Captain Jack Harkness takes on the 1980s.
Feb. 24th, 2007 10:59 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
apiphile.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
vintagemilitaryStory Title: Jack Harkness in North London, 1980s (ish)
Author Name/LJ:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
apiphile
Crossover Fandom: The Young Ones
Rating: R (or PG-13, I can never work it out)
Notes: I posted a poll on LJ after the 1970 fic and people wanted this one. Writing it made my head hurt.
The nineteen eighties really were repugnant. Captain Jack Harkness had seen a lot of nasty places on a lot of nasty planets; he'd seen slavery, world wars, galaxy wars and the end of the world (twice), and he wasn't sure right now that anything could compare to the sheer unending misery of London in the eighties. It was impossible to avoid feeling despondent – the sky felt like it had closed in over the city and hung there like a grey dishcloth. Didn't matter what the weather was doing, the dishcloth feeling remained and while the lucky few with money pranced about in the ugliest automobiles ever made the rest of the country got more and more depressed. It was infectious.
In attempt to cure himself of the rotten malaise – it wasn't like him to be morose, after all – he'd tried moving back to Cardiff, maybe to hang around the Time Rift in the desperate hope of getting flung far enough forwards that there'd be interplanetary travel at long last and he could actually start searching in some meaningful way again. Cardiff, he quickly discovered, was worse.
History training had never given him the full scope of just how bloody miserable it all was, Jack thought as he mooched along under the railway arches with no real aim in mind. Or maybe it had, but he and everyone else had been distracted by flashy things like massacres and coups and the precise moment when human society finally evolved beyond the oppressive stupidity it was currently floundering in. To make things worse, there had been bugger all in the way of assignments to carry out in the last year.
No suspicious activity involving young ladies with baseball bats (which he'd arrived too late to get a straight story on, and been left with the sinking, churning feeling that he'd missed something important by the skin of his teeth). No hysterical reports of robots in the streets of Southwark. Even the deranged drunks had been quiet and limited their conspiracy theories to the government putting poison in the paint, which had the added unpleasantness of being perfectly true.
His musings had driven him up from the more habitable parts of London, such as they were, and into territory that had the pervasive stink of students about it. Jack turned up the collar of his coat and trudged on up the street with more purpose. He was considering, in some half-arsed fashion, emigrating to the States and again and never mind the Time Rift or anything else, not for this decade, when a girl in a ballgown flounced out of a house two doors up and shouted back to some unseen figure in the doorway, "I should have known you didn't really know Suggs, you lying, lying … student!"
Jack peered into the doorway as he passed. A diminutive man – not quite short enough to constitute a midget but definitely enough of a half-pint to qualify for a Napoleon Complex – in impossibly trendy sunglasses beamed after the departing girl with an air of complete unconcern.
"Alright, in hindsight they don't really look like Madness," he said, apparently addressing Jack, "but that's no reason to assume I don't know Suggs."
Jack blinked. Even if he'd been born yesterday and not, by his own reckoning, either a few thousand years into the future or about a hundred years ago in his own personal timeline, he'd still have been able to recognise a fellow con artist. It was the easy, cheesy grin that screamed "TRUST ME" a little too loudly, the excessive sense of relaxation exuded by this funny-looking little man that tipped him off.
And the sunglasses.
"You going to stand there forever?" the short man asked, now definitely addressing Jack, "Or are you coming in to see the room?"
Jack slipped through where the gate ought to have been and hopped gracefully over a binliner that smelled like decomposing body parts, coming to a halt at the foot of the steps and giving the guy – two steps up and still shorter than Jack – his biggest, widest, most untrustworthy bastard smile. "Hi," he said, offering his hand, "I'm Jack Harkness." No point in tacking on the "Captain" this time, and scaring everyone with the assumed stench of authority. Not at this point in history.
"I'm Mike," said Mike, not shaking his hand. "And this is your lucky day. We were just forced to remove the previous tenant of your room for non-payment of rent. And onna account of him being past caring, if you know what I mean." He tapped his nose conspiratorially, and led Jack over a mound of unpaid bills on the doormat. The plaster on the walls was crumbling and in places had fallen through to expose red brick and the whole place smelt of mould. "Don't," Mike advised, starting up the stairs – several of the banisters were missing and one had been replaced with a bicycle pump – "look down."
Something sucked at Jack's boot as he followed the shady little man.
As they rounded onto the first landing, a crash with hints of explosion emanated from what Jack could only assume was the living room, and voices raised in anger drifted through the floorboards.
"Well, actually, Rik, I didn't turn the heating off, you just didn't pay the gas bill –"
" – we give you the money so you can deal with that, hippy! –"
"Actually you don't give me any money, that's why the gas was cut off –"
"OW! Vyvyan! It was him who didn't pay the gas bill, not me!"
"Shut up, girlpants, you were closer."
Mike didn't see fit to explain this, just turned onto the next flight of stairs (which groaned ominously as Jack mounted them and seemed to have been de-carpeted in a hurry, judging from the bits of green fluff still adhering to the tacks that rose like teeth at the edge of each stair) and beamed at Jack again. "Since as you have heard we are currently experiencing some difficulties with our gas supplier," he said, not even having the decency to look embarrassed, "we require utilities payments in advance."
Jack wondered when would be a good time to tell this bizarre little man that he already had perfectly good accommodation above a laundrette in South London, and that apart from the race riots he was quite happy there. Mike was unlocking a suspiciously narrow door now, one which didn't look like it could lead anywhere promising at all.
"That's a closet," Jack said flatly.
"Nonsense," Mike said with an ingratiating smile. "It's a luxurious bedroom suitable for the gentleman about town."
"It's a fucking airing closet," Jack repeated, feeling his temper rising. "There are towels in it. And, for some reason, a medical skeleton's arm."
"Change of plan," Mike said without skipping a beat. He leaned back down into the stairwell and shouted loudly enough to make the house shake. "NEIL! NEIL!"
Footsteps clattered up the stairs and a long head of hair hove into view, attached to the most dour, depressed-looking face Jack had seen in about thirty years. It addressed Mike in a petulant whine. "What is it? I've got to finish cleaning the oven which is going to take even longer now because Vyvyan was using it to dry out his trousers and they caught fire –"
"From now on," Mike said, slapping Neil on the shoulder in a companionable manner, "You're sleeping in the airing closet."
"Hey, that's not fair –"
"Ah," Mike said in a warning tone. "We've been through this before, Neil. I can't give up my room because it's against my religion –"
"I don't think 'Chance To Score With Girls' is a religion, Mike, I checked at the library and they said –"
"Do you want the gas bill paid or not?" Mike asked, his fox-like smile never leaving his face. "This gentleman here is paying for a room in our house, and he's not paying to sleep in an airing closet, is he? Now get your things and scrape the lentils off the ceiling, there's a good boy."
"I already have –" Jack began. He checked himself. So far there had been no reports of rioting in this area of London, and Mike looked like the kind of guy who had his finger on the pulse of absolutely everything within a five mile radius. If anything unusual, anything symptomatic of a hiccupping Time Rift or invasion, occurred in London, there was a better chance of spotting it here than somewhere the streets were alive every night with police cars and screams. Besides, Jack had slept in some absolute holes in his time. How much worse could this be?
He discovered exactly how much worse it could be a few hours later, arriving as night fell with the last of his meagre belongings from the South London flat. Ignoring the ongoing commotion downstairs, Jack hopped up the stairs and tried to shoulder his new bedroom door open.
It was locked.
Jack put down the cardboard box and folded his arms as Mike hove forth from the shadows, tailed by a frankly enormous black man wearing a cheap costume "Security" shirt.
"Where's the key?"
"Insurance and all that," Mike said with another of his ingratiating grins. He had changed clothes since Jack left, and was wearing a pair of the most horrible tartan golf trousers imaginable. "To make sure nothing happens to your room, like the bed falling out of the window or anything."
