Fic: Night Of The Harvester - Part 1
Title: Night Of The Harvester - Part 1-
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Ianto, Jack, OCs.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2389
Spoilers: Nada.
Summary: Visiting an alien planet settled by colonists from earth, Jack and Ianto soon learn that the small settlement is under threat from a mysterious monster known to the settlers as ‘Harvester’.
Written For: spook_me 2024, using Torchwood, Pumpkinhead / Jack O' Lantern.
Disclaimer: Sadly, I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.
A/N: Set in my Through Time and Space ‘verse.
Alien planets, Ianto had quickly discovered in the early days of his travels aboard his TARDIS, were indisputably alien, even the ones colonised by humans. Maybe especially those, because seeing humans going about their day-to-day lives in a reassuringly human fashion, and in a mostly human setting, one tended to assume the place would be a lot like earth, when that was by no means a given.
That is, Ianto had made such assumptions, at least to start with. Jack no doubt would have set him straight if he’d been there. Then again, Jack was a veteran when it came to space travel. He’d been exploring the wider universe for longer than Ianto had been alive. When it came right down to it, from Jack’s point of view, earth itself had been an alien world, since he’d been born and raised on a distant colony planet several thousand years in the future.
Ever since they’d found each other again, following Ianto’s death in Thames House, another death in the House of the Dead, and a most unexpected but very welcome resurrection, they’d joined forces, two immortals travelling together in wedded bliss, meaning that Ianto and his TARDIS now had the benefit of Jack’s prior experience to draw on, as well as all they’d learned in their own travels. They also had the memories of the TARDIS’s forbears, genetically encoded not only into her technical systems, but into every inch of the sentient time- and spaceship’s physiology as well. Accessing those memories still tended to be a bit hit and miss, since the TARDIS was having to discover her own abilities through trial and error, lacking anyone who could instruct her, but between the three of them, they were managing to figure out everything they needed to.
Well, that was true most of the time. Just the act of arriving on a new planet usually brought forth all the pertinent information from the TARDIS’s memory banks, enabling her to tell her two humans all they needed to know about the laws and customs of the various civilisations they encountered. At the same time, she translated the local languages for them, so that all parties could communicate readily with each other. It certainly made Jack and Ianto’s lives simpler, knowing they didn’t have to learn a new language everywhere they went in order to make themselves understood, and it lessened the risk of accidentally causing offence. Jack had long ago told Ianto the tale of how he’d almost got himself executed on one planet because he’d shown his teeth when he’d smiled, something that the planet’s inhabitants considered inexcusably rude.
Every so often though, they’d arrive on a world they’d never visited before, only for the TARDIS to discover an unexpected gap in her memories. Not merely less information than they were accustomed to, but none whatsoever, a complete blank.
This world had seemed fairly normal at first glance; a human colony on an inconspicuous little planet a bit off the beaten track. It turned out to have been settled by chance when the colonists had suffered engine failure enroute to their original destination. The planet itself was similar enough to earth that establishing a colony, even without regular shipments of supplies and equipment from home, hadn’t been a problem, and eighty-four years after their arrival, for the most part they were managing well enough.
As had been explained to Jack and Ianto when they’d first arrived, the colony ship had set out, along with two others, from the Federation of the Americas in the year 2719, old earth calendar. When the people aboard had found themselves stranded on this unknown and unexplored world, they’d resigned themselves to the fact that they were completely cut off from both their homeworld and the planet they’d been meant to colonise, and they’d simply made the best they could of their situation, thankful for the good fortune that had led to their ship breaking down within range of a world with a breathable atmosphere.
Even now the language the colonists spoke was close enough to a somewhat old-fashioned form of American English for Jack and Ianto to follow, with a little help from the TARDIS. With her intuitive grasp of local idioms, she was helpfully filling in the gaps in their understanding by translating any unknown words and terms into something more familiar.
Almost the entire population of the main settlement had turned out to welcome their unexpected visitors on their arrival, perhaps hoping to hear news of the planet to which they’d originally been heading before their engines had given out, but since none of the original colonists were still alive, no one seemed to mind that such information wasn’t forthcoming. The settlers of Colony Planet 997 had no doubt adopted a new name for their world by now anyway, just as the people here had, and they’d most likely forgotten its original designation. Not that it mattered. The colonists and crew of the other two vessels would long since have given up hope of learning what happened to the people aboard the third ship. According to Jack, there’d been a lot of accidents during the great exodus of the twenty-eighth century, when colonisation was still in its infancy. Ships went missing all the time, and few were ever heard from again.
