[Torchwood] "The Male Brood Mare" (NC-17)
Nov. 30th, 2012 04:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtxref_ficAuthor's Note: Written for dark_fest's prompts "Torchwood, Jack, while working for Victorian/Edwardian Torchwood London, they discover he can become pregnant. Forced pregnancy, medical experimentation." and "Torchwood/Doctor Who, Jack/?, "...still, at least I won't get pregnant; never doing that again." the first time Jack was pregnant, mpreg (obviously), dub-con"
WARNING: Pain, blood, awkward sex, discussion of sterilization and abortion (and mentions of less permissive attitudes toward same), period-specific homointolerance and intolerance toward male bodied personages with alien anatomy, specifically a guy with a functioning uterus and ovaries.
Sorry, boys and girls and persons of all persuasions, it's set in ye oldie Victorian times: I swear Russell T. and company threw Jack into that era, just after his little encounter with death, resurrection and a Time Vortex, to be really sadistic to the poor bloke.
Special thanks also goes out to the folks of carpe_ho_ras, for helping me name an original male character.
It did not take long for Alice Guppy and her coterie to find out just how much equipment their newest involuntary acquisition carried. First, on bringing him into the fold, they turned out his pockets, finding the pillbox which Jack kept in an otherwise well hidden inner pocket of his mantled greatcoat, and being the nosy types that they were, they confiscated it, "for further examination and in the interest of science, to fulfill our mission to the Crown."
"We have to be certain that you aren't carrying any contraband of a poisonous nature," Miss Guppy informed him sweetly.
"As if I had the chance to poison anyone, the way you lot keep me cooped up when you aren't sending me out on the dirtiest of your dirty work," Jack growled.
"We can't be too careful with your kind and the substances that you might be carrying," Miss Guppy replied.
Well, this is just wonderful, Jack thought. The pills he carried were formulated to put his complex reproductive system into a wait state, making sure that he fired blanks from either barrel. But now the clock had started to tick and in a matter of time, it would come out of that wait state. The Time Agents had allowed their agents to run on a long leash when it came to their amourous proclivities and affairs, as long as their engagements did not result in offspring, hence the contraceptive cocktail that they issued to their operatives. They considered surgery barbaric; Jack did not want a knife to come anywhere near his personal equipment, but he could not help thinking "Double standard, much?" considering the two years of memories that the Time Agency had stolen from his brain.
Within days, the results of going off the contraceptives started to turn up: in the middle of the night, Jack awakened in his cell, finding his linen drawers gummed to his thighs with a milky substance rather than a clear fluid. Well, that would mean he would have to enjoy the thighs rather than the lips -- upper or nether -- of Polly Dodger, the goodnatured girl with whom he had "consorted" at any chance that he could steal a moment with her, whenever Torchwood let him off his leash and the job took him to Whitechapel. But more signs of his fecundity would turn up soon and he dreaded how Torchwood would take that not so little discovery.
Soon enough, the grumpiness that proceeded his monthly started to snarl up his nerves; Jack scared up some rags along with some pins to hold them in place. But while he could hide the fire, he could not hide the smoke, namely, the soiled rags.
He awoke one morning to find Charles Gaskell, Torchwood's only other male agent, kneeling over his bunk and unlacing his trousers.
"Here, I'm all for a surprise roll in the hay first thing in the morning to get my heart going, but I'd rather you asked first before you started unfastening my clothes," Jack teased. "And I thought you favored the fairer sex, Charlie-boy? Or have you decided to dance on a different end of the floor? Wouldn't mind having you as a partner, if that's the case."
"Hush, you're bleeding: and if you are injured, this is no time for your chatter, Harkness," Gaskell said, opening Jack's fly and pulling open the slit in his linen drawers.
Jack gave Gaskell a patient look. "Injured? I wish that's all it was: thanks to your lot taking awa my pillbox, my monthly came back."
Gaskell stared at him, his swarthy face gathering in a frown of annoyance and confusion. "Men do not bleed like this."
"Men in your time don't, but in my time, there's a fair number who do, unless they're on meds to shut that down," Jack replied, patiently. "And I recall a little chat I had with your esteemed leader about the pillbox she found on me."
"So you mean to say that in your world, your kind have concocted a physic that suppresses the natural order of fertility?" Gaskell asked. At least he had not started to go off about Jack's possessing a double compliment of genitalia and calling him an abomination. He had heard enough of that on a planet appropriately called Puritania.
"Not my plan to leave little Jacks on every planet that I visit, and being heavier in the waistcoat because I'm hatching a kid under it would make it harder to run away from something that's trying to get me," Jack replied.
Gaskell took this in, one cheek twitching and his brow furrowing as he tried to parse all of this. "So you mean to say that you are able to get a woman with child and at the same time, that you are able to be gotten with child?" he asked.
"In so many words, yes," Jack replied. "You got a bright mind behind that handsome face, Gaskell."
"I see, but that does not change the fact that the morals of doing so would be questionable at best: you are a man, to all appearances, albeit a freakish one," Gaskell replied, refastening Jack's trousers.
"And here I thought my charms had gotten around your prejudices: you're killing my hope for enlightenment in your time," Jack drawled, smiling around his own sarcasm.
He could only hope that nothing came of this examination. And aside from Miss Guppy sending one of her girls to collect and destroy the rags -- and to bring fresh ones as Jack required them -- nothing came of it, at least till the flow of blood and tissue stopped itself of its own accord.
But Torchwood never did anything by half measures, and that included vivisecting specimens that fell into their hands. It came as no surprise to him that one night, he awoke as someone popped a sponge stinking with the sickly sweet smell of chloroform over his mouth and nose, while someone else, probably Gaskell, held his legs down. They held the sponge in place till he stopped struggling and he dozed off into a stupor of anesthetic. He almost rather that they had gotten Gaskell to clonk him over the head with something heavy: it would produce about the same results, given his peculiar habit of coming back to life.
This ability to keep slipping out of the grasp of death also meant that anesthetics sometimes went wonky on him: He found himself coming back to consciousness in the middle of the procedure that logically followed the chloroform attack. Someone had slit open his belly, from breastbone to groin and cut back the skin and the muscles beneath, opening him like a zippered suitcase. Gaskell stood nearby, armed with a box camera, snapping pictures; Jack would not have minded, since his appearance defined "photogenic", but he doubted that this quality extended to his internal organs. Torchwood's one medical orderly, a small woman with mussy auburn hair and hollow green eyes, stood over the wooden surgical table, her hands plunged deep into his belly, lifting out organs. He cracked one eye open in time to see her lifting out his uterus, holding it up into the glare from the harsh sodium light that lit the room, then running his Fallopian tubes through the fingers of her other hand. He had seen enough, and he clamped his eyes shut.
"So what does this make this pretty personage?" the medic asked, and from her tone, it sounded like a rhetorical question.
"He's a freak of nature," Gaskell replied, dismissively.
"Wasn't there a hermaphrodite in Mister Barnum's museum of wonders?" the medic asked, ignoring this reply.
"Not one that looked like this subject," Gaskell replied. "The face of that one looked androgynous, not manly like this... personage."
"But did they have a full set of the feminine organs? Would having them not make one female?" the medic mused.
"And yet, this subject in front of us, has both the masculine and the feminine. He -- or perhaps it claims to be able to impregnate and to bear a child," Gaskell replied.
"I suppose one must call a person by the terms that they prefer," the medic replied, proceeding to replace Jack's organs and pulling his muscles and skin closed over them. He felt only the slightest twinges of pain, but the feeling of having someone mucking about with his insides made him wince deep inside his head, making it harder to ape unconsciousness, when he wanted to jump off the table and flee, screaming, despite the fact that it would result in everything falling out of his belly.
They let him heal up, something that took a matter of hours rather than days, but thankfully, they did not send him out on any errands for the next several days: he hated staying cooped up, but the embarrassment of being mucked about with left Jack not wanting to show his face for a bit. And given the date, he knew that another version of himself, the younger one still working for the Time Agency, had descended on the city, which made it necessary for the current version, the grumpier one who had had a run in with a Time Vortex a few months ago, to stay out of sight. The same medic who had cut him open and appraised him later gave him a clean bill of health, and he hoped this would serve as the end of the affair.
