Work Text:
17 April 1956
Jack walks into a pub where the air is thick with the sweet-acrid scent of cigarette smoke. It clings to the walls, creating a yellowish hue that isn’t just a trick of old photographs, in the future. The smell catches in the steam and smoke from frying oil, and the scent of alcohol, fresh from the glass and stale on breath, and heaven help any children who happen to be clinging to mothers’ skirt tails or hiding behind father’s liquor habit for the night, waiting to go home. Their hair and clothing will make them smell like a future they might wish to escape but which will follow them around like scent.
He spots a woman sitting on a bar stool, alone, one leg crossed over the knee of the other as she sits side-saddle because no one’s sitting next to her. It serves as a very small barrier, or else an invitation to any man bold enough to invade her space. She lightly swings her ankle in a way that may or may not be in time with the music that plays from the radio protectively perched on a high shelf in the corner. It is playing a lively song in the background. Something sort of new and popular and pleasant.
The woman holds a wine glass in her fingers like she needs the weight there for some reason. She stares into the half-finished red, like it should warm like brandy. Her eyes peer into the blood-colored liquid like she’s scrying for something in it.
🙧
Susan stares into the wine glass with too much clarity for this time of night. It’s already pushing 10:00 in the evening, and when she peers into the cheap red wine, she sees magic and glitter that should be gone from the world. Her painted lips quirk upward at something that is anything but a joke as she weighs the glass in her hand and the thought of drinking some more on her relatively empty stomach. At least dreamless sleep might await her then.
She brings the glass to her lips and downs the rest of it save for a few ornamental drops that fall back to the bottom when she has painted another mauve crescent against the glass with her mouth.
“Oi,” she says, a bit too gruff for her ladylike dress. “Adam,” she calls to the barkeep – the first and last man she wants to see tonight. “May I have another glass, please?” she asks, demeanor shifting from irreverent to poised without any stutter between the two states. Why should she ever stumble between the profane and propriety? It had only been a stumble into a piece of wooden furniture or a lucky break that she was not on a train for her. A promise kept, a promise broken.
“Sure thing, Susan. Is that three or four?” he asks.
“It’s your accounting, not mine,” Susan replies. She’d gladly pay for an extra glass, just the same as she’d take one for free. It makes little difference as long as she keeps her wits about her enough to walk back to her empty, silent flat, in which no one will ring or write her. She stopped letting boys know enough to call her at home years ago. It hadn’t helped.
🙧
“Susan, was it?” Jack asks as he comes up to the bar, contritely letting the woman know he’d been eavesdropping a little. He shrugs off his coat and takes it by the back of the collar to drop it over the chair back as he selects one of the bar stools which is equipped with a built-up wooden frame. He catches ‘Susan’ looking up at him with a hard look as if affronted by impertinence. He supposes he can’t blame her. “Howdy there, miss,” he greets for a second time, imitating the affect of popular Westerns of the era. “This seat taken?”
She opens her mouth to object, but then she pauses as she glances at the stool directly next to her.
Jack hasn’t touched that one. He has, instead, politely left one free between them.
She closes her lips and shakes her head as she quietly draws the next wine glass into her hand, relinquishing the last to be washed and pulled back into service.
“For you, sir?” Adam the barkeep asks with a warm insistence that suggests Jack is welcome so long as he’s buying something.
“Whatever you’ve got on tap. And the lady’s last or next is on me,” Jack offers with equal warmth.
“That won’t be necessary,” Susan drawls, as much affect as it is drunkenness.
Jack can see that she’s trying to be drunker than she is while still drinking slowly. She looks well-put-together and well-made-up. Her pantyhose match her milky skin tone. Her hair is worn long but pinned up in the practical false-trim of the day. The little bulge of dark, pinned-up hair at the back of her neck accentuates the pearl earrings she wears with little dangly baubles that are casually elegant. She wears a long women’s blazer, a bit tailored at the shoulders, waist, and hem in a way that suggests she is willing to push her way into the realm of menswear-inspired fashion of her era.
