m_findlow

Title: In the cards
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack, OC
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 2,168 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for juliet316's prompt "Torchwood, Jack Harkness, his first encounter with the girl with the Tarot cards" at fic_promptly
Summary: Jack has a difficult decision ahead of him.

Jack couldn't remember who it was that had told him about this place. He may have been very drunk at the time - as was often threatened case these days given his propensity for filling in the days with one of the few things he could legitimately do on this planet and which he was quite skilled at - but by asking around, he’d confirmed it from two other people.

He didn’t usually believe in such nonsense as magic or voodoo or whatever you wanted to call it, and even less so in this so called art of fortune telling, but around these parts it was probably the closest he was going to get to speak to one who was gifted in such things as they were. The purpose might not be able to read his tea leaves but they would no doubt be versed in the kinds of stranger goings on in a city that could point him in the right direction of the kinds of people he really wanted to speak to.

He surely wasn’t the only alien in this city. If he could get stuck here then others must have done so as well, particularly given this city just happening to sit on a rift in time and space. Rifts were tricky things at the best of the times, and this one was especially malignant, picking and choosing its victims at random. He pitied them. He at least only had himself to blame for his own misfortune. Had he gotten the time coordinates right in the first place, it might not have mattered so much that his vortex manipulator had chosen that moment to burn itself out. He'd still be with the Doctor and Rose, having fun and traveling the universe.

Being stranded here in Victorian Cardiff was the kind of hassle he didn't need. What he needed was to reach out to the alien community. He just needed to find out where they tended to congregate. Rumours, if they were to be believed would have someone around here who would know how to fix his damn vortex manipulator, or at least he hoped. After twenty years of bouncing around this little patch of dirt, hopping from one side of the planet to the other in order to experience it in full, he was now thoroughly bored with it. He might have hung around a while longer, but then he’d gotten caught by those two Torchwood women.

Faced with a potential eternity behind bars, letting them torture him for a bit of fun when it suited them, or to sign up with Torchwood and do the odd job for them, he knew which he preferred. That didn’t mean he had to like it, and he certainly didn't approve of their methods or attitudes. Human though he was in appearance, he still considered himself alien, and the way they treated aliens around here was not to his liking. It was usually a case of killing, or at best, capture and dissection. Whether highly intelligent or not, aliens were classed as less than human, and less in most cases than the lowest insect that crawled under one's shoe. It was extremely hard not to take that kind of thing personally. That they regarded the Doctor as public enemy number one told him all he really needed to know about their politics and mission statement.

Unfortunately, they also had him in a bind of a different kind. There were correct in that he needed money. He’d spent most of his reserves enjoying himself for the last two decades and couldn’t get access to the rest without being able to travel back to planets where he had emergency funds hidden away. Level Five worlds like Earth didn't recognise any of his credit identification chips, or have any facilities for transferring funds from one end of the galaxy to the other. They didn't even know then rest of the universe existed yet. Stupid primitive planet.

With a little bit of his old Time Agency trickery, he'd managed to steal a few files from Emily's locked cabinet and grease a few palms as well, to get to the bottom of the alien underground in Cardiff. They were smart and well resourced, knowing that they needed to keep well under Torchwood's radar if they had a hope of surviving. It took all of Jack's guile to convince them to let him into their inner circle, proving to them the hard way that he wasn't a human of this Earth. Dying and coming back, plus being fluent in Galactic Standard and about fifteen other languages was enough to sway even the most distrustful gatekeeper. After that, he had what he needed - an address for the one place in the city where extraterrestrials could mingle in safety.

The door was tucked away at the end of an alleyway in a less than desirable part of the city. That in itself wasn't unexpected. Strange things went unobserved in places where the locals were uneducated, drunken or just plain stupid. He'd been around this part of town before, but he'd never noticed the door or even this particularly narrow alleyway. If he hadn’t known it was there he’d never have found it on his own. Perception filter, he realised, watching other locals wander past its opening without so much as even casting a glance down its length. The technology was meant to keep people out, and here it was working a treat. He knocked twice on the door. A small hatch slid open and a great grey eye boggled around in its socket as it took him in. 'Who sent you?' it asked in Galactic Standard, clearly skeptical given Jack's rather human appearance.

'The woman with a thousand eyes,' Jack replied. He followed that up with a string of random words and numbers also in Galactic Standard. As passwords went, it was a doozy, struggling to wrap even his very talented tongue around the twister, but the heavy latched on the door clinked and scraped, admitting him inside.