Jack stuck his hands in his pockets, his coat rucking up at the sides, and gave Mike an I Am The Commanding Officer And You Will Not Pull This Shit With Me special. Mike's sunglasses gave him absolutely no indication that the man had even been looking at him. He sighed. "How much?"
"Five quid down payment ensures the integrity of your bed and sheets and for an extra fifty pence you get to keep your pillow as well," Mike said hoarsely, with a smile that surpassed ingratiating and mounted "Shit-eating" with ease. "You also get a stylish carriage clock with inbuilt wake-up call worth fourteen-ninety-nine absolutely free. Maurice!" Mike indicated the enormous man in the security shirt.
Maurice produced a white plastic alarm clock with the batteries conspicuously missing and proffered it to Jack.
"I am living in someone else's nightmare," Jack said under his breath, but he produced the five pound note all the same and handed it to Mike, watching as this amateur gangster secreted it about his person with the skill of a stage magician. "I think I'll pass on the carriage clock," he added to Maurice, who looked at Mike.
Mike shrugged and handed Jack a key. "Don't turn it anti-clockwise," he said rather ominously, and clattered down the stairs, Maurice in tow.
One of the more obvious personality defects Jack Harkness was actually willing to own up to having, and occasionally to brag about, was that he was needlessly contrary. He'd call it "endlessly curious" under these circumstances, but until he met a very particular man in a leather jacket with prodigious ears he'd been given to ignoring and contravening orders on a whim.
He turned the key anti-clockwise, expecting nothing more than a horrible grating noise in the lock, but instead the door swung open.
The scene beyond was very definitely not the bedroom he'd glimpsed and been disappointed by earlier, and was in fact a fairly good replica of a pre-Revolutionary French drawing room, peopled with two young ladies in sizeable dresses and gigantic wigs. One of them waved a fan coquettishly at him and said something along the lines of "j'aime un homme dans le uniforme," with a giggle before the footman slammed the door in Jack's face.
Time Rift! Jack thought with a certain sense of wildness; the ability of the young ladies to interact with him made it certain they weren't merely ghosts. Sure, it had gone back this time, but there was no telling what would happen if he opened the door again. There was even a slim chance he'd make it to the right century to get Someone's attention. He started forward eagerly, key in hand.
Jack slipped the slim piece of off-yellow metal into the lock and turned it anti-clockwise, his hands trembling minutely with excitement.
Nothing. The door refused to budge.
He swore quietly and tried again, the cardboard box of his few possessions pushing forgotten against his shins.
Nothing.
"Um, Jack," the hippy said in a worried voice directly behind him, "the lock goes the other way."
Jack turned his head in time to see the man's hangdog expression turn away from him and start up the next flight of stairs to the airing closet and felt a brief pang of guilt. He hadn't thought Mike was actually serious about forcing anyone to sleep in such a cramped space.
The door yielded immediately to the clockwise turn of the lock and to his disappointment revealed nothing more than a barren bedroom with the faint remnants of lentils on the ceiling and a red astrological chart half-finished on the opposite wall. The window was jammed open, and the bed splayed across the centre of the room.
Jack rather got the impression that the bed had already been thrown out of the window once.
The impression was somewhat compounded by chips of paint on the sheets.
Jack sighed and shoved his cardboard box under the bed with the side of his foot. This was already beginning to seem like a bad idea; if not for the brief flash of strangeness in the corridor that convinced him if there was anywhere in London that he truly needed to be, it was here.
An argument appeared to have sprung up in the corridor outside. Jack put his ear to the door tentatively; as far as he could work out there was a little restructuring of the house hierarchy taking place. Neil was complaining that the airing closet wasn't big enough for him and that his hair had been singed, and a horrifically nasal whine was informing him that it was his own fault for being a bloody hippy and never cutting his stupid girly hair in the first place.
"And you can't have my room, it's out of the question! Where would I sleep?"
Jack leaned away from the door. The voice currently speaking was quite capable of penetrating the wood and probably of shattering glass without any assistance from him.
"With Vyvyan?" the nasal voice went on, rising in scandalised pitch. Jack put his finger in his ear and winced. There was an incredulous snort that a wild boar would have been proud of, and the whining voice continued, "I don't bloody think so, Neil! Last time I went in his room he tried to use me for a medical experiment!"
"I suppose I'll just sleep in the living room with the rats then," Neil sighed, and as if in response an aggressive squeaking set up in the walls.
The whiny voice on the other side of the door continued talking, apparently to itself, as Neil's equally penetrating moan was now rising up through the thin floorboards. Jack fought the urge to climb out of the window with his meagre belongings and tell Nasser there had been a terrible mistake and that of course he'd continue letting the flat, Molotov cocktails in the street or not.
Something smashed just outside Jack's bedroom door and there was a roar of, "SHUT UP, YOU WET, GIRLY PRAT!"
Jack took stock of his surroundings as best he could without actually poking his head into the corridor and having it kicked or his coat stolen. The room itself was uninspiringly bare beyond the bedstead (with an anorexic mattress that a prison would have been ashamed of) and a blocked-up fireplace. He guessed the landlord was absentee or at the very least deranged, if he was prepared to let the building out to such obnoxiously destructive people – the astrological chart on the wall bore witness to that, even without the constant stream of bangs, crashes, and splintering noises.
And his new housemates? A con artist who had shown himself capable of running rings around Jack by virtue of being breath-takingly weird, a perma-depressed hippy who seemed content to be a doormat, what sounded suspiciously like a spoilt five-year-old and one unknown quantity with an impressive set of lungs.
Silence settled over the unstable household like a blanket, and Jack decided to risk going downstairs and introducing himself properly to the people who were enduring each other's company in this dump.
When Jack got downstairs the hippy was sweeping ineffectively at a mound of rumble with a broom that had seen not only better days but better decades too, and the owner of the whiny voice was shouting at the front door; presumably at whoever had slammed it as Jack was coming down the stairs.
The owner of the whiny voice … Jack squinted from his vantage point on the bottom stair … looked like he belonged with his voice. He had possibly the stupidest haircut Jack had ever seen (and he'd seen the abominations people were sporting back in 2115, the weirdest year for fashion before cosmetic amputation got really big), he was wearing clothes that wouldn't look out of place as a children's TV presenter, if the presenter in question had been reading too much Hamlet, and he had a rather impressive collection of spots.
Yuck, Jack thought, as the self-important rant ground to a halt and his new housemate turned on his heel with his nose in the air.
"Hello, I'm Rik."
Jack wasn't sure it was possible for someone to swing from obnoxious to obsequious in such a short space of time and yet here it was.
"Jack – Jack Harkness –" he stuck out his hand and stepped down onto the level with what he couldn't help thinking of as a tall streak of pseudo-revolutionary piss. Unfortunately Rik didn’t seem bent on dissuading him of this judgement, shaking Jack's hand with a kind of damp fervour and staring at him in a manner that … well, if the handshake was damp the look was positively soggy. Jack sighed.
"Never mind Vyvyan," Rik said, still shaking Jack's hand and contriving to sound even more like a weasel. He had contorted his face into something that looked like one of Mike's smiles had bred with a gumless leer. Jack restrained himself from whipping his hand out of the increasingly cloying grip of this lunatic and began to fantasise about punching him in the face instead. Not the best start to his new tenancy. "He's just in high spirits, we are all here, we're just so crazy and wacky and out there and different," Rik went on, his apparently endless handshake punctuated only by a few snorting, affected laughs.
Would anyone really mind if I punched him? Jack thought desperately.
"Not that we do drugs or anything like that, or I don't anyway but Neil does because he's a shameless hippy and he doesn't realise that all those free love days are behind us and he's living in the past -"
Jack tried to telegraph some wordless plea for help as Neil passed them with a dustpan brush, but the hippy ignored both of them with an air that might have been wounded dignity or might have been wilful deafness.
" – anyway I'm Rik, oh gosh I said that already, didn't I, and obviously I'm the coolest person in this house, apart from Mike, obviously, because – "
It never ends, Jack thought, feeling his eyes starting to glaze over and his smile solidify. It is the run-on sentence that never, ever ends.
