Archive of Our Own ^beta

The bar is loud and dark and way too crowded, which for most of his long, long life meant Rex wouldn’t set foot in there if you paid him, but he’s trying to put himself out there or some self-actualizing bullshit like that.

So he makes himself leave his tiny rented room on the space station and go through five airlocks, four endless hallways, and three elevators, before he makes it into the bar. He buys a drink, just for the look of things, then finds a seat in the corner and gets ready for a night of talking to no one.

Yeah. Putting himself out there. Sure.

Rex is feeling pretty pleased with himself for following the letter, if not the spirit, of that decision—

—and Jesus fucking Christ, that’s Jack fucking Harkness who’s just walked through the door.

Rex is honestly surprised he recognizes him, after two hundred years, give or take, but who would forget the guy who ruined your life? Especially if he hasn’t changed his look at all. Still grinning that stupid smarmy grin, still wearing that stupid fucking coat.

There’s no way it’s still the same coat. Is there?

And why is this so shocking, actually? Sure, there’s the incredibly slim odds of the two of them ever meeting again, not in a galaxy this big, but more importantly, this is exactly the kind of thing that would happen to Rex.

Because the universe hates him, to be clear.

At least Harkness hasn’t seen him yet, Rex thinks, and is already formulating an escape route when Harkness’s gaze lands right on him.

Then, God help him, they make direct eye contact.

Harkness grins even wider, and immediately starts pushing through the crowd towards him. Rex finishes his drink, not that it’ll help.

Okay, this isn’t the end of the world. It may feel like it, but it’s not, and Rex would know.

Obviously he can’t pretend to not have seen Harkness, considering they’ve already locked eyes. Pretending not to recognize Harkness is also tempting, but just as impractical.

No, aside from setting himself on fire and jumping out the window and into the vacuum of space (which he’s not entirely ruling out), there’s only one thing to do. Pretend to be completely, totally unbothered by any of this.

“Rex!” Jack says, sitting down without asking. He leans across the table, until there’s barely any space between them. “You. Look. Great. How long has it been?”

“Not long enough, World War Two,” Rex grinds out, already failing at his only objective.

Jack laughs, impossibly loud in the already noisy bar, leaning back and slapping the table. Rex can’t tell if this is how Jack has always acted and he’s just forgotten quite how annoying he is, or if he’s doing it on purpose to piss him off. Probably both.

“World War Two, ha,” Jack says. “Haven’t heard that in a while. Most people these days think World War Two is a band.”

Rex doesn’t laugh. He wouldn’t know what people these days think. He doesn’t talk to people. It’s astounding he’s here at all.

“Anyways, how have you been?” Jack asks. Then he looks deliberately around the bar, and leers at Rex. “What brings you here?”

He emphasizes the ‘here,’ of course, like an asshole. Because what Rex conveniently forgot to mention earlier is that this is a gay bar.

They call it something else, these days, though what it is exactly he can’t remember and doesn’t care. It’s not like he was planning on talking to anyone who might give a damn.

Back to the point, yes, this is a gay bar. Rex is at a gay bar, everyone point and laugh. He’s figured some things out, okay? Nothing he would admit out loud, and certainly not to Jack Harkness, but after spending the first thirty-odd years of his life, and considerable time after, trying so hard to be the right kind of man, or even a man at all, seeing the rest of the world slowly care less and less about that kind of thing, is . . . freeing, in a way.

But that’s not the thing that matters.

What does matter is that it’s been two hundred years and change since Miracle Day, since Jack ruined his life.

(And saved his life too, he tries not to think).

And in that time, Rex has done his best to not completely fall apart, to keep going with some semblance of stability. He wouldn’t call himself well-adjusted, not by any basic standard, but he’s not bad, overall. He’s done okay. Is doing okay.

Which, of-fucking-course, is when Jack fucking Harkness shows up and blows everything to hell.

All of a sudden he feels like the old Rex again. 2011 Rex. Rex whose carefully planned life got completely upended, Rex whose dad hated him, Rex who got Vera and Esther and God knows who else killed.

Rex who tried his best every day to be the person he was supposed to be, strong and capable and leading the charge, and had Jack undermine him at every turn.

