| Date: 10 January 2008
Characters: Jack Harkness, Methos Location: hotel hallway, hotel room Link to IJ: thread #29661 |
 He got up in the middle of the night because he had to piss.
He walked out of his bedroom, opened his bathroom door, stepped in and stepped out into a god damn hallway, with the ugliest fucking carpet he had ever seen, and not a toilet in sight. At least he was dressed, right down to his great-coat and boots. Handy thing, being paranoid as shit. "What the fuck is going on here, and who the hell is responsible for it?" he asked no one in particular. |
 "I'd asked that myself, and haven't gotten a suitable answer yet."
Methos had just opened the door of the room he'd appropriated as his own, ready for a shower, and hoping the door would open back up on his hotel room in Bucharest. Not that he'd had any luck in that department in the last week. He looked at the man a moment, before adding, "From what I can tell, you're stuck here until random chance takes you back home." |
| Jack slipped his hands in his pockets and pulled his coat closer around him. "Oh, yeah? That's just fantastic. Who are you?" |
| "Adam, and who are you?" Methos shot back, turning slightly so that he presented the smallest target possible, and so that his right arm would clear the doorframe if he needed to strike or block. Habit deeply ingrained into muscle memory. |
| "Jack," he answered, his hands still in his pockets. "Do you have a bathroom in there?"
Well. He had gotten up to pee. |
| Methos sighed, waving a hand towards the room. "Along with the shower I intended to use. It is a hotel room."
Even if it wasn't the hotel room he really would prefer to have woken up in, being still without a sword. Or any other decent bladed weapon, though at least he'd been able to trim himself a half-way decent stave off one of the trees outside. |
| "Was either a hotel or a whore-house, and you don't look like the 'for rent' type," he said, and slipped past Methos and into the room, coat pulled even tighter around him as he passed and headed straight for the bathroom. |
| "Not recently," Methos muttered, closing the door behind him, and heading for the wardrobe, shedding the duster he'd found in one of the shops, and hanging it carefully up on the hook inside the door. He shed the rest of his clothing into a pile before grabbing the robe he'd initially found the first day here.
He was turning the name over in his mind while he did so, and when he spoke, his voice was deliberately casual. "It wouldn't be Jack Harkness, would it?" He hadn't been trying to run into Jack while he was here, and somehow he didn't think this was the Jack the Doctor had been talking about, but... He shrugged. If it was a Jack Harkness, that was about all that mattered. It would mean he kept his word, after all. After a fashion. |
| He stopped at the bathroom door when he heard the man mutter and looked back over his shoulder. "The past is a funny thing. It either matters a lot, or doesn't count for fuck."
He turned the rest of the way around, and his eyebrow went up, as he thought about the rest of that. "Yeah, it would be. Why?" he asked, very directly, eyes on Adam and paying a lot more attention now than he had been. |
| "Said I'd talk to you if I ran into you. The Doctor seemed to be under the impression I could help." Methos shrugged, his expression bland. He had said he'd think about talking to Jack. Though it felt a damned lot like Mac talking him into something. |
| "Right. Give me two minutes," he said, and held up two fingers to illustrate the point. He opened the door to the bathroom, shut and closed it behind him. He wouldn't be long. He really wanted to hear what Methos was supposed to talk to him about. He just also really had to get that peeing thing out of the way. |
| "However long you need." Methos sighed, leaning against the wall next to the wardrobe.
This conversation was going to be akward, no matter how he looked at it. Always was, telling someone that he was Immortal, or just that Immortals existed. Though the whole not dying thing shouldn't be as hard to explain. It might actually be the dying part that was the hardest, with what the Doctor had told him. |
| He finished up and, before he came back out, washed and dried his hands, and put his coat back on before he came back out.
"All right," he said, side stepping to pick another wall to lean his shoulder again, using it to prop himself up, at enough of an angle to keep his coat falling around him. "What are you supposed to talk to me about, and for who?" He wasn't even rude, at least not deliberately. He was just really, really, blunt. |
| "Doctor asked me to talk to you after I told him I really didn't want to relive history, even if his damned TARDIS worked." Methos tilted his head back, looking at the ceiling, but not quite letting Jack get out of his line of sight. "I'm an Immortal."
He paused, gritting his teeth a moment. He really hated people who could make that carefully buried sense of compassion override his survival instinct at the moment. "The oldest Immortal, five thousand years old." |
| Jack's eyebrows were starting on their way up at the mention of the Doctor, a half dozen or so questions on the tip of his tongue about that, when Methos made his announcement.
