"My name," He says thoughtfully. He takes a deep, thoughtful toke of his absyntharette and blows a smoke ring. "I can't remember my name."
"Give me that." Jack says, and swipes his synth.
"Hey!" He says.
"Your name is John," Rose says patiently, and steals the synth from Jack. They both watch her inhale, her lips framing the stick like art. She doesn't blow a smoke ring –he seemed to be the only one that could-- but she lets her eyes go all half-lidded, the green smoke wreathing around her hair like a halo.
She's so gorgeous, he feels like he could sit here smoking with her until he dies.
"John what?" He asks, because he couldn't very well ask would you please fuck me into this couch, like, right now, Jack can watch? He'd like to, though. He'd really like to.
"John Smith," She says, and passes the absyntharette back to him. Jack presses a kiss to her empty mouth, and falls asleep between them.
John Smith sits on the couch with his two best friends in the world and tries not to think of Rose Tyler's mouth.
*
It is July in New New York, 099: the dawning of the latest and greatest era of beauty, freedom, truth and love, but mostly love. And when it comes to Rose and Jack, a lot of beauty.
Rose is a sweet girl, dyes her hair a lovely cornsilk color for fun, and when she laughs it is like the world is laughing with her and she has the most soft, small, perfect hands. Jack is handsome like a video star or a superhero, and he has this wicked way of looking at a person that makes them feel hot and shy and special. John is tall and gangly, with black hair that would curl if he didn't keep it shaved and very unfortunate ears. He's good with machines and bad with words. John's no one special, really.
They live in a little flat above a Free Theater, and Jack and John fix things to pay the rent, and Rose does the chores and volunteers in the Theater, and every Saturday they do their picture show to great applause. They're one of the best acts, and everyone seems to adore them: they have these little puppets and they act out space adventures, and sometimes Jack gets hit in the face with pie.
John is so hopelessly in love with Rose and Jack that sometimes he thinks he could just about explode.
*
"You've got pie," Jack says, backstage, and runs his thumb over John's cheek.
"Must've--" John starts, then breaks off and completely forgets what he was saying when Jack pops his finger in his mouth, his tongue flickering out just a little. Suddenly, Jack's tongue is the most important thing in the universe.
"Banana," Jack says thoughtfully, and John says "Nnnh," very intelligently, and he can't remember backstage ever being so hot or so close or so banana. Jack's hand is on his shoulder, and he doesn't know what to do with himself except that he'd really, really like to do it with Jack.
"John," Jack says, significantly, and then Rose catches up with them.
"What's all this then?" She asks, still flushed and bouncy from the applause. She is Jack's heterosexual lifepartner and they love each other very much and John is the worst person ever.
"I'm going to do a thing," He says loudly, and flees.
*
He has nightmares a lot, especially if he forgets to have a smoke before bed. There is blood and shouting and things like monsters chasing things like puppets. The puppets never get away and sometimes they have Rose's face and sometimes they have his.
He wakes up with Jack hugging him tightly, Rose stroking his hair.
"What's my name?" He croaks. "It's gone, it's stolen--"
"Shh," Rose says, "Shh, it's just a nightmare, you're safe now."
"They stole my name," He cries. "Someone stole my name and I'll never get it back and I'll never be real again--"
"You're John Smith," Jack says. "And we're here. We'll keep you safe."
It's dark, but not dark enough to hide the tears on Rose's cheeks.
*
He's old, for the crowd they run in. He's not that old, he's not even forty, but it's the wrong side of thirty-- even the wrong side of twenty. But there was the war, and it was hard on him, and all these bright and laughing starchildren are full of something that old men like him have forgotten. He lets the children of the Free Theater call him Grandfather and and he warms himself in their vitality, their bright laughter. In their life.
They're going to change the world. If they let him, he's going to change the world with them.
It was a hard war, and it's a hard world, but when he can watch Rose and Jack laughing and dancing with revolution on their lips and such joy in their hearts, he can feel something in him ease up, just a little.