" – and actually it's quite difficult to start a socialist revolution when you're living with complete bastards like Neil who think stupid things like washing-up liquid are more important than three million on the dole –"
"Rik," Jack said, putting his hand on the kid's shoulder and trying not to make a face at the amount of dandruff that adhered itself to his palm, "Rik –"
" – because poetry is the best way to reach the masses and – yes?"
"Could you let go of my hand, please?" Jack patted Rik once or twice on the shoulder for emphasis and struggled his most charming expression on. This turned out to be a mistake.
Rik all but swooned like a schoolgirl and said something like "anything you say Jack". He did release Jack's hand, thank everything, but his dewy-eyed look of sincere admiration wasn't much of an improvement.
Nor was the way he followed Jack into the kitchen so closely that he seemed to be glued to Jack's hip.
Rik stayed glued to Jack like a particularly persistent growth as he looked around the kitchen and noted with dismay that the cupboards had about two inches of mould growing on the outside. He continued to shadow Jack as Jack investigated the mount of unbagged lentils sitting on the kitchen surface and looking belligerent as lentils can. Jack became vaguely aware of some urgent rambling about poetry as he opened the fridge and took a step backwards from the pungent smell of rotting milk, milk which had bypassed the "cheese" option and gone straight for the "evolve into a new lifeform" package, but he thought nothing of it. Rik's irritating nasal whine had already become merely barely-tolerable background noise.
Until he started reciting poetry.
There was a time and a place for poetry, in Jack's opinion. While trying to impress a particularly difficult-to-please young lady who just happened to have the information one needed to break into a specific safe, for example. In the kitchen, in the 1980s, while he was trying to determine whether the carrot in the fridge had moved or whether he was hallucinating as a result of the smell was not it. Also, this was about as far removed from poetry as Jack was aware human speech could get. He'd listened to Dadaist verse which was less appalling.
"but they are not yellow.
At least you have two lips
And not three - ."
Jack's fist flew out of its own accord - apparently his self-preservation instincts were as strong as ever – and caught the callow youth on the point of his greasy chin. Rik went down like a Betulgesian whore, fast and firmly, and lay in an unappealing starfish of unwashed black clothing and unconscious "poet".
"Shit," Jack said, looking at his fist as though he'd never seen it before. The thought of knocking the kid's lights out had admittedly been circulating in his mind almost since the moment the annoying creature opened his mouth, but he'd thought he had better self-control than that.
A memory a decade-old flashed through Jack's mind and he hastily corrected – he usually had better self-control than that.
"I am so unbelieveably sorry –" Jack began, addressing the other inhabitants of the kitchen, but Neil merely moved off into the garden and Mike waved his hand dismissively without even looking at him.
"It's quite alright, although you're going to need to pay a small Punching Your Housemate tax at the end of the month – one pound fifty for every time you knock him unconscious," Mike carried on leafing through The Sun with little interest. "Personally I prefer to employ Vyvyan to do the honours when it comes to knocking Rik unconscious." He turned a page and studied the newsprint with apparent concentration, and pulled a biro out of his sleeve. "As Mr. Basterd's right hook is more suited to Rik's delicate complexion, if you know what I mean."
Jack didn't, and was quite certain he didn't want to know either. "Basterd?"
"With an 'e'," Mike confirmed. "Sometimes, anyway." He looked up from the newspaper and added, "there's a Loitering In The Kitchen charge, by the way."
"You're all nuts," Jack said, waving a shaking index finger around the kitchen as Neil returned from the garden.
"Oh thanks, just insult me when I haven't even done anything yet –"
"NUTS." Jack repeated, and fled up the stairs as though he was wearing rockets on his boots.
There were times when you woke up, and the TARDIS was whirring quietly to herself and you were heading towards some fantastic place and the Doctor and Rose were playing table tennis and you thought to yourself: I was born to do this. And then, Jack reflected as some of the ceiling plaster fell in and Rik's hypernasal whine began troubling his eardrum in an entirely novel fashion - there were times when you found yourself stuck in the most disgusting house in all history with four completely insane students (three provably insane and one who'd have to be nuts to live with them, even if she hadn't shown her face yet), where vegetables talked to each other and bands had gigs in the living room, and the sad truth was he was probably born to do that, too.
Jack hid in his room all night, ignoring the increasing growls from his stomach and the bewildering conversations from downstairs, slipped into a dream for about an hour and woke up to hear Rik and Neil still wrangling with each other. His watch said it was only eleven, but it felt like it was four in the morning after a particularly long day.
Rik's voice travelled through the floorboards like a knife through jelly. " – because I read that contract pretty carefully, Mike, and I don't remember there being anything about a Being Punched By Your Housemate Tax – "
"Rik, Rik, Rik – Rik, Rik, my old fellow, I'll be honest with you. There has been a slight change to the constitution of the household but as you know change is necessary for progress, and where would we be in this fine nation without progress?"
"I think you're a liar! I bet you just made up this stupid tax so you could have two quid to buy some dirty girlie mags, didn't you?"
"Uncanny!"
"Well I'm not going to submit to your fascist –"
"Oh, Rik. I'm afraid you leave me no choice. Vyvyan? 'It 'im."
Jack pulled the lumpy pillow over his head. He hadn't even bothered to take his coat off when he fell onto the bed and now he couldn’t work out if he was too hot, too cold, or simply feeling crappy because he'd slept in his clothes.
Eventually the crashing and whining downstairs subsided and a little later footsteps sounded on the stairs. Jack groaned into the underside of the pillows. first thing tomorrow, he promised himself. As soon as it was a reasonable hour he'd go back to Lewisham and tell Nasser he'd changed his mind. He was wrapping himself up in this comforting thought and the motheaten blanket and preparing to sleep when, contrary to any expectations he'd had for the rest of the night, the door exploded inwards in a shower of kindling and chipboard.
"What the –" Jack was on his feet and groping for his long-absent sonic blaster before the dust had begun to settle.
In the gap where the remains of his bedroom door hung, shards of wood dangling precariously, a bewildered face was regarding Jack with a kind of moronic intensity. "You're not Neil."
"What the hell did you do that for?"
"Who're you?" the face gave him a look that might have constituted a glare had it not lacked the appropriate malice behind the eyes. This red-headed ape with his scabbed knuckles and his apparently pierced forehead didn't seem to have the focus required to glare at anyone. Jack had seen some low-rent punks on his travels, usually ones still living with their parents who took the safety pins out of their noses for Sunday lunch – he'd never really seen someone looking so hapless and so simultaneously punk.
"Why did you kick down my door?" Jack asked, staring the kid down. So he didn't have a single useful weapon on him at the moment, and the nearest one still needed loading, but he wasn't about to be intimidated by six and a bit feet of apparently brain-dead student.
"IT WAS SHUT," the punk barked with an empty grin, as though this was the most obvious answer imaginable, and as though Jack was an absolute imbecile for having asked it.
"You … bastard," Jack snapped. Somewhere in the back of his mind he was a little disappointed that the fourth and final housemate wasn't some reasonably attractive posh girl with a personality problem and he silently the cursed the fool who decided that "Vyvyan" was a good name for an empty-headed lout with no apparent sense of style, personal hygiene, or anything approaching good manners.
Just how few manners Vyvyan was in possession of was heavily underlined when, instead of going to shake hands or getting the hell out of Jack's room and letting him sleep, the greasy youth lunged with the apparent intention of headbutting Jack on the point of his chin.
Jack dived sideways, flung his arms out and caught the idiot's surprisingly slender neck in a lock. There was a moment of uncertainty, where Jack wondered if he was actually going to have to throttle Vyvyan until he passed out and then struggle with his conscience over whether or not he could get away with throwing the moron out of the bedroom window, and Vyvyan bucked like a rodeo horse.
"I was only testing," Vyvyan said at last in quite a muffled voice, and Jack released him.
"Sure you were."
