Fic: The Sea of Sleep

[azn_jack_fiend]

Title: The Sea of Sleep
Author: azn_jack_fiend
Characters/Pairings: Jack, Alison, Miles (mainly Jack/Alison), OCs
Rating: NC-17 for brief explicit sex, brief explicit violence
Warnings/Spoilers: spoilers for The House That Jack Built tie-in novel
Total Length: ~8k words
Categories: backstory
Summary: Alison's death in 1906 marked the beginning of the bad days at Jackson Leaves. But sideways, in the reconstructed timeline, if Jack saved her, what has he saved her for?
Disclaimer: Does not belong to me.
A/N: Written for rm in the retconbookwrite exchange. I self-indulgently packed this story full of my favorite Edwardian pulp, but our interests might overlap enough for this fic to be a good gift. Thank you very much to heddychaa (beta) and aeshna_uk (beta/britpick/historypick).

Relevant Book Synopsis: Most of the book is set with the Jack, Ianto and Gwen team post-Exit Wounds, but there are also extensive flashbacks to 1906, and Alison and Miles are the book characters from that period. Jack has bought a house named "Jackson Leaves" and has been having separate affairs there with both Alison and Miles, who end up marrying each other (yes, this is a huge weird coincidence). In the original timeline, Miles drowns Alison after their wedding, because when he sees Jack at the wedding, he panics, and doesn't want Alison to discover that he's been having an affair with Jack. He might not have gone to the extreme of killing her if not for the effects of Jack's original 1906 haunted house, which was inhabited by malevolent extradimensional beings. They influenced homicidal or suicidal thoughts, but Miles was probably kind of a dick anyway... Alison seemed like a much more interesting character.

Anyway, Jack stops the haunting in 2009 by going back in time and blowing up the house before it was built, killing the beings by trapping them and forcing them to eat themselves, saving the universe, and, as a side effect, saving Alison. All we know of the reconstructed timeline is that she dies much later, of old age, and has at least one child, named Gordon; Jack meets Gordon in a rest home for a brief period at the very end of the book. So in my fic, I'm answering the question of what happened to Alison in the reconstructed timeline, and secondarily, what happened to Jack for the brief amount of time he was in the same reconstructed timeline, which is a period of time that he doesn't remember at all in the present.  Since he was at the epicenter of the timeline shift, he only remembers the original timeline, in which Alison drowned.

The image of Alison drowning was very strong, and I wanted to carry over a lot of the water imagery into the fic.  The book also had a major sub-theme of violence against women (the present-day owner of Jackson Leaves was dealing with an episode of abuse by her husband); I thought the author handled the theme in an affecting but subtle way, and I wanted to work with that, as well.

~~~

She and I; and nothing, save the silent, spacious void to see us; and only the quiet waters of the Sea of Sleep to hear us.
— William Hope Hodgson

~~~

1906

Alison had waited too long to look Miles in the face. All the tricks of twilight lay between them now, and the River Ely was at her back. He spread his arms.

Miles was raging with fear, that much she knew. Perhaps he would strike her. That might be for the best. She would then cry, and he would lose a measure of his fear in the contemplation of her weakness, and they would come to a silent understanding, and carry on with things. She raised her hands up before her face and laced her fingers together, hoping that their honeymoon departure, however hellish, at least would not involve the explaining away of bruises.

He scarcely moved. Perhaps she misjudged him, and he meant to embrace her.

She spoke softly, very softly, through her fingers. "Darling, shall we go home?"

He came rushing forward, and his arms closed around her like a trap springing shut, and he bore her down into the dark water.

I will not allow this to happen, thought Alison in a determined fashion as she kicked against her waterlogged skirts and fought for air. The world loved her, desired her to live, and knew her will. It could not be otherwise.

His arms were too strong.

She drowned in raw dragging stages, lungs screaming and spasming, mind beating itself against the boundaries of an ever-tightening circle.

Near the end, the darkness was dispelled by a light in the water: not the white light of angels, but a murky green light that shimmered upwards towards her, a light that moved thicker and slower than the water itself. And what it showed her was Jack Harkness at the bottom of the river. Strange, for aside from being improbably upright and undrowned, his hair was longer than the day before, and a stricken look of deep regret twisted his handsome face; so strange, but there he was, her Jack that she'd sent away, back to save her. He reached up and grasped her hand; the light faded and the circle tightened around her throat.

