Nothing Else but Change
Everything changed, everything moved on. Everything except Jack.
Betas: Rustydog and
Donutsweeper
Notes: My gratitude to my betas cannot be textually rendered. They have held my hand, passed the tissues, corrected grammar and typos, forced me to write better and made sure that I had everything I needed to write this. It's not possible to thank them too much, for services above and beyond the call of duty or friendship. Remaining deficiencies are all my own work.
Art by Genie (LJ | e-mail | comment) and Jhava (LJ | e-mail | comment)
Prologue
"What's past is prologue."
Shakespeare, The Tempest
10th January, 2000
The Hub was echoingly empty at six a.m. Jack cranked the music up as high as he could stand, but all it seemed to do was make the place seem even bigger, even more lonely. Sighing, he turned it down again so he could hear himself think and went back to his reading. There were too many files in Torchwood's mainframe to get through, possibly even in his lifetime, and Alex had left him without so much as an index for finding his way around. Personnel files were obviously irrelevant now, and he took a few minutes to seal the records, not lingering over the job.
His team had been his world and now they were dead. Everything changed, everything moved on. Everything except him.
The next set of files to catch his attention were Hub schematics. This place was the mutant love-child of a maze and a fortress, with rooms and corridors and secret chambers that he'd have to explore at some point. He was pretty good on the upper twelve levels, but there were at least six more that he'd only taken the most cursory of looks at, and those were just the levels he knew about. Still, since they didn't have any Weevils in the cells at the moment-
Jack stopped for a moment, resting his hands on the desk. There was no 'they' anymore, no more 'we'. He didn't have any Weevils in the cells. For the time being, he was Torchwood, all of it, and he wasn't going to let himself forget it. Pulling himself back to the present, he began studying the plans again, systematically this time, going floor by floor, highlighting the rooms he knew about and trying to make a note of the ones he didn't. No two floors were the same, and he was starting to think someone had got creative with the laws of space-time, because surely there was no way all this space could fit under Cardiff Bay. Or maybe he was reading the diagrams wrong. They didn't look like they'd been updated in thirty years or more.
It was the crick in his neck that first suggested he'd been at this too long, and his back made a horrible popping sound as he stood up. He felt old.
He'd been down here for over a week now, eating out of the supply cupboard when he remembered to eat, and sleeping on the bunk underneath Alex's office when he could bear to close his eyes. But something had to give eventually, he supposed. Even he couldn't live on emergency rations alone, or at least he didn't want to, and there was no damn way he was doing this without coffee.
Leaving the Hub was pretty much as he'd expected, which was why he'd put it off for so long. Getting past the workstations wasn't so bad; people had come and gone at them for years, and he was used to stopping next to a desk to see how the new person had made it their own. It was when he reached ground level that it really hit him, the abandoned newsagent's smelling of must and rotting paper. Alex had set it up as their cover when he'd first arrived, giving them an actual front instead of making them sneak in through the hidden door when no one was looking. Hiding in plain sight had always been Jack's preferred method too.
He'd have to change it now, though, if only because most of the stock seemed to be growing mould. Maybe he could solve both his problems in one go and open a café instead, although just the thought made him snort with laughter. He could just imagine himself making espresso with one hand while he took pot-shots at Weevils with the other.
Ignoring the sobering thought that he wouldn't have to do that if he took on some new staff, he forced himself to carry on chuckling as he unlocked the front door and headed out into the brisk Cardiff morning.
There was the smell of rain still in the air, although most of it seemed to have fallen during the night. The January weather in Cardiff was usually fairly dismal, not particularly cold, just relentlessly grey and wet, a layer of thick cloud settling over the city for the winter and making everything damp through. Jack turned up the collar of his coat and tried to ignore the chill seeping into him as he headed for the nearest supermarket. It might have been easier to get the car out, or to arrange some kind of delivery, but it was probably more sensible to get out like this. Smell the air, see the sky, or something like that.
Jack kept his eyes fixed on his feet and just walked.
Twentieth century supermarkets were so wonderfully cute that Jack took his time wandering around. Almost a whole aisle was devoted to teas and coffees of different types, and Jack spent long enough reading the packets that the store security guard walked past him twice. Honestly, if he was going to steal something, there were more valuable things he could choose. Jack just liked the pictures, the feel of the packets and boxes under his fingers. Eventually, he threw a selection into his trolley, along with the rest of the pre-packaged and tinned food. He went a bit mad in the freezer aisle, but Torchwood had a huge cold room, and it wasn't like he had the time to do this regularly. Not when there was only him stopping the world being sucked into the Rift.
And if that wasn't a terrifying thought, he didn't know what was. With that on his mind, he didn't really have the attention to do more than pay, and it wasn't until he was three streets away that he realised two things. He still had the trolley with all his shopping in and there was a phone number written on the back of his receipt. If he concentrated hard, he vaguely remembered talking to the kid on the till, and possibly even laughing, but apparently it had all been done on reflex. Folding the receipt carefully and stowing it in an inside pocket, Jack pushed the trolley back to the Hub, considering that he'd bought too much to carry anyway. He'd return it another time.