Catching Up With The Sun Chapter 1, for Torchwood Classic Big Bang
Title: Catching Up With The Sun
Fandom: Torchwood
Rating: Strong T
Characters/pairings: Jack/Ianto, Gwen/Owen?, background Gwen/Rhys, Tosh, Surprise guest, background Suzie and OCs
Warnings (including spoilers): And I Must Scream situations and somewhat graphic descriptions of bloody things.
Word count: about 12,900 words total, 2,500 in this chapter.
Beta: Tech Duinn on fanfiction.net. Exuberant praise in author's notes.
Artist: charie_caphine Also with exuberant praise in author's notes.
Summary: In the fall of 1974, Jack Harkness, Owen Harper and Toshiko Sato are captured while they investigate a string of disappearances that stretch back to the forties. In a horrifying twist of fate, they find themselves transformed into inanimate objects, and there is no help in sight. Unable to speak, move independently or even breathe, what can Jack the pocket watch do to save the world from invasion, his team from insanity, and himself from a broken heart?
Author’s Notes: Written for tw_classic_bb. This was a really difficult fic to write, far outside my usual and I really need to thank again my beta, Tech Duinn. She is a goddess who performed such feats as editing 22 pages in a few hours and making me admit that I’m not perfect. It was her influence that changed this from a totally boring thing that I scribbled on graph paper during finals week to something I don’t actually feel ashamed to post.
And then charie_caphine! The only reason the artwork for this didn't literally blow my socks off is cause I wasn't wearing any at the time. I don't know which God of artistry she stole all that awesomeness from, but I am completely under the spell. I literally cried a little when I saw these pictures.
'So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older,
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.'
~‘Time,’ by Pink Floyd
“You guys ready?” Jack tossed a grin at his two teammates and the rare sunshine of a September morning in Cardiff gleamed off his pearly whites.
Owen scowled back. “Let’s just get this over with.” He patted his hip holster as a last-minute check to his handgun and strode down the street toward their target.
Jack smiled widely at his other companion, Toshiko, who grimaced in return. It had been nearly four months since Jack had insisted to the Director of Torchwood Three that they needed a new medic. Jack hated most of the current team, and they him; Jack though Torchwood was too hostile toward aliens and they believed he was plotting to take over.
With Toshiko’s support, Jack had managed to save the doctor from having the death of his wife retconned out of him, and the three of them had become a close team since then. Even when he was too cynical or abrasive, like today, Jack was glad to have Owen. While Jack had a certain amount of freedom from Torchwood, Toshiko’s ten-year mandatory contract was only half-way through; she wouldn’t be completely free from the organization until 1979. If Jack had to disappear at a moment’s notice, he would hate to leave her alone.
Jack shrugged off the dark thoughts and offered the woman his elbow . “Shall we catch a kidnapper, my dear?”
Tosh tugged a device from her bag and stepped forward without taking his arm. The antennae sticking out made it look like one of the mobile phones that would, Jack knew, become popular in the next few years. He peered over her shoulder to see it better.
“The energy we’ve been tracing definitely seems to be focused in the antiques shop.” Tosh surmised from her screen.
“So it looks like Bilis Manger is our guy.” The captain frowned as they approached Owen, who was waiting impatiently in front of the shop. “I wonder what he’s been doing with them. Nearly fifty people in thirty years. Is he slave trafficking, organ harvesting, is he just another serial killer who happened to find some helpful alien technology?”
“How about we ask him, seeing as that’s what we’re meant to be doing,” Owen said pointedly. “We haven’t got all day.” He grabbed the handle to the shop and tugged it open violently; the bell hanging above the door tinkled and the three Torchwood agents entered.
The shop was well-lit, antiques gleaming throughout the large main room. Though there were several tables and shelves along the walls, along with some glass viewing boxes, the shop seemed tidy and well-kept. As though on cue, a prim old man emerged from a back room. Jack recognized him from the surveillance photos. This was their suspect, Bilis Manger.
“Ah, welcome to Lively Antiques. I hope you’ll find everything to your satisfaction.” The man’s salt and pepper hair was slicked back neatly, and he wore an old-fashioned red and white polka dot cravat. He spread his arms out, inviting them to look around the store. Toshiko gave him a cool smile and did just that, beginning to examine the tables for any clues while Owen stood behind Jack for support.
