rm | TW fic: A Holiday of Bright Mornings (Jack/OFC, Jack/various)

Title: A Holiday of Bright Mornings
Pairings: Jack/OFC (sort of, see notes), Jack/Estelle (referenced), Jack/Ianto (briefly), Jack/Gwen (extra vaguely), Jack/Nine (seriously tiny, blink and it's gone)
Rating: R
Notes: This owes a debt to

tommx who got me thinking about Jack's wife that we know of vaguely from canon, and also suggested the idea that Jack may well be able to have children, but that somehow, they never live very long. I also owe a thank you to

redstapler for giving me encouragement on this early on. Additionally, yes, I know Lahore is in Pakistan, but there was no such thing as Pakistan at the times in question in this piece. Finally, I played fast and loose with the Torchwood timeline and Jack's veracity mainly because Torchwood's timeline and Jack's veracity play fast and loose with us. I should also note, although it is surely apparent, that I completely fell in love with Annie writing this; at their best for me stories are a privilege to write, this was one such.

He married Ann on June 19, 1920. The ceremony was in bright morning and followed by a festive luncheon no one actually wanted to attend now that the thing was done. Her parents, her friends, the people Jack had invited out of common sense, could have had the victory party without them for all he cared. But it wasn't done that way, and so he smiled brilliantly for them all, for all the hours required, while Ann laughed and sang his praises and looked proud and stunned and glowing, even as she leaned over to him from time to time to whisper about the bad manners or poor clothes of various distant relations, her throaty laugh only barely contained.

They took a three-day holiday to the seaside where they sat and stared and smiled at each other almost as much as they did anything else. She was twenty-seven-years-old and had despaired, finding it oddly an emotion she didn't much mind, of ever finding a man to want her once age had made the virtues she may have possessed seemingly irrelevant. But then Jack, omitting years of traveling shows and the trenches of France from his story, had come home to England from India, and met her and loved her. And that was strange. For the both of them.

Because Jack had only meant to flirt with her, and she had only meant to rebuff him and the way he smiled like something from that dark place read of occasionally in the newspapers. But he had laughed at her barbs, and she had seen something like relief in his face and softened, if not quite to him, then to the world.

He courted her with stories. The strange wonders of Lahore and sometimes, when he seemed particularly melancholy, fairy tales of the stars. He told her about long train rides in rancid heat and the way soldiers speak of women, crass and fond. He told her about the smallest and largest of demons, metal servants, dancing creatures, a dead dog by the side of the road, and a man who could find beauty in absolutely anything. His tales were full of strange flowers and poison imps and a constant, slightly cheerful regret.

And if she were inclined to think Jack a bit mad, as most did, he always dispelled it somehow: when he grinned and called her his Annie; when he put his hands to her waist and told her she was a feat of engineering to rival the planes he always gazed up at so longingly; when he compared her to other, even more fanciful marvels she knew she was supposed to be certain weren't actually real. But she wasn't certain. Not at all. After all, Jack was real.

"You should marry me," Jack told her, and she asked him if he were asking.

He asked if he needed to ask.

She told him that he most certainly did. And so he did, asking her and then her father and then her again, properly this time, in his best clothes and down on one knee and with a modest and lovely ring.

So she said yes and laughed when he pulled her down into his lap and they collapsed onto the floor, her whispering to him in the end, "I'm proud of you," and Jack smiling, understanding exactly what she meant.

She married in her mother's lace and Jack found that the breath before his vows hurt, like the burn after dying, like dying felt good, and maybe it would if it was forever.

When they came home from the seaside, he carried her over the threshold and to their bed, proper, as she liked things. But then she had laughed her teasing laugh at him and asked if he minded if she just didn't blush anymore. He grinned, delighted with a woman too matter-of-fact to be either brash or bashful.

They had fourteen years. Fourteen years that took them once to Paris and then motoring on for days to Berlin. Fourteen years where he lied about his work and he knew that she knew and neither of them cared. Fourteen years in which they always made each other laugh, even after the son that died at six days; a little god, Jack thought, that never got his living rest. Fourteen years that left them looking the same age, the sole one of many strange things she chose never to mention, sensing somehow that youth hung heavy on the man she had married. And fourteen years during which she watched with bemusement all the things Jack's eyes couldn't help but follow. Oh, her wicked and wanting husband.

They only took another man to their bed but once, and Ann had marvelled at Jack's face, chanting out its beauty as that other entered him. Jack had said, "I love you," then, over and over, not because she had granted him a sensation admittedly missed, but because even still he found himself somehow only having eyes for her.

Six times, each remembered clearly enough to cut, Jack dressed her as a boy and took her out to see boxing, glad for the crowd that allowed him to press against her and yet do nothing more obviously untoward than whisper in her ear and explain the strategies of combat and the proper way to make a fist. After the third time, she insisted he teach her to throw a punch, bare feet and laughter dancing in the small and not entirely successful vegetable patch behind their house. She didn't have much of a reach, but Jack thought her left hook was something and was happy to nurse that wound for as briefly as it lasted.

When she got pregnant the second time Jack knew dread and expected heartbreak, but chose to love the circumstances like a gambler throws in money, not in the expectation of winning, but as a way to purchase hope. And so he was overjoyed to tears and proud and placed her feet in his lap every night and rubbed them for what seemed like hours.

It hurt to admit, but Jack knows it was a good eight months, a great eight months. But the baby, a girl, was stillborn and Ann died two days later from bleeding and infection. His Annie, small and bloody and it was a hundred times, a thousand times worse than all the men he'd held in pain and in gore though their battlefield exits.

She said, near the end, that she would miss him.

"You've known everything about me all along, haven't you?" he asked, trying not to let his voice crack and failing.

She told him "Yes," her smile still brilliant, and he brushed her damp hair back from her face and told her he would find her, that he would always find her.

That was October 20, 1934.

He mourned for a year. The Black Year, he called it, a memory now full of damp and dirt and little thought; he was sloppy in his grief.

And then he pulled himself together and went back to work, glad for a change to take what Torchwood had for him, eager to place himself in the midst of yet another war, the same war, now and again. He visited Annie's grave when he could.

When he fell in love again, he kept her secret and used the war to run and to regret.

Decades rushed by; bleak, naive, then easy. In 1986 he became friends, actual friends, with one of the younger Torchwood operatives. Jenny, who dated women and went to dance clubs and wanted an older brother. She was tough. A good shot. Smart. And smiled from the very first second Jack told her about Ann.

Jenny lasted only eight months before she was killed on the job, and Jack smashed his fist into the tile and concrete wall of the Hub so hard he shattered half the bones in his hand.

Eleven years later and there was Alex, boss and mentor and fast friend and somehow and nothing more. Sometimes, he would drive Jack out to Annie's graveside, and they'd sit there, backs leaning against the stone that also listed the babies and talk about simple things: the color of the sky, the texture of the grass, the smell of pavement in rain. Sometimes, Alex would wander through the cemetery while Jack stayed sitting with Annie. He would write her letters there and burn them, rubbing the ashes into plantings he made sure were always tended. It was, he knew, all he could do.

*

After Gwen's wedding, and it seemed to take days of cleanup to reach a proper after, he and Ianto lay on his narrow bed, fully dressed and propped up against the wall.

He ran his fingers along the edges of the heavy card the image was printed on before passing it gingerly to the other man.

"Her name was Annie," Jack said.