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He’s jumping off a carriage that freezing January afternoon when she next sees him. A dark-coated figure, tall and thin. The snow pours down incessantly upon the mass of grey, wavy hair on his head and he traverses the rest of the muddy, icy London block with resonating, heavy-booted steps. He disappears between two buildings. By then, it’s too late for her. She follows but she hasn’t quite made the alleyway before she hears a repetitive groan of engines.
The air still smells faintly metallic when she arrives. And she knows she’s missed him. Again. Doctor.
She goes back home. She works assisting a physician and then a midwife even when she can’t take the deaths anymore. She delivers babies she eventually fails to remember the names of, finding no trace of him or his companions for the rest of the eighteenth century.
Eventually, she decides to look for Captain Jack Harkness.
It’s a quest possibly born of a bout of stupidity or self-destruction on her part, searching for a man who might be insane, or violent, or, worse, exactly like her – a man who lives on the premise and the pretense that centuries of pain or plain old life don’t matter at all. Even when they do.
More likely, though, she is unbelievably bored.
She hears of him when there are reports of people being possessed by some sort of demon and something called Torchwood gets mentioned along with his name. Well, she says ‘gets mentioned.’ To tell the truth, it's a far less passive act on her end. The strange thing is: people begin to attribute the odd events to actual demons, of all things, when she knows a hostile alien race is a much more sinister and likely thing. She supposes she should have seen the ending coming: everyone forgets it ever happened.
It’s so human, and she can barely understand it anymore.
It’s many humdrum years from the beginning of her search, more precisely in the spring of 1881, when the meeting happens.
In the park this early in the morning, there is not quite enough light to see the alien creeping up behind her among the trees by the duck pond before she’s being choked by three - no, four - pairs of tentacles. If she wasn't quite awake before, she definitely is now. Then, as she fights with everything she's got to get free from this huge, grey... blob, a man appears, running. Tall, long coat, face with traces of blood that she can immediately tell is not his own. And he’s armed with a very large gun.
“That’s enough!” he shouts. “Let go.”
The alien doubles its vicious, slimy, grip all around her thorax and neck. It takes what she assumes is a breath and lets it go with a noise that is so low, it's more vibration than actual sound. Vision blurry, she sees a momentary look of fury on the man’s face - fury too deep to be quite earthly - before he relaxes and calmly asks the creature to let go one more time. It doesn’t. That’s when she finds out he’s an excellent shot. She blacks out.
She wakes up the next day in a warm bed to an explanatory note signed by Jack Harkness. She spends the morning eating the breakfast set out for her, wishing she remembered what he looked like with clarity. At home, for the rest of the nineteenth century, she reads entire libraries, masters the piano, and tries to get over the anger brought on by the fact that every memory of the night before remains in a perpetual haze.
By the summer of 1919, she has frequented the park far too many times to count. Has had her fill of duck-feeding and cloud-watching and idle chatter with horrifically boring strangers for the next century at the very least. The weird thing is, she still goes back. Every month or so.
These past three years, with the Great War, tending to traumatized soldiers and their families at a military hospital, she’s felt herself slip back to the way she was before meeting The Doctor for the second time in her days of highway robbery. She feels every unthinkable tragedy of this most singular global nightmare down to her bones. Every amputee in pain, every shell-shock case, every wounded soldier, lost orphan, and shattered family. The things they've told her: about the misery of the trenches, and the agony of mustard gas. It feels like quicksand, pulling her down, and if she fights against it, she'll only sink faster. She'll only disappear sooner. She tries to help and is very much convinced no amount of help will be enough. Not now. Not for this.
Ashildr, the girl The Doctor first met in that village. He was so sure she was still within her somewhere. She’s finding it impossible to believe him. Impossible to believe anything other than this: Ashildr is buried away somewhere in the centuries, never to be heard from again. Now, she's just herself - just Me, she thinks - a being who's simply seen too much to ever heal from.
The ducks protest if she stops feeding them. That's a constant.
Thinking back, there was another Doctor sighting before the Great War. April 10, 1912, Southampton. She knew it was him because of the box that disappeared close to the docks as the ship set sail. She knew it was him because he ran away from the tragedy she didn’t know would happen. But he knew. She's sure of it. How the hell could he come armed with the knowledge of what was to happen and still run away? She doesn't know.
In 1913, there were underground reports of an English country school attacked by creatures from another world. She didn't bother to check their reliability. Was The Doctor there? She didn't bother to look into it too much. Didn't care to seek him out, either, in case she was far too late. Again (and, oh, how she despises the lagging technological development she’s stuck in).
Once, she saw a man she didn't recognize watching her in a café. A Black man, with thin-rimmed glasses, closely-cropped hair, and striking green eyes. She was almost certain she was going mad because he didn't look anything like The Doctor she knew, but, somehow, profoundly, she still believed. It was him.
