Title: Eavesdropper
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,674 words
Content notes: None
Author notes: Written for Challenge 414 - Gossip
Summary: Jack is used to there being rumours about him, but that doesn’t make him any less curious about what those rumours are.


Jack was enjoying the team's banter over lunch. Ianto had excelled himself in his selection of Chinese delights. He'd even gotten past the idea that the team liked to swap containers rather than empty what they wanted into a bowl. Jack always thought it tasted better coming straight out of the box. If you couldn't share your germs with your teammates, who could you?

He'd just finished regaling them with one of their funnier cases, trying to show Gwen that working for Torchwood wasn't all grim and scary. His team had done a great job of normalising the wacky, and sometimes gross, nature of what they did on a daily basis. They took his lead and ran with it. That's when the idea struck him to leave the room and see what happened next.

Excusing himself for the bathroom he left and stopped just on the other side of the door. He could have pressed an ear to it to listen, but why bother when he could tap into his vortex manipulator and feed the audio from the room right to him.

‘So, what's he told you?’ Jack could just picture Owen leaning forward and boring his eyes into Gwen as he asked the question. The move surprised Jack a little bit. He'd have bet Tosh would be the one to get the ball rolling; something about how she was settling in and what did she think of Jack. Trust Owen to actually be the bigger gossip.

‘What about?’ Gwen's confusion and suspicion were crystal clear.

‘Himself,’ Tosh replied. Jack got a little buzz out of hearing himself being talked about. He loved to know what people thought of him. It wasn’t egotistical – or at least that's what he told himself. People weren't exactly backward in telling him what they thought of him most of the time. Owen was exceptionally forward, and had a whole array of colourful descriptors for his boss. Jack let him get away with it. Partly because he knew Owen didn't really mean it, and partly because he found it entertaining. The trouble was, no matter how open and honest his team were with him, it was never going to be the whole warts and all truth. There'd always be questions or suspicions about their boss that they'd never voice. Not until they had a captive audience.

Gwen gave the obvious answer. ‘You've been here longer than I have.’ She didn't outright ask them to tell her everything, but there was something of the subtle police officer in the statement, trying to draw out of them what they knew so that she could reconcile it with what little she knew. It was a test as much as anything, Jack realised. She actually knew more about him than all the rest of them. Gwen knew he couldn't die. He'd not precisely asked her to keep that to herself, but he'd implied it in saying that the others didn't know. He also figured her out pretty quickly. She was the kind of girl who liked the power of holding a secret. She wasn't about to offer that little nugget up in exchange for other information.

‘We were banking on you!’ Oh, Tosh. Jack smiled at her exasperation. You're almost as bad as Owen.

‘You're a copper,’ Owen said. ‘You're trained to ask questions.’ Yes, she was, Jack agreed. That was why he hadn’t tried to retcon her again after Suzie had killed herself. She was too much a questioner, unable to let things go. Any retcon was going to be broken through in no time at all. This way, Jack controlled the narrative, and the kind of rumours that swirled around him in the minds of his team. Yet he was still intensely curious as to where they were in terms of their thinking.

‘You don't know anything?’

‘Not who he is, not where he's from. Nothing. Except him being gay.’ Oh ho! Jack nearly laughed out loud. Is that all you’ve got, Owen Harper?

‘No, he's not,’ Gwen replied rather forthrightly, before backtracking. ‘Really, do you think?’

‘Owen does. I don't.’ Ah, so Tosh just considered him charming.

‘And I don't care,’ came the fourth and final voice from the room. Jack's grin widened at that. Ianto was always the one who kept his thoughts and opinions to himself, unless it was pertinent to work. There was just a hint too much speed in that response for Jack to believe the words. No one denied caring about something that quickly. Strange though. Ianto had lost his girlfriend less than a year ago. Maybe he batted for both teams. Jack would have to investigate that further.

Owen's voice interrupted Jack's train of thought. ‘Period military is not the dress code of a straight man.’ Jack bristled slightly at the insinuation. What was wrong with what he wore? Okay, so he was perhaps a little bit out of date with the times, but that didn't make him visibly gay.

