rm | Torchwood fic: A Deck of Ten Billion Cards (Jack/Annie (ofc))

Title: A Deck of Ten Billion Cards
Rating: R
Pairing: Jack/Annie (OFC)
Spoilers: nothing -- this takes place in 1919/1920 and is, if we have any canon for that era, AU.
Author's notes: Written to Hide and Seek by Imogen Heap (I blame

curseangel's fanmix) on repeat. Encouraged by

airspaniel and

redstapler and

marchek. If you haven't met Annie yet, she's from here. You don't need to read that to get this, but you really, really should.

Aside from his wedding vows, Jack never promises Annie anything, lest the world plan great events and leave him a liar and she a fool. He's a liar anyway, so why make it worse? And she -- well, he sees the way people look at her now that she's got him, like she's the luckiest woman alive, like she's courting tragedy, like she's just a whore. It makes him want to growl deep in the back of his throat, a reminder of the animals humans once were, before the rise of cities and the flight to the stars.

Ann notices these things, of course, but doesn't name them, only touching him between the shoulder blades from time to time as a reminder to uncoil all that rage. He is able to smile at her for it, simply because she is no saint, but haughty instead and slyly quiet, at least in most of public life. When she laughs it is loud and round and knowing and at home she is full of foul language that Jack is eternally, truly, bemused to note she didn't learn from him. He doesn't care; he loves it. He loves her. Which is terrifying. Because this is an experiment, a normal life and years that will not offend him for their length, and she deserves a hell of a lot more than the science of the age, even if there is some charm for Jack in seeing what small things provoke wonder here and now.

Whether or not he thinks it right or good or wise, Annie makes Jack of a place, and he does his best to respect the rules of that, although he knows he often bungles it. She's only fragile to him when he remembers she'll die but once. He needs the reminder for the sake of his manners, but it makes him forget how to breathe. It causes an ache in his bones. And when a tightness from it all moves across his face, it brings her to worry.

Annie Benbough had a life before him, more or less. Jack knows this, is fascinated by it, realizes he could have known her for every second of it, but that it's best he didn't. He dwells on the details, though. A younger brother who died in the War and another lost to influenza. A job in a munitions factory. She tells Jack she liked the dirt and the oil of it, tells him the smell of metal reminded her of men.

"Which men?" he asks, and he has to do it twice before she realizes he's teasing, that he wouldn't mind even if there were much to tell.

"We never took in laundry," she says, her way of saying neither she nor her mother were ever prostitutes, and when he smiles like he simply doesn't care, she gets brave. "Only the ugly ones stayed home, anyway," she adds. She winks at him and that's it, he's hers.

They don't fuck before the wedding. There's no where to do it that isn't rushed or unseemly or likely to result in discovery, and it makes Jack a little crazy. It's not like she's never had a lover.

"Or two," she notes with a bit of distaste when they discuss it. But not three. She makes that quite clear when Jack decides counting is amusing.

They do other things. It is enough. It is tantalizing. It is the world new, and Jack finds he likes this brief life of decorous strain when all he wants is to lie naked, beside her, in the dark. He's in awe at the elusiveness of that in this not quite modern age. One night, in a doorway, when his fingers smell of her, he asks, sincerely curious, why they're not doing more. She's not shy.

"Because I've no interest in being quiet for you, Jack. And there's really only so much skulking about in doorways a girl finds charming. Now take me home." She laughs, and he knows just how little resolve she has left on the matter. But he also knows that nothing in the world, and certainly not him, could shake her from it.

After the wedding he undresses her in a seaside inn. The late afternoon light is failing before a storm that will probably merely blow past, and he can barely breathe.

"I -- you --" he stammers, he blushes, he remembers a feeling from what was practically a childhood, the moment itself actually gone and he could weep of it. "It's lovely to see you," he murmurs and she smiles at him, kind and patient, the honey mop of her curls falling across one eye, but the world is too still for either of them to fix it, and it's she that has to get them to the bed before Jack remembers himself as loud and greedy and fascinated.

Propped on an elbow he watches her touch herself, later becomes her husband when she straddles him, her damp fingers shoved in his mouth as he presses his eyes shut almost as if in grief, before laughing and grinning and finding all his easiness and wonder again.

In the night, he gets up to sit in the window, his legs hanging out over the drive below and arms braced on the frame and tells her to choose a star, any star, as if from a deck of ten billion cards. There are too many visible for him to be really sure which one she's picked and it might not be the best choice besides, but he has a story ready anyway, an amalgam of beauty from more than a few bad jobs.

"Did your mother tell you stories?" she asks curiously, still lying in the bed.

"I don't know," he says quietly, without thinking.

She cocks her head.

"I'm sorry. She was -- gone when I was young. I don't remember a lot."

"Well, I bet she told you stories."

Jack decides to agree. After all, maybe she did, and Annie seems so sure.

He watches the sky in silence after that, and when he thinks she's asleep again asks, "Why did we wait?" rattled again by time.

He turns his head when he hears her roll over in the bed. She stretches and he can tell it's calculated so that the sheets slide off of her, so that he can't help but need her again.

She reaches towards him, still stretching, almost toying with the air and then grins all smug.

"Because I wanted to see you like this," she tells him as if it's the most obvious thing in the world.

"Like what?" he's puzzled. Maybe even slightly annoyed.

"Shhhhhh. Just listen," she says.

"To what?" he asks. There's the sea, the occasional bird, her breathing, the creek of the window when he shifts, and something in the trees.

"Stillness," she says after a while. "I wanted to see you still. Like you weren't always short on time."

"I'm not," he says, coming in from the window and climbing onto the bed on his knees, kissing her with the truth of it. "I'm not" he tells her, tells both of them, again.

It's only melancholy for a moment.