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Jack paced the holo of the subject's office, considering the few personal items on the desk, an old fashioned leather blotter, a finely decorated porcelain cup, and an obsidian picture frame cycling through images of real and assumed smiles. Jack leaned through the desk for a closer look at the two-dimensional photograph-of-the-moment; the subject was grinning madly, through the rain and muck of a hiking vacation, and next to him was a slightly younger man rolling his eyes. A previous photo had the companion smiling up through a pair of sunglasses, and the next one was him at home.
An electric thrill traversed Jack's spine; he needed that man located and brought in. That sort of external assistance could prove vital. It was crucial the Time Agency discover where the Saelmian ambassador was hiding. Thus, Jack's orders were to find out fast and by 'any means necessary'.
Curiously, the background briefing he'd received had been atypically sparse. Even still, the process required only forty hours and one collateral termination. All in all, Jack considered it a respectable completion time. Really, the trivialities of why the ambassador was wanted, or the reasons he had gone into hiding, were irrelevant.
Later, classified news-vids carried the brilliant blues and purples of an entire planet, Saelmac, disappearing into the Void, its inhabitants, past and present, violently erased from the writ of existence. Jack didn't blink an eye. He knew he could trust that the fidelity of the time-stream and the future of mankind were at stake.
They had been waiting in Belgium for three days and the cold, hard, winter rain hadn't once stopped beating its staccato cadence on the helmets of the men in the trench.
A soldier, so young he couldn't be shaving yet, squelched past. His uniform was slick with mud and soggy vegetation and he was walking determinedly away from the shallowest extremity of the trench, a section he had no call to be in. Jack grabbed his arm hissed in the private's ear.
"Where were you?"
The boy jerked and skidded in the muck. Guilt flashed across his face then was drowned under rivulets of rain water. "Jus' lookin' sir."
"With full scout kit?" Jack's voice was dangerously quiet and barely audible over the storm. "Our orders are to stay here. No one out."
"Sir, I was jus' lookin'" the private repeated, his voice stronger and slightly defiant. "But there's only five of 'em, sir, in that bunker 'ore there. Jus' five, and we 'ave thirty. It wouldn't be hard, and then we'd be dry. Sir."
"We are holding for the P gas helmets," Jack parroted from the order, received in telegraphic short-form three days ago. "With luck, we'll move tomorrow."
"I don't understand why, sir."
"We don't have to," Jack admonished, giving the boy a sharp shove in the direction of the clamor of voices assembling for supper. "We just have to obey."
He'd always equated flying with freedom. The open sky took no orders and gave none in return. Encased in his cockpit, flying home at the end of an engagement, he could almost pretend that war didn't exist and that death hadn't infected every corner. In his recollections, freedom smelled of oil and leather interwoven with cold sweat and adrenaline. Today, if he tilted his head just right, he could also scent the salty bite of the unbroken ocean beneath him.
Jack eyed the calendar etched into the side of his bird, and chuckled bleakly at his early fear of being rotated off the carrier before the end of the Blitz. Someone had made one, minuscule, navigation miscalculation and now there wasn't much more in his tank than fumes. There was nothing for it, though, but to hold course and hope he'd be in Wales for the end of the war. If he crashed, Jack mused, would he sink, weighted down by gear and overcome by waves? Or would he float, thrown here and there until he finally gasped life from the foreign aromas of another land?
With impeccable timing, the squat form of the Ark Royal appeared on the horizon, and a pissed-off order crackled across the static of the radio.
"Captain James Harper, get that bird down here right now."
Jack glanced at his calendar one more time, and carefully readjusted his mask. It was a while yet before James Harper could be Jack Harkness again.
Jack could taste fear. It was in the air, the dirt, and the sharp tang of copper in the back of his throat. It sang in his blood and it hummed across neurons, jumping from gap to gap and filling his being. But at the end of the universe, with time itself dying, when the Doctor warned him "Jack, don't you dare," fear didn't overwhelm him. Jack fired his terror into the burnt out, perpetual darkness.
This particular flavor of obedience wasn't easy. It wasn't instinctual, and it wasn't blind. Jack obeyed the Doctor because he understood. He knew better. After more than a hundred years, these decisions were Jack's. He was better.
"Hold your fire!"
Jack pressed his hand into the crisp fabric of Ianto's suit, pushing the arm down and sending a bullet directly into the mud. The recoil kicked back into Ianto's body and reverberated through Jack's soul. Still angry and shaking, Ianto re-cocked his weapon and released the safety.
"Ianto," Jack warned, maintaining steady contact. A shudder ripped through Ianto's form.
"It would have killed them," Ianto protested. "They're children, and it would have..."
Jack held Ianto's arm firmly until the resistance drained away, then slid down until their hands touched, warmth and life flowing from skin to skin. Jack wrapped fingers around the smooth metal of the weapon and replaced the safety. Finally, he guided Ianto's hands as they secured the weapon in its holster.
"Let's go," Jack bumped Ianto's shoulder with his own. "We have bigger fish to fry. Like the one handing that kid her orders."