This world was now known as Bounteous by its inhabitants, because the richness of its soil had caused everything they’d planted to flourish. Yet the settlement itself remained smaller than Jack and Ianto would have expected after so long, a township of modest size at the narrower, sheltered end of a fertile valley, and forty or so farms spread out beyond it, each one owned by a single extended family. The colony ship had been carrying approximately fifteen hundred colonists, and it seemed the population was hardly greater than that now.
“It takes time to tame the land, to clear away native vegetation and to cultivate,” their host Tanisa, one of the township’s council of elders, explained. “And then there is Harvester, who always must take his due. We lose many of our people when Harvester comes, those who would try to protect their crops, and their homes. Perhaps if we simply allowed him to take without resistance our lives would be spared, but it is human nature to try to hold on to what is ours, and so instead of losing only our crops, we lose all.”
“Who is this Harvester? An outlaw of some kind?” Jack asked, leaning back in a surprisingly comfortable handcrafted wooden chair in front of a blazing fire, sipping a mug of the local ale.
Tanisa shrugged. “We do not know, Harvester simply is. He rules this world, it belongs to him more than it does to us. He was here first, or so we assume. But each time he comes, he is stronger and takes more from us. Strong as we are, we cannot fight him, although that does not keep us from trying, and always, those who try, die. We lost four farms, four whole families, and all farmworkers the last time Harvester came. Almost a hundred and fifty souls. Less than we might have lost if the surrounding farms had not refused to join the fight.” Shaking her head, Tanisa sighed. “We have learned that much. We no longer go to our neighbours’ aid; they must choose for themselves whether to fight or to run. They always fight. When the next day dawns, we gather the bodies of the dead and burn them on a great pyre. Then we scatter their ashes to nourish the soil, and we begin to rebuild.”
Ianto was horrified. “Does no one ever escape?”
“Some few run, taking refuge wherever they can find it. Mostly the farmworkers. They can find employment on other farms; there is never a shortage of work, especially at harvest time. But the families have always refused to leave their land. All those who are able join the fight, while the youngest, the elders, the ailing or injured, remain within their homes. And yet, when morning comes, even those who neither fought nor ran are found dead, along with all livestock. No one present at the time of an attack has ever survived to tell of their experience.”
“And this happens at every harvest?” Jack too sounded appalled.
Shaking her head, Tanisa smiled. “We were here twelve years before Harvester came the first time. We had built well, planted our crops, tended our animals, raised our children… The settlement was flourishing, and we were beginning to expand. We chose this area to settle in because the soil is rich and fertile, there is abundant water for irrigation from the rivers and streams, and plenty of land to cultivate. We lost only a single farm the first time, one of those furthest from town. We did not know on that occasion what had happened, no one saw anything, but one day the farmworkers were preparing to gather in the crops, and the next, every man, woman, and child, was dead, along with all their livestock, and their fields were empty aside from the bodies of the dead animals.”
“That’s awful!” Despite everything Ianto had seen during his time with Torchwood, he’d never become inured to the horror of sudden and unexpected death, even of one individual. For an entire family and their employees to be wiped out overnight… It awoke memories of the Canary Wharf massacre.
“It was a terrible shock,” Tanisa agreed. “Those alive at the time wrote extensively about the incident in their journals, and even filed reports here in town with the mayor and our constabulary. It was assumed at first that a vile crime had been committed, perhaps by jealous neighbours. Investigations were made, but what caused the deaths was never discovered. The people and animals had been drained of life, and as for the crops in the fields, they were simply gone as if they had never existed. The neighbouring farms were completely untouched, and those who lived on them claimed to have heard nothing, not a single cry for help.”
“Creepy,” was Jack’s opinion.
“For years afterwards, as harvest time approached, night sentries were posted on every farm, and around this town, but nothing happened and after a decade people began to grow complacent, believing the tragedy to have been an isolated incident. But precisely eighteen years after that first devastating loss, two farms were wiped out in a single night. Only on this occasion, there were witnesses, a boy of seventeen summers, and a girl two years younger, who had crept from their beds in the dead of night to meet secretly.”
Jack nodded. “Kids will do that, especially if they’re forbidden to see each other.”
“That is so, children can be wilful and foolish. They wished to wed, but their parents rightly considered them too young. Thus it was that they were the first to see Harvester as he ripped up and consumed the crops, tore doors from their hinges to get at food within the houses, animal feed from the barns. The lovers did not step foot on the afflicted farm’s lands, but they were close enough to swear that every living creature Harvester touched, or so much as looked upon, died instantly without a sound. The young couple immediately fled for the nearest farmhouse, woke the family, told what they had seen, but no one dared venture out until morning, when they found everything as it had been that first time, the crops gone and all people and animals dead, down to the smallest newborn kit and the youngest child, barely a month old.”