‘I think it suits him. Sort of classic.’ Thank you Gwen. Nice that someone can appreciate my style.

‘Exactly,’ Tosh agreed, leaving him feeling even more warm and fuzzy. ‘I've watched him in action. He'll shag anything if it's gorgeous enough.’ Ah, is that a little bit of jealousy I detect, Ms Sato? And for the record, I don't shag just anything. Gorgeous is one thing, but I like to get to know a person before we have the most mind blowing sex. I bet you'd like to watch us, too. Maybe a threesome was on the cards in the future, Jack thought, wondering how he'd ever get Tosh to openly admit she might be into that sort of thing. Maybe Ianto too? This conversation was getting more and more intriguing the longer he listened. Rumours about his sex life fascinated him, especially since everyone seems to think he was having sex a whole lot more often than he actually did. That wasn't to say what he was doing wasn't gossip worthy, but it was more fun when he told those tales, even embellishing them a little bit, just to keep his reputation notorious.

‘We know he's from America, right?’ Jack groaned. Just when things had been spicing up, Gwen had to be practical and put their conversation back on course.

‘We don't even know that for sure,’ Owen said.

‘No US citizen by the name of Jack Harkness born in the last fifty years,’ Tosh added. It proved at least that Owen and Tosh had done some digging on him at some point. Jack had first hand experience in just how difficult it was to keep his identity in check when your date of birth didn't tally with your physical appearance. He'd been tweaking his own records for decades, and corrupting them where simply overwriting the details didn't work.

Even his Torchwood reports from before 1998 had been altered. He'd replaced his name with a pseudonym so that the files would still be accessible to the team without giving away his own involvement. Of course, the paper files in the archives still bore his name, and anyone with sufficient observational skills could have matched his present day penmanship to the words done with quill and ink a century again. He'd found some of them and locked them away, but the archives were a mess and there was hardly ever anyone down there. He adjudged his risk of being uncovered as slim.

It was funny, he'd been using the alias Jack Harkness for so long he scarcely felt like anyone else, even who he'd been born. That was a very long time ago and so far away that apart from sharing the same first letter, the boy he'd grown up as had simply ceased to exist.

There was the sharp crunch of a prawn cracker before Gwen offered ‘Maybe his identity's classified.’

‘Used to be something big in the CIA,’ Ianto replied. ‘That's what I reckon.’ Who knew Ianto held such firm opinions on who Jack was. It made sense that the suit-wearing, James Bond obsessed member of his team might naturally assume he was from the intelligence community in a past life. Of course, there had been that brief stint working with the CIA back in the sixties, but he'd still been Torchwood, and the CIA had been glad to see the back of him. Just for fun, it might be worth dropping a few more breadcrumbs in that general direction. He'd never had to defend his back story, but as lies went, that wasn't a bad one. Unlike Gwen, Jack was fairly certain that if he gave Ianto enough titbits to confirm his suspicions, he was likely to share that with Tosh and Owen. He did so love being right about things.

‘He must have his reasons for wanting to keep things secret.’ Gwen had asked him as much once before. He hadn't given her his reasoning then, simply changing the subject on her. His past was too long and too complicated for anyone to wrap their heads around. Sometimes he wasn't sure he understood it all himself. He had questions that needed answers and there was only one person in the universe who could give them to him. Surely it couldn't be much longer to wait now. The century had turned twice and Jack had managed to hide his true identity far longer than he expected he might be able to. As undercover work went, he'd outstayed even the best Time Agent in deep, deep cover. Captain Jack Harkness was dotted all across the history of this planet and yet almost no one knew he even existed. It was, as he'd put it to Gwen not long ago, kind of a shame.

‘Sure he has. Doesn't stop me wanting to know what they are.’ And you'll just have to keep wondering, Owen Harper. Maybe one day I'll have enough answers to be able to tell you all everything, but until then, I'll just enjoy letting your imaginations run wild with possibilities.