fic in this universe that doesn’t talk about the TARDIS. I think if you watch Doctor Who for any amount of time then you get a visceral reaction of one sort or another to the sound it makes, and the sight of it fading into or out of view. You can see it in the character’s faces; Jackie’s, when she hears it approaching, and Jack’s, when he hears it leaving. That’s his emotional link to the stimulus. Being left behind. A somatic marker like that could be staggeringly disabling. (Uh, pretend that I didn’t just waltz off into psychobabble again there. Smile and nod.)
“Pas de deux,” Suzie says with mock severity, and of course been she’s classically trained, it’s in her cheekbones, in the discipline that stiffens her spine.
“Step of two.” Jack grins. “Two-step,” and he demonstrates, finding muscle memory from God knows how many years ago by his mode of reckoning.
Yes, as well as being a science geek, I can be a dance geek. I don’t think anyone can really write anything of substance without betraying something of themselves. Suzie probably wouldn’t be a dancer if I wasn’t a dancer.
Suzie’s mouth edges towards a smile. “You can be such a clown, Jack.”
Maybe so. Making her laugh is certainly rewarding, as hobbies go.
* * *
Toshiko, he discovers, is a right gossip in her own reserved way. And her idealism is crumbling, changing, losing its polarity. They take to sending each other emails, silly ones, bitching about dead-end cases and the latest royal scandals and how much of an arse Owen is being about the tests on this new organic compound and how much easier it would be to hate him if he were wrong. Nobody likes Owen. Everybody likes Owen. It’s a paradox, but they’re all getting quite used to surrounding themselves with paradoxes.
Tosh: he’s hard to stay mad at
Jack: I don’t know why I don’t fire him, some days
Tosh: of course you do, Jack
And she’s right, of course he does: even leaving aside the ghastly amnesial logistics that would be required if anyone were to leave this job through such a conventional channel, Jack sees just enough of himself in Owen that he can’t pull back, and this fascination generalises to the others as well. They are the house that Jack built, and they reflect the flaws of their architect. From the outside the arrangement might look eclectic, unstable, and perhaps he could have chosen for greater efficacy, but to Captain Jack Harkness these people are ideal because they are the extension of his own personality. No conman can ever quite trust anyone but himself, flaws and all, and Jack – faced with the necessity of teamwork, and not all that far from the cocky brat of a man who once spent two days painting a Tuu’la ambulance mauve – is employing his flaws. The distribution and dilution of his own sins.
That’s it: the house that Jack built. That’s the centre of this fic. That’s the line that I forgot to quote as a summary but everyone quoted back at me anyway. And the plausibility only really struck me once I got past smiling at the cleverness of it – the Torchwood team, as many have pointed out, are not particularly…effective. And Jack isn’t stupid. And…there’s no use rehashing it, it’s in the fic, but I’d be very interested to hear what other people think of this beyond ‘it makes for a neat piece of fanfic’.
Ianto is his effortless appeal, his ability to talk his way into or out of anything. Owen is his arrogance and cleverness; his conviction, muted (thanks to a certain blonde girl with a fragrant name and a stubborn heart) but still partly ingrained, that intelligence confers the right to bend the rules. Tosh is his blindness to consequence in the face of novelty, curious to a damned fault.
He is not sure what Suzie is, which makes him a little nervous – he can manage the others because he can manage himself, if he has to – but she must be something. Perhaps that why he watches her, sometimes, following her everyday dance from room to room; he is trying to recognise a reflection of a personal failing.
* * *
“Oh, wonderful,” Owen says when they find the glove. “Now we’re going to have to find the rest of a dismembered body. This is exactly what I wanted to do with my evening.”
“Don’t be in a hurry to be dredging the entire bay,” Suzie says, turning it over in her hands. “It looks more like a gauntlet, and I don’t think there are any signs of organic tissue in it. I’ll just check –”
Owen watches her slide her hand up into the thing and frowns. “Suze, I don’t think that’s –”
Blue light shoots through the cracks of the metal and Suzie takes a sharp breath in, and Jack spends two awful seconds worrying if this is the beginning of the end and if he’ll be losing another employee tonight, losing her. Nothing more happens, though, and he pushes away the most immediate panic.
Plz notice irony yes thnx. Beginning of the end.
