recklessthings | ♎ caroline forbes

[ he leads the way up to the cashier and pulls out a company credit card, which serves two purposes: one, the obvious transaction and two, pinging the hub back in wales to tell the newbies which walmart to target for cctv footage erasure. ]

So, [ jack asks, handing her the bag as they walk towards the exit. ] What state am I in? I didn't have time to check the coordinates before the last jump.

You are in Georgia.

[Because she's helpful like that. Caroline happens to be on the road herelf, traveling between a New Orleans meeting with the French Quarter witches back to home and her daughters in Mystic Falls.]

Just under the South Carolina border.

Georgia, [ he repeats, giving a low whistle and a shake of his head as the doors part and they walk out into the parking lot. ] I don't think I've ever been this far south along the East Coast. Last state I visited was California and that was a good twenty or so years ago.

[ a beat. ]

Linearly speaking. [ because it's been more than twenty years for him. a couple centuries, more like. ]

[Given that she spends a lot of her time hanging out with really old people who have had their life interrupted by daggers and what not, the idea of being slightly out of time isn't a foreign one.

Not traveling linearly through time, however is new.]

Is that a problem you have often? Needing to qualify how linearly long it's been since you've been somewhere?

[She's just curious.]

Not always, but... sometimes. Hazards of time travel.

[ he does this, when he's intending on retconning people. because he knows (or assumes, in caroline's case) that they won't remember anything he tells them. it's a rare moment of freedom for him to say whatever's on his mind and state the truth instead of a version of it that he paints for the sake of those around him. whether that's pretending to be an american expat in wales or claiming to bear a striking resemblance to a great grandparent when presented with a picture of himself from the early 1900s. ]

Time travel.

[Interesting. While she's sure there's some kind of time travel spell somewhere that doesn't involve a pocket dimension and an ascendant, there's a horrifying flash of her student witches finding it and wreaking havoc on the timeline.]

Huh. You really do learn something new every day.

[And here she thought immortality would be boring.]

[ he stops near one of the cart returns, not really sure whether he's walking given that he teleported in and didn't exactly bring a car with him. ]

You know, most people are at least skeptical, if not surprised by the notion of time travel, alien tech, and actual alien convicts.

[She gives a small shrug, before turning to face him more. Her car is not that far away, but they'll get there when they get there.]

You know, I've been having the kind of year where things that aren't supposed to be real have been actually turning out to be real, so I figure, why not go with it. I'm a modern woman, living in a weirdly supernatural world.

[Then she smirks.]

At least it wasn't a dragon.

[Because that day was a doozy.]

[ he leans back against the railing of the cart return, considering her. ]

I'd say I know the feeling, but... I don't think I actually do. Maybe the "supernatural" part, but even then— This has always been a part of my world. Where I'm from, we've had interstellar and temporal travel capabilities for centuries. Aliens are your neighbors and their technologies have been shared with other species for longer than's been documented.

[ aka he is very much not from this time. not even from this planet. jack is (mostly) human but he didn't step foot on earth until he joined the time agency. ]

—wait, did you say dragon?

Oh yeah. Posing as a woman in human form. She torched an entire bus of people just outside Mystic Falls, and we thought she was some kind of pyromancer, but apparently, it was a full on scales and wings dragon.

[She wasn't actually there for it, but Hope and Ric were and that was the first sign that they had of something bigger being at play.]

I originally thought your Sycorax guy came from the same place the dragon did.

Nah, he's from a world thousands of lightyears from here. Earth is a popular hideaway spot for renegade criminals; they seem to think that because humans in this century haven't ventured past their own moon that it'll stop their pursuers from actually pursuing them, not realizing that agencies like Torchwood exist to do the tracking down for them.

[ in most cases. there are still those who don't bother to make contact and just descend upon the planet without a care for the damage they'll do in the process. ]

And then you have those who come here for fun. You wouldn't believe the number of times I've had to tell some teenager taking their parents ship out for a joyride to get out of the atmosphere because they were spooking the locals.

[And that makes her laugh.]

Oh, teenagers. Never change.

[At least somewhere in the universe there were teenagers who get to make terrible life choices, rather than horrible life or death ones.]

Good to know that even when they're not from Earth, their impulse control is still questionable.