Vyvyan's face gradually cooled down from Almost Unconscious Puce to a healthy pink that looked a good deal better than the Things That Live Under Rocks tan he'd been sporting when he broke in, and he shoved his hands into his jeans pockets. How he managed this when said jeans were tight enough for Jack to take a decent guess at his religion was a mystery, but there he was, hands crammed uncomfortably in his pockets, rocking on the soles of his Doc Martens and looking suddenly bashful.
"So," Vyvyan said with an air of unconcern that didn't mesh with the way he was inspecting the toes of his Docs at all, "fancy a shag, then?"
"Yeah, sure," Jack said absently, then, "Wait, what?"
"Aaahh," Vyvyan said in the same tone as a child who believes he's just tripped his parent on some minor point. "Too late now, you can't take it back."
"Vyvyan," Jack began, and stopped. He closed one eye and tried to imagine what the guy would look like in a couple of decades. Vyvyan regarded him as though he was a new TV program – slack-jawed fascination but with the sense that this had better bloody be good or the TV was getting a claw hammer through the screen soon.
"Wot?"
"Vyvyan Basterd?"
"That's me."
"Basterd with an 'e'?" Jack pressed, sinking onto the greasy mattress and looking up at Vyvyan's pimply visage and out-sized piercings.
Vyvyan appeared to consider this for a while. "Er. Probably?"
No, Jack thought. This can't be him.
"Wot?" Vyvyan demanded, lurking in the remains of the door like a bad smell. "I'm gunna go and wash my knob."
"How considerate," Jack muttered, his mind on other matters.
"Don't," Vyvyan admonished, leaning back in through the wreckage of the door and pointing a stern finger with a very grubby fingernail on the end of it at Jack's head, "go anywhere."
"Right."
Dr Vvyvan Basterd, Jack thought, and opened his eyes. Spotty nineteen-year-old punk. He squinted. Dr Vyvyan Basterd's important work hadn't been even begun until he turned sixty; given the choice he'd have preferred to keep his star-fucking relevant and done the guy shortly after his Nobel Prize, colostomy bag and all.
On the other hand, he'd said yes, and Vyvyan was stomping slope-shouldered to the bathroom to, as he put it, "wash my knob".
Jack put his head in his hands and contemplating the logistical headache of getting his boots off while still reeling from the idea of fucking one of the greatest medical minds of the 21st century in an unwholesome student house. Still, it wasn't the 21st century yet. There was nothing particularly awe-inspiring about the young Vyvyan Basterd, apart from his ability to impersonate a complete moron and the way he managed to menace while not even actually in the room.
"- of my way, girlpants."
"Ow, Vyvyan, that was my nose! I wasn't doing anything, I was just - "
Very slowly, keeping his eyes fixed on the shattered skeleton of the flimsy door, Jack began to unlace his boots. Footsteps on the stairs, heading down in some hurry, and footsteps crossing back across the landing – he kicked off the left boot, and then the right, just as Vyvyan poked his head through the hole in the door, squinted, and said in a wounded voice, "You've still got your clothes on."
Fuck it, Jack thought. Aloud, he said, "I was hoping you'd undress me yourself," and it came out sounding rather husky.
"Oh, right," Vyvyan said with cheerful emptiness, and he clambered through the hole with all the grace and delicacy of a wrecking ball. "Er," he added, peering at Jack in the dim light. He hit the light-switch and the wretched little room was flooded with painfully bright light.
Jack was overwhelmed by a sense of being exposed; there were no curtains on the window, there was no way of shutting the door so that it actually barred the doorway, and Vyvyan was giving him the New TV Program look again, with added confusion. There was a streak of what he could only assume was Rik's blood on Vyvyan's forearm too.
Vyvyan's approach was hesitant. There was no other word for it, and a thought flashed through Jack's weary brain: dear gods, if you exist, please don't let him be a virgin. He was hardly in the mood for a deflowering; and then the kid was on him, all eager, shaking hands and wide tongue and teeth.
So he's a lousy kisser, Jack thought, I can work with that. His teeth smacked against Vyvyan's twice before a compromised was reached, and Jack melted backwards like the heroine of some trashy novel and let Vyvyan do whatever it was he thought he was doing with his tongue.
It turned out that what Vyvyan thought he was doing with his tongue was working better than Jack had realised, something he only discovered when the punk kid stuck his hand up Jack's shirt and Jack's mouth made a distinctly slutty-sounding noise that escaped out of the corner of their sloppy snogging.
Somewhere among the ridiculous noises and embarrassing phrases falling out of his mouth Jack had struggled out of his clothes with enthusiastic and frequently unhelpful assistance from Vyvyan, who managed to tear Jack's shirt and to do something so pleasant to his nipples that Jack really failed to mind the destruction of his favourite (and antique) shirt.
Every now and then Vyvyan seemed to lose the thread of his actions and Jack was forced to redirect him with impatient wiggles and language that wouldn't have been out of place in the kind of film that he'd starred in once or twice back when he was younger. The longer this went on, the less the words were put on, and when Vyvyan finally pinned Jack to the inch-thick mattress with the heels of his grubby hands Jack wasn't sure whether he was cheering or sighing.
After that his occasional yelps were swallowed up by the bed rattling and Vyvyan grunting and Rik banging on the wall and shouting in an even more aggrieved voice than usual, "DO YOU MIND? SOME OF US ARE TRYING TO SLEEP!"
And Jack found himself completely unable to care about how much noise was emanating from his new bedroom, or about the way that anyone standing in the garden (and it was definitely a weird enough neighbourhood that somebody probably would be) or passing in the hallway had an exceptional view of Vyvyan fucking him into the mattress. In fact he was finding it extremely hard to give much of a crap about anything besides arching his back and Vyvyan's teeth on the back of his neck.
Afterwards, when the stars had cleared from the back of his vision and he was slightly more sure that he hadn't accidentally been transported into another universe, and he was feeling just a tiny bit squashed because Vyvyan had collapsed on top of him and his bloody forehead piercings were digging into Jack's spine, he couldn't muster the energy to be embarrassed.
"I dint fink," Vyvyan said into Jack's back, his lips dry and cracked against the evaporating sweat, "you'd be into doin' it rough. Or I wouldn't have bovvered."
"Yes you would," Jack said in a boneless voice. Perhaps he should have made more effort to defend his irresistibleness as Captain Jack Fucking Harkness, the best bang since the big one1, but right now it was an effort of supreme will to say anything and not just pass out. The only thing keeping him awake was the nagging worry that Vyvyan would nick his sonic blaster if he did.
"Yeah," Vyvyan said, rolling off Jack and balancing precariously on the edge of the narrow bed. Jack turned onto his side in an attempt to make more space for them both and wondered idly why the kid wasn't disappearing back off to his own room, now, please. Vyvyan was staring up at the ceiling with an expression that Jack would have considered "thoughtful" if he'd seen it on someone with an IQ higher than things growing on the plates in the kitchen. "But sometimes you just wanna cuddle, don't you?"
Jack's mouth was still hanging open like a fly-trap when another indignant whine from the corridor outside penetrated the room. He didn't quite register what it was that Rik was complaining about, his mind still trying to digest what gibberish Vyvyan had just spewed, but Vyvyan evidently did.
Bollock-naked and coated in two sets of drying sweat, Vyvyan sprang off the bed and stomped across the splinter-strewn floor as though he was still wearing his Doc Martens. Jack winced, but Vyvyan apparently didn't notice or the wood was so rotten and soft that it made no odds.
Vyvyan hopped through the hole in the door, and Rik's squawking went up an octave.
"Shut up, girl pants," Vyvyan shouted. There was a wet slap noise, a howl of pain, and Vyvyan hopped back in through the gaping gash where the door had once been wearing a horrific and smug grin. He stumbled over the door wreckage and sank down onto the bed next to Jack. "I fink," he added in a faint voice, "I have a splinter in an important vein."
Jack peered as his foot. "No." He put his head on Vyvyan's thigh. "But I do think you desperately need a blowjob."
"Now that," Vyvyan agreed, putting his afflicted foot back on the floor, "is an idea I fully endorse."