*
In August it is too hot to hold the Free Theater indoors, and they all relocate to the New Thames. They wear cobbled-together scuba gear and preform under the piers. Saturday's adventure involves Martian mermaids, and Jack as a swashbuckling pirate of the northern Canals. John's puppet rescues Rose's puppet from an octopus trap, and she gives him a kiss on the cheek. No one can clap underwater, but everyone vents lots of enthusiastic bubbles, and they are given slow, sloppy, underwater hugs.
"What happened to the mermaid prince?" Sasha the Lark asks afterwards, when they are lounging around on top of the pier and Rose is off setting up the potluck.
"He had responsibilities," John says, watching Jack come up behind Rose and grab her, carrying her around under one arm as she thrashes and laughs and tries not to drop the orange salad.
Sasha the Lark gives him a sympathetic pat on the arm, and goes off to rescue the orange salad.
*
Jack was in some kind of war. Not the war, not the one that's left John a tired wreck and so many of his cohorts bitter and brutal. But some kind of war, one of the secret ones. He says his brain was wiped by the NCIA and to stop asking him about it already, but some nights he goes brittle, a little thin and glassy under his laughter and his charm. On those nights Rose and John excuse themselves from parties early, and sit with him on the couch, and smoke too many absyntharettes. They hold each other and don't talk much, and John looks away, politely, when Jack and Rose kiss each other like they are drowning.
*
Sometimes he feels like he is drowning too, but he would rather breathe water and die than pull his friends down with him.
*
Rose is young for him and Jack, barely twenty. She's spot on for the group they run in, full of refugee university students: eighteen, nineteen, twenty-something. She's sweet and she's lovely and has so many hopeless admirers that John couldn't remember their names if you gave him a list. He suspects the list would be more like a phone book.
One night one of them climbs into their flat through the window and tries to carry her off, romantically, in the night. Jack brains him with their table lamp and John drops him back out the window.
Their room is on the ninth floor.
Rose says "What am I going do with you cavemen?" but she really means thank you.
They get very drunk and fall asleep in a pile on the sofa, and after that Rose sleeps in bed with Jack.
*
By September, two of the five concordants of the Free Theater have moved on, citing irreconcilable creative differences, but everyone knows they're dropping out, going back to their old lives. One of the founders has been shot by the Obedience Corpse for violation of emotional privacy, for reading non-sanctioned news out loud in the Ramblas Park, and sometimes Jack and John and Rose sit on their battered couch and watch the news on the wall and feel like their brave new world is cracking around them, shattering and stillborn.
"They won't get away with it," Rose says, and her voice is high and shaky. "That can't do that to people, can they? Not, not people?"
Jack pulls her close and kisses her temple. "You can't change the world without breaking a few eggs," He says roughly.
John lets his head fall back against the couch and thinks of puppets, running in the dark, of planets cracking apart in their cold orbits.
*
He wakes up one morning and staggers into the single bathroom, hungover and bleary.
"Get out!" Jack says from the shower.
He throws up in the toilet.
"Sorry," He says.
"Don't you dare flush." Jack says, "I just got this water hot enough." His shape is indistinct through the curtain, but he can see Jack's arms, the curve of his spine against the wall.
"Mmm." He says absently, then says, "Jack, I've forgotten my name again."
"It's John," Jack says, and his voice is just a little breathless. His hands are between his legs. "John Smith."
"Are you--"
"Get out."
He gets, his face hot and his stomach upset.
"Have you seen Jack?" Rose says from the couch.
"No," He lies, and shuts himself in his bedroom.
*
Sasha the Lark comes to them in October. She's the first founder of the Free Theater, the charter president, the one who programmed the Theater into the buildingmakers line by line. She lets them usher her on to the couch and give her a cup of tea and then she lets them see the Concord tattooed on her arm, two of the five names underneath neatly excised and healed over with fabriskin, the third crossed out with a red, scabby line.
"There needs to be five concordants," She says calmly, and takes a sip of the tea. "One for each direction. Me and Beau Buttons can't keep this place running just on our own. And everyone knows you're the best act we've got, we'd all love it if you were official."
