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mrwubblesTitle: Before You Know It (2 of 3, split due to length)
Author: Yuma
Rating: PG-13 (Teen, strong language and mentions of violence)
Category: no pairing, angst, hurt-comfort, team fic
Word Count: 5968 words. Complete
Warning: Mentions torture. Nothing graphic though. Strong language. Spoilers from DW's Utopia and TLOTTL. Takes place after TW's To the Last Man.
Summary: In all honesty, he should have been expecting it. He was there when boys, not yet men, suffered what was first called shell-shock, then combat fatigue, to the neatly packaged politically correct acronym.
Disclaimer: Torchwood is owned by BBC, Russell T Davies, and their mutual affiliates. This is for entertainment purposes only.
<-- Part 1
When it was no longer dark, it was still…dark.
Jack blinked, feeling as disoriented as if he'd just revived. Habit made him take quick inventory. Bullet hole? Arrow? Knife? Killer alien with really bad breath? Stray javelin?
"Here."
Something cool was pressed to his hands and the feel of the icy, sweating glass made him realize he was sitting up on his bed, in nice dry clothes, smelling faintly of soap, deep down in the dark living space he claimed below his Hub office.
"Are you going to drink it or snog it?" A huff and the glass was pushed more insistently towards him. "Hurry up; I wasn't planning on spending the night down here." A heavy pause and the voice continued. The smirk was audible. "Not my type, Captain."
"Small favors." The mutter beyond the dim space made Jack smile.
"What happened?" Jack rasped, taking an experimental sip. He closed his eyes briefly, reveling in the cool, smooth crispness of fresh water. Nothing like the stale, lukewarm swill the guards sometimes remembered to give him—
He didn't mean to, but the spoiled taste of death seeped into the water and his body refused to take any more.
"Cripes." Jack felt himself bent over, coughing, and trying to expel the acrid stench of his own blood drying on him. Hands pounded his back. "Ianto, help me get him to the medical bay. Told you we should have—"
"Hold up," Jack wheezed.
Owen's narrow face looked so sinister in the dark that Jack almost recoiled, but his eyes were kind. When he saw Jack was alright, he pulled back. Clearing his throat, Owen breathed on the bell of his stethoscope, warming it before tugging up Jack's t-shirt around back. Jack could do nothing more than sit there, hunched over his crossed legs, staring at Ianto's shrouded profile.
The stethoscope was still cold and Jack suppressed a shiver. He felt rather than heard Ianto sitting down on the bed in front of him. It was the perfect opportunity to say something totally expected of him: sitting half dressed with two others in bed. But his mind was blank and he was feeling thick headed and stupid.
"Cough," Owen instructed, pressing his instrument just left to his spine.
"I already did," Jack complained faintly. Then he heard Ianto sigh in the dark so he dutifully coughed.
"Again," Owen demanded, moving the bell to the right now. He nodded to himself when Jack complied.
"Sounds good," he said over Jack's shoulder to Ianto.
Jack tolerated sitting there as the two talked around him as if he weren’t here. He had enough when they started debating putting his feet up or not. Jack cleared his throat.
"Right." Owen sounded like he just remembered Jack was sitting between them. "What do you remember?"
There was that odd tone again; nothing like the wary, edgy attitude of the past few weeks. Jack looked over his shoulder at the young doctor and frowned. Owen's face was inscrutable.
"We were in the tunnels," Owen prompted. When Jack furrowed his brow and looked away, Owen breathed out sharply. He rose to his feet, his stethoscope clacking angrily together when he folded it to shove it in his kit. "Fine," he bit out. "Keep your bloody secrets then."
"Wait," Jack croaked although he didn't know if Owen heard, but Ianto never moved and his steadfast loyalty warmed him even though Jack knew he probably didn't deserve it. Owen was right. He did leave, still smarting over their betrayal but had forgiven them because they lost something and could appreciate something he no longer could. But he did leave.