1. "The best bang since the big one" was a phrase originally used in Douglas Adams' Hitch-Hiker's Guide series.
Author Name/LJ:
apiphileCrossover Fandom: The Young Ones
Rating: R (or PG-13, I can never work it out)
Notes: I posted a poll on LJ after the 1970 fic and people wanted this one. Writing it made my head hurt.
The nineteen eighties really were repugnant. Captain Jack Harkness had seen a lot of nasty places on a lot of nasty planets; he'd seen slavery, world wars, galaxy wars and the end of the world (twice), and he wasn't sure right now that anything could compare to the sheer unending misery of London in the eighties. It was impossible to avoid feeling despondent – the sky felt like it had closed in over the city and hung there like a grey dishcloth. Didn't matter what the weather was doing, the dishcloth feeling remained and while the lucky few with money pranced about in the ugliest automobiles ever made the rest of the country got more and more depressed. It was infectious.
In attempt to cure himself of the rotten malaise – it wasn't like him to be morose, after all – he'd tried moving back to Cardiff, maybe to hang around the Time Rift in the desperate hope of getting flung far enough forwards that there'd be interplanetary travel at long last and he could actually start searching in some meaningful way again. Cardiff, he quickly discovered, was worse.
History training had never given him the full scope of just how bloody miserable it all was, Jack thought as he mooched along under the railway arches with no real aim in mind. Or maybe it had, but he and everyone else had been distracted by flashy things like massacres and coups and the precise moment when human society finally evolved beyond the oppressive stupidity it was currently floundering in. To make things worse, there had been bugger all in the way of assignments to carry out in the last year.
No suspicious activity involving young ladies with baseball bats (which he'd arrived too late to get a straight story on, and been left with the sinking, churning feeling that he'd missed something important by the skin of his teeth). No hysterical reports of robots in the streets of Southwark. Even the deranged drunks had been quiet and limited their conspiracy theories to the government putting poison in the paint, which had the added unpleasantness of being perfectly true.
His musings had driven him up from the more habitable parts of London, such as they were, and into territory that had the pervasive stink of students about it. Jack turned up the collar of his coat and trudged on up the street with more purpose. He was considering, in some half-arsed fashion, emigrating to the States and again and never mind the Time Rift or anything else, not for this decade, when a girl in a ballgown flounced out of a house two doors up and shouted back to some unseen figure in the doorway, "I should have known you didn't really know Suggs, you lying, lying … student!"
Jack peered into the doorway as he passed. A diminutive man – not quite short enough to constitute a midget but definitely enough of a half-pint to qualify for a Napoleon Complex – in impossibly trendy sunglasses beamed after the departing girl with an air of complete unconcern.
"Alright, in hindsight they don't really look like Madness," he said, apparently addressing Jack, "but that's no reason to assume I don't know Suggs."
Jack blinked. Even if he'd been born yesterday and not, by his own reckoning, either a few thousand years into the future or about a hundred years ago in his own personal timeline, he'd still have been able to recognise a fellow con artist. It was the easy, cheesy grin that screamed "TRUST ME" a little too loudly, the excessive sense of relaxation exuded by this funny-looking little man that tipped him off.
And the sunglasses.
"You going to stand there forever?" the short man asked, now definitely addressing Jack, "Or are you coming in to see the room?"
Jack slipped through where the gate ought to have been and hopped gracefully over a binliner that smelled like decomposing body parts, coming to a halt at the foot of the steps and giving the guy – two steps up and still shorter than Jack – his biggest, widest, most untrustworthy bastard smile. "Hi," he said, offering his hand, "I'm Jack Harkness." No point in tacking on the "Captain" this time, and scaring everyone with the assumed stench of authority. Not at this point in history.
"I'm Mike," said Mike, not shaking his hand. "And this is your lucky day. We were just forced to remove the previous tenant of your room for non-payment of rent. And onna account of him being past caring, if you know what I mean." He tapped his nose conspiratorially, and led Jack over a mound of unpaid bills on the doormat. The plaster on the walls was crumbling and in places had fallen through to expose red brick and the whole place smelt of mould. "Don't," Mike advised, starting up the stairs – several of the banisters were missing and one had been replaced with a bicycle pump – "look down."
Something sucked at Jack's boot as he followed the shady little man.
As they rounded onto the first landing, a crash with hints of explosion emanated from what Jack could only assume was the living room, and voices raised in anger drifted through the floorboards.
"Well, actually, Rik, I didn't turn the heating off, you just didn't pay the gas bill –"
" – we give you the money so you can deal with that, hippy! –"
"Actually you don't give me any money, that's why the gas was cut off –"
"OW! Vyvyan! It was him who didn't pay the gas bill, not me!"
"Shut up, girlpants, you were closer."
Mike didn't see fit to explain this, just turned onto the next flight of stairs (which groaned ominously as Jack mounted them and seemed to have been de-carpeted in a hurry, judging from the bits of green fluff still adhering to the tacks that rose like teeth at the edge of each stair) and beamed at Jack again. "Since as you have heard we are currently experiencing some difficulties with our gas supplier," he said, not even having the decency to look embarrassed, "we require utilities payments in advance."
Jack wondered when would be a good time to tell this bizarre little man that he already had perfectly good accommodation above a laundrette in South London, and that apart from the race riots he was quite happy there. Mike was unlocking a suspiciously narrow door now, one which didn't look like it could lead anywhere promising at all.
"That's a closet," Jack said flatly.
"Nonsense," Mike said with an ingratiating smile. "It's a luxurious bedroom suitable for the gentleman about town."
"It's a fucking airing closet," Jack repeated, feeling his temper rising. "There are towels in it. And, for some reason, a medical skeleton's arm."
"Change of plan," Mike said without skipping a beat. He leaned back down into the stairwell and shouted loudly enough to make the house shake. "NEIL! NEIL!"
Footsteps clattered up the stairs and a long head of hair hove into view, attached to the most dour, depressed-looking face Jack had seen in about thirty years. It addressed Mike in a petulant whine. "What is it? I've got to finish cleaning the oven which is going to take even longer now because Vyvyan was using it to dry out his trousers and they caught fire –"
"From now on," Mike said, slapping Neil on the shoulder in a companionable manner, "You're sleeping in the airing closet."
"Hey, that's not fair –"
"Ah," Mike said in a warning tone. "We've been through this before, Neil. I can't give up my room because it's against my religion –"
"I don't think 'Chance To Score With Girls' is a religion, Mike, I checked at the library and they said –"
"Do you want the gas bill paid or not?" Mike asked, his fox-like smile never leaving his face. "This gentleman here is paying for a room in our house, and he's not paying to sleep in an airing closet, is he? Now get your things and scrape the lentils off the ceiling, there's a good boy."
"I already have –" Jack began. He checked himself. So far there had been no reports of rioting in this area of London, and Mike looked like the kind of guy who had his finger on the pulse of absolutely everything within a five mile radius. If anything unusual, anything symptomatic of a hiccupping Time Rift or invasion, occurred in London, there was a better chance of spotting it here than somewhere the streets were alive every night with police cars and screams. Besides, Jack had slept in some absolute holes in his time. How much worse could this be?
He discovered exactly how much worse it could be a few hours later, arriving as night fell with the last of his meagre belongings from the South London flat. Ignoring the ongoing commotion downstairs, Jack hopped up the stairs and tried to shoulder his new bedroom door open.
It was locked.
Jack put down the cardboard box and folded his arms as Mike hove forth from the shadows, tailed by a frankly enormous black man wearing a cheap costume "Security" shirt.
"Where's the key?"
"Insurance and all that," Mike said with another of his ingratiating grins. He had changed clothes since Jack left, and was wearing a pair of the most horrible tartan golf trousers imaginable. "To make sure nothing happens to your room, like the bed falling out of the window or anything."
Jack stuck his hands in his pockets, his coat rucking up at the sides, and gave Mike an I Am The Commanding Officer And You Will Not Pull This Shit With Me special. Mike's sunglasses gave him absolutely no indication that the man had even been looking at him. He sighed. "How much?"
