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Rat droppings, dried out in the summer heat, crunched under knock-kneed footsteps as hungover death lurched gracelessly into the kitchen, borne forwards on an invisible wave of caffeine dependency.
"Oh no-oh-oh," came the scratchy howl known to every hangover sufferer as drunkenese for Oh fuck I forgot to buy, scrounge or steal more coffee, and now I have to face the entire day without any chemical assistance at all. It was an eloquent sore-throated groan, and one which Captain Jack Harkness knew intimately.
Not from personal experience, of course – an intelligent man-about-town (-village, -city and occasionally –prison) in the 51st century knew that he needn't suffer the debilitating after-effects of a really good time any longer than it took to give himself a quick blast in the arm – but he'd spent enough time in the 19th and 20th centuries to recognise and interpret this wail correctly. It said, fuckery, for I have also forgotten to get more sugar, it reverberated,it's been the seventies for six months and I've hated every bloody minute of it and it positively bellowed, and now I've trodden on a bastard fork.
Jack considered himself to be a very skilled reader of cries of anguish.
He didn't consider the nominal tenant of this mostly-brown set of rooms to be particularly quick on the uptake, though. The emaciated and half-pickled man and his receding hairline had staggered blindly from what Jack was fairly certain was the bedroom, bounced off the doorjamb and – pausing only to weigh a wine bottle on the dresser and determine it empty – crashed onwards into the foetid wasteland of the kitchen without ever noticing that someone was reclining on his sofa.
He'd felt the same way himself some mornings. Sometimes you just couldn't be bothered to care that there was six feet of uniformed delicious manflesh sprawled on your living room furniture. Or so he'd heard, anyway. It wasn't exactly something Jack had found himself experiencing very often.
From the kitchen (Jack assumed it was a kitchen. When he'd broken into the flat an hour earlier and peered into the gloom the smell alone had convinced him it was an alien nesting site. Only the presence of an uneaten and apparently unmutated rat whiffling about the mountain of crockery in the sink had dissuaded him from blowing the room up for the good of mankind) drifted a triumphant, "ah-ha." Jack's precise and expert drunkenese-to-English translation centre determined that these short syllables meant, there is enough coffee and possibly rat droppings to make a mug of coffee. Although it looks like I shall be drinking it from a paint tin instead. Why is there a paint tin in my kitchen?
Jack basked in the knowledge that he'd invaded the home of an exceptionally articulate drunken moaner.
He stretched on the disgracefully soft sofa, readjusted his boots over the arm nearest the kitchen door to display them at their best effect, and put his hands behind his head. In the kitchen-cum-nuclear-test-site his unwitting host struck two matches and swore in the plummiest accent Jack had heard since Bombay, 1899. He wriggled his shoulders against the armrest and cranked his grin open a little wider, until it looked utterly obscene and yet perfectly friendly at the same time. It was one of his favourites.
There was another perfectly-executed "Fuck" and the whompf of a gas ring coming to life. A stream of clankings and bangings followed, and a moment later the ostensibly legal resident of the flat (although Jack had looked at the four eviction notices strewn over the living room floor and he wasn't sure this anaemic-looking human wreckage had any more right to be here than he did) stumbled into the living room and – completely ignoring Jack – uttered a breath-taking string of invective in the vague direction of the thermostat.
It was becoming apparent that Jack was going to have to wait until coffee had been successfully consumed before he got his grand entrance; his host didn't seem the type to be wholly aware before he'd ingested stimulants. He'd known a girl like that in the 1920s.
After a little while longer lounging in the lap of debatable luxury on Jack's part, and some first-class swearing and whining at inanimate objects and cursing of the laws of physics on the part of his host (apparently it was entirely inconsiderate of the bastard kettle to take so fucking long heating the bloody water), it appeared that coffee had been achieved. The smell of cheap, bad coffee adulterated with rat turds and just the faintest hint of turpentine wafted through the dingy flat and assaulted Jack's nostrils in the most disagreeable fashion, nearly dislodging his grin.
It seemed to be working wonders for the spectre of alcoholic excess in the grey coat, though. Considered slurping noises and groans emanated from the kitchen, and a slightly sparklier version than went into the kitchen stepped out of it, paint tin in hand. "How the fuck did you get in?" he asked Jack, cutting straight to the point.
Jack was impressed and a little put out. The grin didn't appear to be having any effect and the slowly-wakening man looked torn between strangling him and hiding in the bedroom until Jack had been spirited away. "I climbed up the drainpipe," Jack suggested, letting his knees fall apart on purpose, trying to look as unthreatening and fitting as he could. The sad truth was that he clashed horribly with the upholstery, and he knew it.
"No you bloody well didn't," his wild-eyed host insisted, gesturing with his paint tin, "I pulled those off to stop Danny getting in. Get out or I shall – " he lost his balance momentarily and propped himself up on the doorjamb, "- telephone the police."
The British, Jack thought happily as he rolled his weight from his shoulders to his hips and tried to make eye-contact with what appeared to be a pair of chilli-coated marbles, were fantastic. They got so affronted so easily. All you had to do was lie in their living room for a bit and they worked themselves up into a foaming, hysterical rage.
"When you're done shouting," Jack said, lifting his hand from behind his head and extending it lazily in the direction of the wild-eyed Englishman, "Captain Jack Harkness. I was going to ask if I could buy you a drink – seeing as I have a proposition for you."
The conflicting emotions on his host's face were a work of art. Drink warred with wariness and suspicion and, Jack was pleased to note, that old familiar stand-by that had been making his life easier in and out of centuries. Eventually the obscenely bony man completely failed to shake Jack by the hand and said "Withnail."
"You got a first name there, Withnail?" He was about to launch into an explanation that involved liking to be on friendly terms with his landlords – or sub-leasers, in this case – and he'd been intending to roll the word "friendly" out of his mouth with a lascivious wink, but Withnail cut him off.
"Yes."
