Well Hello There

[spacehopper]

When: Any Time
Where: Anywhere
Who: Captain Jack Harkness + You

You've seen him before, maybe even since you were a child. When he appears, it's always been right there, at the edge of your vision, watching you. Sometimes he says hello in passing as he crosses the street. Sometimes he just smiles when you spot him and ducks into a shop or moves around the corner. He comes and goes from your life, never threatening, never tangible.

Until today.

Today he moves towards you purposefully. He has bright blue eyes and dimples when he smiles. He'd not aged a day since you first started to see him. He smells like the best thing in the world to you. He offers his hand. "Hi. I'm Captain Jack Harkness," he says.

Comments

[spacehopper]

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."

[badgirlshenanigans]

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.

[spacehopper]

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."

[badgirlshenanigans]

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.

[spacehopper]

"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.

[badgirlshenanigans]

"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.

[spacehopper]

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.

[badgirlshenanigans]

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.

[spacehopper]

"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.

[badgirlshenanigans]

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?"

[spacehopper]

"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.