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OOC note: SPOILER WARNING: POST AND THREAD MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR TW SERIES 3 TL;DR version: John goes home, and gets dropped back in the nexus post the events of TW S3.
John had gone home. Travelled, fought, fucked and drank his way through every continent the Earth offered. Then, one morning, through the paperthin walls of his motel room in Arizona, on a crackly old TV, he heard them. The children. The heavy intonation that could only mean some sort of population control. Breaking his way in to the room next door, ignoring the passed out junkie and his hooker in the bed, he watched with a quickened heartbeat as the rolling news service gave a garbled tale of children stopping and alien demands.
Maybe Jack needed him? Maybe he could get into Jack's team's good books? Maybe there was a way to play this ransom and make a pretty packet out of it, or at least gain a bargaining chip or three?
In the end, it'd all been too late. His wriststrap had fritzed out after trying to intercept communications between Britain and what they called the 456, and travelling the old fashioned way had just taken far far too long.
Too late. Too late as he crouched at night by the crater that was where the Torchwood Hub had once been. Too late as he found a small little cufflink in the form of a spitfire in the rubble, and just knew in his bones that Jack wasn't around Cardiff anymore. Too late as he leant on the quayside and watched Jack's pet pteranodon far out in Cardiff Bay fishing. Too late as he finally managed to fix his strap again, and he realised that Jack had gone beyond communications reach. Too late, as he finally managed to piece together what had happened by cracking into Government files and communication systems as he sat at a laptop in a hotel room in Cardiff, and fervently wished he'd never heard of this backwater planet, nor ever found Jack again. Too late as he realised Jack had run as far as he could. Again.
Fuck it. Fuck this planet and fuck Jack Harkness for making him give a shit. He threw a bottle of whisky towards a wall, where it hit the corner of a chest of drawers and shattered. John growled loudly in frustration as he got up, the Hotel room suddenly feeling like a prison cell. Moving the remains of the bottle top out of his path earned him a slicing cut across his left palm, and yet another round of colourful cursing. He tore off the edge of the bedsheet to wrap around his hand, and stumbled out of the door in search of air and a new drink.
Where he promptly ended up on the steps outside the nexus' Hotel in fake New New York. He sat down heavily as soon as he realised where he was in his drunken state, laughing bitterly as he did so and shaking his head. "Well, that about figures," he said loudly to the air at large.