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Aug. 5th, 2007 06:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
othercaptjackIt's 1892. Ellis Island.
Not a good year, all told, although Captain Jack Harkness will be the first to admit that maybe he's a slightly biased judge.
Bang bang,
I shot you down
Well, being shot through the heart will do that. It's not quite as instantaneous as he would have liked, but a very slow and cinematic couple of seconds flying backwards through the blurred world; slo-mo, he thinks distractedly, and then there's nothing.
Really nothing.
Bang bang, you hit the ground,
Bang bang...
Jack's head is swimming and he's cold. He can't move, and it's hardly as if there's anything to move, and all he can focus on is that goddamn song. Shit. What's the next line? He's stuck with a song in his head to which he knows a total of three lines, and it won't even be out for another seventy-four years. Fantastic.
Nancy Sinatra, though. Great voice, he always thought. Lovely eyes. Great legs. Pity he never got to meet her in his time-travelling days. Bang bang... Not that it was actually about being shot. More metaphorical, about love and loss. Much like most things. What had he been doing? Obviously. Flirting. Just the wrong person to try and love, he guesses, then there had been the fight that ended with an unexpected bullet to the heart, providing the loss in the situation. He snickers silently. It would so have been worth it, though.
Bang bang...
(Shut up, Nancy, I'm dying here.)
There's a point of light. He's supposed to go towards it, or something. What would help would be if he could just figure out which one was his. Or...
Slowly, warily, Jack sits up, damp ground rough and solidly real beneath his hands. The world wavers one more time, then comes into focus. He blinks around at the darkness of the alleyway, down at his bloodstained shirt, up again at the stars.
That he can see.
With his functioning, less-than-dead eyes.
One hand tears slightly at the hole in his shirt to feel the skin underneath. No wound. He swallows against a dry throat, staring down in silence past the leather gauntlet on his wrist - at least they didn't take that, though right now it can do him the exact same amount of good it would do his attackers... his murderers, he corrects himself. Might as well get the terminology right.
I can't die, Jack, Ace had told him, either decades ago or billions of years in the future, depending how you look at it, and she had thought he probably couldn't either. But testing that had been something of a non-starter, and mortality isn't exactly a habit you shrug off lightly, so he'd almost forgotten... Milliways. He had spent years looking for a door, keeping one eye out all the time before he had come to the slow conclusion that he wasn't going to find one. Before that, weeks on the Gamestation, waiting for a rescue that never came as the oxygen generators slowly emptied, then ran to a halt, forcing him to burn out the Time Gauntlet with a jump he'd have been demoted three ranks at the Agency for even attempting. Assuming he survived. But then...
I'm the man that can never die.
Jack runs a thoughtful finger over the gauntlet again. He needs to fix this thing, now more than ever. And for that, he feels, London is the best place. Looks like he's set to start travelling again.
All on his own. He laughs again, quietly and bitterly.
"Just you and me, then, Nancy," he says softly, and starts to walk, heading for the docks and whistling under his breath.
(Bang bang... My baby shot me down.)
Not a good year, all told, although Captain Jack Harkness will be the first to admit that maybe he's a slightly biased judge.
Bang bang,
I shot you down
Well, being shot through the heart will do that. It's not quite as instantaneous as he would have liked, but a very slow and cinematic couple of seconds flying backwards through the blurred world; slo-mo, he thinks distractedly, and then there's nothing.
Really nothing.
Bang bang, you hit the ground,
Bang bang...
Jack's head is swimming and he's cold. He can't move, and it's hardly as if there's anything to move, and all he can focus on is that goddamn song. Shit. What's the next line? He's stuck with a song in his head to which he knows a total of three lines, and it won't even be out for another seventy-four years. Fantastic.
Nancy Sinatra, though. Great voice, he always thought. Lovely eyes. Great legs. Pity he never got to meet her in his time-travelling days. Bang bang... Not that it was actually about being shot. More metaphorical, about love and loss. Much like most things. What had he been doing? Obviously. Flirting. Just the wrong person to try and love, he guesses, then there had been the fight that ended with an unexpected bullet to the heart, providing the loss in the situation. He snickers silently. It would so have been worth it, though.
Bang bang...
(Shut up, Nancy, I'm dying here.)
There's a point of light. He's supposed to go towards it, or something. What would help would be if he could just figure out which one was his. Or...
Slowly, warily, Jack sits up, damp ground rough and solidly real beneath his hands. The world wavers one more time, then comes into focus. He blinks around at the darkness of the alleyway, down at his bloodstained shirt, up again at the stars.
That he can see.
With his functioning, less-than-dead eyes.
One hand tears slightly at the hole in his shirt to feel the skin underneath. No wound. He swallows against a dry throat, staring down in silence past the leather gauntlet on his wrist - at least they didn't take that, though right now it can do him the exact same amount of good it would do his attackers... his murderers, he corrects himself. Might as well get the terminology right.
I can't die, Jack, Ace had told him, either decades ago or billions of years in the future, depending how you look at it, and she had thought he probably couldn't either. But testing that had been something of a non-starter, and mortality isn't exactly a habit you shrug off lightly, so he'd almost forgotten... Milliways. He had spent years looking for a door, keeping one eye out all the time before he had come to the slow conclusion that he wasn't going to find one. Before that, weeks on the Gamestation, waiting for a rescue that never came as the oxygen generators slowly emptied, then ran to a halt, forcing him to burn out the Time Gauntlet with a jump he'd have been demoted three ranks at the Agency for even attempting. Assuming he survived. But then...
I'm the man that can never die.
Jack runs a thoughtful finger over the gauntlet again. He needs to fix this thing, now more than ever. And for that, he feels, London is the best place. Looks like he's set to start travelling again.
All on his own. He laughs again, quietly and bitterly.
"Just you and me, then, Nancy," he says softly, and starts to walk, heading for the docks and whistling under his breath.
(Bang bang... My baby shot me down.)
