Ficlet Suite: Three Portraits of Divinity
Ficlet Suite: Three Portraits of Divinity
Characters: Jack, Gwen, Owen
Rating: Teen
Warnings: Angst and language in #2, none for #1 or #3
Spoilers: #1 has spoilers for DW 4.12 and 4.13, #2 has spoilers for TW 1.10.
Disclaimer: Torchwood is property of BBC and RTD.
This fic was kindly beta-read by
demotu. Thanks!
I. Children of the Middle Kingdom (Jack, Gwen)
Jack swings the SUV into the car park, and they both hop out.
They look around for the disturbance. Gwen is about to look behind the school building when Jack calls her back. He gestures to his left, saying, “It's over there.” He's pointing towards the small rise that separates the cricket pitch from the rest of the school grounds.
They get up the hill onto the pitch and sure enough, there's something on fire. Except...it isn't. Burning, that is. There are flames in it and on it and around it, and perhaps the flames are it...but it's not burning. It is, however, using a very long tongue to strip leaves from the branch of a tree hanging over the far side of the oval.
Jack stops by the stumps, about fifteen meters away from the creature, and Gwen comes up on his left-hand side, stopping perhaps just a bit further away. It's enormous, the size of one of Rhys' delivery lorries, with a body like a horse, a head like the dragon on the Welsh flag, antlers like a deer, and...scales? Scales, like one of those expensive fish in the ponds at Japanese restaurants.
It's beautiful, that's what it is.
Beside her, Jack's quiet murmur echoes her thoughts. “Oh, you beautiful, perfect thing.” She flicks a glance at him, then turns to stare when she realizes that he's a million miles-or a million years-away. It's different, though. Not like when John first told him about Grey, not like when he came out of the ground or when the Daleks came or when the Doctor called him. It's peaceful, it's reverent, and it's such a surprise to see him like this that she steps back and nearly trips over her own feet.
“So, now, what is it?”
Jack is enough in the here-and-now to answer, “Not an alien, if that's what you're asking.”
“Jack...” The reproach in Gwen's voice brings him back to reality with a snap, and as the weight of his life floods back into his face, she's abruptly sorry she spoke.
“It's...it's like the Night Travelers, or the Mara. It belongs to this planet but it lives outside what humans normally see. The difference being, this one is absolutely harmless.” He pauses, considering. “Well, mostly harmless. If you got up close to it, you'd see that it isn't even crushing the blades of grass where it stands. I am kind of wondering what it's doing here, though...” His voice trails off, and he drifts away to wherever it was he'd just come back from.
The creature ceases its attentions to the tree and drops its head, reaching around with a hind foot to scratch behind an antler. Errant tendrils of flame spark off its foot, spiraling out to wrap around the antler tip and arc off into nothingness. A pose like that should look awkward and undignified, but somehow it still manages to look fiery and magnificent and, if she's being completely honest, much more amazing to behold now that she knows it's not going to try to kill her, and the next thing she knows, Jack's voice snaps her mind back to the here and now.
“It's called a qi-lin. They're considered to be children of the gods in China and Japan, which is why I'm rather surprised to see one in South Wales.” His voice is quiet and respectful, and there is no irony in his words. “I'm also surprised that it's allowing us to be this close to it.” The qi-lin resumes stripping leaves from the branch.
“Allowing us? It doesn't even seem to know we're about.”
“Oh, it knows we're here, it's probably known since we got out of the SUV. Remember what I said about mostly harmless? The pure of heart, it won't bother. The ones who aren't, well, either it will run away or it will kill them.” Jack smiles as he puts a hand on her back and gives her a light push. “Go on up and touch it, if you want.”
Gwen opens her mouth to speak, but shuts it once the implications of Jack's words sink in. She remembers Suzie, Suzie and Lisa and Mary and Jasmine and Carys and the blowfish and the Nostrovites and Beth and Tommy and the man in the hospital who was killed by the Weevil, and she closes her eyes, because Jack's old and Jack's battle-weary and those are just the ones she knows about. But then, from behind her eyelids, she watches him throw himself screaming before Abbadon, imagines him shivering under the earth for two thousand years , and remembers something that Martha had let slip about how he'd chosen to run through an incinerator rather than surrender and give the Earth to the Daleks.
“Fire purifies,” she says.
II. Ad Te Omnis Caro Veniet (Owen/Diane)
Nobody understands angels. They think they do, but the angels they think they understand are these horrid little things that you buy in cheap shops, with their fancy gold wings and gold halos. How those angels are watching over them and making sure they don't fart in public or walk out in front of trains or otherwise act like a complete twat.