“Hello,” Suzie says; wondering, curious, as though greeting a new acquaintance. Her stare falls short of both of them.
“– a good idea,” Owen finishes to no one in particular. “Bollocks. What’s she looking at?”
“I think I should…” Suzie’s voice is still vague. She starts to look around her as though searching for something. “I should find…” Her ungloved hand comes down hard and fast on a crawling insect, but before Jack or Owen can react she touches the dead thing with the glove and gasps raggedly. The blue lights flicker.
The insect shivers and starts to move.
Oh God, Jack thinks, God, except of course he means Doctor and he’s about as terrified as he’s ever been.
Torchwood, when you get right down to it, is about death. Look past the huge amounts of snogging and humour and fast violence and gore and actually think about the enormity of what happened to Jack without playing it for angst…yup, morbid as fuck.
“Jack,” Owen says in an odd voice, “did you see that? That wasn’t just me going nuts, right?”
Jack shoves it all down and stares at the insect, but it’s stopped moving and once again looks well and truly squished. “No, I saw it,” he says slowly. “Suzie, how did you know to do that?”
Suzie finally looks at him, and then she pulls the glove off with shaking hands. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t. It just felt…oh, God, Jack, the energy. The energy.”
“Toshiko,” Jack says into his phone. “We’re coming back to the Hub.”
I’m such a hypocrite. Leaving Tosh at the Hub to do nothing. I’M SORRY, TOSH. I’m sure you were doing something fantastically useful, like hacking into the CIA website.
“What’s happened, Jack?” Tosh asks. “Did you find anything interesting?”
“Yeah.” Jack waves two fingers at Suzie in a wrap that thing up kind of motion, and tries not to look at the insect. “Yeah, you could say that.”
Three hours later they’ve laid out the ground rules, or rather the glove has revealed them: only Suzie can get the thing to work, only a recent and violent death can be reversed, and the resurrection only lasts a few seconds.
“I think I can get it longer,” she says, “if I work on it.” Jack thinks that her eyes are a little too bright, and orders Owen to run a whole battery of medical tests on her to make sure it hasn’t caused some kind of permanent damage.
“A close runner-up in the list of things I wanted to do with my evening,” Owen says, rolling his eyes, but he goes to get his kit.
“How many blood tests do you need to run, Owen?” After a while, Suzie is starting to sound woozy.
“All of them.” Owen shoots Jack a dirty look. “Apparently. Hold still, I need two more vials, and then you should get something to eat.”
“I don’t want to…I need to try again, Jack,” Suzie says, and for the first time in Jack’s memory there is a note almost like hysteria in her voice. He sits down and puts an arm around her.
“Ianto,” he says quietly. “Some food and coffee?”
Ianto nods and disappears. Jack rubs Suzie’s upper arm. “Well, this is certainly something I haven’t seen before,” he tells her, and wonders how much of that is a lie. Suzie’s head is warm on his shoulder, the tired rhythm of her breath very close to his ear.
“I think there’s something amazing out there,” she says. “Maybe we haven’t found it yet, but…something amazing.”
Jack turns to kiss the top of her head – friendly, comforting, no more and no less – and hides the bitterness of his smile in the late-night mess of her curls.
“I know there is,” he says.
Lots of this was just exposition for the sake of exposition, but I’m pleased with the way it came out. Bitterness is a word that I had to fight not to overuse, because it’s Torchwood’s Jack Harkness to the core.
* * *
The magnetic susceptibility of a material is dimensionless. You cannot capture it in units, you cannot pin it to a scale. It is a relationship.
(Jack thinks: this could be important.)
Jack’s a fool. This is gratuitous science. Wow, now you’re all disappointed. You thought that was something really deep, didn’t you?
No, I kid. It’s a true scientific fact, and the concept of being undefined is linked to Jack’s failure to recognize which of his flaws Suzie represents, and the tentative, ambiguous nature of their relationship.
* * *
Jack goes walking one night and sleeps with a married man
There’s a ring on my finger, the guy says feebly, when his shirt is already half-undone and Jack’s neck is covered with fierce hickeys that will be gone by the morning.
That is my favourite sentence in the whole fic. I feel this is worth mentioning.
And bells on my toes, Jack says in return, closing his own fingers over the slim band of metal. Come on.
