It's all AU.

Brant was outside with a book. He was sprawled out, flat on his back. The book was being held up both so he could read without sitting up and to block the sun. When he heard footseps he looked back. "You look familiar." He was... being sarcastic. There were versions of the Doctor all over the place. He still knew which one it was.

He was wandering in the park, enjoying the peace and quiet and pondering on his meeting with his former self. It had been rather eye-opening in a number of ways.

When he saw Jack - a Jack, a mortal Jack - in the distance, he couldn't help but head towards him. He'd never met a mortal Jack before. He was curious.

More sleep, on Jamie's insistence, dinner with the Doctor and Rose, having all in one TARDIS - the Master felt a bit more centered.

This was, he admitted to himself as he wandered towards the library, possibly because the number of people here he counted as family here was larger then back home.

Speaking of. There was a young and mortal version of Jack, walking the other way. The Master stared more than was really polite.

"...Let him stew for a minutes. We'll just keep a leisurely pace, and his curiosity will get the better of him," the Doctor finished, trying to put on a brave face for his companion before he processed they were in fact in a hotel lobby. He staggered for a moment as over four months of memories came rushing back.

Rose tried to hold him up, looking very worried, and steered him over to a chair. "Doctor, are you all right?"

"Oh, my head," the Doctor groaned as he sat, hands in his hair.

"We're not where we were a second ago," Rose whispered to him. "Transmat?"

He lifted his head, eyes wide. "Something a little stranger than that, Rose."

He was stretched out on a couch in the main lounge, ankles crossed and hands behind his head. The window behind him was open, and there was just enough of a breeze coming through to ruffle the pages of his book. He glanced over the top of it when someone walked in, flashed a quick smile and said, "Hey."

It was obviously some version of him, and it was obviously not some version he'd met before.

Brant spotted one of the men he recognized as the Doctor, of some incarnation or another. He poured a cup of tea, took it over and handed it to the Doctor. Then he curled up beside him on the couch.

It was late.

It was always late, but this was a late Jack spent alone. A late night he couldn't look Ianto in the face, because he wouldn't understand. No one could understand. No one he could contact from 21st century Cardiff.

He'd been back in the 1940s, again, World War Two for the fifth time, and it was still beautiful. Still somewhere he wouldn't mind getting trapped, except for the responsibilities to his team and...to his namesake. If that was the right word for a man whose name he'd stolen without ever knowing the true worth of the man.

Well, now he knew. Now he'd seen, danced, kissed, loved and lost, all in one night, and better to have loved and lost, right? He'd believe that again soon.

Draining the last of the brandy from his tumbler, he set the glass down on his desk, pushed his chair back, and ran his fingers over the photograph one final time before adding it to the pile in the tin box and locking it away in the drawer. Reports of disturbances were already coming through, but with any luck, there were purely after effects of Owen tearing the rift open to retrieve them.

An urgent beep from the direction of Tosh's desk called to him, and Jack sighed, pocketed the key to his cabinet, and went out of his office to check on it. Intended to check on it.

Ended up in a familiar looking bar that he recognised within heartbeats, along with a slew of memories that...shit. Shit. Brant.

Jack and Brant and Ianto.

Now he really needed a drink. He crooked a finger at the android behind the bar, ordered a New Canaan brandy, knocked it back in one swallow, regretted it, and ordered another, turning to survey the inhabitants of the bar while waiting for a refill.

There were a lot more doors in this place then Jack had expected. After a while, he wished he'd started marking the ones he'd already checked. Then again, who was to say getting out of here didn't involve some roving wormhole.

He could practically feel Carter's eyes glaring at him from across time and space when he thought that.

He opened another door and stepped across the threshold.

"Woah! Hey! Sorry."

He'd been looking for Jack - a Jack, any Jack - without being willing to admit --even to himself-- that that was what he was doing. When he spotted a familiar outline perched on top of a roof, he didn't hesitate long before taking advantage of a the fire-escape to climb up.

"Hey."

Jamie wandered into the lobby, went and stood in front of the stuffed bunny and appeared to be addressing it, very earnestly. "Tell me the truth here. Is it the ears? Do they stick out too much? The jaw's too strong? Body too gangley? Hair tufts up too much? ...Do I have a strange purplish body odor that I'm the only one who can't smell it? What is it? I can have and maintain an erection for the first time in twenty years and no one's interested."

Brant had been around long enough to get restless again.

The party had been a great diversion to walking back into this mess, and the town itself was interesting enough to hold his attention for quite a while, but in the end his attention span had limits and he'd just about reached them.