There was a long and uncomfortable silence as Jack waited expectantly and Withnail took a defiant sip of his rancid coffee.
"What is it?" Jack prompted at last, drawing his knees together again.
"It's none of your fucking business," Withnail said, managing to combine petty savagery and haughtiness into a cocktail of vitriol. Jack felt his grin falter. Apparently drink was going to gain the upper hand, if anything was. "And it's too early for the pubs to be open." Withnail passed a hand in front of his face, over his large forehead and through his lank hair, a movement designed to conceal a whole-body shudder.
"Ah, fortunately," Jack said, reaching into the pocket of his overcoat and returning triumphant with a bottle of whiskey that should have cost him a good deal more than it had (the girl who'd sold it to him evidently had quite a thing for American accents, although – as he'd told her in the back room of the shop – he had plenty of other accents if she preferred them), "I came prepared."
The fire that kindled in Withnail's bloodshot eyes told him he'd made the right choice.
The whiskey was disappearing faster than Jack had been expecting, and the conversation was not going anything like as well. Or indeed at all. He'd tried a few friendly asides and been met with blank incomprehension and the end of the whiskey bottle; Withnail looked oddly comfortable in the straight-backed chair by the dresser and Jack knew it was like sitting on a spike because he'd tried it out for his Sexy Sprawl Assault before Withnail had even stirred a booze-wasted muscle.
"What I meant is," Jack said eventually, watching Withnail's fingers twitch irritably on the arms of his chair and wondering quite how big the stick up this guy's ass actually was, "I'm going to be in London for a while and I need somewhere to use as my base of operations – off the record."
Withnail waved the bottle grandly at the flat and said something sarcastic about there always being room in his palatial accommodation for complete fucking strangers. Jack wondered if he'd already passed the point where a serious discussion could take place or if there had ever been one to begin with, and the bottle spiralled through the air like the blade of a helicopter.
"Your landlord can't know," Jack pressed. He'd given up on sprawling and opted instead for sitting on the very edge of the sofa, his elbows resting on his knees, his hands pressed together and his thumbs against his lower lip. The thirty-ninth most successful position for wiggling an agreement out of someone, in his lengthy experience, but there was every possibility it might work. "So obviously I'm willing to pay, oh, twice what he'd charge for that room."
Withnail looked momentarily pained, and necked another stinging mouthful of Jack's whiskey. He didn't look much like he was about to roll over and agree, although for the life of him Jack couldn't figure out why. He'd checked out the spare room and found it full of nothing but cardboard boxes full of assorted crap – old playbills and dog-eared paperbacks, the kind of thing that suggested that the tenant of these rooms might have had a life once even if he'd drowned it now; he'd also figured that the eviction notices for non-payment of rent would have provided the guy with an overwhelming motivation to sub-let. He didn't seem like the law-abiding type.
"What do you mean, 'base of operations'?" Withnail added, slapping the whiskey bottle down precariously next to him. "Are you supposed to be some sort of Russian spy?" he sounded less credulous than he did boggled that anyone would claim something so stupid.
"With this accent?" Jack scoffed, sitting back on the sofa and spreading his arms invitingly across the spine of the furniture. He let his knees slide surreptitiously open again.
"An American spy," Withnail sounded bored. "Or a lunatic."
"Actually," Jack said with his most effusive trust-me grin, "I'm a Time Agent. Or I was."
"A maniac," Withnail confirmed, holding the bottle with both hands and giving Jack a slightly bug-eyed look. "A raving maniac."
Jack looked around the flat. There were expensive-looking dinner plates overflowing with cigarette butts, grizzled underpants hanging from the bookcases, a torn newspaper page stuck to the fly-speckled mirror with what looked like blood but might just as easily have been boot polish; there was a miasma of stale tobacco smoke hanging in the air like the spectre of death and the whole place smelt like rodents. Withnail himself appeared to be a coat-hanger skeleton of a man shrink-wrapped in jaundice, his distinctly unhealthy pallor topped with the mechanical, exaggerated expressions of a madman.
Jack forbade from comment. While he sat in meaningful silence, Withnail rooted around behind his ear and produced a splintery cigarette, lighting it on the third match with an expression of purest human exasperation. "Perhaps I am," Jack relented, and played his winning card instead, "but I'm a lunatic with several bottles of good whiskey who's willing to pay you twice what that dump is worth."
"Fine," Withnail said, looking past Jack at some unseen disturbance in the air above his head. "Go and get me some aspirins."
Jack reached into his overcoat pocket again and extracted a small glass jar with a screw cap and no label. "Here," he said, tossing the little brown vessel into Withnail's lap gently. "They're not strictly aspirin, but they'll cure your headache." And your jaundice. And your hair loss, if you're really lucky, Jack thought guiltily, watching Withnail neck four in one handful, and wash the little pink pills down with an unquestioning mouthful of whiskey, not sure what they can do for your personality problems, though.
"Can I have those back, please?" he added after a minute. "They were … kind of expensive."
Withnail put the jar in his coat pocket and took another pull on the whiskey.
Whatever his original plans in Camden, London, had been, Jack was pretty sure they hadn't involved doing someone else's shopping for them. But Withnail had Jack cornered on this – he was either going to have to do as he was told or find someone less astronomically self-centred and incurious to live with. And in London at the meridian of 1970, finding a flatmate who wasn't a curtain-twitching busy-body or suspiciously Irish was like trying to find an honest Slitheen. So he buckled down, and in typical Jack Harkness fashion decided that if he was going to do a thing, he was going to do it properly.
Everyone in this town loves an American accent and a friendly face, he'd thought, making a point of stopping by the market on his way back to Withnail's dungeon of a flat, his body aching from several gruelling hours of surveillance on a man who didn't have the decency to eat or mutilate a single damn person the whole day. Apparently what the traders of North London really loved was the chance to fleece an unsuspecting American to the order of several shillings; behind those twinkling eyes and cheery gales of laughter they were a bunch of merciless sharks determined to separate a man from his small change. Fortunately, Jack wasn't born yesterday by a long stretch and had given as good as he got, to the extent that he was pretty certain someone had paid him to take some bacon off their hands.