Jack Harkness will have music (wherever he goes), and he will dance; and they do, and it’s good, but it’s not quite what he was looking for.
I love this part ridiculously. I had to sound out the predominantly-American boxchat for recognition of the nursery rhyme (ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross) so that it didn’t sound completely random. Jack’s the type to seek distraction. There is NO way he wasn’t sleeping his way across Cardiff, occasionally.
* * *
As is the way of their work, one new crisis or shiny novelty arises after another, and soon the glove is just one of those things that is somewhere at the back of everyone’s minds but never really comes to light. Every so often Suzie tells them that she’s extended the time by another ten seconds, but for the most part she doesn’t discuss it, and maybe she’s a bit distracted but she’s never really been one for talking. It doesn’t seem odd.
She also starts working late with greater regularity, but Jack can hardly call her out on it. They exchange a few surprised glances and then come to a silent agreement not to talk about it, and to stick to their private circles of light within the huge, silent room.
Sometimes – though less and less, as the weeks go by – they emerge from their spheres and dance.
Mumble mumble exposition. Filling this chronological gap was the hardest thing to do. I wrote it last and I’ll never be quite happy with it.
One day Suzie breaks out of her own choreography and does the opposite: she begs important personal business and leaves work early. Her shoulder bag seems to weigh her down more than usual, some new ragged thing presenting itself to Jack’s eyes, etched into the tension of her shoulders. Jack can’t quite stop his own gaze from heating up with concern and a few other emotions that crowd his thoughts in. Too late, too late, these thoughts rage.
Tosh follows his eyes and shoots him a knowing look from behind her glasses. “She doesn’t get involved with people at work,” she says with suspicious immediacy.
“I know,” says Jack.
“Are you sure?” says Owen.
Tosh totally tried to sleep with Suzie as well. You know this to be true. Granted, she probably didn’t try very HARD – she strikes me as the type to shy away quickly from even the gentlest of rejections – but she tried.
* * *
Later he will hate himself for the fact that when Suzie says, “Jack, I think…Jack, could we talk?” he’s running late for a phone conference with the PM, and angry at the local cops for screwing up a crime scene and with himself because someone reported seeing a blue police box just outside of Dublin but he can’t find any solid leads, so he just frowns and asks her if it can’t wait until morning.
Continuing the first objective of Torchwood. Maybe the writers have forgotten (for the moment) but Jack sure as hell hasn’t.
“I’m sure it can. I have plans for tonight anyway,” Suzie says, and walks out of the door. There’s an odd note in her voice that almost makes Jack think better of it and call her back, but she’s gone and he’s got too much on his mind to make the effort. It can wait until morning. It can wait until morning.
But the next morning, Suzie walks in and –
“No,” Jack says before anyone can so much as greet her, striding towards her and waving his hands. “No, no, no. Go home and sleep it off, whatever it is.”
“You do look a bit rough, Suze,” Toshiko says.
Suzie’s eyes are far too bright, glittering like fragile wealth behind her glasses and above the smudges of fatigue. For a moment Jack suspects she’s going to argue, and almost hopes that she will, but then the angle of her shoulders changes abruptly and the fight diffuses out of her body.
“Right,” she says. “Sorry. Right,” and then she’s turning around and Jack is watching her walk away for the second time in twelve hours.
Personally I find it difficult to believe that nobody would have noticed anything, but see also: not the best investigative team in the world. And Jack can be remarkably self-absorbed. This is…the beginning of the end of the end. I like to think that there are moments like that. Not just slow transitions, but moments of change. I write a lot of moments.
* * *
Later that week there’s news of a violent stabbing.
Suzie says: “I think I’m ready to test the glove out on humans.”
So they do.
* * *
Gwen Cooper’s burnout is written in the lines of her face, in the way she cares, so automatically and pugnaciously. Jack looks at her and sees the short decades that she has left before the job grinds her down. He sees the ideals she once had, he sees their edges already blunted by the pragmatism of her present self, and he sees the mundanely depressing fate of every good person who volunteers to face up to the ugliness of life on a daily basis.
Past and present and future. He doesn’t like seeing the universe this way; no suspense, no joy, no fucking fun. One more complaint to add to his list of symptoms.
Seriously. Jack used to live on thrills and uncertain futures, and now he feels the world turning. He’s the least suited personality archetype to immortality that I can imagine. Ergo, bitterness up the wazoo.