The problem with all that la-dee-dah shite about angels is that angels aren't nice. These are things where they come to see you and the first thing out of their mouths is “Fear Not!” Shouldn't that tell you something? If the first thing you have to say when you see a bloke is “Fear Not,” could it be because you're really fucking scary? That's what I thought. And then you have to take into account that every time angels show up, bad shit happens. Can you imagine, some poor bird at home making soup and an angel shows up on her ceiling and tells her, “Fear Not! And congratulations, princess, you're knocked up now. Have a nice day.” Can you? Or you're out in a field, minding your own bloody business with your friends and your sheep when an army of angels show up in the sky telling you that you need to go look at some random bird's kid, or to chase you out of your home with a flaming sword? They're not nice people. Just ask anybody who lived in Sodom, although to be quite honest I'd be a little upset too if I rocked up at some place wanting a good night's sleep and all the men in the town showed up at my doorstep for a friendly bit of nonconsensual Sunday evening buggery.
See, I reckon that angels were people once, and then they either discovered something that made them different or they were already different and just changed, and then they mostly forgot that they ever were anything like us. They go about through the heavens, la la la fly away, and that's just fine. Us on the ground, we're too busy eating and drinking and fucking and fighting for them to notice us, or for us to notice that they're even there. And they won't notice, because they've forgotten.
Now, so long as they keep forgetting, everything is okay. It's when they remember that trouble starts, and that happens now and again. They remember that they were human once, remember how it felt, and decide that they want to feel it again. So they come down out of the sky, and find somebody who they think will help them remember, and next thing you know you're dancing under the stars and making love on purple satin sheets and pulling in every favour you ever had to put wind under their wings, but it will never work, because sooner or later they'll remember everything they wanted to remember about being human, go back to being angels, and fly off again.
And that's when you realize you forgot to put the lamb's blood on your door.
III. Crescendo (diminuendo) (Jack)
Jack has no idea how old he is anymore. He's old enough that his hair is as white as snow (and he still has it all, more's the luck) and that he's witnessed the dawn of sentient life on at least ten planets now, including this one. He's been on this planet for about ten thousand of their long years, quietly watching as they emerged from the dreamtime into sapience some fifteen or twenty generations ago. That's the way of things.
It's midnight in the midwinter, and he's in the town of Xiel-al-qulochoa, and Jack is doing what he has done every year at midnight in the midwinter for ten thousand years: rowing a boat. The oars dip into the water, piercing the reflections of the two moons and shaping them into intersecting circles. At precisely the center of the lake, he stops, heaves an anchor into the water, and tugs on the line made fast to the bow until he's convinced that he's not going anywhere. It's peaceful out here, where the first moon (the setting one) illuminates the snow and the still-high second moon (the green one) casts shimmering emerald light over everything else.
He is in a small boat in the middle of a lake surrounded by a small town on a small continent drifting in an iridescent blue ocean on the smallest planet in a solar system ringing like jewels around a small M-class star located in the central stellar cluster of a small spiral-arm galaxy somewhere in the middle of a great, glorious, amazing universe. Needless to say, the night stars here are spectacular.
Jack stares at the sky, smiling, loving every second of every minute of every hour he's out on the lake, watching the second moon (the green one) gracefully sail through the star-studded blackness until it too retreats beyond the horizon. By now it's quite cold out, and he's glad of the blankets and heat packs he's brought. His heart races in anticipation of what's coming-any minute, any minute now-
A spark of brilliant scarlet explodes across the sky. Then yellow, then gold, then flaming red. While the last emerald moonbeams dissipate amongst the mountains, the meteor shower begins, tens, then hundreds, then thousands of them, marking the light-flecked dark with glorious trails of colour. Jack closes his eyes and imagines, raising his hands above him as he's done every year for ten thousand years, that he can catch that blazing light and hold it forever in his hands. The universe with its galaxy with its star with its solar system with its planets with its oceans with its continents with its cities with its lakes have all coalesced into one point of joy reveling in the sheer mad glory that is existence from the bottom of a rowboat.
On the snow-covered shore, thousands and thousands of silent pilgrims watch the God of Winter row his boat to the center of the lake, watch as he lifts his hands and calls the first light of the new year from heaven, just as he's done every year since the dawn of time.
*********
Author's notes: This is not the first fic I've ever written about a kirin (the Japanese spelling, and most commonly encountered outside east Asia as the mascot of the supremely delicious Kirin Beer). My first TW fic (and first fic ever) featured a kirin, and it shall not be linked here as it is a bad, bad, bad fic indeed. The Kirin is supposed to be a creature of great luck and wisdom, third only behind Dragon and Phoenix in terms of holiness in imperial China, and I felt it deserved better than bad-fic, so I made it come on over and eat the shrubbery in South Wales. Insert your own punch line here.
The title of Owen's little soliloquy is taken from the Requiem mass, and translates to mean, "To you shall all flesh come." The inspiration for Owen's piece comes from a comment in sarcasticchick's fic The Windhovers, although her interpretation of the subject matter and mine are (to commit the sin of massive understatement) somewhat different.