Is he really that different now from who he was then? Probably not, but at least he has distance from it now. The possibility of a clean slate.

And now . . .

Rex scowls at Jack, determined not to take the bait. “So this is a coincidence, huh?”

Jack smirks. “Yeah, I’ve spent the last two hundred years stalking you. Of all the gin joints, et cetera.”

Casablanca. Jack probably saw it opening night. Like it or not, tonight’s really going to be a trip down memory lane, isn’t it?

“Okay, whatever,” Rex says. “We’ve caught up. Now let’s go our separate ways and maybe we’ll see each other in another two centuries.”

“Looking forward to it,” Jack says. “Buy you another drink?”

“No,” Rex says.

Jack ignores him and gets up. While he’s over at the bar, spending way too long flirting with the bartender (who isn’t even human; Rex might be slightly more relaxed about his sexuality now but he definitely still has standards), Rex considers making a run for it.

Then he sighs. Why bother? By the time he gets through the crowd, Jack will just follow him out into the hallway.

Jack comes back, and hands Rex his drink. He’s not exactly sure what it is, some alien beer probably, but it looks surprisingly normal. He was expecting a neon-coloured, beach umbrella-festooned monstrosity.

“I’m glad the place is doing so well,” Jack says, looking around at the crowds. “You know I came up with the name?”

“No you didn’t,” Rex says on impulse. The name is some alien word he can’t pronounce: Myfanwy’s, if he’s remembering correctly.

“Yes I did,” Jack says. He launches into a rambling story about meeting several people at a poker game, losing badly, flirting incessantly, on and on until Rex wonders if he’s ever going to get to the point or if he’ll be stuck spending the rest of eternity listening to this never-ending anecdote. “Then the next morning they said they were opening a bar but couldn’t think of a name, so I suggested Myfanwy’s.”

So that’s how you pronounce it. Rex never would have guessed.

“And the rest is history, huh?” he says sarcastically. “Fascinating stuff, Jack. Thanks.”

“Eh, you don’t get it,” Jack says.

Rex frowns. “What’s there to get?” Please let it not be a euphemism. The universe might hate him, but it must owe him at least one by now.

“Myfanwy was our pterodactyl,” Jack says, like that explains anything at all. The worst part is that it could still be an innuendo.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Jack waves a dismissive hand. “Back at Torchwood.”

“You know, it’s been a while, but I’m pretty damn sure I’d remember a pterodactyl.” That would have just been the icing on the cake, wouldn’t it? A pole through the chest and ancient conspiracies and alien cultists, and an actual dinosaur flying around.

“I meant real Torchwood,” Jack says. Rude, but fair. Rex never even wanted to be Torchwood in the first place, despite Jack and Gwen’s insistence on keeping that clown show alive. “Before your time. She came through a rift in time and space, then Ianto and I caught her.”

Right, Ianto. Rex thinks he remembers the name; he was the dead boyfriend, wasn’t he?

Not the nicest way to put it, but what does it matter now? Other than Jack, and Rex himself but he hardly counts, see earlier statement, everyone in Torchwood is dead. Even Gwen Cooper, and Rex kind of thought she’d hold on forever just out of spite and pure willpower.

“Ianto’s the one who named her, obviously,” Jack is saying, and Rex reluctantly forces himself to start paying attention again. If one of them has to get all misty-eyed going down memory lane, better Jack than him.

“Obviously?” Rex asks. Was the sainted boyfriend some kind of alien linguist too?

Jack looks at him like he’s an idiot. “Because he was Welsh? And Myfanwy is a Welsh name?”

Oh, God, the Welsh. Rex has had enough of Wales for several lifetimes, thank you; back when they declared independence, he felt like he was having war flashbacks every time he saw the name on the news. Their bridges with tolls, their intensely aggravating population, not to mention the high chances of getting shot at from a helicopter.

“I know that,” Rex lies scornfully. “I just didn’t know he had the sole pterodactyl-naming prerogative in Torchwood.”

He hasn’t even touched the pterodactyl thing, but why not? Why shouldn’t that pack of clowns have had a pet dinosaur? Stranger things have happened, mostly to him.

Jack laughs. “He definitely thought so.”