Ianto shuddered. “How many times has this happened?
“Four. Harvester has returned every eighteen years since that first occasion, taking three farms on his third visit, and four on the last, different farms each time, with no obvious pattern. But now when the date draws close, all farms mount guards, and an alert system is in place. On the third occasion, workers and family members from surrounding farms went to the aid of those under attack, to no avail. None of them survived, all were killed in an instant. It was devastating. So when the alerts sounded on the last occasion, everyone simply locked themselves in their homes and prayed to whatever gods might listen that their farm, and their family, would be spared.”
“And you don’t know in advance which farms will be targeted next?” Jack was frowning.
“We have found no means of predicting where Harvester’s whim will take him. We know not why one farm draws his attention while another does not.” Tanisa’s smile was bleak. “So many lives this world has cost us, and yet we cannot leave, our ship was damaged beyond our ability to repair it. Perhaps we would not leave even if we could. In the years that Harvester does not come, life is good, our farms and our families flourish. But the settlement grows slowly, if at all. We fear for the coming generations. Some believe we should no longer bear children, because it is unfair of us to bring such innocent souls into so uncertain a world.”
“And now this will be your eighty-fourth harvest since you landed here.” Despite the ale he’d drunk, Ianto was stone-cold sober, but he was still surprised that his voice was so steady.
“That is true.” Tanisa tossed another log on the fire and stared deep into the flames. “It has been almost eighteen years; soon Harvester will come again, and we worry, but there is little that we can do. Already the corn grub numbers are increasing, swarming our cornfields, eating our grain. Soon they will be fat and full, then they will burrow into the ground to begin their lifecycle anew, and Harvester will rise once more. We expect to lose five farms this year, but we have no choice other than to accept the losses as inevitable. It is the way of things here, and as such we are resigned to it.”
There was something so fatalistic in Tanisa’s voice that Ianto had to repress a shudder. He and Jack hadn’t been looking for trouble, but it seemed that they’d found some anyway. The question was, what could they do about it?
TBC in Part 2
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Ianto, Jack, OCs.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2389
Spoilers: Nada.
Summary: Visiting an alien planet settled by colonists from earth, Jack and Ianto soon learn that the small settlement is under threat from a mysterious monster known to the settlers as ‘Harvester’.
Written For: spook_me 2024, using Torchwood, Pumpkinhead / Jack O' Lantern.
Disclaimer: Sadly, I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.
A/N: Set in my Through Time and Space ‘verse.
Alien planets, Ianto had quickly discovered in the early days of his travels aboard his TARDIS, were indisputably alien, even the ones colonised by humans. Maybe especially those, because seeing humans going about their day-to-day lives in a reassuringly human fashion, and in a mostly human setting, one tended to assume the place would be a lot like earth, when that was by no means a given.
That is, Ianto had made such assumptions, at least to start with. Jack no doubt would have set him straight if he’d been there. Then again, Jack was a veteran when it came to space travel. He’d been exploring the wider universe for longer than Ianto had been alive. When it came right down to it, from Jack’s point of view, earth itself had been an alien world, since he’d been born and raised on a distant colony planet several thousand years in the future.
Ever since they’d found each other again, following Ianto’s death in Thames House, another death in the House of the Dead, and a most unexpected but very welcome resurrection, they’d joined forces, two immortals travelling together in wedded bliss, meaning that Ianto and his TARDIS now had the benefit of Jack’s prior experience to draw on, as well as all they’d learned in their own travels. They also had the memories of the TARDIS’s forbears, genetically encoded not only into her technical systems, but into every inch of the sentient time- and spaceship’s physiology as well. Accessing those memories still tended to be a bit hit and miss, since the TARDIS was having to discover her own abilities through trial and error, lacking anyone who could instruct her, but between the three of them, they were managing to figure out everything they needed to.
Well, that was true most of the time. Just the act of arriving on a new planet usually brought forth all the pertinent information from the TARDIS’s memory banks, enabling her to tell her two humans all they needed to know about the laws and customs of the various civilisations they encountered. At the same time, she translated the local languages for them, so that all parties could communicate readily with each other. It certainly made Jack and Ianto’s lives simpler, knowing they didn’t have to learn a new language everywhere they went in order to make themselves understood, and it lessened the risk of accidentally causing offence. Jack had long ago told Ianto the tale of how he’d almost got himself executed on one planet because he’d shown his teeth when he’d smiled, something that the planet’s inhabitants considered inexcusably rude.
