Torchwood FF: Time doesn't stop for the world's ending (Team, R)
Title: Time doesn't stop for the world's ending
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack, team (implications if you want to see them)
Rating: R
Length: 4,700 words
Disclaimer: All belongs to the BBC
Spoilers: Set post-S1, but no S2 spoilers
Warnings: Character death, violence (future war fic)
Summary: They were all indoors when it happened. Working late, in the lower levels, and Jack dreaded to think what might have been had the world ended on an afternoon instead of during overtime.
AN: The possibility of being Russelled in three days is a powerful motivator to post. And yes, I am going to go to Porn Battle now that the gen-fic is finally finished...
ETA: I fail at both friendship and etiquette. The lovely and generous mi_guida read this one over for me when I fell out of love with it. ♥
They were all indoors when it happened. Working late, in the lower levels, and Jack dreaded to think what might have been had the world ended on an afternoon instead of during overtime.
The scanners had screamed, all at once; a separate alarm for each ship of the fleet, a deafening disharmony.
Tosh had gone running, but Jack was faster, and he had already had a phone to his ear by the time the four of them were all beside him. He had pointed to them, one by one. “UNIT HQ, Downing Street, Torchwood One, aerial defence.”
“Engaged.”
“Switchboard.”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing.”
There had been no response from UNIT London either. They had managed a brief phone call with the Prime Minister before that too had been ended without explanation. The Valiant and the others like it had gone, before they could even give a warning. And either they were the only Torchwood operatives still alive, or the others, too few to start with, were stuck in the same loop as they found themselves in.
The CCTV showed people being mowed down where they stood: the clubbers and the homeless and the middle-aged couple taking a late-night walk by the Bay. It wasn’t especially accurate - the shots were being taken from ships that still hung too high in the air - but it didn’t need to be, not at that frequency. It was a culling.
Jack was being catapulted from war zone to war zone, as if that was his natural place in life. He could blame this on what had happened in the Game Station too. Unerring ability to find trouble could be just another skill that had been given to him in the remodel, already a favoured trait with the one he had been patterned after. But that was not fair: he had always been a soldier.
“Go to lockdown,” he said.
“What?”
“Jack, all those people…”
“We can’t just…”
“We’re supposed to be…”
“Now!”
* * * *
Somewhere between cabin-fever and getting used to it, Owen snapped. Jack looked up from his scans to where Owen should have been listening to the radio broadcasts, and found an empty space.
“Tosh?”
She turned to look at him, red-eyed from the screens and from crying.
“Where’s Owen?”
“Sorry?”
“Owen.”
She peered over the edge of the upper walkway to look into the autopsy bay. Then, still moving stiffly and quietly, walked to the sofa. She shook Gwen’s shoulder. “Gwen?”
“Mmm?”
“Did you see where Owen went?”
Gwen woke up quickly. “We’ve lost Owen?”
“We just don’t know where he went.”
“That’s pretty much the definition of ‘lost’, Tosh.” They hadn’t had to sedate her, thank God, but it was a close run thing. She had called Rhys, called the house, called his work, called their friends. The lack of response was probably the only thing that had prevented her going out there to find him, never mind Jack’s warnings. She was still in a daze. “Call Ianto,” she managed.
Ianto didn’t need to be called - he came down the stairs at a run, from where he had been monitoring the CCTV, the only one apart from Jack who could stomach it. “Open the door!”
“Ianto?” Jack asked, but already moving towards the main door. He barely had it open an inch before he could hear Owen’s frantic yelling. Jack thrust the door open with as much force as he could manage, allowing Owen to get in, with a young man in his arms and a kid trailing behind. “Owen,” he growled.
Owen didn’t stop to explain - he rarely did. “Later,” he answered, en route to the autopsy table.
The child was crying, completely silently, and followed Owen to the table. The man Owen was carrying choked once as he was laid down. Owen jabbed him with a syringe and went to work with a scalpel. “I need…” he started.
Jack came to his elbow. “What?”
“Blood. Suction. It’s right over…”
“I’ve got it. Owen, what the hell were you…?”
“Can we deal with this after? At some point when I’m not trying to get a liver back inside someone, maybe?”
“Count on it.”
*
Jack had lost the ability to inspire fear in Owen, though it was unclear whether the reason was their new situation - reality worse than any bare threats - or whether Owen had finally chosen a cause.
And that was not quite right, he thought, watching Owen patch up their seventeenth refugee. Owen had always been a doctor, and Jack had made him a soldier too. You do not close your ears to a voice in pain; you do not leave a man behind; you do not sit and watch.
The man and the child had survived, and Owen just shook his head when Jack had asked about the mother. There was room enough in the Hub for two more, but that was never going to be the problem. Anything done once could be done again - less remarkable the second time, less of a miracle and more like their jobs. Tosh watched the CCTV again, eyes skimming over the corpses and searching for movement. Gwen was leaning over her shoulder, and Ianto had disappeared into the vaults looking for more supplies to feed the camp that they were growing here.
Jack had never fought a siege before - not like this, not in a city stubbornly slow in dying. There is a part of him which wishes - the kind of desire he thought he’d quelled - that they would just hurry up and give in. There would be ways to escape out of conquered territory that he could not find in the middle of a war zone. Other parts of him marvelled at them, in the way of another man, these twenty-first century humans, all fight. But on their own, without the kind of help that didn’t exist in this time, there was no chance.
Jack pulled the key from his pocket and held it so tightly that its ice-cold feel was a burn. He didn’t know what he was saying, only that it was something like a prayer.
Owen came to find him, muttering, “Jesus. Fuck. Jack.” And then Owen’s slim fingers pressed Jack’s fist open and the metal stung him when Owen pulled it away. Blood was slick in their grip and Owen was still swearing. “Fuck. Jack. It’ll be alright, yeah? We’re okay.”