“He must have been something to put up with you,” Rex says.

It’s the wrong thing to say though, because instead of Jack taking it as an insult (which he honestly seems incapable of doing most of the time), he just sighs and says, quietly so Rex has to strain to hear him over the rest of the bar, “Yeah, he really was. They all were.”

And Rex knows Jack is probably thinking about ‘his’ Torchwood, Ianto and Gwen and all his other dead friends, but he’s thinking about his own. Vera and Esther and, yes, even Gwen, and her husband and her daughter, and everyone else too. Rex’s dad, and his old coworkers, Shapiro and Noah and maybe even Charlotte. All those people who are dead now, maybe because of him and maybe not, but that doesn’t change anything.

Rex knows everyone dies. Obviously. If he was mortal, everyone would still be dead, and there would still be nothing he could do about it. It feels different, though. It feels like it’s his fault, all of it, a burden on his shoulders that gets bigger every day, and the only thing he can do is remember everyone he’s lost, a longer and longer list.

Sometimes he thinks he’s going to go crazy with the weight of it.

“How can you stand it?” Rex says abruptly, surprising himself with the question.

Jack looks surprised too. “I’ve been doing this a lot longer than you have,” he says, and he’s almost gentle.

Rex scowls all the same. “That doesn’t answer my question.”

“We don’t have a choice but to stand it,” Jack says. He shrugs. “Simple as.”

“That’s depressing as hell,” Rex says.

“Cheers,” Jack says, and mimes lifting a glass.

After a moment, feeling like a tool the whole time, Rex lifts his own, still-full, glass and taps it against Jack’s imaginary one. ‘Cheers,” he says. Cheers to the fact that they can’t kill themselves so their only other option is to suffer through life forever.

Well, it’s nothing he hasn’t thought about before.

“You know, I’m glad I ran into you,” Jack says, changing the subject with no subtlety whatsoever. Rex would expect nothing less. “I was just wondering the other day—well, it might have been last year, but same difference—what you were up to.”

Oh great. At least they’re out of the reminiscing portion of the evening, but the interrogation about his personal life part is hardly any better.

“Pretty much nothing,” Rex says. “Surviving. What else?”

After he died and came back to life—the second time—he tried to pretend everything was the same, or as close as he could manage. He kept working for the CIA, trying to make some kind of difference, trying to find the remnants of the Three Families and stop them, but eventually he looked around and realized he wasn’t achieving anything. Just going through the motions of the life he had and had lost the second the Miracle happened.

With that sobering epiphany under his belt, Rex spent a lot of time wandering. Across Earth at first, then into space, then nowhere in particular. Trying to figure out who he was and what he wanted, and coming up with nothing much.

So basically two centuries of reliving his early twenties.

“And you’re . . .” Rex says, trying to head off more questions about his non-existent personal life at the pass, “hold on, let me guess. Hunting down alien fugitives trying to turn the Earth into jet fuel and sell it off to the highest bidder?”

He’s deliberately being outlandish, but Jack just shrugs.

“Nah, been there, done that,” he says. “Twice, actually. Three times if you count the thing with the rabbits—”

Somehow, despite the whole immortality thing, Rex still gets headaches. He can feel one approaching now at top speeds.

“—but no, right now I’m more in the resource management business,” Jack continues. “In a few weeks, there’s going to be an archeological dig on Dorva Prime, and they’re going to discover a mineral that might revolutionize space travel. Or destroy it, if it gets into the wrong hands.”

He doesn’t explain how he knows that. By now, Rex has learned better than to ask.

“Good luck,” Rex says sourly. Unfortunately, he means it, because instead of getting pissed off by Jack he’s now starting to feel (slightly) jealous.

It’s not that he necessarily wants to go to an archeological dig on some distant planet, or get embroiled in a resource war, but—

Well, maybe he does want that, just a little. Maybe he does want something more than bumming around space stations that all look exactly the same and speaking to no one and going to gay bars without even having the nerve to say anything about it out loud.

Is he having another epiphany about the way his life has been going?

And God help him, it was caused by Jack, who can never, ever know. If Rex thought he was insufferable before—

“There’s always room for one more,” Jack says.

God damnit, Rex thinks.

