Nothing Else but Change
Chapter Two
"Nothing is permanent but change."
Heraclitus
The world gradually faded back in around him, or at least the grating he was lying on did. It was cool and hard and pressing into his cheek uncomfortably, but given how the rest of him felt, he was quite happy to just lie on it for a moment. Then someone started shouting at him.
"Identify yourself!"
Female, southern British accent of some kind, and sounded seriously ticked off. Trying not to groan, Jack lifted his head enough to turn it in the direction of her voice.
"I said identify yours- Jack?" The shouting was replaced with running footsteps, then someone's hands were on him, turning him over, and he was blinking as the overhead lights shone right in his eyes. "Jack, can you hear me?"
"I hear you," he managed, coughing a little. Turning his head, he felt his eyes still watering from the lights and kept on blinking to try and clear them. Gradually, the woman's face came into focus, bending over him with a very worried look on her face.
"Jack, what happened? What are you doing here?"
Dark hair, dark eyes, Asian, pretty and with strong hands. From the way she was running them over his body, she either had some medical training or she just really, really liked him. In his experience, you couldn't rule either option out.
"What happened?" he asked, belatedly realising that she'd just asked him that. "Who are you?"
She frowned. "Jack, it's Tosh. Toshiko?" When he carried on looking at her blankly, her frown deepened. "You didn't accidentally take a dose of Retcon, did you?"
"You know about Retcon?" His head was spinning, but Jack forced himself to sit up and look around. He was still in the Hub, still where he had fallen when the Rift manipulator had gone kablooey. Everything was the same, and everything was different. There were more monitors around the desks, and the walls seemed to have been repainted. In front of him the woman, (Tosh, did she say her name was?) was giving him a worried look.
"Jack, seriously, what happened? You're starting to scare me."
"That makes two of us." Slowly, Jack started to climb to his feet, accepting Tosh's help when she put a hand under his elbow. "What happened?"
"Okay, now we're just going round in circles." Tosh half-dragged him to the nearest desk and pulled the chair out for him. "Let's start at the beginning. Year."
That was standard Torchwood procedure for this kind of thing, which together with the Retcon reference meant that Tosh had to work here. Which was weird, but then again, what wasn't where Torchwood was concerned?
"It's January fourteenth in the year 2000," Jack said, rubbing his cheek and feeling the indentations of the grating. "Or at least, it was five seconds ago."
"There's our problem then." Going over to another desk, one surrounded by more screens that Jack would have thought one person could sensibly use, Tosh began typing. "It's the fourteenth of January, but it's 2005. You've time-hopped."
A chill ran down Jack's spine. "Am I here?" When Tosh just gave him a confused look, he got to his feeet, bad idea or not, trying to get her to understand. "The me who belongs here. The me from 2005. You know him, so I must be here somewhere."
"You and Suzie are out investigating a Weevil infestation in Bute Town." Tosh typed for another few seconds. "The car just got there. You won't be back for ages."
"If I call in, don't tell me I'm here," Jack said quickly, trying to get his head to stop spinning. "That's really important."
"That's standard time travel protocol," Tosh said, a slight note of reprimand in her voice. "You don't have to tell me my job, Jack." Then she flashed him a smile, and he supposed he could forgive her being a little ticked off, under the circumstances. "You taught me it."
"Right." Leaning back on the desk, Jack put one hand to his head and tried to concentrate. "Sorry."
He heard Tosh push her chair back, then her footsteps came towards him. "How are you feeling?" she asked, and he had no time to reply before her hands were on him again, tipping his chin up as she tried to look into his eyes. "Did you hit your head?"
"I'm fine," he said, because as much as his head felt like it could explode at any moment, he was fairly sure that was just a feeling. Probably. And it wasn't important anyway. Gently, he pulled her hands from his face. "Something happened with the Rift, I don't know what, and the next thing I know, I'm here."
"We did have a spike here," Tosh said, glancing towards her computers, "but nothing serious, and according to our readings, nothing came through."
"Except me." He wasn't exactly steady on his feet yet, but Jack managed to stagger his way over to her workstation. It looked like he was going to upgrade the computers at some point in the next five years, and if the screen he was looking at was anything to go by, he hadn't exactly stuck to Earth technology to do so. Cool.
Tosh was shaking her head. "No, that's what I'm saying. Nothing came through, nothing at all. The spike wasn't powerful enough for that."