Only then, did Miss Guppy and her second in command, Emily Holroyd, get more ideas: they did not conduct the discussions where he could hear them, but from the looks in their eyes as they passed his cell, he knew they had hatched a plot that involved him. He expected them to continue to send him out on their most dangerous little errands. But instead, out of the blue, they kept him confined to his cell for several days before having him moved out to the countryside, in a coach with windows covered in blackout curtains, and a double guard of outriders. A rather pointless amount of security, in his estimation. If he wanted to escape -- and if his wrist strap vortex manipulator worked at all -- he would not have taken off across the moor, he would have headed off to the other side of the universe and the furthest reasonable point on the time continuum, putting them as far away as he could.
All through the journey, he kept asking Miss Holroyd and the other woman who accompanied her -- Elizabeth Something or Other, whom Miss Holroyd kept shushing every time she tried to talk to Jack -- where they were going, but she gave him only the most pat answers, "We need to conduct some experiments, and privacy is needed to ensure that no one interferes." and other things of that ilk.
At length, after several days and several nightly stops at inns (one of which, Jack tried escaping from in the middle of the night by climbing up the chimney, only to find the mouth blocked by some newfangled contraption designed to keep the rain and the rats out, and clearly to keep desperate ex-Time Agents in) that Miss Holroyd had notified in advance to clear the premesis of all other guests -- compensating the innkeepers with sufficient coin in their stead -- the carriage drew up before a stone manor house.
"So why the dickens have you brought me here?" Jack demanded. His companions replied by hauling him out of the carriage, throwing a cloak over his head and dragging him up the steps to the house. Once inside the front doors, they pulled the cloak away.
"Okay," he said, looking around, taking in the richly appointed foyer. "Noble house, parquet floor, lots of money and influence. Mind if I ask who's the master of the house?"
"Lord Hamish Gledhall, the Earl of Houlton and member of the House of Lords," Miss Holroyd replied, as a butler approached to take their cloaks. "We need to test your endowments and the Earl needs an heir, otherwise his estate and title shall be entailed to a nephew in America."
"Can't have it all falling into the hands of a beastly foreigner who probably thinks a Lakota war bonnet is the height of fashion," Jack drawled, mockingly, as they lead him up the stairs. "And he can't find a bride to bear him a son?"
"His Lordship had a bride, but she died whilst giving birth to her only child, who did not survive the night," the butler replied. "His Lordship's... fancies do not run to the fair sex."
Jack quickly put two and two together. "And so I'm supposed to lie back and think of Britain with him, eh?" Miss Holroyd gave him a withering look in reply.
Once they reached the top of the stairs, their guide lead them down a hallway, to the door of a well-appointed sitting room opening onto a bedchamber. They paused in the sitting room, before a folding Japanese style screen arranged before a settee.
"Miss Emily Holroyd of Torchwood, with the... young personage," the butler announced.
"Well, stop being so coy and mysterious and let him in," a rich but gruff baritone voice rumbled behind the screen. "Let me see this wondrous young man."
Jack approached, peering around the screen. On the settee reclined a tall man, likely a robust figure in his youth but now that he had slid down the wrong side of sixty, he had run terribly to fat as the saying went, his heavy form clad in a rich purple silk dressing gown, one thick-fingered hand resting on the grip of a heavy blackthorn walking stick. His face had the jowly look of a bulldog, but his pale blue-grey eyes had a spark in them that suggested he had likely had his share of amourous adventures in his past.
"So this is he, this is Mister Harkness, the lively young personage you spoke of, Miss Holroyd?" he asked.
"Make that the highly gifted young man," Jack cut in before Miss Holroyd could witter about his anatomy.
A smirk twitched at the corner of Lord Houlton's thick mouth and a twinkle showed in one eye. "Well then, let's be on with this," he said. Gesturing at Miss Holroyd, her companion and the butler with his stick, he added, "Out with you: Mister Harkness and I need our privacy for this matter. I won't have you watching us, just to satisfy your curiosity."
Jack would not have minded much, watching him in action would have educated Miss Holroyd and her little friend as to what he really did with his "manly consorts", but the Earl called the shots here, since they stood under his roof. Miss Holroyd opened her mouth to object, but she closed it nodded. "As your Lordship wishes," she said, and putting a hand on her young lady companion's arm, she lead the girl out of the room, the butler escorting them.
The Earl braced his stick on the floor, then heaved himself up onto his feet. "Well, shall we be on with it?"
"Usually I'd prefer a few drinks, maybe a long chat, but it's not really a date, is it?" Jack said. "You're the one leading the dance here: you call the steps." Get this over with as quickly as they could, he could not help but think. The guy was not his type, not because of his looks, but simply because Miss Holroyd had arranged the matter: this had nothing to do with a horizontal waltz and everything to do with getting him, Jack, with child and in the event that he wanted to do that, he would go looking for someone of his own choosing. Lord Houlton put a hand behind his back and steered him into the bedchamber. Someone had turned back the sheets on the curtained four-poster bed within, normally a sight which Jack found inviting and inspiring, but not exactly now, given the circumstances.
The Earl guided him toward the bed, gently but firmly pressing him to sit down on it, before sitting down next to him. Jack wondered if younger brides of men just as old and run down in appearance felt as discomforted. The Earl leaned in and kissed him on the mouth: his mouth felt a bit dry and Jack felt him quiver with eagerness, but he felt a reasonable amount of pressure in that kiss, enough that he did not mind parting his lips and leaning into the kiss, reciprocating it.
Then he felt Lord Houlton's hand reaching in and unlacing the front of his trousers. Jack very nearly pulled aside, but the larger man leaned over him, pushing him onto the bed. No way he could really slide out from under the Earl.
Lie back and think of Britain, indeed, Jack thought as the Earl parted his legs and slid into the slit between them. Looking at the Earl, he hoped he could accommodate, just so this would go with as little discomfort as possible.
The whole embrace took only a handful of moments. Once the Earl rolled off him, Jack turned over onto his side, turning his back to the larger man, emitting what he hoped sounded like a blissful sigh, but which he knew meant relief. One embrace down, how many more to go, till the Earl conceived his heir and Torchwood set their experiment in motion?
After the initial engagement -- their first night together in the sack, to put it less delicately -- their subsequent couplings did not feel so uncomfortable or awkward. Jack, however, could not say that he looked forward to them: he remembered something that a dour, epileptic Russian novelist he had met on his travels, saying something like "A man grows accustomed to anything, the beast." Jack could say the same about the Earl's sagging, flabby flesh.
Night after night, the Earl called him to his chamber, and night after night, Jack answered the call, grudgingly, not happy with the prospects, but not unwillingly. He had once been captured by a king on a planet where le droit du seigneur formed the order of the day, and he had handled that as best he could, strangling the king with the bed curtains and making his escape. Only now, he did not have a space hopper in orbit, waiting for him, and so an assassination had to come off the table.
The Earl did not force him to attend: some nights, he did not send the footman to escort him to the Earl's bedchamber. But he lacked originality and passion in his approach, and that made the whole thing an ordeal to be borne with: Jack could not fault him for that, as the Earl probably had had to limit his couplings to hurried affairs, fumbling with any willing man servants at hand. Even still, if Jack wanted to make time with a flabby dance partner, he preferred the company of a Singing Slug from the Viridian Nebula with whom he had spent some interesting hours. And if the old goat had tried anything genuinely nasty with Jack or had tried to force him, he would have returned the favor and, Earl or no, he would have snapped the man's neck.
But on some level, Jack felt a twinge of pity for the Earl: poor old fogy had not had a decent toss in the sheets like he had wanted to and with the kind of company he preferred in a long time. Years, decades, perhaps. And so he let the Earl have at him, however he preferred, as grabby and too eager as the old man might act, the look of contentment he saw in the Earl's eyes, after the deed would suffice. Though that did not preclude Jack's beating as quick and quiet a retreat back to his room as he could manage, while the Earl, exhausted by his exertions, slept afterward.
By the fourth or fifth week of this, Jack had a feeling that the results which the Earl -- and Miss Holroyd -- required had taken effect. The nausea that he felt on awakening each morning soon, after several days, developed into full on morning sickness -- or all day sickness that had him crouching over a porcelain chamber pot retching his insides raw when he least expected it. He contemplated sneaking out of his room and having an accident on a staircase, but Miss Holroyd and one of her girl goons kept a close watch on his room. And it would do no good for the Earl: the old goat only wanted an heir, though that might have resulted from caving to the demands of the House of Lords and the rest of his peers rather than from a real desire for a child to carry on his lineage. Too bad these folk had yet to discover artificial insemination, though Jack would have preferred the old fashioned method, if ever wanted to have a kid at all -- preferably with some lovely lady or a 51st century gent of his own stripe to carry the little one.