His borrowed key was stiff in the lock, requiring elbow movements he'd not had to use since – well, since after the middle of the 20th century, certainly – and there was a small dog in the hallway when he finally got through the door, paper bags of food, toilet paper (the stuff looked like it could be used to sandpaper steel) and industrial strength bleach. The dog regarded him with a quizzical expression as Jack managed to drop the bleach on the bottom stair.
"It's for unblocking the toilet, all right?" he told the dog, and sat down on the wooden stair next to his errant cleaning chemicals. The whole entrance hall was papered with letters addressed variously to Mr. Withnail (no initial, and Jack couldn't help wondering if he gave the same curt response to officials who asked for his name as he'd received), Mr. Donald Twain, and a Mr. Peter Marwood, which was puzzling as he was given to understand that the downstairs tenant was a Mr. Reginald P. Blackwall.
The dog continued to peer at Jack in what Jack's tired mind considered to be an unnecessarily supercilious fashion. "What?" he said at last, putting the bleach back into the torn paper bag it had fallen from and giving the dog a stern look back. "If you'd seen that toilet you wouldn't be approaching it with bleach, my friend. You'd be there with a potato-masher and a case of gunpowder."
Waves of potent scorn radiated from the small dog as it stared at Jack and whiffled its nose decisively. "There was a fish poking out of the u-bend," Jack explained desperately, as the dog turned its head away in disgust, "A haddock. The whole flat is like a Dali movie."
A moment later he shook himself and got to his feet, gathering the paper bags in his arms – the bacon was starting to soak through onto the sleeve of his coat and spending a day crouched outside someone's office while smelling of pig fat didn't sound like an appealing way to spend the morrow. "And here I am," he admitted, "talking to a dog."
"You think you have problems," the dog snorted, trotting back to its own flat, "there's a mad American man on my staircase."
Jack considered arguing, but realised that the dog probably had a point. And that he hadn't had enough sleep. He clumped wearily up the narrow staircase, rounded the corner at the fish-infested bathroom and bowled the bleach bottle to a skidding halt just inside the bathroom door before going on his way up the remainder of the stairs to the flat.
He'd been intending to go straight into the kitchen and put the bacon in the spot where a civilised person would have had a refrigerator, but as he passed Withnail's bedroom the door was wide open and someone was sawing logs. He couldn't resist seeing what kind of state the man was in that he'd passed out at seven in the evening.
Dropping the bags gingerly in the corridor outside, Jack moved stealthily through the open door stopped at the threshold. Withnail was a man who knew how to pass out with definite style; clad in a single sock, a pair of incredibly dubious underpants that had probably been white once in the early 1960s, and his ubiquitous grey coat, Jack's new landlord had draped himself crossways over the double bed and was hanging off it on both sides. His face, despite being upside down and streaked with dried saliva, looked a deal less saggy and pallid than it had when Jack departed; his hair just a touch thicker and a lot less greasy, although the wrist of the hand that dangled awkwardly beyond his head was still unwholesomely bony.
Regarding this miraculous transformation Jack realised that this human wreckage still had his Panaceas, and they weren't the kind of thing that needed to be left in anyone's possession this century, much less the pockets of the kind of insane person who would probably eat the rest of them in one swallow if he got bored.
There was no movement in the bedroom but the shallow rise and fall of Withnail's toast rack ribcage as Jack stole into the room like a thief, circumnavigating a slippery pile of empty wine bottles and coverless paperbacks with the kind of diligence that made him the right man for boring surveillance jobs in Whitehall and nearly blowing his cover when he didn't spot a crazy-deformed black umbrella in time. Jack swore under his breath, but Withnail seemed dead to the world. Four Panaceas and a bottle – Jack glanced at the glass in Withnail's hand, and sure enough it was completely empty – of goodish whiskey could do that to a man independently of each other, never mind in combination.
Nevertheless, Jack crouched as he got nearer to the bed, and slowed up, edging a foot delicately around a bulging suitcase. It looked almost like Withnail had considered walking out of his own life some dust-gathering time ago and then got too drunk to manage it; Jack slithered tiger-like over discarded clothing and crunched gingerly on yellowing newspapers. And then he hit his toe on a wine bottle.
The clink of steel toe-cap on glass echoed around the room like a gunshot, and Jack froze. Withnail made a sound like drain being unblocked and filled with jelly, his hips moving independently of the rest of his torso to some more comfortable position, his lips smacking on the air. Jack held his breath, counted backwards from ten in Icelandic, and waited a heartbeat longer, but there were no further signs of life.
Through the dust and the disjointed snores Jack moved like a goddamned ninja, and finally found himself leaning over Withnail's corpselike body with his hands raised like a concert pianist, trying to work out which pocket the bastard had hidden his pills in.
After some careful examination of the situation Jack concluded that he didn't have a goddamn clue but that the pocket nearest him had a bulge in it and hey, it was closer. There was an evens chance that the pills were in there, and he'd always been a lucky kind of guy. Apart from the whole being stranded in the middle of the 19th century thing, and the memory loss thing, and the being killed by daleks thing. Other than that he was generally a lucky kind of guy.
Jack stopped putting it off and extended his hand, arcing his arm uncomfortably to avoid brushing his coat sleeve on any of the exposed flesh laid out before him, screwing up his face in concentration as he angled his hand and slid it s…l…o…w…l…y into the coat pocket … holding his breath now, his fingers groping blindly … for what turned out to be a screwed up piece of paper.
He held in the curse. Perhaps it was in the other pocket. With movements as tiny and precise as a watchmaker Jack slipped his hand back out of the pocket, and leaned over Withnail's prone body, holding his coat sleeve out of the way of any accidental brushings with his other hand.