Judging by her appearance, Jack presumes that she is not married – no ring and no line where one used to be – and that no little pub urchin is likely to be hiding somewhere waiting for ‘mummy’ to take him or her home.
“Of course, I don’t mean to intrude,” Jack says.
“Oh, but isn’t that exactly what you mean to do?” Susan asks with a forced chuckle that is as much punctuation as response. It seems to carry with it a right to be irritated with him. He sort of likes it, because it means she isn’t falling over herself to impress him. She isn’t boring or terribly taken with his accent or the way he always seems both out of place and exactly in the right place at the right time to most people.
Susan takes another sip of her wine and looks down into it again. She snorts to herself at another private joke.
“Can you blame me – a guy who’s alone – for trying to chat up a pretty girl who’s alone?” Jack suggests wryly, going for self-deprecating.
“I’m hardly a girl. A woman twice over,” Susan says.
The phrase catches Jack off-guard. Sometimes, he is going about his very, very long life, bored and just trying to blend in with the local color. Starving himself and depriving himself of social interaction certainly won’t kill him. He’s tried to let it. It isn’t a nice way to go or to come back. However, the longer he remains himself an anomaly, the more it seems to him that other anomalies have a way of finding their way to him. It’s like some sort of magnetism or law of physics that he can only meet so many normal, ordinary people before another strange one finds him, mindless and in the dark about what’s happening most of the time.
He wonders if it’s just a strange turn of phrase. An expression of world-weariness. Or if it’s something more.
Jack regards the woman with more respect and interest than before. Something less than casual. There is a softness there, as much as there’s a curiosity that’s clamoring for the right question.
Susan catches him looking at her and blinks a few times. She snorts again, softly, in a way that seems to make him less dignified by the moment, rather than to make her less elegant in her demeanor.
“Cat got your tongue?” she asks when his searching silence seems to have overstayed its welcome.
Jack shakes himself out of philosophical pondering and forces himself to say the next-best-thing to the right thing as soon as it comes to mind.
“I’m just wondering the most polite way to ask if there’s something in particular you’re trying to drink away this evening,” he blurts, hoping that the armor of his misplaced accent will beg apology if it offends her too much. For a second, it looks like it does, and he wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d ended up with a handbag to the head. Upon closer inspection, she seems to carry a larger bag, like a briefcase, rather than a small handbag. While he’s sizing up its weight and likelihood to really hurt as a weapon, she moves her pump-heeled foot against a cross-beam support of the barstool’s legs and clears her throat.
“Are you here to join the fray, if I am?”
“Something like that, yeah,” Jack says, leaping at the opportunity to not have this conversation go even further out into the domain of death that he can only ever imagine or taste at its cusp before being spit back out into warm, sticky life itself.
Susan chuckles to herself.
“Have a seat and drink. Share as you like. If you say something interesting enough, I might share something mad in turn,” she offers, fixing her gaze forward over the bar and at nothing in particular.
Jack catches Adam’s warning look as he accepts his cold pint of beer at last. It seems as if the woman might be a regular from the vaguely protective but not particularly lecherous air this Adam has about her.
“So, what brings you to London?” she asks.
Jack is taken out of the moment just enough to wonder how she knows. Then it hits him. Again. When he’s not playing a part, it’s hard not to think of himself as something that belongs simply by merit of having been around these isles for so long. But the accent sticks, unless he’s making a point of playing someone other than this particular part which has hovered around him for so long, until it’s almost like the one he was born into.
“Ah, you gathered I’m not from around here.”
“You sound American.”
“And if I say I’m not?”
“Canadian, I’d guess, though I somehow doubt it,” Susan replies with a sigh. Another sip of wine.
Politely, Jack drinks his beer for a moment to even up the odds.
“What if I said neither of those?” Jack presses, for some reason curious enough to see if there’s something more to this woman or if he’s just really bored.
“Australian of some extraction I’ve never met, though again… I’m betting American.”
“What are we betting?”