Naturally, the moment Miss Holroyd grew aware of Jack's bouts of nausea and sickness, she knew exactly what he had gotten into. Or what had gotten into him.
The following morning, Jack awoke to find his shirt and trousers had vanished and someone had left a shapeless gown in their place.
"Hey! Who nicked my duds?" Jack yelled. "I'm not against going starkers, but there's folk here who wouldn't appreciate my form or seeing my equipment."
The door opened and Miss Holroyd entered, looking displeased.
"You need to be fittingly attired, in your condition," she said, stiffly, looking from the gown to Jack and back again. "We'll have you fitted with a maternity corset as it becomes necessary."
"I can fit into my trews for at least a couple months more. And I'm sure His Lordship knows a good tailor who can fit me into something looser when I need it," Jack replied.
"You are overlooking the fact that you possess the womanly parts and that you are with child," she replied, patiently.
"And if I'm gonna wear a dress, that'll happen when I take the notion into my own head," Jack replied, starting to lose patience.
"You do realize that the lot of you are guests in my house and subject to my rules of hospitality," a rich but irate baritone voice snarled in the hall doorway. The Earl, clad in his dressing gown and leaning on his blackthorn stick, stood there, glowering, his florid face gone purple with annoyance. "And I shan't have *one* of those guests" -- here he glared at Miss Holroyd -- "Stripping another guest" -- he looked at Jack with less ire -- "Of his dignity as a *man*."
"Yet, your Lordship, we have need of clothing befitting her condition --" Miss Holroyd started to say.
Lord Houlton raised one meaty hand for silence, his gaze softening and a look of wonder coming into his faded eyes as he looked Jack up and down. But his rightful ire returned. "Be that as it may, *he* clearly prefers to be addressed and regarded as a man, whatever his state of fecundity or however nature has shaped him. And if I find that you types are treating him as anything besides that, I shall see that your quarters are removed to a spot next to the donkey in my stables."
Miss Holroyd harrumphed and quit the room. Jack watched her depart, then released the breath he did not realize that he had been holding.
"Well, looks like your lordship told her what for," he said. "Thanks for coming to my defense. Thought I had that one in the bag, but I guess I didn't."
"I do not tolerate bullies under my roof, on any count," the Earl replied. "If she does that again, do not hesitate to notify me or one of my staff. I'll see that you are kitted out properly."
Then losing a little of the stiff upper lip, Lord Houlton looked from Jack's face to his waist, almost as if he expected the younger man to have started to show his condition already. "And so... is it true, then?" he asked, hopefully.
"That you got me up the duff?" Jack replied. "Yeah, it's true."
A smile hinting at pride flickered in the corners of Lord Houlton's mouth. "In that case, I shall lend you some of my shirts and suits as you require them." With a glance down at his own capacious self, he added, "You and I are about the same height, and I should think that my waistcoats will serve you well."
"That's very kind of you, your Lordship," Jack said, with relief.
"It is the least that I can offer after that termagant harried the father of my child," the Earl replied.
"At least you didn't call me the mother," Jack twitted back. "Or I might be inclined to take back what I said."
Lord Houlton glared at him, then chuckled under his breath. "You have a clever tongue and a sharp wit: No wonder they handle you so hard: they've met their match when they met you."
The next few months passed without much in the way of further affronts to Jack's manly dignity, at least from Miss Holroyd: now that they had succeeded in setting up their experiment, she decided it for the best that she went back to London, to attend to business as usual, at least till Jack's time came. The Earl promised to find a willing -- and open minded -- physician to attend to Jack through his confinement. And "confinement" applied in more than one sense of the word: no one outside of the manor who had no right to know about Jack or his condition could find out what went on inside its walls. People suspected where Lord Houlton's desires ran, and though Jack fulfilled them as well as the Earl's duty to his lineage, no one would understand, much less accept them.
Fortunately, Lord Houlton's clemency continued: he assigned his personal footman to keep an eye on Jack and to keep him company, given the way that they had to keep him hidden away in an upper floor suite, far away from prying eyes. And the Earl himself regularly visited his "male brood mare", a clever moniker which they came to agree on, when his duties to the House of Lords did not have him occupied and away from his estate.
"I've had the term 'brooding' applied to me, when I've been in a darker mood. Not that I get into one very often," Jack said, the night they settled on the phrase. "But this is the first time the word really fit. But a mare?"
"I suppose I rode you well, though I regret, I sit more heavily in the saddle than I once did," Lord Houlton replied.
"Takes all kinds to make a world and I've had dance partners of all shapes and sizes and colours and species," Jack replied with a shrug of one shoulder. "There's no hard feelings at my end: I've got a strong constitution."
"So you would... call yourself a man of experience, I take it?" Lord Houlton noted, with a smirk. "They say that you came from another world: so that means that it is true, that there are people dwelling on other spheres circling other stars, and that from time to time, they find their way to our world?"
"Earth's had its share of visitors: I've been all over this world, and not just in this time frame," Jack said.
Lord Houlton raised an eyebrow, nodding slowly. "You have the look of a well-traveled man. Had I not been born to this estate, I would have done my share of traveling. But duty called and I let its burden settle on my shoulders."
"Well, I've got nine months to stay put and dozens of stories of the places I've seen," Jack said. "The time will pass for us if I spend what time we've got telling you about them."
"I think I would enjoy that, if you are willing to share your tales with your host," Lord Houlton said.
"Consider it a bargain," Jack replied with a smile. "Most people don't believe me when tell my tales, or they think I'm fabricating. Or mad."
Late in the winter, however, when the spring season had started, a Royal announcement arrived: Queen Victoria herself had heard tell of the well-equipped young man who now served as Lord Houlton's brood mare and she wished to see him in person. The Earl broke the news to Jack: he would not spring this on his guest and ward.
"She would have to come now, when I'm ready to pop," Jack grumbled, rubbing his swollen sides, irritably.
"You would look more convincing, and Her Majesty never ventures this far into the North county until the worst of the winter has passed," Lord Houlton said, looking up from the letter. "Her messenger is waiting. Shall we accept her request?"
"I suppose if I say no, it'll cost you some points with Her Royal self," Jack said. "All right, as long she keeps her hands to herself."
Lord Houlton snorted. "I hardly expect she will prod you, and given your fondness for conquest I would think that you would welcome it if she were to take you in hand and claim you for the crown," he noted.
"Did you just make a joke?" Jack growled, annoyed, but smiling.
"One has to make light of embarrassing situations like this," Lord Houlton said.
A week later, Her Majesty arrived at the manor, surrounded by a few guards (no ladies in waiting, to Jack's disappointment: he could use some pretty faces to look at) as she approached Jack's bedside. Jack himself sat propped on a pile of large cushions, clad in a loose, linen shirt untucked from his trousers.
"Begging your Lordships pardon, but you sure this young... person is truly with child?" one of the guards asked.
Victoria darted a withering look at the skeptic. "I have borne nine children of my own: I know the signs of gravidity," she said. And raising her own walking stick, she slid the tip under the hem of Jack's shirt, lifting the front and uncovering his belly, silencing the skeptics. The objecter's eyebrows rose and he backed away, squeamishly.
"Torchwood has clearly served its purpose, since it has acquired such a ... useful and unusual human specimen," Victoria declared. "And we are pleased to see that through you, the unnatural has proven natural."
"Well, I'm glad to hear you approve of me," Jack murmured.
Victoria shot him a look that could have withered a full grown Pleidean banyan tree. "However, we are not pleased to find that a male has usurped the natural order of childbearing and taken from women what is their God given role in the order of nature," she replied.
"A man can't help how he's equipped: someone engineered this a few dozen generations before my time," Jack retorted.
"We accept that you are an unusual specimen," Victoria shot back. "But this shall be the first and the last time that you usurp a woman's place." Her gaze leveled itself on the Earl. "And the last time that you employ this male to do do so."