Withnail snorted and champed at the air, freezing Jack to the spot more effectively than any gun barrel ever had. He swallowed, his hand hovering above Withnail's pocket, and counted up to ten in Yuh-n'an, which took some time as they had no concept of "four" and he wasn't sure if he should bypass it entirely or try to invent one on the spot. When he reached ten and Withnail hadn't moved or grunted again, Jack rolled up his coat sleeve and lurched slowly forwards, his fingertips brushed the wool at the lip of the pocket … and as they did, Jack chanced a look at Withnail's sleeping face.
Right at the moment that the man's eyes flew open.
There was a sound remarkably similar to a strangled goose, a brief flurry of movement and displaced dust, and somehow Withnail was on the other side of the room, clutching his coat around him like a scandalised housewife and staring at Jack with eyes like really bloodshot saucers.
"What the fuck are you doing?" Withnail shouted, summoning up reserves of indignation the likes of which Jack hadn't experienced from someone in possession of both testicles before. "Are you trying to kill me? You fucking maniac! What do you mean by looming over a sleeping man like that? I could have had a fucking heart-attack!"
"I was trying," Jack said, trying to sound harmless and reasonable while kneeling on Withnail's hopelessly stained sheets and rolling his coat sleeve back down, "to get my pills back."
"Why the hell didn't you just ask?" Withnail barked, evidently still extremely rattled by this rude awakening.
"All right," Jack said, putting his hands in his coat pockets and cocking a plaintive smile at the trembling man in the corner (somehow perched atop a box that contained a stuffed fox, Jack noticed). "Can I have my pills back, please?"
Withnail appeared to give this due consideration, for all of a half-second. "Absolutely not," he snapped. "Are you going to attempt to assault me in my sleep again?"
There was an undertone – barely noticeable to anyone who wasn't Captain Jack Harkness and therefore very much attuned to these particular social harmonics – to his querulous enquiry that suggested, discretely, that he might not be entirely averse to being assaulted in his sleep by Jack. Maybe. If Jack warmed his hands up first.
Out of deference to the way Withnail was still holding his coat wrapped around his skinny frame and boggling at Jack, he bit down the I can if you want me to that sailed glibly to the forefront of his mind, and instead offered, "I really need those pills, Withnail. C'mon. I'll pay you for their safe return if that's what you want."
Withnail gave him a suspicious look, his nostrils flaring.
"With much better whiskey," Jack added, watching Withnail's rictus of righteous ire for some weak point. His knees were sinking slowly into the mattress and he really, really wanted to just put the damned bacon away in the kitchen somewhere the rats couldn't get to it, and let the welcoming arms of unconsciousness take him.
Withnail's suspicious look did not abate.
"And … sexual favours?" Jack said, squeezing the suggestion out with a grimace.
"I beg your pardon?"
When Jack had left the living room to begin his battle against the gas cooker he'd left Withnail sprawled in an undignified manner across the sofa, reading Entertaining Mr. Sloane with both intense concentration and unparalleled disgust. When he stormed back in there fifteen minutes later with his shirt sleeves rolled up to ask Withnail for another box of cook's matches, the man had abandoned contemporary theatre in favour of further alcohol consumption. There was a brief tug-o-war over the matchbox.
I could tell him anything, Jack mused as he cracked a blueish-white egg on the rim of a frying pan caked with burnt-on black bits. I could tell him about that one girl who changed species just by putting on a buffalo skin and he wouldn't do anything but call me a 'fucking loony' and rattle my own pills at me. He watched the bubbles start to form at the sizzling edges of the egg whites. "Can I have my pills back, please?" he called back into the living room, peering around the doorjamb.
Withnail barely paused the whiskey before his mouth to say, "No," firmly. Jack could see his smirk before Withnail pressed the neck of the bottle his lips, and snapped his head back to the cooking as a glob of fat spat onto his forearm.
Jack laid a few strips of bacon into the pan next to the eggs and partially over them. "Can I please have my pills back?"
"No," Withnail repeated, sounding almost cheerful. Jack swore he could hear something like a chuckle – because grown men don't giggle - before another faint glug indicated the man was back at the whiskey.
He wasn't sure how many times he asked for the return of his Panaceas in the time it took for the bacon to curl up like a handful of dead slugs or the eggs to frazzle and spit themselves into rubbery disks, but it was a lot more than anyone else would have been able to stand. Jack gritted his teeth as he dumped the fry-up onto hastily-wiped plates, wondering how long it would be before the bastard drank himself unconscious again and gave Jack another shot at reclaiming his property.
"What are those things?" Withnail asked abruptly. The clink of an almost-empty bottle being set down reverberated through Jack's clenched jaw as he stepped into the living room, balancing a hot, damp plate in each hand. "Whatever they are, you're not having them back. I feel sensational."
"It wears off," Jack assured him, putting the groaning plate on top of a pile of books roughly in front of Withnail and balancing his own precariously on his knees.
"Which is why I will be keeping the remainder in my pocket," Withnail pointed out, punctuating this eminently sensible plan with a stab to the heavy atmosphere with his fork.
"That's really not a good idea."
"Balls," Withnail snapped. His eyes were bright despite the – Jack peered at the bottle – phenomenal quantity of alcohol he'd managed to put away in this short period of time; Jack judged that he was probably feeling invincible about now, and for the first time found himself wishing the Panaceas had some unpleasant side-effect. He thought about the one side-effect they were definitely documented as having and shuddered. Not him.
"You say that now," Jack muttered, perfectly well aware that Withnail would still be saying it in a week, a month, whenever. Stupid pills and their stupid lack of chemical retribution.
Withnail ignored him and, instead of eating the wobbling heap of brown-edged eggs and tormented pig products, pulled the little phial of pink pills out of his pocket and began toying with them. First he rattled the pot experimentally, listening for the remaining pills, and then he started tossing them from hand to hand, his supper sitting untouched on the table in front of him. Even his fingernails had stopped looking so brittle and scratched, Jack noted. The whiskey was evidently not denting the Panacea effect even the tiniest bit.
