The rent In The Fabric Chapter 5
Dec. 29th, 2010 12:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
galadriel1010Title: The Rent In The Fabric
Chapter Title: Chapter 5
Challenge/Fest: Journey Story Big Bang
Rating: T
Dedication: Beta-d by my brother. Any mistakes remaining are his fault.
Summary: Jack Harkness leaves Earth behind to shake off the pain of losing everything, and to keep his promise to Ianto. Along the way, hope kindles, and he sets out on a search for the other end of the Rift and the hope of a reunion. There are aliens, space stations, a university, and a familiar face on his path.
Characters: Jack Harkness, OCs and a surprise familiar face.
Contains: Angst, world invention, liberal use of a business management degree.
Disclaimer: Torchwood and its environs, occurrences and persons belong to the BBC. The original characters have disowned me.
The conference wound up after another week, during which Jack drifted around the venue in a daze. He was peripherally aware of the discussions around him and the way they hushed when he approached, but he was too hollow to worry or heed them. Diane made sure that he ate enough to keep him going and that he wasn’t left alone even when he slept. For so long he’d been running on determination and hope, and Cyrieth’s words had wrenched away his support and plunged him into the breakdown that his friends had feared.
A hollow pain consumed him, dragging every moment into infinity and weighing him down. Some days he couldn’t drag himself from his bed, other days he was filled with a listless energy that drove him to pace the complex aimlessly. Nothing pierced the intense agony of his loss, or made it the slightest bit easier to bear.
It took a month for him to begin the slow journey back to himself. A brittle purpose gripped him at last and pushed him back into the labs to the team. They tiptoed around him, treating him with kid gloves and speaking in hushed tones whenever he was in the room.
Diane took him aside eventually and sat him down with yet another mug of whatever it was that wasn’t tea. He hadn’t got around to asking yet, but it tasted fine, had plenty of sugar, and hadn’t killed him, so he sipped at it cautiously and watched her.
“You need to decide what you want to do now,” she told him gently. “You can stay here as long as you want, but you have to stop wandering into the labs if you’re not actually working.”
“I’ll join you if you’ll let me. I have the experience and a good level of understanding, I’m good with technology... I want to help and make a difference.” He leaned forwards, needing her to understand. “You do good work here, more than we could ever have hoped to do. Please, let me stay...”
“It’s not my decision,” she told him cautiously, “but I’ll ask Hakkan. He’ll probably want to interview you.”
“I can cope with that.” He gave her a weak smile. “I’ve spent too long hurting, and I need to start trying to live. Helping will help with that.”
X~X~X~X
Diane led him into the medical facility on the far side of the campus, checked them in at the front desk and handed Jack an alarm. “Just in case,” she assured him. “I’ve never needed to use it, but we carry them anyway.”
“In case of what?”
“In case one of them gets... upset,” she said delicately. A nurse arrived to lead them through the double doors into the facility itself, and Diane slipped her arm through Jack’s to keep him moving. “This is where we treat the people who come through the Rift to us. Some of them are lucky, like me - we have a couple working at the facility, and a few more have gone out into the world, mostly on to Terrara to go to university. Most, though... The Rift is dangerous. Even if you don’t land in a volatile location, and the more volatile somewhere is the more likely it is to attract Rift activity, even if, simple exposure to that amount of temporal energy and the huge pressures exerted... very few species can tolerate it without protection.”
He looked down at her. “The Sky Gypsy acted as your protection?”
“It did. They didn’t know if that was possible, so they’d never tried it. Once I came through, though, they knew it was safe. Now all we need to do is find a way to bring people back,” she added wryly.
“What about that gateway?”
“If the gateway is open, then people can pass forwards and back without harm,” she confirmed. “But once the Rift is closed, we have no way of reopening it in the same time and location. They’re trapped there until the Rift stabilises again sufficiently.”
Before Jack could say anything, the nurse showed them into one of the facility’s common rooms. Some of the residents turned to look at them, mostly nervous twitches before they shuffled away from the stranger at the door, and others ignored them as if they weren’t there. He recognised the trauma wreaked by Rift travel in all of them, even recognised a few of them as people missing from Cardiff. “I hoped they were being looked after,” he told her quietly. “I hoped...”
“That they weren’t all this damaged?” She sighed. “I wish it were true. We do everything we can for them. It’s not enough, but it helps.”
He shook her off and looked around the room, checking every face. Those who had noticed him shied away at his scrutiny, and none of them recognised him. None of them bore a resemblance to Ianto. It was half relief, half not. He turned back to Diane and gestured at the door. “Can we...”