[ was his impulse control questionable? he wants to say yes, because his adult impulse control wasn't exactly stellar, but he can't recall. his teenage years were a very, very long time ago. back when he was still mortal, back before gray was taken. ]

You know, it's been a long time since I met someone who wasn't surprised by any of this. [ even other companions, like the three who now traveled with the doctor's latest regeneration, could still be surprised. but this woman isn't.

it's oddly refreshing. ]

Oh, don't get me wrong. The idea of life beyond Earth is ... a lot and I'm sure I will have a existential crisis about that and what it means later, but once you wake up a vampire, it's kind of a sliding scale, you know?

[It's much easier to accept that something is a thing, rather than fighting it and trying to pretend it doesn't make any sense. Also, since he's sharing, she feels like she might as well.]

[ —he takes it back, he apparently is still capable of being surprised. his eyebrows go up. ]

Vampire? You're a vampire?

Yep.

[The "p" lands with a pop, and she glances back over her shoulder towards the store. No one's coming in or going out, it's too late for that, but she will hold up her whiskey as an offering.]

Maybe we should do this over a drink.

[ maybe they should, even if he's incapable of getting drunk. if he drinks fast enough, the buzz will hit him for a bit, but it never stays and he never gets truly wasted. not that he wants to experience a hangover again after recalling the headache he had while he was mortal during the miracle, but knowing he can't is one of those things he has a lot of conflicting feelings about.

he gestures for her to drink first — ladies first — and then holds out his hand for the bottle once she's taken the first swig. ]

So you're, what, a couple hundred years older than you look?

Oh, no. Not yet. I mean, barring any future disasters I will, but right now I'm just a couple decades older than I look.

[Benefits of turning at seventeen, wrinkles are never going to be a problem. She takes a swig of the whiskey, before passing it over to him.]

I'm hoping to at least get a couple of centuries under my belt though. Make a respectable showing.

[ jack debates not saying anything at all about not looking one's age, but in the end, he's curious. it's rare for him to come across those who have the potential to live as long as he has, and for someone who is supposed to be a leading expert on everything "strange" on this planet, he knows very little about vampires. ]

I stopped counting somewhere around twenty-five hundred or so.

[Her eyebrows go up at that because "stopped counting" implies that there could be a considerable amount more, and while two thousand year-old creatures have made an appearance in her life in the past, nothing older than that.

At least not before Jack.]

Congratulations, you are officially the oldest person I've ever met. Silas had the record for a while, but he tapped out at two thousand.

[And is now dead. Good riddance.]

So what flavor of immortal are you? If you don't mind my asking.

Not at all, [ though he doesn't usually clarify this. for anyone. not even those closest to him, usually out of a need to either protect the doctor in the only way he knows how or out of an inability to even begin talking about that part of his life to those who have no prior understanding of it. ]

I'm a living fact, a fixed point in time.

[Her brow furrows at first. Science has never been her strong suit and when her world became full of magic and she stopped paying attention even more. But she does at least give it a try, taking the bottle of whiskey back and taking another swig as she tries to think through it.]

So ... is it like you physically can't change because you're always going to be as you were when you became a fact?

[She makes a face like she doesn't think that sounds right. She's probably offending someone somewhere.]

Kind of. Long story short, I was killed once and a friend brought me back to life using the power of a temporal vortex, but they didn't know what they were doing and accidentally brought me back forever.

[ it's a lot more complicated than that, but that's the gist of it. ]

I can be killed, but I don't stay dead. I revive pretty quick. I've been trampled by horses, shot through the heart, blown up, starved, exsanguinated... Nothing sticks.

... Oh.

[As cavalier as she can be about her immortality, at least she knows that she has a way out. When she finally becomes sick of the world, should she live that long, there are ways for her to bow out of existence.

She can't imagine what it would be like to have zero options for death. That no matter what you do, you keep coming back.]

I'm sorry. That sounds terrible.

There are worse things out there in the universe than being the only immortal human.

[ it might have taken him a while to learn that and to embrace what he is, but he got there. eventually. he had the time to figure it out. ]


	✔ Cʀᴏssᴏᴠᴇʀs/AU ✔ Aᴄᴛɪᴏɴsᴘᴀᴍ ✔ Pʀᴏsᴇ	✔ Pɪᴄᴛᴜʀᴇ ᴘʀᴏᴍᴘᴛs ✔ Oᴛʜᴇʀᴡᴏʀᴅʟʏ ✔ Sᴛᴀʀᴛᴇʀs	♥ F/M, F/F ⏰ Lᴇɢᴀᴄɪᴇs-ᴄᴏᴍᴘʟɪᴀɴᴛ

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