Characters: Jack, Gwen, Owen
Rating: Teen
Warnings: Angst and language in #2, none for #1 or #3
Spoilers: #1 has spoilers for DW 4.12 and 4.13, #2 has spoilers for TW 1.10.
Disclaimer: Torchwood is property of BBC and RTD.
This fic was kindly beta-read by
demotu. Thanks!
I. Children of the Middle Kingdom (Jack, Gwen)
Jack swings the SUV into the car park, and they both hop out.
They look around for the disturbance. Gwen is about to look behind the school building when Jack calls her back. He gestures to his left, saying, “It's over there.” He's pointing towards the small rise that separates the cricket pitch from the rest of the school grounds.
They get up the hill onto the pitch and sure enough, there's something on fire. Except...it isn't. Burning, that is. There are flames in it and on it and around it, and perhaps the flames are it...but it's not burning. It is, however, using a very long tongue to strip leaves from the branch of a tree hanging over the far side of the oval.
Jack stops by the stumps, about fifteen meters away from the creature, and Gwen comes up on his left-hand side, stopping perhaps just a bit further away. It's enormous, the size of one of Rhys' delivery lorries, with a body like a horse, a head like the dragon on the Welsh flag, antlers like a deer, and...scales? Scales, like one of those expensive fish in the ponds at Japanese restaurants.
It's beautiful, that's what it is.
Beside her, Jack's quiet murmur echoes her thoughts. “Oh, you beautiful, perfect thing.” She flicks a glance at him, then turns to stare when she realizes that he's a million miles-or a million years-away. It's different, though. Not like when John first told him about Grey, not like when he came out of the ground or when the Daleks came or when the Doctor called him. It's peaceful, it's reverent, and it's such a surprise to see him like this that she steps back and nearly trips over her own feet.
“So, now, what is it?”
Jack is enough in the here-and-now to answer, “Not an alien, if that's what you're asking.”
“Jack...” The reproach in Gwen's voice brings him back to reality with a snap, and as the weight of his life floods back into his face, she's abruptly sorry she spoke.
“It's...it's like the Night Travelers, or the Mara. It belongs to this planet but it lives outside what humans normally see. The difference being, this one is absolutely harmless.” He pauses, considering. “Well, mostly harmless. If you got up close to it, you'd see that it isn't even crushing the blades of grass where it stands. I am kind of wondering what it's doing here, though...” His voice trails off, and he drifts away to wherever it was he'd just come back from.
The creature ceases its attentions to the tree and drops its head, reaching around with a hind foot to scratch behind an antler. Errant tendrils of flame spark off its foot, spiraling out to wrap around the antler tip and arc off into nothingness. A pose like that should look awkward and undignified, but somehow it still manages to look fiery and magnificent and, if she's being completely honest, much more amazing to behold now that she knows it's not going to try to kill her, and the next thing she knows, Jack's voice snaps her mind back to the here and now.
“It's called a qi-lin. They're considered to be children of the gods in China and Japan, which is why I'm rather surprised to see one in South Wales.” His voice is quiet and respectful, and there is no irony in his words. “I'm also surprised that it's allowing us to be this close to it.” The qi-lin resumes stripping leaves from the branch.
“Allowing us? It doesn't even seem to know we're about.”
“Oh, it knows we're here, it's probably known since we got out of the SUV. Remember what I said about mostly harmless? The pure of heart, it won't bother. The ones who aren't, well, either it will run away or it will kill them.” Jack smiles as he puts a hand on her back and gives her a light push. “Go on up and touch it, if you want.”
Gwen opens her mouth to speak, but shuts it once the implications of Jack's words sink in. She remembers Suzie, Suzie and Lisa and Mary and Jasmine and Carys and the blowfish and the Nostrovites and Beth and Tommy and the man in the hospital who was killed by the Weevil, and she closes her eyes, because Jack's old and Jack's battle-weary and those are just the ones she knows about. But then, from behind her eyelids, she watches him throw himself screaming before Abbadon, imagines him shivering under the earth for two thousand years , and remembers something that Martha had let slip about how he'd chosen to run through an incinerator rather than surrender and give the Earth to the Daleks.
“Fire purifies,” she says.
II. Ad Te Omnis Caro Veniet (Owen/Diane)
Nobody understands angels. They think they do, but the angels they think they understand are these horrid little things that you buy in cheap shops, with their fancy gold wings and gold halos. How those angels are watching over them and making sure they don't fart in public or walk out in front of trains or otherwise act like a complete twat.