"Five quid down payment ensures the integrity of your bed and sheets and for an extra fifty pence you get to keep your pillow as well," Mike said hoarsely, with a smile that surpassed ingratiating and mounted "Shit-eating" with ease. "You also get a stylish carriage clock with inbuilt wake-up call worth fourteen-ninety-nine absolutely free. Maurice!" Mike indicated the enormous man in the security shirt.
Maurice produced a white plastic alarm clock with the batteries conspicuously missing and proffered it to Jack.
"I am living in someone else's nightmare," Jack said under his breath, but he produced the five pound note all the same and handed it to Mike, watching as this amateur gangster secreted it about his person with the skill of a stage magician. "I think I'll pass on the carriage clock," he added to Maurice, who looked at Mike.
Mike shrugged and handed Jack a key. "Don't turn it anti-clockwise," he said rather ominously, and clattered down the stairs, Maurice in tow.
One of the more obvious personality defects Jack Harkness was actually willing to own up to having, and occasionally to brag about, was that he was needlessly contrary. He'd call it "endlessly curious" under these circumstances, but until he met a very particular man in a leather jacket with prodigious ears he'd been given to ignoring and contravening orders on a whim.
He turned the key anti-clockwise, expecting nothing more than a horrible grating noise in the lock, but instead the door swung open.
The scene beyond was very definitely not the bedroom he'd glimpsed and been disappointed by earlier, and was in fact a fairly good replica of a pre-Revolutionary French drawing room, peopled with two young ladies in sizeable dresses and gigantic wigs. One of them waved a fan coquettishly at him and said something along the lines of "j'aime un homme dans le uniforme," with a giggle before the footman slammed the door in Jack's face.
Time Rift! Jack thought with a certain sense of wildness; the ability of the young ladies to interact with him made it certain they weren't merely ghosts. Sure, it had gone back this time, but there was no telling what would happen if he opened the door again. There was even a slim chance he'd make it to the right century to get Someone's attention. He started forward eagerly, key in hand.
Jack slipped the slim piece of off-yellow metal into the lock and turned it anti-clockwise, his hands trembling minutely with excitement.
Nothing. The door refused to budge.
He swore quietly and tried again, the cardboard box of his few possessions pushing forgotten against his shins.
Nothing.
"Um, Jack," the hippy said in a worried voice directly behind him, "the lock goes the other way."
Jack turned his head in time to see the man's hangdog expression turn away from him and start up the next flight of stairs to the airing closet and felt a brief pang of guilt. He hadn't thought Mike was actually serious about forcing anyone to sleep in such a cramped space.
The door yielded immediately to the clockwise turn of the lock and to his disappointment revealed nothing more than a barren bedroom with the faint remnants of lentils on the ceiling and a red astrological chart half-finished on the opposite wall. The window was jammed open, and the bed splayed across the centre of the room.
Jack rather got the impression that the bed had already been thrown out of the window once.
The impression was somewhat compounded by chips of paint on the sheets.
Jack sighed and shoved his cardboard box under the bed with the side of his foot. This was already beginning to seem like a bad idea; if not for the brief flash of strangeness in the corridor that convinced him if there was anywhere in London that he truly needed to be, it was here.
An argument appeared to have sprung up in the corridor outside. Jack put his ear to the door tentatively; as far as he could work out there was a little restructuring of the house hierarchy taking place. Neil was complaining that the airing closet wasn't big enough for him and that his hair had been singed, and a horrifically nasal whine was informing him that it was his own fault for being a bloody hippy and never cutting his stupid girly hair in the first place.
"And you can't have my room, it's out of the question! Where would I sleep?"
Jack leaned away from the door. The voice currently speaking was quite capable of penetrating the wood and probably of shattering glass without any assistance from him.
"With Vyvyan?" the nasal voice went on, rising in scandalised pitch. Jack put his finger in his ear and winced. There was an incredulous snort that a wild boar would have been proud of, and the whining voice continued, "I don't bloody think so, Neil! Last time I went in his room he tried to use me for a medical experiment!"
"I suppose I'll just sleep in the living room with the rats then," Neil sighed, and as if in response an aggressive squeaking set up in the walls.
The whiny voice on the other side of the door continued talking, apparently to itself, as Neil's equally penetrating moan was now rising up through the thin floorboards. Jack fought the urge to climb out of the window with his meagre belongings and tell Nasser there had been a terrible mistake and that of course he'd continue letting the flat, Molotov cocktails in the street or not.
Something smashed just outside Jack's bedroom door and there was a roar of, "SHUT UP, YOU WET, GIRLY PRAT!"
Jack took stock of his surroundings as best he could without actually poking his head into the corridor and having it kicked or his coat stolen. The room itself was uninspiringly bare beyond the bedstead (with an anorexic mattress that a prison would have been ashamed of) and a blocked-up fireplace. He guessed the landlord was absentee or at the very least deranged, if he was prepared to let the building out to such obnoxiously destructive people – the astrological chart on the wall bore witness to that, even without the constant stream of bangs, crashes, and splintering noises.
And his new housemates? A con artist who had shown himself capable of running rings around Jack by virtue of being breath-takingly weird, a perma-depressed hippy who seemed content to be a doormat, what sounded suspiciously like a spoilt five-year-old and one unknown quantity with an impressive set of lungs.
Silence settled over the unstable household like a blanket, and Jack decided to risk going downstairs and introducing himself properly to the people who were enduring each other's company in this dump.
When Jack got downstairs the hippy was sweeping ineffectively at a mound of rumble with a broom that had seen not only better days but better decades too, and the owner of the whiny voice was shouting at the front door; presumably at whoever had slammed it as Jack was coming down the stairs.
The owner of the whiny voice … Jack squinted from his vantage point on the bottom stair … looked like he belonged with his voice. He had possibly the stupidest haircut Jack had ever seen (and he'd seen the abominations people were sporting back in 2115, the weirdest year for fashion before cosmetic amputation got really big), he was wearing clothes that wouldn't look out of place as a children's TV presenter, if the presenter in question had been reading too much Hamlet, and he had a rather impressive collection of spots.
Yuck, Jack thought, as the self-important rant ground to a halt and his new housemate turned on his heel with his nose in the air.
"Hello, I'm Rik."
Jack wasn't sure it was possible for someone to swing from obnoxious to obsequious in such a short space of time and yet here it was.
"Jack – Jack Harkness –" he stuck out his hand and stepped down onto the level with what he couldn't help thinking of as a tall streak of pseudo-revolutionary piss. Unfortunately Rik didn’t seem bent on dissuading him of this judgement, shaking Jack's hand with a kind of damp fervour and staring at him in a manner that … well, if the handshake was damp the look was positively soggy. Jack sighed.
"Never mind Vyvyan," Rik said, still shaking Jack's hand and contriving to sound even more like a weasel. He had contorted his face into something that looked like one of Mike's smiles had bred with a gumless leer. Jack restrained himself from whipping his hand out of the increasingly cloying grip of this lunatic and began to fantasise about punching him in the face instead. Not the best start to his new tenancy. "He's just in high spirits, we are all here, we're just so crazy and wacky and out there and different," Rik went on, his apparently endless handshake punctuated only by a few snorting, affected laughs.
Would anyone really mind if I punched him? Jack thought desperately.
"Not that we do drugs or anything like that, or I don't anyway but Neil does because he's a shameless hippy and he doesn't realise that all those free love days are behind us and he's living in the past -"
Jack tried to telegraph some wordless plea for help as Neil passed them with a dustpan brush, but the hippy ignored both of them with an air that might have been wounded dignity or might have been wilful deafness.
" – anyway I'm Rik, oh gosh I said that already, didn't I, and obviously I'm the coolest person in this house, apart from Mike, obviously, because – "
It never ends, Jack thought, feeling his eyes starting to glaze over and his smile solidify. It is the run-on sentence that never, ever ends.