She throws a rock into the duck-pond and then sees a shadow eclipse the midday sun.
“Hello,” Jack says.
“Oh, hello,” she answers. “I’ve been wondering when I’d see you again.”
He smiles and offers his arm.
Cardiff is nice this time of year, he says. And so he treats her to a train ride in which he explains how he met The Doctor after so many years, and how he asked that a certain Lady should be looked out for.
She laughs. “That is... appropriately patronizing.”
"Yup." He sips his coffee. “Oh, and he won't visit, either. God forbid His Lordship spares five minutes!”
She laughs again. “How long had it been since you’d last seen him?”
“Ooh, long story.”
But there were delays along the way and they had time. She hears of how he became immortal (not The Doctor’s doing, she’s genuinely surprised to find out), and how he met The Doctor again in 2007, by his account a very bad year for planet Earth (for those that remember it).
“150 years,” she says, shocked, the difference between 800 and 150 seeming minuscule at the moment. “How can he just go and do that?”
“I don’t know,” he answers. She knows it’s a question she shouldn’t have asked. It’s a question that, to her judgment, still cuts him unexpectedly deep after all these years.
She changes the subject. “So what did you do?”
He tells her of Torchwood. And of what will happen to the children. To one child in particular. In The Doctor’s absence. His voice wavers, and that is when she understands why The Doctor mentioned him.
Where it matters, Jack is still mostly whole, untouched by the indifferent rust of immortality. For the first time ever, she allows herself to think it possible for her, too. Some day.
They stay silent a long time after that. The last thing he says before they get off the train is that by his calculation, it’s been 55 years since the 456, and 50 since America and the story of how once the human race became immortal. The Doctor, of course, was infuriatingly conspicuous for his absence both times.
Jack is a massive flirt. She doesn’t know why she’d missed it until now-- and actually “Jack is a massive flirt” might be the understatement of her life-- because in a pub in Cardiff, he seems to be wooing anything that moves. She can’t say she’s surprised, though. The suave persona he puts on fits him like a glove.
He returns from his not-quite-appropriate dance with the bartender, laughing.
“Are you always like this?” she asks.
“Pretty much.” He extends his hand out to her. “Come on!”
He really is good, she concedes. She loves the hot jazz piano. And his enthusiasm. Of course, she quickly comes to the realization that she can’t remember the last day that was this good, which is worrisome, because she knows, given enough time, she will forget this, too. She ponders whether he will.
For once, she stops herself going down that road and simply passes the night with him. Drinking. Dancing. Eating.
They’re on top of a hill lying down when the evening comes to a close.
He names the stars drunkenly. She corrects him. Neither of them is right.
She breaks the silence. “Do you think he’s okay? The Doctor?”
He hesitates for a moment before he answers. “Don’t see why not.”
She thinks of Clara Oswald. Of how The Doctor will outlive her and anyone else he befriends. “Because he’s a masochist.”
“True.”
“So?”
“The only thing worse than The Doctor is The Doctor alone. I think he learned that the hard way. He’ll be alright as long as he keeps, I don’t know—”
“Falling for whatever makes this planet so damn interesting to him?”
He laughs a little. “Exactly.”
She hasn’t known The Doctor as long or as well as Jack does, but immediately realizes that’s a lesson she has to learn, too. The whole ‘finding the planet interesting somehow’ thing. She thinks she might get around to it someday. It’s a long process.
The next morning, in a small inn room, she pours the tea. Then she asks point-blank about his mayflies.
He replies that it’s a very long list he doesn’t care to rehash.
“I just want to know one thing,” she says. “Do you remember them?”
“Yes,” he says, immediately. And she recognizes the look in his eyes perfectly. Wishes she didn’t.
It will be centuries later, but Jack does tell her about Torchwood, and falling in love with Ianto Jones, and believing in things he hadn't thought about for years, and all his faith evaporating in his very arms as Ianto... well, he doesn't share what happened exactly. He doesn't have to.
For now, though, they have breakfast, bantering instead about the insane ways they should have been killed but weren’t (otherwise known as the javelin-to-the-chest vs. a-spot-of-Bubonic-Plague debate). Neither is willing to open up the subject of mayflies again. He shows her around Torchwood whilst it’s empty (he’s not supposed to cross his own timeline) and suggests she might talk to the director about joining part-time.
She declines and says goodbye to him at the train station. She gets an unexpected hug in return, which she doesn’t know how to process, but tries to reciprocate anyway. She catches a last glimpse of his coat as she sits on the train. Maybe at the turn of the century, she’ll see him again.