Every so often though, they’d arrive on a world they’d never visited before, only for the TARDIS to discover an unexpected gap in her memories. Not merely less information than they were accustomed to, but none whatsoever, a complete blank.
This world had seemed fairly normal at first glance; a human colony on an inconspicuous little planet a bit off the beaten track. It turned out to have been settled by chance when the colonists had suffered engine failure enroute to their original destination. The planet itself was similar enough to earth that establishing a colony, even without regular shipments of supplies and equipment from home, hadn’t been a problem, and eighty-four years after their arrival, for the most part they were managing well enough.
As had been explained to Jack and Ianto when they’d first arrived, the colony ship had set out, along with two others, from the Federation of the Americas in the year 2719, old earth calendar. When the people aboard had found themselves stranded on this unknown and unexplored world, they’d resigned themselves to the fact that they were completely cut off from both their homeworld and the planet they’d been meant to colonise, and they’d simply made the best they could of their situation, thankful for the good fortune that had led to their ship breaking down within range of a world with a breathable atmosphere.
Even now the language the colonists spoke was close enough to a somewhat old-fashioned form of American English for Jack and Ianto to follow, with a little help from the TARDIS. With her intuitive grasp of local idioms, she was helpfully filling in the gaps in their understanding by translating any unknown words and terms into something more familiar.
Almost the entire population of the main settlement had turned out to welcome their unexpected visitors on their arrival, perhaps hoping to hear news of the planet to which they’d originally been heading before their engines had given out, but since none of the original colonists were still alive, no one seemed to mind that such information wasn’t forthcoming. The settlers of Colony Planet 997 had no doubt adopted a new name for their world by now anyway, just as the people here had, and they’d most likely forgotten its original designation. Not that it mattered. The colonists and crew of the other two vessels would long since have given up hope of learning what happened to the people aboard the third ship. According to Jack, there’d been a lot of accidents during the great exodus of the twenty-eighth century, when colonisation was still in its infancy. Ships went missing all the time, and few were ever heard from again.
This world was now known as Bounteous by its inhabitants, because the richness of its soil had caused everything they’d planted to flourish. Yet the settlement itself remained smaller than Jack and Ianto would have expected after so long, a township of modest size at the narrower, sheltered end of a fertile valley, and forty or so farms spread out beyond it, each one owned by a single extended family. The colony ship had been carrying approximately fifteen hundred colonists, and it seemed the population was hardly greater than that now.
“It takes time to tame the land, to clear away native vegetation and to cultivate,” their host Tanisa, one of the township’s council of elders, explained. “And then there is Harvester, who always must take his due. We lose many of our people when Harvester comes, those who would try to protect their crops, and their homes. Perhaps if we simply allowed him to take without resistance our lives would be spared, but it is human nature to try to hold on to what is ours, and so instead of losing only our crops, we lose all.”
“Who is this Harvester? An outlaw of some kind?” Jack asked, leaning back in a surprisingly comfortable handcrafted wooden chair in front of a blazing fire, sipping a mug of the local ale.
Tanisa shrugged. “We do not know, Harvester simply is. He rules this world, it belongs to him more than it does to us. He was here first, or so we assume. But each time he comes, he is stronger and takes more from us. Strong as we are, we cannot fight him, although that does not keep us from trying, and always, those who try, die. We lost four farms, four whole families, and all farmworkers the last time Harvester came. Almost a hundred and fifty souls. Less than we might have lost if the surrounding farms had not refused to join the fight.” Shaking her head, Tanisa sighed. “We have learned that much. We no longer go to our neighbours’ aid; they must choose for themselves whether to fight or to run. They always fight. When the next day dawns, we gather the bodies of the dead and burn them on a great pyre. Then we scatter their ashes to nourish the soil, and we begin to rebuild.”
Ianto was horrified. “Does no one ever escape?”
“Some few run, taking refuge wherever they can find it. Mostly the farmworkers. They can find employment on other farms; there is never a shortage of work, especially at harvest time. But the families have always refused to leave their land. All those who are able join the fight, while the youngest, the elders, the ailing or injured, remain within their homes. And yet, when morning comes, even those who neither fought nor ran are found dead, along with all livestock. No one present at the time of an attack has ever survived to tell of their experience.”
“And this happens at every harvest?” Jack too sounded appalled.
