[Cardiff] The solace and the silence.

[onlysayinghello]

Distracted was putting it mildly, and he knew that everyone at the Hub could see it too. Of course it wasn't as if he had much to divulge to them. There were the glances though, burning gazes at the back of his head that the moment he turned to face them snapped away as if caught doing something they knew they shouldn't be doing.

He thought for sure that Gwen would question him, all her needing to know just what made him tick, it had to be eating at her to see him so out of his element. Yet there he was seated at his desk in the Hub trying not to think about the fact that there was a four hundred year old man at his flat, that had been buried alive... and that Jack had grown a bit more than fond of him. Of course all the unanswered questions were inching up in his conscious as well. None of it made any of it any easier.

Still he'd just taken off. Flight to Japan and back again without so much as an explanation as to just what had gone on. It was routine for Jack, they should have been aware of it by now, that not every thing he did had an answer available to give, even to them. It was better for them, or at least that was what he convinced himself of. Glancing to the clock he was relieved that it had been a slow day, well relatively slow at least. Owen was off looking into something or another and the rest of the cases had been tied up for a few days now. Jack could have taken time off, he could have just rested up, stayed in bed and taken care of things for Adam.

Instead he felt torn... because he wasn't sure what to even think, and having Adam in his flat... around him all the time wasn't helping him keep a clear head on it all. So the time apart was something he needed, and he knew Adam needed it as well. A time to just be alone and not with anyone around him to ask questions that Jack knew wouldn't be easy to answer. Questions Jack knew he had more than a few of.

Standing up he grabbed his coat off the rack and said his good nights to Tosh, telling her not to stay too late. He stopped and picked up something for dinner and then headed up to his flat. Keys slid into the door and his toe pushed it open, hands still holding the food. A few steps into the room and his foot nudged the door shut behind him before the food was placed on the counter. The chill in the room surrounded him, even with his big coat, but he didn't actually mind. Temperatures didn't seem to phase him these days, and he could see the slight flush to Adam's cheeks proof that once more he had been standing in the cold. It was the moments like this, where Jack saw something he hated seeing in anyone, and it was that exact reason why Jack knew he was right going into work.

It pulled at him, tugging him in so many different directions he wasn't even sure which way was up, let alone right. All he saw was the despair and the half empty gaze from across the room. Jack let his eyes meet Adam's and in that silence Jack wished he already had all the answers, but he knew he was far from that moment... so far he couldn't even think what the horizon looked like.

"You didn't have to shut that," Jack's words cut across the cold of the room before he started to move toward Adam. "The window, I mean."

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[onlysayinghello.livejournal.com]

In his lifetime he'd known of the events that changed the world, heard the legends, read the archives... even visited a few of them during training. All the agents being sent out to maintain, to protect their way of life. The human race had come so far in so many years and now that time travel was allowed, the smallest change could create a maelstrom of events. So the Time Agency was enacted and everything that fell out of line was tracked and recorded. It was why Jack knew that at the core of it all the big stuff was happening now.

The big stuff apparently was happening at the hands of the man he'd shared a bed with. All the talk of changing the world and this was it, this was the plan. To simply start again, anew, and Jack wasn't even sure what to think. His past had the events of Kirby Plaza.... the bomb... the destruction, but it also had records of it not happening. Even the Time Agency had archive upon archive of alternate timelines, ones that had transpired or had shifted off. Always keeping track of how things could have gone... just in case the timelines met up again.

When the date came for Kirby Plaza Jack was ready, but the event had changed. Jack wasn't a Time Agent anymore, and for all he knew the fifty-first century was forever changed by that. For all Jack knew his entire history had shifted off the books he'd studied at the Agency. Not that it mattered to him because he was still there, still existing apart from it all.

An impossible thing, words that echoed in his mind all too clearly, all too often. Now he was faced with a truth that he knew all too well... Adam had intended on the destruction, and even in Jack's own memory the events were still hazy. Whether they had happened with Kirby Plaza... or apart from, or even at all, and he was more confused than he wanted to be.

He also knew he was becoming too reliant on things that could have changed. The rift changed it. Kirby Plaza changed it, and now Odessa had changed it. Constantly, always, never ending things weren't happening the way they were supposed to and maybe that was the way it was supposed to be.

Jack didn't move from Adam, he didn't drop his hand from his neck, or the other from the tight grip that was still there.