He makes himself laugh and says, “If I ever want a job, I know who not to call.”

Jack smirks. “I don’t know, I seem to remember having some fun.”

“You have a very bad memory, then,” Rex says. “Let’s see, we got betrayed, shot at, poisoned—”

“‘We’ got poisoned? Remind me again, which one of us had to get injected with formaldehyde?”

“Yeah, but I had to take two back-to-back seven-hour flights sitting next to you, so I’m pretty sure I had it worse.”

Great, now he’s the one reminiscing. About really shitty stuff, sure, but that still counts. He feels like a crotchety old man telling his grandkids that back in his day, he had to walk uphill to school, in the snow, both ways.

Jack snorts. “Hey, I’m good company. Ask anyone.”

“Truer words were never spoken,” Rex says. “Though not ones that make me feel good about the average person’s standards.”

“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.”

Rex rolls his eyes. Jack flirts with everyone, always. He can mostly tune it out (by which he means he seethes internally but manages to keep his mouth shut), but then when Jack starts flirting with him, he loses all his self-control.

He can’t even say what it is about it that bothers him so much.

Okay, okay, that’s not entirely accurate. Back during the Miracle, there were plenty of things that bothered him.

It bothered him that Jack never seemed capable of being serious, always making jokes and acting like a horny teenager even when lives were at stake. And yes, it bothered him that Jack kept targeting him, kept making him the butt of the joke, kept poking at him like he could see that thing inside Rex that he’d managed to hide until then, trying to drag it into the light.

But that was then, and this is now. He should be over this, or at the very least have the emotional maturity to take the high ground.

Well, no one’s ever accused him of being emotionally mature before.

Rex opens his mouth to make some sarcastic retort, and actually manages to say it before he has yet another, even more unwelcome, epiphany.

“No offense but I’d rather die,” he says. “Oh, wait!”

Then Rex thinks, the thought bubbling up unwelcome and out of nowhere, that maybe the reason he hates Jack’s flirting so much is because, somehow, he actually does want to sleep with him.

No way. Bullshit. And yet . . .

And yet, now that the thought’s out there he can’t shake it.

What would happen if Rex finally took Jack up on his offer?

If he really means it, of course, but Jack’s never been too discerning. If he says he wants something, he wants it.

So.

Obviously it would be incredibly embarrassing. Rex would never be able to show his face around Jack ever again; forget accidentally making eye contact in bars, it would all be throwing himself out of windows from here on out.

On the other hand, Rex might need to relax about some things. Esther once told him he’d give himself an aneurysm before he was forty, always worried about what other people thought of him. Sure, he’d hidden it well, behind bravado and callousness and just being damn good at his job, but most of that was deliberate. A mask he wore to make sure no one ever saw his doubts, his failures, his past.

Now, well. Jack already knows about most of that, already saw his worst failures. How much worse can it get, really?

Rex looks at Jack, going on about some time he had sex in a funeral home or something (Rex isn’t listening, and he’s pretty sure Jack isn’t either, the words just coming out on autopilot to fill the silence). He thinks about what will happen if he doesn’t do anything, if he makes his excuses and goes back to his room and doesn’t see anyone he knows for another two hundred years.

Yeah. Fuck that.

“I’m not going fossil-hunting with you,” Rex says, interrupting another pointless anecdote.

Jack laughs. “Hey, I never thought you would. Unless that’s meant to be some crack about my age, in which case I should tell you that you’re really not that much younger than I am. If you don’t count the thousand years buried under Cardiff.”

Rex sure as hell isn’t touching that with a ten-foot pole, so he barrels onwards. “I’m not going to your archeological dig, but if you’ve got room wherever you’re staying . . .”

He trails off. More than one lifetime of casual hookups under his belt and he honestly can’t force himself to say the words.

Jack blinks, then looks downright delighted. “Rexy baby, all you had to do was ask.”

“If you call me that again, I’m killing us both.”

“Hey, I like a man who can drive a hard bargain. Though I hope that’s not the only hard thing you can drive—”

Jesus, Rex might actually be an idiot. Somehow that horrible line still hasn’t deterred him.

“Shut up for a couple minutes, and let’s see what happens.”