All Jack gets in the half-darkness in response to the A-word is Harry's do go on look of polite, credulous curiosity. Jack's already mentioned them before, during his understandable (albeit unnecessary) outburst regarding stress, and the good Doctor clearly doesn't identify as human. He's already long since filed extraterrestrial life into his mental dossier on the man.
Besides which he is, at this point, prepared to throw his hands up in the air and say fine to almost anything he's likely to encounter. Ghosts; immortals; magic; time travel; alternate universes. Why not aliens? If anything - in the context of an infinite and unexplored universe - intelligent alien life is one of the more feasible things he's encountered so far.
The smile when he hears tell of secret military groups and MI6 and outlandish equipment is all internal, not reaching his mouth or even his eyes. Kingsman's toys are, at least, classic spycraft and developed entirely in-house. Simple, sometimes brutal tools - but elegantly and efficiently used, at least until something goes wrong. While there's some vague comfort in the fleeting notion that Valentine's pet project was not of their world - that human hands couldn't have forged something so terrible - he knows that that, too, isn't so. Valentine was a genius; he just happened to be demented. Quite simply, if an organisation as historically well-heeled as the Torchwood Institute existed in the England he knows and loves, they would know about it.
(As for running jokes, well. He's still a few years off his bus pass, isn't he? And there's never going to be a pension in the offing, not for him.)
The way his gaze darts away for just a moment is noted but not commented on. He would guess a condensation of the truth, maybe a veil drawn over something that doesn't belong in the mission statement, rather than an outright lie. He can't begrudge that, all things considered.
"Except you," he ventures quietly, and permits himself the reach of a hand to stroke the hair at the nape of Jack's neck. "And you've hardly a face that would convince the Treasury to stump up."
no subject
Besides which he is, at this point, prepared to throw his hands up in the air and say fine to almost anything he's likely to encounter. Ghosts; immortals; magic; time travel; alternate universes. Why not aliens? If anything - in the context of an infinite and unexplored universe - intelligent alien life is one of the more feasible things he's encountered so far.
The smile when he hears tell of secret military groups and MI6 and outlandish equipment is all internal, not reaching his mouth or even his eyes. Kingsman's toys are, at least, classic spycraft and developed entirely in-house. Simple, sometimes brutal tools - but elegantly and efficiently used, at least until something goes wrong. While there's some vague comfort in the fleeting notion that Valentine's pet project was not of their world - that human hands couldn't have forged something so terrible - he knows that that, too, isn't so. Valentine was a genius; he just happened to be demented. Quite simply, if an organisation as historically well-heeled as the Torchwood Institute existed in the England he knows and loves, they would know about it.
(As for running jokes, well. He's still a few years off his bus pass, isn't he? And there's never going to be a pension in the offing, not for him.)
The way his gaze darts away for just a moment is noted but not commented on. He would guess a condensation of the truth, maybe a veil drawn over something that doesn't belong in the mission statement, rather than an outright lie. He can't begrudge that, all things considered.
"Except you," he ventures quietly, and permits himself the reach of a hand to stroke the hair at the nape of Jack's neck. "And you've hardly a face that would convince the Treasury to stump up."