To his surprise, Owen did stop. He could see the young man's shoulders slump a little, his head shaking, before turning back around. He still looked wary, almost, if not the same, as when Jack first came back. They all stared at him when they thought he wasn't looking for days, as if he'd dissolve or bolt any minute. At the time, he understood. Jack told himself it didn't bother him.
But it did.
The silence was long enough that Jack expected to find them both gone when he raised his head. If anything, Ianto and Owen surrounded him again.
Their close proximity reminded Jack how they weren't executed in front of him. That year never existed. The paradox, the Doctor had euphemized, was gone and Jack felt incredibly foolish for feeling like it was still there.
"You were remembering something."
Jack sucked in his breath sharply at the blunt observation. He met Owen's gaze, could feel Ianto's in the shadows. Speechless, Jack nodded, and then stopped. No, how could he remember something that didn't exist anymore? He shook his head.
"Not sure." Jack grimaced. That didn't come out right. He sighed, weary, more tired than he'd ever felt and he braced his heavy head with a hand. Alone. He needed to be alone right now and not be their leader for a moment and just…he needed to be alone again.
"Well," Owen sounded startlingly patient. "Either you were or you weren't. Which is it?"
Ianto was sitting pretty close to his feet. He died by his feet as well, eyes staring up blankly at him, still expecting their leader to make this okay. God, they were so wrong. So disillusioned and miserably unprepared and foolish to even try and rescue him—
"Jack!"
Jack's eyes snapped up, and he nearly reared back if Ianto's almost painful grip on his shoulders hadn't immobilized him. Owen was inches from his face. When had they moved?
"What?" Jack managed and tried for a reassuring smile because the twin expressions of concern were too much to look at. He could tell he'd failed when Owen sat back down on the edge of the bed, his lips pursed.
"Is this one of those things you won't talk about?" Owen guessed. He didn't wait for an answer as he rummaged through his medical kit.
Jack could feel the weight of their gazes. It was like the cloak of darkness wasn't enough.
"You said you could smell your blood on you."
A quiet voice, tentative as if stepping on thin ice, sounded startling in the nothingness Jack once relied on this space to offer. Ianto spoke, as if in question, intruding into the void. Owen turned his head sharply towards Ianto, then back to Jack, his narrowed eyes silently challenging him to answer.
It was that sliver of bravado, daring to pierce the self-imposed solitude, which made Jack answer before he realized it.
"Sometimes I can taste it." And he could, tongue swollen from thirst and drowning in the blood he vomited.
The stunned silence told Jack he never should have answered. Just like before, his answers never fixed anything; only invited more questions.
"Was this when you left?" Owen finally said, his voice hoarse like it hadn't been used in a long time.
Not deserted or run away, but just left. Before, Owen had always accused him of flight. Jack didn't know how to respond to the difference now. Wordlessly, he nodded.
"How long?" Ianto knew the right question to ask next. It was easier to answer than the others.
"Long," Jack rasped. He knew it wasn't really an answer. "But it won't happen to you anymore," he amended. Not for this planet. Not for this universe.
Owen just studied him carefully, evaluating him. It reminded Jack of meeting him for the first time years ago: a new doctor, wary and thinking Jack was some sort of con man when Jack offered him Torchwood. Jack smiled sardonically to himself. Owen was almost right. He just missed it by a century or more.
"Was that your first flashback?"
Jack stared at Owen. What was he talking about?
Owen shook his head, exasperated. He muttered to himself before looking back over.
"You did recruit Doctor Owen Harper, Harkness." Owen took his water glass, passing it behind him to Ianto.
Jack tried to ignore how his mouth watered at the sound of Ianto refilling the glass. It even sounded cold.
"All the signs were there," Owen said conversationally as he passed the glass back down to Jack. "Drink up. Good for shock."
Jack wanted to tell Owen, tell Ianto they were wrong. It wasn't shock. It wasn't…that. He'd seen boys cowering in foxholes while hell descended. He saw men clawing their nurses, cursing, thinking the Nazis had come. That wasn't him.
"Was it your first one?" Owen insisted as he grabbed Jack's wrist.
The cool digits twitching with life over his eternal pulse were too much. Saxon made him hold Owen's hand and listen to his life fade. Jack yanked his hand back. "I'm fine," he snapped harder than he really intended.