“No, you’re not,” Jack answered, and wondered why Ianto had not been the one to notice. Ianto wouldn’t have asked difficult questions.
“Not yet,” Owen said. “But we can… right? You’re a soldier, you must’ve seen this before.”
“Not like this. Not without…”
Jack always knew when Ianto snuck up on him. He didn’t turn around.
“What do you need?” Ianto asked.
“Excuse me?”
“What do you need us to do? We have twenty-six people in here, and we can assume there are more survivors in the city. We have the Hub, and the archives, and five trained operatives.”
“And with that we save the world?”
“Let’s start with Cardiff, shall we sir, and see how it goes from there?”
*
The map he draws of the invading fleet is made up of two-penny coins and a child’s teaching map of Great Britain. The countries are vague, cheerful splodges of colour against a bright blue sea, and the ships are being dubbed ‘flying saucers’ though Jack knows that in reality they are not copper circles. Nothing is to scale, or the right shape, but someone had broken into a toy-shop display window to bring this back to him, and it had made him laugh. Somewhere in the vaults there may be serious maps and charts - probably even a scale model if Torchwood One’s defence of the Empire jargon had worked its way down here. Maybe not though - Torchwood Three was a little maverick even before Jack had got his hands on it.
So it made sense that they managed to function - his team, and scraps of the police, and the civilians - as both refugee camp and strike force. The invaders were stronger, and faster, and all Cardiff had was home field advantage. So they made of that what they could: the tunnels, and the short-cuts, and the fact that something in the alien physiology stopped them infiltrating the hub.
There were good days.
They found Rhys, holed up with a group of people in a fucking pub, no less. Gwen shrieked and smiled and walked hand-in-hand with him into the Hub like it was a honeymoon suite.
And there was the afternoon when Tosh poked at her scans, poked at them again, and asked, “Jack, would you look at this?” A cluster of the little blips they were identifying as human, all in a bunch, more than seventy. They sent out a team and it was a school; a head teacher who had looked at the lights in the sky and remembered the sixties; had taken them to the basement to duck and cover.
The kids ran around the Hub and it reminded him of the Blitz, they looked so feral. Packs of them, half-washed and half-dressed, but he made sure everyone was fed and at least there was noise now.
*
Tosh came running into Jack’s office, smiling sharp triumph. “Why can’t they find us?”
“Good question. Now give me the answer.”
“They see in the dark!”
“True,” Jack agreed.
“But they can’t…”
“Tosh!” Jack said, “Tell me what you have.”
“Infra-red. I don’t know why I didn’t… we have shielding for the Hub so no one sees it on a fly-over. That must have been the only thing that…” She tailed off.
Jack wrapped an arm around Tosh’s shoulder and kissed her forehead. Her hair was lank, tied back in a tight knot, and she was leaning heavily against him. “Get some sleep,” Jack said.
“I can’t…”
“Tosh. You’ve done the hard job. Let us pick up the slack.”
She left reluctantly, throwing scraps of advice over her shoulder about weevils and body temperature and how that explained how they’d been able to hide amongst the fresher corpses. Jack stored the information up but refused to make the mistake of asking more questions, or else Tosh would never get some rest. He waited until he could see her take the corridor down to the medical bay, and a spare bed.
In the conference room, Jack picked his way through the sleeping bodies. He brushed Gwen’s hair away from her mouth and pulled the blanket over her. Someone would come to wake her up for watch soon enough, and they didn’t have the time to break for colds and flu. She smiled, and turned into the warmth of her fiancé’s body.
Jack looked at the table. They had model tanks on the map now - bright blue plastic things that belonged to some war game or another. Owen’s group, though, was still marked out by a yellow Lego man, which he refused to change. Bad luck, he protested, and it didn’t bother Jack enough to fight over it. He was, though, tempted to point out that the luck should have run out when Ianto had changed the toy’s body for a version with a stethoscope. One of the kids had rummaged around in the box to find a tiny medical bag made to scale. Owen was good with kids - Jack hadn’t known that before.
“Ianto,” Jack called. He could hear the low murmuring of a building full of people passing the word for Ianto Jones. It didn’t take long - when Ianto wasn’t in the field he was somewhere near the offices.
“Sir?” Ianto asked, stepping into the room. “Tosh is…”
“It’s okay, I sent her to get some sleep.”
“Good.” The corner of Ianto’s mouth curved up into a smile. “She wouldn’t listen to me.”
“Look at this.” Jack pointed at the map. “How would you hide from infra-red detection?”
“Jack?”
He had a team, and the enemy had a weakness. “Time to go to work.”
*
He opened the door of his office to Gwen screaming. This was the reason she shouldn’t be allowed into the field, he thought, walking down the steps to where the door was still open. She was an excellent shot, good in a crisis, but she couldn’t deal with this part. He put an arm around her shoulders and carefully turned her into Andy’s waiting arms. Jack knelt down beside Owen’s body.
The wound was obvious, and neat. A semi-circular hole where Owen’s chest should be. Cauterised in the heat. Maybe it hadn’t hurt.
Andy was explaining, somewhere above Jack’s head. A surprise attack, and there had been too many of them. Owen had lead the squad into the sewers, where they knew the weevils were hiding. Trying to create some panic, and get them cover. It had worked, mostly, save that Owen’s eyes had been closed shut by someone well-meaning, and Jack was fighting the urge to pry them open again. To see whether he had looked shocked, or in pain, or whether it had all been too fast for any of that. Andy was explaining that he couldn’t explain - that he didn’t know how it had happened. Jack did. Knew that if he turned the body over the hole would be messier, larger - the entry point. Owen was always bad at keeping an eye on his left flank. If Jack had been there, he would have been covering that blind spot. But none of the others would have known, and Jack could only be so many places at once, and everyone wanted him here. A poor allocation of resources: he had as many lives as he needed but he couldn’t share them out.
