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mhalachaiAnd then I went crazy and wrote this.
Summary: No matter how long he searched, no matter how much he hoped, Jack Harkness never expected to see Grey again.
Disclaimer: Russell T. Davis and the BBC own Torchwood. Laurel K. Hamilton owns Anita Blake. Crossovers own me.
Rating: PG-13
Setting/Spoilers: Set after Torchwood 2x06, "Reset" (the most recent episode in the UK, and spoilers for that due to a certain thing), and spoilers for characters revealed in Torchwood 2x05, "Adam". It's ten years "after canon" for Anita Blake, because the books started in 1994 and I say so.
Characters/Pairings: Jack Harkness and Team Torchwood (TW) and Nathaniel Graison (AB)
Words: 9,035
Notes: Yes, I am going *there*. Author notes on this one are at the end of the story because I feel the need to explain myself for once.
~~~
Jack shoved his hands into his coat pockets. The wet fingers of the inevitable downpour crept down his collar, and he wished, not for the first time, that the Rift had opened in the French Riviera, not rainy, dreary Cardiff.
Yet here they were, standing around the mangled corpse of an alien. What they didn't know was if the thing came through the Rift alive and was killed here, or if the corpse slipped through after death.
Jack really, really hoped for the latter.
Gwen scraped blood samples off the ground while Toshiko took pictures with the camera. Ianto spoke quietly with the police officers holding back the gawkers, while Jack...
He sighed. While he stood around, lost in thought about how much he needed his doctor. Only this year, he wasn't thinking of the Timelord.
He'd been alive for almost two hundred years, had been losing people he loved since that day when he'd let go of his brother's hand, had seen his father's body shattered in the sand. Jack would be alive forever, would lose everyone in the end, and still he could barely believe how much it hurt to lose someone under his care.
Someone for whom he was responsible.
Someone whose death he hadn't been able to prevent.
Someone for whom he should have taken the fucking bullet.
The rain trickled down his collar and the tattered remains of Torchwood scraped together the last moments of the dead alien, and he knew that he would lose them all, the same way he'd lost Owen. The same way he lost everyone else for whom he was responsible, starting with his little brother Grey all those years ago.
Jack frowned. Ever since that day when Torchwood woke up missing forty-eight hours, Jack hadn't been able to rid himself of the nagging memories of his brother. Part of it he could put at the feet of 'Captain John Hart', with those bullshit last words about finding Grey. But Jack suspected that was nothing but a smokescreen. Jack had bounced around the universe, back and forth through times and worlds, and he'd never found a single trace of Grey, living or dead.
That didn't explain why he couldn't get his little red-headed brother out of his mind.
Beside the body, Gwen put the last sample into a plastic bag. She closed the lid on her little box as she stood. The rattle of the stretcher behind him pulled Jack out of his mental fog.
Without many words, the team hoisted the body onto the stretcher. Tosh quietly covered the blue furry face with the edge of the body bag.
One day it'll be her, Jack thought as Ianto and Gwen moved the stretcher into the little-used Torchwood van. Sooner or later I'll bag and tag them all, and whoever comes after them, until I can't take it anymore.
Ianto came over to Jack. "Do you want me to go talk to the police before we go?" he asked. His normally combed hair was flattened with rain. Jack wanted to kiss him to prove they were still alive, crime scene propriety be damned, but managed to restrain himself. "Or should I send Gwen? Her old partner Andy is manning the blockade."
Jack blinked the water out of his eyes. "I'll go."
Ianto raised his eyebrows. "All right," he said. Still, Jack didn't move for a minute. "Would you like us to meet you back at the Hub?"
Jack gave Ianto a look. "What did I ever do to you?" he asked.
The corner of Ianto's mouth quirked, and suddenly Jack wanted to laugh. Ianto had such a knack for dragging him back from melancholy.
"Right, sir," Ianto said smoothly. "One more thing."
"Yeah?"
"You seem to have an admirer." Ianto gestured towards the police blockade. "A young man, over by the light standard. He's been staring at you for some time."
Jack stood up a little straighter, ignoring the cold air rushing in his collar. "Is that a fact?"
"Indeed." Ianto smirked, just a little. "Don't delay us too long."
"Would I keep you guys out in the rain?" Jack asked, just to see Ianto roll his eyes. "I'll go talk to Andy and see if I can do anything for my stalker."
Ianto sighed. "I'll have Gwen move the van."
Jack was still chuckling as he turned around to scan the crowd for the young man. A few people were still looking at the scene from underneath umbrellas, with mild displays of interest. Jack's eyes moved along the line of bystanders, almost lazily, until--
I let go of his hand. It was the worst day of my life.
--until Jack saw Grey.
The world moved a fraction to the left, refracted and inverted and left Jack unable to breathe.
Grey.
His brother Grey stood at the edge of the police tape, drenched in the downpour.
This wasn't the ghost Jack had been seeing for weeks, not the curious little boy dressed in the clothing of the Boeshane Peninsula. He was older than when Jack had last seen him, chin-length auburn hair plastered to his face by the rain and he had changed but Jack still knew him, would always know him.
As Jack stared at him, Grey's eyes grew huge in his pale face. A frozen eternity passed in a moment, then the van trundled across the road, breaking the moment.
When the path was clear again, Grey had vanished.
Jack stumbled across the road, his feet heavy as lead, catching on the edges of the crumbling pavement. The air had closed in around the spot where Grey had stood, smoothing over the possibilities and broken hopes as if nothing had ever stood there.
A flash of yellow and black out of the corner of Jack's eye, then Gwen's old partner, Andy stood in Jack's way. "Can we re-open the road now?" he was asking. "You've got all you need?"
Jack blinked. "What?"
The now-familiar bemused expression settled on Andy's face. "Can we re-open the road to foot-traffic?" he asked slowly. He must have seen something in Jack's face, for the amusement faded quickly. "Are you all right? You're looking as if you've seen a ghost."
Jack had to say something about his brother who couldn't possibly have been there, who had been lost so many years before...
... only Ianto had seen him first, and while Ianto was many things, he wasn't psychic and he didn't know of Jack's ghosts.
Andy turned Jack's world upside down by saying, "Are you looking for that bloke who was standing right here?"
Jack's head snapped around. "Did you see where he went?" he demanded.
Andy took a step back. "He went down that alley," he said, pointing. "He was going pretty fast. Do you think he's a suspect?"
But Jack was already moving. The overhead light had faded into early twilight, casting everything into shadow. Every step Jack took threatened to pull him further away from fragile hope pounding in his chest, but he kept moving against the centuries of guilt and loss.
At the end of the fenced-off alley stood a lone body, leaning against a rough wall. Jack's steps slowed. Uncertainty gnawed at his guts. If this wasn't Grey...
But the boy-- no, a young man, had reacted to the sight of Jack. He had known Jack and that was almost enough for Jack.
The man was breathing unsteadily, his eyes closed against the world. Jack stopped. Up close, the man looked both younger and older than Jack had initially thought. How old was he? How long had it been for him, how many years?
And how was he here? Now?
Distant sounds pushed at Jack's attention, but he willed himself to ignore them. This was all that mattered. A few minutes before, he had been thinking about how he had all the time in the universe, but now the seconds were slipping away through his fingers and he didn't know how to hold on.
The man opened his eyes, haunted blue-violet eyes, and stared at Jack.
"Jack?" a voice came from behind him. It was Gwen's voice, and in that instant he hated her for being there, for taking this moment away from him. "Jack, what's going on?"
Grey started at the sound of her voice. He took a step back, then another. Jack knew he was a moment shy of fleeing, and that he couldn't bear. He reached out and grabbed the man's arm, a solid weight under that expensive leather jacket.
Grey went still.
"Jack?" Now Gwen and Ianto were both in the corners of his vision, their guns drawn and pointed at the ground. Jack pushed them out of his mind.
"Grey?" Jack whispered, his voice cracking on the word. Grey jerked back, but Jack didn't let go of his arm. "I thought..." He felt a smile cross his lips. "I thought I'd never see you again."
If anything, Grey went even paler. "I saw you die," he said faintly. A fine tremor ran up his arm. "I saw Dad smash your head in, how..."
Jack tightened his grip on Grey's arm. "What are you talking about?" he demanded. "Dad never lifted a hand against either of us! Grey--"
"Stop calling me that!" Grey wretched his arm out of Jack's grasp.
Quicksilver fear ran down Jack's spine. Grey had moved more quickly than any human ought to be able, than was allowed by the laws of physics and the limitations of the human body, even as enhanced as those bodies had been by the fifty-first century.
"What's your name?" Gwen said conversationally.
Grey didn't answer.
"I'm Gwen," the woman went on. "Do you know Jack here?"
A slight frown creased Grey's forehead, and he glanced momentarily at Gwen. "That's not his name," he said.
"What's his name, then?" Gwen asked.
Grey blinked hard. He wiped the rain from his face, and as Jack watched, a faint ghost of silver ran though those eyes. The young man looked lost for a long moment, then said, "He's Nicky."
The childish ghost of his baby brother's voice, unable to pronounce the hard consonants in Nhiktay, echoed in Jack's head. His first-name, the name of his mother's father, he had left behind when he first took up arms for the Time Agency. He hadn't heard that name in almost twenty decades, and now to have it laid bare at his feet...
"Nicky?" Gwen was saying. "That's a nice name." She let her gun fall to her side. "What's your name?"
Grey's eyes went back to fix on Jack's face. "Nathaniel."
Gwen inched forward. "It's nice to meet you, Nathaniel." She put her gun up, which at any other might have worried Jack except that out of the corner of his eye he could see Ianto at the ready. "We know him," Gwen nodded at Jack, "as Jack."
Grey, or Nathaniel, or whatever the hell he was calling himself, looked around him. Jack knew the instant he realized he was being circled. Grey's eyes grew wild and flashed silver. "I saw you die," Grey said again, voice rising in anger. "You died for me and I was alone for years and you don't get to just come back to life like this!"
Before Jack could say a thing, Grey whirled and bolted for the blind-end of the alley. The fence was too high for any human to jump; even a Weevil would have a hard time getting over it, but Grey pulled himself up effortlessly and was over the top of the fence and down the other side of the alley before anyone could move.
He moved too quickly to be allowed. The way he'd moved wasn't human.
Ianto took a step towards the fence. "Do we go after him?" he demanded. Jack looked at him. "Jack? Are we going after him?"
"Andy said he might be a suspect," Gwen put in. She turned to look at Jack, all wide empathic eyes and straggly wet hair and suddenly, violently, Jack didn't want to hear what she was about to say. "But he's not, is he?"
Jack pushed his hair off his forehead. Grey had come back into his life and then had run out again and Jack couldn't think. "Where the hell is Tosh?" he demanded. Looking out for his team was second-nature and he didn't know where Tosh was and that was enough to bring him back.
"She's in the van," Ianto said.
"Who was that, Jack?" Gwen pressed.
Jack looked down the alley for a long moment, at the last place he had seen his baby brother, all grown up. Then he turned away. "Let's get back to the Hub."
"Jack, who is Grey?"
Gwen's voice chased him down the alley, pushing and picking at wounds Jack hadn't even known he had.
"Jack!"
~~~
He ignored Gwen all the way back to the Hub, choosing to treat traffic laws as suggestions instead of rules. He parked the van and was out the door before the engine had completely stopped. Let the others deal with the alien body.
That plan lasted all of three minutes. Back underground, Gwen, Tosh and Ianto crowded into the doorway of Jack's office, looking more like drowned rats than Earth's best defense against alien invasion.
They stared at him for a while he tried in vain to access the city's CCTV. Finally, Tosh spoke. "It might go faster if you let me help," she said softly. She edged toward his desk. "Jack, let me help?"
Jack didn't stop typing. "Get out of my office. All of you."
No one moved.
"I said get out!" Jack exclaimed. He shot to his feet, looming over Tosh. She flinched but didn't back away.
"Jack, who's Grey?" Gwen asked yet again.
He transferred his glare from Tosh to Gwen. He smiled humorlessly at her. "None of your damned business."
"It is our fucking business!" Gwen snapped, stalking across the office. "First John Hart says he's found 'Grey', then this young man appeared at an alien crime scene and you insist that he's Grey but he refuses that, and he keep saying he saw you die! Who the hell is he?"