Shaking her head, Tanisa smiled. “We were here twelve years before Harvester came the first time. We had built well, planted our crops, tended our animals, raised our children… The settlement was flourishing, and we were beginning to expand. We chose this area to settle in because the soil is rich and fertile, there is abundant water for irrigation from the rivers and streams, and plenty of land to cultivate. We lost only a single farm the first time, one of those furthest from town. We did not know on that occasion what had happened, no one saw anything, but one day the farmworkers were preparing to gather in the crops, and the next, every man, woman, and child, was dead, along with all their livestock, and their fields were empty aside from the bodies of the dead animals.”
“That’s awful!” Despite everything Ianto had seen during his time with Torchwood, he’d never become inured to the horror of sudden and unexpected death, even of one individual. For an entire family and their employees to be wiped out overnight… It awoke memories of the Canary Wharf massacre.
“It was a terrible shock,” Tanisa agreed. “Those alive at the time wrote extensively about the incident in their journals, and even filed reports here in town with the mayor and our constabulary. It was assumed at first that a vile crime had been committed, perhaps by jealous neighbours. Investigations were made, but what caused the deaths was never discovered. The people and animals had been drained of life, and as for the crops in the fields, they were simply gone as if they had never existed. The neighbouring farms were completely untouched, and those who lived on them claimed to have heard nothing, not a single cry for help.”
“Creepy,” was Jack’s opinion.
“For years afterwards, as harvest time approached, night sentries were posted on every farm, and around this town, but nothing happened and after a decade people began to grow complacent, believing the tragedy to have been an isolated incident. But precisely eighteen years after that first devastating loss, two farms were wiped out in a single night. Only on this occasion, there were witnesses, a boy of seventeen summers, and a girl two years younger, who had crept from their beds in the dead of night to meet secretly.”
Jack nodded. “Kids will do that, especially if they’re forbidden to see each other.”
“That is so, children can be wilful and foolish. They wished to wed, but their parents rightly considered them too young. Thus it was that they were the first to see Harvester as he ripped up and consumed the crops, tore doors from their hinges to get at food within the houses, animal feed from the barns. The lovers did not step foot on the afflicted farm’s lands, but they were close enough to swear that every living creature Harvester touched, or so much as looked upon, died instantly without a sound. The young couple immediately fled for the nearest farmhouse, woke the family, told what they had seen, but no one dared venture out until morning, when they found everything as it had been that first time, the crops gone and all people and animals dead, down to the smallest newborn kit and the youngest child, barely a month old.”
Ianto shuddered. “How many times has this happened?
“Four. Harvester has returned every eighteen years since that first occasion, taking three farms on his third visit, and four on the last, different farms each time, with no obvious pattern. But now when the date draws close, all farms mount guards, and an alert system is in place. On the third occasion, workers and family members from surrounding farms went to the aid of those under attack, to no avail. None of them survived, all were killed in an instant. It was devastating. So when the alerts sounded on the last occasion, everyone simply locked themselves in their homes and prayed to whatever gods might listen that their farm, and their family, would be spared.”
“And you don’t know in advance which farms will be targeted next?” Jack was frowning.
“We have found no means of predicting where Harvester’s whim will take him. We know not why one farm draws his attention while another does not.” Tanisa’s smile was bleak. “So many lives this world has cost us, and yet we cannot leave, our ship was damaged beyond our ability to repair it. Perhaps we would not leave even if we could. In the years that Harvester does not come, life is good, our farms and our families flourish. But the settlement grows slowly, if at all. We fear for the coming generations. Some believe we should no longer bear children, because it is unfair of us to bring such innocent souls into so uncertain a world.”
“And now this will be your eighty-fourth harvest since you landed here.” Despite the ale he’d drunk, Ianto was stone-cold sober, but he was still surprised that his voice was so steady.
“That is true.” Tanisa tossed another log on the fire and stared deep into the flames. “It has been almost eighteen years; soon Harvester will come again, and we worry, but there is little that we can do. Already the corn grub numbers are increasing, swarming our cornfields, eating our grain. Soon they will be fat and full, then they will burrow into the ground to begin their lifecycle anew, and Harvester will rise once more. We expect to lose five farms this year, but we have no choice other than to accept the losses as inevitable. It is the way of things here, and as such we are resigned to it.”
There was something so fatalistic in Tanisa’s voice that Ianto had to repress a shudder. He and Jack hadn’t been looking for trouble, but it seemed that they’d found some anyway. The question was, what could they do about it?
TBC in Part 2