“Of course.” She steered him out onto the corridor and found them a couple of chairs where he could sit down and compose himself again. Her hand rested on his shoulder until he reaised his head to stare at the wall. “He’s not here, Jack. If he’d come through the Rift, I would have recognised him.”
“I know.” He pulled his sleeve up to show her his wriststrap. “I saved the coordinates of the Rift activity from when he disappeared. I hoped that one day I could find someone who could take me back there, so I could save him...”
“Opening the Rift again that close to the sort of activity that Cyrieth uses would have destroyed Cardiff.” Diane closed his hands over his wriststrap and held them there. “I’m sorry, Jack. We’ll do what we can, but... there isn’t really a lot.”
“Yeah. I’m getting that idea.” He rested his head in his hands, unheeding of his wriststrap still clutched in his hand. “Why do I keep hoping?”
“You must have really loved him,” Diane said softly. “I think that’s probably why.” She stood up and caught his elbow to pull him up with her. “You’ve had enough for today. You’ve had enough for a lifetime.”
He went where she guided him, and let his mind drift away to a time when he had more than hope and disappointment.
X~X~X~X
They called him into a meeting a week later, and he could tell from their expressions that he wasn’t like what they were going to say. He sat warily and flicked his gaze between Diane and Hakkan, who had sat at either end of the table. “So I’m guessing this is bad news.”
There was an awkward pause, and Kiki spoke first. He shuffled his notes and avoided looking at Jack. “We’re been taking readings of the Cardiff Rift opening to monitor the situation and, well, the situation is that it’s opening. The Rift is active in Cardiff, and as far as we can tell it’s uncontrolled.”
Gri took over. “The activity levels are increasing steadily. They’re still low at the moment, but if they keep going then the whole city could disappear within a couple of years. That’s no problem, really, we could go over there and install a Rift Moderator to keep it under control, but...”
“We can’t go there,” Kiki finished for him. “As Diane’s probably told you, we can’t return here if the Rift is closed, and we can’t keep the Rift open for as long as it would take to install the equipment. It will be a one way trip.”
He shrugged. “So you can go by another way. Hire a ship and transport everything that way.”
“Jack, it took you nearly a year to get here,” Diane told him gently. “It wouldn’t take much shorter for us to get there, because of the visa regulations and the passage negotiations we’d need to go through to get permission to pass through some of the sectors between here and there. It has to be by Rift.”
“And let me guess, it has to be me?” He felt nausea rising and pushed his seat back to get away. “I lost everything there. I can’t... I can’t go back.”
“I’m sorry, Jack. But it’s the only way to protect Cardiff.”
“No it isn’t. One of you could go through and arrange for a ship to go and pick you up and bring you back. If it’s going to take so long, you’ll be finished and have a team in place by the time it gets there. Or someone could go and stay there, or, or something.” He leaned against the wall as his knees threatened to buckle. “It doesn’t always have to be me.”
“You know Cardiff and the Rift better than anyone,” Hakkan told him, more gently than Jack had thought him capable of. “You are the only person who can restore order to Cardiff. No one else has the same mix of skills as you.”
“It’s always me.” Jack closed his eyes tightly against the sting of tears, shaking his head. “It’s too much.”
“We really are sorry,” Diane whispered. “If there was any other way...”
Jack glared at her and forced his knees to straighten. “I’ll do it. You knew I’d do it, no matter the cost to me. Like every other time.” He left before they could say anything more, and locked himself in his room until they stopped trying to get in.
X~X~X~X
Jack slipped into the staff room and looked around at the expectant faces that looked up at him. They’d fallen silent when he entered, looking variously curious and guilty, and Diane and Raura couldn’t meet his eyes.
He sighed, leaning back against the wall. “I’ll go. So what do I need to do?”
They turned to look at Hakkan, who started making notes in the file on his lap. “We need to find the most stable period possible to minimise the damage, maximise the length of time we can have the Rift open, make it easier to install the Rift modulator at your end... Kiki, can you keep an eye on the readings and do us a prediction for the best time?”
Kiki nodded and looked down at his own file. “It’s looking volatile for the next week, too many fluctuations and too fast - I think it’s still disturbed from that demonstration opening we did...”
“Yeah, that sort of thing,” Hakkan cut across him. “We don’t need to know right now. Ruara, you’re in charge of preparing the equipment to send over - get it ready to roll as soon as possible. Diane, I want you and Jack to find the best location to open the Rift. We need somewhere secure where we can set the Rift modulator up long-term, at least.”