After Miles released his grip and abandoned her, she floated downriver toward the bay. She had all the time in the world now. They found her at dawn near Penarth Road and wrestled her out of the river with the aid of a gaff hook, her long brown hair clotted grey from factory effluent. The funeral was held closed-casket, and when Miles went to the gallows a few months later, he did not, for obvious reasons, join her in the family plot. There she rested for a geologic age, until the earth swallowed her bones, and the earth in turn was swallowed by a new rising sea.

~~~

Jack's new house felt like no house at all, bare as it was. The cream-colored walls and spacious rooms were hallmarks of the modern style, Alison knew; if they were layered, even lightly, with rugs and pictures and mementos, they would draw together to form a quite respectable home, not the cavernous way station which the house currently resembled. A way station, or perhaps a witch house... at any rate, having an imaginative turn of mind, she could easily fantasize that the mattress sprawled at a rough angle in the middle of the bedroom was their raft, and the vast empty expanse of dark brown parquet the pattern of waves on which they drifted.

True, the house needed a woman's touch, along with a bed-frame, but Alison had a practical turn of mind as well, and resolved to think no more along any line that led to marriage, or rather, the conspicuous absence of its prospect. It was not a hard resolution to follow: to think only of the present while lying in Jack's arms. He lay still now. But as she traced the long, smooth line of his forearm, he stirred, and showed certain signs of wanting to resume their play.

"Have you brought no other sheets, Jack? You do make a mess of them," she chided. He never spent inside her. It was a measure against childbirth and a sign of a considerate lover, but it often led to a great need for fresh sheets in the aftermath, and she saw none in the room.

"I hadn't thought of that," he confessed. Then he crooked his head away from her and grinned, lifting one eyebrow slightly; he must be calculating some new and entirely wicked idea, she thought, as her pulse began to race and the heat again rose up inside her.

"I have just the answer," he said, and trailed his forefinger appreciatively along her lower lip. "I could move you down and come in your mouth."

She felt herself blushing, and turned her eyes away. "Jack!"

"Try it once? Then tell me if you like it," he offered.

She already knew she would say yes. It was in the weightless way he put the question, neither begging nor demanding.

"Why should I like it?" she asked in all sincerity.

"Why? Why not? I like it... very much," he said, and kissed her lightly, and pressed her body closer under the sheets, matching her heat with his own. "Maybe because it's the taste of desire. And taking a man's cock in your mouth, knowing how it makes him feel, that's good, too." She had thought nothing Jack could say would surprise her anymore, but she still gasped.

"Made you open your mouth," he said with a delighted smile. "You're shocked. Shocked! What else can I say to keep your mouth open like that? Can you lick your lips for me, Alison? That's right. So beautiful. Closer..."

He covered her at a perfect distance, resting all his weight on his elbows. She sang little half-crying noises while he filled her... her cunt, oh God... with the length of his shaft, their fitting together impossibly tight. The sweet heavy pleasure of it sank downwards, and soon her legs shivered as she struggled feverishly to spread them wider and twine them around his own.

"More?" he asked, though he was already fully pinning her.

"Please... Jack— "

Of the several ways he terrified her, this was not one.

He ground his hips into hers, moving in tight, quick circles, making her feel him everywhere inside her. He reached down with his right hand and rocked her, almost screaming, into that place where everything went black, and when she came back, fucked her jolting into the mattress; and then, finally, when he pulled from her with a raw-edged groan and guided her down and had her suck and swallow and lick him clean, she found she liked it very much indeed.

~~~

Later in the night, Jack offered to go downstairs to fetch a lamp, but the light of the electric chandelier suited Alison well enough.

"Where shall I begin to read?" she asked.

He settled in beside her, tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear. "Anywhere but the start. I already tried. Fascinating idea, but the style's too roundabout."

She opened the book at random. "When the Green of some future History of the English People comes to review our times, he will, from his standpoint of comfort and convenience, find the present streets of London quite or even more incredibly unpleasant than are the filthy kennels, the mudholes and darkness of the streets of the seventeenth century to our enlightened minds. He will echo our question, 'Why did people stand it?'" How novel! I have never imagined such a point of view, thought Alison. "He will be struck first of all by the omnipresence of mud, filthy mud, churned up by hoofs and wheels under the inclement skies..."

She paused to cast a fond glance at Jack, and could not but notice his discontented frown. "Another part, perhaps?"

"Please, Alison."

She flipped forward an inch. "A virile man, though he, too, is subject to accidents, may, upon most points, still hope to plan and determine his life; the life of a woman is all accident. Normally, she lives in relation to some specific man, and until that man is indicated her preparation for life must be of the most tentative sort. She lives, going nowhere, like a cabman on the crawl..."

Now it was her turn to sigh and frown. "Too roundabout for my taste, as well. He promises to paint a picture of life a hundred years from now, yet speaks only of the present."

"Goddamn it, I was expecting flying horseless carriages," grumbled Jack.

He roused himself, lifted the Anticipations of Wells from her hands and returned it to the basket beside the mattress. As a replacement, he chose a pulp magazine. A sea serpent with fiery eyes coiled on its cover, a hapless group of sailors cringing underneath its fangs.

"Tally ho, this looks like a ripping great yarn," pronounced Jack in his best toff, which was to say, not very good at all. She choked off a giggle and turned it into a tsk.