Well, that settled it, and though he wished the Queen had phrased it differently, at least she had put herself in his corner, Jack thought.
A few weeks after Victoria's visit, and a week before Easter, but a few days before Miss Guppy and Miss Holroyd, with their medic in tow, were slated to arrive and attend the birth, Jack awakened in the dead of night, feeling a wave of pain tightening his back and rolling forward through the walls of his belly. He reached for the bell pull beside the bed, yanking on it, hard. Some long moments later, the footman, with his nightshirt tucked into his trousers, hurried into the room, his eyes still fogged with sleep.
"Something the matter, Mister Harkness?" he asked.
"Yeah, tell your master his kid is about to make their debut," Jack grunted, gripping the one of the bedposts. "Hope he managed to find an open-minded surgeon in the meantime."
"Indeed, sir," replied the footman -- Mister Jones, or some common name like that, though he had some Welsh first name with a lot of y's in it -- and he left the room with a practiced quickness.
Lord Houlton came into the room a moment later, a look of apology on his broad face. "I wish that I had better news for you, but I regret to say that I never was able to procure the services of a willing or qualified surgeon," he said.
Jack forced himself to keep his breathing deep and even. "Lot of good you are at a time like this," he grunted, against the contraction flowing through his body. "Looks like you're going to have to do the honors."
Lord Houlton frowned and took a step back. "I don't think that I have the nerve to do that," he said, squeamishly.
"You put this kid in me, you're going to help me take them out," Jack insisted. "Get me a pile of clean towels, a needle and thread, and a carving knife. And a pot of weak tea when I need it."
"A knife... what do you intend to do?" the Earl asked.
"I'm gonna have to cut myself open. Don't worry, I heal easily: I'm tricky that way," Jack grated.
"But that is... that's not natural," the Earl said.
"You want your child -- and mine -- to live?" Jack retorted.
"But of course."
"Then get me that carving knife, otherwise, neither of us is going to make it," Jack demanded.
"I shall take my chances," Lord Houlton replied. "Jones, fetch the towels which Mister Harkness requested."
The next few hours would get exciting: Jack had seen a few births -- female and male -- as a kid on the Boeshane Peninsula. He knew what to do, as long as he had a knife handy, but now that one had been denied, he could only make do as best he could. The tea kept him hydrated, but he could feel the child within him pushing against the narrow passage of his vaginal canal. Too narrow: he could only hope that his strong constitution would ease the process. But as the hours dragged on and day moved into night, then night into another day, with no sign of the child emerging, he could not help the apprehension setting in.
His water had broken hours ago, now blood had started to flow, too quick and too abundantly. As he pushed down with his stomach muscles clenched, he had felt something tear inside, something he probably needed. But the child's head did not appear.
Too many towels, too many linens, dyed red with his blood....
By sunset, he felt himself weakening. The child had stopped moving hours ago, not a good sign. Even the contractions had stopped. So much pain, but even that had started to ebb. Not a good sign. Not a good way to go...
The coldness that set in came as a relief: served the Earl right for denying his requests. Then the all too familiar blackness started to fill the edges of his range of sight. Dying never felt easy and the slow deaths caused him the most agony, but this time at least, Jack welcomed it. He caught himself feeling one regret: he would never get to look on the face of the child that lay dead within him. He or she might possess half the genetics of the man who had let him die, but the other half belonged to Jack...
He caught himself welcoming the blackness as it filled the middle of his range of vision and he sank back into the cold grip of death, embracing it and letting it swallow him. Maybe those mopey German Romantics had hit on something: maybe Death offered the most gentle embrace...
...As he gasped awake, he looked up into the faces of Alice Guppy and Emily Holroyd. The cement ceiling behind them suggested the cold, pragmatic halls of Torchwood.
"Huh... guess you brought me home again," he rasped, voice still husky with the last traces of pain. Never thought he would actually welcome the sight of the place.
"That is the first time you have called this place a home," Miss Guppy noted. "Are you relieved to be here?"
"Yes, and no," Jack said, sitting up. A twinge cut across his lower abdomen. He put a hand to his belly, still slack from the ordeal, but not as much as he had feared, and found a fresh row of stitches. "The child..." He hardly dared to ask the question.
"We had to remove her by way of a post mortem examination. Miss Seward did the honors," Miss Holroyd replied. He winced at the thought of that weird little woman rummaging about in his guts, but at least that time, he had no way of knowing what went on. No chance of waking up in the middle of the procedure, either. Small mercies, who'd have guessed?
"Her... it was a girl?" he asked, feeling his heart sink into his heels.
"It would have been a daughter," Miss Guppy said, sadly. "We regret to inform you, but the child did not survive the ordeal."
"Only because her father denied me what I needed," he snapped.
"We did try to find a surgeon who would perform the surgery when the time came, but aside from Miss Seward, we could not find one who possessed of ...an open mind," Miss Holroyd explained.
"I could have handled it, if he'd have let me have a knife," Jack said, climbing off the table, and reaching for the set of clothes laid out on a chair nearby. His usual linen shirt and tan trousers, thankfully.
"He did not trust you with it: he's not... accustomed to modern techniques," Miss Guppy explained, stepping aside and averting her eyes as Jack dressed himself.
"Where will you go from here, Mister Harkness?" Miss Holroyd asked.
"Anywhere but here, and don't try to stop me," Jack snarled, hauling on his trousers.
"I suppose... after the ordeal through which we put you, we owe you compensation of some sort," Miss Guppy said apologetically.
Jack did not have it in his nature to strike a woman unless she had struck him first and he did not deserve it, but in that moment, he could not help but feel tempted to take one of the empty heads of these two in either of his hands and slam them together.
"Compensation...." he snarled, fastening his trousers and starting on his shirt while shoving his feet into his boots. "I say you owe me my freedom."
"If that is what you want..." Miss Holroyd said, lifting her hands, palm up, in assent.
"I'll take it," Jack spat back and settinf his back to them, headed out of the place and into the daylight.
At least now that Miss Holroyd had taken him off the leash, he had free rein to do what he had to do, and the first thing he had in mind was to make sure that this never happened again, that no one ever got him with child ever. He tracked down Polly Dodger, who might know where he could find the necessary services, not an easy thing to find in a country obsessed with childbearing.
"Missed you 'orribly, Jack: you been on one 'uv yer missions?" Polly asked, over a couple glasses of gin in a hole in the wall bar tucked away in a back corner of Whitechapel.
"Something like that: they got me in trouble, the way a girl would get in trouble, and they sent me up north to have the baby," Jack replied, matter of factly.
She looked at him, head tilted in puzzlement but with no sign of disbelief, then she tittered, grinning. "So it's true?"
"Hey, how'd you find that out?" he demanded, not angered, but curious.
"Jack, Ah've 'ad me face in t' front o' yer trews, ah've done a lit'ul explorin'," she said. She glanced around, then leaned in and whispered, "Ah know a lady doctor who'd be more'n willin' to fix you up, make it so's y' won't 'ave to worry 'bout that 'appening again. She'll even do it f'r free if y' can't pay."
"Money isn't the issue here: I just need to have this taken care of as soon as I can," he said. "Where's her surgery?"
"Ah can take y' there if y' like," she said. "She done me the honors once when I got up the duff."
"Please tell me I wasn't the father," Jack groaned. The last thing he needed to hear right now was that another of his offspring had slipped away.
"Nooo, 'twas Boxer, that German bloke 'oo's wacky in the 'ead," she said.
"Him? I thought he couldn't tell a poke from a joke," Jack twitted, relieved.
"No one else 'ud give him a ride, an' he always been sweet to me. Totty in th' 'ead, but sweet, so I let 'im 'ave one as a kindness," she said, tossing back the last off her gin before rising and offering her hand to him. "Well, time's a-burnin', let me take you roun' t' Madame Durless's surgery..."
The surgery itself stood on the edge between Whitechapel and one of the more polite neighborhoods: that made the environs cleaner, and yet it still had a touch of Whitechapel's anonymity. At least the lady surgeon, a pretty young red head with a kindly disposition and more importantly, a forward thinking mind, did not ask the kind of questions that would have put Jack's teeth on edge. She performed her service, kept him out of sight while he healed (during which she marveled at his ability to heal quickly), then sent him on his way.