He flopped into a chair in the lobby, noticed the newspaper on a table beside him. He picked it up, glanced at the date and then snorted, laughed and tossed it aside. Lifted both his hands and pressed the heels into his eyes.

"This place is a joke."

The Master was sitting at one of the tables savoring a shot of whiskey as he waited for people to show up. He'd traded out of his usual politician's suit, for a longer, more closely tailored knee length jacket, and had actually lost the tie. The white rose remained pinned, of course.

Everything was set up. Tables, large enough for 4 or 5 people to sit comfortably, around the outside of the room. Food and open bar at the far wall from the doors. And still a fairly large space in the middle for dancing. It was going to be interesting to see how many people showed up, because frankly he wasn't sure what the population of the town was. He couldn't help but wonder, given the malleable and mind bending nature of the this place - if more people showed up then could really fit, would the room mysteriously seem bigger? It wasn't a completely absurd idea, here.

As predicted, there were no Doctors with red roses and black converses in sight, yet.

After leaving the Doctor - and still with too much to think about and less chance of being able to avoid doing so - Jack wasted no time in finding the bar.

Not so much for the fact that he needed a drink, but more because that's where Brant said he'd been headed, and considering the overload of information Brant had just had to deal with, Jack was more than a little concerned.

It wasn't empty, of course, but it was pretty quiet, and easy to spot Brant sat at one end of the bar chatting to the server. Jack hooked out a stool next to him, slid onto it, and let his arm fall around Brant's shoulders. "Hey."

Jack had too many things to think about. Immortality, the Doctor, Brant...yeah, that one was taking up most of his mind. Falling in love with a kid who'd barely left home, who he'd only ever encounter in a place outside time, and by all accounts, who he wouldn't remember when he went back to Cardiff.

He'd fallen out of the habit of getting blind drunk to escape thinking, and although he was pretty sure he'd be able to lay his hands on recreational drugs somewhere in this place, he'd been there, done that.

That left him with his usual retreat.

Get somewhere high and avoid thinking about any of it.

It was probably coincidence that took him back to the balcony where he'd first met Brant.

Following some very pleasurable activities, Jack kissed the Doctor and Martha goodbye, listened for the Doctor's TARDIS's dematerialisation noise, and sent his own TARDIS into the Vortex. Now that he could, he planned to go to 2000, and watch Rose for a while.

Then his ship unexpectedly lurched. "Whoa, Emma, sweetheart. You been picking up bad habits from the old girl?" Jack pressed levers and buttons, trying to get her under control. Minutes later, they landed, rather heavily.

And in a park, near some trees, according to the monitor.

Apparently, that was the only where he was going to get.

When was completely out of the question.

"Better go investigate, then," Jack said, leaving his ship. He locked her up, watched the chameleon circuit kick in, assuming the form of an oak tree, and walked towards the park's exit.

Ianto had found the Doctor and then gone and gotten a good night's sleep. He was awake and in a fresh suit the next morning, preparing coffee for the pot in the lobby before absently offering a fresh cup to the man next to him, "Good morning."

He was restless. He was used to being confined to a fairly small area, with a limited population, but he'd been geared up to go somewhere - finally. Jack was fantastic and he was having a good time meeting and talking to people, to be sure, but this morning he was at loose ends.

He took a cup of coffee from one of the server androids, found out where it was meant to be going and took it over himself. "Hey," he said, with a quick, sweet grin as he offered the person their coffee. "Mind some human company?"

Brant had found a set of interconnecting blocks in the toy-store, and dragged the thing back to the hotel. At the moment he was at a table near the door, glass of water at his elbow, building what looked like some sort of multi-colored spaceship.

It was late. There wasn't a whole lot to do. He was making his own fun.

It was late 'evening' according to both his biological clock and the slow return of the stars outside when he found Jack outside.

Even from behind, and even realizing that there was more than one version of him floating around, there was something more than the coat that told Brant that it was 'his' Jack. He resisted the urge to reach out mentally, and instead paced slowly toward him. "Hey," he said, calm and quiet and from a reasonable distance. "You planning on coming back inside tonight, or are we galaxy-gazing."

Him going away wasn't one of the options.

He wasn't short on finding things to occupy him. New place, new time - everything was interesting enough to hold his attention, especially now that he'd decided he was at least mostly safe here.

At the moment he was sitting on a bench outside, with a basket of fried chicken strips. He was pulling them apart with his fingers as much as eating them, at least at the moment. There was a paper cup with a lid and straw sitting at his feet, and he was, just in general, looking really relaxed, and maybe even a little sleepy.

When he heard - sensed, felt, something - someone near-by, he looked up and cocked his eyebrow slightly. "Hey."