Author: Lady Smith
Recipient: None. For the Captain Jack Harkness side challenge.
Rating: R
Fandoms: Dr Who/Farscape
Summary: Missing years, voices in your head - the retirement package for Time Operatives is interesting.
"A parting gift, operative Denselmo," a voice says, and I feel a long spike insert itself into my head and then the world goes white with pain and then I wake up and it's two years later.
I leave the name Denselmo behind. I never liked it much anyway. I spend a few years (relatively) in seedy bars, trying to piece together what happened and eventually figure out that I don't want to know.
It's after the first week that the voices start. Or the voice, actually. Because I only ever hear one, and it's the same one I heard before the whiteness.
He ask questions, pulls me into mindscapes, and basically tries to get me to divulge everything I know about what happened in those two years. I scream "I don't know" as loudly as I can, and I usually end up in whatever passes for the drunk tank in whatever century I'm in.
Once, when he's driving me insane, I grab someone - I don't even remember who anymore, or what gender they were - and discover that he's pretty distractible himself. He does everything he can to ruin my fun, but eventually the endorphins push him away and I can feel him starting to like it a little and he recoils in horror.
>From then on, as long as I've got a date I can shut him up, and that suits me fine. It's when I'm having a particularly bad night and we're alone I get desperate and download the entire contents of a random library chip into my brain. Turns out it's a collection of old flatscreen films from earth made between 1910-2010, and from then on I find I can distract him with movies. He's developed an obsession with them, and that's good. Unless it's just me who has, because there is no "him". I try not to think about it.
I decide I really need a hobby. A better one, I mean. Since I've got all the skills, a few gadgets, and the know how to steal a timeship, I decide to start pulling the kind of scams we used to crack down on people for.
When things are slow the two of us watch movies. Eventually he gets curious about why humans seem to obsess over sex so much. I decide to show him, opening myself up in every way I can while stroking myself and his eyes go wide and we enter a really vivid fantasy world he builds and things are very rarely slow after that.
I start calling him Harvey, after an invisible friend in one of the movies. He answers to it. He starts calling me Captain Jack, after a pirate, since I stopped answering to Denselmo. It's a good name. Suits me. I start using it myself when I need an alias, throwing in a last name when I need one from old family names - Cancarra, Bowman, Harkness, Jemmy - but never Denselmo. Never Denselmo. The names write themselves across the psychic paper in the minds of the people I meet and for the time I'm with them, that's who I am. Only Harvey knows that I'm just Jack. Only Jack.
They do eventually catch up with me, and I'm expecting to get executed but all they do is strap me to a fancy metal chair and when I wake up, it's still the same year but Harvey is gone. They thank me for my cooperation and dump me back in my ship.
Sometimes when I'm alone at night, I touch myself and pretend I can still hear his voice. Anything, I've discovered, is better than being alone.