Slipping the pill into Gwen’s drink is easy, harmless, but it still feels like murder.
Despite everything I think Jack still has the urge to save. It’s a very fictional kind of irony, as well as the fact that he is still searching for someone to step into the Doctor’s shoes and save him – this being his own selfishness, of course – that pushes him and Gwen in the opposite direction.
* * *
“I’ve got to,” says Suzie, “I’m sorry, I’ve got to,” and through the searing pain in his forehead Jack’s wondering when it all went so terribly wrong, wondering how he missed the signs. Gwen is close to tears and even closer to breaking through the amnesia, her degradation not graceful at all. Time to end this.
All right, I confess, I stole the ‘graceful degradation’ and this sewing-up of the trope from an original story of mine, but I think it fits this one better.
He stands up.
“Put the gun down,” he says, and says some more things without really hearing the sound of his own voice, and holds out a hand – let me cut in?
But she is lifting her own hand in a swift arc, the gun is turning, beautiful and ballistic. And by the time Jack recognises Suzie Costello for what she is – his obsession, his self-destruction – the bullet is already halfway home.
Yes, there’s a triple meaning to ‘self-destruction’ there – his own desire to push the boundaries of immortality, her suicide, and her shooting him in the head. It was hard to dance around the revelation and rely on Jack’s own obliviousness when it’s obvious to ME how similar he and Suzie are. Their easy, consuming addiction to the pursuit of an idea. A selfishness that doesn’t recognize itself because it’s underlaid by massive insecurity.
Anyway, that’s all that’s been sparked off by reading the fic, but if anyone has any questions or further comments or wants to start a ridiculously in-depth meta discussion with me, go right ahead.
*follows the author home*
This story rocks my socks because it is actually fantastic meta (a sort of "best of" meta with little impressive insights from everywhere), but it's also meta that's housed in great prose.
And yay for theme inversions from Doctor Who, for palindromes of Jack, for Jack reflecting himself in his (ineffective) team, and for Tosh trying to sleep with Suzie. I didn't even garner that last one from the fic itself, but you say it now and it is so very, very true. I wish I had meta-ish thoughts to throw back at you, but everything is still percolating through my brain.
Re: *follows the author home*
Anyway, I'm pleased you found enough food for thought in there to make the percolating worthwhile.
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[---]
Torchwood, when you get right down to it, is about death. Look past the huge amounts of snogging and humour and fast violence and gore and actually think about the enormity of what happened to Jack without playing it for angst…yup, morbid as fuck.
These comments of yours make it very clear to me why this fic resonates so with me. (Be it concretely or abstractly. *g*)
To me, the attraction of Torchwood is that it's an extremely, surprisingly dark show. Beneath the surface gloss of the silly humour and Jack's dazzling smile, it's all about death and loss and human failure. There are occasional sparks of light and beauty, but, for the most part, the characters are all fumbling through a vast darkness, and to survive in that darkness - or survive the sense of meaninglessness it imposes on them - they all, one by one, succumb to the various temptations around them; little by little losing themselves, sinking deeper into the abyss they are struggling to escape. It is, as you say, cynical in the extreme, and not quite like anything I've seen on tv before.
This is how I see the show, and I've never been quite satisfied with any story I read in this fandom - even though some of them were excellent and highly enjoyable - because they failed, or more likely didn't try, to convey these things. You have it nailed, though. The sense of a surrounding emptiness, the inevitability of personal degradation (such a perfect word to use), the brightness and melancholy of the beautiful moments that, despite everything they are, can't save anyone... You've captured the show as I see it, which is a large part of why this story gives the thrills.
I write a lot of moments.
Another reason why I love this. You don't need to write long tales about how the years go by if you can pin the important things down by revealing clear, distinct, tangible moments in time. My favourite form of story-telling.
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And yes, yes, yes - the show is cynicism with a frivolous varnish over the top. Thanks for delving so deep here, I think we certainly see this the same way, and it's good fun to tease things out.
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I am a huge Moffat fan.
Me too. Apart from the brilliance that is "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances", I think "The Girl in the Fireplace" is one of the most overwhelming and poignant pieces of television writing out there. I'm in awe of his skill. And I'd love to see him write something for Torchwood.