Three long steps across the office and Jack had Gwen backed against the wall. He shoved his hands against the wall on either side of her head. He wanted to hit something and Gwen was so very conveniently there, but he refused to walk down that road. Not now, not ever.
She stared up at him, defiant and angry. But not scared. Never scared.
For a moment, he hated himself. All the time in the world and never able to fix a fucking thing.
He glared down at Gwen. "If I tell you that he's my brother, which of you win the pool?"
Gwen swallowed hard. "Pool? What pool are you talking--"
Jack slapped the wall by her head. "You know what pool I'm talking about."
From behind them, Tosh's voice slid through the air. "Owen did." Her breath hitched. "Owen thought... he was the one who bet Grey was your brother."
Slowly, Jack stepped away from Gwen. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that Ianto stood beside Tosh, his hand on her shoulder. The glare in his eyes was all for Jack.
The fight going out of him, Jack went back to his chair to resume his battle with the CCTV recordings.
Tosh took a deep breath. "Jack, let me do that," she said again.
His hands stilled on the keyboard. He felt so tired, more tired than he had in a very long time. Too tired to fight with the only people he had left in the world, other than his changeling brother. Still, it took him a minute to say, "Fine."
He trailed down the steps from his office after Tosh, down to her bank of computers. She slipped out of her wet coat as she took her place before the monitors. Jack perched on the nearby rails, unable to stop himself from hunching over. It was a defensive posture and he knew it, but he'd been through too much and he didn't know how the hell to stop it.
With almost obscene ease, Tosh pulled up the CCTV monitors around the crime scene and retrieved the footage from the confrontation. Jack almost didn't recognize himself on the screen.
Tosh's fingers danced as she followed Grey's movements, down the alley and through the streets of Cardiff with the CCTV cameras. In under ten minutes, she showed the final moments when Grey turned in out of the rain and into a hotel lobby.
"He might be a guest there," Tosh murmured. "What name would he be under?"
"Try Nathaniel," Gwen suggested. Jack refused to look at her. "He sounded American. Sort of like Jack."
"Nathaniel," Tosh murmured. She hacked into the hotel registration system and scrolled through the list. "This might be him," she said in a minute. She pointed at the screen. Gwen crowded in, but Jack hung back. "Nathaniel Graison. Place of residence, St. Louis, United States."
Gwen frowned, hanging over Tosh's shoulder. "He's thirty-one years old? He didn't look nearly that old. I'd have said he wasn't any older than twenty-four."
Thirty-one years old. Jack had lost Grey when Grey was just six years old. Twenty-five years had passed for Grey, while for Jack...
Jack couldn't stay still. He slipped off the rails and walked across the catwalk, around the Hub, wet boots hard on the metal grating, the only stable thing in the world under his feet.
"If he's from St. Louis, I can probably check customs records," Tosh said brightly. "If he came into the country around the same time as he checked into the hotel, I can--"
Tosh's voice stopped sharply, at the same instant as Gwen's startled gasp filled the air. Jack whirled. Both women were staring in varying degrees of horror at Tosh's screens.
Jack didn't know how he got back across the floor, but the next thing he knew, he was beside the computers. "What?" he demanded.
Tosh's eyes were wide. "He's... he's in the country on a medical waver. Section 15-C."
Jack felt as if he'd been punched. It all made sense suddenly. The silvering eyes, the too-fast movement...
According to U.K. Customs, Nathaniel Graison was a self-declared lycanthrope.
"It has to be one of the lesser contagious types," Ianto murmured. He pried himself away from the wall and came over, to type over Tosh's shoulder. "Parliament passed a law to stop admitting those with wolf-lycanthropy back when Harold Saxon was running for prime minister."
Ianto's typing produced the full visa record for Nathaniel Graison. At first, Jack wasn't sure what he was seeing. He knew that whenever anyone was admitted with a Section 15-C, the background paperwork was extensive, but the information in Nathaniel's visa record was beyond anything he'd seen in a customs file. A declaration of assets, a work history, and a juvenile criminal record that went on and on--
The screen went blank.
Jack jerked forward. "What--" He looked at Tosh. "Bring it back up!"
Tosh ducked her head, cheeks flaming pink. "I've transferred it up to your office. You don't need us reading it along with you."
Gwen looked as if she were about to object, but Ianto hit her in the arm and she kept her mouth shut.
"Oh. Right." Jack stuck his hands in his pockets, strangely reluctant to leave, to go learn things about his brother he couldn't unlearn. "So, the body from the crime scene..."
"We'll take care of it," Ianto said. Tosh was already working on CCTV records from the street where the alien had been found.
Feeling rather superfluous, Jack slowly went up to his office. The records on Nathaniel Graison were displayed on his screen, yet another example of Tosh's quiet brilliance. He could have sworn he'd turned the thing off before he left the building.
He could look at the files and figure out what had happened to Grey. Maybe the information would explain why he had lycanthropy.
Jack rubbed his hand over his eyes. He couldn't remember when he'd gotten his standard vaccinations as a child. Wasn't it before entering school? Or hadn't the medical ship been hijacked the year Grey started school? Two hundred years had pitted Jack's memory and he couldn't pick out the pieces that were suddenly very important.
Because if Grey hadn't been given the standard vaccinations, which contained the usual cocktail to counter any lycanthropic mutation, then the young man going by the name Nathaniel Graison...
I let go of his hand.
Disgusted with himself, Jack sat up in his chair and pulled the screen towards him. Two hundred years old, going to live forever, and time was running through his fingers. Every second he delayed, Grey might be running away.
~~~
The details of Nathaniel Graison's life were written in pain. He'd been found wandering among the slums in St. Louis in 1983, bruised and bloodied and unable to remember anything except vague shadows of seeing "Daddy hurting Nicky". The Missouri Children's Agency hadn't been able to find him an adoptive family -- he'd been so odd, smart and empathic and always watching. He bounced between foster homes until he was twelve, when he started living on the streets.
That was when the arrests for prostitution and drug possession began.
Five years later, the arrests stopped abruptly. Instead of assuring Jack, the sudden absence of Nathaniel Graison in the face of the law was quietly terrifying. It could have been so many things, but most likely Nathaniel had gotten himself mixed up with a dealer or a pimp who hadn't wanted to share Nathaniel with the police.
Things had gotten better in the last ten years, at least. Nathaniel Graison had a fair amount of money in his bank account, a steady job, and owned a small farm in rural Missouri, although Jack thought it was a little dodgy that a lycanthrope had a farm. Feeling a little numb, Jack opened up a business directory and typed in the name of Nathaniel's workplace. Guilty Pleasures sounded like one of those chocolate shops that sold Gwen birthday cakes every-so-often.
When Ianto came into the office a few minutes later, Jack was staring blankly at a website.
"Everything's in order downstairs," Ianto said. He deposited a cup of coffee and a bottle of water on Jack's desk. "Is there anything I can do?"
Jack tilted back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. A thousand suggestions flitted across his mind, some crass, some impossible. He settled for saying, "When is the UNIT doctor coming to help with the autopsy?"
"He'll arrive tomorrow morning." Ianto perched on the edge of Jack's desk. "There was a meeting in Paris he's having to tear himself away from."
"Yeah." Jack pursed his lips. "We need a new doctor."
Ianto leaned over a little to see Jack's screen. "I'll scan the files for any promising candidates," he said.
Jack looked at the man just in time to see his expression change as he realized what he was seeing. And then again, as he recognized the picture on the screen.
"Oh yeah," Jack said. "He's a male stripper in a St. Louis vampire strip club."
Ianto sat up straight. "I wouldn't know anything about that, sir."
"Vampire strip clubs?"
"St. Louis."
The sharp rhythm of the banter pulled Jack back from his memories. "You came in here for a reason, what was it?"
Ianto shrugged, just a little to mess the perfect lines of his suit. Only Ianto could come back in from a soaking in the rain and look that good. "I wanted to see if there was anything we could do."
"You can stop asking me if there's anything you can do." Jack got to his feet.
Ianto was unperturbed. "I have a cousin, she lives up near Pontypridd."
Having dug through Ianto's personal files after the Cyberman-girlfriend-in-the-basement incident, this was not news to Jack.
"She has a son, he's a few years young than me." Ianto smiled faintly. "He has wolf lycanthropy. He went to school up in Scotland for a while. And there are those rumours about the Royal family..."
Jack crossed his arms as he swung around to glare at Ianto. "This isn't about Nathaniel Graison being a lycanthrope."
Ianto blinked at Jack. "Then why are you still here?"
"Excuse me?"
"You know his hotel."
"Ianto--"
"Tosh thinks he might have seen something to do with the alien attack. He was at the crime scene for some time," Ianto said. "Of course, you could send Gwen to talk to him--"
"Hey, I'm still the boss here!"
"I never said you weren't." He paused, considering, and then tacked on, "Sir."
Jack wondered if Ianto was trying to make him feel like an ass, or if that was the guilt again. "What did Tosh say?"
"That Nathaniel Graison arrived at the scene shortly after the police, just before us. He seemed very interested in the goings on. At least, until he spotted you. Then his attention was... on other things."
"You're not going to stop until I go see him, are you?"
Ianto opened his eyes a little wider, looking oh-so-innocent in ways that Jack knew he was not. "Tosh is adamant about interviewing Mr. Graison."
Jack knocked back a cup of coffee strong enough to strip paint off a wall, then reached for the bottle of water. "What's the word down there?"
"Tosh is trying to give you space, and Gwen is curious."
"I'll bet she is." Jack picked up his coat and made a face. The thing was still sopping wet. "When did you start the betting pool?"
"Owen started it," Ianto corrected. "And just after you came back."
"What would Owen have won?"
"Night out at the pub."
"Is that all?"
"For a year."
"Nice." Jack pulled his spare jacket out from the closet. It was leather, enough like the Doctor's that he couldn't wear it without having a million regrets. He'd been meaning to get rid of it since he came back from the Valiant.
Tonight, it seemed, he could just add to the mountain of regret.
"Make sure Tosh and Gwen get out of here at a reasonable hour, will you?" Jack said, pulling on the coat.
Ianto nodded. "Be careful," he said as Jack left the office.
"It's not like he can actually hurt me," Jack said, stopping in the doorway.
"That's not what I meant."
And that, Jack mused, was as close as either of them were to saying they cared.
Jack didn't want people to care. It made it hurt more when they went away.
~~~
No one was answering the door. As much as Jack tried to think logically, panic rose with every knock. It might have been the wrong room, the wrong floor, the wrong man he chased across the city. It might have all been a co-incidence...
... but Nathaniel Graison had used his first-name, a name that Jack himself hadn't let himself think for over a hundred years.
Jack would knock once more, then he'd get the porter to open the damned door for him.
He'd lifted his hand when a door opened down the hall, and a man stepped out. There was nothing overtly threatening about him, but the hair stood up on the back of Jack's neck.
This man was different.
Jack lowered his hand to his hip. Just in case.
The man broke the silence. "Can I help you?"
"It depends." Jack didn't move. "I'm looking for Nathaniel Graison."
"Why?"
The man's wariness made Jack smile coldly. "It's concerning an incident this evening downtown. I'm here to ask Mr. Graison a few questions."
The man's hackles went up. "Nathaniel just went out for a walk, that's all."
Before Jack could come up with a witty retort about sightseeing tours in the Cardiff downpour, Nathaniel Graison crept out into the hall. "It's okay, Louis," Nathaniel said quietly.
"Nathaniel--"
Nathaniel pushed still-wet hair out of his face. "I'll be okay," he said as he walked towards Jack.
Louis glared at Jack. "I'll be right next door if you need anything."
"Thanks," Nathaniel said. He edged past Jack to open the room door. "What do you want?"
Jack was finding it a little hard to breathe. He'd faced down against gods and demons in his time, and he was coming apart in the face of one young man. "How... How are you?"
Nathaniel walked into the hotel room, pulling off his jacket. "You told Louis that you wanted to ask about that dead guy," he said, faintly accusatory. He wouldn't look at Jack.
"That was part of it," Jack said. He closed the door behind him. Two hundred years of guilt over losing Grey pounded in his head. "I needed to see you."
"Here I am." Nathaniel tossed his jacket onto the bed. "Is that it?"
"No, that's not it--"
"Then what the hell do you want?" Nathaniel asked shakily, whirling around. "You can't come back into my life after being dead for so many years, you just can't."