"Everything changes..." it was the only constant thought he had in his mind, the only thing repeating over and over again, "I thought I knew what I was getting myself into. I'd save the world, I knew the events, the way things were supposed to happen and then... everything started to change. Little things, like... well big things actually, right now," Jack met Adam's eyes, "Right now running right under Cardiff there's a temporal rift. Time... just seeps out of it, all the timelines fighting for space in there, and it just changes everything."

He wasn't even sure he had a point, or even if his thoughts were coming around to anywhere cohesive, "I can't stop it all, I can't fix any of it until it's right there... right on that edge, and I knew about Odessa... and I wasn't there to stop it. Because everything changes. There isn't a constant in my lifetime anymore."

His hand slide from the back of Adam's neck to against his jaw, "Even you... it's changed. It's honest, and it's real- raw to the point where it hurts, because if you had the choice- if you could go back and change it, you'd do it."

Jack exhaled, a half smile of assurance there, "You'd have done it and one of a thousand things that eats away at this existence would have happened... at your hands. And I'm standing here trying to reconcile it in my mind, trying to put it into something that doesn't sound like it goes against every fiber of my being...."

The pause is ripping at his heart because he can't seem to make it right... he can't fix it.

"Because it does. It goes against it all, but everything changes. That's the one constant I have is that at some point there's going to be a change and it'll happen again, and again... until the timeline I know actually sifts itself out of the sieve, and we'll be left with the one timeline... the one future, and a thousand pasts."

Shutting his eyes he kept his hand to Adam's jawline, needing to touch, to feel something just to ground him to the moment, "Everything changed... and I don't think I was ready for it this time."

[changehistory.livejournal.com]

Adam lifted his hand to curl around Jack's at his jaw, still holding tightly to the other. The touches helped steady him. The fact that Jack hadn't lashed out, hadn't pushed him away--it helped. He wasn't sure what to say, what words there were. Jack sounded as lost as he felt, wondering, always, what came next.

To think you knew that, to think you had some idea of it, then find it ripped away and everything changed...he understood that on some level.

"I don't know what comes next," he said, softly, meaning in life, in time, with them, with Hiro, with the world. "I don't...I never thought of failure. I couldn't afford to. I didn't count on Hiro being there, ready to stand in my way, yet again."

He let his eyes slowly travel over Jack's face, resting on his lips. "I wasn't ready for that, for this, for...freedom in a world where things continue to crumble to dust at an alarmingly slow rate, and ..." He shook his head a little. "Events change. The people and places and names change. But at its core, nothing really does, Jack. The world goes on as it always has and people are as they have always been. No one learns, no one remembers, no one..." He trailed off, aware he was trembling again and hating himself for it.

Taking what he hoped was a steadying breath, he shifted just a bit closer to Jack. The heat of the shower was sliding away and being replaced by the ice of the room he'd let get cold. Chest and feet still bare, adding to the emotional insecurity, he was shivering. At least he wanted to blame it on the cold, rather than need, a desperate need to make someone, anyone, understand. Linderman had. Angela had. Arthur had. Before they twisted back on him and changed their minds and chickened out, they'd understood. It had been so long, and part of him knew Jack never would, not really, but he needed him to, so knowledge and need warred.

"It needs to change. Something has to, eventually, and it will be drastic and chaotic and out of control with no vision for what comes after, no plan to rebuild, nothing in place to clean up and move forward. The world is spinning madly toward its own destruction. It needs saving."

[onlysayinghello.livejournal.com]

Jack let the words sink in, the slight sting of them gave his heart more to think on than he wanted to, and in a way he knew what Adam was thinking, but he'd seen it... seen the survival, seen the human race through all the efforts. History repeats you can cleanse with the flood of an ocean, and it'll all build up the same as it was in time... and both of them would be there to see all of it return.

His head shook slightly in disagreement as he pulled away from Adam, seeing the chill on his skin apparent as the confusion in his own eyes. His hand gently brushing to a cheek before he allowed a soft kiss to be placed upon lips. His hands held Adam's face for a moment trying to tell him things he couldn't even find the words for.

Instead he placed a hand to his shoulder, securing him there for a moment as he moved away from him trying to take a step away, trying to take a moment to clear his mind. Jack moved to the bedroom to grab Adam a shirt, feeling a slight bit of guilt that he'd been standing there in the cold of the room for so long before either of them noticed.