As he bounced the small brown pot from palm to palm Withnail kept shooting taunting glances at Jack over his bony shoulder, and Jack felt uncomfortably like a spider in the grip of a very particular sort of small boy. The kind of small boy – he wasn't proud to admit it – that he'd been too, although spiders had by then meant something completely different.
Jack shoved a forkful of egg through his teeth with difficulty and with very little attention paid to what he was doing, watching the pot of pills like a cat as it rattled and bounced back and forth, back and forth. He was, therefore, completely ready and poised for the leap when Withnail set the pills down by his plate and picked up his fork; he was also unfortunately so focussed on his lightning-fast strike that he forgot that his own dinner was still balanced precariously across his knees.
In the aftermath of the explosion of fried food, crockery, paperbacks, and swearing from Withnail Jack stood triumphant and greasy in the wreckage, his Panaceas safe and sound back in his hand, and wiped his mouth with his coat sleeve. It was bleeding a little. His de facto landlord seemed surprisingly unruffled by the experience, hanging his head like a naughty schoolboy and still smirking apologetically when Jack raised both eyebrows and sat down on a piece of bacon that had somehow ended up in the sofa.
"At least you still have your bacon," Jack pointed out, propping his left foot up on his right knee and trying to look disapproving. When he caught Withnail's eye again, however, the drunk was looking less like a naughty schoolboy and considerably more wistful than Jack had suspected he was capable of looking. He sighed. "Alright," he said, getting to his feet again. "You can have the sexual favours anyway."
Amply marinated in whiskey and twitching like a speed freak - although whether with anticipation or apprehension Jack had no idea - Withnail led the way unsteadily to his room, tripping on some invisible obstacle and throwing out an arm to steady himself against air. Jack, sober as a judge, did not feel this boded very well at all, but he'd given his word and ... well. It had been a while. He could stand to compromise his usually high standards. Probably.
Withnail climbed over the heaps of detritus like he was getting into a tree house (a rather wobbly tree house at that), knelt on the mattress as Jack picked his way through the murk, and just stopped, his look uncertain and his coat still on.
Vaulting the last of the newspapers, Jack wondered silently what was wrong with his room or even the sofa, which at least would have had the advantage of not taxing Withnail's not terribly skilful locomotion abilities. He grabbed the flaps of Withnail's coat and threw them apart in a businesslike fashion, his stomach pressed against the edge of the bedstead. Hauling himself up onto the mattress like a seal, Jack yanked down Withnail's dubious underpants (getting little resistance from the greying cotton and less from their owner) and found himself confronted with a mostly flaccid and probably wholly unwashed cock.
He took a deep breath, cupped the somewhat forlorn-looking penis in his right hand and began some undisguisedly mechanical tugging. This is shitty, Jack's ego grumbled at the back of his mind, you're Captain Jack Harkness. You know how to show a guy the time of his life. Jack picked up the pace a little as he felt Withnail's cock swell in his hand. Shut up, he told his ego and the ache that was developing in his shoulder, he smells like goat and it's complicated. Really complicated.
He tried not to hold his breath; the Panaceas would have dealt with any infections that he wasn't already immune to. They were usually sadly deficient at removing smells, but that was no reason to risk being rude right now. To his considerable surprise it didn't taste particularly bad, more as though it had definitely been washed in the last few hours, which meant – Jack discovered it was quite hard to make a wry face when someone's dick was edging between your lips – that Withnail had possibly been a little too confident that this was how the day was going to end.
Jack decided to stop thinking about it and get on with the task in mouth, but he'd barely got the head of Withnail's dick past his teeth, his saliva pooling under his tongue, when the man in question grabbed him by the shoulder. It wasn't an oh god go on don't stop grab, which Jack felt would have been a little premature but not entirely unheard of for this early stage, but a get up grab.
He let Withnail haul him up to head height unquestioningly, and before he could try a searching look on the man's face to try and get some clue of what the problem was, Withnail's mouth had found his.
The courtesy (or arrogance, depending on how you looked at it) of Withnail's genital hygiene hadn't been extended to his mouth; he tasted of whiskey and smoked-to-the-very-butt cigarettes, and his lips were still rough with chapped and cracked skin. He was however a surprisingly good kisser. Jack had been expecting – if he'd been expecting at all, Withnail hadn't really seemed the kissing type – an awkward probing tongue, maybe some drool, and a great deal of clumsiness. There was clumsiness, but it came from Withnail's hands, seizing at the back of Jack's head too hard and catching in his hair, the force with which they moved still not disguising the tremor in his fingers.
Drawing in closer, his shirt against Withnail's bare chest, Jack got hold of the back of Withnail's neck and for a moment the pressure of their mouths against each other was painful, each pressing the other's head towards him. Jack conceded defeat on this and pulled back from Withnail's otherwise rather tender kiss for air and orientation.
Glancing at Withnail's face (which he would cheerfully admit was more to do with vanity over his prowess than lust or even curiosity about the effect of the Panaceas) Jack's already off-balance expectations got knocked even further sideways. He was used to inspiring a certain amount of drooling desire in, well, everyone; he'd had a long time to get used to being an object of sexual fantasies and all it had ever done was make his life easier.
Withnail mostly just looked kissed - his lips were a little swollen, his hair even more dishevelled (how the hell he even managed to notice that Jack had no idea), his cheeks flushed for the first time in their short acquaintance and his mouth didn't seem to shut properly anymore. Jack was about to congratulate himself on a job well done and get on with the goddamn fellatio (after another half an hour or so of kissing, if he was honest with himself) when he caught Withnail's eye and nearly choked. For someone so determined to hide under a thick blanket of whiskey Whatever-his-name-was Withnail was wearing something on the surface of his no longer bloodshot eyes; Jack couldn't remember when he'd last seen naked hunger and desperation that intense. He wondered how many years it had been since the man last balled someone; but it was a idle speculation drowned by another glance to check if he'd been right.