And for the first time in a few years, that way followed a path of his own choosing: he had heard that Torchwood had set up the groundwork for a branch in India: apparently some officers of the Raj had had trouble with some assassins whose nature had proved not of this world. And while part of him wanted to set his back on Torchwood and never see it again, he still had a Doctor see about his condition. His immortality, that is.
WARNING: Pain, blood, awkward sex, discussion of sterilization and abortion (and mentions of less permissive attitudes toward same), period-specific homointolerance and intolerance toward male bodied personages with alien anatomy, specifically a guy with a functioning uterus and ovaries.
Sorry, boys and girls and persons of all persuasions, it's set in ye oldie Victorian times: I swear Russell T. and company threw Jack into that era, just after his little encounter with death, resurrection and a Time Vortex, to be really sadistic to the poor bloke.
Special thanks also goes out to the folks of carpe_ho_ras, for helping me name an original male character.
It did not take long for Alice Guppy and her coterie to find out just how much equipment their newest involuntary acquisition carried. First, on bringing him into the fold, they turned out his pockets, finding the pillbox which Jack kept in an otherwise well hidden inner pocket of his mantled greatcoat, and being the nosy types that they were, they confiscated it, "for further examination and in the interest of science, to fulfill our mission to the Crown."
"We have to be certain that you aren't carrying any contraband of a poisonous nature," Miss Guppy informed him sweetly.
"As if I had the chance to poison anyone, the way you lot keep me cooped up when you aren't sending me out on the dirtiest of your dirty work," Jack growled.
"We can't be too careful with your kind and the substances that you might be carrying," Miss Guppy replied.
Well, this is just wonderful, Jack thought. The pills he carried were formulated to put his complex reproductive system into a wait state, making sure that he fired blanks from either barrel. But now the clock had started to tick and in a matter of time, it would come out of that wait state. The Time Agents had allowed their agents to run on a long leash when it came to their amourous proclivities and affairs, as long as their engagements did not result in offspring, hence the contraceptive cocktail that they issued to their operatives. They considered surgery barbaric; Jack did not want a knife to come anywhere near his personal equipment, but he could not help thinking "Double standard, much?" considering the two years of memories that the Time Agency had stolen from his brain.
Within days, the results of going off the contraceptives started to turn up: in the middle of the night, Jack awakened in his cell, finding his linen drawers gummed to his thighs with a milky substance rather than a clear fluid. Well, that would mean he would have to enjoy the thighs rather than the lips -- upper or nether -- of Polly Dodger, the goodnatured girl with whom he had "consorted" at any chance that he could steal a moment with her, whenever Torchwood let him off his leash and the job took him to Whitechapel. But more signs of his fecundity would turn up soon and he dreaded how Torchwood would take that not so little discovery.
Soon enough, the grumpiness that proceeded his monthly started to snarl up his nerves; Jack scared up some rags along with some pins to hold them in place. But while he could hide the fire, he could not hide the smoke, namely, the soiled rags.
He awoke one morning to find Charles Gaskell, Torchwood's only other male agent, kneeling over his bunk and unlacing his trousers.
"Here, I'm all for a surprise roll in the hay first thing in the morning to get my heart going, but I'd rather you asked first before you started unfastening my clothes," Jack teased. "And I thought you favored the fairer sex, Charlie-boy? Or have you decided to dance on a different end of the floor? Wouldn't mind having you as a partner, if that's the case."
"Hush, you're bleeding: and if you are injured, this is no time for your chatter, Harkness," Gaskell said, opening Jack's fly and pulling open the slit in his linen drawers.
Jack gave Gaskell a patient look. "Injured? I wish that's all it was: thanks to your lot taking awa my pillbox, my monthly came back."
Gaskell stared at him, his swarthy face gathering in a frown of annoyance and confusion. "Men do not bleed like this."
"Men in your time don't, but in my time, there's a fair number who do, unless they're on meds to shut that down," Jack replied, patiently. "And I recall a little chat I had with your esteemed leader about the pillbox she found on me."
"So you mean to say that in your world, your kind have concocted a physic that suppresses the natural order of fertility?" Gaskell asked. At least he had not started to go off about Jack's possessing a double compliment of genitalia and calling him an abomination. He had heard enough of that on a planet appropriately called Puritania.
"Not my plan to leave little Jacks on every planet that I visit, and being heavier in the waistcoat because I'm hatching a kid under it would make it harder to run away from something that's trying to get me," Jack replied.
Gaskell took this in, one cheek twitching and his brow furrowing as he tried to parse all of this. "So you mean to say that you are able to get a woman with child and at the same time, that you are able to be gotten with child?" he asked.
"In so many words, yes," Jack replied. "You got a bright mind behind that handsome face, Gaskell."
"I see, but that does not change the fact that the morals of doing so would be questionable at best: you are a man, to all appearances, albeit a freakish one," Gaskell replied, refastening Jack's trousers.
"And here I thought my charms had gotten around your prejudices: you're killing my hope for enlightenment in your time," Jack drawled, smiling around his own sarcasm.
He could only hope that nothing came of this examination. And aside from Miss Guppy sending one of her girls to collect and destroy the rags -- and to bring fresh ones as Jack required them -- nothing came of it, at least till the flow of blood and tissue stopped itself of its own accord.
But Torchwood never did anything by half measures, and that included vivisecting specimens that fell into their hands. It came as no surprise to him that one night, he awoke as someone popped a sponge stinking with the sickly sweet smell of chloroform over his mouth and nose, while someone else, probably Gaskell, held his legs down. They held the sponge in place till he stopped struggling and he dozed off into a stupor of anesthetic. He almost rather that they had gotten Gaskell to clonk him over the head with something heavy: it would produce about the same results, given his peculiar habit of coming back to life.
This ability to keep slipping out of the grasp of death also meant that anesthetics sometimes went wonky on him: He found himself coming back to consciousness in the middle of the procedure that logically followed the chloroform attack. Someone had slit open his belly, from breastbone to groin and cut back the skin and the muscles beneath, opening him like a zippered suitcase. Gaskell stood nearby, armed with a box camera, snapping pictures; Jack would not have minded, since his appearance defined "photogenic", but he doubted that this quality extended to his internal organs. Torchwood's one medical orderly, a small woman with mussy auburn hair and hollow green eyes, stood over the wooden surgical table, her hands plunged deep into his belly, lifting out organs. He cracked one eye open in time to see her lifting out his uterus, holding it up into the glare from the harsh sodium light that lit the room, then running his Fallopian tubes through the fingers of her other hand. He had seen enough, and he clamped his eyes shut.
"So what does this make this pretty personage?" the medic asked, and from her tone, it sounded like a rhetorical question.
"He's a freak of nature," Gaskell replied, dismissively.
"Wasn't there a hermaphrodite in Mister Barnum's museum of wonders?" the medic asked, ignoring this reply.
"Not one that looked like this subject," Gaskell replied. "The face of that one looked androgynous, not manly like this... personage."
"But did they have a full set of the feminine organs? Would having them not make one female?" the medic mused.
"And yet, this subject in front of us, has both the masculine and the feminine. He -- or perhaps it claims to be able to impregnate and to bear a child," Gaskell replied.
"I suppose one must call a person by the terms that they prefer," the medic replied, proceeding to replace Jack's organs and pulling his muscles and skin closed over them. He felt only the slightest twinges of pain, but the feeling of having someone mucking about with his insides made him wince deep inside his head, making it harder to ape unconsciousness, when he wanted to jump off the table and flee, screaming, despite the fact that it would result in everything falling out of his belly.
They let him heal up, something that took a matter of hours rather than days, but thankfully, they did not send him out on any errands for the next several days: he hated staying cooped up, but the embarrassment of being mucked about with left Jack not wanting to show his face for a bit. And given the date, he knew that another version of himself, the younger one still working for the Time Agency, had descended on the city, which made it necessary for the current version, the grumpier one who had had a run in with a Time Vortex a few months ago, to stay out of sight. The same medic who had cut him open and appraised him later gave him a clean bill of health, and he hoped this would serve as the end of the affair.