" – and actually it's quite difficult to start a socialist revolution when you're living with complete bastards like Neil who think stupid things like washing-up liquid are more important than three million on the dole –"
"Rik," Jack said, putting his hand on the kid's shoulder and trying not to make a face at the amount of dandruff that adhered itself to his palm, "Rik –"
" – because poetry is the best way to reach the masses and – yes?"
"Could you let go of my hand, please?" Jack patted Rik once or twice on the shoulder for emphasis and struggled his most charming expression on. This turned out to be a mistake.
Rik all but swooned like a schoolgirl and said something like "anything you say Jack". He did release Jack's hand, thank everything, but his dewy-eyed look of sincere admiration wasn't much of an improvement.
Nor was the way he followed Jack into the kitchen so closely that he seemed to be glued to Jack's hip.
Rik stayed glued to Jack like a particularly persistent growth as he looked around the kitchen and noted with dismay that the cupboards had about two inches of mould growing on the outside. He continued to shadow Jack as Jack investigated the mount of unbagged lentils sitting on the kitchen surface and looking belligerent as lentils can. Jack became vaguely aware of some urgent rambling about poetry as he opened the fridge and took a step backwards from the pungent smell of rotting milk, milk which had bypassed the "cheese" option and gone straight for the "evolve into a new lifeform" package, but he thought nothing of it. Rik's irritating nasal whine had already become merely barely-tolerable background noise.
Until he started reciting poetry.
There was a time and a place for poetry, in Jack's opinion. While trying to impress a particularly difficult-to-please young lady who just happened to have the information one needed to break into a specific safe, for example. In the kitchen, in the 1980s, while he was trying to determine whether the carrot in the fridge had moved or whether he was hallucinating as a result of the smell was not it. Also, this was about as far removed from poetry as Jack was aware human speech could get. He'd listened to Dadaist verse which was less appalling.
"but they are not yellow.
At least you have two lips
And not three - ."
Jack's fist flew out of its own accord - apparently his self-preservation instincts were as strong as ever – and caught the callow youth on the point of his greasy chin. Rik went down like a Betulgesian whore, fast and firmly, and lay in an unappealing starfish of unwashed black clothing and unconscious "poet".
"Shit," Jack said, looking at his fist as though he'd never seen it before. The thought of knocking the kid's lights out had admittedly been circulating in his mind almost since the moment the annoying creature opened his mouth, but he'd thought he had better self-control than that.
A memory a decade-old flashed through Jack's mind and he hastily corrected – he usually had better self-control than that.
"I am so unbelieveably sorry –" Jack began, addressing the other inhabitants of the kitchen, but Neil merely moved off into the garden and Mike waved his hand dismissively without even looking at him.
"It's quite alright, although you're going to need to pay a small Punching Your Housemate tax at the end of the month – one pound fifty for every time you knock him unconscious," Mike carried on leafing through The Sun with little interest. "Personally I prefer to employ Vyvyan to do the honours when it comes to knocking Rik unconscious." He turned a page and studied the newsprint with apparent concentration, and pulled a biro out of his sleeve. "As Mr. Basterd's right hook is more suited to Rik's delicate complexion, if you know what I mean."
Jack didn't, and was quite certain he didn't want to know either. "Basterd?"
"With an 'e'," Mike confirmed. "Sometimes, anyway." He looked up from the newspaper and added, "there's a Loitering In The Kitchen charge, by the way."
"You're all nuts," Jack said, waving a shaking index finger around the kitchen as Neil returned from the garden.
"Oh thanks, just insult me when I haven't even done anything yet –"
"NUTS." Jack repeated, and fled up the stairs as though he was wearing rockets on his boots.
There were times when you woke up, and the TARDIS was whirring quietly to herself and you were heading towards some fantastic place and the Doctor and Rose were playing table tennis and you thought to yourself: I was born to do this. And then, Jack reflected as some of the ceiling plaster fell in and Rik's hypernasal whine began troubling his eardrum in an entirely novel fashion - there were times when you found yourself stuck in the most disgusting house in all history with four completely insane students (three provably insane and one who'd have to be nuts to live with them, even if she hadn't shown her face yet), where vegetables talked to each other and bands had gigs in the living room, and the sad truth was he was probably born to do that, too.
Jack hid in his room all night, ignoring the increasing growls from his stomach and the bewildering conversations from downstairs, slipped into a dream for about an hour and woke up to hear Rik and Neil still wrangling with each other. His watch said it was only eleven, but it felt like it was four in the morning after a particularly long day.
Rik's voice travelled through the floorboards like a knife through jelly. " – because I read that contract pretty carefully, Mike, and I don't remember there being anything about a Being Punched By Your Housemate Tax – "
"Rik, Rik, Rik – Rik, Rik, my old fellow, I'll be honest with you. There has been a slight change to the constitution of the household but as you know change is necessary for progress, and where would we be in this fine nation without progress?"
"I think you're a liar! I bet you just made up this stupid tax so you could have two quid to buy some dirty girlie mags, didn't you?"
"Uncanny!"
"Well I'm not going to submit to your fascist –"
"Oh, Rik. I'm afraid you leave me no choice. Vyvyan? 'It 'im."
Jack pulled the lumpy pillow over his head. He hadn't even bothered to take his coat off when he fell onto the bed and now he couldn’t work out if he was too hot, too cold, or simply feeling crappy because he'd slept in his clothes.
Eventually the crashing and whining downstairs subsided and a little later footsteps sounded on the stairs. Jack groaned into the underside of the pillows. first thing tomorrow, he promised himself. As soon as it was a reasonable hour he'd go back to Lewisham and tell Nasser he'd changed his mind. He was wrapping himself up in this comforting thought and the motheaten blanket and preparing to sleep when, contrary to any expectations he'd had for the rest of the night, the door exploded inwards in a shower of kindling and chipboard.
"What the –" Jack was on his feet and groping for his long-absent sonic blaster before the dust had begun to settle.
In the gap where the remains of his bedroom door hung, shards of wood dangling precariously, a bewildered face was regarding Jack with a kind of moronic intensity. "You're not Neil."
"What the hell did you do that for?"
"Who're you?" the face gave him a look that might have constituted a glare had it not lacked the appropriate malice behind the eyes. This red-headed ape with his scabbed knuckles and his apparently pierced forehead didn't seem to have the focus required to glare at anyone. Jack had seen some low-rent punks on his travels, usually ones still living with their parents who took the safety pins out of their noses for Sunday lunch – he'd never really seen someone looking so hapless and so simultaneously punk.
"Why did you kick down my door?" Jack asked, staring the kid down. So he didn't have a single useful weapon on him at the moment, and the nearest one still needed loading, but he wasn't about to be intimidated by six and a bit feet of apparently brain-dead student.
"IT WAS SHUT," the punk barked with an empty grin, as though this was the most obvious answer imaginable, and as though Jack was an absolute imbecile for having asked it.
"You … bastard," Jack snapped. Somewhere in the back of his mind he was a little disappointed that the fourth and final housemate wasn't some reasonably attractive posh girl with a personality problem and he silently the cursed the fool who decided that "Vyvyan" was a good name for an empty-headed lout with no apparent sense of style, personal hygiene, or anything approaching good manners.
Just how few manners Vyvyan was in possession of was heavily underlined when, instead of going to shake hands or getting the hell out of Jack's room and letting him sleep, the greasy youth lunged with the apparent intention of headbutting Jack on the point of his chin.
Jack dived sideways, flung his arms out and caught the idiot's surprisingly slender neck in a lock. There was a moment of uncertainty, where Jack wondered if he was actually going to have to throttle Vyvyan until he passed out and then struggle with his conscience over whether or not he could get away with throwing the moron out of the bedroom window, and Vyvyan bucked like a rodeo horse.
"I was only testing," Vyvyan said at last in quite a muffled voice, and Jack released him.
"Sure you were."
Vyvyan's face gradually cooled down from Almost Unconscious Puce to a healthy pink that looked a good deal better than the Things That Live Under Rocks tan he'd been sporting when he broke in, and he shoved his hands into his jeans pockets. How he managed this when said jeans were tight enough for Jack to take a decent guess at his religion was a mystery, but there he was, hands crammed uncomfortably in his pockets, rocking on the soles of his Doc Martens and looking suddenly bashful.