A black void of need tempered with strands of lust stared back at him from Withnail's eyes.
Jack lunged.
Later, before he fell asleep face-down with Withnail's arm draped over his buttocks like a blanket, very little of the preceding minutes were clear in his head. He remembered his shirt getting torn up a bit, and he remembered being in too much of a hurry to even think about removing his socks or even his trousers below much below the knee. There was one crystal-clear moment when Jack's hand had closed over the end of Withnail's dick just as more come than anyone that thin should be able to produce came forth – crystal-clear because Withnail had muttered a distressed-sounding "Peter" under his breath and Jack had thought Ah with the kind of clarity that usually required controlled substances.
He had a dim memory having bitten Withnail's neck and shoulders a couple of times and being rewarded with some distinctly incoherent and throaty noises; he also had a hazy idea that he'd sworn up and down to himself that he was only going to blow the guy and not in actual fact fuck him so hard the bed nearly fell apart, but after the look Withnail had given him it felt like short-changing him. And short-changing your landlord just wasn't good manners, Jack thought in a feeble attempt at justification. He tried very hard not to be smug into the unwashed pillow case and failed.
When Jack woke he was stiff, sore, satisfied and alone. The quality of light streaming through the half-drawn curtains suggested it was not long after dawn; the warmth still lingering in the dent on the other side of the mattress offered the hypothesis that Withnail hadn't got up that long ago. Jack rolled over onto his back, stretched, and allowed himself one short moment of unbridled panic as the word Panacea drifted menacingly through his mind.
He had just about finished his panic when Withnail slumped against the doorframe – he'd thrown on his revolting coat again but it was all the concession he'd made to decency – with a single mug of what smelt like coffee clasped in his hand.
Jack made some inconclusive moment towards getting up, but the bed seemed intent on eating him whole.
"I think it's better," Withnail said in what he probably thought was a sly and calculating manner in between a furtive slurp of coffee, "if you sleep in here."
"Okay," Jack said, sitting up and trying with little subtlety to locate his shirt among the detritus on Withnail's bedroom floor. He thought he saw it atop the fox-in-a-box (although how it had got there was still a mystery) but squinting revealed it to be some sort of duster. The idea of Withnail actually owning a duster was a bewildering one. "So," Jack added, swinging himself off the bed and onto yellowing newspapers, hauling his trousers back up in one languid movement, "who was he?"
"Who?" Withnail was, it transpired, the world's most appallingly bad liar. He couldn't have been more obviously rattled if he'd spewed his tar-like coffee all over the floor, and as it was he very nearly jumped out of his skin, looking as if Jack had walked over and punched him in the stomach.
Jack racked his brain. "… Donald Twain?"
It was Withnail's almost tangible and solid relief that told him he'd picked the wrong name, quite before Withnail opened his mouth and said in the most toffee-nosed, arch voice imaginable, "That is my stage name, you imbecile."
Fighting the urge to ask him exactly what stage it was "Donald Twain" ever found himself on, Jack did up his trousers with a look of great concentration. When he judged the silence to have gone on for long enough he looked up at Withnail and added a casual, "Peter, then."
All the colour drained out of Withnail's face so fast there might have been a sluice gate at the back of his neck; paler than blotting paper and clutching surreptitiously at the doorjamb, his coffee slopping unheeded over the back of his hand, Withnail said, "no one," as though he'd seen a ghost.
Jack cast about for his shirt again and finally found it under the pathetic heap of blankets and coats at the foot of the bed. He shrugged, inspecting the damage and pointedly not looking at Withnail's disconcerted stick-figure in the doorway. "All right." He pulled the shirt on and held up his finger. "One last question. How many more of those pills did you take?"
"Oh good Christ," Withnail whined, plainly glad to be off the topic of Peter, taking another sip of what remained of his coffee, "are you still going on about that? What does it matter?"
Jack did up the last of his shirt buttons and fixed Withnail's irritable look with his most earnest, Trust-Me-I'm-American face, and said quietly, "I need to know, Withnail."
His de facto landlord pulled an exasperated face and threw his hands in the air (showering the doorway with the very last bitter dregs of his coffee). "THREE," he shouted, as though Jack had offended him beyond any redemption, "I took three more." The look he threw Jack was scandalised and indignant, but Jack could see damn well he was worried. "And don't tell me I'm going to die," Withnail went on, turning back into the corridor and dismissing the notion completely, "I don't want to hear it."
Jack licked his lips and crunched his way over the bedroom rubble to stand behind him; Withnail's extra inches were at their most obvious as Jack stood on tip-toe to whisper into the man's ear: "I think I may have even worse news."
"I don't want to hear it," Withnail breathed, his shoulders tensing. "I don't want to hear anything."
Jack licked his lips again and pressed his mouth against Withnail's ear, his lips tickling against the cartilage as he imparted as gently as he knew how the cautionary information he'd received when he bought the Panaceas (and alright, maybe "bought" was not exactly correct, but there had been an exchange of services for goods), a few hundred years ago (or away. Jack had never been sure how to describe what had happened in his personal past and the universe's future, preferring to sidestep the issue by offering the listener a drink, or possibly a quick fumble) and a couple of galaxies to the left. The warning had been quite firm:
"These little things increase the efficiency of every bodily process the human being performs, so be careful."
Jack had evidently not looked appropriately concerned, although he'd been quite sore at the time and his thought processes were a little muddled; the reason for acquiring the Panaceas in the first place had involved a quite staggering dose of fish toxins.
"Captain," the Panacea-vending mostly-human had said, giving him a sharp tap on the cheek to get his attention, "Be very careful. Exponentially increased fertility is not something a man who travels needs."
Jack had said something uncharacteristically callous involving abandoning other people with the load of child-bearing and being gone before anyone could pee on a stick, a reference that was so hopelessly outdated that his interlocutor had merely boggled at him for a moment.