Only then, did Miss Guppy and her second in command, Emily Holroyd, get more ideas: they did not conduct the discussions where he could hear them, but from the looks in their eyes as they passed his cell, he knew they had hatched a plot that involved him. He expected them to continue to send him out on their most dangerous little errands. But instead, out of the blue, they kept him confined to his cell for several days before having him moved out to the countryside, in a coach with windows covered in blackout curtains, and a double guard of outriders. A rather pointless amount of security, in his estimation. If he wanted to escape -- and if his wrist strap vortex manipulator worked at all -- he would not have taken off across the moor, he would have headed off to the other side of the universe and the furthest reasonable point on the time continuum, putting them as far away as he could.
All through the journey, he kept asking Miss Holroyd and the other woman who accompanied her -- Elizabeth Something or Other, whom Miss Holroyd kept shushing every time she tried to talk to Jack -- where they were going, but she gave him only the most pat answers, "We need to conduct some experiments, and privacy is needed to ensure that no one interferes." and other things of that ilk.
At length, after several days and several nightly stops at inns (one of which, Jack tried escaping from in the middle of the night by climbing up the chimney, only to find the mouth blocked by some newfangled contraption designed to keep the rain and the rats out, and clearly to keep desperate ex-Time Agents in) that Miss Holroyd had notified in advance to clear the premesis of all other guests -- compensating the innkeepers with sufficient coin in their stead -- the carriage drew up before a stone manor house.
"So why the dickens have you brought me here?" Jack demanded. His companions replied by hauling him out of the carriage, throwing a cloak over his head and dragging him up the steps to the house. Once inside the front doors, they pulled the cloak away.
"Okay," he said, looking around, taking in the richly appointed foyer. "Noble house, parquet floor, lots of money and influence. Mind if I ask who's the master of the house?"
"Lord Hamish Gledhall, the Earl of Houlton and member of the House of Lords," Miss Holroyd replied, as a butler approached to take their cloaks. "We need to test your endowments and the Earl needs an heir, otherwise his estate and title shall be entailed to a nephew in America."
"Can't have it all falling into the hands of a beastly foreigner who probably thinks a Lakota war bonnet is the height of fashion," Jack drawled, mockingly, as they lead him up the stairs. "And he can't find a bride to bear him a son?"
"His Lordship had a bride, but she died whilst giving birth to her only child, who did not survive the night," the butler replied. "His Lordship's... fancies do not run to the fair sex."
Jack quickly put two and two together. "And so I'm supposed to lie back and think of Britain with him, eh?" Miss Holroyd gave him a withering look in reply.
Once they reached the top of the stairs, their guide lead them down a hallway, to the door of a well-appointed sitting room opening onto a bedchamber. They paused in the sitting room, before a folding Japanese style screen arranged before a settee.
"Miss Emily Holroyd of Torchwood, with the... young personage," the butler announced.
"Well, stop being so coy and mysterious and let him in," a rich but gruff baritone voice rumbled behind the screen. "Let me see this wondrous young man."
Jack approached, peering around the screen. On the settee reclined a tall man, likely a robust figure in his youth but now that he had slid down the wrong side of sixty, he had run terribly to fat as the saying went, his heavy form clad in a rich purple silk dressing gown, one thick-fingered hand resting on the grip of a heavy blackthorn walking stick. His face had the jowly look of a bulldog, but his pale blue-grey eyes had a spark in them that suggested he had likely had his share of amourous adventures in his past.
"So this is he, this is Mister Harkness, the lively young personage you spoke of, Miss Holroyd?" he asked.
"Make that the highly gifted young man," Jack cut in before Miss Holroyd could witter about his anatomy.
A smirk twitched at the corner of Lord Houlton's thick mouth and a twinkle showed in one eye. "Well then, let's be on with this," he said. Gesturing at Miss Holroyd, her companion and the butler with his stick, he added, "Out with you: Mister Harkness and I need our privacy for this matter. I won't have you watching us, just to satisfy your curiosity."
Jack would not have minded much, watching him in action would have educated Miss Holroyd and her little friend as to what he really did with his "manly consorts", but the Earl called the shots here, since they stood under his roof. Miss Holroyd opened her mouth to object, but she closed it nodded. "As your Lordship wishes," she said, and putting a hand on her young lady companion's arm, she lead the girl out of the room, the butler escorting them.
The Earl braced his stick on the floor, then heaved himself up onto his feet. "Well, shall we be on with it?"
"Usually I'd prefer a few drinks, maybe a long chat, but it's not really a date, is it?" Jack said. "You're the one leading the dance here: you call the steps." Get this over with as quickly as they could, he could not help but think. The guy was not his type, not because of his looks, but simply because Miss Holroyd had arranged the matter: this had nothing to do with a horizontal waltz and everything to do with getting him, Jack, with child and in the event that he wanted to do that, he would go looking for someone of his own choosing. Lord Houlton put a hand behind his back and steered him into the bedchamber. Someone had turned back the sheets on the curtained four-poster bed within, normally a sight which Jack found inviting and inspiring, but not exactly now, given the circumstances.
The Earl guided him toward the bed, gently but firmly pressing him to sit down on it, before sitting down next to him. Jack wondered if younger brides of men just as old and run down in appearance felt as discomforted. The Earl leaned in and kissed him on the mouth: his mouth felt a bit dry and Jack felt him quiver with eagerness, but he felt a reasonable amount of pressure in that kiss, enough that he did not mind parting his lips and leaning into the kiss, reciprocating it.
Then he felt Lord Houlton's hand reaching in and unlacing the front of his trousers. Jack very nearly pulled aside, but the larger man leaned over him, pushing him onto the bed. No way he could really slide out from under the Earl.
Lie back and think of Britain, indeed, Jack thought as the Earl parted his legs and slid into the slit between them. Looking at the Earl, he hoped he could accommodate, just so this would go with as little discomfort as possible.
The whole embrace took only a handful of moments. Once the Earl rolled off him, Jack turned over onto his side, turning his back to the larger man, emitting what he hoped sounded like a blissful sigh, but which he knew meant relief. One embrace down, how many more to go, till the Earl conceived his heir and Torchwood set their experiment in motion?
After the initial engagement -- their first night together in the sack, to put it less delicately -- their subsequent couplings did not feel so uncomfortable or awkward. Jack, however, could not say that he looked forward to them: he remembered something that a dour, epileptic Russian novelist he had met on his travels, saying something like "A man grows accustomed to anything, the beast." Jack could say the same about the Earl's sagging, flabby flesh.
Night after night, the Earl called him to his chamber, and night after night, Jack answered the call, grudgingly, not happy with the prospects, but not unwillingly. He had once been captured by a king on a planet where le droit du seigneur formed the order of the day, and he had handled that as best he could, strangling the king with the bed curtains and making his escape. Only now, he did not have a space hopper in orbit, waiting for him, and so an assassination had to come off the table.
The Earl did not force him to attend: some nights, he did not send the footman to escort him to the Earl's bedchamber. But he lacked originality and passion in his approach, and that made the whole thing an ordeal to be borne with: Jack could not fault him for that, as the Earl probably had had to limit his couplings to hurried affairs, fumbling with any willing man servants at hand. Even still, if Jack wanted to make time with a flabby dance partner, he preferred the company of a Singing Slug from the Viridian Nebula with whom he had spent some interesting hours. And if the old goat had tried anything genuinely nasty with Jack or had tried to force him, he would have returned the favor and, Earl or no, he would have snapped the man's neck.
But on some level, Jack felt a twinge of pity for the Earl: poor old fogy had not had a decent toss in the sheets like he had wanted to and with the kind of company he preferred in a long time. Years, decades, perhaps. And so he let the Earl have at him, however he preferred, as grabby and too eager as the old man might act, the look of contentment he saw in the Earl's eyes, after the deed would suffice. Though that did not preclude Jack's beating as quick and quiet a retreat back to his room as he could manage, while the Earl, exhausted by his exertions, slept afterward.
By the fourth or fifth week of this, Jack had a feeling that the results which the Earl -- and Miss Holroyd -- required had taken effect. The nausea that he felt on awakening each morning soon, after several days, developed into full on morning sickness -- or all day sickness that had him crouching over a porcelain chamber pot retching his insides raw when he least expected it. He contemplated sneaking out of his room and having an accident on a staircase, but Miss Holroyd and one of her girl goons kept a close watch on his room. And it would do no good for the Earl: the old goat only wanted an heir, though that might have resulted from caving to the demands of the House of Lords and the rest of his peers rather than from a real desire for a child to carry on his lineage. Too bad these folk had yet to discover artificial insemination, though Jack would have preferred the old fashioned method, if ever wanted to have a kid at all -- preferably with some lovely lady or a 51st century gent of his own stripe to carry the little one.