"Nightmares." Ianto's voice was startling in the dark. "He's been having nightmares."
It felt like a punch in the gut, like Ianto stepping up to join Gwen again in opening the rift. Jack growled at Ianto. "I don't sleep!"
"Could have fooled us," Owen observed in a dry voice. "You were out for five hours."
Ianto's grip on his arms kept him in bed. Normally, Jack could knock them away easily if he wished, but today Ianto's hands weighed him down.
"Easy." Owen's words soothed in the darkness. "Grab a few more hours, Captain. Nothing needs doing that can't wait."
"That thing from the rift—"
"Already bug jam, thanks to you, and being washed out to sea. Tosh is tracking for more right now in case it's a hive." Owen recaptured his hand and he made approving noises as he counted the beats. "If you want, I can give you something to sleep—"
"No." The idea of being trapped in a memory without the escape of waking up was unappealing.
"Well, my next suggestion would have been to talk but we all know how well that'll work."
Jack pulled his hand away and waved him off. "I'll sleep." He'd try. "I'll be fine." He always was. "You guys might as well call it an early day."
The shrug was audible in Owen's voice. "I still have to finish my bug samples and Gwen's still trying to persuade half of Cardiff's waterworks not to flush for the next three hours." He rose to his feet. He surprised Jack with a hand on his shoulder and offered a brief squeeze. "We'll be here for a while. We were thinking dinner." Owen paused. "Your treat, of course."
"As long as it's not pizza delivery," Jack said wearily, giving up. Ianto, certain he wasn't going to fall out of bed, sat back, pulling away and Jack felt oddly bereft.
"I was thinking curry."
"Punhara's menu is in Tosh's top drawer," Ianto instructed, not moving.
Jack could hear them talking, hushed, as Owen tried to scribble down Ianto's order for them both in the dark. Jack listened, strangely comforted by the sounds of life invading the lonely bowels of the Hub. He could hear Gwen and Tosh outside, just past the open manhole, laughing about something. Music he missed hearing for one lost year.
It's over, he thought to himself. The year that never was. Deal with it.
"Get some rest," Owen advised.
"It never happened," Jack called out before Owen could climb up the ladder. The doctor paused at the first rung.
"The thing you won't or can't talk about?" Owen asked, his face hidden.
"It won't happen to you. Not anymore," Jack stressed. "There's nothing to talk about."
Owen's exhale was loud and annoyed. "We're not asking you to tell us everything." He sounded almost amused. Jack could imagine him smirking. "I don't think we're ready for that."
"Lord, no," Ianto agreed in a light voice.
"Jack…" Owen took a deep breath. "Just let us know before you run off again—"
"I won't run," Jack rasped. Not ever again.
Owen didn't scoff this time. "Good." He started climbing up the ladder again when he stopped. "Oh, and Jack?"
Jack raised his eyes blearily, trying to make Owen out.
"I know you said it didn't happen to us. Not anymore." Owen couldn't hide the lilt of curiosity that promised more questions in the future. "But apparently it did happen."
Jack opened his mouth to reassure him when Owen continued.
"To you."
Jack's mouth snapped shut.
Apparently satisfied with getting the last word, Owen continued on up.
"Get some sleep," he said gruffly in parting. He popped his head back into the manhole with a smirk. "Doctor's orders," Owen added in a smug voice. And then his voice joined the other two.
Alone in the dark, his solitude returned, Jack was dismayed to realize the nothingness he'd hoped for wasn't enough to pacify the trembling in his fingers as he smoothed the sheet draped across him. The void now suffocated when it had soothed before. The absence of sound was a tangible presence that sat on his chest. It hurt. Jack sat there on his bed, waiting, but it wouldn't go away.
From what Owen and Ianto were not telling him, it was bad. Bad enough they took him back here and bundled him into bed like a child.
Jack scrubbed his face wearily with both hands. Their great fearless leader. He propped his elbows on his knees and stared vacantly into the dark. What did they all think? He came back after abandoning them, only to return broken.