Jack returned shrugging the shirt over shoulders before he moved in front of him again trying to get all his thoughts to tether into one cohesive sentence, "It's true... it's spinning faster than you can feel, and maybe toward it's demise, or it's destruction... but it's not the big things that do it. It's not those grand gestures that make the greatest impact. It's the one person that lives... instead of dies. It's the choice to believe in a Utopia, and then the choice you make when you realize that it's not there."

Jack's eyes were earnest, and his brow furrowed with such determination that he was certain he was going to sound like he was preaching the cause he'd fallen into for himself.

"I've seen the human race go from what you saw four hundred years ago, to now, all the way to the actual end of time. I've seen the hope they give each other, and I've seen the choices they make... and it's never the big things. It's never the floods, or the locusts or the bombs in Kirby Plaza that does it... it's the one person not doing what they were meant to. It's the small things that need changing, it's..."

Jack paused, trying to reign in his thoughts once more, "The end of humanity is a cold dark space... they put all their hopes into one plan, one place thinking it's their fresh start... it's their dream... and when it's not there they do the only thing they know they can do... follow someone else, and blindly."

It was a year of his life, a year that only a handful of people would even know of, but it happened.

"The world needs saving, but wiping it clean won't save anything... wiping it clean is the destruction it's spinning toward."

[changehistory.livejournal.com]

Half of Adam wanted to argue, to say that was exactly what the world needed. His eyes blazed for a moment with a fervent light, a prophet, a messiah ready to die for his cause, but then he glanced down, lashes sweeping across his skin, words dying unsaid on his lips.

How could you argue with what someone from the future knew, ever? It was too familiar, always pulling him against every natural inclination. First toward action, now toward patience, struggling for some sense of autonomy of self from the vagaries of a history he couldn't ever seem to find.

"It could be there," he said, softly. "Utopia, I mean...." But it had slid through his fingers, again. He huddled into the shirt, pulling it on with numb fingers that couldn't quite find the buttons. It was something against skin, though, even if the cold went deeper than just skin and bone and nerves.

He touched Jack's cheek, just briefly, sliding fingers down his jaw before he turned back to the food. "I can't...have this debate now, Jack. The right the wrong, the way to do it, the things to come. I told you what I did. I told you why I did it. Can we...save the rights and wrongs of the whys for after we've both slept? Facts I can give you, answers to questions, but I can't...I haven't the fight in me for the rest."

[onlysayinghello.livejournal.com]

Jack had felt the day wear on him longer than any other. He'd been dead for three days and that felt like a walk in the park compared to the agony he was going through in his mind right now. The truth of it was that it wasn't going to be something as simple as one discussion and all would be set aside. Jack knew that things like this didn't disappear over night, and the certainly didn't get any easier to sort out.

Running his hands through his hair he exhaled a breath he wasn't sure he'd been clinging onto for so long. Slight frustration and exhaustion had washed over him, and he knew that Adam was right, and they couldn't just get this all done and over with quickly. If it was going to be that cut and dry he'd be upset with himself for not giving Adam the same chance he'd have wanted for himself.

"You're right, it's a lot... it's too much in a lot of aspects, but it's a lot to try and sort through in one night. I told you in Japan that there was always time, and I meant it. So let's just eat and maybe tonight at least one of us will actually be able to sleep."

Jack met his eyes again, trying to give him that slight look of reassurance, to let him know that despite the trust not being there completely, it was worth looking for in case he needed it.

[changehistory.livejournal.com]

Adam managed a smile in return. "I'm sorry if I kept you up," he said, softly. "At least for something not so fun..."

He needed that reassurance more than he could say, more than he could pull in and process for the moment.

"I'm not going anywhere," he promised with a slight frown. "We can talk...I imagine we could talk about this over and over and again and again for a very long time and not hit the bottom of it all. I..."

He picked up one of the take out boxes blindly, not caring what it really was at the moment. "Let's...you had a full day at work. Let's eat, maybe you can tell me something of popular culture I've met and why there are quite so many channels on the television now...and we can just...be."

He wanted to be, wanted to find his center again, to get back from Kensei to Adam and shake off some of that until he knew who he was again, to have that talk, to find that certainty, somewhere back inside of him.