"I didn't die--"
"I saw you die!" Nathaniel shouted. "I saw our father bash in your skull!"
"What are you talking about? Dad never hit either of us!"
Nathaniel curled around himself, reacting as physically as if Jack had punched him. "Then maybe I was wrong. Maybe you're not Nicky."
"I am," Jack said desperately. He had to be. This couldn't be a mistake. He couldn't lose his brother like this. "Grey--"
"Why do you keep calling me that?"
"Because it was your name!" Jack made himself take a few steps back. "Before--"
He stopped. Nathaniel Graison couldn't remember being Grey. His memories had obviously been tampered with, and Jack was pretty sure he knew by whom.
Letting out a short breath, Jack silently apologized for the half-truths he was about to tell. "We were attacked, when we were kids. I was trying to get you to safety but I let go of your hand and when I looked back, they had taken you. They killed Dad and so many others, but not you. Me and Mom, we looked for your body, but..." He paused, the memory of his mother's grief a tangible thing that that chased him after all these years. "They took children all the time."
The stories from his childhood had been so horrible, and it had taken Jack decades to pull the truth from lies. He still could barely think of that day at the Time Agency when he realized the truth in the tales of children taken to be sold across times for slaughter, for meat. There was no danger in killing a child that didn't exist in that time, after all.
The most horrible thing of all had been the realization that they weren't aliens. No, they were just humans gone so very wrong.
Nathaniel stared at him. "What are you talking about? Mom died when I was little."
"No, she didn't." Jack sat on the end of the bed. "She didn't die until I was about twenty." Just after he'd been accepted to the Time Agency. She'd been so proud.
Nathaniel sank into the chair across the room. "That's not possible."
"Yes it is." Jack rubbed at his palm.
"But I remember..." Nathaniel swallowed hard. His eyes flicked from side to side, panicky. "Why can't I remember?"
Jack leaned forward. "The memories are falling apart the longer you push at them, aren't they?" he said. Classic hallmark of the crude mind-wipe used on the stolen children. Anything to keep the livestock from crying during the sale.
Nathaniel pulled his knees up to his chest. "What about the crime scene?" he asked desperately. "You wanted to know about the crime scene, you told Louis."
"Yeah, I did." Pieces of the puzzle were slowly starting to come together. Grey had been shattered by the men who took him, and from the looks of things he'd been broken for a very, very long time. Jack cleared his throat. "How did you get there?"
I let go of his hand.
"I went for a walk, that's all," Nathaniel said. He stared very hard at Jack's shoes.
"You ended up pretty far away from the hotel."
Nathaniel shrugged. "We got here two days ago and I've kind of been stuck in the hotel. I needed to get out of here for a while."
"You and Louis?"
Nathaniel frowned at the tone in Jack's voice. "It's not like that. He's just a friend."
"You came all the way from St. Louis with just a friend?"
Nathaniel went still. "How do you know I'm from St. Louis?"
Jack contemplated lying, but it was getting so he was having a hard time keeping track, quite a feat for him. "We accessed the hotel records," he said simply. "Your hometown's listed."
Nathaniel stared sharply at Jack, contemplating. Oh, how Jack remembered that look from his little brother. "Louis is giving a lecture at a natural biology seminar at the university in Cardiff," he said after a minute. "I'd never been outside of the States, and I ended up tagging along."
"That's a lot of Section 15-C paperwork you had to fill out to just 'tag along'."
"Who the hell are you?" Nathaniel demanded. "None of that's on my hotel registration."
"We're like the police," Jack said. "So. You tagged along with a friend to Cardiff."
"I told you! I'd never been anywhere and it just sort of came up in conversation that Louis was going traveling. He helped me with the paperwork, he'd done it before."
"He's also a..."
"A lycanthrope." Nathaniel's glare turned challenging.
"Like you."
Nathaniel flinched. "Different type of lycanthrope. I'm a wereleopard."
Jack managed to avoid reacting. Ever since being mauled to death by a pride of lions in South Africa in 1902, he really hadn't been a cat person. "I thought cats hated the rain."
"I don't like being stuck inside. I went for a walk and just kept going."
"What drew you to that particular street? It's a little out of the way."
"I smelled blood in the air. But the smell was weird, like it wasn't right."
Interesting that he'd picked up on that. According to Tosh's preliminary readings, the dead alien's blood was copper-based instead of the terrestrial iron-base. "Then what?"
"The police were already there. I just looked for a while. It didn't make any sense."
"What didn't?"
"The body. It wasn't--" Nathaniel stopped abruptly. "I mean--"
"You mean it didn't look like delicious human tartare." Jack wondered if he'd been a little too flippant. "Did you sense anything else out of the ordinary?"
Nathaniel hesitated.
"What?"
Nathaniel shook his head. "It's like... the air tasted like there had been a lightening strike, but there wasn't any lightning, I'd have seen it."
Lightning. Which pointed directly to Rift activity. It was looking as if the option of someone using the Rift to dump the body was more likely than Jack had thought at first. At least that option was better than having a killer operating in the city.
Before Jack could decide what to say next, his phone rang. A quick glance at the call display told him it was Ianto.
Ianto, who was supposed to be at home by now.
He flipped open the phone. "Yes?"
The rushing sound of the SUV roared over the line. "We've got another one, Jack," Ianto said quickly. "Rift activity a few minutes ago. Several things came through at once and Tosh thinks we might have a severe problem."
"The scanners are showing high energy readings like weapon fire," Tosh called out. She much have been leaning over his shoulder to be so close. "Lots of them!"
Before Jack could reply, Ianto let out a high-pitched meep. "Ianto?" Jack demanded.
"Gwen's driving," the man said, his voice a little thready. "That wasn't an actual road!"
"Do you want me to pull this car over?" Gwen shouted.
"Yes!"
"Well, I won't!"
Jack was strongly tempted to fire them all on principle. "Where are you going?"
"Tosh will download the coordinates into your phone," Ianto said. "And hurry."
"Don't do anything stupid!" Jack slammed his phone shut. "I have to go," he said to Nathaniel as he started backing out of the room. "I'll call you tomorrow or something."
"But--"
"I have to go!" Jack hesitated in the doorway. "I'm sorry."
He couldn't stay, but he couldn't walk away, not now. Did he leave his brother, so recently found, or did he risk the team that had become like family to him?
Jack gripped the doorway so hard his skin broke on the metal hinge. It wasn't a choice he could make.
With one last look at his brother, Jack ran.
~~~
Luckily, the cost of Jack's hesitation in the hotel wasn't his team's blood. By the time Torchwood arrived at the site of the Rift activity, twenty-five minutes to midnight, the alien skirmish had almost ended. The battle had all the hallmarks of a gang shoot-out. Frighteningly soon, there was only one blue-faced alien left standing.
And that alien promptly turned on the humans and shot a fist-sized hole through Jack's chest.
When Jack finally revived, most of Torchwood's bullets were in the now-dead alien and it was three minutes past midnight and the horrible day was over.
Once he ascertained that his team was unharmed, all Jack could think was that he finally had an excuse to get rid of the leather jacket.
~~~
At nine the next morning, Jack was lying on his side in his office, coughing up chunks of congealed blood and dead lung tissue while Gwen looked on, nauseated.
Jack wasn't that badly hurt. He'd been caught in a gas attack in the War, and being immortal hadn't stopped his lungs from liquefying along with the rest, but he'd come back from it all right.
But pretending he was hurt worse than he was stopped Gwen from asking questions about Grey, which was good because even Jack didn't know how he was going to deal with this one.
Besides, he had to get the blood out of his lungs somehow.
The phone on his desk rang. Gwen reached over to punch the button to transfer the call to speakerphone.
"Sir?" Ianto asked over the line.
Jack frowned. Wasn't Ianto supposed to be up at the Tourist Office doing paperwork? "Yes?"
"There's a young man up here wishing to speak with you. Regarding last night."
Jack sat up too fast. "He is? Who is it?"
Gwen moved to the computer and pulled up the Tourist Office surveillance video on Jack's screen. In black and white, Ianto stood behind the counter, facing off against...
"Is that Grey?" Gwen asked.
Jack was on his feet and reaching for his coat. "I'll come up and around on the lift," he said. "Everything all right?"
"Indeed, sir." Then the line went dead.
"Jack?" Gwen said. "Don't you think the lift will take too long?"
"Ianto's not in trouble," Jack said. He pointed at the screen. Even without sound, it was easy to see that Ianto was pouring the man a cup of coffee and breaking out the tourist maps of Cardiff.
"But if he is--"
"One of these days I'll show you all the dangerous things in the Tourist Office that Ianto can use to defended himself." Jack shoved his gun into the holster. He hesitated. "What, you don't have a problem with lycanthropes, do you?"
The tense set in her shoulders gave him his answer.
"Not very PC of you, Cooper." He left his office before she could respond.
Down the stairs, past the computers, to the lift. "Tosh, can you fire 'er up?"
Tosh glanced at Jack over the top of her spectacles. "Did you tell him about the Tourist Office last night?" she asked sternly.
"Nope." Jack hopped onto the paving stone as it started to rise.
"Then how did he know about it?" Tosh called.
"I'll find out!" Then he was up into the open air of the Plass.
The walk from the lift to the entrance of the Tourist Office wasn't nearly long enough for Jack to gather his thoughts. It was, however, enough to set off another round of coughing as he went through the Office door. Nothing like making a confident entrance back into a long-lost brother's life like hacking up the remains of a lung, Jack thought in disgust.
Ianto handed over a crisp white handkerchief to Jack. "Would you like some water?" he asked, not entirely unfeeling. Jack would have felt neglected, but for the very exact way in which Ianto was watching Nathaniel.
Jack spat a mouthful of blood into the handkerchief and wiped his lips. "Love some," he replied. "Hey, Nathaniel." He would have smiled, but a mouthful of bloody teeth wasn't very attractive. "You just stop by for a visit?"
Nathaniel had pressed himself against the far wall at Jack's abrupt entrance. "What's wrong with you?"
Jack waved the question away. "They always said I shouldn't take up smoking," he said after a swallow of water. "How did you know how to find us here?"
Nathaniel was carefully not looking at the bloody handkerchief in Jack's hand. "I read the name on the side of your van last night, and I asked around where to find you."
Jack could feel Ianto's glare burning into his head. They'd had the discussions about how a top-secret alien fighting organization probably shouldn't have its name stamped onto various modes of transportation. Jack would deal with that later.
"And who did you ask?" Jack asked, still pleasant on the outside. Inwardly, he was cursing. Who was he going to have to Retcon now?
Nathaniel shrugged, his hair swinging forward to cover his eyes. He brushed it back. "Meredith told me."
Jack looked at the other man, wondering if he should laugh or cry. "I thought I had a deal with Meredith," Jack said, all joking gone out of him.
The corner of Nathaniel's mouth quirked up into a familiar smile. "He said you'd say that. He also said that it didn't count because he was only telling me that you ran the Tourist Office by the Plass." The smile faded away. "He told me that if I came down here looking for you, I'd deserve all that I got. What did that mean?"
Jack tossed the bloody kerchief into the trash by Ianto's feet. "It means you need to move in less psychopathic circles." He shot a look at Ianto. "We'll be back later. Call if anything comes up."
Ianto looked distinctly disgruntled. It could have been anything from the wrecked handkerchief to the decided lack of communications, but Jack didn't really want to deal with it at the moment.
He held open the door for Nathaniel, gave Ianto a reassuring wink, and ushered his brother out into the overcast day.
They wandered up down the waterfront for a few minutes in silence. Nathaniel finally said, "Meredith said you knew what he was."
"Yeah." Jack buttoned up his jacket against the cold. "Vampire master of the city, although why anyone would want to admit that about Cardiff boggles the imagination."
Nathaniel looked at Jack out of the corner of his eye. "Do you know a lot about vampires?"
"Enough to stay out of their way." Jack stopped by the third lamp from the end, positioned perfectly to be picked up by the CCTV. No need for the team to have to go through too much trouble to spy on him. As far as Jack knew, none of them could read lips. That Torchwood skill had died with Suzie Costello.
Nathaniel hunched his shoulders against the cold wind coming in off the water. "How badly hurt are you?" he asked.
"I'm fine," Jack bluffed. Nathaniel shook his head.