He completely fails to meet that expectation because he meets her in Dublin mid-Depression and takes her away to America (rather, he nearly scares her to death by walking up to her on the street and greeting her loudly at midnight). In the boat ride, they tend to people with minor injuries and ailments and in their free time, go out on the deck and talk of Jack’s travels with The Doctor, and she shares some of the adventures she’s not forgotten yet. He describes every past adventure with absolute joy and she teases him, says that he talks like he was more than a little in love with The Doctor, and he doesn’t deny it. In fact, he says that memory is enhanced now that he imagines The Doctor’s voice with his present incarnation’s Scottish accent.
When they land and settle, they set up a shop to give free food to people fleeing the Dust Bowl, which they keep up for about a year before they run out of cash. They hate the desperation in the people’s faces when they tell them they’re leaving, but at least they have the comfort of knowing how many would have died had they not done what they did.
They get back to Britain, and she invites him home only to find him gone from her guest room the next morning.
In January of 1941, she’s swamped with work. She’s decided to join the RAF, putting on her uniform and going to training every day. She never thought she’d fly, always wanted to, more than she wanted anything, ever. Good news, though: she’s been allowed to make her first solo flight tomorrow.
Along with that, there is the arrival of new American volunteers. Among them, she sees him through the cafeteria window, getting pelted by rain as he loads a box of supplies into his aircraft. She runs.
She barely reaches him before he ascends the stairs for the last time. Unsure of whether to call out his name or not, she settles for “wait!”
He stops and looks at her. The smile he puts on nearly erases the lack of recognition in his eyes. “Hello. Captain Jack Harkness. And who might you be?”
She shakes his hand nonetheless. “Never mind. I just thought. Forget it.”
She turns to leave but he places a hand on her shoulder. “What is it? Maybe I can help.”
In retrospect, telling him that he looks like someone she knows might not have been the best move, but she settles for trusting him to sniff out the potential for paradox. He is a time traveler, after all (or at least, he was, when she met him). He could also just buy into the excuse. Either way suits her.
“Do you know me?” he asks.
She nods and hopes he says goodbye and doesn’t push further.
Instead, what he says leaves her confused.
“Let me buy you a drink.”
After hesitating for a second, she does.
Young Jack, if possible, is even more rambunctious. He knows everyone in the airbase and absolutely everyone knows him. According to him, in more than a few cases, intimately.
This Jack has a type of unsettling innocence though. That’s what strikes her. A mild optimism about the War that doesn’t quite match the logical realism she remembers. A view of his peers’ strength in battle just naïve enough that she thinks it couldn’t have been forged from the loss experienced by the man she met before. He also cuts himself opening up a beer can, big angry slash across the pad of his index finger, and bleeds profusely for more than 15 seconds. He’s not immortal yet. Which means she best not mention The Doctor, either.
“I know we meet in the future,” he says, amidst their discussion of the Blitz. “It’s okay. I won’t ruin it. Thank you for trying to keep away from me .” She nods.
“Though I wish I had a hint of who you were.”
She doesn’t answer and he thankfully understands when she says she can’t tell.
They spend a few moments talking about her experience with the training, but decidedly steering clear of any dangerous topics. Eventually, they finish their drinks. He takes off on a test flight.
For the next four or five weeks, she sees him around sometimes, and sometimes she has lunch with him, where they talk only of their jobs (well, mainly she talks, and mostly about being able to fly a plane, now), and it’s on one of those occasions when he casually lets it drop that he’s from the 51st Century. He says he doesn’t know why he trusts her with that information, but that he does.
She smiles. “Thanks for trusting me.” Possibly the first time in her life that she truly means it.
Then one day, a bomb (about which there are rumors that say that it’s not, in fact, a bomb) falls close to Albion Hospital and she doesn’t see him again for a while.
She already knows why.
In 1956, just as she is closing up shop (these days she’s curating a museum somewhere in Italy for a while), she sees a figure dash past her. She recognizes the coat, and unfortunately, also the creature that’s chasing him. A Weevil. Vicious buggers.
She runs after them. Jack dashes into the deserted train station. It follows close by. The Weevil has cornered him, no matter how strong he’s been in their wrestle for control, and he’s about to drop to the tracks. She makes a sound behind them, and the Weevil sees her, which gives Jack enough time to run to safety. It launches at them, but she’s ready. They grapple, and she gets big cuts and bruises and a few teeth marks before she’s able to draw her pistol and shoot. She shoots twice more for good measure.
She collapses against the dirty wall of the station, out of breath, same as him. Jack has giant scratches all over his face, and his white shirt is torn and bloodied in several places. So is her dress.
She decides to be sure where he is on his timeline first. “Who are you?”
He looks at her in amazement. “Really? That’s your question? Not who he is, but me?”
“Yes,” she says.
He frowns, then smiles. “I like you.” She shakes his hand. “Captain Jack Harkness.”
