Flight feathers and three feet of black silk
Title: Flight feathers and three feet of black silk
Author: redsnake05
Fandom: Torchwood
Rating: R
Warnings: Character death
Prompt: 134) Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over. -- Octavia Butler (1947-2006), African-American science fiction author.
Summary: Jack thinks he sees Tosh everywhere, and perhaps he does. She is content to categorise and compartmentalise.
Author's notes: I am indebted to used_songs for her excellent beta skills.
We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,, she said, her arms outstretched to him, halfway between supplication and temptation. You know, that imagined place, the one where the twilight that streams through the great high windows and floods over the tables laid for a feast. The place with the eternal light on the meadows as we sit in them in the late afternoon. We shall prepare, there, we shall get ready. He watched her step towards him, her smile fixed and glittering, even as he stepped away, and away, always back and away. He didn't want to be chosen, he wasn't ready to be chosen.
It wasn't until Jack woke up that he realised he couldn't be chosen, he was safe from her selection, but that did little to quiet the frantic hammer of his pulse. He edged out of bed, slipping into his clothes in the dark with the smooth ease of long practice. He didn't want a light. He didn't want to imagine Tosh with light shining bright around her like a halo, like the frenzy of battle, like the passion of death. He didn't want to imagine her lit by the bluish glow of her computer screen. She was like a raven, sleek and smooth and bright eyed, ready to pick over the remains and see what should be saved.
Jack climbed slowly through the Hub, heading for the very top where he could look down on all of it and see all the ghosts laid out in front of him. Some lay where they had fallen, or where he had found them. Some he still pictured working in their accustomed places. Tosh was there, too, dark and serious. The Hub was still, humming faintly with Earth electronics and alien tech, humming from the inside out. Faint light trickled through from doorways and monitors and security keypads. Jack realised that he had never seen the Hub completely dark. It was always light in there somewhere.
His pulse picked up again, trip hammer fast, fast as the beat of a raven's wings. Fast as her fingers on a keyboard. Fast as the thunder of hooves on a battlefield. She was silence, but not darkness. Not Tosh. She had kept his secrets, and all she had asked him for was a place of light and work, to get ready for the days to come. He dropped his head into his hands and wished for her silence by his side.
>>>>
Tosh watched the man sitting at the table. Her fingers shook slightly and she twisted them together to hide the tremor. The red cotton that encased her was rough and her head hurt from calculating strings of differential equations in an effort to stave off madness. She had thought about cutting herself, so she could write the working in blood on the concrete, adding red to the grey. She didn't want to think about the punishment that would have brought. Instead she fixed her gaze on him, level and steady in the way her fingers couldn't manage. Captain Jack Harkness, he had said. His smile had been big and easy, a wide stretch to cover secrets. She didn't care about his secrets right now, just about whether the out he was offering her was truly within her grasp.
When she stepped outside, wrapped up in a dark coat that he had provided with her hair clean and glossy even though she could still feel the dirt lingering under her skin, she had looked up at the sky. It wheeled blue above her and she blinked. She'd been expecting it to be dark. She had lost track of time in the cell, where the light was always on. It shone down on her, pitiless and without mercy, stripping her back to red cotton and dark-circled eyes. It burned her bare, down to strings of numbers in arcane codes, back to ancient mantras, back to the raw firings of her synapses.
Tosh let him escort her to the car with a hand under her elbow, let him take her to Cardiff. She let him show her the apartment, tiny but with lots of windows. She stood by one, her fingers just touching the clear glass, and he smiled at her. She smiled back, still a little uncertain under her new plumage, but fairly sure that the escape he was offering her was another, nicer, imprisonment.
"Thank you," she said, politely. Jack merely smiled, as easily as she had ever seen him. She knew that he hadn't saved her for any reason of altruism. She also wondered who had found the apartment, furnishing it starkly in dark colours.
"It was my pleasure," he said, with some relish, as if savouring a private joke. "I'll leave you alone now. You start work tomorrow. I'll come and pick you up." Then he was gone in a swirl of garbadine, leaving her alone in an apartment with huge windows through which light would spill, dark corners that she could illuminate with lamps that were subdued and under her control. Even though she had hated the light, she couldn't imagine living in darkness now.
The dreams started that night.