“We’re here to speak to you, Mr. Manger,” Jack said, aiming for firm yet polite. They didn’t know yet how dangerous Manger was, but if he really had kidnapped nearly fifty people without being detected, Jack thought it was probably safer to remain civil for the time being.
“Are you the police?” Manger asked, sounding slightly startled; the glimmer in his eyes told Jack an entirely different story. “How may I be of assistance?”
“We’re investigating a few disappearances in the area. Do you know any other these people?” Jack removed several photographs of the most recent victims from his coat pocket and spread them on one of the glass counters. All the photos were of victims whose disappearances coincided with mysterious energy bursts in this area of Cardiff.
Manger took several moments to examine the photos, then shook his head. “I’m very sorry that I couldn’t be of any help, officer.” His apologetic smile was just a bit too wide.
“Thank you for your time,” Jack said flatly. He collected the photos, then turned to leave with Owen and Toshiko.
Before they reached the door, Jack felt a wave of something come over him, some sort of energy. Before he could call out to his teammates, they had fallen to the ground. Before his eyes, their bodied changed color, shrunk and shifted, being molded like colored clay until a fez and a teacup sat on the floor in front of him.
As he watched his friends transformed before him, Jack was horrifically aware of the same changes happening to himself. It felt like he was made of plastic, like the rest of the world had become blurred paints and spilled this way and that along a canvas. Only Toshiko and Owen were clear, and Jack’s last thought before he passed out was shame that he couldn’t protect them.
While Jack sluggishly dragged himself back to consciousness after his transformation, he felt like he was covered in something slimy and cold, and he was swamped with nausea. Instead of a flesh and blood body with two arms, two legs, a head that he could move at will, Jack found himself less than two inches tall and with no control whatsoever over his body. His back half was made of silver and an elegant crystal plane protected his face, upon which three hands moved steadily around. He had a loop atop him that was meant for a fob.
In other words, Jack had been turned into a pocket watch.
He had less than ten seconds to get over the shock of his condition before the huge, lined face of Bilis Manger appeared before Jack’s crystal face. Bilis spoke and wiped a cloth over Jack’s crystal face and metal casing, but Jack couldn’t hear him. He could only see the man’s thin lips moving, and for a moment the isolation drove his panic up another notch.
Then Manger walked away, and Jack saw that he had been placed on a shelf with a view of the entire shop. He immediately spied the bright red shade of Toshiko’s fabric across the room on a hat stand, but it took a several minutes of determined searching before he found Owen in a display case with other porcelain figures, nearly hidden from Jack’s view.
It was only once he’d calmed down that an odd feeling became apparent to him. Radiating from beside him was a sense of pity and comfort. Jack tried to focus and figured out that the emotions were radiating from a brass alarm clock that was placed next to him on the shelf. A new wave of repulsion swept over him as Jack wondered how many of the ‘Lively Antiques’ had once been alive.
Jack discovered the limitations of the transformation over time. He could see through his crystal face, but many of the objects relied solely on the emotions they could sense from their fellow transformed individuals. Jack couldn’t hear anything at all, but he could feel vibrations and touch. Usually the hands of customers were brisk and made him feel nauseous as they turned him this way and that through the air.
From his spot on the shelf, Jack watched hundreds of customers enter the shop and buy various ‘antiques,’ unaware that they were touching and, in some cases, taking home a trapped person. Jack felt sick when a customer inspected all the porcelain in Owen’s case. The woman’s finger dipped inside Owen and swirled around, probably looking for dust. It made Jack sick to consider how invaded his friend must have felt.
Occasionally, life in the shop would be interrupted by Manger bringing in his latest victim, their shock and fear screaming out through the room. Many of the transformed people would reach out to the newcomers, as the brass alarm clock had for Jack. For some, however, the shock of transformation was too great, and no one was able to reach them. Other times the transformed people would all panic in unison when one of the truly ‘Lively Antiques’ was tossed about carefully or even dropped on the ground.
The worst part of it was the boredom. In between the fear of being broken or taken away from the shop into the dangerous world, Jack could practically feel his mind atrophying from the boredom. For someone who had spent the last hundred years going from bar fights to adventures to friendly beds to wars and everywhere in between, the enforced stillness was agony. The constant ticking of his face made it impossible for him not to know exactly how long it had been since he had moved of his own accord, since he’d last breathed, or spoken, or had his true skin touched.
