[Ficcish] Try to be something experimental - you don't turn me off, I will never fail…
The thing about being a Fact is that sometimes, if it's for you, the universe is willing to cheat a little.
Well, really, there's a way of looking at it that you're one big cheat of the universe - don't age, don't get sick, don't get wounded, don't get dead, and all those people who long for immortality need a radical attitude adjustment, because Thane's only been here for a few weeks now and what has he discovered but that it sucks.
Jack knew enough to know that he didn't revive with something keeping him dead. 600+ pounds of dead weight crushing every bone and organ in his body would qualify. So Thane doesn't recognize the significance in the fact that the universe, in its stubborn insistence to keep him alive and exact to the idea it has of him, has tweaked a few probabilities here and there.
It's nothing big. Nothing catastrophic, nothing to cause a wound in the fabric of causality, but a random muscular twitch here or a little uneven effect of air resistance there and the armadillo fell just slightly askew, hind foot between Thane's legs instead of digging through the stomach, armored collar digging into the concrete next to Thane's face rather than through his face and brain. Add to that a slight residual imbalance in the way it landed and was crushed against the ground and the body atop him lists ever so slowly to one side, settling at a rate nigh-imperceptible to the naked eye, and at the end of maybe half an hour, maybe more, a few necessary centimetres are opened up for his ribcage to fix itself and John Thane comes to with blood congealing on his - everything and a mind that's been fucked to hell by two-maybe-three psychics and a sense that something's torn his world apart and left him in the exact same nowhere that he had after Boe-Shayne.
And then he starts screaming.
Maybe he hears footsteps and maybe he doesn't but after a moment fear kicks into instinct and he's squirming as best he can in the space the universe has left for him, dragging his hands together under the force that's crushing him, hitting a sequence of buttons on instinct and activating a very specific program. Teleport. Strict exclusion. He doesn't need to be taking the freakish engineered corpse with him when he goes, and oh, he goes.
Back to the rooms, first, even though seeing them is like a cut against his gut. The prisoners are gone, but to hell with the prisoners. His equipment is gone, the Doctor is gone, even Hart has managed to weasel his way out of it somehow and he teleports again, random destination, before he can look at the place any longer. No. This isn't right. Of all the ways it could have ended, ultimate victory, ultimate defeat, it chose this and this isn't an ending.
But here's the thing. It'll never end for me.
He opens up the freeform note program, the one that's been interfaced into the network command line, and scrawls something with the first thing he can find as a stylus. His hand is shaking. Everything he's wearing has been soaked with blood, his or the other thing's, and he has no idea what he's writing and by the end just shuts down the program with a send command and presses himself into a wall so he doesn't fall apart. He's not sure what he just sent off. His mind is trying to class it as a distress call and he knows that isn't right.
He can't think, that's the problem, he can't fucking think...
He needs something. He can start from there. Needs clothing, that's for sure, because this stuff is cold and cooling and sluggishly dripping and stinks to high hell of iron and adrenaline and acid from when his stomach must have split open and it's a good thing that he doesn't come back with a full stomach because used to gore he may be, but this it making him want to vomit and he has to hold against the wall to hold on.
That passes. He strips down, everything except the wrist devices, and hides the clothing in a corner. He's in something, some building, can't spare the time to identify it except that it seems new and clean except for him and he can't hear people, but maybe that's just the time of day. Too bad. They get bloodsoaked clothing when they come in.
He makes a list of places to go. The penthouse he and Hart took over is the first stop, because it might be a crime scene now but he's sure it's not guarded and it has running water and he needs a shower. Then it's a mall, doesn't matter which one, wandering through at shy of five o'clock in the morning and picking out clothing to replace the stuff he's dumped and he winds up with black work pants with plenty of pockets, with steel-toed boots and a charcoal-grey tee, and then he finds himself in a sporting goods store picking through the knives.
Nice things, knives. Hunting knives and combat knives and filleting knives and boning knives and pocket knives with too many accessories, and the rifles may not be what he's used to but he picks out a nice one there, ignores the fifty alarms going off because he'll be out of there soon, smashes the ammunition cabinet and takes what he needs, and teleports away armed and dangerous, unsteady on his feet without anything vaguely resembling a plan.
Psychics. The hell with all of them. Tearing up his mind as though they belong in there. He's not heading for Torchwood, which surprises him - he finds himself on the pier, curled around his new rifle, shivering and reflecting that he should have grabbed a coat except for some reason he shies at the thought, wondering if he should have checked up on things he needed to do to turn an off-the-shelf display rifle into a functional weapon, wondering if he cares, if he has the energy to check now or to care. If someone finds him he can just teleport away. He can keep running until a plan presents itself. That's what he did after Boe-Shayne, and there that urge to vomit is back.
He's aware, in a peripheral way, that there's something wrong with him, and it's more wrong than usual. He's not aware what that is, except that a more stable person might class him miserable, and that's a word that's lost all meaning. That's what they said since the beginning, isn't it? From the beginning straight on through, and the beginning was so very long ago.