Tosh was crying, and Ianto held onto her. Jack had thought they would have more time to prepare for this. Trust Owen to screw up the best-laid plans.
He leant down and kissed Owen’s forehead. Tosh passed him the leather jacket from Owen’s workstation, and he wrapped it around the body to cover up the gaping hole. Jack leant down again, and touched his lips to Owen’s cooling ones, just barely. He stood up, and accepted Gwen back into his arms.
The Hub was quiet, but he could hear the start of shuffling feet, and kids beginning to fidget. Because, sure it was sad, but Owen was a bit of a prat, wasn’t he, and not the only doctor in the place anyhow. The only one who was an expert in laser blasts though, Jack observed in his head. The only one who knew how most of the scanners worked, who had any clue about the physiology of their invaders. That wasn’t even the point, but he was angry on Owen’s behalf against these fictional critics. He waved them all away.
Tosh crept up to bury herself under Jack’s coat, and Ianto was tugged with her. They had never had a group hug before, and this was one member short of classing. Long, long minutes later, they stepped apart. Carried the stretcher like pall-bearers to the morgue.
*
One less shouldn’t matter in a group of so many, but it wasn’t one from two hundred, it was one from five and that mattered a great deal. He worried about Gwen, who had been broken and split and who had terrified her fiancée with the force of her grief, before it all suddenly stopped.
Gwen stood in the autopsy bay. “He let me do this once,” she said, gingerly peeling alien skin away with a scalpel.
“Should you be…?”
“Nicola already did one, don’t worry.”
“Which one’s Nicola?”
“The one Owen was… It was him and Tosh, you see. They’d both been showing someone else the ropes. In case…”
“Yeah.”
“So he showed her how this worked. And how they… And what am I supposed to do, Jack?”
“Gwen.” He couldn’t remember how to talk to her - something that used to be easy. Jack knew, he knew, the hundred-thousand reasons he had hired Gwen and needed her beside him. They didn’t stop being true because the situation had changed. He had stood on the walkway and watched her, gliding through the crowds with gentle smiles and reassuring touches. After him, it was Gwen and Ianto that the others looked to, to know what was going on, to fix the crying. She felt everything, beautiful woman, and he loved her for it, even when he wished for both their sakes that she would stop.
Gwen was easy to hold, the way none of the others were. She folded into his embrace, not crying now.
“They can’t teach what you do,” he told her. “That’s all.”
She didn’t look like she believed him, and that was one more skill he had lost here somewhere, buried underground.
*
This was something less than a war of attrition, and there were days when there appeared to be no movement at all. Numbers had settled, and in the close range scans which were all Tosh could manage at this stage, there were no human life signs. Once, weeks ago now, they caught a glimpse of a close bunch of dots which looked human, in the direction of the army base. But they were not prepared for the kind of assault it would take to get them there, and now the scans didn’t reach. They prayed, or hoped, or swore - whatever it took to maintain the belief that they weren’t all that was left.
The last time they were able to check, the attacks seemed concentrated on the developed countries, but no one knew if that was a strategy, or an order of priority, or if they had simply read the screens wrong. Tosh believed she had seen ground-to-air missiles launched from somewhere in the US territories; Jack suspected that might have been hope talking.
He leant into the doorway to the conference room, now being used a dorm for the rotating guard-force. Jack didn’t look too closely at the map tonight.
“Report?” he asked Ianto.
“No new losses.”
It took Jack a moment to remember when Ianto had last reported one, to work out how long they had gone without a death. It felt like one of those joke signs: no casualties in three-two-one hours. Twelve, he remembered eventually. Late morning. It had been a bad few days.
“Tosh and Nicola Adams are trying to figure out how they communicate.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
Ianto was still standing beside him, expectant. Jack reached out his hand before he registered it consciously. Ianto had brought him coffee. Jack laughed, and hugged Ianto with one arm. “Don’t go anywhere,” he said, and they both knew he wasn’t joking.
*
Gwen came to the office door, and she was crying, but silently now. They had broken something inside her and Jack was savagely grateful because he knew what she was going to say and could not hold her up as well as himself this time. “Jack. Jack, it’s Tosh.”
Tosh who should never have been out there. Who was smart and strong and brave but not a soldier. Who had gone out anyway because she couldn’t do anything with the communications systems from in here and no one else knew how to do it outside.
She was not quite a corpse yet. Her hand twitched within Jack’s, lying on the autopsy table. “Jack,” she whispered. It was a goddamn terrible last word and he wanted to shake her to make her come back and try again but famous last words had gone out the window ninety-seven days ago. Going out fighting had stopped meaning a lot a good while back. It was pretty much the only way left to go.
He closed her eyes, and kissed her twice, and felt Gwen crying on one shoulder and Ianto trying not to on the other. Jack cried for her anyway. On the other side of the table the blonde girl whose name Jack dredged up as Joanne was weeping too, holding Tosh’s hand tightly. She had found herself someone of her own after all, and that was one glad thing to hold against the darkness.
*
Day one hundred and ten, and Tosh’s last act led them to the army camp and a swelling of numbers. Two days after that, Owen’s Nikki asked him, “Look at this?” with hope badly hidden in her voice. A little less than two weeks later, Jack woke with a start to the sound of too much silence. He took the steps upstairs two at a time, waiting for some indication that he wasn’t the last man alive.
They were waiting for him at the door.
“We’ve got Cardiff,” Ianto said, and Jack couldn’t make sense of the statement. “Sir,” Ianto repeated patiently, “We have Cardiff.”
Occupation was a tricky thing to be sure of and Cardiff was hardly a walled city, but the cheer rang up and he was a part of it. He took Ianto into his arms and they danced to Vera Lynn, right there in the doorway of his office.
When the lights go on again all over the world
And the boys are home again all over the world
Ianto was within his grasp and this song was not a sad one. Still, he buried his face in Ianto’s shoulder, and held on much too tightly.