The story of the sea serpent, "A Tropical Horror," thrilled them every bit as much as the cover promised. Alison read at a rapid pace, and punctuated the most horrible moments (the serpent's tongue was a hollow spike for sucking blood) by hushing her voice and grabbing at Jack in a theatrical fashion, to see if she might startle him and make him laugh.

Once she finished the story of the poor young sailor, the magazine slipped from her fingers, and Jack's warm hands smoothed the sheets over her shoulders as she drifted off to sleep.

~~~

Mr. Midway never looked more like a whiskered vulture than when he delivered warnings against bill-dodging customers. "Mrs. Smith owes us one pound, ten and six, and she shan't have her gown until she pays at least the pound," he said, and pursed his lips suspiciously at Alison. "If she calls on us while I'm out, do not gossip. Do not negotiate. Tell her to return and speak only with me. Full stop!"

Alison nodded, quashing her familiar irritation at being spoken to thus, since she had never given him any cause at all to doubt her work. Satisfied to some degree, her employer grabbed his umbrella and left the shop for his lunch appointment. She felt a surge of relief as the door creaked shut behind him and she was finally, blessedly, alone. She moved to the edge of the counter and began smoothing and sorting scraps of silk to the music of the soft rain, wishing she could order her thoughts in much the same way.

Her employer’s judgment of her female virtue was only one of many dangers; she had awakened to the heart-stopping realization that she was wholly surrounded by them.

Why can't I have a fine thing? Oh, you are still a child, Alison. Sheer and dark smoky blue. My reputation is not yet ruined... not yet. Silvery, rough and ragged along one edge. He has never lied to me, or, when he lied, he knew that I knew they were lies. Somewhere between peach and orange, also rough. I would do almost anything rather than go into service like mother. Green slippery satin. Captain's Court, the seven sleepers' den, the Sargasso Sea. Bronze taffeta. I believe he's a spy, and have almost stopped believing he's an American. Creamy white and very smooth but marked with a grey smudge. The choice was already made for me, there is nothing left but the timing, but I will pretend it's mine, as if I'm free.

All sorted and wrapped now, except for a thin strip of crumpled gold-and-cocoa brocade, probably too torn and frayed to be of any further use. Alison ran her hands back and forth over the pattern, waiting.

The next time the door opened, it was a solicitor of funeral insurance, easily discouraged, and then after him, a thin woman in a lumpy dress who startled at the prices and slipped right back out the door with an apologetic look, and then there was Jack, whistling a tune. He was dressed as a civilian and looked smart in a brown herringbone Norfolk suit, no doubt with a pistol hidden under the jacket.

"I've got sunshine, on a cloudy day. That's you, sweetheart. Let's talk about the weekend. Do we have a few minutes before the boss gets back?"

Alison stared down at the strip of brocade under her fingers. The pattern was of some sort of animal, but only half the body was visible, the rest torn away. "I found out yesterday that Mr. Midway has just bought a house across the street from yours, Jack. If he should ever see me..."

She could not look at his face, but from the edge of her vision, she saw Jack rest his arms on the counter and lean towards her.

"That's terrible luck," she heard Jack say. "And I'd just bought a bed-frame and a gramophone. I thought we could practice dancing on the vertical for a change. But there's always that place on Park Street with the private room..."

He trailed off.

The animal could be a lion, a dog, a dragon. She'd never know. She was making a mess of things with her obstinate silence, but was there ever a graceful way to end a love affair? She hoped very much that Jack would not reach out and touch her chin and turn her face to meet his eyes. Or that he would.

"Is there anything you need to tell me?" asked Jack, quietly.

"I'll — you — I can't go on. I'm sorry," she managed to whisper. "Goodbye."

He pressed his right hand on top of hers, not too hard, just enough to feel his warmth, and then slowly drew it away.

"Goodbye, sunshine," he said.

She heard the sound of his boots, then the sound of the door opening and closing, which meant she was safe to cry for a little while. After she had measured that while, she held the strip of cloth against her burning eyelids and tried her best to press away the ache of tears.

~~~

"Alison! Alison! Do get out of bed, or you won't have time to put up your hair." Alison groaned and buried her face deeper in the pillow, but Emma, horribly persistent, began tugging at her shoulder. Alison surrendered and raised herself out of her narrow bed, a dull anger at her cousin beating at the back of her throat, but as she rubbed her eyes, she felt ashamed of it, and it vanished.

Emma sat back down directly across from her, on her own narrow bed, and stared at Alison with some concern. "You've had the blue devils for a week now. Won't you tell me what happened?"

Alison began to brush her hair. Emma had a good head and was not one for telling secrets, but she was also seven years younger, and understood much less of things between men and women than she thought she did.

"I had a... suitor. We've ended. Not as badly as we could have ended, but still — dear, don't ask me to talk more. I'm resolved to be cheerfuller company today."

"Was it Miles?" asked Emma, then clapped her hands over her mouth. "No more, no more, I swear," she muffled.