"Officially what?" John asks, and Jack gives him the look that he gives when John is being thick.
"If we want to join the Theater," Rose says, then cheers and throws her arms around Sasha, spilling tea all over everyone. "Oh Sasha, that's brilliant!We'd love to!"
"Would we now?" Jack says dryly.
Rose hits him in the shoulder. "Shut up, you."
"John," Sasha the Lark says, very seriously, and they all turn and look at him. He realizes that he has his hands laced together so tightly his knuckles are white, that he is tense as a wire.
"I'm not much of a joiner," He says tightly, and has to look away. "It didn't work out so well, last thing I joined."
"Oh, John," Rose says quietly, and slips off of Sasha's lap. "I'm sorry, Sasha, but it's all of us or none of us."
"I know," Sasha says, very seriously, and gets up. "You shouldn't feel like this changes anything. You're welcome to stay as long as you like, you know that."
"Wait," John says, before she's entirely gone. "I'll do it. I'll sign."
Sasha the Lark doesn't quite squeal with delight, but it's a close thing.
*
"What do you think is out there?" He asks one night. They're on the roof of the Theater, watching a meteor shower.
"Where?" Rose asks.
He pets her hair for a while. "There. Space, sort of thing."
"Space, I suppose." Rose leans into his hand, makes a noise like a cat when he digs his nails in.
"Lots of space out there, in space." He says knowledgeably.
"You would know," She murmurs. Her hair feels fantastic.
"Why would I?"
"Oh," She says, and looks sheepish. "I dunno. You don't spend much time down on Earth with the rest of us, that's for sure." She yawns, lets herself sag into his arms. Her weight in his arms feels like something meaningful, something deeply and infinitely precious. She smells like peaches.
"Rose?"
"Yes?" She sounds sad. He wants to hold her and kiss her and tell her that he will never let anything make her sad.
Instead he says, "I've forgotten my name again."
"It's John. John Smith." She sounds exasperated, but she hits him on the shoulder and it feels all right.
"Lots of space out there, in Smith." He says, to see her smile.
"Oh, shut it."
They wake in the morning to find that some time in the night Jack has draped the duvet over them, and left for groceries.
Jack comes back in late afternoon, smelling of smoke. He doesn't have any groceries, but he's sporting a colorful and impressive hickey and a sad, hollow look in his eyes.
John wants to say I didn't sleep with her, I just love her. Or maybe I love you both, why can't I just have you both? Or even just I'm so sorry.
He doesn't say anything like that. He picks a pointless fight with Rose over the dishes, then storms off to wander the streets of New New York and get lost for five hours and think of Jack and Rose, having make-up sex on the kitchen floor, and Rose licking over the mark on Jack's neck, and Jack sliding his gorgeous square hands under Rose's pink knickers.
He the worst person in the world.
*
Running the Theater is harder than sitting around fixing things, because people don't shut up and turn on when you hit them with a burst of sonic. It takes bribes and shouting and a surprising amount of running about. Jack handles the people stuff as often as he can, and Rose is a natural at everything. John finds himself assigned to crisis management, which involves enough explosions to keep him happy.
Something close to happy, anyway.
*
"This one?" Jack says, pointing at a white line on Rose's leg.
"Tried to shave with a kitchen knife. I was twelve." Rose picks through Jack's hair. "Where's your cranial incision?"
"It healed up." Jack touches her knee. "These?"
"I just fell down a lot as a kid. What about John?"
"What about me?" He asks.
"Don't you have any scars?"
John stares at her, then himself. "I don't know."
"What about this one?" Jack traces the faintest mark on her forehead.
"Fell out of a tree. Mickey was hysterical."
"He would be."
John stares at his hands. He has no scars. None.
"I was in a war," He says. "I was blown up. Twice!"
"Government medical," Jack says with satisfaction. "God bless the old US."
"I don't believe it," Rose says. "I'm sitting on a couch with two old soldier boys and I'm the one with the most scars. You two really know how to make a girl feel pretty."
"Ah, well." Jack settles back on the couch. "I'll be pretty enough for both of us."