She looked up at Jack and smiled tightly. “How about the Hub? That was secure.”
“Someone blew it up. Not viable any more.”
“Right...” She nodded thoughtfully. “We have a map of Cardiff with the Rift coordiantes. If you can think of somewhere, we can overlay the coordinates no problem. We’ll start that this afternoon.”
“And I’ll do the paperwork.” Hakkan scribbled another note and passed it to Diane, then looked up at Jack. “I’m glad you agreed to do this, Jack.”
He couldn’t say the same, but smiled anyway. “Someone has to. It’s almost always me - why not this time?”
X~X~X~X
Kiki found them a stable period nearly a fortnight after Jack agreed to go back. The equipment was packed, the location chosen, the coordinates set, and the team trained and prepared repeatedly for the rapid work they would need to do. Jack wandered aimlessly between the stacks of boxes and equipment in the store room, runnign his fingers over the labels. He turned a corner and found Diane watching him, sitting on one of the crates. “You wandered off again,” she told him softly. “They sent me to look for you.”
“I just wanted to check it was all ready,” he lied, trailing a finger down one of the labels. “I’m not good at hanging around and waiting.”
“I know.” She jumped off her box and turned to rest her hands on top of it. “We should get this stuff through to the Rift room, ready to go. It’s tomorrow morning, at last. One more sleep.”
“One more nightmare,” he corrected. “Why am I doing this?”
“Because someone has to.” The crate started trundling across the floor under her guidance. “And only you can do it.”
X~X~X~X
“Optimum conditions in five minutes,” Kiki yelled. “Don’t make me come over there.”
“We’re ready, Kiki!” Raura snapped back. “Don’t have a grappy. Just keep an eye on the window we’ve got.”
“You’re got half an hour,” he told them for the third time that morning, glaring over the top of his computer. “Same as every time. You do your job, I’ll do mine.”
“That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you,” Diane muttered, passing the last box of tools across to Jack. “Hakkan, have we got everything ready to go?”
“That’s the last bit. Let’s get it across in five minutes, and that will give us twenty to start getting things set up.” His hand landed on Jack’s shoulder, and he turned him away from the arch frame. “Are you alright, Jack?”
“No, but does that matter?” There were three crates of equipment and two boxes of tools standing at the edge of the platform for the team to shift them across through the window into Cardiff. “I keep going in circles.”
Hakkan squeezed his shoulder and said nothing, leaving him to his thoughts for the last three minutes.
The technicians were gathered around the computers, checking and rechecking the readings and preparing to open the rift. Kiki called out a last warning and everyone who was going across scrambled to their stations, each of thembehind a crate. Jack rested his hads on top of the crate in front of him and kicked the brakes off whilst the lights began to wind up the arch, growing in speed and intensity. As soon as the window was stable, Hakkan pushed his crate forwards and the others followed.
They’d opened the window into an empty warehouse that Torchwood owned. It was in the middle of the new developments in the docks area, standing alone and broken amongst new developments and renovated buildings. Jack had agreed to their using it partly because of how appropriate it felt. The wind whistled through broken windows, and there were puddles of standing water all across the concrete floor.
He stepped back to watch them set up their Rift modulator. It would draw its power from the Rift, enough to power the whole building if they needed it to. There were monitors, a Rift sphere that showed the power flowing through the Rift at any one time and indicated the direction of flow, and a sub-etheric resonator - not for sniffing. He choked and sat on the edge of one of the empty crates with his hands between his knees until Kiki’s voice called through the doorway.
Hakkan stepped back adn wiped his hands on his tunic. “It’s ready.” He turned to Jack and smiled. “The Rift is all yours once more.”
Jack smiled bittery and saluted them. “I guess this is goodbye, then.”
Diane looked at him once and turned to Hakkan. “I’m staying. Throw my stuff through next time it’s stable.” She stood on her toes to whisper something in his ear and then pushed him towards the doorway. “Now go, before you get trapped here.”
He smiled knowingly. “Welcome home. We’ll see you when we can. You’re always welcome back.”
“I know. Go!”
They stepped through the archway and stood on the other side, waving until the window closed and left them behind. Jack turned away when they were gone and looked around the desolate space, back in the last place he'd wanted to be. Wind rattled the roof, and something deeper and colder than that cut him to the bone.
"So..." Diane said with blatantly false cheer. "To work, then?"