Alison shook her head and smiled a little ruefully. Miles was her single prospect for marriage now, and he seemed a good one — the wholesaler's son, a good career in business ahead of him, broad-shouldered and well-featured — but he was also tied to Cardiff, and a great urge to leave this town had suddenly taken her over. By the end of this year, she thought. I must look hard, and not wait too long, or I will lose my chance forever.

As soon as Alison arranged herself, Emma chivvied her to a fair to benefit the Home for Incurables. Throughout the festivities, Alison succeeded at maintaining a not-too-grimly-cheerful smile. Emma was happy at that, and ate a big piece of fruitcake, but it disagreed with her, or perhaps her corset was laced too tight, and she began sucking in her breath and ominously clutching at her stomach just as the sack race was about to begin. Alison found her a resting spot on a flat rock a little uphill from the event, which proved to be already occupied by a thin young man named Gavin Powell, who was carrying a cup of punch, which he kindly offered to Emma.

Emma's stomach quieted. Introductions were made in more detail, and Gavin turned out to be a distant cousin of their closest greengrocer.

Alison noticed he was also carrying a sketchpad. "May we see your drawings?" she inquired.

He opened the pad, fingers tripping on the page and almost tearing it. They looked upon a fantastical animal. The head was rendered in beautiful detail, but the musculature of the body was oddly angular, and the legs were not to any sort of proportion. "It's a griffin," said Gavin in a burst of pride. "My ambition is to illustrate books for a career."

Alison examined him more closely. He was shorter than her, more than a few years younger, and a bit sunken-chested. Otherwise, he had a pleasant face, with a straight nose and a nice strong brow, the dark hair of the Welsh and eyes that might be hazel, though he was casting them around so widely it was almost impossible to tell their color. She sensed that being an artist, he must have passion burning inside of him, an amorphous passion like a lump of molten ore. She suddenly felt less coldly calculating and, thus, less empty inside her own skin.

"What a wonderful griffin!" remarked Alison. "Do you think you'll embark on your career in Cardiff, or will you go to London?"

~~~

When Alison gave her notice at the shop, Mr. Midway had the gall to assume that he would be the one to give her away at the altar. "My uncle will have that honour," she said, biting back a burning desire to continue on with sharper words, tyrannical, delusional and petty being the mildest.

Alison and Emma rode to the wedding in a hansom cab. Emma remarked at how the snow matched her dress and seemed to make the world all new again. It was a commonplace thought, but Alison loved her sweetness and sense of wonder, and squeezed her hand, and said that Emma's new day would come soon enough.

Gavin certainly did not have the funds for a honeymoon in the French Riviera, or else they would have waited for the summer. She was in perfect accord that whatever they had between them should be set aside for London. A week's holiday at a cozy cottage in Swansea would suffice.

Gavin was somewhat confused and dejected after their first night together in that cottage, so Alison explained her girlhood riding accident, and how her dear departed parents had consoled her afterwards, saying that men understood these things; that it was a well-known wisdom. Gavin brightened. The next night, their relations improved.

London had greasy smoking skies and filthy creeping mud and was endlessly marvelous.

Gavin secured a job at Morrison & Mullen Publishing in their catalogue division, drawing illustrations of tools and toys and boots and hats. Alison found them a flat in Holborn that was spacious for the price. It jutted up against a raucous music hall, but they were both deep sleepers. In the quietest mornings, if she walked several hundred feet southwards, the liquid sounds of the Thames would call to her.

She carried her pregnancy well. If her hopes came true, she would take after her aunt, and bear children with workmanlike aplomb, though perhaps not quite so rapidly (Emma was one of eleven). Alison had seen and heard her own mother die in childbirth, and die very badly, when Alison was nineteen. Sometimes she would lightly pencil these memories of ages, years and fractions in the margins of old newspapers, roll them over in her mind, and follow them, in even more hesitant hand, with her own ideal maths: four children, two girls and two boys, two years apart, all of them living.

They would often spend evenings together at the dinner table, Alison embroidering, and Gavin drawing his figures, for he wanted to move up to books at Morrison & Mullen. She set aside some of her work for future children but sold most of it to a seamstress she had met one day in Covent Garden.

The nights grew colder. The singing from the music hall kept on, always. I love you truly, truly dear, life with its sorrow, life with its tear, fades into dreams when I feel you are near, for I love you truly, truly dear.

Two cousins came to London to prepare for her lying-in, Emma from Cardiff and Mary from Newport. A midwife, recommended to her by Mr. Morrison's wife, delivered the child with brisk confidence. It was a painful, bloody mess, but it was over with soon enough, and her beautiful little prune-wrinkled boy was a proper reward. They named him Edward, after Gavin's brother.

Alison demanded to be let back on her feet after the first week. Holding her son, she walked out of the door, then down the stairs with a cousin poised nervously at each arm, stopping at the doorway of their flat, where she took a deep breath, and smiled, and lectured to Edward, "This is London." The life of the street rushed by in a brilliant uncaring swarm.