"Shut it," She says, but she still laughs when he kisses her.
John stares at his hands, his perfect skin.
He was in a war, and doesn't have a single thing to show for it.
*
At one point in October Rose is on loan to the Scissor Sharks as their wind-up doll. She says it's a step up from puppets, her tongue just peeking out from her teeth as she grins. She makes a fantastic doll, and when she minces and clicks on stage, dodging sharks as her key runs down, people cry and then go all hushed and quiet. They applaud louder at the comedy bits, after.
She's brilliant, but it still makes John kind of sick inside to see her run down, her eyes fluttering closed under heavy makeup, the sharks closing in around her.
Jack catches him watching one day, up in the lighting, watching the part where Rose drops to her knees. His knuckles are white around the wires.
"Help," Rose calls out, clicking and whirring as she pushes at the sharks, as she struggles to rise. "Someone do something!"
"You too?" Jack says quietly, and takes John's hand.
John buries his face in the front of John's coat, in the solid warmth of him, and it's almost enough as Rose screams, high and piercing, from the stage.
He can feel Jack shaking, just a little, and it makes him hold on longer than he should.
They take Rose out to the Floating Market, afterwards, and they all get good and drunk and eat too much candy and Jack flirts with and then throws up on an Obedience Officer and then they spend the night in jail.
"You never take me anywhere nice." Rose says.
"Anywhere you are is nice enough," John says.
"What he said," Jack says.
They sleep in a big pile on the one narrow cot and John wakes up with someone's elbow in his mouth, cramped and needing a smoke and a piss and so happy.
He loves his friends, and they like him back enough. Enough for anyone.
*
Jack gets a tattoo. It's a quanto-psychic tattoo, all the rage among their group, so it looks like whatever the viewer wants to see.
"That's you all over," John says.
"I think it's brilliant," Rose says.
"What do you see?" Jack asks.
"You, bringing me dinner."
"No, really."
Rose grins. "No, it really does."
"And you, Mister Smith?"
John frowns. "It's just a bunch of squiggles. Are you sure it's on right?"
Jack and Rose look at each other.
"What kind of squiggles?" Jack says, very seriously.
John concentrates. "Circles, lines. A star map, like." He feels something in his head, something rushing in his ears, far away, calling him."My name..." He reaches a hand out, traces the shapes with his finger and Jack shivers all over. Claps his hand over the tattoo.
"Aw, the damn thing's busted already. There goes eighty credits," Jack says. He goes-- retreats, almost-- to the kitchen and starts making dinner.
He also gets the tattoo taken off.
*
It snows in November, real snow, and it is fantastic and gorgeous and shining and people start dying in it. Dying from the cold. There aren't enough public spaces or enough power and the Obedience Corpse are cracking down on unauthorized fires, because of carbon credits.
The Free Theater takes in as many people as it can, as interns and stagehands and propmakers and performance artists and deputy architects and janitors and whatever else Sasha the Lark can think of. The place has never been so full. Or so clean.
John watches the city freeze and knows he should hurt for it, for all those people dying alone in the snow but Rose and Jack are dancing in the street, and there are snowflakes in their hair, and he has hot chocolate waiting for them on the roof, smoking synth after synth until the world is one soft, electric whirl around him, all the edges burned away.
They are so beautiful, and that is what hurts.
*
Rose and Jack get a winter flu. Jack consumes an enormous amount of soy protein and chocolate, mostly at the same time, and bounces back to something like coherence in a day or two.
Rose doesn't.
"It's getting bad," John says. "What do we do? I've never had to take care of anyone before-- I'm botching it. That's why she's not getting better, isn't it? Am I killing her? Are you going to let me kill her? We should take her to a hospital, get her shots. People are dying out there. We have to take care of her."
"John. Stop pacing." Jack pats the edge of the bed. "Bring us some tea and then come back here."
"Tea! Yes. Right." He rushes to the kitchen.
"What kind of tea?" He shouts.
"Any kind of tea."