Conclusion -->
Author: Yuma
Rating: PG-13 (Teen, strong language and mentions of violence)
Category: no pairing, angst, hurt-comfort, team fic
Word Count: 5968 words. Complete
Warning: Mentions torture. Nothing graphic though. Strong language. Spoilers from DW's Utopia and TLOTTL. Takes place after TW's To the Last Man.
Summary: In all honesty, he should have been expecting it. He was there when boys, not yet men, suffered what was first called shell-shock, then combat fatigue, to the neatly packaged politically correct acronym.
Disclaimer: Torchwood is owned by BBC, Russell T Davies, and their mutual affiliates. This is for entertainment purposes only.
<-- Part 1
When it was no longer dark, it was still…dark.
Jack blinked, feeling as disoriented as if he'd just revived. Habit made him take quick inventory. Bullet hole? Arrow? Knife? Killer alien with really bad breath? Stray javelin?
"Here."
Something cool was pressed to his hands and the feel of the icy, sweating glass made him realize he was sitting up on his bed, in nice dry clothes, smelling faintly of soap, deep down in the dark living space he claimed below his Hub office.
"Are you going to drink it or snog it?" A huff and the glass was pushed more insistently towards him. "Hurry up; I wasn't planning on spending the night down here." A heavy pause and the voice continued. The smirk was audible. "Not my type, Captain."
"Small favors." The mutter beyond the dim space made Jack smile.
"What happened?" Jack rasped, taking an experimental sip. He closed his eyes briefly, reveling in the cool, smooth crispness of fresh water. Nothing like the stale, lukewarm swill the guards sometimes remembered to give him—
He didn't mean to, but the spoiled taste of death seeped into the water and his body refused to take any more.
"Cripes." Jack felt himself bent over, coughing, and trying to expel the acrid stench of his own blood drying on him. Hands pounded his back. "Ianto, help me get him to the medical bay. Told you we should have—"
"Hold up," Jack wheezed.
Owen's narrow face looked so sinister in the dark that Jack almost recoiled, but his eyes were kind. When he saw Jack was alright, he pulled back. Clearing his throat, Owen breathed on the bell of his stethoscope, warming it before tugging up Jack's t-shirt around back. Jack could do nothing more than sit there, hunched over his crossed legs, staring at Ianto's shrouded profile.
The stethoscope was still cold and Jack suppressed a shiver. He felt rather than heard Ianto sitting down on the bed in front of him. It was the perfect opportunity to say something totally expected of him: sitting half dressed with two others in bed. But his mind was blank and he was feeling thick headed and stupid.
"Cough," Owen instructed, pressing his instrument just left to his spine.
"I already did," Jack complained faintly. Then he heard Ianto sigh in the dark so he dutifully coughed.
"Again," Owen demanded, moving the bell to the right now. He nodded to himself when Jack complied.
"Sounds good," he said over Jack's shoulder to Ianto.
Jack tolerated sitting there as the two talked around him as if he weren’t here. He had enough when they started debating putting his feet up or not. Jack cleared his throat.
"Right." Owen sounded like he just remembered Jack was sitting between them. "What do you remember?"
There was that odd tone again; nothing like the wary, edgy attitude of the past few weeks. Jack looked over his shoulder at the young doctor and frowned. Owen's face was inscrutable.
"We were in the tunnels," Owen prompted. When Jack furrowed his brow and looked away, Owen breathed out sharply. He rose to his feet, his stethoscope clacking angrily together when he folded it to shove it in his kit. "Fine," he bit out. "Keep your bloody secrets then."
"Wait," Jack croaked although he didn't know if Owen heard, but Ianto never moved and his steadfast loyalty warmed him even though Jack knew he probably didn't deserve it. Owen was right. He did leave, still smarting over their betrayal but had forgiven them because they lost something and could appreciate something he no longer could. But he did leave.
To his surprise, Owen did stop. He could see the young man's shoulders slump a little, his head shaking, before turning back around. He still looked wary, almost, if not the same, as when Jack first came back. They all stared at him when they thought he wasn't looking for days, as if he'd dissolve or bolt any minute. At the time, he understood. Jack told himself it didn't bother him.