It took Jack a moment to catch up with what she was saying, distracted as he was by the images flashing across her screens. There was a map of Cardiff with a flashing dot in the middle of Bute Town which was obviously his present self and whoever else Tosh had said was with him. He really needed to start paying more attention. Another screen was split between four cells, each of which had Weevils in. Then there were some readings of some kind that he could probably have interpreted given a little time and possibly some maths lessons, and finally the one graph he did recognise, that of the Rift monitor.
"Which is the relevant activity?" he asked, squinting as she adjusted the screen. She was right about it not being big enough to get a person through, and if he was honest, it didn't look like much more than the everyday activity he'd been seeing since they starting measuring the Rift this way. "Okay, so if I didn't come through the Rift, how did I get here? Was there a flash of light? Any glowing anywhere? Moving shadows? Anything at all?"
Tosh was doing a fairly good job of not looking at him as though he was insane, but he could see the thought lurking behind her eyes. "I'm sorry, Jack," she said, shaking her head. "There was nothing. One minute you weren't there, the next?" She shrugged. "I thought you were an intruder."
"I am." Although it wasn't a good idea in his condition, Jack shook his head. "I shouldn't be here, and there's no sign of how I got here. This has to be the Rift." He waved away her protests. "I know what you're saying, Tosh, but look, I'm here." He prodded her in the arm just to make the point. "I'm real, I'm tangible, I'm not a ghost or a projection or anything like that. So either our senses are deceiving us, or this thing is." His wave took in both her computers and the Rift manipulator. "Personally, I've always preferred the human touch."
Whereas most people would have been somewhere between 'panicked' and 'freaked out' by having a future version of their boss appear out of nowhere, Jack got the distinct impression that Tosh was loving having a problem to get her teeth into. As she waved him out of her chair and began typing new commands in the computer, Jack found himself watching her fingers move across the keys, the way she held her head at a slightly odd angle until she seemed to notice what she was doing and pulled a pair of glasses out of a battered case. After a few minutes, she had apparently forgotten all about him, and since his head was still pounding, he decided to go and see if they still kept paracetamol in the kitchen.
They didn't, but a few glasses of water eased the worst of the pain, and he decided that since he was here, he might as well make himself useful. The kettle was new but the microwave was the one from his Hub, and vaguely he wondered if any of his ready meals were still in the cold room. Armed with two cups of coffee, he made his way back into the Hub, pausing on one side of the bridge. Tosh was looking up at the screens, and her face was a picture of absolute concentration as she typed, eyes flicking from one display to another. Jack got the feeling that he could fire his gun next to her ear and she wouldn't react beyond slight annoyance. There was definitely something special there, something that he knew he'd seen when he'd employed her. Would employ her. Whatever.
Contrary to his expectations, she actually acknowledged his presence as he put the coffee on her desk, smiling at him, then nodding to one of her screens.
"I'm still not seeing anything, Jack, I'm sorry. As far as I can see, you're not here."
He came to stand beside her, bumping their shoulders together. "Just a figment of our imaginations, huh?"
"Something like that. Sorry." She looked so apologetic that Jack instinctively reached out, wrapping an arm around her shoulders and hugging her to him.
"Not your fault." She didn't flinch or move away, just leaned against him in a way that suggested he'd maintained his hands-on approach with the people who worked for him. "But there has to be an explanation for this. I didn't just drop out of nowhere." Under his arm, Tosh tensed, and he could almost feel her thinking. "What is it?"
"Something Torchwood One have been working on," she said, sitting up and shifting closer to her computer. "They're not sure what it does, but they do know it appeared out of nowhere and that as far as their instruments can tell, it doesn't exist."
"Do you have any pictures?"
Tosh shook her head. "I've got a contact there who's been sending me reports. Jack - you - and Yvonne don't get on very well. I don't think you've - they've - spoken in a few years, to be honest."
"So what does your contact think it is?"
"No one knows," Tosh said simply. "It doesn't exist. I don't think anyone has any idea what do with it. It's just sitting in the vault at the moment, doing nothing."
"In my experience, things don't do nothing, and they usually do it just when you're not looking." Catching Tosh's eye, he grinned. "You know what I mean."
Tosh turned her chair towards him with a distinct conspiratorial look on her face. "Well, if you want the real story, according to my contact, everyone who worked on the object starting seeing things."
This was clearly where he was supposed to chip in, so Jack picked up his cue. "What kind of things?"