>>>>
Jack woke up at his desk, head pillowed on his arms. He looked up at the blue light streaming in the door, flooding through the windows. Even at night, the light was still here. He shivered to himself and pushed the dream of Tosh from his mind. The images lingered, reluctant to leave, but he heaved himself out of his chair and out of his office, wiping his hands over his face to try to wake up. He hated the groggy, cotton-headed feeling that came with a cricked neck and the uncomfortable memory of a dream he hadn't wanted to have. Stepping out the door, he looked down at the workspace below. Gwen's corner was stuffed with trinkets and pictures, the uneasy marriage she persisted in cultivating between humanity and the utterly alien. He watched the sheaves of paper flutter in the desultory breeze from a fan and thought of Tosh.
In his dream she had run scarves of black, three feet long, supple, thin and strong, through her hands as she had looked at him. We do our best work when the world looks the other way, she said. They suspend their disbelief so we can slip through the stage set of the world, indistinguishable from the other stage hands until we strike. We are shinobi, moving unseen through alleys and sewers and abandoned buildings. We need only just enough light for our feet and our hands, for our work. But afterwards, I will meet you freely in the light of a hundred candles, the light of a thousand paper lanterns.
Shivering, Jack ran his hands up and down his arms. It seemed that she had always been there. She was silent feet and a quiet voice, slipping smoothly into the Hub. He missed her.
>>>>
The work was absorbing and time-consuming; that was good. Her colleagues were quiet and focused on their own projects; that was better. She gathered together the pieces of her life and built something from the fragments. They were jagged and sharp, but she disguised their edges with the clean lines of a traditional tea set, or the soft bleed of calligraphy inks into paper hangings in the apartment. At work, no one minded a few sharp edges, and they mostly merged into strings of code and the hard outlines of the computer system she slowly engineered. Jack kept his distance and his secrets, and, if this needs must be a cage, it was at least a spacious one.
She slipped from day to night with ease, she didn't care about the source of her illumination. The eerie glow of the computer screen was the same as the sun beating down on her shoulders as she moved without notice through scenes of chaos. She had been there six months when Jack arrived on her doorstep, late at night. She let him in and sat him down in a chair close to the window, one with a lamp over it. She wanted to be able to see his face, see the shades of meaning she had learned to attach to that empty smile that he wore like armour.
"You're fitting in well," he said.
"Yes," she replied, handing him a cup of tea. She could see the value in what they are doing. She loved the work. Jack laughed and smiled and drank his tea.
"This isn't a prison sentence," he said, finally, as he put his cup down.
"No?" said Tosh. "Is it, perhaps, the afterlife?" She wondered if she had served purgatory in red overalls to a soundtrack of a mechanical voice reciting her crimes and her punishments, and if now she walked the fields as a restless ghost.
"You can tell it's not a prison sentence, or you would not dare say such a thing to your warden," said Jack.
"Perhaps you are lulling me into a false sense of security," said Tosh. She smiled as she said it though. There was something disarming about Jack, whatever the secrets he kept behind that pleasant facade. They were not her secrets. She was unconcerned with them.
Some time after that, she started to wake up with black feathers on her pillows, some long and glossy, others short down. She swept them into a box and kept them under the bed.
>>>>
Jack didn't want to go to sleep. He sat on the edge of his bed and wished for the Rift to activate, for an invasion of Weevils, for anything that would mean he had to get up and carry on working. He didn't want to close his eyes and see her, dark and still and deadly behind his eyes. She was waiting for him, deep in his mind. She might be waiting with her shield, to take him to the endless loop of battle and feasting, or she might be wrapping her hands in dark cloth with a smile that invited him to spar with her. She might be waiting, as he had seen her once with her head tilted to one side and her eyes fixed bright and dark on him, considering whether she might pounce on him and tear him to pieces. She would be sleek and dark, with talons that could tear at his eyes and smooth feathers that she could arch up on, taking to the sky.
>>>>
Tosh was content. She knew why she was here and what she was doing, and that was all she needed. The span of her hands was enough for her to hold her world in, as she went about the act of preparation. There was her waking world; the crowded archives of The Hub and her projects, chasing down aliens with a gun strangely light in her hands. Mostly, though, she was a being of charge and switches, flickering binary in her synapses. She kept the change from her work, separating it out as she had separated out so many things before. Her mind was a maze of delineations, her life barely less so.
She mostly changed at night, opening a window to the smoggy sky and letting the cool air sink into her. She could feel the transformation in her shoulders first, and she breathed deep through the first shivery moments. As time went by, it happened faster and was more seamless. The darkness felt different, then, even The Rift was less pressing a concern as her human cares faded. Tosh tilted her head and looked at herself in her new form, sleek and utterly unremarkable save for the human intelligence behind the sharp black eyes and wicked beak. She would always shake out her wings, even if she didn't fly, admiring the span of them.