The problem with all that la-dee-dah shite about angels is that angels aren't nice. These are things where they come to see you and the first thing out of their mouths is “Fear Not!” Shouldn't that tell you something? If the first thing you have to say when you see a bloke is “Fear Not,” could it be because you're really fucking scary? That's what I thought. And then you have to take into account that every time angels show up, bad shit happens. Can you imagine, some poor bird at home making soup and an angel shows up on her ceiling and tells her, “Fear Not! And congratulations, princess, you're knocked up now. Have a nice day.” Can you? Or you're out in a field, minding your own bloody business with your friends and your sheep when an army of angels show up in the sky telling you that you need to go look at some random bird's kid, or to chase you out of your home with a flaming sword? They're not nice people. Just ask anybody who lived in Sodom, although to be quite honest I'd be a little upset too if I rocked up at some place wanting a good night's sleep and all the men in the town showed up at my doorstep for a friendly bit of nonconsensual Sunday evening buggery.
See, I reckon that angels were people once, and then they either discovered something that made them different or they were already different and just changed, and then they mostly forgot that they ever were anything like us. They go about through the heavens, la la la fly away, and that's just fine. Us on the ground, we're too busy eating and drinking and fucking and fighting for them to notice us, or for us to notice that they're even there. And they won't notice, because they've forgotten.
Now, so long as they keep forgetting, everything is okay. It's when they remember that trouble starts, and that happens now and again. They remember that they were human once, remember how it felt, and decide that they want to feel it again. So they come down out of the sky, and find somebody who they think will help them remember, and next thing you know you're dancing under the stars and making love on purple satin sheets and pulling in every favour you ever had to put wind under their wings, but it will never work, because sooner or later they'll remember everything they wanted to remember about being human, go back to being angels, and fly off again.
And that's when you realize you forgot to put the lamb's blood on your door.
III. Crescendo (diminuendo) (Jack)
Jack has no idea how old he is anymore. He's old enough that his hair is as white as snow (and he still has it all, more's the luck) and that he's witnessed the dawn of sentient life on at least ten planets now, including this one. He's been on this planet for about ten thousand of their long years, quietly watching as they emerged from the dreamtime into sapience some fifteen or twenty generations ago. That's the way of things.
It's midnight in the midwinter, and he's in the town of Xiel-al-qulochoa, and Jack is doing what he has done every year at midnight in the midwinter for ten thousand years: rowing a boat. The oars dip into the water, piercing the reflections of the two moons and shaping them into intersecting circles. At precisely the center of the lake, he stops, heaves an anchor into the water, and tugs on the line made fast to the bow until he's convinced that he's not going anywhere. It's peaceful out here, where the first moon (the setting one) illuminates the snow and the still-high second moon (the green one) casts shimmering emerald light over everything else.
He is in a small boat in the middle of a lake surrounded by a small town on a small continent drifting in an iridescent blue ocean on the smallest planet in a solar system ringing like jewels around a small M-class star located in the central stellar cluster of a small spiral-arm galaxy somewhere in the middle of a great, glorious, amazing universe. Needless to say, the night stars here are spectacular.
Jack stares at the sky, smiling, loving every second of every minute of every hour he's out on the lake, watching the second moon (the green one) gracefully sail through the star-studded blackness until it too retreats beyond the horizon. By now it's quite cold out, and he's glad of the blankets and heat packs he's brought. His heart races in anticipation of what's coming-any minute, any minute now-
A spark of brilliant scarlet explodes across the sky. Then yellow, then gold, then flaming red. While the last emerald moonbeams dissipate amongst the mountains, the meteor shower begins, tens, then hundreds, then thousands of them, marking the light-flecked dark with glorious trails of colour. Jack closes his eyes and imagines, raising his hands above him as he's done every year for ten thousand years, that he can catch that blazing light and hold it forever in his hands. The universe with its galaxy with its star with its solar system with its planets with its oceans with its continents with its cities with its lakes have all coalesced into one point of joy reveling in the sheer mad glory that is existence from the bottom of a rowboat.
On the snow-covered shore, thousands and thousands of silent pilgrims watch the God of Winter row his boat to the center of the lake, watch as he lifts his hands and calls the first light of the new year from heaven, just as he's done every year since the dawn of time.
*********
Author's notes: This is not the first fic I've ever written about a kirin (the Japanese spelling, and most commonly encountered outside east Asia as the mascot of the supremely delicious Kirin Beer). My first TW fic (and first fic ever) featured a kirin, and it shall not be linked here as it is a bad, bad, bad fic indeed. The Kirin is supposed to be a creature of great luck and wisdom, third only behind Dragon and Phoenix in terms of holiness in imperial China, and I felt it deserved better than bad-fic, so I made it come on over and eat the shrubbery in South Wales. Insert your own punch line here.
The title of Owen's little soliloquy is taken from the Requiem mass, and translates to mean, "To you shall all flesh come." The inspiration for Owen's piece comes from a comment in sarcasticchick's fic The Windhovers, although her interpretation of the subject matter and mine are (to commit the sin of massive understatement) somewhat different.