Lisa Smith ([personal profile] aeshna_uk) wrote2008-04-24 09:56 pm

Fanfic: "Reflections"

Title: Reflections
Author: Aeshna
Fandom: Doctor Who/Torchwood
Rating: R
Word count: 1,224
Characters: Jack Harkness, The Rani
Summary: Trust had ever been the weakness of fools.
Spoilers: all very general at this point!
Disclaimer: Not mine, no matter how many DVDs and toys I buy! Everything here belongs to RTD and to Auntie Beeb, who already has my licence fee.
Archive: Sure, whoever wants it – just let me know where it ends up!
Notes: This was originally intended for a porn battle post, but then it grew a bit and I decided to use it to start off my [livejournal.com profile] infinityplus_1 table instead. :) A small look at what Time Agent!Jack might have been up to in those two years that he can't remember....

Many thanks to [livejournal.com profile] mimarie for looking this over for me. Feedback of any variety is very much appreciated but not compulsory – I'll post anyway! I've suffered for my art, now it's your turn....



It had always amused her, the sentimental attachment the Doctor felt towards his pets. To her, the lower species were tools to be manipulated in the name of science, scarcely sapient within their restricted senses and little minds. They were tiny, pathetic, so incapable of knowing the true glories of the universe that she felt nothing as they begged and fought and tried to escape, their small lives worthless against the value of her work.

Until....

She felt the disturbance in the timeline, the echo of an unfamiliar temporal surge. Interest piqued, she isolated it for observation, folding it into a dimensional pocket until she was ready to study her new specimen.

And such a specimen it was.

He was human, as near to a perfect example as she had seen – sleek and lean and dangerous, every move measured and graceful and almost singing with coiled energy. He didn't beg for release or mercy, didn't rail against his captivity, he simply watched her as she watched him: seeking weakness, any flaw in the facade, anything that might allow an advantage. This one was a predator and a part of her wondered at how he might be broken to her will... even as a part of her knew that to be a waste.

It would be so much more satisfying to have one such as this feed willingly from her hand.

And so she kept him. Trained him with reward and punishment and subtle increments of trust, let him observe her work and felt a flicker of triumph each time he dragged a screaming subject before her, a flash of unexpected pride when he suggested an avenue of research she had not yet considered. And when an uprising within her breeding stock offered clear escape, he returned to her carrying the severed heads of her challengers and a reputation as fierce as her own.

He could have fled. He chose not to.

That changed things.

He hadn't resisted as she knotted her hand in his hair and forced him to his knees, his fragile throat exposed to her mercies. His skin tasted of sweat and smoke and his mind was alive with the thrill of the fight, with the adrenal jolt of the kill... and with a seething tangle of emotions all focused on her, only on her. She'd shivered and straddled him then and there, impaling herself as he grunted and arched against the console room floor, his mind singing even as his pulse pounded beneath her taloned grasp. She rode him hard and fast, merciless in her passions and at the end of it he lay bruised and bleeding and hers to his core.

Her own tamed Time Agent, not so much broken as bent to her darkest whims. And it wasn't only her hand that he fed from.

Then the war came and, for all their differences, she had answered the President's call. And he... he would have died for her, her precious pet, would have followed her into hell without qualm or question, a willing victim to the end. He was only human, little more than an animal compared to her kind, and yet....

And yet, he was hers – body and soul and fate. Her responsibility.

Her choice, this time.

Not his.

She woke him with painted nails dragged hard across solid muscle and soft skin, smiling as he hissed and pressed into her touch, already erect and eager for more. There had never been anything gentle in this game, no soft caresses or teasing sighs, and she closed his throat with an iron grip as she mounted him, feeling his breath stutter in his chest as her wet folds spread tight around him and she rocked in time with his racing pulse. It would be so, so easy to end it here, to ride him into oblivion, to take as sacrifice all the strength and beauty laid open and vulnerable beneath her....

And take she would. After a fashion.

Trust had ever been the weakness of fools.

Never breaking rhythm, she shifted her grip, now pressing against his sweat-damp temples and driving into his mind as breath surged back into his lungs. He convulsed and panicked, choking on air, fighting and clawing as she ruthlessly sliced away their time together, tearing free every last memory, every emotion that might draw him back to her side. He was strong but she was stronger, victory in their unequal battle signalled with a whimpering keen and a heated rush between her thighs... and then he was limp and twitching beneath her, as tiny and pathetic as any of his kind.

She sat for a while, simply watching him breathe, then injected a sedative and prepared him for release back into the wild. A hotel on the outskirts of a thirty-first century spaceport offered sufficient shelter, and so she left him clad in what she had found him in, refusing to look back as she set the coordinates for Gallifrey.

It was for his own good, she told herself over and over. He was only a human, after all, little more than an animal....

It wasn't his war.

# # # # #


She was caught in the shockwave at the Fall of Arcadia, her crippled ship screaming around her as it sought the refuge of the Vortex, reality dissolving into fire as her body failed her and failed her and left her gasping, newborn, in chill darkness. Her ship was less easily healed, fractured to its heart, and it took all of her patience and knowledge to repair its strength enough to ease it back out into the universe, to rejoin the war –

Only to find that the war was over and there was nothing but echoing silence where her people should be.

She rested in void for a long time, her new self mourning the old, weeping for the burnt-umber skies and shining spires she would never know again. So very much lost... and yet she was still alive, her TARDIS still feebly functional. She found a temporal faultline and followed it to its source, letting her wounded ship drink deeply of the energies that bled from it while she ventured out into the primitive city that looked to be her home for the duration. There was something here, something that shouldn't be. Interest piqued, she sought it for observation and –

And now she was the one within the cage, trapped and powerless, as a creature she could barely comprehend watched her as she watched him: seeking weakness, any flaw in the facade, anything that might allow an advantage. He had been dangerous long before he had been hers, but now – with reality remade about him, caught in spacetime like an insect in amber and raised far beyond even a Time Lord's influence – now he was immortal, impossible...

Wrong.

Whatever cruelties she had inflicted in the name of science were as nothing against what had been done to him.

She wore a different face and he bore a different name, but he still held himself with a predator's poise, with all the casual arrogance of control, and she knew him, knew him body and soul, knew him just as surely as he failed to know her.

She wondered how long it would be before he had her feeding from his hand.

~ fin ~

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