Tosh actually lowered her voice a little, which was unnecessary, but cute. "Ghosts."
"Ghosts." Jack couldn't keep the note of scepticism from his voice. "Like, dead people?"
"Why not? They could be time echoes, or hallucinations or pretty much anything like that. All my contact knows is that they had to shut everything down because anyone who spent too much time in the same room as that thing started seeing things all the time. They couldn't work with it any more, and eventually even Yvonne gave up on it. They're trying to think of something else." There was a certain air of satisfaction about the way Tosh said it, and a definitely smugness in the way she sat back and sipped her coffee. The scary thing was, Jack had the feeling that if she was given the chance, there wasn't any problem she couldn't solve.
"And you think something like that happened to me?" Jack pinched the bridge of his nose. "I'm here, Tosh. I'm not a ghost, I'm not an echo. I'm here."
"You said the Rift activated, right?" There was genuine excitement in her voice now that was making Jack's head hurt. "Maybe the additional power meant that you could materialise fully. Or maybe I'm the one who materialised. The Rift did spike, it's just that nothing happened."
"So because this thing at Torchwood One conjures things out of nothing, you think the same thing happened here?"
"It's a theory." Tosh sounded a little hurt that he hadn't immediately jumped on her explanation, but if he was honest, it didn't really make any sense to him. Still, he hadn't meant to offend her.
Without thinking, he took her hand in his, pulling her closer, chair and all, so that he could kiss her forehead. "Where did I find you?" he asked, more to himself than her.
Tosh tipped her head back, her expression affectionate and almost sad. "In prison," she said simply, and before Jack could get his wits together to ask more, she'd pushed her chair back to her desk and started to type again. "Well, if you don't think my explanation makes sense, what's yours?"
"I really wish I had one." Giving in, Jack took a long swig of his coffee and tried to think. Whatever had happened to him, it seemed to have scrambled his brain a little and he was finding it hard to concentrate. "Maybe the Rift doesn't do what we thought it did." When there was no reply, Jack looked up, hoping that Tosh had been distracted by a potential solution. In the corner of the room, just behind the Rift monitor, there was the faintest of glows, barely more than a dull light bulb would give out, but still out of place in that dark corner of the Hub. "Er, Tosh?"
"Oh my God." The voice coming from behind him was male, the words clipped and precise and Jack knew that voice. He spun around, resisting the urge to salute.
"Gerald?"
"Jack?"
Jack closed his eyes and began to swear.
By the time he'd got his annoyance under control enough to hold a civilised conversation, Gerald had returned with a decanter and two glasses.
"Come on, lad," he said, gesturing with them. "I know you don't normally, but you look like you need it."
Gerald had always called him lad, right from the day he'd arrived to pull Torchwood Three back into order. For the first two months, Jack had hated it, distrusting anything that came from the London base and resenting this newcomer's intrusion on his patch. Of course at the time, he'd pretty much hated Torchwood in general, and everything they stood for. All his original team were gone, lost to him forever, and he would have hated anyone who'd come in after that. He hadn't dealt so well with change at the time. He'd had a lot of practice since then, and it seemed that he was getting more of it tonight. As if seeing Ben hadn't messed with his head enough. It was actually kind of comforting, the way Gerald just turned and walked away, expecting Jack to be right behind him.
Following obediently, Jack climbed the stairs to what would become the library, the war room, the map room, the library again, and most recently, the conference room. Jack would probably change that again, just for the sake of it.
For now, the space was Gerald's office, unofficially, of course. According to his personnel file, he'd retired in 1918, but that was more than twenty years before Retcon, and you didn't just walk away from Torchwood. Looking around the room, at the piles of papers and neat bookshelves, Jack put the date somewhere in the early 1920s.
"Here." Gerald held the glass out towards him, and Jack only hesitated for a second before accepting, then taking a seat.
"Thanks." The whiskey was good, but it was also his third of the night. While Jack had no illusions about his alcohol tolerance, he also knew that he was tired, he hadn't eaten, and he wasn't used to it. Three or four wouldn't be a problem, but he should probably stop himself before he got to five.
"So." Folding himself into the other armchair, Gerald fixed Jack with a critical look. "When are you from?" Before Jack could answer, he went on, "I'm guessing the future, looking at your clothes, your haircut. You look good. Healthy."
With a snort of laughter, Jack tipped his glass in salute. "Very good. And thank you, I try. What year is this?"