“Another beer?” Susan offers before he can laugh it off as a joke.
Jack realizes he isn’t joking. For some reason, she isn’t joking.
“Uh. Nah. You don’t have to do that. Let’s just say I’m here on business, but my business is mostly around Cardiff these days,” he says quickly.
Despite their mutual refusal to accept buying each other a drink, another beer and another glass of wine arrive in due course. Jack doesn’t worry about the accounting of it. It’s still within such reasonable bounds that he can even pay the man without resorting to psychic paper.
For a few moments, they chat around the general ideas of their jobs without many details being given. She gets the idea that he travels for work for some business interest based in Cardiff in exchange for his getting the impression that she works in an office, making herself indispensable with a typewriter and a good manner at a desk without doing anything that will leave a dent in history. He begins to believe that the moment he had thought she’d been strange had been false familiarity. But then.
Jack is laughing, and while being drunk isn’t really on the horizon, he feels enough of the alcohol to feel a tiny bit warmer than before, like the universe might be a little friendlier to him as he is.
“What if I told you I’m not even from the same planet as an American?” Jack finds himself saying in the midst of a conversation that had somehow seemed to flow in that direction.
Only, it seems that he has entirely misread the flow of the conversation, because he runs into a great big dam with Susan’s eyes going wide and too sober to continue speaking. Suddenly, her heavy bag is hoisted up, and she’s walking out the door, and he has no idea what about that question – which would have been stupid, drunken nonsense to any completely uninformed and ordinary person – has her running away.
He stands and wheels himself around, about to run after her, when the barkeep gruffly reminds him that he doesn’t have a tab.
After quickly throwing down some cash, Jack hits the door of the pub and looks left and right. The street isn’t very busy, but there are enough people about for him to panic for a moment that he might have lost sight of her forever. She had only given him a first name, and he knows that London has more than one way of eating people and connections alive.
Then, he lays eyes on her, through a drizzly haze, her back to a wall beneath the shelter and overhang and shadow of a building and set of stairs, a quick jog up the road.
🙧
Susan doesn’t know why the man who calls himself Jack is so easy to talk to at first. She also doesn’t know why it makes her feel so betrayed when he goes and says something like that, completely catching her off-guard and throwing aside any blanket of protection the evening of drinking wine had provided.
‘What if I told you I’m not even from the same planet as an American?’
Planet. Planet. Not world . Susan leans back against the jagged and worn brick of a building after she finds a dark enough place to feel like she can fade from the reality and perception of this world for a moment.
She smacks herself softly on the forehead with her off hand as the other grips the handle of her briefcase and tests its weight. She glances back the way she had come without really seeing anything but movement. She turns this way and that, torn between going home and going back, seeing if that man is still there so she can convince him and can convince herself that she’s not crazy.
Then, in the whirl of movement she had given herself in her indecision, she sees the heavy billow of his long jacket. It looks like a relic from the war.
“You followed me,” she says, going still and feeling very awake and rigid and sober as she goes over the reasons a man follows a woman in this world in particular. Not that it had been unheard of in the other one. Stop it, Susan . There is no other world. There never was.
She presses her lips into a tight line, and her teeth press down within until it hurts. The discomfort is grounding and keeps her focused through any sense of intoxication she might have otherwise enjoyed.
“Only because I want to know why that spooked you,” Jack says. He puts his hands up, palms out, near his head, in a gesture of surrender.
Possessed by some kind of desperation to make herself feel safe again, or at least in control of the danger, Susan lunges forward into his space while his hands are up. She reaches for the interior pockets and pats along any hiding place she can think of from his chest to his belt.
Jack takes a shaky breath that might sound a bit like laughter or a sigh. He keeps his hands up.
“Oh, that these were better circumstances,” he jokes.
“Be quiet,” she orders him. Then she feels it. She only just caresses it, unwilling to pull it out on the street, even at night. Her eyes shoot up to look at Jack’s.
“You have a gun,” she says.
Jack shakes his head and speaks to her calmly.