"Yeah." He sighed. "Back to work."
Chapter Title: Chapter 5
Challenge/Fest: Journey Story Big Bang
Rating: T
Dedication: Beta-d by my brother. Any mistakes remaining are his fault.
Summary: Jack Harkness leaves Earth behind to shake off the pain of losing everything, and to keep his promise to Ianto. Along the way, hope kindles, and he sets out on a search for the other end of the Rift and the hope of a reunion. There are aliens, space stations, a university, and a familiar face on his path.
Characters: Jack Harkness, OCs and a surprise familiar face.
Contains: Angst, world invention, liberal use of a business management degree.
Disclaimer: Torchwood and its environs, occurrences and persons belong to the BBC. The original characters have disowned me.
The conference wound up after another week, during which Jack drifted around the venue in a daze. He was peripherally aware of the discussions around him and the way they hushed when he approached, but he was too hollow to worry or heed them. Diane made sure that he ate enough to keep him going and that he wasn’t left alone even when he slept. For so long he’d been running on determination and hope, and Cyrieth’s words had wrenched away his support and plunged him into the breakdown that his friends had feared.
A hollow pain consumed him, dragging every moment into infinity and weighing him down. Some days he couldn’t drag himself from his bed, other days he was filled with a listless energy that drove him to pace the complex aimlessly. Nothing pierced the intense agony of his loss, or made it the slightest bit easier to bear.
It took a month for him to begin the slow journey back to himself. A brittle purpose gripped him at last and pushed him back into the labs to the team. They tiptoed around him, treating him with kid gloves and speaking in hushed tones whenever he was in the room.
Diane took him aside eventually and sat him down with yet another mug of whatever it was that wasn’t tea. He hadn’t got around to asking yet, but it tasted fine, had plenty of sugar, and hadn’t killed him, so he sipped at it cautiously and watched her.
“You need to decide what you want to do now,” she told him gently. “You can stay here as long as you want, but you have to stop wandering into the labs if you’re not actually working.”
“I’ll join you if you’ll let me. I have the experience and a good level of understanding, I’m good with technology... I want to help and make a difference.” He leaned forwards, needing her to understand. “You do good work here, more than we could ever have hoped to do. Please, let me stay...”
“It’s not my decision,” she told him cautiously, “but I’ll ask Hakkan. He’ll probably want to interview you.”
“I can cope with that.” He gave her a weak smile. “I’ve spent too long hurting, and I need to start trying to live. Helping will help with that.”
X~X~X~X
Diane led him into the medical facility on the far side of the campus, checked them in at the front desk and handed Jack an alarm. “Just in case,” she assured him. “I’ve never needed to use it, but we carry them anyway.”
“In case of what?”
“In case one of them gets... upset,” she said delicately. A nurse arrived to lead them through the double doors into the facility itself, and Diane slipped her arm through Jack’s to keep him moving. “This is where we treat the people who come through the Rift to us. Some of them are lucky, like me - we have a couple working at the facility, and a few more have gone out into the world, mostly on to Terrara to go to university. Most, though... The Rift is dangerous. Even if you don’t land in a volatile location, and the more volatile somewhere is the more likely it is to attract Rift activity, even if, simple exposure to that amount of temporal energy and the huge pressures exerted... very few species can tolerate it without protection.”
He looked down at her. “The Sky Gypsy acted as your protection?”
“It did. They didn’t know if that was possible, so they’d never tried it. Once I came through, though, they knew it was safe. Now all we need to do is find a way to bring people back,” she added wryly.
“What about that gateway?”
“If the gateway is open, then people can pass forwards and back without harm,” she confirmed. “But once the Rift is closed, we have no way of reopening it in the same time and location. They’re trapped there until the Rift stabilises again sufficiently.”
Before Jack could say anything, the nurse showed them into one of the facility’s common rooms. Some of the residents turned to look at them, mostly nervous twitches before they shuffled away from the stranger at the door, and others ignored them as if they weren’t there. He recognised the trauma wreaked by Rift travel in all of them, even recognised a few of them as people missing from Cardiff. “I hoped they were being looked after,” he told her quietly. “I hoped...”
“That they weren’t all this damaged?” She sighed. “I wish it were true. We do everything we can for them. It’s not enough, but it helps.”
He shook her off and looked around the room, checking every face. Those who had noticed him shied away at his scrutiny, and none of them recognised him. None of them bore a resemblance to Ianto. It was half relief, half not. He turned back to Diane and gestured at the door. “Can we...”
