thetart | when I see you again, as I always do [RP with quitehomoerotic]

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when I see you again, as I always do [RP with quitehomoerotic]

It had been a slow day, so when Shaz rushed into CID alight with the news that someone was threatening to jump off the building across the street from the Met, Alex's heart jumped ever so slightly with excitement.

Shoving Sam Tyler's file into her desk (she had been blankly staring at it for over an hour), Alex grabbed her blazer and made a beeline for the door. She had been preoccupied - not even by Sam, so much, as thoughts about Jack Harkness. Jack bloody Harkness and his disappearing act. Alex had never had anyone disappear straight from her arms before; timing aside, she had started to honestly wonder how far gone she really was. She had enjoyed her short time with him, but now she was left, again, with a bunch of unanswered questions and ghostly figures and a life that didn't make sense anymore.

"Oy, Bolly, that's not CID business," Gene Hunt barked from his office, glowering at her in his special way from behind the desk as she approached the door.

"They'll need a negotiator," she argued. "Someone to talk him down. You know I'm more qualified than anyone else in the building."

He grunted. Alex, luckily, was fluent in the grunting language of lardy fascists and understood it meant "Fine, do what you want."

So she slipped out the door and made her way to the street, heading towards the congregation of coppers who stood, staring up at the roof with blank and helpless looks on their faces. She peered along with them at the figure, able to only just make out his features in the glaring sunlight of the fading day.

As recognition hit her, Alex Drake realized her boring day was about to get a lot more interesting.

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Jack Harkness wasn't a man adverse to an occasional drink or two. That said, even for him it was strange to wake up in a pool of his own dried blood on a planet he was only too certain he'd left. His little sojourn to the 1980s had certainly been real.

Hadn't it?

Maybe it was some dream. Some new strange elaborate dream. He had to admit, it was certainly the sort of scenario he might concoct; a mystery he could solve and an extremely attractive woman to solve it with. Not to mention a rather enjoyable evening between the sheets.

Still, can't have been real, can it? Not when he woke up right where he'd last been.

Jack continued about his life, getting into danger as he is wont to do. Until, of course, he got killed again.

And he woke up in 1983.

Strange.

It didn't feel like a dream at all. Jack knew dreams; he knew nightmares. He'd had plenty of them after all. No, this felt real.

So, of course, he did what he knew best, investigated. That was to say he drew attention to himself. When looking for a police woman (okay, detective, whatever), causing a stir was a sure fire way to pull them out. So he stood on a roof of a building and climbed up to the edge, and he waited.

It was, of course, barely any time at all before there was a large crowd below. And barely any time longer before a familiar face was amongst them.

He saw her, and he grinned down in her direction before stepping back from the edge. And he waited.

Edited 2010-07-18 01:31 (UTC)

Still aghast at what she had seen, Alex felt frozen in time as he disappeared briefly from her view and back onto the roof.

She turned to Shaz, who stood a few steps behind her, gazing up at the roof. "You think he'll really do it, ma'am?"

"I don't think that's quite his goal," Alex answered truthfully. "Let them know I'm heading up there to talk to him. And clear out this crowd."

Obediently, Shaz went on her way, and Alex started up the fire escape to the roof. Her feet were unsteady beneath her suddenly weak legs.

On the roof the wind whipped desperately around her, and Alex crossed her arms, scanning the roof again, hoping against hope this wasn't just another strange apparition, that he wasn't going to just disappear again.

But he hadn't. He stood there, next to the roof, that jacket flowing around him in the breeze, and she approached him with slow steps, as if she were coming towards a feral animal.

"Hi," she said, after a long moment. "You've caused quite the scene down there."

"Well if it isn't Alex Drake," Jack said with a wide ear to ear grin on his face. His hands were shoved in his pockets and he was standing there a little like he was posing for a painting.

Her statement made his grin widen by degrees (if that were possible). He turned his head and gestured off the roof. "What that?" he asked, all mock innocence in his voice. "That's nothing. You should see me when I've had my weetabix."

He nodded to her and tilted his head back a little. All serious.

"We need to talk."

Alex, on the other hand, could not find it in herself to smile.

Instead she stood in front of him, coming to a stop at the kind of distance that existed between strangers, not lovers. She didn't want to be angry at him, not anymore than she ever wanted to be sad or scared or lonely. But seeing him there brought it all to the surface, and Alex wasn't exactly one to hold back.

