ALL THOSE YEARS IN THE SHADOWS

Fandom: Crossover - Rise of the Guardians / Doctor Who / Torchwood

Rating: Gen

Pairings: None

Relationships: None

Characters: Captain Jack Harkness, Pitch Black, Sanderson Mansnoozie

Story Summary: Two immortals observe a third.

Author's notes: An AU where Jack walked away from Victorian-era Torchwood and never got a hope spot..

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The ramshackle man coughed as he emerged from his nest of piled-up newspapers and scavenged cardboard under the rotting footbridge. He blinked in vexation at watery sunlight stabbing painfully into his rheumy eyes. He hitched one shoulder higher than the other as he straightened from a crouch to what passed for a standing position.

His sleeves felt looser today. His greatcoat was a necessary weight upon his bony shoulders and broken frame... with it, his movements were hampered; without it, there was not enough of *him* to keep body and soul together in a literal sense.

His mind was too raddled by alcohol to wend its way through metaphors. A few random thoughts did manage to emerge from the cerebral underbrush.

Maybe another blanket will fall from the sky.

Would a blanket come if he looked for it? Would it come when he wasn't looking?

Didn't other things fall from the sky? Wasn't there someONE who used to arrive out of the blue from the sky?

"Out of the blue", now that was a good one. He wanted to get into the blue, didn't he...

What?

He propelled himself away from the retaining wall onto the sidewalk, driven by a need for sustenance. His hands clutched at the air in front of him in spasmodic movements; in its transit, his left wrist passed briefly into his line of sight.

There was something on his wrist.

There was nothing on his wrist.
 

"Yes, that's right, you're going. You've been gone for ages. You're already gone. You're still here. You've just arrived. I haven't even met you yet. It all depends on who you are and how you look at it. Strange business, time. Think about me when you're living your life one day after another, all in a neat pattern. Think of the old traveller, with his days like crazy paving."

He scarcely noticed passersby on the pavement, since most shied away from him, gave him a wide berth or crossed the street to get clear of him entirely. His mind did fleetingly register that the air was very strange today; he would move between warm pockets of air and cold ones seemingly at random, and neither gave him a pleasant sensation.

Hunger was the enemy now, and to conquer it was now the only thing that moved his feet over the uneven rises and falls of concrete. The dumpster behind the restaurant called out to him... there would be something there for him.

And then back to his blanket, a thing that had come to him rather than something he had sought.

His endless days were unsought as well.

He wished he could remember seeking.

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After the fourth instance of each of them positioning themselves in front of the shambling drunkard and finding themselves walked through each time, the short golden figure raised small pawlike hands to the taller black-draped one in a silent gesture of defeat.

With a shake of the head the slender, lanky being murmured, "We don't register even as hallucinations. I could have sworn, with the number of aliens he's seen, that he'd see US."

They watched the doomed man shuffle away from them, the buttons on his greatcoat once as bright as the Sandman's eyes, the tarry stains at its hem as dark as the Boogeyman's robes.

The Captain's shadow was more handsome than he.