Changing during the day was more risky, though she had done it once or twice. Those were the best times, when the blue sky called to her to soar and she could go. Following the wind, the endless possibilities of earth and heaven. She was wild, free for the first time ever. She had only to eat, only to fly.
The last time she changed was not for the love of it, or the exhilaration of freedom. She weighed their chances of escape, or hers, at least. Jack would be fine whether the rest of the team found them in an hour or next week. She would not. The water was rising steadily and showed no signs of stopping. Survival meant more than secrecy or freedom, and Tosh made the last choice on her own. Jack had jumped backwards, hands raised against her caw of despair. She looked at him, tilting her head to see him through one eye. Automatically, her mind weighed him up, assessing his ability to harm, or maybe as a possible food source. He had only secrets to offer her, an endless stream of them behind his tongue, and she had just given away her last one. She flew through the broken skylight without looking back, circling once only before she found the ground. It had never felt so alien under her feet.
>>>>
Jack wondered if things might have been different if he'd insisted on her talking to him, if he'd forced her to tell him everything. But she had gone home, and for the first time had not answered the door when he knocked. The next day, a building had exploded and it was too late then. She was gone. He looked down at his hands and up at the breaking dawn. He'd made it through another night, safe from dreams, never safe from regrets.
When the raven landed next to him, Jack thought he must have fallen asleep on the bench. He hadn't. The raven was there, looking at him from shoulder height as it balanced on the wood next to him, calm and unafraid.
"But there is only darkness, nothingness. There is no future life," he said. If the raven could have shrugged, it would have, Jack was sure. His skin crawled with its proximity. The raven looked at him for a moment longer before bending its head, dropping a stone onto the bench. Jack shrank back as its wings unfolded, terrified that this was the end of the dream he'd woken from, that its talons would bite into its skin. But it was gone with a derisive noise, as if to make it clear that it had no further interest in him.
Jack took the stone back to The Hub and put it on Tosh's abandoned work station. Late that night, as he stood in his doorway and looked down at the main workspace below, he considered it. The doorway symbol of inguz winked at him from one side, the character for "end" on the other. He dropped his head to his hands and wished Tosh goodbye.
Author: redsnake05
Fandom: Torchwood
Rating: R
Warnings: Character death
Prompt: 134) Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over. -- Octavia Butler (1947-2006), African-American science fiction author.
Summary: Jack thinks he sees Tosh everywhere, and perhaps he does. She is content to categorise and compartmentalise.
Author's notes: I am indebted to used_songs for her excellent beta skills.
We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,, she said, her arms outstretched to him, halfway between supplication and temptation. You know, that imagined place, the one where the twilight that streams through the great high windows and floods over the tables laid for a feast. The place with the eternal light on the meadows as we sit in them in the late afternoon. We shall prepare, there, we shall get ready. He watched her step towards him, her smile fixed and glittering, even as he stepped away, and away, always back and away. He didn't want to be chosen, he wasn't ready to be chosen.
It wasn't until Jack woke up that he realised he couldn't be chosen, he was safe from her selection, but that did little to quiet the frantic hammer of his pulse. He edged out of bed, slipping into his clothes in the dark with the smooth ease of long practice. He didn't want a light. He didn't want to imagine Tosh with light shining bright around her like a halo, like the frenzy of battle, like the passion of death. He didn't want to imagine her lit by the bluish glow of her computer screen. She was like a raven, sleek and smooth and bright eyed, ready to pick over the remains and see what should be saved.
Jack climbed slowly through the Hub, heading for the very top where he could look down on all of it and see all the ghosts laid out in front of him. Some lay where they had fallen, or where he had found them. Some he still pictured working in their accustomed places. Tosh was there, too, dark and serious. The Hub was still, humming faintly with Earth electronics and alien tech, humming from the inside out. Faint light trickled through from doorways and monitors and security keypads. Jack realised that he had never seen the Hub completely dark. It was always light in there somewhere.
His pulse picked up again, trip hammer fast, fast as the beat of a raven's wings. Fast as her fingers on a keyboard. Fast as the thunder of hooves on a battlefield. She was silence, but not darkness. Not Tosh. She had kept his secrets, and all she had asked him for was a place of light and work, to get ready for the days to come. He dropped his head into his hands and wished for her silence by his side.