"We needed to talk before, but you left," she told him, and she wondered if the bitterness in her voice sounded childish. "You've been gone for weeks. I don't know what exactly it is about you that my subconscious has fixated on, but it's not helping me. I don't need you just coming in and out of my life, being another distraction."

"Really now, the way I remember it it wasn't much talking you were interested in." Jack said to her with a slight quirk of one eyebrow. It was rather short, and perhaps more than a little childish, but well, Jack wasn't beyond that sort of behaviour.

He pulled one hand out from his pocket and gestured it out in front of him, adding emphasis to his words.

"And actually I didn't leave, I disappeared; there's a difference."

Jack was a man who could quite easily be grumpy, and a little part of his mind told him to turn around and go, she obviously didn't know what was going on here so why waste his time? But no; no there was more to this, and maybe whatever it was, she was a part of it.

Pursing her lips, Alex acknowledged what he said with a nod - after all, his vanishing act wasn't exactly the typical circumstances of awakening to an empty bed. But she hadn't wanted to believe that she had seen what she'd seen.

More importantly, she understood, it wasn't Jack that she was angry with at all. To be fair, it wasn't even anger. It was more a frustration, a need to understand what had happened to him and what was happening to her. He had to mean something in the scheme of things. He had to be significant.

With a deep breath she took another step forward, letting her eyes drift over him as she tried to puzzle him out. "Where did you go?" she asked him, her tone suddenly comforting, gentle.

"Oh no," Jack said, "nuh uh, don't you pull that voice on me, I know that voice. That's the sensitive 'we'll talk this out' voice. I've known people who use that voice. And sure, you use it as much as you like, but you don't use it on me, you got that?"

Gwen Cooper used to use that voice. Jack used to see how frankly wonderfully she used that voice. Not on him, of course, on him it was more shouting and firm looks. Unless she wanted a day off, of course.

Still, he took a long breath. Inside he knew he was being much more difficult than he needed to be, and so he sighed, tilting his head a little.

"I woke up," he told her matter of factly. "Woke up in a pool of my own blood, actually. Which, by the way, I'd never recommend. Hell to get out of shirts."

Alex sucked in her breath. "Some of us don't have the luxury of waking up like that," she told him. "Some of us stay stranded in this bloody place."

It sounded like a ridiculous thing to say, but her tone was completely devoid of mirth. The gentleness was gone, too. If anything else, she just sounded tired.

"Maybe... Maybe we should go somewhere else and talk," she said. "Half of the Met is down there taking bets about how wide the radius of your body splatter will be, and I think it's time to send them all home disappointed."

"Luxury? You'd call that luxury? You know it's really no trip to Disneyland."

That said, he agreed that she was right, and standing around on a roof (fun as that was) wasn't going to get a lot done.

He smirked a little at the idea they were all waiting down there for a body, and briefly he considered giving them what they wanted.

"You know I could jump, maybe find out," he said flippantly, shrugging his shoulders back slightly. "Though maybe you could go down put a bet in first for me. I'd hate to miss out."

Tilting his head, he looked towards the roof edge, and then with a sigh, back to Alex.

"Somewhere quiet. Private." he said. "Lead the way, DI Drake."

Alex ignored his quip (she'd begun to get pretty good at that, considering her experience with Gene Hunt) and nodded towards the stairway.

"You know where my flat is," she told him matter-of-factly. "I'll let them know you've backed down and gone home, and they'll move out."

Really, the last thing she needed her team to see was her escorting the madman on the roof to her flat. What shreds were left of her sanity wouldn't stand for that.

She turned away, looking back a second to add, "And try not to disappear this time."

"Oh don't tell me; meet you back at yours, go make myself comfortable. Damn you women don't leave any time waiting do you?" He laughed and walked behind her, but he realised his teasing might not be taken as such, and so he cleared his throat.

Stepping down the steps he turned back to look at the sky before looking again back towards her. As they reached the bottom he paused and nodded.

"I'll do my best," he said.

"Don't make yourself too comfortable," Alex replied, and it was the first time there was any sense of teasing in her tone.

She parted from him at the bottom of the stairs, making her way back over to the crowd that was now thinning to essential personnel.

Making up a story about the strange man fleeing down the fire escape wasn't particularly difficult - it wasn't exactly a lie, either - and the officers in charge resigned themselves to a night of drinking at Luigi's instead of mopping bits of Captain Jack Harkness of the street. And Alex resigned herself to a night of whatever having Jack Harkness in her flat meant.