"You're a what?" Not that he didn't know what immotal meant, but the An and almost audible capitalization sure as hell had his attention. As well as his eyebrows just about in his hairline. |
| "An Immortal. I can't die unless you cut off my head. Not quite as permanent as the Doctor gave the impression you are, but I'm still rather attatched to living." Methos glared at Jack a moment, his voice sarcastic and almost biting. He really didn't enjoy sharing secrets, but he liked repeating himself even less. |
| "It was the An that got me," Jack said. He wasn't snapping, but he was definitely sounding cranky. "It implies some plurality - and since you know you can die if your head's cut off, I'm going to go with assuming that's true."
He paused and put his hands in his pocket and head to the side, temple nearly brushing the wall. "Not as permanant as I am. Does that mean if you cut off my head I'll live?" he asked, incredulously. Honestly, he'd had long enough fo figure out he kept getting back up after things that should kill him. He didn't have answers yet, though, not by a long shot. |
| Methos shrugged. "I don't know. The Doctor certainly seemed to think you have forever, no dying." He pushed away from the wall, stepping closer to Jack.
"How long have you been immortal?" |
| Jack didn't move - didn't even change the angle he was leaning against the wall at - but there was a subtle shift in the way he was holding himself as Methos approached. Gathering himself to move quickly, if he needed to, awareness of the direction, and watchful eyes on Methos.
"Great, sounds like a party," He said, sarcastically. "About forty years. " |
| Methos narrowed his eyes as Jack shifted, ingrained responses shifting his own weight, ready for a fight if it was offered, to escape if he had the chance.
"It's not always a party, but there are decades that are better than others." He winced at the handful of decades Jack had been immortal. He was fairly certain that this wasn't the Jack the Doctor had asked him to talk to, now. "MacLeod would be better at this," he muttered. He'd never really been all that good with new Immortals. Just look at his track record - of all the ones he'd dealt with as newly-fledged Immortals, only one was still alive, and she hated him. "I won't tell you it gets any better, or any easier, but it changes. It always changes, humanity, mortals, change. Even Immortals change, or they go mad." |
| Jack responded to Methos' response by turning further in toward the wall - not putting his back to it, but coming closer to turning his back to Methos. It wasn't a normal protective response, and it wasn't much more than his weight shifting again, but it was driven by instinict.
"Who's MacLeod, why would he be better at it, and yeah, thanks. I'm working out the different thing. I'm not new to time changing things, at least. Even if I dont' usually live through it all." |
| Methos was thrown by Jack's turning away, rocking back on his heels a moment, confusion flashing across his face.
"There are times you wouldn't have wanted to live through." Methos frowned, narrowing his eyes. "And I'm not going to hurt you. You're about three millenia too late if you were expecting that." |
| Jack responded to Methos' remark about not hurting him by catching what he was doing, apparently becoming aware of it for the first time.
"I've travelled in time before. I hope like hell I do again," he said, as he pushed himself back to a more neutral position, though still with his shoulder against the wall. He put his hands in his pockets while he stood there, though. "If I run into you in the future, three thousand years ago, I'll stay out of your way. How do you know the Doctor? Which Doctor?" |
| "I watched Doctor Who, though it's been a while. He was on his seventh rengeration when I stopped watching." Methos shrugged. "Ran into a couple different versions of the same regeneration here. Gangly, makes me think of an over-caffinated ferret."
He studied Jack a moment. "And if you run into me three thousand years ago, don't just stay out of my way. Run. I wasn't alone, and the other three weren't any better." |
| "I'm not familiar with that one," he admitted. "But I'll keep my eyes open." Over caffeinated ferret did not even remotely sound like the Doctor he knew.
He didn't ask about the other regenerations and Doctor Who. He had a feeling it was something to do with alternate universes - and he was familiar enough with the concept. "Fortunately," he drawled as he realized. "It doesn't sound like you're from any universe that makes it likely for me to walk into you, anywhere." |
| "Good." Methos paused, running through the conversation in his mind a moment. Good enough to fit in his definition of having kept to what he told the Doctor he'd do. "Do you mind if I get my shower now? You can talk to the Doctor yourself if you want, he's out there somewhere." He waved a hand in the general direction of the rest of the hotel. |
| He nodded. "That sounds like a plan. Enjoy your shower and I'll see you around," he said, and then took two steps backwards, out of arms reach, before he turned around and let himself out. |