>>>>
Tosh watched the man sitting at the table. Her fingers shook slightly and she twisted them together to hide the tremor. The red cotton that encased her was rough and her head hurt from calculating strings of differential equations in an effort to stave off madness. She had thought about cutting herself, so she could write the working in blood on the concrete, adding red to the grey. She didn't want to think about the punishment that would have brought. Instead she fixed her gaze on him, level and steady in the way her fingers couldn't manage. Captain Jack Harkness, he had said. His smile had been big and easy, a wide stretch to cover secrets. She didn't care about his secrets right now, just about whether the out he was offering her was truly within her grasp.
When she stepped outside, wrapped up in a dark coat that he had provided with her hair clean and glossy even though she could still feel the dirt lingering under her skin, she had looked up at the sky. It wheeled blue above her and she blinked. She'd been expecting it to be dark. She had lost track of time in the cell, where the light was always on. It shone down on her, pitiless and without mercy, stripping her back to red cotton and dark-circled eyes. It burned her bare, down to strings of numbers in arcane codes, back to ancient mantras, back to the raw firings of her synapses.
Tosh let him escort her to the car with a hand under her elbow, let him take her to Cardiff. She let him show her the apartment, tiny but with lots of windows. She stood by one, her fingers just touching the clear glass, and he smiled at her. She smiled back, still a little uncertain under her new plumage, but fairly sure that the escape he was offering her was another, nicer, imprisonment.
"Thank you," she said, politely. Jack merely smiled, as easily as she had ever seen him. She knew that he hadn't saved her for any reason of altruism. She also wondered who had found the apartment, furnishing it starkly in dark colours.
"It was my pleasure," he said, with some relish, as if savouring a private joke. "I'll leave you alone now. You start work tomorrow. I'll come and pick you up." Then he was gone in a swirl of garbadine, leaving her alone in an apartment with huge windows through which light would spill, dark corners that she could illuminate with lamps that were subdued and under her control. Even though she had hated the light, she couldn't imagine living in darkness now.
The dreams started that night.
>>>>
Jack woke up at his desk, head pillowed on his arms. He looked up at the blue light streaming in the door, flooding through the windows. Even at night, the light was still here. He shivered to himself and pushed the dream of Tosh from his mind. The images lingered, reluctant to leave, but he heaved himself out of his chair and out of his office, wiping his hands over his face to try to wake up. He hated the groggy, cotton-headed feeling that came with a cricked neck and the uncomfortable memory of a dream he hadn't wanted to have. Stepping out the door, he looked down at the workspace below. Gwen's corner was stuffed with trinkets and pictures, the uneasy marriage she persisted in cultivating between humanity and the utterly alien. He watched the sheaves of paper flutter in the desultory breeze from a fan and thought of Tosh.
In his dream she had run scarves of black, three feet long, supple, thin and strong, through her hands as she had looked at him. We do our best work when the world looks the other way, she said. They suspend their disbelief so we can slip through the stage set of the world, indistinguishable from the other stage hands until we strike. We are shinobi, moving unseen through alleys and sewers and abandoned buildings. We need only just enough light for our feet and our hands, for our work. But afterwards, I will meet you freely in the light of a hundred candles, the light of a thousand paper lanterns.
Shivering, Jack ran his hands up and down his arms. It seemed that she had always been there. She was silent feet and a quiet voice, slipping smoothly into the Hub. He missed her.
>>>>
The work was absorbing and time-consuming; that was good. Her colleagues were quiet and focused on their own projects; that was better. She gathered together the pieces of her life and built something from the fragments. They were jagged and sharp, but she disguised their edges with the clean lines of a traditional tea set, or the soft bleed of calligraphy inks into paper hangings in the apartment. At work, no one minded a few sharp edges, and they mostly merged into strings of code and the hard outlines of the computer system she slowly engineered. Jack kept his distance and his secrets, and, if this needs must be a cage, it was at least a spacious one.
She slipped from day to night with ease, she didn't care about the source of her illumination. The eerie glow of the computer screen was the same as the sun beating down on her shoulders as she moved without notice through scenes of chaos. She had been there six months when Jack arrived on her doorstep, late at night. She let him in and sat him down in a chair close to the window, one with a lamp over it. She wanted to be able to see his face, see the shades of meaning she had learned to attach to that empty smile that he wore like armour.
"You're fitting in well," he said.
"Yes," she replied, handing him a cup of tea. She could see the value in what they are doing. She loved the work. Jack laughed and smiled and drank his tea.
"This isn't a prison sentence," he said, finally, as he put his cup down.