"People don't cough up blood like that," he said. "Every time you exhale, it smells like blood. It wasn't like that last night."
"I'll be fine," Jack amended. "Just got caught up in something to do with work last night. Nothing that won't heal."
The wind blew Nathaniel's hair across his face. This time, he didn't bother to push it out of his eyes. "I've been thinking a lot since last night," he said. "About back when we were children."
"Yeah?" Jack asked. "What do you remember?"
"Seeing you die," Nathaniel said quietly. "About how you'd step in between me and Dad when he wanted to hit me, and he'd hit you instead."
"That never happened--"
"It's all I can remember!" Nathaniel burst out. "There isn't anything else in my head before the foster families!"
Jack's fists clenched in his pockets. "I'm sorry," he said.
Nathaniel curled over just a little more. "You're telling me that something stole me away? And messed with my memories?"
Jack nodded. "So you wouldn't kick up a fuss when they--" He stopped.
"When they what?" Nathaniel asked. "When they dumped me in the middle of the slums?"
Jack thought back to Nathaniel's juvenile record, to the history of pain and blood trailing after him through the years. It hit him like a jolt, that Nathaniel hadn't been a child in a very long time.
"When they sold you," Jack said bluntly. "I don't know what went wrong, why they ended up dumping you. They may have gotten the coordinates wrong, or the buyer backed out. I don't know."
Nathaniel let out a sharp breath. "I have a friend," he said after a long minute. "His father started selling him and his twin brother when they were six."
Jack turned his head away. What was it about humanity that led the dregs of its society to prey on the helpless? Humans never managed to evolve out of their potential for depravity.
Nathaniel shivered, then straightened up. He put his hands on the railing. "What are people supposed to talk about in this kind of situation?" he asked.
"I'm not exactly sure," Jack said. "Never been across something like this before."
"How about asking if you're married, or have kids?"
"Not married," Jack replied. His one foray into single motherhood was best left unmentioned. "What about you?"
Nathaniel turned his head. He was smiling. "I'm not married, but I've been with someone for twelve years." It was the first time Nathaniel had sounded proud of something.
"Twelve years?" Jack echoed. "Nice run. Why didn't you and she get hitched?" Jack tried to remember in what decade the Americans had finally pulled their heads out of their asses and legalized homosexual marriage. "Or is it a 'him'?"
"No, it's a 'her'." Nathaniel reached into his back pocket and pulled out a single photograph. "Her name is Anita. This is us on a vacation last year in New York."
She was pretty, Jack thought as he looked at the photo of Nathaniel standing with the young woman. Not a knock-out, but lovely in that familiar girl-next-door way. And she didn't look at day over twenty-five.
Jack looked closer at the picture. The scene seemed ordinary, but something about her eyes... Her eyes were dark and held a terrible weight in them.
The Doctor had eyes like that.
Unease swirled in Jack's gut. He handed the photo back to Nathaniel. "What does she do?"
Nathaniel tucked the photo away. "She's a police consultant," he said vaguely. "I wasn't sure if I should come all the way out here without her, but she said she'd be okay for a few days. We're leaving tonight to go home."
Jack's smile froze on his face. "Home, back to St. Louis."
"Yeah." Nathaniel stared at Jack with those strange, familiar eyes. "I have to get back to work."
Jack was strongly tempted to ask if St. Louis was undergoing a male stripper shortage, but alienating his brother probably wasn't the best idea. "Yeah."
Nathaniel glanced out at the water. "Do you ever go to the States?"
"No, my work keeps me here," Jack said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the Tourist Office.
"You work for the Cardiff Tourism Board?"
"You could say that."
Nathaniel tapped his fingers on the railing. Rain was beginning to fall across the water. "So what now?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, what do you want?"
Jack frowned. "I don't want anything," he said. Another cough tickled the back of his throat, but he forced it down. "Maybe we could talk sometime?"
"Do you have email?" Nathaniel suggested. He pulled a piece of paper and pen out of his pocket and scribbled something on the back of the note. He handed it to Jack. "I'm better at email sometimes."
This wasn't happening. Jack hadn't found Grey again after all these years just to let him walk away with only an email address to remember him by. He cast around for something, anything, to keep the young man around. "Do you want to have lunch?" Jack asked.
Nathaniel glanced at his watch. "It isn't even ten in the morning."
"Brunch, then?"
Nathaniel bit his lip and looked away. "I don't think that's a good idea," he said weakly. "You were dead until yesterday and I can't... I can't deal. Not, like, right away."
"Gr-- Nathaniel, please." Captain Jack Harkness never begged, not like this, but damn everything to hell, he couldn't lose Grey like this.
Nathaniel stepped back. "I told Louis I'd meet up with him after his lecture. That's in a little bit."
And like that, he turned to go.
The wind robbed all the air from Jack's lungs and he couldn't speak.
Nathaniel paused a few feet away. "I'm glad you're not dead," he said, then he turned and walked away.
Jack didn't want to watch Nathaniel Graison walk away, but what could he do? He had been the one to let go of Grey's hand, he had been the one to condemn Grey a life of pain. What could he possibly offer his brother now?
The palms of Jack's hand burned as he watched his brother walk away through the rain.
~~~
Twenty minutes later, Gwen appeared and pulled Jack out of the downpour. She was uncharacteristically quiet all the way down into the Hub, not pressing, not asking, just being.
Until they reached the bottom of the stairs.
"I don't have anything against lycanthropes," she said so abruptly that Jack jumped a little. "I just don't understand them. There aren't a lot of times I've run across them in Cardiff."
Jack exhaled and fancied he could taste blood over his tongue. "Are you sure about that?" he asked with a wink.
Gwen's eyes went wide.
In the Hub, the UNIT doctor had finally shown up and was elbow deep in alien corpse. Jack had worked with the man in the past (married, very straight, very dull) and gave him a brief wave. The man nodded in response.
Ianto caught Jack's eye, holding up an evidence bag that held an empty coffee cup.
Remembering how Ianto had offered Nathaniel a drink up at the Tourist office, Jack sighed. "Why are you such a cynic?"
"I'm only doing what you would, sir." Ianto's face was suspiciously blank. "If any of us had a long-lost sibling wander back into the fold--"
"Yeah, yeah." Jack slapped the man's arm on the way up the stairs. "Fine, whatever, go ahead. Hell, DNA tests all around."
"You'd yell at me if I pulled that stunt," Gwen complained mildly as she went to her computer.
"I yell at you for the hell of it," Jack reminded her. "I don't yell at Ianto. Well, not outside of the bed--"
"Stop!" Gwen put her hands over her ears. "I don't want to hear it."
Jack caught the smirk on Ianto's face as he turned away.
Ah, sibling rivalry.
Jack threw his coat over the couch arm on the way to his computer. Something about what Nathaniel had said, something about that picture of his girlfriend was bothering Jack. But what was it?
When in doubt, Jack bypassed the standard Torchwood databases and went straight to the source of all information. He opened Google and typed in "St. Louis" and "Anita". He didn't really expect anything as he hit enter.
But his lack of faith was overturned the moment the search return came up as, "Did you mean: St. Louis and Anita Blake?"
The bottom of Jack's stomach dropped out. Now he realized why the woman's photograph had looked so familiar.
Nathaniel was dating Anita Blake.
His brother was dating the fucking Necromancer, a woman whose power had made her into a legend that echoed across the stars for tens of thousands of years. In the Time Agency, there was a standing order to avoid Anita Blake at all costs; she was too powerful and too unpredictable and, considering what had happened in 2024, too damned dangerous.
For all intents and purposes, the man who couldn't die was the brother-in-law to the woman who could raise the dead, any dead.
At times like this, Jack couldn't believe that there wasn't some sadistic motherfucker running the universe.
What had his brother gotten himself into?
He opened up an email message on the server (which did not lead back to jack.harkenss@torchwood.uk, no matter what Tosh kept threatening them all with), and typed in,
Just wanted to make sure you got home safe.
Jack.
~~~
Two days later, Jack received a reply to his email.
Did we live in a place called Bow Shane, or Bosh Lane? I keep remembering that name. There was a lot of sand everywhere.
Jack glanced at the DNA results on his desk, then back to his brother's email. He smiled to himself. Nathaniel was beginning to remember life on the Boeshane Peninsula.
Maybe Jack would be able to find Grey in the man Nathaniel had become, after all.
end. and next time, in St. Louis...
~~~
Author notes: I can't help myself. It's all about my favorite kink. Jack Harkness's little lost brother Grey had lovely auburn hair. Nathaniel's last name is Graison and he has auburn hair. Do I really need more explanation?
Apparently I do. It occurred to me that we don't really know that much about Nathaniel's childhood. He's only ever talked about being a hooker as a teenager, and being infected with lycanthropy at seventeen by Gabriel so he could take more damage. His memories of watching his brother's murder were vague in the extreme. So, the 'what if' here could work.
And then, the timeline. Guilty Pleasures was published in 1994, and only three years have passed 'on screen', so the 'ten years later' works. And it lets me have Nathaniel a little more mature and focused; less needy.
Lastly, this story wouldn't fucking end. I finally threw up my hands and went for broke. I've written better, but meh. This one was just for kicks. And the kicks keep on coming...
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
Summary: No matter how long he searched, no matter how much he hoped, Jack Harkness never expected to see Grey again.
Disclaimer: Russell T. Davis and the BBC own Torchwood. Laurel K. Hamilton owns Anita Blake. Crossovers own me.
Rating: PG-13
Setting/Spoilers: Set after Torchwood 2x06, "Reset" (the most recent episode in the UK, and spoilers for that due to a certain thing), and spoilers for characters revealed in Torchwood 2x05, "Adam". It's ten years "after canon" for Anita Blake, because the books started in 1994 and I say so.
Characters/Pairings: Jack Harkness and Team Torchwood (TW) and Nathaniel Graison (AB)
Words: 9,035
Notes: Yes, I am going *there*. Author notes on this one are at the end of the story because I feel the need to explain myself for once.
Jack shoved his hands into his coat pockets. The wet fingers of the inevitable downpour crept down his collar, and he wished, not for the first time, that the Rift had opened in the French Riviera, not rainy, dreary Cardiff.
Yet here they were, standing around the mangled corpse of an alien. What they didn't know was if the thing came through the Rift alive and was killed here, or if the corpse slipped through after death.
Jack really, really hoped for the latter.
Gwen scraped blood samples off the ground while Toshiko took pictures with the camera. Ianto spoke quietly with the police officers holding back the gawkers, while Jack...
He sighed. While he stood around, lost in thought about how much he needed his doctor. Only this year, he wasn't thinking of the Timelord.
He'd been alive for almost two hundred years, had been losing people he loved since that day when he'd let go of his brother's hand, had seen his father's body shattered in the sand. Jack would be alive forever, would lose everyone in the end, and still he could barely believe how much it hurt to lose someone under his care.
Someone for whom he was responsible.
Someone whose death he hadn't been able to prevent.
Someone for whom he should have taken the fucking bullet.
The rain trickled down his collar and the tattered remains of Torchwood scraped together the last moments of the dead alien, and he knew that he would lose them all, the same way he'd lost Owen. The same way he lost everyone else for whom he was responsible, starting with his little brother Grey all those years ago.
Jack frowned. Ever since that day when Torchwood woke up missing forty-eight hours, Jack hadn't been able to rid himself of the nagging memories of his brother. Part of it he could put at the feet of 'Captain John Hart', with those bullshit last words about finding Grey. But Jack suspected that was nothing but a smokescreen. Jack had bounced around the universe, back and forth through times and worlds, and he'd never found a single trace of Grey, living or dead.
That didn't explain why he couldn't get his little red-headed brother out of his mind.
Beside the body, Gwen put the last sample into a plastic bag. She closed the lid on her little box as she stood. The rattle of the stretcher behind him pulled Jack out of his mental fog.
Without many words, the team hoisted the body onto the stretcher. Tosh quietly covered the blue furry face with the edge of the body bag.
One day it'll be her, Jack thought as Ianto and Gwen moved the stretcher into the little-used Torchwood van. Sooner or later I'll bag and tag them all, and whoever comes after them, until I can't take it anymore.
Ianto came over to Jack. "Do you want me to go talk to the police before we go?" he asked. His normally combed hair was flattened with rain. Jack wanted to kiss him to prove they were still alive, crime scene propriety be damned, but managed to restrain himself. "Or should I send Gwen? Her old partner Andy is manning the blockade."