He brings every box of tea in the kitchen to Jack, along with a cup, a thermos, the sugar pot, honey, a few ice cubes, cinnamon, and the teapot. Then he goes back and gets the kettle.
"You're a mess when you're worried." Jack says.
"I'm not worried." John says. He pours the kettle into the cup, then the cup into the teapot, then sticks in the honey, cinnamon, a tea bag, and a handful of loose leaf. It takes two tries to pour the resultant mixture into the cup, which he then knocks off the nightstand.
"You're cute when you're worried," Jack says, and pours himself a thermos of tea.
John drops the teapot off the edge of the bed when he tries to set it down.
"I'm a little worried." He admits.
"Is that tea?" Rose mumbles. "I want it."
John automatically goes to pet her hair, and finds Jack doing the same thing. Their fingers tangle and catch, and Jack gives him a deep, heart-melting smile. Beneath their fingers Rose is warm and alive.
"She's gonna be fine," Jack says. His soft foreign drawl has never been so reassuring.
John stops worrying.
*
Beau Buttons, Wonder Cat At Large, finishes her newest installation piece she calls Grandfather and sets it up in the front hall. It consists of about a dozen life-size facsimiles of John. Each one is in the same black robe on top of a different kind of stand. One is on a marble plinth, one a cardboard box, one balanced on a big red rubber ball, and so on. They shift and scratch their heads and look around and watch people go by and they all wiggle a little and wave at Jack and Rose whenever they go by. They look like a flock of scruffy crows to John, but everyone else seems to like the effect.
"They look just like you," Rose says to John. She is standing in front of a beaming facsimile that is standing on an overturned bucket.
"Are my ears really like that?" John asks mournfully.
"Bigger," Jack says thoughtfully. "And Sasha really didn't get how crooked your nose is."
"My nose isn't--" He touches it gingerly. "Is it?"
"Jack!" Rose says. "Don't tease him."
"It's a very nice nose," Jack says. "I love your nose. In a manly, heterosexual way."
"Okay, then." John says. He feels better.
The facsimile gives him a dirty look, and goes back to beaming at Rose.
*
He goes to the kitchen for some water, some time in late December, and finds Rose and Jack doing the dishes, their heads together. Jack is holding Rose's wrist.
He presses himself to the other side of the doorway.
"Six months." Jack is saying. "It's time. We've got to. He said."
"I don't want to," Rose says, her voice hoarse and full of tears. "I can't do it, I don't want to do it, why can't we just stay like this forever--"
"He doesn't want this. He wouldn't want this. We have to."
"What if he does?" She demands. "What if he does? We have to ask him. We have to give him a choice."
"It's not really him." Jack says quietly. "You know that. All this time, it's not really him. There is no choice. "
"Don't say that! Don't you ever say that!" She pounds his chest, tears all down her cheeks.
"Shh." He murmurs, pulling her close, stroking her hair.
"I love him." She whispers, then chokes on a sob. "I love him, I love him!"
"I do too." He says, flat and unhappy.
They stand there and hold each other for a long time.
"We love him, and we're going to kill him." Rose says against Jack's chest.
"We're going to set him free," Jack says, and he looks like he desperately wants to believe it.
John takes a step backwards, his hand over his mouth, then another step.
"John?" Rose calls from the kitchen, her voice glass-bright and thin.
He runs.
*
He's in Ramblas Park, fetched up against the trunk of a laughing willow when he finds he can't run any farther. He feels like a fox before hounds but he loves them, and he can no more run from them than he could cut off his shadow.
"You're going to kill me." He says when they find him.
"No." Jack says.
"Yes." Rose says.
"We're going to wake you up." Jack says, and holds out a small metal compact. The design is like the pattern he had seen in Jack's tattoo. "You know how you keep forgetting your name? We kept it for you, we had to hide it. Your real name. But the time is up and now we have to give it back to you and it's going to change things."
"I'm going to die."
"No--"
"Yes." Rose says. "You're going to change and then you won't be you anymore."
"Rose, stop." Jack says tightly. His hand around the metal compact is shaking.
"We won't be us anymore."