"So," Vyvyan said with an air of unconcern that didn't mesh with the way he was inspecting the toes of his Docs at all, "fancy a shag, then?"
"Yeah, sure," Jack said absently, then, "Wait, what?"
"Aaahh," Vyvyan said in the same tone as a child who believes he's just tripped his parent on some minor point. "Too late now, you can't take it back."
"Vyvyan," Jack began, and stopped. He closed one eye and tried to imagine what the guy would look like in a couple of decades. Vyvyan regarded him as though he was a new TV program – slack-jawed fascination but with the sense that this had better bloody be good or the TV was getting a claw hammer through the screen soon.
"Wot?"
"Vyvyan Basterd?"
"That's me."
"Basterd with an 'e'?" Jack pressed, sinking onto the greasy mattress and looking up at Vyvyan's pimply visage and out-sized piercings.
Vyvyan appeared to consider this for a while. "Er. Probably?"
No, Jack thought. This can't be him.
"Wot?" Vyvyan demanded, lurking in the remains of the door like a bad smell. "I'm gunna go and wash my knob."
"How considerate," Jack muttered, his mind on other matters.
"Don't," Vyvyan admonished, leaning back in through the wreckage of the door and pointing a stern finger with a very grubby fingernail on the end of it at Jack's head, "go anywhere."
"Right."
Dr Vvyvan Basterd, Jack thought, and opened his eyes. Spotty nineteen-year-old punk. He squinted. Dr Vyvyan Basterd's important work hadn't been even begun until he turned sixty; given the choice he'd have preferred to keep his star-fucking relevant and done the guy shortly after his Nobel Prize, colostomy bag and all.
On the other hand, he'd said yes, and Vyvyan was stomping slope-shouldered to the bathroom to, as he put it, "wash my knob".
Jack put his head in his hands and contemplating the logistical headache of getting his boots off while still reeling from the idea of fucking one of the greatest medical minds of the 21st century in an unwholesome student house. Still, it wasn't the 21st century yet. There was nothing particularly awe-inspiring about the young Vyvyan Basterd, apart from his ability to impersonate a complete moron and the way he managed to menace while not even actually in the room.
"- of my way, girlpants."
"Ow, Vyvyan, that was my nose! I wasn't doing anything, I was just - "
Very slowly, keeping his eyes fixed on the shattered skeleton of the flimsy door, Jack began to unlace his boots. Footsteps on the stairs, heading down in some hurry, and footsteps crossing back across the landing – he kicked off the left boot, and then the right, just as Vyvyan poked his head through the hole in the door, squinted, and said in a wounded voice, "You've still got your clothes on."
Fuck it, Jack thought. Aloud, he said, "I was hoping you'd undress me yourself," and it came out sounding rather husky.
"Oh, right," Vyvyan said with cheerful emptiness, and he clambered through the hole with all the grace and delicacy of a wrecking ball. "Er," he added, peering at Jack in the dim light. He hit the light-switch and the wretched little room was flooded with painfully bright light.
Jack was overwhelmed by a sense of being exposed; there were no curtains on the window, there was no way of shutting the door so that it actually barred the doorway, and Vyvyan was giving him the New TV Program look again, with added confusion. There was a streak of what he could only assume was Rik's blood on Vyvyan's forearm too.
Vyvyan's approach was hesitant. There was no other word for it, and a thought flashed through Jack's weary brain: dear gods, if you exist, please don't let him be a virgin. He was hardly in the mood for a deflowering; and then the kid was on him, all eager, shaking hands and wide tongue and teeth.
So he's a lousy kisser, Jack thought, I can work with that. His teeth smacked against Vyvyan's twice before a compromised was reached, and Jack melted backwards like the heroine of some trashy novel and let Vyvyan do whatever it was he thought he was doing with his tongue.
It turned out that what Vyvyan thought he was doing with his tongue was working better than Jack had realised, something he only discovered when the punk kid stuck his hand up Jack's shirt and Jack's mouth made a distinctly slutty-sounding noise that escaped out of the corner of their sloppy snogging.
Somewhere among the ridiculous noises and embarrassing phrases falling out of his mouth Jack had struggled out of his clothes with enthusiastic and frequently unhelpful assistance from Vyvyan, who managed to tear Jack's shirt and to do something so pleasant to his nipples that Jack really failed to mind the destruction of his favourite (and antique) shirt.
Every now and then Vyvyan seemed to lose the thread of his actions and Jack was forced to redirect him with impatient wiggles and language that wouldn't have been out of place in the kind of film that he'd starred in once or twice back when he was younger. The longer this went on, the less the words were put on, and when Vyvyan finally pinned Jack to the inch-thick mattress with the heels of his grubby hands Jack wasn't sure whether he was cheering or sighing.
After that his occasional yelps were swallowed up by the bed rattling and Vyvyan grunting and Rik banging on the wall and shouting in an even more aggrieved voice than usual, "DO YOU MIND? SOME OF US ARE TRYING TO SLEEP!"
And Jack found himself completely unable to care about how much noise was emanating from his new bedroom, or about the way that anyone standing in the garden (and it was definitely a weird enough neighbourhood that somebody probably would be) or passing in the hallway had an exceptional view of Vyvyan fucking him into the mattress. In fact he was finding it extremely hard to give much of a crap about anything besides arching his back and Vyvyan's teeth on the back of his neck.
Afterwards, when the stars had cleared from the back of his vision and he was slightly more sure that he hadn't accidentally been transported into another universe, and he was feeling just a tiny bit squashed because Vyvyan had collapsed on top of him and his bloody forehead piercings were digging into Jack's spine, he couldn't muster the energy to be embarrassed.
"I dint fink," Vyvyan said into Jack's back, his lips dry and cracked against the evaporating sweat, "you'd be into doin' it rough. Or I wouldn't have bovvered."
"Yes you would," Jack said in a boneless voice. Perhaps he should have made more effort to defend his irresistibleness as Captain Jack Fucking Harkness, the best bang since the big one1, but right now it was an effort of supreme will to say anything and not just pass out. The only thing keeping him awake was the nagging worry that Vyvyan would nick his sonic blaster if he did.
"Yeah," Vyvyan said, rolling off Jack and balancing precariously on the edge of the narrow bed. Jack turned onto his side in an attempt to make more space for them both and wondered idly why the kid wasn't disappearing back off to his own room, now, please. Vyvyan was staring up at the ceiling with an expression that Jack would have considered "thoughtful" if he'd seen it on someone with an IQ higher than things growing on the plates in the kitchen. "But sometimes you just wanna cuddle, don't you?"
Jack's mouth was still hanging open like a fly-trap when another indignant whine from the corridor outside penetrated the room. He didn't quite register what it was that Rik was complaining about, his mind still trying to digest what gibberish Vyvyan had just spewed, but Vyvyan evidently did.
Bollock-naked and coated in two sets of drying sweat, Vyvyan sprang off the bed and stomped across the splinter-strewn floor as though he was still wearing his Doc Martens. Jack winced, but Vyvyan apparently didn't notice or the wood was so rotten and soft that it made no odds.
Vyvyan hopped through the hole in the door, and Rik's squawking went up an octave.
"Shut up, girl pants," Vyvyan shouted. There was a wet slap noise, a howl of pain, and Vyvyan hopped back in through the gaping gash where the door had once been wearing a horrific and smug grin. He stumbled over the door wreckage and sank down onto the bed next to Jack. "I fink," he added in a faint voice, "I have a splinter in an important vein."
Jack peered as his foot. "No." He put his head on Vyvyan's thigh. "But I do think you desperately need a blowjob."
"Now that," Vyvyan agreed, putting his afflicted foot back on the floor, "is an idea I fully endorse."
1. "The best bang since the big one" was a phrase originally used in Douglas Adams' Hitch-Hiker's Guide series.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}