Jack blinked the water out of his eyes. "I'll go."
Ianto raised his eyebrows. "All right," he said. Still, Jack didn't move for a minute. "Would you like us to meet you back at the Hub?"
Jack gave Ianto a look. "What did I ever do to you?" he asked.
The corner of Ianto's mouth quirked, and suddenly Jack wanted to laugh. Ianto had such a knack for dragging him back from melancholy.
"Right, sir," Ianto said smoothly. "One more thing."
"Yeah?"
"You seem to have an admirer." Ianto gestured towards the police blockade. "A young man, over by the light standard. He's been staring at you for some time."
Jack stood up a little straighter, ignoring the cold air rushing in his collar. "Is that a fact?"
"Indeed." Ianto smirked, just a little. "Don't delay us too long."
"Would I keep you guys out in the rain?" Jack asked, just to see Ianto roll his eyes. "I'll go talk to Andy and see if I can do anything for my stalker."
Ianto sighed. "I'll have Gwen move the van."
Jack was still chuckling as he turned around to scan the crowd for the young man. A few people were still looking at the scene from underneath umbrellas, with mild displays of interest. Jack's eyes moved along the line of bystanders, almost lazily, until--
I let go of his hand. It was the worst day of my life.
--until Jack saw Grey.
The world moved a fraction to the left, refracted and inverted and left Jack unable to breathe.
Grey.
Grey.
His brother Grey stood at the edge of the police tape, drenched in the downpour.
This wasn't the ghost Jack had been seeing for weeks, not the curious little boy dressed in the clothing of the Boeshane Peninsula. He was older than when Jack had last seen him, chin-length auburn hair plastered to his face by the rain and he had changed but Jack still knew him, would always know him.
As Jack stared at him, Grey's eyes grew huge in his pale face. A frozen eternity passed in a moment, then the van trundled across the road, breaking the moment.
When the path was clear again, Grey had vanished.
Jack stumbled across the road, his feet heavy as lead, catching on the edges of the crumbling pavement. The air had closed in around the spot where Grey had stood, smoothing over the possibilities and broken hopes as if nothing had ever stood there.
A flash of yellow and black out of the corner of Jack's eye, then Gwen's old partner, Andy stood in Jack's way. "Can we re-open the road now?" he was asking. "You've got all you need?"
Jack blinked. "What?"
The now-familiar bemused expression settled on Andy's face. "Can we re-open the road to foot-traffic?" he asked slowly. He must have seen something in Jack's face, for the amusement faded quickly. "Are you all right? You're looking as if you've seen a ghost."
Jack had to say something about his brother who couldn't possibly have been there, who had been lost so many years before...
... only Ianto had seen him first, and while Ianto was many things, he wasn't psychic and he didn't know of Jack's ghosts.
Andy turned Jack's world upside down by saying, "Are you looking for that bloke who was standing right here?"
Jack's head snapped around. "Did you see where he went?" he demanded.
Andy took a step back. "He went down that alley," he said, pointing. "He was going pretty fast. Do you think he's a suspect?"
But Jack was already moving. The overhead light had faded into early twilight, casting everything into shadow. Every step Jack took threatened to pull him further away from fragile hope pounding in his chest, but he kept moving against the centuries of guilt and loss.
At the end of the fenced-off alley stood a lone body, leaning against a rough wall. Jack's steps slowed. Uncertainty gnawed at his guts. If this wasn't Grey...
But the boy-- no, a young man, had reacted to the sight of Jack. He had known Jack and that was almost enough for Jack.
The man was breathing unsteadily, his eyes closed against the world. Jack stopped. Up close, the man looked both younger and older than Jack had initially thought. How old was he? How long had it been for him, how many years?
And how was he here? Now?
Distant sounds pushed at Jack's attention, but he willed himself to ignore them. This was all that mattered. A few minutes before, he had been thinking about how he had all the time in the universe, but now the seconds were slipping away through his fingers and he didn't know how to hold on.
The man opened his eyes, haunted blue-violet eyes, and stared at Jack.
"Jack?" a voice came from behind him. It was Gwen's voice, and in that instant he hated her for being there, for taking this moment away from him. "Jack, what's going on?"
Grey started at the sound of her voice. He took a step back, then another. Jack knew he was a moment shy of fleeing, and that he couldn't bear. He reached out and grabbed the man's arm, a solid weight under that expensive leather jacket.
Grey went still.
"Jack?" Now Gwen and Ianto were both in the corners of his vision, their guns drawn and pointed at the ground. Jack pushed them out of his mind.
"Grey?" Jack whispered, his voice cracking on the word. Grey jerked back, but Jack didn't let go of his arm. "I thought..." He felt a smile cross his lips. "I thought I'd never see you again."
If anything, Grey went even paler. "I saw you die," he said faintly. A fine tremor ran up his arm. "I saw Dad smash your head in, how..."
Jack tightened his grip on Grey's arm. "What are you talking about?" he demanded. "Dad never lifted a hand against either of us! Grey--"
"Stop calling me that!" Grey wretched his arm out of Jack's grasp.
Quicksilver fear ran down Jack's spine. Grey had moved more quickly than any human ought to be able, than was allowed by the laws of physics and the limitations of the human body, even as enhanced as those bodies had been by the fifty-first century.
"What's your name?" Gwen said conversationally.
Grey didn't answer.
"I'm Gwen," the woman went on. "Do you know Jack here?"
A slight frown creased Grey's forehead, and he glanced momentarily at Gwen. "That's not his name," he said.
"What's his name, then?" Gwen asked.
Grey blinked hard. He wiped the rain from his face, and as Jack watched, a faint ghost of silver ran though those eyes. The young man looked lost for a long moment, then said, "He's Nicky."
The childish ghost of his baby brother's voice, unable to pronounce the hard consonants in Nhiktay, echoed in Jack's head. His first-name, the name of his mother's father, he had left behind when he first took up arms for the Time Agency. He hadn't heard that name in almost twenty decades, and now to have it laid bare at his feet...
"Nicky?" Gwen was saying. "That's a nice name." She let her gun fall to her side. "What's your name?"
Grey's eyes went back to fix on Jack's face. "Nathaniel."
Gwen inched forward. "It's nice to meet you, Nathaniel." She put her gun up, which at any other might have worried Jack except that out of the corner of his eye he could see Ianto at the ready. "We know him," Gwen nodded at Jack, "as Jack."
Grey, or Nathaniel, or whatever the hell he was calling himself, looked around him. Jack knew the instant he realized he was being circled. Grey's eyes grew wild and flashed silver. "I saw you die," Grey said again, voice rising in anger. "You died for me and I was alone for years and you don't get to just come back to life like this!"
Before Jack could say a thing, Grey whirled and bolted for the blind-end of the alley. The fence was too high for any human to jump; even a Weevil would have a hard time getting over it, but Grey pulled himself up effortlessly and was over the top of the fence and down the other side of the alley before anyone could move.
He moved too quickly to be allowed. The way he'd moved wasn't human.
Ianto took a step towards the fence. "Do we go after him?" he demanded. Jack looked at him. "Jack? Are we going after him?"
"Andy said he might be a suspect," Gwen put in. She turned to look at Jack, all wide empathic eyes and straggly wet hair and suddenly, violently, Jack didn't want to hear what she was about to say. "But he's not, is he?"
Jack pushed his hair off his forehead. Grey had come back into his life and then had run out again and Jack couldn't think. "Where the hell is Tosh?" he demanded. Looking out for his team was second-nature and he didn't know where Tosh was and that was enough to bring him back.
"She's in the van," Ianto said.
"Who was that, Jack?" Gwen pressed.
Jack looked down the alley for a long moment, at the last place he had seen his baby brother, all grown up. Then he turned away. "Let's get back to the Hub."
"Jack, who is Grey?"
Gwen's voice chased him down the alley, pushing and picking at wounds Jack hadn't even known he had.
"Jack!"
He ignored Gwen all the way back to the Hub, choosing to treat traffic laws as suggestions instead of rules. He parked the van and was out the door before the engine had completely stopped. Let the others deal with the alien body.
That plan lasted all of three minutes. Back underground, Gwen, Tosh and Ianto crowded into the doorway of Jack's office, looking more like drowned rats than Earth's best defense against alien invasion.
They stared at him for a while he tried in vain to access the city's CCTV. Finally, Tosh spoke. "It might go faster if you let me help," she said softly. She edged toward his desk. "Jack, let me help?"
Jack didn't stop typing. "Get out of my office. All of you."
No one moved.
"I said get out!" Jack exclaimed. He shot to his feet, looming over Tosh. She flinched but didn't back away.
"Jack, who's Grey?" Gwen asked yet again.
He transferred his glare from Tosh to Gwen. He smiled humorlessly at her. "None of your damned business."
"It is our fucking business!" Gwen snapped, stalking across the office. "First John Hart says he's found 'Grey', then this young man appeared at an alien crime scene and you insist that he's Grey but he refuses that, and he keep saying he saw you die! Who the hell is he?"
Three long steps across the office and Jack had Gwen backed against the wall. He shoved his hands against the wall on either side of her head. He wanted to hit something and Gwen was so very conveniently there, but he refused to walk down that road. Not now, not ever.
She stared up at him, defiant and angry. But not scared. Never scared.
For a moment, he hated himself. All the time in the world and never able to fix a fucking thing.
He glared down at Gwen. "If I tell you that he's my brother, which of you win the pool?"
Gwen swallowed hard. "Pool? What pool are you talking--"
Jack slapped the wall by her head. "You know what pool I'm talking about."
From behind them, Tosh's voice slid through the air. "Owen did." Her breath hitched. "Owen thought... he was the one who bet Grey was your brother."
Slowly, Jack stepped away from Gwen. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that Ianto stood beside Tosh, his hand on her shoulder. The glare in his eyes was all for Jack.
The fight going out of him, Jack went back to his chair to resume his battle with the CCTV recordings.
Tosh took a deep breath. "Jack, let me do that," she said again.
His hands stilled on the keyboard. He felt so tired, more tired than he had in a very long time. Too tired to fight with the only people he had left in the world, other than his changeling brother. Still, it took him a minute to say, "Fine."
He trailed down the steps from his office after Tosh, down to her bank of computers. She slipped out of her wet coat as she took her place before the monitors. Jack perched on the nearby rails, unable to stop himself from hunching over. It was a defensive posture and he knew it, but he'd been through too much and he didn't know how the hell to stop it.
With almost obscene ease, Tosh pulled up the CCTV monitors around the crime scene and retrieved the footage from the confrontation. Jack almost didn't recognize himself on the screen.
Tosh's fingers danced as she followed Grey's movements, down the alley and through the streets of Cardiff with the CCTV cameras. In under ten minutes, she showed the final moments when Grey turned in out of the rain and into a hotel lobby.
"He might be a guest there," Tosh murmured. "What name would he be under?"
"Try Nathaniel," Gwen suggested. Jack refused to look at her. "He sounded American. Sort of like Jack."
"Nathaniel," Tosh murmured. She hacked into the hotel registration system and scrolled through the list. "This might be him," she said in a minute. She pointed at the screen. Gwen crowded in, but Jack hung back. "Nathaniel Graison. Place of residence, St. Louis, United States."
Gwen frowned, hanging over Tosh's shoulder. "He's thirty-one years old? He didn't look nearly that old. I'd have said he wasn't any older than twenty-four."
Thirty-one years old. Jack had lost Grey when Grey was just six years old. Twenty-five years had passed for Grey, while for Jack...
Jack couldn't stay still. He slipped off the rails and walked across the catwalk, around the Hub, wet boots hard on the metal grating, the only stable thing in the world under his feet.
"If he's from St. Louis, I can probably check customs records," Tosh said brightly. "If he came into the country around the same time as he checked into the hotel, I can--"
Tosh's voice stopped sharply, at the same instant as Gwen's startled gasp filled the air. Jack whirled. Both women were staring in varying degrees of horror at Tosh's screens.
Jack didn't know how he got back across the floor, but the next thing he knew, he was beside the computers. "What?" he demanded.
Tosh's eyes were wide. "He's... he's in the country on a medical waver. Section 15-C."
Jack felt as if he'd been punched. It all made sense suddenly. The silvering eyes, the too-fast movement...
