Jack In Camden (1970) [Jack/Withnail, rather long]

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

Story Title: Jack In Camden, 1970
Author Name/LJ: apiphile
Crossover Fandom: Withnail & I
Rating: PG-13/R (Slash)
Notes: Please don’t kill me.



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?"


There, er, there is more.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_bounce_/]

AHAHA! This is fantastic! Really, really fantastic. I'd never have even thought of doing a crossover with those two and you're doing an amazing job with it, too.

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I hope you feel the same way after the second part.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_bounce_/]

I do. I can't believe you did that to Withnail of all people but it's still very, very good.

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

If there's one thing I've learnt from my obsessive fangirling of that film, it's that Withnail was clearly *born* to suffer as a result of his own excesses. ;) I'm still trying to figure out who to have Captain Jack run into in the 1980s.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_bounce_/]

The 80's is hard. I'm sitting here pre-morning coffee and all I can come up with are The Young Ones, Fireman Sam and Turtles. And yeah.

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

Heh, I had My Beautiful Laundrette and The Young Ones, and so far the flist seems overwhelmingly in favour of the latter because it'd be funny and also stop me ranting about race for three weeks. ;)

[http://users.livejournal.com/_bounce_/]

I'm in favour of The Young Ones because I don't know My Beautiful Laundrette at all. Although I've just googled it and it would be very, very interesting to see that one, too.

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

I have just been attacked by an especially savage plotbunny, so it looks like being The Young Ones after all. Wish me luck ...

[http://users.livejournal.com/_bounce_/]

Good luck!

[damned-colonial.livejournal.com]

Arthur Daley (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minder_(TV_series))?

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

*CHOKE* Oh my god.

[damned-colonial.livejournal.com]

Don't tell me it wouldn't be perfect.

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

The kind of perfect that makes me have nightmares. :D

[damned-colonial.livejournal.com]

You scare me. It's not so much the Jack, or the Withnail, but the occasional hint that you're channelling the ghost of Douglas Adams.

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

I, er, sorry? :D

On a totally unrelated note, is that the Earl of Rochester in your icon?

[damned-colonial.livejournal.com]

Well, not as such. I used to have a Rochester icon that used a screencap from P&M, but then I redid all my icons in this style, and it just seemed appropriate that this chap should get to use Rochester's line.

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

He does *look* rather kinky for an illustration, it has to be said.