[for gwen]

[more_flexible]

Jack had talked to Dream, the Lord Whatever, and as the sun dropped beneath the horizon the potential of dreaming was something he just wanted to avoid. Horrible was what the man had said, and he hadn't been off.

So, under the guise of 'pain relief', Jack had taken a joint and matches out into the grass near the treehouse and laid back to look at the stars. As he inhaled the smoke he wondered which of them he'd been to. Which of them he'd never be close to again.

Comments

[captainjack.livejournal.com]

"Ohh, don't cry, Gwen," he cooed, wiping her tears as well. "You really don't deserve to be hurt, and especially not by me. Seems like I try to change and that's still all I'm good at."

[be-normal.livejournal.com]

Gwen thinks that perhaps he's missing the point. That he's the only one that she allows to bring her to tears, anymore. "No," she says with a slight shake of her head. "If that was all you were good at, I wouldn't be crying in the first place."

[captainjack.livejournal.com]

Jack swallowed hard and closed his eyes again. "Even crying you're pretty," he said quietly. "...kiss the girls and make them cry. Isn't that an old nursery rhyme?"

[be-normal.livejournal.com]

He can't have any idea of how his words affect her, and for a few seconds, Gwen simply looks down at him there in her lap, bathed in starlight, and marvels. Quietly, she leans down and presses feather-light kisses first to one closed eye and then the other.

"You're worth it," she murmurs, brushing her lips fleetingly over his before sitting up again.

[captainjack.livejournal.com]

With one soft, shuddering breath, he nodded as tears slipped from beneath his lashes. "That's just what I used to think about the Doctor. Before. The one I travelled with."

[be-normal.livejournal.com]

There's a white-hot moment where she wants to smack him, wants to tell him to take it back, to say that he's not the same, not even close. But then, the films had told a different story, hadn't they? And Gwen knows, with a sickly sort of certainty, that her relationship with Jack has been meticulously crafted so that he is exactly that.

Still, it feels too much like he's demeaning her emotions, like she doesn't know any better, and that pisses her off. But maybe she's got it wrong.

"You promised me," she reminds him as she brushes her thumb under his eyes, smearing the tears there.

[captainjack.livejournal.com]

"I did," he nodded. "I promised and I mean it. My Gwen...my girl," he said, mostly to himself. He wouldn't leave her like that, except somehow he knew eventually he would.

At least she didn't have to watch the TARDIS disappear in front of her like she didn't matter at all. And even though he'd gone from Torchwood, he must have come back. the shelf was already giving him cans with 2's on them.

[be-normal.livejournal.com]

"Yes," Gwen murmurs, brushing her knuckles over the curve of Jack's cheek. "Yours." If there's one truth about her life anymore, that's it. He owns her, wholly and irrevocably, but then that's never been the problem. It's that she can't say the same about him, not even the little bit she could back home.

[captainjack.livejournal.com]

"What do you want from me, Gwen?" he asked, finally looking up at her. He'd asked Ianto and Owen and Tosh had been so upfront that he didn't need to. But Gwen...he couldn't believe she'd look at him, touch him like she did without wanting something he wasn't giving her.

[be-normal.livejournal.com]

I want you to be him.

"I don't know," she whispers, but the lie is clear on her face and she knows it. "To let me love you, maybe," she amends, and even high she has difficulty looking him in the eye as she says it and has to look away, chewing fretfully against her bottom lip.

[captainjack.livejournal.com]

"I let you do that now," he said as his lips curved up ever-so-slightly. "One of these days when I'm not high I'll figure you out and then you'll be in for it." It was such an empty threat.

[be-normal.livejournal.com]

"I don't know what there is to figure out," Gwen tells him, and that's the God's honest truth. She reckons she's pretty damned transparent most of the time.

[captainjack.livejournal.com]

"It's easier for me to find out what makes people tick if I just go to bed with them."

He admitted it without any pretense, and it wasn't an invitation. Especially not when it was followed by, "And I'm not doing that anymore."