“Just an old soldier. Don’t worry about it,” he says.
She raises her eyebrows at him, wondering if that excuse over such a weapon has ever worked.
“You can even borrow it for the evening if it makes you feel better. And I promise, you can be more thorough with your search if we go someplace a little more appropriate for such interrogations.”
Susan scoffs and backs away, her hands empty. She rubs her hands on her blazer and picks up her dropped briefcase from the ground and huffs. She isn’t sure if she even minds if he takes out a gun.
What does she care? What does it matter?
Perhaps it would be joining them.
Perhaps it would be quiet. It would be peace. Forevermore.
And the people around her are not subjects, and they are not friends. She owes them nothing.
“An old soldier from which war?” she asks with faintly bitter skepticism.
“Yours,” he says simply.
She knows which he means, and she shakes her head. She looks down. It’s almost disappointing.
“Susan,” Jack pleads, and she wonders what he could be pleading with her for. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? “I just want to know why me mentioning other planets sent you running when inappropriate flirting didn’t.”
“Inappropriate flirting was always my way of coping with it,” she says vaguely. He won’t know what she means, so what does it matter?
“I promise nothing you can say to me would be met with unkindness unless you’re a threat to national – and thereby planetary – security,” Jack says, and he gives her a wry little salute. She hates salutes, but it’s hard to begrudge him it when it looks so sincere. She smirks wearily.
She shakes her head again and looks down.
“There’s absolutely no way you’d believe me,” she promises.
She hasn’t breathed a word of it to anyone. Not for seven years. Not since each of them was gone in an afternoon. In an instant, she has to hope, even if it seems cruel to hope that it was quick rather than terrifying. Even before that, she’d refused to speak about it with them for years. And oh, how she has regretted that since. Even words of argument would have been words. Would have been speech, connection, intimacy. Would have been being known rather than slipping away into the unknown , forever and without forgiveness.
Her throat starts to ache and close as if to speak of it would be too sacred for her secular tongue to manage to speak anymore. Her eyes burn, and she feels her face start to screw up like that of a disappointed child. She has no mirror, but she can remember the way Lucy used to look as if the entire world had lost all its beauty in her cherubic features when anything broke her heart.
The fact that she could remember the visage of a woman in those features, rather than only the face of a girl, was one of the only proofs of it that she could entertain anymore without feeling dirty in a way that no one in this country would ever forgive or understand.
She tries to push it away as she desperately fumbles under the flap of her briefcase for her handkerchief.
She finds it and dabs her face. She tries to hide her eyes before she feels Jack touch her elbow.
She instinctively jerks away from it.
Oh, how she had despised touch for months and years afterward.
She isn’t sure she’s ever truly gotten over it.
“Sorry,” Jack says when she refuses to let him guide her by the arm. “We can go sit somewhere. Outside. Neutral. No judgment,” he promises.
She doesn’t know if she ever really agreed to it when they find a public bench and sit down in view of a tree, somewhere children might play if it weren’t ticking on toward midnight.
She blinks through the blur of unshed tears and tucks her briefcase under her arm, making with it some shelter and warmth against her body made of leather rather than of human touch.
“Take your time. I’ve got all day. All night. Forever. Trust me,” Jack rattles off as if trying to distract her. She wipes her eyes again and keeps them closed for a long moment, breathing in and out, slow and deep. She appreciates what he’s doing, even if it’s misguided.
At least he’s some kind of foreigner and isn’t likely to convince anyone she’s insane in any legally consequential way.
And the treacherous thought occurs to her again: what would it matter if he did? Perhaps the asylum is less lonely than a one-bedroom flat.
🙧
Susan finally exhales in a way that Jack thinks means she’s about to tell him the truth. Whatever it is, he can tell that she holds it close to her chest and that she thinks she has a good reason to do so. He looks over at her as though her story is the only thing that matters. For now, he decides, it’s the only thing that does. Even if it turns out to be a crazy story, he has the time.
“When I was a child, we were sent away. From the city. Out into the countryside,” she begins.