“Nice to meet you.” She wipes her nose free of blood with a tissue. “Why was it attacking you?” The cuts on his neck are already beginning to heal, she notices.
“Oh, sort of my job,” he replies. “Except I didn’t bring any weapons. Thought I’d take a vacation. You know, Italy: pizza, a good opera, a nice Italian girl for a night or two.”
She laughs. “Well that turned out peachy, didn’t it?”
“Actually, it did. Don’t you think so?” He helps her up off the ground. She looks at her hands and finds they’re good as new. She wonders if he notices as well (almost a given, she thinks). She’s relieved by his next sentence. “How’d you learn how to fight, anyway? That was impressive.”
“Thanks. Viking ancestry.”
“Is that so, Ms—?”
She does not give him her real name. “And, yes, yes, it is.”
“Well, the questions still remain. Why the pistol? And why are you so blasé about him?”
She goes for the full never-seen-an-alien-before routine. “A lady must defend herself, of course. And, as for him, I assume he’s some sort of experiment, yes? A vicious variety of beast that got out of control and broke free?”
“No, but good guess.” He smiles. “I kind of want lasagna after that? You in?”
“Lead the way, Captain.” They go back to his place to change before hitting the restaurant (she hasn’t cross-dressed in centuries, and to be frank, she’d missed it).
She spends the evening hearing about aliens she’s met multiple times and about his job at Torchwood, all the while drinking fine Italian wine and pretending to be flabbergasted at the very idea of extraterrestrial life.
She must have been especially charming, because she wakes up in her own bed the day after, and she goes over the events of the night before and finds only a few of them have been retconned. He must have given her a smaller dose, this time.
She’s a surgeon in 1965, working part-time for an organization called UNIT. In the beginning, it’s hell, because now she begins to see The Doctor regularly, young versions of him – even sees his ship parked in his lab –so, in case she does something crazy, she shuts herself up in her consulting room or in the Operating Theatres all day for a while and ultimately asks for a transfer.
Still, she offers whatever support she can to Jo Grant when she parts ways with The Doctor. In 1974, she finds out he’s dropped Sarah off. She’s surprised by this one’s strength, even though she catches Sarah crying once. She offers to help her in her investigative career for a while, but Sarah declines. Over tea with Liz Shaw and dinner with Tegan, she starts to learn about life with The Doctor from the perspective of a mayfly. He was right. It does sound sort of amazing, the way they tell it.
So, in the spring of 1987, when she meets the right version of Jack again, the one who’s approaching 350 years old, she only has one request.
“Take me away.”
“What?”
“Please, Jack. Anywhere. Could be the dingiest star in the galaxy. I’d never know!”
He smiles. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. Absolutely. I’m—”
“Sick of Earth?” She nods, desperately. “Know the feeling.”
He pauses a while. Teases her by taking out his wrist-computer, which she knows he calls a Vortex Manipulator, and pressing a few buttons before answering. “Okay. Got some stuff I gotta do first, though. I’ll come back tomorrow morning.”
She can’t remember the last hug she gave so willingly.
It’s fun, the traveling. Addictive. They negotiate for Torchwood with invading alien races. She sees him gasp his way back to life when a poison arrow gets him in the neck. He watches her heal blindingly fast when she falls off a hundred-story building during a brawl with an annoying Blowfish she met at a bar. They repurpose a planet’s communications network to get rid of a virus killing the half-android population. They get everyone out of a nuclear power plant that’s gone critical. They break out of prison after she accidentally (or possibly not accidentally) insults the (leering-idiot) chief of a tribe host of an Intergalactic Festival. She learns the graphic meaning of “pansexual” when she opens their hotel room’s door too early. So. Many. Limbs. He takes her to The Library (Capital T, Capital L). She swears she then spends a sleepless week and a half there because alien literature when it can be translated, becomes her favorite (she takes as many books as she can carry and comes back several times in the next three centuries).
Doesn’t last long, any of their trips. But they are fun, whenever they happen.
They’re half asleep on a cliff overlooking a silver ocean when he asks.
“What if this was every day?”
“What? The traveling?”
“Yes.”
“You tell me. You’re barely on Earth anymore, Jack.”
He looks at her. “So?”
“So what?”
“How long would you like to keep this up?”
She honestly doesn’t know. It’s a sort of magnetism she feels. The only real thrills in her life are the ones outside her home planet. It’s amazing, the entire Universe. And she doesn’t know how to face that without also facing the truth. She has the horrible certainty that she could become worse than The Doctor if something doesn’t keep her anchored. Jack knows this, too, knows it’s true of himself as well, so he amends his question.
“All right. How much is too much?”
“I don’t know.”
It’s a balance they battle to find until she’s more than 1300 and he’s approaching the half-century.
In the meantime, they travel the stars. Together and on their own.
They have plenty of time, after all.