But it did.
The silence was long enough that Jack expected to find them both gone when he raised his head. If anything, Ianto and Owen surrounded him again.
Their close proximity reminded Jack how they weren't executed in front of him. That year never existed. The paradox, the Doctor had euphemized, was gone and Jack felt incredibly foolish for feeling like it was still there.
"You were remembering something."
Jack sucked in his breath sharply at the blunt observation. He met Owen's gaze, could feel Ianto's in the shadows. Speechless, Jack nodded, and then stopped. No, how could he remember something that didn't exist anymore? He shook his head.
"Not sure." Jack grimaced. That didn't come out right. He sighed, weary, more tired than he'd ever felt and he braced his heavy head with a hand. Alone. He needed to be alone right now and not be their leader for a moment and just…he needed to be alone again.
"Well," Owen sounded startlingly patient. "Either you were or you weren't. Which is it?"
Ianto was sitting pretty close to his feet. He died by his feet as well, eyes staring up blankly at him, still expecting their leader to make this okay. God, they were so wrong. So disillusioned and miserably unprepared and foolish to even try and rescue him—
"Jack!"
Jack's eyes snapped up, and he nearly reared back if Ianto's almost painful grip on his shoulders hadn't immobilized him. Owen was inches from his face. When had they moved?
"What?" Jack managed and tried for a reassuring smile because the twin expressions of concern were too much to look at. He could tell he'd failed when Owen sat back down on the edge of the bed, his lips pursed.
"Is this one of those things you won't talk about?" Owen guessed. He didn't wait for an answer as he rummaged through his medical kit.
Jack could feel the weight of their gazes. It was like the cloak of darkness wasn't enough.
"You said you could smell your blood on you."
A quiet voice, tentative as if stepping on thin ice, sounded startling in the nothingness Jack once relied on this space to offer. Ianto spoke, as if in question, intruding into the void. Owen turned his head sharply towards Ianto, then back to Jack, his narrowed eyes silently challenging him to answer.
It was that sliver of bravado, daring to pierce the self-imposed solitude, which made Jack answer before he realized it.
"Sometimes I can taste it." And he could, tongue swollen from thirst and drowning in the blood he vomited.
The stunned silence told Jack he never should have answered. Just like before, his answers never fixed anything; only invited more questions.
"Was this when you left?" Owen finally said, his voice hoarse like it hadn't been used in a long time.
Not deserted or run away, but just left. Before, Owen had always accused him of flight. Jack didn't know how to respond to the difference now. Wordlessly, he nodded.
"How long?" Ianto knew the right question to ask next. It was easier to answer than the others.
"Long," Jack rasped. He knew it wasn't really an answer. "But it won't happen to you anymore," he amended. Not for this planet. Not for this universe.
Owen just studied him carefully, evaluating him. It reminded Jack of meeting him for the first time years ago: a new doctor, wary and thinking Jack was some sort of con man when Jack offered him Torchwood. Jack smiled sardonically to himself. Owen was almost right. He just missed it by a century or more.
"Was that your first flashback?"
Jack stared at Owen. What was he talking about?
Owen shook his head, exasperated. He muttered to himself before looking back over.
"You did recruit Doctor Owen Harper, Harkness." Owen took his water glass, passing it behind him to Ianto.
Jack tried to ignore how his mouth watered at the sound of Ianto refilling the glass. It even sounded cold.
"All the signs were there," Owen said conversationally as he passed the glass back down to Jack. "Drink up. Good for shock."
Jack wanted to tell Owen, tell Ianto they were wrong. It wasn't shock. It wasn't…that. He'd seen boys cowering in foxholes while hell descended. He saw men clawing their nurses, cursing, thinking the Nazis had come. That wasn't him.
"Was it your first one?" Owen insisted as he grabbed Jack's wrist.
The cool digits twitching with life over his eternal pulse were too much. Saxon made him hold Owen's hand and listen to his life fade. Jack yanked his hand back. "I'm fine," he snapped harder than he really intended.