~~~

She was expecting again by next spring, sooner than she would have liked. Nevertheless, it was a comfort that Edward would have a playmate near his age, almost a twin.

Gavin won a promotion, and was charged with bookkeeping for a substantial portion of the catalogue division. It was not the move to book illustration that he desired, though it still pleased them both. Alison could afford to spend less time embroidering after dinner; instead, she often read a book next to Gavin, or chatted with the neighbors.

The walls of their flat must have been dark green for decades. Alison had them painted cream with gold trim and brightened the dining room with prints of the sunrise over the Thames.

The air grew colder and smokier again as her time approached. Emma came, just Emma this time, and helped wonderfully with Edward and the cleaning. Gavin said that she could choose the name if the child was a girl, and "Melissa" immediately caught her fancy.

The same midwife attended, but something wrong happened inside Alison, and her baby girl was born dead. She remembered very little of it all.

The neighbors filed by her bed to console her. She wished she could tell them to save their words, because what was there to mourn? Melissa had only ever existed as a burdensome phantom, or a bad fairy. Even after she was buried, she was nothing but trouble. Alison lay sick with some sort of infection, so Emma could not return to Cardiff; Gavin resented that Alison was not yet up and about and cooking for him, and poor Edward cried and cried and cried.

The doctor recommended bed rest and copious amounts of laudanum. But Alison had always prided herself on her powers of perception, and as its price for relief, the drug stole those away. Emma's long thin face would randomly squash itself into a moon-like roundness, and sparkling snowflakes flew out of people's mouths whenever they opened their lips.

She halved her dose and was at least able to think and speak again, if more slowly than she would have wanted. "Bring me some more books," she begged of Emma. "No comedies of manners or romances or dreary domestic tragedies. Any manner of weird adventure will do." She even made Emma promise to buy her pulps if she could find nothing else suitable.

Of Emma's purchases, the one that made the strongest impression was a tale of haunting called The House on the Borderland. It was weird beyond all measure of weirdness, for the traditional ghosts had all been replaced by inexplicable cosmic forces. The narrator was assuredly dead by the end of the book, but how he had died (eaten alive by a fungus, or savaged by the snuffling pig-things) and whether his soul would survive and rejoin his lost love in the Sea of Sleep, or return to the future when the earth had grown cold... it all remained shrouded in mystery. The man had stubbornly chosen his fate, so Alison did not sympathize much on his behalf, but felt saddest for his brave dog Pepper, who did not deserve to fall into bones and dust when time sped up and the sun began racing around the earth like a shiny ribbon.

At night, the laudanum locked her in half-sleep, then stirred her paralyzed body with overlapping waves of nausea and giddiness. Alison often entered the world of the book while in that state. Sometimes she had her own body, and sometimes she was a man, feeling more powerful and heavier between her legs, while at the same time, completely herself. She would grab her rifle, whistle her dog to her side and go hunting for the source of the waters and the secret of the house.

A snuffling pig-thing charged at her. She shot it down, and it was Mr. Midway. He stirred feebly, still, so she gripped hard and beat in his face with the butt of her rifle, screaming at him that he was not her father, how dare he, and he made her give up her fine thing. She pounded his head into gobbets of deliquescent pink jelly that soaked down into the cracks of the corridor, awakening creatures that began burrowing up through the ground towards her, vast larvae; the walls were melting like candle wax. And then, for no apparent reason, she spat out a mouthful of thick blood, burst from her skin, and died.

She woke in the chamber of racing time, and died again, like Pepper, flesh drying and shrinking around her bones, feeling the dust of her body tickle through naked eye sockets and spill out into the cold clear air.

The better dream came when she found the Sea of Sleep. She had no body at all, nor life, but drifted like a will-o'-the-wisp through time itself. The endless sea was calm, so calm. The wave-less surface, suffused with faint light, gently blanketed a layer of deeper darkness.

After a while, a paler square shimmered into focus on the face of the water: it was a floating mattress. On that strange ship there slept Jack Harkness, embodied, normal, and serene, white sheets gathered at his waist, fine strong arms lying palms down on either side. She thought to brush the soft curves of his eyelids, to see his blue eyes full of laughter once more, to rescue him, to draw him up from the Sea — was this why she had set forth from the house with her gun and her dog? No, that was someone else, and God how it hurt, but she had already made her choice.

It was some solace to know that her Jack was not suffering, merely resting, here at the quiet conclusion of the universe.

