Title: Riptide
Author: Aeshna
Fandom: Doctor Who/Torchwood
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 1,111
Characters: Jack Harkness
Summary: He was the rock in the stream, the boulder in the flow, the obstacle that could not be washed away.
Spoilers: DW3.13 The Last of the Time Lords
Disclaimer: Not mine, no matter how many DVDs and toys I buy! Everything here belongs to RTD and to Auntie Beeb, who already has my licence fee.
Archive: Sure, whoever wants it – just let me know where it ends up!
Notes: During the writing of something else, I suddenly needed to know where Jack was when time was resetting itself. A quick bit of rewatching confirmed that he was still down in the reconfigured TARDIS, of course, and that led to wondering just how much his unique relationship with the space-time continuum would play into his perception of things. It would have made for an awkward lump of exposition in the original story, so it's been calved off into this so that I can get it out of my head. :)

Many thanks to mimarie and jwaneeta for looking this over for me. Feedback of any variety is very much appreciated but not compulsory – I'll post anyway! I've suffered for my art, now it's your turn....

Claiming for the 100_situations prompt, "return".

The world snapped back to a chorus of screams, to the whisper of blades and the scent of blood and cordite. He shrugged death aside – a familiar reflex now, barely registering – and threw himself forward, his focus narrowed to the battered blue doors that had haunted his thoughts for so very long. He could hear the angry confusion of the Toclafane guards as they realised their error, abandoning their shrieking human prey too late as he crashed into the Paradox Machine's heart and barred the way behind him. The gun was heated and heavy in his hands, a familiar, welcome weight as he found his balance and found the trigger, spraying destruction into something he had once held more than dear. The bullets spattered and sparked, drawing out flashes of brilliance as they found vulnerable points, but he didn't stop firing, didn't stop until –

Flame blossomed and plumed, a moment of sudden, explosive violence painting the broken coral dome with crimson and gold, and there was pressure as something twisted, something cracked –

He stilled –

– his inevitable constancy. He was the rock in the stream, the boulder in the flow, the obstacle that could not be washed away –

– shutting out the physical as the storm coursed through reality. He could feel it –

– erasing the unnatural scars of the past year like waves smoothing over savaged sand. He stood at the very centre of the universe, untouched and unafraid as the Toclafane were cast screaming into the abyss, as –

No wonder the TARDIS had fled. She couldn't handle the competition.

Finally, finally –

...and then all was as it should be, as it had been, the paradox erased. It was over.

It had never even been.

Jack Harkness let out a slow breath and released his grip on the machine gun, letting it swing free on its strap. The console room was still and perfectly dark when he opened his eyes, the stale air edged with a chill that was not quite natural, but he could feel something faintly alive, curled and quiescent beneath the destruction, could feel a sense of hope, of pain, of quivering fear....

"No need to be scared of me, sweetheart," he told the silent presence, wondering at the way he could feel it shifting against his senses as he never had before. "I'm done in here. Once and for all."

The corridor was light and vibration and stifling heat as Jack stepped through the TARDIS doors... and stopped. He had imagined himself to be the only one untouched by the temporal reversal, but the bodies of the black-clad guards still lay where they had fallen, sliced apart by the laughing Toclafane. He gazed at them without guilt or pity – he had needed the distraction they offered to reach his goal and a year of their contempt and casual cruelty had withered any ability to care about their fate – and frowned. He had felt the change, had felt the shifting of the currents, the turning of the tide, and the Valiant had enclosed the very heart of the crisis. It should have borne the brunt of the paradox's collapse, should have been the first place to be scoured clean of that psychopath's influence. The past year should exist only in his memories and, perhaps, those of the two warring Gallifreyans, unless –

Jack quirked a small, humourless smile as realisation came. The Valiant and her inhabitants had stood at the fountainhead... but the ship had somehow been caught in his temporal lee, sheltered in the still space left as the torrent was forced around his fixed and immutable presence. The rest of the world had been granted a second chance, but the Valiant, it seemed, was an island of lost souls, her ghost year real, her deaths and her memories painfully permanent.

He looked down at the guards again, then stepped over their corpses and started back towards the bridge at a jog. There was still work to be done and he was going to enjoy seeing that alien bastard grovel for mercy. The Doctor – double genocide that he was – might have offered forgiveness, but Jack hadn't and he'd spent much of the past twelve months imagining what he'd like to do to his keeper, every wishfully detailed scenario carefully designed to avoid forcing a regeneration. He knew how to find the weak points of an organism, how to calibrate response, how to play each nerve and muscle and buried insecurity like a finely-tuned instrument. He had a years-worth of grievances demanding attention and he was going to have his reckoning, one way or the other.

The Doctor wouldn't agree to a second of it, of course, would no doubt scowl and mutter about Torchwood's influence. But Jack had influenced the Institute far more than it had ever influenced him over the years, had built himself a place to belong, had spent the last year mourning for something that had been the first to –

He stopped, his heart suddenly beating faster as realisation struck.

The first to be lost... and the last to be found. Time had reversed, the universe reset. His team was alive.

His team was waiting for him.

They were alive.

He was laughing as he reached the lift and hit the control for the bridge. Time couldn't touch him, it seemed, not forward nor back, but it didn't matter because they were still alive.

Screw the Master and his twisted psyche; screw the Doctor and his sanctimonious double-standards – he hoped they'd be happy together. Suddenly vengeance didn't seem quite so important any more.

He was going back.

He was going home.

~ fin ~