According to U.K. Customs, Nathaniel Graison was a self-declared lycanthrope.
"It has to be one of the lesser contagious types," Ianto murmured. He pried himself away from the wall and came over, to type over Tosh's shoulder. "Parliament passed a law to stop admitting those with wolf-lycanthropy back when Harold Saxon was running for prime minister."
Ianto's typing produced the full visa record for Nathaniel Graison. At first, Jack wasn't sure what he was seeing. He knew that whenever anyone was admitted with a Section 15-C, the background paperwork was extensive, but the information in Nathaniel's visa record was beyond anything he'd seen in a customs file. A declaration of assets, a work history, and a juvenile criminal record that went on and on--
The screen went blank.
Jack jerked forward. "What--" He looked at Tosh. "Bring it back up!"
Tosh ducked her head, cheeks flaming pink. "I've transferred it up to your office. You don't need us reading it along with you."
Gwen looked as if she were about to object, but Ianto hit her in the arm and she kept her mouth shut.
"Oh. Right." Jack stuck his hands in his pockets, strangely reluctant to leave, to go learn things about his brother he couldn't unlearn. "So, the body from the crime scene..."
"We'll take care of it," Ianto said. Tosh was already working on CCTV records from the street where the alien had been found.
Feeling rather superfluous, Jack slowly went up to his office. The records on Nathaniel Graison were displayed on his screen, yet another example of Tosh's quiet brilliance. He could have sworn he'd turned the thing off before he left the building.
He could look at the files and figure out what had happened to Grey. Maybe the information would explain why he had lycanthropy.
Jack rubbed his hand over his eyes. He couldn't remember when he'd gotten his standard vaccinations as a child. Wasn't it before entering school? Or hadn't the medical ship been hijacked the year Grey started school? Two hundred years had pitted Jack's memory and he couldn't pick out the pieces that were suddenly very important.
Because if Grey hadn't been given the standard vaccinations, which contained the usual cocktail to counter any lycanthropic mutation, then the young man going by the name Nathaniel Graison...
I let go of his hand.
Disgusted with himself, Jack sat up in his chair and pulled the screen towards him. Two hundred years old, going to live forever, and time was running through his fingers. Every second he delayed, Grey might be running away.
The details of Nathaniel Graison's life were written in pain. He'd been found wandering among the slums in St. Louis in 1983, bruised and bloodied and unable to remember anything except vague shadows of seeing "Daddy hurting Nicky". The Missouri Children's Agency hadn't been able to find him an adoptive family -- he'd been so odd, smart and empathic and always watching. He bounced between foster homes until he was twelve, when he started living on the streets.
That was when the arrests for prostitution and drug possession began.
Five years later, the arrests stopped abruptly. Instead of assuring Jack, the sudden absence of Nathaniel Graison in the face of the law was quietly terrifying. It could have been so many things, but most likely Nathaniel had gotten himself mixed up with a dealer or a pimp who hadn't wanted to share Nathaniel with the police.
Things had gotten better in the last ten years, at least. Nathaniel Graison had a fair amount of money in his bank account, a steady job, and owned a small farm in rural Missouri, although Jack thought it was a little dodgy that a lycanthrope had a farm. Feeling a little numb, Jack opened up a business directory and typed in the name of Nathaniel's workplace. Guilty Pleasures sounded like one of those chocolate shops that sold Gwen birthday cakes every-so-often.
When Ianto came into the office a few minutes later, Jack was staring blankly at a website.
"Everything's in order downstairs," Ianto said. He deposited a cup of coffee and a bottle of water on Jack's desk. "Is there anything I can do?"
Jack tilted back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. A thousand suggestions flitted across his mind, some crass, some impossible. He settled for saying, "When is the UNIT doctor coming to help with the autopsy?"
"He'll arrive tomorrow morning." Ianto perched on the edge of Jack's desk. "There was a meeting in Paris he's having to tear himself away from."
"Yeah." Jack pursed his lips. "We need a new doctor."
Ianto leaned over a little to see Jack's screen. "I'll scan the files for any promising candidates," he said.
Jack looked at the man just in time to see his expression change as he realized what he was seeing. And then again, as he recognized the picture on the screen.
"Oh yeah," Jack said. "He's a male stripper in a St. Louis vampire strip club."
Ianto sat up straight. "I wouldn't know anything about that, sir."
"Vampire strip clubs?"
"St. Louis."
The sharp rhythm of the banter pulled Jack back from his memories. "You came in here for a reason, what was it?"
Ianto shrugged, just a little to mess the perfect lines of his suit. Only Ianto could come back in from a soaking in the rain and look that good. "I wanted to see if there was anything we could do."
"You can stop asking me if there's anything you can do." Jack got to his feet.
Ianto was unperturbed. "I have a cousin, she lives up near Pontypridd."
Having dug through Ianto's personal files after the Cyberman-girlfriend-in-the-basement incident, this was not news to Jack.
"She has a son, he's a few years young than me." Ianto smiled faintly. "He has wolf lycanthropy. He went to school up in Scotland for a while. And there are those rumours about the Royal family..."
Jack crossed his arms as he swung around to glare at Ianto. "This isn't about Nathaniel Graison being a lycanthrope."
Ianto blinked at Jack. "Then why are you still here?"
"Excuse me?"
"You know his hotel."
"Ianto--"
"Tosh thinks he might have seen something to do with the alien attack. He was at the crime scene for some time," Ianto said. "Of course, you could send Gwen to talk to him--"
"Hey, I'm still the boss here!"
"I never said you weren't." He paused, considering, and then tacked on, "Sir."
Jack wondered if Ianto was trying to make him feel like an ass, or if that was the guilt again. "What did Tosh say?"
"That Nathaniel Graison arrived at the scene shortly after the police, just before us. He seemed very interested in the goings on. At least, until he spotted you. Then his attention was... on other things."
"You're not going to stop until I go see him, are you?"
Ianto opened his eyes a little wider, looking oh-so-innocent in ways that Jack knew he was not. "Tosh is adamant about interviewing Mr. Graison."
Jack knocked back a cup of coffee strong enough to strip paint off a wall, then reached for the bottle of water. "What's the word down there?"
"Tosh is trying to give you space, and Gwen is curious."
"I'll bet she is." Jack picked up his coat and made a face. The thing was still sopping wet. "When did you start the betting pool?"
"Owen started it," Ianto corrected. "And just after you came back."
"What would Owen have won?"
"Night out at the pub."
"Is that all?"
"For a year."
"Nice." Jack pulled his spare jacket out from the closet. It was leather, enough like the Doctor's that he couldn't wear it without having a million regrets. He'd been meaning to get rid of it since he came back from the Valiant.
Tonight, it seemed, he could just add to the mountain of regret.
"Make sure Tosh and Gwen get out of here at a reasonable hour, will you?" Jack said, pulling on the coat.
Ianto nodded. "Be careful," he said as Jack left the office.
"It's not like he can actually hurt me," Jack said, stopping in the doorway.
"That's not what I meant."
And that, Jack mused, was as close as either of them were to saying they cared.
Jack didn't want people to care. It made it hurt more when they went away.
No one was answering the door. As much as Jack tried to think logically, panic rose with every knock. It might have been the wrong room, the wrong floor, the wrong man he chased across the city. It might have all been a co-incidence...
... but Nathaniel Graison had used his first-name, a name that Jack himself hadn't let himself think for over a hundred years.
Jack would knock once more, then he'd get the porter to open the damned door for him.
He'd lifted his hand when a door opened down the hall, and a man stepped out. There was nothing overtly threatening about him, but the hair stood up on the back of Jack's neck.
This man was different.
Jack lowered his hand to his hip. Just in case.
The man broke the silence. "Can I help you?"
"It depends." Jack didn't move. "I'm looking for Nathaniel Graison."
"Why?"
The man's wariness made Jack smile coldly. "It's concerning an incident this evening downtown. I'm here to ask Mr. Graison a few questions."
The man's hackles went up. "Nathaniel just went out for a walk, that's all."
Before Jack could come up with a witty retort about sightseeing tours in the Cardiff downpour, Nathaniel Graison crept out into the hall. "It's okay, Louis," Nathaniel said quietly.
"Nathaniel--"
Nathaniel pushed still-wet hair out of his face. "I'll be okay," he said as he walked towards Jack.
Louis glared at Jack. "I'll be right next door if you need anything."
"Thanks," Nathaniel said. He edged past Jack to open the room door. "What do you want?"
Jack was finding it a little hard to breathe. He'd faced down against gods and demons in his time, and he was coming apart in the face of one young man. "How... How are you?"
Nathaniel walked into the hotel room, pulling off his jacket. "You told Louis that you wanted to ask about that dead guy," he said, faintly accusatory. He wouldn't look at Jack.
"That was part of it," Jack said. He closed the door behind him. Two hundred years of guilt over losing Grey pounded in his head. "I needed to see you."
"Here I am." Nathaniel tossed his jacket onto the bed. "Is that it?"
"No, that's not it--"
"Then what the hell do you want?" Nathaniel asked shakily, whirling around. "You can't come back into my life after being dead for so many years, you just can't."
"I didn't die--"
"I saw you die!" Nathaniel shouted. "I saw our father bash in your skull!"
"What are you talking about? Dad never hit either of us!"
Nathaniel curled around himself, reacting as physically as if Jack had punched him. "Then maybe I was wrong. Maybe you're not Nicky."
"I am," Jack said desperately. He had to be. This couldn't be a mistake. He couldn't lose his brother like this. "Grey--"
"Why do you keep calling me that?"
"Because it was your name!" Jack made himself take a few steps back. "Before--"
He stopped. Nathaniel Graison couldn't remember being Grey. His memories had obviously been tampered with, and Jack was pretty sure he knew by whom.
Letting out a short breath, Jack silently apologized for the half-truths he was about to tell. "We were attacked, when we were kids. I was trying to get you to safety but I let go of your hand and when I looked back, they had taken you. They killed Dad and so many others, but not you. Me and Mom, we looked for your body, but..." He paused, the memory of his mother's grief a tangible thing that that chased him after all these years. "They took children all the time."
The stories from his childhood had been so horrible, and it had taken Jack decades to pull the truth from lies. He still could barely think of that day at the Time Agency when he realized the truth in the tales of children taken to be sold across times for slaughter, for meat. There was no danger in killing a child that didn't exist in that time, after all.
The most horrible thing of all had been the realization that they weren't aliens. No, they were just humans gone so very wrong.
Nathaniel stared at him. "What are you talking about? Mom died when I was little."
"No, she didn't." Jack sat on the end of the bed. "She didn't die until I was about twenty." Just after he'd been accepted to the Time Agency. She'd been so proud.
Nathaniel sank into the chair across the room. "That's not possible."
"Yes it is." Jack rubbed at his palm.
"But I remember..." Nathaniel swallowed hard. His eyes flicked from side to side, panicky. "Why can't I remember?"
Jack leaned forward. "The memories are falling apart the longer you push at them, aren't they?" he said. Classic hallmark of the crude mind-wipe used on the stolen children. Anything to keep the livestock from crying during the sale.
Nathaniel pulled his knees up to his chest. "What about the crime scene?" he asked desperately. "You wanted to know about the crime scene, you told Louis."
"Yeah, I did." Pieces of the puzzle were slowly starting to come together. Grey had been shattered by the men who took him, and from the looks of things he'd been broken for a very, very long time. Jack cleared his throat. "How did you get there?"
I let go of his hand.
"I went for a walk, that's all," Nathaniel said. He stared very hard at Jack's shoes.
"You ended up pretty far away from the hotel."
Nathaniel shrugged. "We got here two days ago and I've kind of been stuck in the hotel. I needed to get out of here for a while."
"You and Louis?"
Nathaniel frowned at the tone in Jack's voice. "It's not like that. He's just a friend."
"You came all the way from St. Louis with just a friend?"
Nathaniel went still. "How do you know I'm from St. Louis?"
Jack contemplated lying, but it was getting so he was having a hard time keeping track, quite a feat for him. "We accessed the hotel records," he said simply. "Your hometown's listed."
Nathaniel stared sharply at Jack, contemplating. Oh, how Jack remembered that look from his little brother. "Louis is giving a lecture at a natural biology seminar at the university in Cardiff," he said after a minute. "I'd never been outside of the States, and I ended up tagging along."