"Nightmares." Ianto's voice was startling in the dark. "He's been having nightmares."
It felt like a punch in the gut, like Ianto stepping up to join Gwen again in opening the rift. Jack growled at Ianto. "I don't sleep!"
"Could have fooled us," Owen observed in a dry voice. "You were out for five hours."
Ianto's grip on his arms kept him in bed. Normally, Jack could knock them away easily if he wished, but today Ianto's hands weighed him down.
"Easy." Owen's words soothed in the darkness. "Grab a few more hours, Captain. Nothing needs doing that can't wait."
"That thing from the rift—"
"Already bug jam, thanks to you, and being washed out to sea. Tosh is tracking for more right now in case it's a hive." Owen recaptured his hand and he made approving noises as he counted the beats. "If you want, I can give you something to sleep—"
"No." The idea of being trapped in a memory without the escape of waking up was unappealing.
"Well, my next suggestion would have been to talk but we all know how well that'll work."
Jack pulled his hand away and waved him off. "I'll sleep." He'd try. "I'll be fine." He always was. "You guys might as well call it an early day."
The shrug was audible in Owen's voice. "I still have to finish my bug samples and Gwen's still trying to persuade half of Cardiff's waterworks not to flush for the next three hours." He rose to his feet. He surprised Jack with a hand on his shoulder and offered a brief squeeze. "We'll be here for a while. We were thinking dinner." Owen paused. "Your treat, of course."
"As long as it's not pizza delivery," Jack said wearily, giving up. Ianto, certain he wasn't going to fall out of bed, sat back, pulling away and Jack felt oddly bereft.
"I was thinking curry."
"Punhara's menu is in Tosh's top drawer," Ianto instructed, not moving.
Jack could hear them talking, hushed, as Owen tried to scribble down Ianto's order for them both in the dark. Jack listened, strangely comforted by the sounds of life invading the lonely bowels of the Hub. He could hear Gwen and Tosh outside, just past the open manhole, laughing about something. Music he missed hearing for one lost year.
It's over, he thought to himself. The year that never was. Deal with it.
"Get some rest," Owen advised.
"It never happened," Jack called out before Owen could climb up the ladder. The doctor paused at the first rung.
"The thing you won't or can't talk about?" Owen asked, his face hidden.
"It won't happen to you. Not anymore," Jack stressed. "There's nothing to talk about."
Owen's exhale was loud and annoyed. "We're not asking you to tell us everything." He sounded almost amused. Jack could imagine him smirking. "I don't think we're ready for that."
"Lord, no," Ianto agreed in a light voice.
"Jack…" Owen took a deep breath. "Just let us know before you run off again—"
"I won't run," Jack rasped. Not ever again.
Owen didn't scoff this time. "Good." He started climbing up the ladder again when he stopped. "Oh, and Jack?"
Jack raised his eyes blearily, trying to make Owen out.
"I know you said it didn't happen to us. Not anymore." Owen couldn't hide the lilt of curiosity that promised more questions in the future. "But apparently it did happen."
Jack opened his mouth to reassure him when Owen continued.
"To you."
Jack's mouth snapped shut.
Apparently satisfied with getting the last word, Owen continued on up.
"Get some sleep," he said gruffly in parting. He popped his head back into the manhole with a smirk. "Doctor's orders," Owen added in a smug voice. And then his voice joined the other two.
Alone in the dark, his solitude returned, Jack was dismayed to realize the nothingness he'd hoped for wasn't enough to pacify the trembling in his fingers as he smoothed the sheet draped across him. The void now suffocated when it had soothed before. The absence of sound was a tangible presence that sat on his chest. It hurt. Jack sat there on his bed, waiting, but it wouldn't go away.
From what Owen and Ianto were not telling him, it was bad. Bad enough they took him back here and bundled him into bed like a child.
Jack scrubbed his face wearily with both hands. Their great fearless leader. He propped his elbows on his knees and stared vacantly into the dark. What did they all think? He came back after abandoning them, only to return broken.
Conclusion -->