[be-normal.livejournal.com]

She wouldn't have accepted regardless, but the last bit does make her brows draw together in uncertainty. "You're not going to bed with people anymore?"

[captainjack.livejournal.com]

"I promised Greg," he nodded. "No fucking anyone but him."

[be-normal.livejournal.com]

"Oh," Gwen says, blinking. She pauses a moment and then lifts her shoulders in a shrug. "Okay." The natural thing might be to doubt him, but while everyone's always talked about how he'll 'shag anything if it's gorgeous enough,' Gwen herself has never seen much evidence of this. It should never be underestimated what pains Jack went to so that she would remain sheltered.

What she doesn't understand, though, is what they were just doing, and why his head's in her lap. "Then why were you just snogging me?"

[captainjack.livejournal.com]

Jack snorted and cupped her cheek. "I can't fuck anyone else but if it weren't for snogging I'd screw him to death. Ace had it right, I'm not made for one person."

[be-normal.livejournal.com]

"What was all that taking me to my star business, then?" Gwen asks, her brows lifting. In spite of her dubious tone, she leans instinctively into Jack's touch. "Or did you mean that literally? Might have a bit of trouble with it, if so."

[captainjack.livejournal.com]

"Stars?" he asked, confused for a minute as his thoughts swirled around and finally gongealed on the memory. "Oh, yeah!" he smiled and sat up, draping his arm lightly over her and looking up in silence for a moment.

He pointed to one star, then started to draw a line from point to point to point. "That will be the constellation Gwen Cooper. It looks like a heart. See?" he explained, an edge of eagerness to his voice, hoping she saw what he saw.

[be-normal.livejournal.com]

She doesn't really see it, but she nods anyway because she doesn't want to disappoint him. "You chose a heart for my constellation?" she asks, turning to watch his profile.

[captainjack.livejournal.com]

He kept his eyes trained on the sky. "Yeah," he grinned. "It's what I see when I look in your eyes...and what I see when you look at other people. You, I don't know, love. It's honest. And you don't shy away from it even if it's going to hurt."

He turned and looked into her eyes for a moment, searching even in the darkness, then looked back up. "I wish you looked at me now like you look at me then. I'm missing something and I don't know if I'll ever be that same thing for you, Gwen. For any of you. I'm sorry, you know."

[be-normal.livejournal.com]

That sends an immediate surge of guilt through Gwen, because she sees it as some sort of deficit on her part rather than his. That she is unable to see him the same way. But then again, it's all been so confusing, the mixed signals... One day he's insisting he's not the same person, the next she's his.

"Don't be sorry," she says at last, although she's sorry, too. Sorry that he can't be the person she left behind. "Look at me, Jack." She lifts a hand to his chin to try and coax his gaze back around to her.

[captainjack.livejournal.com]

He turned to look, pressing his chin into her hand, the rough stubble finally enough to rasp against her palm. "What is it?"

[be-normal.livejournal.com]

"Just look at me," Gwen quietly insists. She blinks once, and then lifts both hands, her fingers tenderly brushing the hair from his face and then smoothing over his brow, against his temples, across his cheeks; short, gentle strokes, and her gaze follows the motions as if she's memorizing him visually as well as through touch. Confirming, remembering.

Finally, her hands still against his jaw, and her eyes lift and focus on his again. There's a spark of recognition in the shadowed green of her gaze, and she smiles.

There you are.

"Hi."

[captainjack.livejournal.com]

He sat quietly, looking at her, resisting the urge to close his eyes and just feel her, resisting also the urge to close the distance and really kiss her for real...push her back in the grass and reach under her shirt and make her whimper and moan.

He sat quietly as she explored, looking for whatever she was looking for. Then he saw it, that look in her eyes. Just a look that cut into his heart like when Greg called him baby or when Dream had been behind him today stroking his hair and kissing him so tenderly.

"Hi," he said. Tried to say. His voice was far too tight and quiet for it to be much more than a breath.