"Captain," the being had said, putting a vacuum-sealed packet of a thousand pink pills into his hand with what Jack had considered at the time to be unnecessary gravity, "unless you truly wish to gestate a foetus in your lower colon I strongly suggest you exercise caution with this medication. Or in your sex life," The being had smirked across all three of zir mouths and added, "I hold more hope for the medication."
In Camden, 1970, Jack barely got to finish his quiet explanation before Withnail leapt away from him like a scalded cat, back into the bedroom, and stared at him with wide, wild eyes. "I knew it," Withnail shrieked, backing still further away, "you're a fucking lunatic!"
"Look – " Jack began, not entirely sure where he was intending to take the conversation and hoping to hell that the conciliatory and calming tone he was using would be enough, like talking to a dangerous dog. He took a step towards Withnail, with his hand extended.
"Back off!" Withnail yelped, seizing a dog-eared copy of Journey's End and flinging it with surprising accuracy at Jack's face. Withnail stumbled backwards over a half-packed suitcase and smashed something with his shin. Jack batted the book away and advanced another step.
"Withnail, you have to listen –"
"I'm not listening to you, you're a bloody maniac!" Withnail barked, scrambling back around the bed and pranging what looked like a glass paperweight at Jack. Whatever it was, it stung Jack's hand as he caught it and tossed it to one side, and made him feel slightly less charitable. "Get away from me!"
Jack pressed on, getting close enough to cup Withnail's elbow in a vaguely restraining and comforting gesture, only to have Withnail leap back onto the bed and call him a variety of synonyms for crazy, while pelting him with unwashed clothing, paperbacks and bric-a-brac.
"Withnail," Jack snapped, losing his temper. Perhaps it was the tone of his voice, but when he bounded up onto the mattress and seized Withnail by his upper arms, giving him an abrupt shake, the man barely protested. "This is serious –"
"- you're not the one with a potential heir growing in his guts!" Withnail whimpered. It shouldn't have been possible for someone six inches taller than Jack to peer up at him imploringly, but Withnail gave it a damned good go.
"Withnail," Jack repeated, sitting them both on the edge of the bed and clasping his landlord's hand between two of his own, his expression grave, "I'm afraid I may have got you pregnant."
"I'm pregnant," Withnail repeated for what seemed like the millionth time. A second whiskey bottle sat empty between his bare legs, and Jack sighed and shifted on the uncomfortable wooden chair. The midday sun was fairly cooking him, but he wasn't sure he could strip down to his vest without causing comment or, more likely, outright hysteria from Withnail. The man appeared to be in a fragile mental state, which, Jack guessed, was entirely his fault.
Well, mostly his fault. Withnail hadn't exactly protested about the act that had led to his current state, and he had necked seven Panaceas against Jack's advice, so really … it was still all Jack's fault.
There was a shift in the tension in the room, and in the clouds of dust rising through shafts of light from the half-closed curtains; Jack took a deep breath to say something possibly comforting and nearly choked on the stifling air.
"I know a man who can deal with this," Withnail mused, raising his head at least and letting it fall back over his shoulders as limply as a discarded condom, and Jack sat up as though a poker had been rammed through him.
"No, you can't –"
"He's very experienced in wielding coathangers," Withnail continued, wincing despite the thunderous quantities he'd imbibed over the past three hours. "God knows I tried to forget that conversation, he was a dreadful little – "
"No," Jack repeated, trying to add authority rather than panic to his voice, "He won't know what to do! And it could compromise everything I'm –"
"Alright then," Withnail snapped, his head falling forwards again and rolling around somewhere just above his knees. He glanced up at Jack through his unruly hair. "Do you know what to do?"
"I can't say I've ever performed an abortion on a guy before," Jack admitted, lacing his fingers together and tucking them under his chin. "But –"
"What a coincidence," Withnail interrupted, the pitch of his voice rising, "I can't say I've ever been a pregnant man before!" He clamped his legs together, knocking over the empty whiskey bottle and adding in a worryingly manic voice, "If it weren't for the problems it would cause for my family I should be getting my agent to call up all the bloody newspapers, they'd have a field day! 'Man conceives child during ill-advised sodomy misadventure'!"
He seemed about to continue, but Withnail broke off his tirade in a fit of giggles which rapidly escalated into hiccupping, barking laughter that had more than a tinge of hysteria to it. Jack got to his feet and scooped up his great-coat, which had already begun to absorb the mustiness and stale smell of the flat.
"What are you doing now?" Withnail groaned as Jack began rifling through his coat pockets, his fingers questing for a particular oddly-shaped implement that Jack had thought he probably wouldn't need but which he couldn't resist acquiring anyway, especially since it was so shoddily-guarded and unobtrusive.
"Finding us a way out of this mess," Jack snapped, discarding something which looked like a clockwork mouse but which had a distressing tendency to blow up non-cellular matter whether he wanted it to or not (apparently it was operated by brainwave activity, although Jack had never been able to figure out which brainwave activity caused it to set fire to MacVities chocolate-coated digestives, implode computers on contact or, on one memorable occasion, cause all clothing bearing a particular white dye to become transparent). "Got it."
Withnail looked at the smooth grey object in Jack's hand and said in a distinctly cold voice, "How, exactly, are you proposing to cause a miscarriage with an ocarina?"
"It's not an ocarina," Jack said shortly, cupping the device in his hand as he set down the coat. It began to pulse feebly in his palm, drawing what little energy it needed to restart from his body heat.
"It looks like an ocarina," Withnail muttered, getting to his feet rather unsteadily. "What are you going to do, tootle the thing to death?"
"This," Jack said, giving the little device a flourish, "is an Interrupted Phase Subsonic Scanner."
"Is that supposed to mean something?"
"Not to you, no," Jack said, turning it towards Withnail, who backed up hastily. "Hold still." He dropped to one knee beside Withnail's abdomen, holding up the Eye-Pee-Ess-Ess. "I've set it to scan for any life forms containing my DNA –"
"Your what?"