Naturally, the moment Miss Holroyd grew aware of Jack's bouts of nausea and sickness, she knew exactly what he had gotten into. Or what had gotten into him.
The following morning, Jack awoke to find his shirt and trousers had vanished and someone had left a shapeless gown in their place.
"Hey! Who nicked my duds?" Jack yelled. "I'm not against going starkers, but there's folk here who wouldn't appreciate my form or seeing my equipment."
The door opened and Miss Holroyd entered, looking displeased.
"You need to be fittingly attired, in your condition," she said, stiffly, looking from the gown to Jack and back again. "We'll have you fitted with a maternity corset as it becomes necessary."
"I can fit into my trews for at least a couple months more. And I'm sure His Lordship knows a good tailor who can fit me into something looser when I need it," Jack replied.
"You are overlooking the fact that you possess the womanly parts and that you are with child," she replied, patiently.
"And if I'm gonna wear a dress, that'll happen when I take the notion into my own head," Jack replied, starting to lose patience.
"You do realize that the lot of you are guests in my house and subject to my rules of hospitality," a rich but irate baritone voice snarled in the hall doorway. The Earl, clad in his dressing gown and leaning on his blackthorn stick, stood there, glowering, his florid face gone purple with annoyance. "And I shan't have *one* of those guests" -- here he glared at Miss Holroyd -- "Stripping another guest" -- he looked at Jack with less ire -- "Of his dignity as a *man*."
"Yet, your Lordship, we have need of clothing befitting her condition --" Miss Holroyd started to say.
Lord Houlton raised one meaty hand for silence, his gaze softening and a look of wonder coming into his faded eyes as he looked Jack up and down. But his rightful ire returned. "Be that as it may, *he* clearly prefers to be addressed and regarded as a man, whatever his state of fecundity or however nature has shaped him. And if I find that you types are treating him as anything besides that, I shall see that your quarters are removed to a spot next to the donkey in my stables."
Miss Holroyd harrumphed and quit the room. Jack watched her depart, then released the breath he did not realize that he had been holding.
"Well, looks like your lordship told her what for," he said. "Thanks for coming to my defense. Thought I had that one in the bag, but I guess I didn't."
"I do not tolerate bullies under my roof, on any count," the Earl replied. "If she does that again, do not hesitate to notify me or one of my staff. I'll see that you are kitted out properly."
Then losing a little of the stiff upper lip, Lord Houlton looked from Jack's face to his waist, almost as if he expected the younger man to have started to show his condition already. "And so... is it true, then?" he asked, hopefully.
"That you got me up the duff?" Jack replied. "Yeah, it's true."
A smile hinting at pride flickered in the corners of Lord Houlton's mouth. "In that case, I shall lend you some of my shirts and suits as you require them." With a glance down at his own capacious self, he added, "You and I are about the same height, and I should think that my waistcoats will serve you well."
"That's very kind of you, your Lordship," Jack said, with relief.
"It is the least that I can offer after that termagant harried the father of my child," the Earl replied.
"At least you didn't call me the mother," Jack twitted back. "Or I might be inclined to take back what I said."
Lord Houlton glared at him, then chuckled under his breath. "You have a clever tongue and a sharp wit: No wonder they handle you so hard: they've met their match when they met you."
The next few months passed without much in the way of further affronts to Jack's manly dignity, at least from Miss Holroyd: now that they had succeeded in setting up their experiment, she decided it for the best that she went back to London, to attend to business as usual, at least till Jack's time came. The Earl promised to find a willing -- and open minded -- physician to attend to Jack through his confinement. And "confinement" applied in more than one sense of the word: no one outside of the manor who had no right to know about Jack or his condition could find out what went on inside its walls. People suspected where Lord Houlton's desires ran, and though Jack fulfilled them as well as the Earl's duty to his lineage, no one would understand, much less accept them.
Fortunately, Lord Houlton's clemency continued: he assigned his personal footman to keep an eye on Jack and to keep him company, given the way that they had to keep him hidden away in an upper floor suite, far away from prying eyes. And the Earl himself regularly visited his "male brood mare", a clever moniker which they came to agree on, when his duties to the House of Lords did not have him occupied and away from his estate.
"I've had the term 'brooding' applied to me, when I've been in a darker mood. Not that I get into one very often," Jack said, the night they settled on the phrase. "But this is the first time the word really fit. But a mare?"
"I suppose I rode you well, though I regret, I sit more heavily in the saddle than I once did," Lord Houlton replied.
"Takes all kinds to make a world and I've had dance partners of all shapes and sizes and colours and species," Jack replied with a shrug of one shoulder. "There's no hard feelings at my end: I've got a strong constitution."
"So you would... call yourself a man of experience, I take it?" Lord Houlton noted, with a smirk. "They say that you came from another world: so that means that it is true, that there are people dwelling on other spheres circling other stars, and that from time to time, they find their way to our world?"
"Earth's had its share of visitors: I've been all over this world, and not just in this time frame," Jack said.
Lord Houlton raised an eyebrow, nodding slowly. "You have the look of a well-traveled man. Had I not been born to this estate, I would have done my share of traveling. But duty called and I let its burden settle on my shoulders."
"Well, I've got nine months to stay put and dozens of stories of the places I've seen," Jack said. "The time will pass for us if I spend what time we've got telling you about them."
"I think I would enjoy that, if you are willing to share your tales with your host," Lord Houlton said.
"Consider it a bargain," Jack replied with a smile. "Most people don't believe me when tell my tales, or they think I'm fabricating. Or mad."
Late in the winter, however, when the spring season had started, a Royal announcement arrived: Queen Victoria herself had heard tell of the well-equipped young man who now served as Lord Houlton's brood mare and she wished to see him in person. The Earl broke the news to Jack: he would not spring this on his guest and ward.
"She would have to come now, when I'm ready to pop," Jack grumbled, rubbing his swollen sides, irritably.
"You would look more convincing, and Her Majesty never ventures this far into the North county until the worst of the winter has passed," Lord Houlton said, looking up from the letter. "Her messenger is waiting. Shall we accept her request?"
"I suppose if I say no, it'll cost you some points with Her Royal self," Jack said. "All right, as long she keeps her hands to herself."
Lord Houlton snorted. "I hardly expect she will prod you, and given your fondness for conquest I would think that you would welcome it if she were to take you in hand and claim you for the crown," he noted.
"Did you just make a joke?" Jack growled, annoyed, but smiling.
"One has to make light of embarrassing situations like this," Lord Houlton said.
A week later, Her Majesty arrived at the manor, surrounded by a few guards (no ladies in waiting, to Jack's disappointment: he could use some pretty faces to look at) as she approached Jack's bedside. Jack himself sat propped on a pile of large cushions, clad in a loose, linen shirt untucked from his trousers.
"Begging your Lordships pardon, but you sure this young... person is truly with child?" one of the guards asked.
Victoria darted a withering look at the skeptic. "I have borne nine children of my own: I know the signs of gravidity," she said. And raising her own walking stick, she slid the tip under the hem of Jack's shirt, lifting the front and uncovering his belly, silencing the skeptics. The objecter's eyebrows rose and he backed away, squeamishly.
"Torchwood has clearly served its purpose, since it has acquired such a ... useful and unusual human specimen," Victoria declared. "And we are pleased to see that through you, the unnatural has proven natural."
"Well, I'm glad to hear you approve of me," Jack murmured.
Victoria shot him a look that could have withered a full grown Pleidean banyan tree. "However, we are not pleased to find that a male has usurped the natural order of childbearing and taken from women what is their God given role in the order of nature," she replied.
"A man can't help how he's equipped: someone engineered this a few dozen generations before my time," Jack retorted.
"We accept that you are an unusual specimen," Victoria shot back. "But this shall be the first and the last time that you usurp a woman's place." Her gaze leveled itself on the Earl. "And the last time that you employ this male to do do so."
Well, that settled it, and though he wished the Queen had phrased it differently, at least she had put herself in his corner, Jack thought.