“Of course.” She steered him out onto the corridor and found them a couple of chairs where he could sit down and compose himself again. Her hand rested on his shoulder until he reaised his head to stare at the wall. “He’s not here, Jack. If he’d come through the Rift, I would have recognised him.”
“I know.” He pulled his sleeve up to show her his wriststrap. “I saved the coordinates of the Rift activity from when he disappeared. I hoped that one day I could find someone who could take me back there, so I could save him...”
“Opening the Rift again that close to the sort of activity that Cyrieth uses would have destroyed Cardiff.” Diane closed his hands over his wriststrap and held them there. “I’m sorry, Jack. We’ll do what we can, but... there isn’t really a lot.”
“Yeah. I’m getting that idea.” He rested his head in his hands, unheeding of his wriststrap still clutched in his hand. “Why do I keep hoping?”
“You must have really loved him,” Diane said softly. “I think that’s probably why.” She stood up and caught his elbow to pull him up with her. “You’ve had enough for today. You’ve had enough for a lifetime.”
He went where she guided him, and let his mind drift away to a time when he had more than hope and disappointment.
X~X~X~X
They called him into a meeting a week later, and he could tell from their expressions that he wasn’t like what they were going to say. He sat warily and flicked his gaze between Diane and Hakkan, who had sat at either end of the table. “So I’m guessing this is bad news.”
There was an awkward pause, and Kiki spoke first. He shuffled his notes and avoided looking at Jack. “We’re been taking readings of the Cardiff Rift opening to monitor the situation and, well, the situation is that it’s opening. The Rift is active in Cardiff, and as far as we can tell it’s uncontrolled.”
Gri took over. “The activity levels are increasing steadily. They’re still low at the moment, but if they keep going then the whole city could disappear within a couple of years. That’s no problem, really, we could go over there and install a Rift Moderator to keep it under control, but...”
“We can’t go there,” Kiki finished for him. “As Diane’s probably told you, we can’t return here if the Rift is closed, and we can’t keep the Rift open for as long as it would take to install the equipment. It will be a one way trip.”
He shrugged. “So you can go by another way. Hire a ship and transport everything that way.”
“Jack, it took you nearly a year to get here,” Diane told him gently. “It wouldn’t take much shorter for us to get there, because of the visa regulations and the passage negotiations we’d need to go through to get permission to pass through some of the sectors between here and there. It has to be by Rift.”
“And let me guess, it has to be me?” He felt nausea rising and pushed his seat back to get away. “I lost everything there. I can’t... I can’t go back.”
“I’m sorry, Jack. But it’s the only way to protect Cardiff.”
“No it isn’t. One of you could go through and arrange for a ship to go and pick you up and bring you back. If it’s going to take so long, you’ll be finished and have a team in place by the time it gets there. Or someone could go and stay there, or, or something.” He leaned against the wall as his knees threatened to buckle. “It doesn’t always have to be me.”
“You know Cardiff and the Rift better than anyone,” Hakkan told him, more gently than Jack had thought him capable of. “You are the only person who can restore order to Cardiff. No one else has the same mix of skills as you.”
“It’s always me.” Jack closed his eyes tightly against the sting of tears, shaking his head. “It’s too much.”
“We really are sorry,” Diane whispered. “If there was any other way...”
Jack glared at her and forced his knees to straighten. “I’ll do it. You knew I’d do it, no matter the cost to me. Like every other time.” He left before they could say anything more, and locked himself in his room until they stopped trying to get in.
X~X~X~X
Jack slipped into the staff room and looked around at the expectant faces that looked up at him. They’d fallen silent when he entered, looking variously curious and guilty, and Diane and Raura couldn’t meet his eyes.
He sighed, leaning back against the wall. “I’ll go. So what do I need to do?”
They turned to look at Hakkan, who started making notes in the file on his lap. “We need to find the most stable period possible to minimise the damage, maximise the length of time we can have the Rift open, make it easier to install the Rift modulator at your end... Kiki, can you keep an eye on the readings and do us a prediction for the best time?”
Kiki nodded and looked down at his own file. “It’s looking volatile for the next week, too many fluctuations and too fast - I think it’s still disturbed from that demonstration opening we did...”
“Yeah, that sort of thing,” Hakkan cut across him. “We don’t need to know right now. Ruara, you’re in charge of preparing the equipment to send over - get it ready to roll as soon as possible. Diane, I want you and Jack to find the best location to open the Rift. We need somewhere secure where we can set the Rift modulator up long-term, at least.”