*
“How many more?” Jack asked.
“There’s still room,” Ianto said, pushing the morgue drawer shut.
It seemed counterintuitive, the way their death rate climbed so steeply now they had finally stopped losing. (Except that it didn’t, not to Jack: the universe always took more than it gave). They were spread too thin, their recruits growing at only half the rate of the territory to protect.
“One of the new people,” Ianto began, carefully. Jack was always wary of Ianto speaking carefully.
“What?”
“Said something about prisoners.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Prisoners.”
“I heard what you said, Ianto; what did you mean? What would they need prisoners for?”
“We haven’t, exactly, gone into detail about their motivations.”
Jack laughed, not amused. “Slaughtering the locals seemed kinda like priority one.”
“Yes, but we always wondered…”
“What?”
“About the bodies.”
Gwen thought Ianto’s fixation with the corpses was warped. Jack understood it, but his own explanation for their sometime absence was no more complex than disintegration. He had fought plenty of battles where there was no use for coffins to take home draped in flags. Here, they had corpses, but not a city’s worth, and that was the problem Ianto kept returning to.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” Jack advised.
“I never do,” Ianto responded.
It was a lie, and Jack knew it, but Ianto’s cool pretence was a comfort he allowed himself. There would be time enough for yet more reality if they ever got through this. There was still no answer on the secure frequencies.
*
The Hub was ‘HQ’ now - the centre of their little resistance, but no longer everyone’s home base. Jack found himself back doing the parts he hated: calling teams in and out over the radio, checking in with the outposts. The outer edge of their territory was a shifting line which he had to move on the map every few hours. Ianto came in and out holding clipboards and folders, making worrying noises about the need to think about how they were allocating resources. They were beginning to run out of weaponry, and it looked very much like this was going to be decided on who could last out the winter.
“Jack,” Gwen was asking, and for once he was genuinely surprised by her approach, distracted by the map. Leadership had never been a skill he claimed. Time Agents worked alone, or in pairs; in the army he had never been the top of the chain. He forgot, sometimes, that Gwen and Ianto were there to be led. Three was the wrong number - it was a number that belonged to something else - and he could forget about their need until they stood in front of him.
“Jack,” Gwen said again.
“Hmm?”
“I just need to get past.” She gestured through the doorway. “Are you alright? You were miles away.”
“Years,” he said, and didn’t need to turn to see her frown. He knew she hated that.
Gwen’s hand fell soft on his elbow, a brief press. “One day,” she said, and he expected her to go on.
When she didn’t, he asked, “One day what?”
“One day, when all this is over, you’re going to tell me.”
He was repeating himself. “Tell you what?”
She smiled, blinding and gloriously beautiful against all this. “Everything. You can buy me a drink.”
Jack took her hand, forgot about her fiancée, and kissed the promise onto the small round bones of her knuckles. “Okay.”
*
It had been so long since Jack had heard it that he had almost forgotten the sound. The comms: incoming, long-range, top-security. He pressed ‘accept’ before allowing himself to think about it.
“Captain Harkness?”
The face that flickered onto the screen was that of a young-ish woman, with dark skin and dark hair. He didn’t know her.
“Captain Harkness, this is UNIT HQ, come in.”
“This is Jack Harkness,” he answered, as the Hub went silent.
The connection went to static for a moment and then came back, shakily. “This is UNIT. Alien invasion has been repelled. Repeat: invasion repelled.”
“Excuse me?”
She smiled, just for a second, and he realised that she was younger than he had thought. “Stand down, Captain Harkness, and prepare for relief. We won. You did a hard job well and we’re coming in to finish it up for you. Repeat: stand down, and prepare for relief. We’re coming in.”
It was day one hundred and fifty seven. This was why nothing had been in the history books. Earth had been under alien occupation for less than a year, thirty centuries before Jack was born. On a long enough timeline… Live long enough and everything starts to mean nothing unless you’re there to witness.
There was still silence all around him. Jack looked up. A few people were crying, some were looking at him, some at Ianto or Gwen.
“You heard what the lady said,” he told them. “We won.”
* * * *
It took six months from that day.
He went to Ianto first.
“Come away with me.”
“Jack?”
He gestures outside, onto Ianto’s roaming lawn where the ship had silently dropped. Decloaked, it was a cute little thing. Not much compared to some of the ships he’d travelled in, but it would do.
“Jack?” Ianto asks again, with quickening wonder in his voice. All this time and a tiny little cargo ship could still impress him.
“Come away with me?” he says again, a question this time.
Ianto steps into the ship without hesitation.
*
Gwen is on her own. Funny, in a way that wasn’t really funny at all, that her engagement had lasted through the war but could not take the peace. It cannot have been that Rhys doesn't understand, because he had been there alongside her in the trenches. But he is not now, and she falls against Jack like a life raft.
“Jack.” She reaches out to let Ianto curl her small palm into his. “I missed you two.”
“We missed you. How do you feel about a trip?”
She frowns. “Are we coming back?”
“I don’t know. Gwen… there are other things out there. Planets that aren’t always war zones, races that aren’t always trying to kill you. Great food and great sex,” he adds hopefully.
“Okay.”
“Okay to the food, or okay to the sex?”
“Just okay. Let’s go.”
No one notices until they are moments shy of breaking atmo. “Captain Harkness,” a voice calls, “You don’t have permission to…”
“I was stood down,” he reminds them. “The war’s over, we won, I’m going back to my life.”
“Surely you can’t mean to… Captain Harkness, you’re a war hero, you can’t just…”
“Can,” he answers, and turns off the speaker.
They break through with barely a jolt, and the view-screen is a map of the stars. Gwen is to his left, Ianto to his right. The planet behind them is full of ghosts, and things which will soon be ghosts. On a long enough timeline. But the stars in front hold promises, and he is not alone. He doesn’t look back.