The interior of the building could have been mistaken for any of a dozen pubs Jack frequented in town, apart from the most obvious fact that apart from him, there were only a handful of other humanoid patrons. Jack didn't know who he was looking for yet, hoping only to engage a few people and see where that lead him. You never knew what skills or technology some species might have, and he still didn't know just how much getting to access to those right tools might cost him. Whatever the price, he vowed he'd pay it, if only to get himself off this godforsaken rock. If it took a transport ship to get him out of here he'd take it, and then worry about fixing his wrist strap afterwards.

The night became a long slow series of drinks, sat alone in the unsheltered courtyard that opened out at the back of the establishment. Just like any other pub, it had its share of drunken patrons and whores ready to tickle the fancies of anyone with a bit of coin. Jack wasn't interested in picking up, not tonight. His own company was enough for him until he could find the right person to strike up a conversation with.

He let his gaze drift over the various drunken patrons, trying to decide where he should start offering to buy drinks when a girl approached the upturned crate where he was keeping his bottle of liquor and the empty flagons of earlier company, all of whom had been moderately unhelpful with his current situation. They knew about Torchwood of course, though he kept that morsel to himself. Technically he didn't work for them anymore. It would only annoy Emily and Alice that they wouldn't be able to find him. He wasn't afraid of them or what they might do to him. They had to catch him first, and this time he knew who they were. He wouldn't get jumped again.

'Can I read your cards?' she asked him. She couldn't have been more than about nine years old, though clearly she wasn't what she appeared to be. Little girls didn't just get let in through the front door.

Jack avoided meeting her gaze so it'd be easier to say no. He may have come here looking for someone with the gift of foresight but this little waif wasn't what he had in mind. He had real questions that needed answering. The last thing he wanted was to set her into a fit of tears and end up with his arse being kicked out into the alley. 'No, thank you,' he said, with equal lashings of politeness and that rude disinterest that people famously served up to strangers on the streets who tried to hand them pamphlets about this cause or that.

If she heard his response she didn't show it. Instead she loudly swept everything from the table, clearing it in an instant and shuffling the deck of cards in her hand as she stared up at him.

'No, really,' he said, her gaze not willing to take no for an answer. Reluctantly, Jack eased himself back onto the stool opposite her. Humour her and then he could go back to what he came here for.

Without acknowledging him further, she began setting the cards out on the table in a single row of three. She flipped over the leftmost card, a tower, then the center card, a knight in armor with a face that was eerily identical to his own, and the one to its right, a heart pierced by three swords.

'He's coming,' the girl announced. 'The one you're looking for.'

Jack resisted the urge to get excited. The problem with fortune telling was that it was so vague that you could ascribe almost any meaning to the predictions doled out. She wasn't really referring to the Doctor. She couldn't be. It was just Jack trying to attach meaning to useless mumbo jumbo.

She dealt a further three cards to the right of first lot, layering them one over the other in a vertical line and frowning at them thoughtfully before meeting his gaze again. 'But the century will turn twice before you find each other again,' she added.

Now he knew she was talking nonsense. He broke into a smile, lowering his head. 'Ooohh, are you for real?' he taunted.

The look in her eyes immediately unsettled him, as did the almost imperceptible smile that tugged at the edge of her mouth, defying him to deny it as truth. He paused a moment to let it sink in. The century would turn twice? It was 1889 now. He sat up a little straighter. 'You, mean I have to wait a hundred years to find him?'

She didn't reply, but it served just as well as an affirmation. The bottom fell out of his stomach at the thought. A hundred years? At least, he reminded himself. The century would turn twice. He might have to wait nearly two hundred years if she was telling the truth. 'What will I do I the meantime?'

His eyes dropped back down to the table, specifically at the picture of himself dressed as a knight. He'd always been a soldier, with the Time Agency in any case. But those days were done and gone, or were they? Could he really stick it out here for another hundred years? The prospect of working for Torchwood and Emily, or whoever followed her once she was dead and buried seemed unpalatable. Then again, whether he worked for them or not, they would continue to make life difficult for people like him, displaced aliens, and goddesses only knew what might happen if they got the wrong technology in their hands. At least if he stayed on, he might be able to curb some of the violence and the mistreatment. If he walked away now, they'd only hunt him down, and he didn't want to spend eternity locked up in some dungeon, clever as he thought he might be at evading them. Ultimately, it only took one slip up, one excess of confidence, to be right back where he'd started, but this time with no second chances. If he was, he might never get back to his Doctor.

He leaned back in the chair. This wasn't what he'd come here for, yet now that it was laid out in front of him, it didn't seem like he had a lot of choice. He didn't want to believe it, but there was something about the way the girl sat so placidly across from him that made him squirm. It was like she'd been expecting him to come here tonight, ready to relay the message that had been on her mind.

'Anything else you wanna tell me?' he asked, staring pointedly at the remaining deck of cards in her small hands.

'These are just cards,' she replied. 'They don't mean anything.'