The cramps from her twisted womb died down, and she tapered off the laudanum, though the lack of it made her sicker for a while. The dreams decreased in dynamism; they returned to their previous pattern, being that of images from daily life recombined in a nonsensical, fairly tedious fashion.

~~~

Alison had always accepted that men and women lived in different worlds. With Gavin, the overlap of their worlds had been pleasant, but after her illness, it was no longer so. She desperately wanted to forget his looks of contempt at her weakness, his squeamishness about the blood, or how he had edged Edward away with his boot when Edward had crawled to him for comfort. If Gavin would only soften enough to let her forget... instead, he began to spend most of his evenings away from the flat, and snapped at her when he returned.

Their relations became utterly mechanical, then hateful.

She missed Emma. They wrote to each other often.

For her third pregnancy, Gavin refused any visitors. "I'll hire the Richards girl from upstairs to watch you for a week," he said. "I've no desire to keep supporting your whinging relatives."

Alison was not a superstitious woman, and she did love the name, so her new baby daughter became Melissa-that-lived. Edward was sweet with her, stroked her tiny dark wisps of hair, and learned how to shout "Sissy".

Alison tiptoed through the next two years, learning the measure of the strange man her husband had grown into. Their life was not wholly bad. He stopped disbursing household funds with any consistency, but she returned to embroidery and made up much of the difference. She had a little of her own time during midday, and kept the children out of his way at night.

Gavin often cursed Mr. Morrison, though from what Alison knew, he was not at all a harsh man, nothing like Mr. Midway, and perhaps kinder to his employees than he should be. But Gavin had wanted to illustrate a penny dream book, and had all sorts of sketches done, and Mr. Morrison had denied his case, so instead of drawing treasure chests and princes and dragons he must stay drawing tools and toys and boots and hats and looking after the catalogue accounts.

One day Gavin grabbed her arm and threw her against the cupboard. Then, another day, again — though he never struck her in the face.

One day she saw Edward push Melissa down in much the same way.

Alison realized that she could not doze away the rest of their lives; the time had come for some sort of action. She sharpened her eyes and began to go through Gavin's papers while he was gone during the day, and found, at first to her dismay, many, many racing tickets, and some curious double bookkeeping notations jotted down on the back of a bill of lading.

She composed a letter, laboring over every curl of the pen, tracing the words over and over again, and carefully burning all the drafts.

Dear Messrs. Morrison & Mullen, Powell owes me and will not pay so I am forced to this. Your man is a thief and has been rooking you for a year. Look into the name of Bert Avery, he took sick and went away to York but he is still on your books as a part-timer and his salary goes to Powell. I am afraid of him so must remain nameless, he told me once when he was drunk he killed a man who pressed him too hard on gambling debts and buried him in the lot behind the Sun in Splendour Inn in St. Pancras.

The second letter was the exact copy of the first, with one line added above:

Posted this letter today. Run.

Alison had thought long and hard about the dead body, but she did not want Gavin sent to prison, where she would have the tiresome duty of bringing him food and communicating with solicitors and anxious relatives, and her children would have the shame of a convict father. She wanted him gone. She knew only that the Inn had an evil reputation, and there might be human bones there, and there might not, but the mention would certainly strike the proper note of panic in Gavin.

When she took the first letter to the pillar box, her gloved hand trembled in fear that a Holmesian detective would see through the artifice of the masculine handwriting, but she forced herself to let the envelope slip into the stomach of the thing.

She gave Gavin the second sealed envelope when he returned from work. "This was left under the door," she told him, and did not meet his eyes, as she was accustomed not to.

Later that night, he walked briskly out the door, carrying a valise. He did not look back, even as Edward called out "Da!" to him, and Alison imagined that his face would be very pale.

Gavin would have taken all the money, so the end of London approached. Alison was only a little sad at that, because the night before, she had dreamt of the cries of the seagulls over the Cardiff docks.

There was singing that night from the hall, as always. Oh! I do like to be beside the seaside, I do like to be beside the sea! I do like to stroll upon the Prom, Prom, Prom! Where the brass bands play: "Tiddely-om-pom-pom!"

~~~

Her uncle took Alison back as graciously as she could have hoped. She and Emma returned to sharing the same attic room, and her children slept stacked in the closet. They still thrived.

What little money she could earn, she sent to a solicitor in London. The divorce was a wretchedly complicated affair. They must prove not only desertion, but adultery; the law was quite clear on that account.

Gavin's parents refused to visit at Christmas, blaming her for not defending his reputation, which was laughable in a grim sort of way. Apparently he had gone to New York City, or maybe Cuba. He did not write to her.

Her cousin Evan had joined the Army while she was in London. She soon met the sergeant of his platoon, a large, amiable, stiff-mustached man with the melodic name of Gordon Griffiths. To her surprise, he began paying court to her, not at all put off by her strange, liminal social position.

"I'm at loose ends without a wife," he bluntly confessed as they were strolling through Victoria Park one afternoon. "Jenny took charge of everything. She's been buried five years, I can't seem to hold on to my pay, and I miss having someone waiting for me at home. You're a keen woman, Alison, and you have a damn pretty figure, pardon me."