FIN. Comments are always appreciated :)
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack, team (implications if you want to see them)
Rating: R
Length: 4,700 words
Disclaimer: All belongs to the BBC
Spoilers: Set post-S1, but no S2 spoilers
Warnings: Character death, violence (future war fic)
Summary: They were all indoors when it happened. Working late, in the lower levels, and Jack dreaded to think what might have been had the world ended on an afternoon instead of during overtime.
AN: The possibility of being Russelled in three days is a powerful motivator to post. And yes, I am going to go to Porn Battle now that the gen-fic is finally finished...
ETA: I fail at both friendship and etiquette. The lovely and generous mi_guida read this one over for me when I fell out of love with it. ♥
They were all indoors when it happened. Working late, in the lower levels, and Jack dreaded to think what might have been had the world ended on an afternoon instead of during overtime.
The scanners had screamed, all at once; a separate alarm for each ship of the fleet, a deafening disharmony.
Tosh had gone running, but Jack was faster, and he had already had a phone to his ear by the time the four of them were all beside him. He had pointed to them, one by one. “UNIT HQ, Downing Street, Torchwood One, aerial defence.”
“Engaged.”
“Switchboard.”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing.”
There had been no response from UNIT London either. They had managed a brief phone call with the Prime Minister before that too had been ended without explanation. The Valiant and the others like it had gone, before they could even give a warning. And either they were the only Torchwood operatives still alive, or the others, too few to start with, were stuck in the same loop as they found themselves in.
The CCTV showed people being mowed down where they stood: the clubbers and the homeless and the middle-aged couple taking a late-night walk by the Bay. It wasn’t especially accurate - the shots were being taken from ships that still hung too high in the air - but it didn’t need to be, not at that frequency. It was a culling.
Jack was being catapulted from war zone to war zone, as if that was his natural place in life. He could blame this on what had happened in the Game Station too. Unerring ability to find trouble could be just another skill that had been given to him in the remodel, already a favoured trait with the one he had been patterned after. But that was not fair: he had always been a soldier.
“Go to lockdown,” he said.
“What?”
“Jack, all those people…”
“We can’t just…”
“We’re supposed to be…”
“Now!”
* * * *
Somewhere between cabin-fever and getting used to it, Owen snapped. Jack looked up from his scans to where Owen should have been listening to the radio broadcasts, and found an empty space.
“Tosh?”
She turned to look at him, red-eyed from the screens and from crying.
“Where’s Owen?”
“Sorry?”
“Owen.”
She peered over the edge of the upper walkway to look into the autopsy bay. Then, still moving stiffly and quietly, walked to the sofa. She shook Gwen’s shoulder. “Gwen?”
“Mmm?”
“Did you see where Owen went?”
Gwen woke up quickly. “We’ve lost Owen?”
“We just don’t know where he went.”
“That’s pretty much the definition of ‘lost’, Tosh.” They hadn’t had to sedate her, thank God, but it was a close run thing. She had called Rhys, called the house, called his work, called their friends. The lack of response was probably the only thing that had prevented her going out there to find him, never mind Jack’s warnings. She was still in a daze. “Call Ianto,” she managed.
Ianto didn’t need to be called - he came down the stairs at a run, from where he had been monitoring the CCTV, the only one apart from Jack who could stomach it. “Open the door!”
“Ianto?” Jack asked, but already moving towards the main door. He barely had it open an inch before he could hear Owen’s frantic yelling. Jack thrust the door open with as much force as he could manage, allowing Owen to get in, with a young man in his arms and a kid trailing behind. “Owen,” he growled.
Owen didn’t stop to explain - he rarely did. “Later,” he answered, en route to the autopsy table.
The child was crying, completely silently, and followed Owen to the table. The man Owen was carrying choked once as he was laid down. Owen jabbed him with a syringe and went to work with a scalpel. “I need…” he started.
Jack came to his elbow. “What?”
“Blood. Suction. It’s right over…”
“I’ve got it. Owen, what the hell were you…?”
“Can we deal with this after? At some point when I’m not trying to get a liver back inside someone, maybe?”
“Count on it.”
*
Jack had lost the ability to inspire fear in Owen, though it was unclear whether the reason was their new situation - reality worse than any bare threats - or whether Owen had finally chosen a cause.
And that was not quite right, he thought, watching Owen patch up their seventeenth refugee. Owen had always been a doctor, and Jack had made him a soldier too. You do not close your ears to a voice in pain; you do not leave a man behind; you do not sit and watch.
The man and the child had survived, and Owen just shook his head when Jack had asked about the mother. There was room enough in the Hub for two more, but that was never going to be the problem. Anything done once could be done again - less remarkable the second time, less of a miracle and more like their jobs. Tosh watched the CCTV again, eyes skimming over the corpses and searching for movement. Gwen was leaning over her shoulder, and Ianto had disappeared into the vaults looking for more supplies to feed the camp that they were growing here.
Jack had never fought a siege before - not like this, not in a city stubbornly slow in dying. There is a part of him which wishes - the kind of desire he thought he’d quelled - that they would just hurry up and give in. There would be ways to escape out of conquered territory that he could not find in the middle of a war zone. Other parts of him marvelled at them, in the way of another man, these twenty-first century humans, all fight. But on their own, without the kind of help that didn’t exist in this time, there was no chance.
Jack pulled the key from his pocket and held it so tightly that its ice-cold feel was a burn. He didn’t know what he was saying, only that it was something like a prayer.
Owen came to find him, muttering, “Jesus. Fuck. Jack.” And then Owen’s slim fingers pressed Jack’s fist open and the metal stung him when Owen pulled it away. Blood was slick in their grip and Owen was still swearing. “Fuck. Jack. It’ll be alright, yeah? We’re okay.”
“No, you’re not,” Jack answered, and wondered why Ianto had not been the one to notice. Ianto wouldn’t have asked difficult questions.