A few weeks after Victoria's visit, and a week before Easter, but a few days before Miss Guppy and Miss Holroyd, with their medic in tow, were slated to arrive and attend the birth, Jack awakened in the dead of night, feeling a wave of pain tightening his back and rolling forward through the walls of his belly. He reached for the bell pull beside the bed, yanking on it, hard. Some long moments later, the footman, with his nightshirt tucked into his trousers, hurried into the room, his eyes still fogged with sleep.
"Something the matter, Mister Harkness?" he asked.
"Yeah, tell your master his kid is about to make their debut," Jack grunted, gripping the one of the bedposts. "Hope he managed to find an open-minded surgeon in the meantime."
"Indeed, sir," replied the footman -- Mister Jones, or some common name like that, though he had some Welsh first name with a lot of y's in it -- and he left the room with a practiced quickness.
Lord Houlton came into the room a moment later, a look of apology on his broad face. "I wish that I had better news for you, but I regret to say that I never was able to procure the services of a willing or qualified surgeon," he said.
Jack forced himself to keep his breathing deep and even. "Lot of good you are at a time like this," he grunted, against the contraction flowing through his body. "Looks like you're going to have to do the honors."
Lord Houlton frowned and took a step back. "I don't think that I have the nerve to do that," he said, squeamishly.
"You put this kid in me, you're going to help me take them out," Jack insisted. "Get me a pile of clean towels, a needle and thread, and a carving knife. And a pot of weak tea when I need it."
"A knife... what do you intend to do?" the Earl asked.
"I'm gonna have to cut myself open. Don't worry, I heal easily: I'm tricky that way," Jack grated.
"But that is... that's not natural," the Earl said.
"You want your child -- and mine -- to live?" Jack retorted.
"But of course."
"Then get me that carving knife, otherwise, neither of us is going to make it," Jack demanded.
"I shall take my chances," Lord Houlton replied. "Jones, fetch the towels which Mister Harkness requested."
The next few hours would get exciting: Jack had seen a few births -- female and male -- as a kid on the Boeshane Peninsula. He knew what to do, as long as he had a knife handy, but now that one had been denied, he could only make do as best he could. The tea kept him hydrated, but he could feel the child within him pushing against the narrow passage of his vaginal canal. Too narrow: he could only hope that his strong constitution would ease the process. But as the hours dragged on and day moved into night, then night into another day, with no sign of the child emerging, he could not help the apprehension setting in.
His water had broken hours ago, now blood had started to flow, too quick and too abundantly. As he pushed down with his stomach muscles clenched, he had felt something tear inside, something he probably needed. But the child's head did not appear.
Too many towels, too many linens, dyed red with his blood....
By sunset, he felt himself weakening. The child had stopped moving hours ago, not a good sign. Even the contractions had stopped. So much pain, but even that had started to ebb. Not a good sign. Not a good way to go...
The coldness that set in came as a relief: served the Earl right for denying his requests. Then the all too familiar blackness started to fill the edges of his range of sight. Dying never felt easy and the slow deaths caused him the most agony, but this time at least, Jack welcomed it. He caught himself feeling one regret: he would never get to look on the face of the child that lay dead within him. He or she might possess half the genetics of the man who had let him die, but the other half belonged to Jack...
He caught himself welcoming the blackness as it filled the middle of his range of vision and he sank back into the cold grip of death, embracing it and letting it swallow him. Maybe those mopey German Romantics had hit on something: maybe Death offered the most gentle embrace...
...As he gasped awake, he looked up into the faces of Alice Guppy and Emily Holroyd. The cement ceiling behind them suggested the cold, pragmatic halls of Torchwood.
"Huh... guess you brought me home again," he rasped, voice still husky with the last traces of pain. Never thought he would actually welcome the sight of the place.
"That is the first time you have called this place a home," Miss Guppy noted. "Are you relieved to be here?"
"Yes, and no," Jack said, sitting up. A twinge cut across his lower abdomen. He put a hand to his belly, still slack from the ordeal, but not as much as he had feared, and found a fresh row of stitches. "The child..." He hardly dared to ask the question.
"We had to remove her by way of a post mortem examination. Miss Seward did the honors," Miss Holroyd replied. He winced at the thought of that weird little woman rummaging about in his guts, but at least that time, he had no way of knowing what went on. No chance of waking up in the middle of the procedure, either. Small mercies, who'd have guessed?
"Her... it was a girl?" he asked, feeling his heart sink into his heels.
"It would have been a daughter," Miss Guppy said, sadly. "We regret to inform you, but the child did not survive the ordeal."
"Only because her father denied me what I needed," he snapped.
"We did try to find a surgeon who would perform the surgery when the time came, but aside from Miss Seward, we could not find one who possessed of ...an open mind," Miss Holroyd explained.
"I could have handled it, if he'd have let me have a knife," Jack said, climbing off the table, and reaching for the set of clothes laid out on a chair nearby. His usual linen shirt and tan trousers, thankfully.
"He did not trust you with it: he's not... accustomed to modern techniques," Miss Guppy explained, stepping aside and averting her eyes as Jack dressed himself.
"Where will you go from here, Mister Harkness?" Miss Holroyd asked.
"Anywhere but here, and don't try to stop me," Jack snarled, hauling on his trousers.
"I suppose... after the ordeal through which we put you, we owe you compensation of some sort," Miss Guppy said apologetically.
Jack did not have it in his nature to strike a woman unless she had struck him first and he did not deserve it, but in that moment, he could not help but feel tempted to take one of the empty heads of these two in either of his hands and slam them together.
"Compensation...." he snarled, fastening his trousers and starting on his shirt while shoving his feet into his boots. "I say you owe me my freedom."
"If that is what you want..." Miss Holroyd said, lifting her hands, palm up, in assent.
"I'll take it," Jack spat back and settinf his back to them, headed out of the place and into the daylight.
At least now that Miss Holroyd had taken him off the leash, he had free rein to do what he had to do, and the first thing he had in mind was to make sure that this never happened again, that no one ever got him with child ever. He tracked down Polly Dodger, who might know where he could find the necessary services, not an easy thing to find in a country obsessed with childbearing.
"Missed you 'orribly, Jack: you been on one 'uv yer missions?" Polly asked, over a couple glasses of gin in a hole in the wall bar tucked away in a back corner of Whitechapel.
"Something like that: they got me in trouble, the way a girl would get in trouble, and they sent me up north to have the baby," Jack replied, matter of factly.
She looked at him, head tilted in puzzlement but with no sign of disbelief, then she tittered, grinning. "So it's true?"
"Hey, how'd you find that out?" he demanded, not angered, but curious.
"Jack, Ah've 'ad me face in t' front o' yer trews, ah've done a lit'ul explorin'," she said. She glanced around, then leaned in and whispered, "Ah know a lady doctor who'd be more'n willin' to fix you up, make it so's y' won't 'ave to worry 'bout that 'appening again. She'll even do it f'r free if y' can't pay."
"Money isn't the issue here: I just need to have this taken care of as soon as I can," he said. "Where's her surgery?"
"Ah can take y' there if y' like," she said. "She done me the honors once when I got up the duff."
"Please tell me I wasn't the father," Jack groaned. The last thing he needed to hear right now was that another of his offspring had slipped away.
"Nooo, 'twas Boxer, that German bloke 'oo's wacky in the 'ead," she said.
"Him? I thought he couldn't tell a poke from a joke," Jack twitted, relieved.
"No one else 'ud give him a ride, an' he always been sweet to me. Totty in th' 'ead, but sweet, so I let 'im 'ave one as a kindness," she said, tossing back the last off her gin before rising and offering her hand to him. "Well, time's a-burnin', let me take you roun' t' Madame Durless's surgery..."
The surgery itself stood on the edge between Whitechapel and one of the more polite neighborhoods: that made the environs cleaner, and yet it still had a touch of Whitechapel's anonymity. At least the lady surgeon, a pretty young red head with a kindly disposition and more importantly, a forward thinking mind, did not ask the kind of questions that would have put Jack's teeth on edge. She performed her service, kept him out of sight while he healed (during which she marveled at his ability to heal quickly), then sent him on his way.
And for the first time in a few years, that way followed a path of his own choosing: he had heard that Torchwood had set up the groundwork for a branch in India: apparently some officers of the Raj had had trouble with some assassins whose nature had proved not of this world. And while part of him wanted to set his back on Torchwood and never see it again, he still had a Doctor see about his condition. His immortality, that is.