"… semen," Jack stroked the top of the Eye-Pee-Ess-Ess, feeling it vibrate across the bottom as it scanned. He'd have been more comfortable with the device if it had been one of those early 51st Century ones which developed a screen when it had data to transmit, rather than the late 55th Century ones that transmitted compressed information to the holder through electrical impulses in the skin that were interpreted brainside – they always made him feel a little violated. In the unpleasant, mind-control way.
Withnail flinched but didn't pull away as Jack passed the Eye-Pee-Ess-Ess over his belly. "What's it saying?" he asked nervously. "When do I know?"
"You're definitely pregnant," Jack muttered, a thought dawning on him. From what he remembered of 55th Century technology, there was an almost unlimited amount of power that could be generated in short bursts if you were prepared to risk the possibility of side-effects. Side-effects which, unlike the Panaceas, really didn't seem too bad at the moment.
"Oh god," Withnail whined. "Why did my life ever need to contain that phrase?"
"The good news is," Jack continued, stroking the back of the Eye-Pee-Ess-Ess in new patterns, trying to contain his excitement as the idea coalesced in his head, "I think I can do something about it. You see, the Interrupted Phase Subsonic Scanner works by –"
He caught Withnail giving him a beautifully uncomprehending look, and hedged, "- really complicated science. But if I can fix the settings it'll emit – well, it'll kind of irradiate anything foreign growing in your gut and, in the process, render you infertile." Jack ran his fingers over the smooth top of the Eye-Pee-Ess-Ess almost idly, feeling the information transmitting from his fingertips into the … matter. He'd never quite been able to reconcile himself to the idea that these things were grown, rather than made.
Withnail slapped his hand away at the wrist, nearly knocking the precious device from his hand. "What?" he squawked, pulling away from Jack with a look of horror. "You can't sterilise me like some kind of farm animal!"
"Why not?" Jack swung the device back towards Withnail's abdomen, his temper hanging there by the thread of his teeth. "A minute ago you were talking about coathangers up the rectum as though you'd survive the experience."
"My father wants grandchildren!" Withnail shouted, slapping Jack's arm away again. "If I don't provide him with a bouncing baby son at some point he's going to cut me out of his fucking will!"
Jack raised an impatient eyebrow and raised his arm to point at Withnail's gut again, feeling the little device surging with stored power. "Were you intending to marry some poor girl and get her in the family way, Withnail?" he cast a pretend look around at the bombsite that constituted Withnail's living room – the décor hadn't been improved by Withnail's hysterical drinking and occasional falls as he spent the morning trying to get his head around the idea of being knocked up – but kept his attention on Withnail's flailing arms, "because it doesn't look like it."
Withnail shuffled his feet uncomfortably, keeping out of the line of Jack's arm still. "Eventually, yes!"
Jack twisted his mouth into a sour smile. "That does kind of fly in the face of the facts."
"What facts?" Withnail demanded, as though he'd genuinely forgotten something important.
"The one about you being completely bent springs to mind," Jack muttered, watching Withnail's face.
Withnail's in-breath was sharp and scandalised, and his nostrils flared like flamenco skirts. "How dare you!"
"Aha!" Jack's determined grimace flashed to the surface as he discharged the Eye-Pee-Ess-Ess into Withnail's midriff, feeling his body jerk just a little off-balance as the innocuous-looking grey pebble-like thing spat unseen waves of radiation this century hadn't even dreamed of, right into Withnail's colon with unerring accuracy. Hopefully unerring, anyway. He straightened his squat and as casually as rolling up his shirt sleeve, he gave the Eye-Pee-Ess-Ess another pass over Withnail's heaving stomach while the guy carried right on yelling.
"You utter, utter, utter bastard," Withnail hissed, apparently all shouted-out. Jack couldn't figure out whether it was his sneak attack or the observation that had got him so wound up, but he seemed to have run out of air for complaining with and anyhow, Jack had more important things on his mind.
"I have good news," Jack interrupted, before Withnail could inform Jack exactly how many different shapes and shades of complete shit he was and how many different authorities Withnail would call down on his head. Withnail stopped in mid-rant and eyeballed Jack suspiciously. Jack supposed he hadn't really been prominent as a bearer of glad tidings in Withnail's life so far, and continued, "it appears that the world won't be gaining a little bundle of joy from my loins –"
"It wasn't your loins that were the problem," Withnail said in an arch voice that did nothing to disguise the bald relief on his face or the way he sagged from the shoulders downwards.
"I'll make us some more coffee," Jack offered, ducking into the kitchen as Withnail's legs gave out and spilled him untidily onto the sofa. He could hear the scrape of matches as he grappled with the kettle, and the smell of fresh cigarette smoke drifted through the strata of stale smoke hanging through the flat. He didn't bother to wonder where Withnail had managed to find a second box of matches, just scraped coffee into the mugs he'd washed the previous day (which were already starting to revert to their native patina of grease and dust) and called over his shoulder, "You know what with your ill-advised overdose on my pills –"
He could hear Withnail stiffen in his seat, and edged back towards the kitchen door so he could watch him over his shoulder. " – your little swimmers would probably have survived a direct hit to the balls …" he peered at the cloth-clad area of anatomy in question, amused to see that Withnail still squirmed at the attention. "… with a nuclear warhead."
Jack tapped his foot. The kettle didn't appear to be heating in any kind of a hurry. "And that's if the Eye-Pee-Ess-Ess wasn't sufficiently advanced to only destroy what I told it to." He resisted the urge to stick his tongue out, but Withnail's round-eyed, tight-mouthed expression was too much for him to keep a completely straight face.
"You bastard," Withnail repeated, getting off the sofa and hauling his coat closed around himself again. "Bugger coffee. I want more whiskey. Where's the whiskey, you impossible shit?"
"No," Jack said, going back to the living room and squaring up to Withnail, whiskey bottle seized surreptitiously from the table now hanging from his hand. "It's my turn, I think."