“Not yet,” Owen said. “But we can… right? You’re a soldier, you must’ve seen this before.”
“Not like this. Not without…”
Jack always knew when Ianto snuck up on him. He didn’t turn around.
“What do you need?” Ianto asked.
“Excuse me?”
“What do you need us to do? We have twenty-six people in here, and we can assume there are more survivors in the city. We have the Hub, and the archives, and five trained operatives.”
“And with that we save the world?”
“Let’s start with Cardiff, shall we sir, and see how it goes from there?”
*
The map he draws of the invading fleet is made up of two-penny coins and a child’s teaching map of Great Britain. The countries are vague, cheerful splodges of colour against a bright blue sea, and the ships are being dubbed ‘flying saucers’ though Jack knows that in reality they are not copper circles. Nothing is to scale, or the right shape, but someone had broken into a toy-shop display window to bring this back to him, and it had made him laugh. Somewhere in the vaults there may be serious maps and charts - probably even a scale model if Torchwood One’s defence of the Empire jargon had worked its way down here. Maybe not though - Torchwood Three was a little maverick even before Jack had got his hands on it.
So it made sense that they managed to function - his team, and scraps of the police, and the civilians - as both refugee camp and strike force. The invaders were stronger, and faster, and all Cardiff had was home field advantage. So they made of that what they could: the tunnels, and the short-cuts, and the fact that something in the alien physiology stopped them infiltrating the hub.
There were good days.
They found Rhys, holed up with a group of people in a fucking pub, no less. Gwen shrieked and smiled and walked hand-in-hand with him into the Hub like it was a honeymoon suite.
And there was the afternoon when Tosh poked at her scans, poked at them again, and asked, “Jack, would you look at this?” A cluster of the little blips they were identifying as human, all in a bunch, more than seventy. They sent out a team and it was a school; a head teacher who had looked at the lights in the sky and remembered the sixties; had taken them to the basement to duck and cover.
The kids ran around the Hub and it reminded him of the Blitz, they looked so feral. Packs of them, half-washed and half-dressed, but he made sure everyone was fed and at least there was noise now.
*
Tosh came running into Jack’s office, smiling sharp triumph. “Why can’t they find us?”
“Good question. Now give me the answer.”
“They see in the dark!”
“True,” Jack agreed.
“But they can’t…”
“Tosh!” Jack said, “Tell me what you have.”
“Infra-red. I don’t know why I didn’t… we have shielding for the Hub so no one sees it on a fly-over. That must have been the only thing that…” She tailed off.
Jack wrapped an arm around Tosh’s shoulder and kissed her forehead. Her hair was lank, tied back in a tight knot, and she was leaning heavily against him. “Get some sleep,” Jack said.
“I can’t…”
“Tosh. You’ve done the hard job. Let us pick up the slack.”
She left reluctantly, throwing scraps of advice over her shoulder about weevils and body temperature and how that explained how they’d been able to hide amongst the fresher corpses. Jack stored the information up but refused to make the mistake of asking more questions, or else Tosh would never get some rest. He waited until he could see her take the corridor down to the medical bay, and a spare bed.
In the conference room, Jack picked his way through the sleeping bodies. He brushed Gwen’s hair away from her mouth and pulled the blanket over her. Someone would come to wake her up for watch soon enough, and they didn’t have the time to break for colds and flu. She smiled, and turned into the warmth of her fiancé’s body.
Jack looked at the table. They had model tanks on the map now - bright blue plastic things that belonged to some war game or another. Owen’s group, though, was still marked out by a yellow Lego man, which he refused to change. Bad luck, he protested, and it didn’t bother Jack enough to fight over it. He was, though, tempted to point out that the luck should have run out when Ianto had changed the toy’s body for a version with a stethoscope. One of the kids had rummaged around in the box to find a tiny medical bag made to scale. Owen was good with kids - Jack hadn’t known that before.
“Ianto,” Jack called. He could hear the low murmuring of a building full of people passing the word for Ianto Jones. It didn’t take long - when Ianto wasn’t in the field he was somewhere near the offices.
“Sir?” Ianto asked, stepping into the room. “Tosh is…”
“It’s okay, I sent her to get some sleep.”
“Good.” The corner of Ianto’s mouth curved up into a smile. “She wouldn’t listen to me.”
“Look at this.” Jack pointed at the map. “How would you hide from infra-red detection?”
“Jack?”
He had a team, and the enemy had a weakness. “Time to go to work.”
*
He opened the door of his office to Gwen screaming. This was the reason she shouldn’t be allowed into the field, he thought, walking down the steps to where the door was still open. She was an excellent shot, good in a crisis, but she couldn’t deal with this part. He put an arm around her shoulders and carefully turned her into Andy’s waiting arms. Jack knelt down beside Owen’s body.
The wound was obvious, and neat. A semi-circular hole where Owen’s chest should be. Cauterised in the heat. Maybe it hadn’t hurt.
Andy was explaining, somewhere above Jack’s head. A surprise attack, and there had been too many of them. Owen had lead the squad into the sewers, where they knew the weevils were hiding. Trying to create some panic, and get them cover. It had worked, mostly, save that Owen’s eyes had been closed shut by someone well-meaning, and Jack was fighting the urge to pry them open again. To see whether he had looked shocked, or in pain, or whether it had all been too fast for any of that. Andy was explaining that he couldn’t explain - that he didn’t know how it had happened. Jack did. Knew that if he turned the body over the hole would be messier, larger - the entry point. Owen was always bad at keeping an eye on his left flank. If Jack had been there, he would have been covering that blind spot. But none of the others would have known, and Jack could only be so many places at once, and everyone wanted him here. A poor allocation of resources: he had as many lives as he needed but he couldn’t share them out.