As even as she stood outside the door of her own flat, she didn't have any idea what that meant.

She pulled open her door and slipped in, crossing through the kitchen to the living room.

"Oh I wouldn't dream of it," he said back with a light smirk before departing ways at the foot of the stairs.

He walked over to her flat and though the door was locked he had no trouble gaining access. Stepping inside he took a few steps around. He walked into the kitchen and pulled open a drawer full of cutlery he doubted was ever used.

It was all real. It all felt real. It all looked real. And sure, dreams felt real while you were dreaming them, but you weren't supposed to know they were dreams, were you?

Moving back to the couch he sat himself down and lifted a three day old newspaper from the table to leaf through it. His head was still in it when Alex arrived back in the room.

"You know news is just no fun when you already know what's coming," he said.

Passing through the living room, Alex prepared glasses of wine for the both of them, never quite looking at Jack.

"The last three years of my life have been spent puzzling out the vague memories I have of all these events from my childhood." She shrugged. "But it's a bit worth it to see the look on Chris' face when I 'guess' the winner of Eurovision every year."

She settled down next to him on the couch, keeping, still, a distance that didn't speak to their previous intimacy. "It's funny, isn't it? What you remember and what you forget."

Alex offered him a glass of wine, sipping slowly from her own.

Jack folded the newspaper and set it down to the side, diverting his full attention to Alex. He looked up to her and laughed. "Oh yeah, you think that's something? Try telling people when the war is going to end."

Beat.

"And when the next one is going to begin. You should see the looks on their faces then."

He took the glass from her and drank a single sip.

"I was wrong," he said, serious again, "last time I was here, I was wrong. I didn't come here like I thought I did. There's something bigger going on."

She kind of felt like Jack was being less prophetic and more of stating the obvious, because she had been saying for ages that there was more to this than meets the eye.

But he was someone to talk to, and that was an improvement from her usual isolation. She could say things to Jack she could never dream of saying to Gene.

"Let me guess," she told him, setting her glass on the table in front of them. "When you woke up, you were back wherever you come from. And it felt different, like it wasn't right anymore. Because now that you're back here, here feels so much more real than anything back home."

"No," Jack said plainly. Not one to beat around the bush.

"Felt just about as real as it always has," he told her. "And trust me, I should know; I've woken up in my own blood quite a few times."

Of course there was plenty she didn't know. She didn't know about his handy little knack not to stay dead, and really, that had to be a factor in whatever was going on.

"Point is," he said, "I didn't get here last time like I thought I did. Strange thing, seems I got a little muddled --and I wouldn't often admit to that-- But turns out I'd been shot. Familiar, Alex?"

Wincing slightly, Alex retrieved her wine. Obviously, what had happened to him had been different but... why?

"We both were shot. Both of us woke up here, only to find ourselves revived in the real world in the wake of that trauma. But..." She tilted her head at him, examining him quietly. "When I went back, when I woke up, it looked like home but it didn't feel real. Not as real as this place. I'm not sure it was real."

Alex's head was spinning, and she tried to fight for a single shred of sense in all of this, but it was nowhere to be found. "What do you mean you've woken up in your own blood a few times? That's not exactly a common occurrence for a politician or an escort. Or even a copper."

Jack sat himself forward a little, and inclined slightly towards her.

"When you say you woke up, how? Where? Because I've got a feeling it wasn't like I woke up --trust me, I'm unique there-- What happens to me can't happen to you. You're right though, that this feels real. It's not a dream, I know that much."

He took his glass again and downed the contents in one.

"An escort? Really now, I left all that behind me years ago." He said, and shot a wink in her direction.

Alex looked away, flushing involuntarily at his wink. She fixed her concentration on the corner of a desk so she didn't have to look Jack in the eyes as she spoke.

"I woke up in hospital. My little girl was there, waiting for me. I was so happy for this all to be over, to be home again." Her lips had curved into a fond smile, one that faded as she continued to tell her story. "And that's when... I started to hear them. Calling to me, asking me for help, telling me to come back. I dreamt about them, every night. And I sent Molly away, because I couldn't bear to look at her, knowing that not every bit of me wanted to be back with her."

She pressed her lips together, trying to reign in the longing and ache that overtook her heart. "What kind of mother does that, Jack? It was like I had forgotten what it felt like to be real. And just when I thought my world was crumbling again, I woke up here. I came back."

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