"That's a lot of Section 15-C paperwork you had to fill out to just 'tag along'."
"Who the hell are you?" Nathaniel demanded. "None of that's on my hotel registration."
"We're like the police," Jack said. "So. You tagged along with a friend to Cardiff."
"I told you! I'd never been anywhere and it just sort of came up in conversation that Louis was going traveling. He helped me with the paperwork, he'd done it before."
"He's also a..."
"A lycanthrope." Nathaniel's glare turned challenging.
"Like you."
Nathaniel flinched. "Different type of lycanthrope. I'm a wereleopard."
Jack managed to avoid reacting. Ever since being mauled to death by a pride of lions in South Africa in 1902, he really hadn't been a cat person. "I thought cats hated the rain."
"I don't like being stuck inside. I went for a walk and just kept going."
"What drew you to that particular street? It's a little out of the way."
"I smelled blood in the air. But the smell was weird, like it wasn't right."
Interesting that he'd picked up on that. According to Tosh's preliminary readings, the dead alien's blood was copper-based instead of the terrestrial iron-base. "Then what?"
"The police were already there. I just looked for a while. It didn't make any sense."
"What didn't?"
"The body. It wasn't--" Nathaniel stopped abruptly. "I mean--"
"You mean it didn't look like delicious human tartare." Jack wondered if he'd been a little too flippant. "Did you sense anything else out of the ordinary?"
Nathaniel hesitated.
"What?"
Nathaniel shook his head. "It's like... the air tasted like there had been a lightening strike, but there wasn't any lightning, I'd have seen it."
Lightning. Which pointed directly to Rift activity. It was looking as if the option of someone using the Rift to dump the body was more likely than Jack had thought at first. At least that option was better than having a killer operating in the city.
Before Jack could decide what to say next, his phone rang. A quick glance at the call display told him it was Ianto.
Ianto, who was supposed to be at home by now.
He flipped open the phone. "Yes?"
The rushing sound of the SUV roared over the line. "We've got another one, Jack," Ianto said quickly. "Rift activity a few minutes ago. Several things came through at once and Tosh thinks we might have a severe problem."
"The scanners are showing high energy readings like weapon fire," Tosh called out. She much have been leaning over his shoulder to be so close. "Lots of them!"
Before Jack could reply, Ianto let out a high-pitched meep. "Ianto?" Jack demanded.
"Gwen's driving," the man said, his voice a little thready. "That wasn't an actual road!"
"Do you want me to pull this car over?" Gwen shouted.
"Yes!"
"Well, I won't!"
Jack was strongly tempted to fire them all on principle. "Where are you going?"
"Tosh will download the coordinates into your phone," Ianto said. "And hurry."
"Don't do anything stupid!" Jack slammed his phone shut. "I have to go," he said to Nathaniel as he started backing out of the room. "I'll call you tomorrow or something."
"But--"
"I have to go!" Jack hesitated in the doorway. "I'm sorry."
He couldn't stay, but he couldn't walk away, not now. Did he leave his brother, so recently found, or did he risk the team that had become like family to him?
Jack gripped the doorway so hard his skin broke on the metal hinge. It wasn't a choice he could make.
With one last look at his brother, Jack ran.
Luckily, the cost of Jack's hesitation in the hotel wasn't his team's blood. By the time Torchwood arrived at the site of the Rift activity, twenty-five minutes to midnight, the alien skirmish had almost ended. The battle had all the hallmarks of a gang shoot-out. Frighteningly soon, there was only one blue-faced alien left standing.
And that alien promptly turned on the humans and shot a fist-sized hole through Jack's chest.
When Jack finally revived, most of Torchwood's bullets were in the now-dead alien and it was three minutes past midnight and the horrible day was over.
Once he ascertained that his team was unharmed, all Jack could think was that he finally had an excuse to get rid of the leather jacket.
At nine the next morning, Jack was lying on his side in his office, coughing up chunks of congealed blood and dead lung tissue while Gwen looked on, nauseated.
Jack wasn't that badly hurt. He'd been caught in a gas attack in the War, and being immortal hadn't stopped his lungs from liquefying along with the rest, but he'd come back from it all right.
But pretending he was hurt worse than he was stopped Gwen from asking questions about Grey, which was good because even Jack didn't know how he was going to deal with this one.
Besides, he had to get the blood out of his lungs somehow.
The phone on his desk rang. Gwen reached over to punch the button to transfer the call to speakerphone.
"Sir?" Ianto asked over the line.
Jack frowned. Wasn't Ianto supposed to be up at the Tourist Office doing paperwork? "Yes?"
"There's a young man up here wishing to speak with you. Regarding last night."
Jack sat up too fast. "He is? Who is it?"
Gwen moved to the computer and pulled up the Tourist Office surveillance video on Jack's screen. In black and white, Ianto stood behind the counter, facing off against...
"Is that Grey?" Gwen asked.
Jack was on his feet and reaching for his coat. "I'll come up and around on the lift," he said. "Everything all right?"
"Indeed, sir." Then the line went dead.
"Jack?" Gwen said. "Don't you think the lift will take too long?"
"Ianto's not in trouble," Jack said. He pointed at the screen. Even without sound, it was easy to see that Ianto was pouring the man a cup of coffee and breaking out the tourist maps of Cardiff.
"But if he is--"
"One of these days I'll show you all the dangerous things in the Tourist Office that Ianto can use to defended himself." Jack shoved his gun into the holster. He hesitated. "What, you don't have a problem with lycanthropes, do you?"
The tense set in her shoulders gave him his answer.
"Not very PC of you, Cooper." He left his office before she could respond.
Down the stairs, past the computers, to the lift. "Tosh, can you fire 'er up?"
Tosh glanced at Jack over the top of her spectacles. "Did you tell him about the Tourist Office last night?" she asked sternly.
"Nope." Jack hopped onto the paving stone as it started to rise.
"Then how did he know about it?" Tosh called.
"I'll find out!" Then he was up into the open air of the Plass.
The walk from the lift to the entrance of the Tourist Office wasn't nearly long enough for Jack to gather his thoughts. It was, however, enough to set off another round of coughing as he went through the Office door. Nothing like making a confident entrance back into a long-lost brother's life like hacking up the remains of a lung, Jack thought in disgust.
Ianto handed over a crisp white handkerchief to Jack. "Would you like some water?" he asked, not entirely unfeeling. Jack would have felt neglected, but for the very exact way in which Ianto was watching Nathaniel.
Jack spat a mouthful of blood into the handkerchief and wiped his lips. "Love some," he replied. "Hey, Nathaniel." He would have smiled, but a mouthful of bloody teeth wasn't very attractive. "You just stop by for a visit?"
Nathaniel had pressed himself against the far wall at Jack's abrupt entrance. "What's wrong with you?"
Jack waved the question away. "They always said I shouldn't take up smoking," he said after a swallow of water. "How did you know how to find us here?"
Nathaniel was carefully not looking at the bloody handkerchief in Jack's hand. "I read the name on the side of your van last night, and I asked around where to find you."
Jack could feel Ianto's glare burning into his head. They'd had the discussions about how a top-secret alien fighting organization probably shouldn't have its name stamped onto various modes of transportation. Jack would deal with that later.
"And who did you ask?" Jack asked, still pleasant on the outside. Inwardly, he was cursing. Who was he going to have to Retcon now?
Nathaniel shrugged, his hair swinging forward to cover his eyes. He brushed it back. "Meredith told me."
Jack looked at the other man, wondering if he should laugh or cry. "I thought I had a deal with Meredith," Jack said, all joking gone out of him.
The corner of Nathaniel's mouth quirked up into a familiar smile. "He said you'd say that. He also said that it didn't count because he was only telling me that you ran the Tourist Office by the Plass." The smile faded away. "He told me that if I came down here looking for you, I'd deserve all that I got. What did that mean?"
Jack tossed the bloody kerchief into the trash by Ianto's feet. "It means you need to move in less psychopathic circles." He shot a look at Ianto. "We'll be back later. Call if anything comes up."
Ianto looked distinctly disgruntled. It could have been anything from the wrecked handkerchief to the decided lack of communications, but Jack didn't really want to deal with it at the moment.
He held open the door for Nathaniel, gave Ianto a reassuring wink, and ushered his brother out into the overcast day.
They wandered up down the waterfront for a few minutes in silence. Nathaniel finally said, "Meredith said you knew what he was."
"Yeah." Jack buttoned up his jacket against the cold. "Vampire master of the city, although why anyone would want to admit that about Cardiff boggles the imagination."
Nathaniel looked at Jack out of the corner of his eye. "Do you know a lot about vampires?"
"Enough to stay out of their way." Jack stopped by the third lamp from the end, positioned perfectly to be picked up by the CCTV. No need for the team to have to go through too much trouble to spy on him. As far as Jack knew, none of them could read lips. That Torchwood skill had died with Suzie Costello.
Nathaniel hunched his shoulders against the cold wind coming in off the water. "How badly hurt are you?" he asked.
"I'm fine," Jack bluffed. Nathaniel shook his head.
"People don't cough up blood like that," he said. "Every time you exhale, it smells like blood. It wasn't like that last night."
"I'll be fine," Jack amended. "Just got caught up in something to do with work last night. Nothing that won't heal."
The wind blew Nathaniel's hair across his face. This time, he didn't bother to push it out of his eyes. "I've been thinking a lot since last night," he said. "About back when we were children."
"Yeah?" Jack asked. "What do you remember?"
"Seeing you die," Nathaniel said quietly. "About how you'd step in between me and Dad when he wanted to hit me, and he'd hit you instead."
"That never happened--"
"It's all I can remember!" Nathaniel burst out. "There isn't anything else in my head before the foster families!"
Jack's fists clenched in his pockets. "I'm sorry," he said.
Nathaniel curled over just a little more. "You're telling me that something stole me away? And messed with my memories?"
Jack nodded. "So you wouldn't kick up a fuss when they--" He stopped.
"When they what?" Nathaniel asked. "When they dumped me in the middle of the slums?"
Jack thought back to Nathaniel's juvenile record, to the history of pain and blood trailing after him through the years. It hit him like a jolt, that Nathaniel hadn't been a child in a very long time.
"When they sold you," Jack said bluntly. "I don't know what went wrong, why they ended up dumping you. They may have gotten the coordinates wrong, or the buyer backed out. I don't know."
Nathaniel let out a sharp breath. "I have a friend," he said after a long minute. "His father started selling him and his twin brother when they were six."
Jack turned his head away. What was it about humanity that led the dregs of its society to prey on the helpless? Humans never managed to evolve out of their potential for depravity.
Nathaniel shivered, then straightened up. He put his hands on the railing. "What are people supposed to talk about in this kind of situation?" he asked.
"I'm not exactly sure," Jack said. "Never been across something like this before."
"How about asking if you're married, or have kids?"
"Not married," Jack replied. His one foray into single motherhood was best left unmentioned. "What about you?"
Nathaniel turned his head. He was smiling. "I'm not married, but I've been with someone for twelve years." It was the first time Nathaniel had sounded proud of something.
"Twelve years?" Jack echoed. "Nice run. Why didn't you and she get hitched?" Jack tried to remember in what decade the Americans had finally pulled their heads out of their asses and legalized homosexual marriage. "Or is it a 'him'?"
"No, it's a 'her'." Nathaniel reached into his back pocket and pulled out a single photograph. "Her name is Anita. This is us on a vacation last year in New York."
She was pretty, Jack thought as he looked at the photo of Nathaniel standing with the young woman. Not a knock-out, but lovely in that familiar girl-next-door way. And she didn't look at day over twenty-five.
Jack looked closer at the picture. The scene seemed ordinary, but something about her eyes... Her eyes were dark and held a terrible weight in them.
The Doctor had eyes like that.
Unease swirled in Jack's gut. He handed the photo back to Nathaniel. "What does she do?"
Nathaniel tucked the photo away. "She's a police consultant," he said vaguely. "I wasn't sure if I should come all the way out here without her, but she said she'd be okay for a few days. We're leaving tonight to go home."
Jack's smile froze on his face. "Home, back to St. Louis."
"Yeah." Nathaniel stared at Jack with those strange, familiar eyes. "I have to get back to work."
Jack was strongly tempted to ask if St. Louis was undergoing a male stripper shortage, but alienating his brother probably wasn't the best idea. "Yeah."