The rest of the Torchwood team came to the shop a week after they had been captured, but they had clearly not been very interested in the investigation. Jack would have strangled the Director with his own hands in that moment- and he’d felt the sentiment echoed from the other objects, once they’d understood what was going on- if he had been able to move. After they left, unhindered by Manger, Jack had begun to lose hope that he and the other ‘antiques’ would ever be turned back into themselves.
For eleven years, ten months, two weeks, six days, sixteen hours, forty minutes and thirteen seconds, Jack lived on a dusty shelf in the corner of the shop. Toshiko was purchased in the fourth year by a pale and excitable man wearing a red bowtie. Other transformed people had come and gone, but there were still a few who had been in the shop for years even before the Torchwood agents had arrived.
Due to his now-impeccable time sense, Jack knew it was August 13, 1986 when the man entered the shop. He stepped in quietly, the bell above the doorframe tinkling politely. Jack felt a moment of pity for the bell, who had once been a man. After years of being beaten by the door every day, the man’s presence had vanished and none of the other objects could reach him.
The new customer was stately. Tall, well-groomed and professionally dressed in a crisp suit, Jack estimated that he was around thirty-five years old. He was greeted by Bilis Manger and gave the old man a bland smile before beginning to browse the shop. He quickly approached the shelf with the time pieces. When his eyes lit upon seeing Jack‘s shiny silver casing, Jack knew his time had come.
The man picked him up and held him close to stormy gray eyes, and Jack was distracted from his dread by the warmth of his hand. It seeped into Jack’s metal casing and he basked like a snake in the sun, barely aware of anything besides the long-missed sensations of warmth and touch. He was unaware of what was happening around him until he was hit by the cold air outside the shop and dropped into a deep pocket, the transformed bell tinkling somewhere behind. He had been bought.
Over the next few days, he was given to a watchmaker to be cleaned and inspected. Jack welcomed the flurry of new sensations- although being polished tickled something awful- and appreciated every swipe of cloth over his crystal face, every firm twist of gears and every velvety drop of oil that made him run smoothly again. Although he had never stopped ticking, he’d gotten a rather bad rust problem over the years.
After enduring a few days in a dark and silent cloth-lined box, Jack found himself shaken and dragged into a bright room filled to the brim with young children. From the weathered, broad hands of the man who had purchased him, Jack was passed to the plump, sticky, unwieldy paws of a young child. If he could have, Jack probably would have screamed as he saw the approach of a gaping, gooey, cavernous mouth, but when the child bit down on his casing he was too shocked to move even if he’d been able.
One tiny canine tooth met the edge of Jack’s casing and his crystal face cracked. It wasn’t a huge crack; in fact, it was so miniscule that it would be hard to see without a magnifying glass. But to Jack it was large and allowed him to feel the breath of the young boy who had made the mark.
Ianto.
Until that moment Jack had been afraid of what would happen if his pocket watch form was damaged or broken. He had been lonely away from the comfort of the other objects in the shop. But in that instant, even the ever-present boredom was absolutely overcome by his sense of the boy. In a second’s time Jack knew that Ianto was usually quiet and responsible, but today he was excited about his birthday party- he was turning three. He was happy that all of his friends had come over and he was hoping to get a puppy. He knew that Ianto liked the vanilla cake his parents had gotten him but wished it was chocolate, and also that he would be going to wash the stickiness off his hands as soon as present time was over. Most of all, Jack could feel Ianto’s true childish joy, and it shocked him to the core.
Jack’s tiny body was suffused with the child’s emotions and dreams. The sensations were so powerful that he barely noted being tugged away from Ianto’s hands until the word ‘No!’ pierced his consciousness.
Jack hadn’t heard a word spoken since he’d been transformed. The objects in the shop could only communicate through their emotions and he couldn’t hear the words of the customers. To some extent, he’d stopped thinking in words. When he heard that ‘No!’ accompanied by a spike of fear and anger, he knew they belonged to Ianto. Those emotions were the brightest things he’d felt in years.
The hand that tore him from Ianto was softened by lotion, but it harshly slapped him into another hand, making Jack dizzy. Jack landed face-up and recognized the man who’d bought him from the shop. The man’s hand closed around him, but between the fingers Jack watched as he was brought into a master bedroom.
When he spied the cloth-lined box, Jack began praying desperately to a God he had never believed in, but it was to no avail. He was placed face-up in the box, and the last thing he saw for fourteen years was the man’s uncaring face as he lowed the box’s cover and shut out all of Jack’s light.
Chapter 2