m_findlow

Title: Playing by the rules
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,490 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for Juliet316's prompt "Torchwood, Jack, he's learned to make up his own rules as time has gone by" at fic_promptly
Summary: Rules were made to be broken

Jack has never been much for rules. Rules are constrictive, telling you all the things you're not allowed to do, which is fine in certain circumstances. For so many years he was with the Time Agency, where rules were not only there to keep the agents in line, but also to protect them. It was one thing to be able to travel the length and breadth of time, but there had to be limits as to what you could and couldn't do. It would be all too easy to get caught up in the timeline of wherever your mission took you, inadvertently getting involved far beyond what was required, and affecting the timeline permanently. Who knew what would happen then. You yourself might cease to exist because of your own actions, so it was vitally important to have rules. Not all of them were written in stone either. Some of them he picked up on the job. Those were probably the most important ones; the ones they couldn't teach you, the ones which were akin to survival skills, but adapted to fall in line with Agency policy, as it were.

But what happens when the people you've come to rely upon so much betray you?

The Time Agency had become his family away from home. He'd still been just a boy when he'd left the Boeshane, but they'd taken him in, given him an education unlike any he'd had back home, and given him rigor and discipline at an age when he needed it most. Without it, he'd probably have become a drifter, a vigilante, stuck on a tiny world where nothing ever happened. He couldn't see himself becoming a merchant or an itinerant farmer, nor a teacher or an intellectual. He was a runner. He needed somewhere he could use his physicality and braun. If the Time Agency hadn't come along, he'd have no doubt stowed away on a passing ship and run away from home, looking for adventure and excitement.

He'd had plenty of both in his years with the Agency, making some good friends, and a lot of lovers, along the way. But then it had all gone wrong. One minute everything had been fine, and the next he woke up not knowing where he was, or what he'd been doing. Somehow he'd managed to make his way back to Agency headquarters, but they refused to tell him anything. All his old friends had gone silent on him. Two years of memories gone. What the hell had he been doing, and why would nobody tell him? He suspected he knew why. He'd done something horrific, and no one wanted any evidence of it to stick to them, yet whatever it was, he was not persona non grata, which probably meant that he'd been following orders. Try as he might, he couldn't uncover the truth, and the longer it went on, the more he felt like a pawn in their bigger game. He didn't want to wait to find out what else he might have done in the name of the Agency that was cruel and distasteful. Whatever rules they'd decided to adopt weren't there to protect him, at least not from his point of view. They were there to protect themselves. The family he'd come to love had abandoned him, so he abandoned it. If that was where following the rules got you, he didn't want to be a rule follower anymore.

Lawlessness suited him well. He got what he needed, within his own bounds of what was proper and good. No one ever really got hurt when he did things his way, it was more of an inconvenience. That he could live with. He'd made up his own set of boundaries to keep himself within the limits of what he thought he could get away with. It didn't mean he always followed them, and often fell into trouble with others like himself who'd become jaded and haunted by their experiences, but it did give him a measure ethics, which was more than he could have said for some of those companions.

Then his life had been turned upside down again. To say The Doctor followed rules was like trying to unravel a ball of yarn from the inside out. There were clearly some kinds of rules, but good luck if you could fathom them out. He suspected maybe like him, The Doctor was just making it up as he went, and in his line of work, that was probably the only way to do it. But before he'd had the chance to unravel that particular mystery, he'd found himself abandoned again, stuck in the nineteenth century on planet Earth and unable to die.

Try as he might, there were no rules to fit that set of circumstances. What were you supposed to do if you were stranded on a backwater planet and couldn't die? Did you just accept your lot and get on with it? That didn't sound right. He couldn't spend all of eternity here. He'd go mad.

Just when that he thought he'd exhausted travelling this tiny rock, and generating his own brand of lawlessness here, he'd been scooped up by Torchwood. If he hadn't liked rules before, he certainly didn't like these rules now. It was less rules, of course and more like blackmail. Work for us, or spend the rest of your days being tortured by us. They almost equated to the same thing in his mind, the only difference being that if he played by their rules for now, he might eventually be able to bend them to suit his own needs.

And he had. Slowly but surely, he'd earned himself a place at Torchwood. Not necessarily the place he'd wanted, since he was still a floater all the way up to the turn of the century, but he did have a freedom of sorts. The old regime had worn itself down with piety and self interest, and with that came a new era of more practical and pragmatic leaders. Ones who knew the value of killing later and asking questions first, or not killing at all. Perhaps finally he'd settled into something he could live with, at least until The Doctor came back for him, which he was. Jack was just counting down the days.

He should have known that time would be cruel to him, just as it always had. The second century had turned, and with it his entire world yet again.

He stood there, in the now empty hub, the bodies cleared away and stored, just as they all were, down in the depths of the morgue to be forever frozen in time, just as he might be one day if he could ever break this curse. What was he supposed to do now? Leader of Torchwood? He couldn't do that. That required rules and discipline. It required him to take responsibility, not just for himself, but for the whole city, and anyone who got involved in this madcap job. He'd never been a leader; not really. Always a follower, even when he didn't like it. How was he supposed to steer the ship now? He'd have to change the way he did everything. As a leader he'd have to start making up some new rules, rules that suited him and what he wanted to achieve. Not long after came the fall of Torchwood One, and he knew that despite all the headaches his new regime had caused them, that he'd made the right decision. Rules could be changed and adopted to suit the conditions. Staying one way for the sake of history was always going to end badly, it was just that he'd had the gift of long years of experience to see to what they couldn't. And so that's what he did. He changed and adapted, threw out the old where it didn't work, tweaked the existing to make it better, and developed a whole new set of rules that focused on what was important, rather than what was important only to a select few people in government.

There were plenty of mistakes and false starts along the way, but as he stands in the boardroom now, looking out over the hub and at his team, he realises that for all of this life he's learned to make the rules up as he goes. There's no one size fits all set of rules that will keep him and his team alive, but they do the best that they can to keep themselves safe, and to keep the city safe. The rules he's had to follow might not have always been to his liking, but each one brought him closer to the set of immutable laws that he's use to govern his life, and the next, and whatever comes after that, because when you know you're going to live forever, there's no telling what might happen.