Tosh was crying, and Ianto held onto her. Jack had thought they would have more time to prepare for this. Trust Owen to screw up the best-laid plans.
He leant down and kissed Owen’s forehead. Tosh passed him the leather jacket from Owen’s workstation, and he wrapped it around the body to cover up the gaping hole. Jack leant down again, and touched his lips to Owen’s cooling ones, just barely. He stood up, and accepted Gwen back into his arms.
The Hub was quiet, but he could hear the start of shuffling feet, and kids beginning to fidget. Because, sure it was sad, but Owen was a bit of a prat, wasn’t he, and not the only doctor in the place anyhow. The only one who was an expert in laser blasts though, Jack observed in his head. The only one who knew how most of the scanners worked, who had any clue about the physiology of their invaders. That wasn’t even the point, but he was angry on Owen’s behalf against these fictional critics. He waved them all away.
Tosh crept up to bury herself under Jack’s coat, and Ianto was tugged with her. They had never had a group hug before, and this was one member short of classing. Long, long minutes later, they stepped apart. Carried the stretcher like pall-bearers to the morgue.
*
One less shouldn’t matter in a group of so many, but it wasn’t one from two hundred, it was one from five and that mattered a great deal. He worried about Gwen, who had been broken and split and who had terrified her fiancée with the force of her grief, before it all suddenly stopped.
Gwen stood in the autopsy bay. “He let me do this once,” she said, gingerly peeling alien skin away with a scalpel.
“Should you be…?”
“Nicola already did one, don’t worry.”
“Which one’s Nicola?”
“The one Owen was… It was him and Tosh, you see. They’d both been showing someone else the ropes. In case…”
“Yeah.”
“So he showed her how this worked. And how they… And what am I supposed to do, Jack?”
“Gwen.” He couldn’t remember how to talk to her - something that used to be easy. Jack knew, he knew, the hundred-thousand reasons he had hired Gwen and needed her beside him. They didn’t stop being true because the situation had changed. He had stood on the walkway and watched her, gliding through the crowds with gentle smiles and reassuring touches. After him, it was Gwen and Ianto that the others looked to, to know what was going on, to fix the crying. She felt everything, beautiful woman, and he loved her for it, even when he wished for both their sakes that she would stop.
Gwen was easy to hold, the way none of the others were. She folded into his embrace, not crying now.
“They can’t teach what you do,” he told her. “That’s all.”
She didn’t look like she believed him, and that was one more skill he had lost here somewhere, buried underground.
*
This was something less than a war of attrition, and there were days when there appeared to be no movement at all. Numbers had settled, and in the close range scans which were all Tosh could manage at this stage, there were no human life signs. Once, weeks ago now, they caught a glimpse of a close bunch of dots which looked human, in the direction of the army base. But they were not prepared for the kind of assault it would take to get them there, and now the scans didn’t reach. They prayed, or hoped, or swore - whatever it took to maintain the belief that they weren’t all that was left.
The last time they were able to check, the attacks seemed concentrated on the developed countries, but no one knew if that was a strategy, or an order of priority, or if they had simply read the screens wrong. Tosh believed she had seen ground-to-air missiles launched from somewhere in the US territories; Jack suspected that might have been hope talking.
He leant into the doorway to the conference room, now being used a dorm for the rotating guard-force. Jack didn’t look too closely at the map tonight.
“Report?” he asked Ianto.
“No new losses.”
It took Jack a moment to remember when Ianto had last reported one, to work out how long they had gone without a death. It felt like one of those joke signs: no casualties in three-two-one hours. Twelve, he remembered eventually. Late morning. It had been a bad few days.
“Tosh and Nicola Adams are trying to figure out how they communicate.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
Ianto was still standing beside him, expectant. Jack reached out his hand before he registered it consciously. Ianto had brought him coffee. Jack laughed, and hugged Ianto with one arm. “Don’t go anywhere,” he said, and they both knew he wasn’t joking.
*
Gwen came to the office door, and she was crying, but silently now. They had broken something inside her and Jack was savagely grateful because he knew what she was going to say and could not hold her up as well as himself this time. “Jack. Jack, it’s Tosh.”
Tosh who should never have been out there. Who was smart and strong and brave but not a soldier. Who had gone out anyway because she couldn’t do anything with the communications systems from in here and no one else knew how to do it outside.
She was not quite a corpse yet. Her hand twitched within Jack’s, lying on the autopsy table. “Jack,” she whispered. It was a goddamn terrible last word and he wanted to shake her to make her come back and try again but famous last words had gone out the window ninety-seven days ago. Going out fighting had stopped meaning a lot a good while back. It was pretty much the only way left to go.
He closed her eyes, and kissed her twice, and felt Gwen crying on one shoulder and Ianto trying not to on the other. Jack cried for her anyway. On the other side of the table the blonde girl whose name Jack dredged up as Joanne was weeping too, holding Tosh’s hand tightly. She had found herself someone of her own after all, and that was one glad thing to hold against the darkness.
*
Day one hundred and ten, and Tosh’s last act led them to the army camp and a swelling of numbers. Two days after that, Owen’s Nikki asked him, “Look at this?” with hope badly hidden in her voice. A little less than two weeks later, Jack woke with a start to the sound of too much silence. He took the steps upstairs two at a time, waiting for some indication that he wasn’t the last man alive.
They were waiting for him at the door.
“We’ve got Cardiff,” Ianto said, and Jack couldn’t make sense of the statement. “Sir,” Ianto repeated patiently, “We have Cardiff.”
Occupation was a tricky thing to be sure of and Cardiff was hardly a walled city, but the cheer rang up and he was a part of it. He took Ianto into his arms and they danced to Vera Lynn, right there in the doorway of his office.
When the lights go on again all over the world
And the boys are home again all over the world
Ianto was within his grasp and this song was not a sad one. Still, he buried his face in Ianto’s shoulder, and held on much too tightly.