Nathaniel glanced out at the water. "Do you ever go to the States?"
"No, my work keeps me here," Jack said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the Tourist Office.
"You work for the Cardiff Tourism Board?"
"You could say that."
Nathaniel tapped his fingers on the railing. Rain was beginning to fall across the water. "So what now?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, what do you want?"
Jack frowned. "I don't want anything," he said. Another cough tickled the back of his throat, but he forced it down. "Maybe we could talk sometime?"
"Do you have email?" Nathaniel suggested. He pulled a piece of paper and pen out of his pocket and scribbled something on the back of the note. He handed it to Jack. "I'm better at email sometimes."
This wasn't happening. Jack hadn't found Grey again after all these years just to let him walk away with only an email address to remember him by. He cast around for something, anything, to keep the young man around. "Do you want to have lunch?" Jack asked.
Nathaniel glanced at his watch. "It isn't even ten in the morning."
"Brunch, then?"
Nathaniel bit his lip and looked away. "I don't think that's a good idea," he said weakly. "You were dead until yesterday and I can't... I can't deal. Not, like, right away."
"Gr-- Nathaniel, please." Captain Jack Harkness never begged, not like this, but damn everything to hell, he couldn't lose Grey like this.
Nathaniel stepped back. "I told Louis I'd meet up with him after his lecture. That's in a little bit."
And like that, he turned to go.
The wind robbed all the air from Jack's lungs and he couldn't speak.
Nathaniel paused a few feet away. "I'm glad you're not dead," he said, then he turned and walked away.
Jack didn't want to watch Nathaniel Graison walk away, but what could he do? He had been the one to let go of Grey's hand, he had been the one to condemn Grey a life of pain. What could he possibly offer his brother now?
The palms of Jack's hand burned as he watched his brother walk away through the rain.
Twenty minutes later, Gwen appeared and pulled Jack out of the downpour. She was uncharacteristically quiet all the way down into the Hub, not pressing, not asking, just being.
Until they reached the bottom of the stairs.
"I don't have anything against lycanthropes," she said so abruptly that Jack jumped a little. "I just don't understand them. There aren't a lot of times I've run across them in Cardiff."
Jack exhaled and fancied he could taste blood over his tongue. "Are you sure about that?" he asked with a wink.
Gwen's eyes went wide.
In the Hub, the UNIT doctor had finally shown up and was elbow deep in alien corpse. Jack had worked with the man in the past (married, very straight, very dull) and gave him a brief wave. The man nodded in response.
Ianto caught Jack's eye, holding up an evidence bag that held an empty coffee cup.
Remembering how Ianto had offered Nathaniel a drink up at the Tourist office, Jack sighed. "Why are you such a cynic?"
"I'm only doing what you would, sir." Ianto's face was suspiciously blank. "If any of us had a long-lost sibling wander back into the fold--"
"Yeah, yeah." Jack slapped the man's arm on the way up the stairs. "Fine, whatever, go ahead. Hell, DNA tests all around."
"You'd yell at me if I pulled that stunt," Gwen complained mildly as she went to her computer.
"I yell at you for the hell of it," Jack reminded her. "I don't yell at Ianto. Well, not outside of the bed--"
"Stop!" Gwen put her hands over her ears. "I don't want to hear it."
Jack caught the smirk on Ianto's face as he turned away.
Ah, sibling rivalry.
Jack threw his coat over the couch arm on the way to his computer. Something about what Nathaniel had said, something about that picture of his girlfriend was bothering Jack. But what was it?
When in doubt, Jack bypassed the standard Torchwood databases and went straight to the source of all information. He opened Google and typed in "St. Louis" and "Anita". He didn't really expect anything as he hit enter.
But his lack of faith was overturned the moment the search return came up as, "Did you mean: St. Louis and Anita Blake?"
The bottom of Jack's stomach dropped out. Now he realized why the woman's photograph had looked so familiar.
Nathaniel was dating Anita Blake.
His brother was dating the fucking Necromancer, a woman whose power had made her into a legend that echoed across the stars for tens of thousands of years. In the Time Agency, there was a standing order to avoid Anita Blake at all costs; she was too powerful and too unpredictable and, considering what had happened in 2024, too damned dangerous.
For all intents and purposes, the man who couldn't die was the brother-in-law to the woman who could raise the dead, any dead.
At times like this, Jack couldn't believe that there wasn't some sadistic motherfucker running the universe.
What had his brother gotten himself into?
He opened up an email message on the server (which did not lead back to jack.harkenss@torchwood.uk, no matter what Tosh kept threatening them all with), and typed in,
Just wanted to make sure you got home safe.
Jack.
Two days later, Jack received a reply to his email.
Did we live in a place called Bow Shane, or Bosh Lane? I keep remembering that name. There was a lot of sand everywhere.
Jack glanced at the DNA results on his desk, then back to his brother's email. He smiled to himself. Nathaniel was beginning to remember life on the Boeshane Peninsula.
Maybe Jack would be able to find Grey in the man Nathaniel had become, after all.
Author notes: I can't help myself. It's all about my favorite kink. Jack Harkness's little lost brother Grey had lovely auburn hair. Nathaniel's last name is Graison and he has auburn hair. Do I really need more explanation?
Apparently I do. It occurred to me that we don't really know that much about Nathaniel's childhood. He's only ever talked about being a hooker as a teenager, and being infected with lycanthropy at seventeen by Gabriel so he could take more damage. His memories of watching his brother's murder were vague in the extreme. So, the 'what if' here could work.
And then, the timeline. Guilty Pleasures was published in 1994, and only three years have passed 'on screen', so the 'ten years later' works. And it lets me have Nathaniel a little more mature and focused; less needy.
Lastly, this story wouldn't fucking end. I finally threw up my hands and went for broke. I've written better, but meh. This one was just for kicks. And the kicks keep on coming...
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Date: 2008-02-20 05:12 am (UTC)One nit pick. It should be Harold Saxon and not Howard Saxon.
I really like this and how you keep up the melancholy mood Jack is in throughout the fic. Love that it's not a happy ending per se but more a beginning. Love that the team both pushes and retreats when necessary. And that Nathaniel didn't come with one of the standard crew.
Are you going to write more to this universe? Because I would *love* to read more.
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Date: 2008-02-20 05:33 am (UTC)Like a kick in the guts? Yeah. That's the one. Ouch.
Nicely done as ever.
:)
Jaydeyn
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Date: 2008-02-20 05:39 am (UTC)S
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Date: 2008-02-20 05:43 am (UTC)Thanks for your kind words!
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Date: 2008-02-20 05:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-20 06:24 am (UTC)It's hard to write Jack because he's all over the map. So I went with woe!Jack and left manic!Jack for another day. Except he's still a little manic, working for the Cardiff Tourism Board and being shot in the chest and coughing up blood to torment Gwen.
I think I'd like to see if I can write a "Jack in St. Louis" fic because a) Jack v. Anita = Badness, and b) I'd like to see how Nathaniel/Grey would react if he were to see his "brother" die again.
... it occurs to me that I'm mean to fictional characters.
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Date: 2008-02-20 07:35 am (UTC)Hope you continue this.
-- Rosy
P.S.: Will Little Bun Blake be showing up in future parts?
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Date: 2008-02-20 07:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-20 07:57 am (UTC)LOVE the idea of Cardiff having a vampire master... poor bastard...
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Date: 2008-02-20 09:02 am (UTC)And what DID happen to her in 2024? Mysterious!
-- Guile
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Date: 2008-02-20 09:25 am (UTC)For a while there I thought Nathaniel might be Jack's nephew (Graison and divergent memories and all), but this makes more sense than identical relatives. Love it, uber-empathic Gwen and all!
And did I spy...
"She has a son, he's a few years young than me." Ianto smiled faintly. "He has wolf lycanthropy. He went to school up in Scotland for a while."
...cousin Ianto! :D
Plz to have Reece in sequel?
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Date: 2008-02-20 09:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-20 11:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-20 02:17 pm (UTC)Anita shoots Jsck.
Jack dies.
Jack stops dying.
Everyone stares.
But in a /much/ nicer way! ;)
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Date: 2008-02-20 03:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-20 03:45 pm (UTC)It all just *works* so well. And it's great to read a story based around a relationship of Jack's that is entirely platonic, for a change.
I can't wait to get his reaction to Anita's lifestyle... And imagine him flirting with Jean-Claude!
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Date: 2008-02-20 04:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-20 04:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-20 04:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-20 05:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-20 06:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-20 08:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-20 08:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-20 08:26 pm (UTC)If I do go with more on this, I'll probably avoid tying it into any existing AB fic I've written -- it's easier that way. Although I'd love to make this the sequel to Inevitable, I think I might get punched if I don't finish that first.
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Date: 2008-02-20 09:27 pm (UTC)*pouts*
-- Rosy
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Date: 2008-02-20 09:28 pm (UTC)You did spy! And if I go insane, I might use this as the starting point for a potential Inevitable sequel. Or I might skip that step and just leave the teaser. I don't know... Oh, choices.
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Date: 2008-02-20 09:30 pm (UTC)-- Rosy
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Date: 2008-02-20 09:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-20 09:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-20 10:19 pm (UTC)I love it when people take the tiniest of things and make them intofics like this :D
Em
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Date: 2008-02-21 01:02 am (UTC)-- Rosy
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Date: 2008-02-21 04:21 am (UTC)Will there be more?
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Date: 2008-02-21 05:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-21 06:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-22 03:16 am (UTC)i was just curious. Are you ever going to update "Letter Box?"
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Date: 2008-02-23 02:06 am (UTC)Umm...Shouldn't it be fatherhood, or am I missing something? Also, when was that? (I'm only seen a few episodes...)
Very interesting story, the Reece mention extra fun(is in the middle of reading Inevitable)
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Date: 2008-02-23 02:34 am (UTC)---
Captain Jack Harkness: There you go. I can taste it. Oestrogen. Definitely oestrogen. You take the pill, flush it away, it enters the water cycle, feminises the fish. Goes all the way up into the sky, then falls all the way back down onto me. Contraceptives in the rain. Love this planet. Still, at least I won't get pregnant. Never doing that again.
---
Torchwood. Making MPreg canon since 2006.
I couldn't help myself with the Inevitable shout-out. I have this horrible urge to make this universe the sequel to Inevitable, only because then it'd be more focused on Nathaniel than Harry and Anita (because they've had their screen time, frankly). But who knows.
How are you enjoying Inevitable?
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Date: 2008-02-23 02:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-23 02:41 am (UTC)And of course, the added trauma of the family issue.
I think I'll need to write the sequel to this one day.
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Date: 2008-02-23 11:48 pm (UTC)I just finished reading Inevitable and is about to leave a review over at TtH. It's really great, at times I forgot that it wasn't canon since you have the characters down so good and I love your reworking of certain HBP events with those sudden left turns.
Also, is it okay if I friend you? I love your current stories, and is slowing reading through all of them inbetween studying for midterms
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Date: 2008-02-24 01:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-28 10:30 am (UTC)More, please? With sugar on top?
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Date: 2008-04-01 04:49 am (UTC)This was truly awesome...t made me find out what torchwood was and watch all the episodes lol
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Date: 2008-09-29 10:55 am (UTC)*coughs*
Done. Really. (OMFGOMFG)
I'm not sure how much love I can express for this...because I saw Nathaniel, and my heart went "NO WAI" in all caps because he's is, to date, my favorite Anita Blake character.
And this is so wonderfully characterized and gorgeous and I'm probably going to reread it a few thousand more times, LOL
Seriously though, you've got a really good Jack Voice and a really good Nathaniel voice! (I've not read..well, ANY Anita Blake fics...but I find that the last few AB books have kind of made me a little...enh. So it was so exciting to see these two smushed and OMFG NATHANIEL. *coughs*)
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Date: 2008-09-29 05:22 pm (UTC)(I actually started in AB fics, and have had a lot of experience writing these guys, but it never really gets easier. Nathaniel is hard to get a handle on, because we only ever see him through Anita's biased eyes in the books)
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Date: 2008-09-30 04:56 am (UTC)A lot of people think Jack's easy to write and it's just like...no. No, he's really not.
But it's cool to see Nathaniel pop up in a Torchwood fic! Do you mind if I friend you, by the way?
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Date: 2008-09-30 05:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-06 06:41 am (UTC)