Not the most romantic of proposals, true, but that was of no moment at this stage in her life. Sergeant Gordon had other commendable qualities; or rather, his flaws were such that they did not overshadow his qualities. He liked his drink, but overindulgence merely turned him slow and sleepy. He could be quick to anger, but it passed just as quickly, and he never spoke of old grudges. His men seemed to respect him. He displayed vast reserves of patience during games of soldiering with Edward. The fact that he was already in his forties encouraged her to believe that he would never grow into something unrecognizable; he was cooked in the fires of the Boer War, set in his ways, and almost an old soldier.

Though Gordon was nothing at all like Jack, she wondered in passing: would Jack, too, change into someone different, not so foreign, and who would care for him when he grew older?

She told Gordon she would think on it.

The next week, she met Gordon by the doorway of her uncle's house. Edward and Melissa ran screaming to her of some terrible injustice perpetrated by the children next door, but they forgot what it was and scrambled away when the same children called them over to play with marbles. Amidst all the chaos, Gordon waited, pensively tugging at his mustache.

"I should say yes to you if I were free," began Alison. She twisted the corner of her apron in one hand, embarrassed. "I believe you're a good man," she continued after a long pause, for lack of anything better to say, though it was essentially true. "Will you help me get my divorce? There's only one thing lacking. The solicitor dances around it, and I cannot arrange it myself."

After she managed to explain, Gordon brightened, and said it could be done in a week. He sent one of his men to London to find a likely prostitute, and paid her a generous sum to swear in court that she had been Gavin Powell's mistress.

When the divorce came through later that year, Alison became Mrs. Griffiths, and they moved into a neat little brick house in Grangetown. She discovered several more of his flaws, but they were all fairly minor ones, such as a habit of bursting into the South Wales Borderers regimental song at unlikely bedtime moments.

When the war approached, she knew that Gordon would be sent over the sea. Fortunately, there was the matter of his age... surely they would discharge him, or move him to a training position, before any serious combat?

~~~

Melissa sniffled, on the verge of tears, and Edward kicked at the ground. Billy the seal refused to come out of the pond at Victoria Park.

"Keep calling his name," advised Alison. "But don't throw your chocolates into the pool unless he's ready, or they'll be wasted."

"Yes, Mummy," said Edward. Two spots of red color rode high on his cheeks, and his breath frosted in the air. He beckoned Melissa over to the railing around the pond.

Alison sat with Emma on a bench halfway between the pond and the sere, winter-barren garden. She fumbled on opening her new book, and grew so impatient that she stripped off her gloves to get at the right page, regard for cold fingers clean forgotten due to the excitement of the story.

The great tails of the plant men lashed with tremendous power about us as they charged from various directions or sprang with the agility of greyhounds above our heads; but every attack met a gleaming blade in sword hands that had been reputed for twenty years the best that Mars ever had known; for Tars Tarkas and John Carter were names that the fighting men of the world of warriors loved best to speak.

"Alison, do you think it's wrong not to want to have your own children?" asked Emma. Alison groaned silently to be dragged back from Barsoom, but Emma deserved a thoughtful answer to a thoughtful question. She closed the book.

"I'm sure you've considered such common arguments as God's will, the dictates of womanly feeling, the continuation of the species, and so on, and so on," said Alison. "It all depends on the circumstances, I suppose. I've often thought, on the most practical level, that we have children as a sort of insurance policy against dying alone."

Emma nodded in acknowledgement. "You know, they've stopped pressuring me. There are few enough men left that they understand I've no chance at all. And I'm... glad. No matter what the future holds."

"Then I am glad, too," said Alison, and squeezed her hand.

Emma suddenly pointed. "Oh my. Look over there. On that bench by the oak tree, could that be your Miles?"

"I believe it is. I shall say hello." She left her book behind (turning the lurid cover face down) and put her gloves back on as she walked toward the figure, who was wearing a nicely cut blue overcoat and a black cap and was most definitely Miles, and still handsome, except that his nose had gotten just a touch bulgy and reddish.

"How do you do, Miles," she said, as she stood in front of him. "It's been such a long while, hasn't it?"

He looked up at her with a distant smile. "Alison... yes. Ten years or more."

"Well, I've been to London and back. I had two children with my first husband in London, Edward and Melissa — they are at the pond over there — and then a daughter with my second, but she died of the influenza earlier this year. I shall soon have another..." she said, hand wavering, ultimately deciding not to touch her roundness to illustrate those words, as Miles' cast of face was beginning to make her feel ill at ease.

He offered no comment.

"My second husband died at the Marne, a few months before the armistice," she forged on, "along with one of my cousins."

He sighed. She did not ask him how he had spent his war, waiting to see if he would offer, but he remained silent. She would try one more topic.

"Do you ever see Captain Jack Harkness?" she asked.

"Who? No!" Miles glared at her, thrown into animation as if by an electric siren.

"Oh, I had wondered — I saw you taking lunch with him one day, from the shop window and I... I thought you might have remembered him. An American. But that was very long ago. I should see to my children now. Have a good afternoon, Miles." Alison bobbed her head, gave him a wide and diplomatic smile, then hurried back to Emma.

"Will you see him again?" asked Emma, looking up from her own book, a Galsworthy with a quite respectable cover.

"Goodness, no. I'll marry again, but I'm in no hurry now, not with my widow's pension. And... he was rather sour."

She saw that more children had come to join Edward and Melissa, and cries of "Billy!" rang from all around the pond. A dark form surfaced; there was a plaintive bark and a splashing of chocolates.

Alison imagined that Billy must miss the sea terribly, being captured, yet so close, close enough to smell the salt in the air when the wind blew the right way. How the sea would call to him... she had never even swum in the sea, and it still called to her. All she ever was and would be, all the stories she loved, formed and fell apart in that tidal yearning. Back to the beginning, back to the water.

She picked up the book and continued her story.