*
“How many more?” Jack asked.
“There’s still room,” Ianto said, pushing the morgue drawer shut.
It seemed counterintuitive, the way their death rate climbed so steeply now they had finally stopped losing. (Except that it didn’t, not to Jack: the universe always took more than it gave). They were spread too thin, their recruits growing at only half the rate of the territory to protect.
“One of the new people,” Ianto began, carefully. Jack was always wary of Ianto speaking carefully.
“What?”
“Said something about prisoners.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Prisoners.”
“I heard what you said, Ianto; what did you mean? What would they need prisoners for?”
“We haven’t, exactly, gone into detail about their motivations.”
Jack laughed, not amused. “Slaughtering the locals seemed kinda like priority one.”
“Yes, but we always wondered…”
“What?”
“About the bodies.”
Gwen thought Ianto’s fixation with the corpses was warped. Jack understood it, but his own explanation for their sometime absence was no more complex than disintegration. He had fought plenty of battles where there was no use for coffins to take home draped in flags. Here, they had corpses, but not a city’s worth, and that was the problem Ianto kept returning to.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” Jack advised.
“I never do,” Ianto responded.
It was a lie, and Jack knew it, but Ianto’s cool pretence was a comfort he allowed himself. There would be time enough for yet more reality if they ever got through this. There was still no answer on the secure frequencies.
*
The Hub was ‘HQ’ now - the centre of their little resistance, but no longer everyone’s home base. Jack found himself back doing the parts he hated: calling teams in and out over the radio, checking in with the outposts. The outer edge of their territory was a shifting line which he had to move on the map every few hours. Ianto came in and out holding clipboards and folders, making worrying noises about the need to think about how they were allocating resources. They were beginning to run out of weaponry, and it looked very much like this was going to be decided on who could last out the winter.
“Jack,” Gwen was asking, and for once he was genuinely surprised by her approach, distracted by the map. Leadership had never been a skill he claimed. Time Agents worked alone, or in pairs; in the army he had never been the top of the chain. He forgot, sometimes, that Gwen and Ianto were there to be led. Three was the wrong number - it was a number that belonged to something else - and he could forget about their need until they stood in front of him.
“Jack,” Gwen said again.
“Hmm?”
“I just need to get past.” She gestured through the doorway. “Are you alright? You were miles away.”
“Years,” he said, and didn’t need to turn to see her frown. He knew she hated that.
Gwen’s hand fell soft on his elbow, a brief press. “One day,” she said, and he expected her to go on.
When she didn’t, he asked, “One day what?”
“One day, when all this is over, you’re going to tell me.”
He was repeating himself. “Tell you what?”
She smiled, blinding and gloriously beautiful against all this. “Everything. You can buy me a drink.”
Jack took her hand, forgot about her fiancée, and kissed the promise onto the small round bones of her knuckles. “Okay.”
*
It had been so long since Jack had heard it that he had almost forgotten the sound. The comms: incoming, long-range, top-security. He pressed ‘accept’ before allowing himself to think about it.
“Captain Harkness?”
The face that flickered onto the screen was that of a young-ish woman, with dark skin and dark hair. He didn’t know her.
“Captain Harkness, this is UNIT HQ, come in.”
“This is Jack Harkness,” he answered, as the Hub went silent.
The connection went to static for a moment and then came back, shakily. “This is UNIT. Alien invasion has been repelled. Repeat: invasion repelled.”
“Excuse me?”
She smiled, just for a second, and he realised that she was younger than he had thought. “Stand down, Captain Harkness, and prepare for relief. We won. You did a hard job well and we’re coming in to finish it up for you. Repeat: stand down, and prepare for relief. We’re coming in.”
It was day one hundred and fifty seven. This was why nothing had been in the history books. Earth had been under alien occupation for less than a year, thirty centuries before Jack was born. On a long enough timeline… Live long enough and everything starts to mean nothing unless you’re there to witness.
There was still silence all around him. Jack looked up. A few people were crying, some were looking at him, some at Ianto or Gwen.
“You heard what the lady said,” he told them. “We won.”
* * * *
It took six months from that day.
He went to Ianto first.
“Come away with me.”
“Jack?”
He gestures outside, onto Ianto’s roaming lawn where the ship had silently dropped. Decloaked, it was a cute little thing. Not much compared to some of the ships he’d travelled in, but it would do.
“Jack?” Ianto asks again, with quickening wonder in his voice. All this time and a tiny little cargo ship could still impress him.
“Come away with me?” he says again, a question this time.
Ianto steps into the ship without hesitation.
*
Gwen is on her own. Funny, in a way that wasn’t really funny at all, that her engagement had lasted through the war but could not take the peace. It cannot have been that Rhys doesn't understand, because he had been there alongside her in the trenches. But he is not now, and she falls against Jack like a life raft.
“Jack.” She reaches out to let Ianto curl her small palm into his. “I missed you two.”
“We missed you. How do you feel about a trip?”
She frowns. “Are we coming back?”
“I don’t know. Gwen… there are other things out there. Planets that aren’t always war zones, races that aren’t always trying to kill you. Great food and great sex,” he adds hopefully.
“Okay.”
“Okay to the food, or okay to the sex?”
“Just okay. Let’s go.”
No one notices until they are moments shy of breaking atmo. “Captain Harkness,” a voice calls, “You don’t have permission to…”
“I was stood down,” he reminds them. “The war’s over, we won, I’m going back to my life.”
“Surely you can’t mean to… Captain Harkness, you’re a war hero, you can’t just…”
“Can,” he answers, and turns off the speaker.
They break through with barely a jolt, and the view-screen is a map of the stars. Gwen is to his left, Ianto to his right. The planet behind them is full of ghosts, and things which will soon be ghosts. On a long enough timeline. But the stars in front hold promises, and he is not alone. He doesn’t look back.
FIN. Comments are always appreciated :)