torchwoodinstitute | Well Hello There

As with just about everyone who meets him for the first time, Jemma's a little taken aback. By taken aback, it means she's staring rather gobsmacked at the very pretty that is Captain Jack Harkness.

Unfortunately, Jemma fails at these sorts of things. "Jemma Simmons. Have we met? That's not a line, I mean it could sound like a line, but you look familiar. That's not a line either. Why do I keep saying that?"

He couldn't help but laugh, massive hand warm against hers. "We've never officially met, no. And I don't mind it if they happened to be lines." He'd been watching Jemma's progress since she was small, wowing her teachers until she surpassed anything that they could teach her. It had been lonely, at least to Jack, growing up without equals, until she applied to work for SHIELD.

But here, there had been set backs too. That's what happened when someone tried to rule the world, unfortunately.

Jack wasn't going to take sides. SHIELD and HYDRA could have their little drama. He was much, much more interested in things on a more universal scale.

"I've come to offer you a job. I think you're finally ready for it."

Jemma kept shaking his hand, much longer than she should.

"A job?" Being smart doesn't mean being socially savvy. "Was that a line?" If she kept thinking that way this could go very badly.

"And that sounds like one of those emails offering me millions of dollars, if I send all my banking information."

Jack laughed. He was use to skeptics but usually they gave him crazy looks or asked for details in condescending tones. Not Jemma. He appreciated that. It took a special sort, and she had exactly what it would take to be a member of Torchwood. Understandably, over the years, he had become selective in the process. He was not getting attached to what might amount to fodder again.

He let her keep shaking his hand for as long as she liked.

"Lucky for both of us, I'm not an email. We've only had one incident where email has taken a physical form but it wasn't human. Just a lot of worms. You wouldn't believe how literal some species can be. At least it wasn't a virus, right?"

He knew he was confusing her. Making her wonder. Making her question. That was the point.

"You have a particular skill set that's being wasted here. There bigger and better out there, Jemma. If you want that."

She still has a hold of his hand.

"I've been infected with an alien virus. I wouldn't want to experience it again." Jemma is good with understatement.

Another thing she's good at is being enthused about things other people may find disgusting. "You wouldn't happen to know where I could get a sample of those worms, do you? I'd have to make sure there wasn't any computer or web-linked technology around, but I could handle it."

Hook a girl with worms? Easier than fishing.

"I would, in fact," the Captain said with a grin. "We've kept a few samples on ice. You never know when you'll need a literal computer worm." It was a good thing he knew all about Jemma Simmons, or at least enough about her to be aware of what to bait his hook with.

He had to admit: it was a little bit easier than he thought, though.

"Do you think you're up for that sort of challenge though?" His grip never turned limp in her hand. He found her clinging to be...well.. Darling, almost. Jack always did have a soft spot for people like her.

"I would be most interested in seeing them, but," the but had her finally releasing his hand. Jemma's been scammed by a pretty, oh so pretty, ~~why is he so pretty?~~ before and terrible things came as a result. It made her distrustful. Ward's influence will always cast a pall on things.

"Buy," She repeated herself to steel up her nerve. "You know that. Of everything in the world you come up and talk about something I would be fascinated in."

Garrett had access to all the SHIELD files. Her privacy had been invaded before. "So if we've never officially met, why do you look familiar? How do you know anything about me? I've been scrubbed from existence."

Sky made sure of that. Jemma Simmons only existed in SHIELD's records.

"Emails creating worms are actually not the most interesting thing I could have mentioned being in possession of," Jack mused, scratching his chin. "They might be the most game actually. They never did much but wriggle around looking for soil." Jack had to laugh at the memory. His team faced worse and they had all be so highly unnerved by a bunch of earthworms! "Everything I do and am would fascinate you, Jemma. That's why I'm here."

And that totally sounded like a line, but it was perhaps the most truth Jemma would ever get out of him.

He didn't move. He didn't cross the distance she put between them. He didn't have to. She was wary, which was good. Wary would keep her alive. "You know where you've seen me before. Think back. You know that everything I know about you is first hand experience. You just have to be open to the thought."

"Then what is the most interesting thing, and if you say you, I know it's a line. It doesn't matter how pretty and shiny your teeth are." Jemma hoped that last part was only in her head.

When it sounded like a line, and acted like a line, it's a line. He was a walking line.

"You're not from SHIELD." It had dominated her life since the age of 17, so her first thought was there. "You've never been in SHIELD, or watched by SHIELD, that I know of."