There was a moment of hesitation, as though Gerald was trying to decide whether or not to answer the question. He'd always been cautious. "1921."
From the state of the room, of the little of the Hub he'd seen, that was probably the truth. Jack trusted his instincts, so when Gerald carried on giving him a curious look, he said, "Yes, I'm from the future. Seventy-nine years in the future to be exact."
Gerald didn't react beyond nodding to himself and taking a sip of whiskey. Given the year, he was used to a more silent Jack, more cautious, hiding from himself and everyone around him. The twenties had not been good to either of them.
"At least you've managed to put on some weight," Gerald said dryly, still examining Jack as though he was a scientific specimen. "Honestly, my boy, you look like a skeleton at the moment."
"I remember." Jack vaguely remembered people hovering in the background of his life during this period, solicitous and well-meaning and all completely unable to reach him. It hadn't been until Black Tuesday and the circling of the vultures that he'd really managed to drag himself back into the real world.
"Seventy-nine years." There was something distant in Gerald's voice, the way he got when he was thinking hard about a problem. "I take it humanity makes it to the next millennium without too much further incident." Seeing Jack's face, he waved a hand vaguely. "Of course, you can't tell me. Shouldn't ask really. But one does like to know these things. Natural curiosity and all that."
"Sorry." Jack shook his head. "I would if I could."
"Quite, quite. Nature of causality, all that kind of thing. But if you're not here to give me some dire warning about the future of mankind, then why are you here?"
Sighing a little, Jack swirled the liquid in the bottom of his glass. "Gerald, I really wish I knew."
One thing that Jack would say for Gerald was that once he was presented with a problem, he would stop at almost nothing to solve it. After questioning Jack for ten minutes, demanding every detail of the initial experience, then as much as Jack was willing to tell him about his jaunt to 2005, he sat back in his chair and reached for pencil and paper.
"By your time, the Rift is accepted as fact, not just a new theory? That's very good news. Very good indeed." Scribbling as he spoke, Gerald glanced up occasionally to check his facts, but otherwise seemed completely focussed on what he was doing. "We've hypothesised that the Rift cuts through space and time, and that it is quite possible for objects to move through it, backwards and forwards. Yet you say that none of Torchwood's instruments were able to detect any such movement?"
"As near as we could tell." Jack smiled ruefully. "I mean, the technology gets better, but it's not that good. Not yet."
"Very well. So we will have to assume that your movements are related to the Rift, but not caused by it. It may be that the fluctuations in the Rift are triggering something else that is moving you through time."
That was a good point, actually. "But not space." Seeing Gerald's questioning look, Jack added, "I'm staying in the same place each time, just moving in time. We know the Rift can do that, but if we can't find a direct relationship, maybe it's because it's not there to be found."
"Very well." Gerald was still writing intently. "So we have a force that is triggered by fluctuations in the Rift, that is capable of moving people through time but which is apparently undetectable. Is this meaning anything to you?"
"No." Slumping back in his chair, Jack stared up at the ceiling. "I'm starting to think that I'm doing it to myself."
"After spending over a hundred years living on top of the Rift, that might be possible."
Jack blinked, wondering if it could be that simple. It wasn't like he hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about the various Torchwood teams, past and potential future, recently. "Maybe," he said slowly.
"If you don't mind my saying so, Jack, you look healthier physically but you also look..." Gerald trailed off, obviously searching for the most diplomatic word. "Weary," he settled on at last. "Do you sleep nowadays?"
"When I have to." There was no point lying to Gerald, and not only because he'd known Jack too long to be fooled. Even in this present, lurking in his office most of the time, brooding and quiet and only emerging to debunk theories and criticise current practice, Gerald was Torchwood, the centre-point around which they all revolved. Gerald knew everything, he'd read everything, he'd seen everything, and unlike Jack, he could admit to it all as well.
"Now that sounds like you." Gerald tilted his head to one side. "So what do you think is going on?"
"The Rift," Jack said at once, surprised at how sure he sounded. "It's got to be. I saw something, just before I ended up here. I don't know what it was, but it didn't belong here."
"Do you think something came through? Or was it the Rift itself?"
These were the right questions, Jack was sure. He just wasn't sure he knew the answers. "I don't think it was the Rift exactly," he said slowly. "Your theory sounds better, with something coming through that we couldn't detect, then it reacting to fluctuations in Rift activity and pinballing me around in time."
"Pinball?"
"Never mind."