~~~

1906

Jack remembered when he could call up the dataspheres of a thousand planets, when he could run search programs so sophisticated that flirting with them brought cleaner results. The opportunities for media entertainment were a lot more limited nowadays. He'd been to see a few of the first movies, basic stuff, and really, watching the audience go bug-eyed was absolutely the best part.

He scuffed his boots over the cobbles as he walked, not in any hurry to go home. In fact, he had to fight an impulse to turn around, go back to the Hub, spend a few more hours messing around with the latest artefact.

It was too bad about Alison. The memory of the colour of her eyes was already fading, but her voice... contralto, was it called? Stunning. Still vivid. The absence sawed at him, at night, in the too-quiet bedroom.

When he'd bought the house, he'd taken Alison there, showed her the plaque with that ridiculous, pretentious name — Earl's Court — that had caught his attention in the first place. At her suggestion, at her laughter, he'd climbed up on a bucket and scrawled a correction to "Captain's Court" with a lump of coal. The name only lasted until the next rain. Buying the house was an awful idea, anyway. His next place should be smaller, maybe high on a hill somewhere.

He stopped for a second and took a deep breath, not fighting an impulse so much as letting it wash over him and away. There was no good reason to go get her back, to tie her to trouble.

Then he walked a mile thinking of nothing, passing by shadowy houses, just looking up at the stars every once in a while; still bright, though fainter with every decade of Cardiff's advancing light.

The best times were when he could tell himself, keep your head down, do a good job, find your fun where you can, take it day by day, and before you know it, he'll be swinging by to pick you up.

This wasn't the best of times. It was the other kind, when he might as well be lying face-up at the bottom of a deep hole with the twentieth century stomping on his throat over and over again. With hobnail boots on. When did they stop using hobnail boots? Fuck, they hadn't even invented penicillin yet.

He definitely needed company tonight. Miles? He grinned a little, thinking about how far Miles liked to let go. But afterwards, he wasn't any good. He'd either skulk off, or glower while drinking himself into a stupor, then stagger off. Jack understood why, but it still wasn't very complimentary. Or entertaining.

He turned right, towards a place he knew down by the docks. He could find a sailor there. Tall, dark, handsome, clean-smelling... well, he might have to settle on clean-smelling. Take him back to the house and ask him for sea stories. Jack doubted his hypothetical hook-up would need much persuasion, though persuasion could be fun. Sailors liked to tell stories.

The sea was their space and time, and it might as well be his, by now.

He passed a familiar landmark, the gap in the row of houses where some temporal terrorist had bizarrely decided to bomb a foundation. Another house's bones were already rising from a fresh foundation. By next year, the gap would be gone.

The gap inverted, flipped negative space into positive, became an obtrusive presence in a row of absences; in the second Jack took to decide this was more than a trick of the light, the new translucent surreality exploded in his face, violent and soundless.

The house in front of him was complete, but dying; there were rats in the walls, and he could hear them eating each other, faint muffled crunching. The night air thickened into water and the sick green moonlight whorled down through the water like paint. He reached up through the spill of light, aching with the immediacy of an old but newly remembered desire, reached up towards a hand —

The air was clear. Jack found himself standing in front of the half-built house, weight shifted one foot forward, arm tentatively raised, as if he were about to hail a cab.

Damn, that was weird, he thought, recoiling and putting his hands back in his coat pockets. His dry coat pockets. But Torchwood had been over this site with a fine-tooth comb. It must be something residual, a mirrored aftershock from a larger Rift event. Reality hiccups: a typical occupational hazard.

Jack checked the sky out of a vague hope that he'd been skipped ahead, but the stars were just as bright.

He kept moving, kept walking down towards the docks. Something clicked into place as he fell into motion, something had just gone right, and he felt like the world wanted him to go exactly this way, and was laying a trail of fantastical promises along the sea breeze.

He'd follow, as long as he lasted.
 

~~~

THE END

 

Further Reading/Links: The stuff I quote or reference is all available for free online, since the copyrights have expired: H.G. Wells' Anticipations (1901); William Hope Hodgson's "A Tropical Horror" (1905) and The House on the Borderland (1908); Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Gods of Mars (1918).  Last, Billy the Seal's Facebook fan club.