His familiarity gnawed at her, and there was a strange memory of a picture of him, but it wasn't since the picture was taken at the end of WWII.

"Was your father in the SSR?"

Jack laughed, genuinely. Oh, he could answer her. He could tell her that the most interesting thing he ever came across was anti-gravity pudding on Mars or the bit of slime in the fridge of the TARDIS that gained accidental sentience and kept them apprised of when they ought to change the bulb, but instead, he would flash those pretty, shiny teeth and give her a small bit of a shrug.

The second part of multiple questionnaire was more to the point anyway.

"I'm not nor have I ever been a member of SHIELD. If you need an abbreviated resume, it's store clerk, time agent, intergalactic con man, companion to a man in a little box, prisoner off and on, RAF pilot, secret agent and all around great guy."

Okay, now he was flirting.

"My father's not from around here."

Those teeth were weapons of mass flirtation, and Jemma found them almost irresistible. She wasn't trained for this sort of dealing!

She cursed herself for her inability to have kept the words inside her head.

"Intergalactic con man?" She didn't trust her ears. "And what exactly is a time agent?"

The other details were carefully filed. With Simmons, no one knew when fact would leap out of her brain.

Jack waved his hand and coming from any other hand, it might have looked flippant (or maybe a little gay), but Jack pulled it off without a single condescending bone in his perfect body. "I'm going to need your resume, Ms. Simmons, first. Really, you should apply to these things properly and I should take the correct steps with you in the hiring process or I'll turn out to be a terrible boss."

Jemma tilted her head, then looked behind her. Was this a joke on Fitz's part? He found the most attractive man in all history and convinced him to discombobulate Jemma?

"Um. First of all," Jemma's tone became rather more formal. "You said you came to offer me a job. Secondly, you commented on my skill set and third, say I'm supposed to remember you. I don't think you need my CV." Those thing that rolled around in Jemma's head just came out. Even when distracted by whatever the shiniest teeth in all history, Jemma's mind continued working.

"So unless you're going to tell me where I know you from, maybe I'll turn around and tell Fitz this was a rather cruel prank."

Wherever the little Scotsman was hidden.

"Leo isn't ready," Jack said immediately. "Not yet. Maybe soon, but I have my eye on him too." Some people go by first names. Jack might have had a military title but it sounded so...boring to go by your family name. "But you can tell him anything you like." He had a pocket full of Retcon for a reason.

But she had asked some valid questions so Jack focused on that.

"I gave you a present on your sixth birth. A little gold locket. You still have it and you haven't figured out how to open it yet because you're trying too hard. I administered your A levels. I was in the receiving line when you got your second doctorate. You told me you liked my cologne." He'll go on if you'd like.

"Fitz is ready for anything!" It was a spontaneous, and vehement defense of her friend. "He's just as good as me, and you can't judge him because he couldn't open the locket either!" It was a game, first year of the academy. She stopped, uncertain if that should have been revealed.

Her mind looked back to those moments. She was the smallest person at her A-levels, and she could swing her feet under the chair as she wrote them. There was one invigilator during, "Was it my Physics examination? Were you the one with the candies or the one with the pencils?"

Usually, the formality prevented any direct contact, but her Physics: there had been only 13 other students writing at her school, was much more informal.

She can't imagine him being one of the more formal ones.

"I didn't see your face," she meant receiving her doctorate, as she was too embarrassed to look at the rest of the receiving line, particularly the one who got that spur of the moment comment.

Well, that wasn't what Jack had been judging. It took a particular sort to be a Time Agent, even more than a Torchwood agent. Leo got too attached to people, too quickly. That was a worrying trait. He felt betrayal a lot more than Jack would have liked. It stunted him. Perhaps in time he could fix that. Or he could go back in a different Leo Fitz's time line and fix it.

It was still an option. For now, though, he was focused on Jemma.

"The sweets," Jack grinned. "I make sure you got your favorites. Don't blame me because you were too shy to look up for never seeing me. I've been with you for a long time." Always a face in the crowd. Always watching.

He'd been at it for months...for him. It was a lifetime for Jemma.

Jemma liked her codependent Scotsman as he was. There was only one point in his life Jemma wanted changed.

That was her fault. Did this man know?

She picked up immediately on a couple of discrepancies. "I remember the sweets, but that man must've must've been the same age as you, and at Uni, no one there had the name Harkness." She said it like it was some sort of Eureka moment. Liked she caught him in a falsehood. Little did she know.

One other point, "and you know that sounds the tiniest bit creepy? I've been with you a long time." She tried to laugh it off. She didn't do very well.