Apparently content to let the anachronism go for now, Gerald nodded thoughtfully. "It's certainly one possibility, although there are others."
"Such as?" When Gerald didn't say anything, just kept up that steady look, Jack frowned. "You think I'm doing it?"
"Are you?"
This time, Jack hesitated. He wanted to say 'no', but something stirred at the back of his mind, stopping him. "Not on purpose," he said at last. "I mean, things aren't exactly a rose garden where I'm from, and it's not like I haven't wanted out. Everyone does, at some point." Except you, he didn't add. Jack had come close to walking out on this job at least three times over the years, and someone had talked him out of it every time. One of those times, it had been Gerald, although Jack wasn't sure if that had happened yet.
"You've always stayed," Gerald said, as though reading Jack's mind. "You stayed with Torchwood when Alice was killed. You stayed when everyone thought you were crazy, talking about the Rift the way you did. You even stayed when Harriet died and everyone thought I was going to get them killed as well."
"Like that would bother me." The words came easily, but there was a seriousness in Gerald's eyes that was making Jack uncomfortable.
"Maybe so." Leaning back in his chair, Gerald wrapped his hands around his glass. "But you don't seem too keen to get back to your Torchwood. The Jack I know would be patching something together from an old radio and a pair of stockings, swearing or shooting at anyone who tried to interfere. You're making yourself comfortable, sitting in my chair, drinking my whiskey and asking stupid questions."
"They're not stupid." Jack looked away. In 1958, the wall to his left would be replaced with glass and he'd be able to see down into the Hub below. For now, he was looking at Gerald's collection of photographs, the Torchwood of Gerald's past, the past that had felt so far away to Jack, and was so real now. He closed his eyes. "You don't have what I need here. Not even silk stockings can make a Rift manipulator of the sensitivity I'd need. Is it so wrong to want to pass some time with an old friend?" And yes, that was all true. But it was also true that Jack didn't really have anything to go back to, no one to worry about him back in his own time. If there was no human activity in the Hub for seventy-two hours, the computer would send an automatic message to Torchwood One, and Yvonne would finally get her hands on the precious Rift manipulator that she was so jealous of. Maybe that would be better all round, except for how it left Jack bouncing backwards and forwards through time, unsure whether he was the living or the ghost.
"I'm not going to ask you when I die," Gerald said, with complete matter-of-factness, cutting through Jack's mounting self-pity. "But I'm assuming that by the time we get to your present, I'm long gone. If you want to talk to the dead, Jack, call a medium. If you want to get home, do something about it."
"Like what?" Angry now, Jack turned back to Gerald. "I was brought here, Gerald. This wasn't my idea."
"Do you think if you say that enough times you can make it true?" Gerald held up a hand, forestalling Jack's objections. "From what you've told me, Jack, nothing happened with the Rift. All that happened was that it spiked and you were moved in time. Then you were moved in time again."
"I saw something," Jack said quickly, making Gerald raise his eyebrows. "I didn't think..." He ran a hand through his hair. "It was just a glow, like a really faint light. Nothing really."
"In this place? When is it ever nothing?"
That was a fair question. "So what? Next time I should go into the light?"
"It might be a good start." Gerald took a long swig of his drink. "I'm not saying this is the answer, Jack, but at the moment, you're not doing anything. Doing something has to be better, surely."
"Either that, or it'll suck the whole Earth into the Rift, rip it to shreds and kill all life on this planet."
Gerald's bark of laughter was so familiar that Jack felt the last of his anger melt away. It had been too long since Jack had heard anyone laugh, let alone a good friend.
"Well," Gerald said, glancing towards the bottle on his desk, "since our equipment is too primitive for you to work with-"
"Hey, I never said that," Jack protested, but he returned Gerald's smile. "You guys will get there."
"I don't suppose you care to give us a head start?"
Already shaking his head, Jack opened his mouth to answer, then stopped. Behind Gerald, in the corner of the room, one of the lamps was starting to flicker. A second later, it began to glow more brightly.
Jack was already on his feet, staring at it, when it suddenly went out, leaving him blinking against the spots in his vision.
"Don't move."
Wonderful. Jack didn't recognise the voice, but it sounded like it was holding a gun. Very slowly, he held his hands away from his sides and began to turn around.
"Listen," he began, hoping that his voice at least might be recognised, "this isn't what it looks like."
"The hell it isn't," the woman with the gun said, and shot him in the head.