Jack’s mind fills in the gaps. As much as he isn’t from this country and doesn’t even pretend to be, as much as he isn’t from this planet, he’s been to that time and place more than once. He finds himself offering horror story fill-ins that could make someone react badly to reminders of that time. To reminders, even, of the mercy of escape.
“We?” he prompts, trying to paint a clearer picture.
“My two brothers and my sister. One brother was older than me, one younger, and my sister was the youngest,” she says.
Jack picks up on the use of the past tense, and he is familiar enough with stories about death to assume the worst. He waits and looks at her, rather than being uncouth enough to ask. He tries to get eye contact as they sit side by side on the bench.
“They died,” she says. “All at once. In a railway accident in 1949.” It sounds as clinical as can be, even though her voice is shaking. She studies his eyes, and though they shine, none of her tears fall as she speaks the truth of it.
It doesn’t explain why mentioning being from another planet in the most oblique of ways would have freaked her out, but it does explain the trauma. The wine. The evening alone. The recklessness. She’s shell-shocked, as they say.
“I’m… really… very sorry, Susan,” Jack says. He uses her name. Someone had once taught him the importance of asking for and of using their names, even if they’ll be strangers soon. Even if they’ll be dead soon. Even if they’ll be forgotten by everyone but you. Always ask their names, even if you will forget someday. Even if you can’t.
The silence lingers for a moment, and she looks away from him abruptly as if angered. He can’t blame her.
“I know that doesn’t mean much of anything, coming from a stranger…”
“It feels like they were murdered,” she says.
Jack stops. He senses that they are almost to the bulk of the matter, whatever it is.
“I know it’s crazy. I know it was an accident. Trains derail. Human error accounts for much of human tragedy. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t matter . But I feel like they were taken from me by a cruel god, and that I was left behind by a god even more bent on cruelty!”
She is so breathless and looking at him with desperation afterward that Jack senses this is the first time she has given words to the thought. He can’t tell if she means a cruel God, as in the Christian God commonly worshiped in this country, or if she means a god as a metaphor or a force of nature. He doesn’t think the theological hypothetical matters much to the rage she feels at being left behind. He had fought his own battle against the feeling of being left behind, to live on, by a cruel god of his own.
He sits with her. After a moment, he reaches out to push a lock of hair that had fallen loose from its neat pinning behind her shoulder. She glances down, either seeing or feeling it, and her exhale tells him that she accepts the gesture, whether or not it is of any comfort.
“Can you… I mean, do you want to tell me why it feels like they were murdered?”
“Well… it’s… You see, when we were sent away to the Professor’s house, when we were young, there was this… wardrobe…” she explains.
She spends a few moments telling him a story about playing hide and seek. How her little sister, the most innocent of them, and how her younger brother, the troubled one, had found their way first into the back of the wardrobe which had, in turned out, been bigger on the inside .
Jack finds himself feeling a little dizzy and on the verge of nausea, laughter, or both.
‘The Professor,’ is it?
There is no way it could be him, and yet it wouldn’t surprise him. He knows that the other Time Lords had adopted a similar nomenclature for their titles, typically. At least, that was the way they parsed in brains that were thinking in English. He can’t help but wonder.
He doesn’t do it on purpose when he reaches over and places his hand on Susan’s forearm. She looks at him as if it’s unexpected, but she doesn’t behave as though it’s entirely unwelcome. She’s a little tense, but she doesn’t shake off his touch.
“Please. Please don’t think I’m mad. I’ve convinced myself I’m mad for years. I told them I didn’t believe them! And then they died. And I’m sure that they thought they were going back there, and I’m not even sure if there exists! If it even can exist. It seems impossible. Wouldn’t science have suggested such a thing were possible, if it were?” Susan says breathlessly.
Jack lifts his free hand in a gentle, placating gesture and then lowers it down so as not to seem patronizing.
“I promise I don’t think you’re crazy. And if you’ve got the time, I think I can… tell you why…”