"Think about it, Jemma." A person's mind was their most valuable asset to him. The rest could come later. You could condition a body and while in some cases you could improve a mind too, there was just something about the way a human was wired that made it far better to start with intellect and work up to the rest.

He would let Jemma come to her own conclusions, but first, he offered her a glossy blue card with a honeycomb logo on it in white, shaped like a T.

"When you're ready, come here." There was only a city and a country on the back of the card. Cardiff, Wales.

Jemma took the blue card, and immediately heldit up to the sun, as if there might be something hidden on it, or in it. Systematically, she ran a fingertip lightly on the edges, in case she felt something other than cardstock.

She didn't make any pretense of subtlety. "And I go to Cardiff and what? Wander? Visit Cardiff Castle? The Museum? Caerphilly Castle?"

"To find us," Jack said with a grin, knowing she would find absolutely nothing at all about that card except for the address of a particularly lovely plaza with an old glass building on it and an interesting water feature. This dimension's Millenium Centre was intact and not a hole in the ground and Jack was nothing if not a masochist. "If you decide to come, I'll show you what we do. If you don't...no hard feelings, Miss Simmons. But we probably won't meet again."

He offered her his hand for a shake and nodded. He had a few others to go and see still but perhaps she'd come to find them all and then...well, he'd have the Retcon ready just in case but he didn't think he'd need it.

Charles could vaguely remember seeing someone like this when he first arrived in England for his university studies, but other than being a handsome chap, he hadn't really had the time to pay attention. Usually time found him deep in his studies, trying to track down people to speak to, lecturing, or more likely than not, over in one of the local pubs skillfully winning bar bets or picking up women.

So when the other comes up to him when he's tucked up in a bar, just having ordered a pint, he grins easily back and takes the hand, immediately scanning over the other's mind without a second thought. "Nice to meet you," with that soft accent that makes him sound right at home, "Charles Xavier."

It very likely was not nice to meet Jack Harkness. Death tended to render one’s thoughts impossible to reach and though Jack had been given new life through a series of horrible but well intentioned events, his thoughts remained cold, hard and dead. That wasn’t to say that he couldn’t think -- Jack was a smart cookie in every sense of the phrase -- but Charles was going to be sorely mistaken if he hoped to get anything from the dimpled, blue eyed man with the massive bear paw hands currently engulfing his own.

“Oh, I know who you are. I don’t think anyone here can say that they don’t.” Charles was friendly, charismatic… Handsome. All things that worked to his advantage without the telepathy coming into place.

This wasn’t quite Jack’s favorite time period, not because he had anything against the seventies, but because he knew he was buried twice under the soil not so far away. Oh, time travel had it’s fun little quirks. And Jack had bad luck with soil.

“Do you have time to talk?”

Charles had yet to ever feel a mind that was closed off to his, so he blinks when, as he tries to scan Jack's thoughts for anything, he feels nothing at all except a blank wall, cold and strong as steel, he can't hide the surprise that crosses his face. Still, he forces that feeling down as quickly as he could, shaking his head before bringing the smile back to his face. Jack's comment about everyone knowing him makes him laugh despite his faint unease, leaning forward on the bar.

"Well, this is one of my favorite pubs. Close to campus and all of that," he returns, studying the other man and trying to figure out what that strange mental wall could be.

Oh? Is this bloke trying to pick him up? That's a touch unusual. Men usually don't do it for him, though occasionally there has been one or two that caught his interest. The easy manner remains, brows going up. "Oh? What about, then?"

Jack couldn’t get away with being a student. This wasn’t the right era for people his apparent age to return to school. He hadn’t bothered to affect an accent either, so he firmly sounded American. Oxford tended to be a little more discriminatory as to whom it accepted as students or allowed to teach.

It never bothered Jack to stretch the truth. He was a fantastic con man…despite not remembering a good two years of that con man life. He had stopped bothering to look for it. There were too many times, too many dimensions, and his current job took up too much of his honestly infinite time.

“Your research. Your interests. I have an opportunity for you.” Jack went straight to recruitment. “I promise, I’m not being cheeky. Yet.”

Ah! Charles' smile went from a bit smarmy to actually interested, those eyes bright as he leaned forward with it. He was always happy to discuss his research with other people, in particular someone who might have an opportunity. He was still in classes, trying to finish out his double masters here, but things outside of that would never be outside of his scope.

"Oh, what kind of opportunity?" His grin increased as he added, "not that you couldn't be cheeky with me." Followed by a laugh, a natural charmer, making it all sound so easy.

Well Hello There

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