She looked up at Jack and smiled tightly. “How about the Hub? That was secure.”
“Someone blew it up. Not viable any more.”
“Right...” She nodded thoughtfully. “We have a map of Cardiff with the Rift coordiantes. If you can think of somewhere, we can overlay the coordinates no problem. We’ll start that this afternoon.”
“And I’ll do the paperwork.” Hakkan scribbled another note and passed it to Diane, then looked up at Jack. “I’m glad you agreed to do this, Jack.”
He couldn’t say the same, but smiled anyway. “Someone has to. It’s almost always me - why not this time?”
X~X~X~X
Kiki found them a stable period nearly a fortnight after Jack agreed to go back. The equipment was packed, the location chosen, the coordinates set, and the team trained and prepared repeatedly for the rapid work they would need to do. Jack wandered aimlessly between the stacks of boxes and equipment in the store room, runnign his fingers over the labels. He turned a corner and found Diane watching him, sitting on one of the crates. “You wandered off again,” she told him softly. “They sent me to look for you.”
“I just wanted to check it was all ready,” he lied, trailing a finger down one of the labels. “I’m not good at hanging around and waiting.”
“I know.” She jumped off her box and turned to rest her hands on top of it. “We should get this stuff through to the Rift room, ready to go. It’s tomorrow morning, at last. One more sleep.”
“One more nightmare,” he corrected. “Why am I doing this?”
“Because someone has to.” The crate started trundling across the floor under her guidance. “And only you can do it.”
X~X~X~X
“Optimum conditions in five minutes,” Kiki yelled. “Don’t make me come over there.”
“We’re ready, Kiki!” Raura snapped back. “Don’t have a grappy. Just keep an eye on the window we’ve got.”
“You’re got half an hour,” he told them for the third time that morning, glaring over the top of his computer. “Same as every time. You do your job, I’ll do mine.”
“That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you,” Diane muttered, passing the last box of tools across to Jack. “Hakkan, have we got everything ready to go?”
“That’s the last bit. Let’s get it across in five minutes, and that will give us twenty to start getting things set up.” His hand landed on Jack’s shoulder, and he turned him away from the arch frame. “Are you alright, Jack?”
“No, but does that matter?” There were three crates of equipment and two boxes of tools standing at the edge of the platform for the team to shift them across through the window into Cardiff. “I keep going in circles.”
Hakkan squeezed his shoulder and said nothing, leaving him to his thoughts for the last three minutes.
The technicians were gathered around the computers, checking and rechecking the readings and preparing to open the rift. Kiki called out a last warning and everyone who was going across scrambled to their stations, each of thembehind a crate. Jack rested his hads on top of the crate in front of him and kicked the brakes off whilst the lights began to wind up the arch, growing in speed and intensity. As soon as the window was stable, Hakkan pushed his crate forwards and the others followed.
They’d opened the window into an empty warehouse that Torchwood owned. It was in the middle of the new developments in the docks area, standing alone and broken amongst new developments and renovated buildings. Jack had agreed to their using it partly because of how appropriate it felt. The wind whistled through broken windows, and there were puddles of standing water all across the concrete floor.
He stepped back to watch them set up their Rift modulator. It would draw its power from the Rift, enough to power the whole building if they needed it to. There were monitors, a Rift sphere that showed the power flowing through the Rift at any one time and indicated the direction of flow, and a sub-etheric resonator - not for sniffing. He choked and sat on the edge of one of the empty crates with his hands between his knees until Kiki’s voice called through the doorway.
Hakkan stepped back adn wiped his hands on his tunic. “It’s ready.” He turned to Jack and smiled. “The Rift is all yours once more.”
Jack smiled bittery and saluted them. “I guess this is goodbye, then.”
Diane looked at him once and turned to Hakkan. “I’m staying. Throw my stuff through next time it’s stable.” She stood on her toes to whisper something in his ear and then pushed him towards the doorway. “Now go, before you get trapped here.”
He smiled knowingly. “Welcome home. We’ll see you when we can. You’re always welcome back.”
“I know. Go!”
They stepped through the archway and stood on the other side, waving until the window closed and left them behind. Jack turned away when they were gone and looked around the desolate space, back in the last place he'd wanted to be. Wind rattled the roof, and something deeper and colder than that cut him to the bone.
"So..." Diane said with blatantly false cheer. "To work, then?"
"Yeah." He sighed. "Back to work."