"No?" said Tosh. "Is it, perhaps, the afterlife?" She wondered if she had served purgatory in red overalls to a soundtrack of a mechanical voice reciting her crimes and her punishments, and if now she walked the fields as a restless ghost.
"You can tell it's not a prison sentence, or you would not dare say such a thing to your warden," said Jack.
"Perhaps you are lulling me into a false sense of security," said Tosh. She smiled as she said it though. There was something disarming about Jack, whatever the secrets he kept behind that pleasant facade. They were not her secrets. She was unconcerned with them.
Some time after that, she started to wake up with black feathers on her pillows, some long and glossy, others short down. She swept them into a box and kept them under the bed.
>>>>
Jack didn't want to go to sleep. He sat on the edge of his bed and wished for the Rift to activate, for an invasion of Weevils, for anything that would mean he had to get up and carry on working. He didn't want to close his eyes and see her, dark and still and deadly behind his eyes. She was waiting for him, deep in his mind. She might be waiting with her shield, to take him to the endless loop of battle and feasting, or she might be wrapping her hands in dark cloth with a smile that invited him to spar with her. She might be waiting, as he had seen her once with her head tilted to one side and her eyes fixed bright and dark on him, considering whether she might pounce on him and tear him to pieces. She would be sleek and dark, with talons that could tear at his eyes and smooth feathers that she could arch up on, taking to the sky.
>>>>
Tosh was content. She knew why she was here and what she was doing, and that was all she needed. The span of her hands was enough for her to hold her world in, as she went about the act of preparation. There was her waking world; the crowded archives of The Hub and her projects, chasing down aliens with a gun strangely light in her hands. Mostly, though, she was a being of charge and switches, flickering binary in her synapses. She kept the change from her work, separating it out as she had separated out so many things before. Her mind was a maze of delineations, her life barely less so.
She mostly changed at night, opening a window to the smoggy sky and letting the cool air sink into her. She could feel the transformation in her shoulders first, and she breathed deep through the first shivery moments. As time went by, it happened faster and was more seamless. The darkness felt different, then, even The Rift was less pressing a concern as her human cares faded. Tosh tilted her head and looked at herself in her new form, sleek and utterly unremarkable save for the human intelligence behind the sharp black eyes and wicked beak. She would always shake out her wings, even if she didn't fly, admiring the span of them.
Changing during the day was more risky, though she had done it once or twice. Those were the best times, when the blue sky called to her to soar and she could go. Following the wind, the endless possibilities of earth and heaven. She was wild, free for the first time ever. She had only to eat, only to fly.
The last time she changed was not for the love of it, or the exhilaration of freedom. She weighed their chances of escape, or hers, at least. Jack would be fine whether the rest of the team found them in an hour or next week. She would not. The water was rising steadily and showed no signs of stopping. Survival meant more than secrecy or freedom, and Tosh made the last choice on her own. Jack had jumped backwards, hands raised against her caw of despair. She looked at him, tilting her head to see him through one eye. Automatically, her mind weighed him up, assessing his ability to harm, or maybe as a possible food source. He had only secrets to offer her, an endless stream of them behind his tongue, and she had just given away her last one. She flew through the broken skylight without looking back, circling once only before she found the ground. It had never felt so alien under her feet.
>>>>
Jack wondered if things might have been different if he'd insisted on her talking to him, if he'd forced her to tell him everything. But she had gone home, and for the first time had not answered the door when he knocked. The next day, a building had exploded and it was too late then. She was gone. He looked down at his hands and up at the breaking dawn. He'd made it through another night, safe from dreams, never safe from regrets.
When the raven landed next to him, Jack thought he must have fallen asleep on the bench. He hadn't. The raven was there, looking at him from shoulder height as it balanced on the wood next to him, calm and unafraid.
"But there is only darkness, nothingness. There is no future life," he said. If the raven could have shrugged, it would have, Jack was sure. His skin crawled with its proximity. The raven looked at him for a moment longer before bending its head, dropping a stone onto the bench. Jack shrank back as its wings unfolded, terrified that this was the end of the dream he'd woken from, that its talons would bite into its skin. But it was gone with a derisive noise, as if to make it clear that it had no further interest in him.
Jack took the stone back to The Hub and put it on Tosh's abandoned work station. Late that night, as he stood in his doorway and looked down at the main workspace below, he considered it. The doorway symbol of inguz winked at him from one side, the character for "end" on the other. He dropped his head to his hands and wished Tosh goodbye.