"There was never an us." Jack says. He doesn't look either of them in the eye. "We were all just playing our parts."
"Don't you say that," John shouts. "Don't you say that to her! Don't tell me you aren't--"
"I'll say what's true!" Jack shouts back at him. "None of this was real! None of this is how we are! You don't even love us--"
John punches him in the face. Rose screams, short and sharp, and Jack reels back a step.
"You fucker!" He says, and punches John back. They hit the ground in a tangle of angry blows and flying limbs. Jack is not a small man but he doesn't seem to know what he's doing, and when John rolls him on to his back and straddles him he sobs and goes limp.
"You don't love us." Jack gasps out, sounding desperate, sounding angry. "You can't. You never did."
"You are the stupidest man in the world," John says, and kisses him.
Jack moans again and then kisses back, licking hot and eager up into him, his gorgeous hands wrapping around John's head.
"Doctor," He whispers, and something electric sizzles through John.
"Say that again," He demands. Jack bites his earlobe, then licks it, then says "Doctor," right into his ear and grinds up hard against him.
The world goes all tense with pleasure and John realizes he is about two seconds away from having wild sex with Jack Harkness in a public park. In front of his girlfriend.
"Let's all go home and talk about this," He says, and his voice comes out a little funny.
"Lets." Rose says.
"Shit." Jack says, but he follows them anyway.
*
John barely makes it inside before Jack locks the door behind him and Rose takes off his shirt. He's not sure whether he should be panicking. He feels panicky. Rose taking off her own shirt doesn't help. She has the most fantastic breasts.
"So this is, what, my last rights?" He asks. "A pity shag and then off I go?"
"Something like that," Jack says, then grabs his face and kisses him so thoroughly his knees go weak and his vision goes wobbly. Rose is holding on to him from behind, working on the fastening of his trousers, and they all just about make it to the couch before going down in a tangle of limbs and half-discarded clothing.
"We're losing you, too," Rose says, and it makes just as much sense as anything that's happened today. She kisses softer than Jack, sweeter, and he is drowning in it.
"I love you," He says, gasps, the words wrenching out of him. "I love you both, I have since I-- since we--"
"Shh," Rose says.
"You have to know," He says, and Jack presses their mouths together, cutting him off, Rose's soft, small hands working down the front of his pants.
Between them they take him apart, past his defenses, past his name, down to his raw and trembling flesh and then beneath.
He holds on to them both, afterwards, shattered past the point of caring, and they brush the tears off his cheeks until he falls asleep.
*
"John," Jack says. He opens his eyes, instantly awake, and Jack is holding out the little compact. Close up it looks more like an antique watch. It feels right in his hands, as cool and perfect as an egg. He can feel a wind blowing, somewhere far away inside of him and it feels like his true name.
"No," Rose says, "God, please, don't, not yet."
"I have to, don't I?" He asks.
Jack swallows. "I wish you didn't. I-- wish--"
He presses a kiss to Jack's temple, then Rose's. The thing in his hands is a watch, and he can feel it heating, hatching. Singing. "I love you two." He says roughly, over the pulse and rush of the device. "Don't forget that. Don't let me forget that."
Jack looks away. "Just do it."
John opens the watch.
*
He is sitting in the hospital, getting his stitches dissolved, and a man with a freshly healed cranial incision comes in holding hands with a pretty girl.
"Hey there," He says, and flashes a brilliant smile. "I'm Captain Jack Harkness."
"Jack," The girl says reprovingly, and smacks his shoulder.
"This is Rose." Jack says, and sits down next to him. "Who are you?"
He looks up at his nurse, who is busy sponging solution out of his hair.
"You're John Smith," She says.
"I'm John Smith." He tells Captain Jack Harkness and Rose.
"Pleased to meet you," they say in chorus.
"You wanna get out of here?" Jack says, and Rose smiles.
"We're going house-hunting." She says. "Got a whole military pension to blow."
John Smith looks at his nurse.
"You're done," She tells him.
"I'm done," He tells Jack and Rose.
They take his hands like they are already friends, and lead him out of the hospital and into the rest of his life.