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Re: the various references to the number three, such as "Three is not an important number, but five feels right." My immediate, reflexive interpretation when first reading the fic (and on subsequent rereading) was that Jack associates the number three with the trio - the threesome, if you will, though the sexual connotations of that word aren't necessary for this discussion - that was made up of himself, the Doctor and Rose. Hence his insistance that three is not important - a relationship of three is the most important thing he's experienced, but it's an importance he badly wants to forget - and what strikes me as his itchy eagerness to make sure he is not part of a team of three again. I find it interesting that you don't mention having had this thought when writing the relevant paragraphs.
And so it goes, the life of Captain Jack Harkness. Some days are easier than others, sometimes his chest won't seize up when he sees a throbbing blue light, sometimes he can go a whole week without remembering what it feels like to die. Distractions help. His life has never flashed before his eyes, not once, but it glides sometimes in the in-between hours when Ianto is rebuttoning his shirt or the lights of Cardiff are spread out below him or he's dancing with Suzie. Gliding like ice on glass and spinning like a needle.
You point out your own favourite paragraph in the story; this is mine. Especially the last two sentences. Goosebumps.
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And...I didn't mention the 'three' significance simply because it's not a thought that I had :) Three was for strikes, and Torchwood Three, and that was the only connection - everything else was just playing around with words. I tried not to think about the threesome (in as much as I COULD, Jack being Jack) because they're quite honestly not what this story was about. But your reading of it is very interesting, and I'm glad the story kicked up these intriguing concepts.
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I utterly adored all your insight into this. I must admit that I love stuff like this - I don't think I've watched a movie yet that I didn't prefer with the commentary. It makes the actual piece so much more enjoyable when you see the thoughts behind it.
Thank you.
(Also, I'm totally behind you on the "Give Tosh more lines" - our girl just doesn't get enough screentime.)
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I actually don't watch films with the commentaries - something about breaking the fourth wall. I prefer my escapism to be capsulated. I don't read many interviews or go in for finding out about celebrities either.
Hell yes. Hopefully S2 will see Tosh emerge with more lines and more personality.
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* I never had any idea why on earth you thought "graceful degradation" was special until just now, when I realized that, of course, it's all to do with echoes and parallels. Well, and paradox, I suppose. still. I am impressed with it, finally.
* Personally, I fucking love canon!Suzie Costello, and may even prefer her to your stable alternative. But obviously I didn't know this nearly as well as you did, and so perhaps the impression wasn't strong enough to override the glorious wreck of a person that canon gave us. It would take a lot to compete with that kind of violence (I don't just mean the serial killing) in any case, and I do not know if there was enough of your Suzie for that . . . that kind of character needs volume/space/time to win out in such a situation.
* I like seeing the inside of your head because we make very different decisions and pursue different things in a story. Some of the things that you seem to assume people know, also, such as your little quip about Anglo-Saxon penchants, I have quite frankly never encountered in my life, and it amazes me that, all the while claiming ignorance, you have these exclusive bits of literary knowledge preserved in your brain (unless everyone else knows, and I am just exceptionally ignorant?). I actually brought that up because I was going to say, as an example, that I would probably not consciously alliterate, and certainly not to that extent, and yet I hardly notice it -- and indeed find it compelling -- in your writing. But, as has been expressed, art is (often) what you can get away with. Chapeau!
* I had never (perhaps this follows) heard the rhyme to which you allude, except in An Experiment in Love, where it had puzzled me immensely . . .
* It remains a very good fic. You, first and foremost, tell a good story.
* I am not sure what else I have to say.
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Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross
To see a fine lady upon a white horse
With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes
She will have music wherever she goes
The Anglo-Saxon penchant for alliteration is something...uh...my mother and I were talking about because SHE got it out of Peter Ackroyd's Albion: A History of the British Imagination, which I am reading one of these days. I didn't really expect many people to know it, I just...this commentary is a stream-of-consciousness and I don't really edit my thoughts to consider what others might have heard of. Consider it education?
More later!
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I fell in love with 'graceful degradation' as soon as my neuroscience lecturer told me about it; in reference to neurological systems, but stealing an engineering term. As psychophysics does.
I must say I have no idea what your reference to AP English Lit has to do with anything. Er.
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* You do that often! Like, you cite something just as an aside that NOBODY ELSE KNOWS. *weeps*