FIC::Torchwood::black and white picture show (PG-13)
Title: black-and-white picture show
Author: hyacinthian
Rating: PG-13
Author's Note: Inspired by Sigfried Sassoon's The Imperfect Lover. Also, deals with the afterlife in a manner not traditionally thought of? I don't know - it worked well for the purposes of the story. And Tosh and Owen toe the line between being dead/being alive. Angsty Mcangst!
Summary: Life after death is 90% waiting. ToshOwen
The thing is that the afterlife isn't all it's cracked up to be. God, what a great metaphor for life. The entire time, being shepherded off to some strange place with rumors and myths of gold and fluffy clouds and it's just...nothing. They wander around this giant, cosmic plateau, bookended by an enormous crevasse. The newly dead often spend their time there (there is no hunger here, no thirst, no lust), peering past the crevasse back at their lives, watching their friends and family mourn them. It's the strangest of coping mechanisms, to be sure, and when he went through it, it was oddly surreal. But Tosh, Tosh was...calm. And that was what frightened him. He figures if there were dandelions or violets, she'd be picking at them, plucking perhaps at the blades of grass with her thin fingers. In the wake of death, he can see the bags under her eyes more clearly; perhaps they're more pronounced. He wants to laugh (but he isn't sure if there's air here; they are dead) at the thought of death playing a joke on all of them, the dead looking like zombies. He wants to laugh.
But, in death, he feels that things are peaceful. Tosh wanders around with him, still smiles at him sometimes. He's not quite sure how he feels about it. He smiles back, a thin, fragile thing that makes him look menacing. He asks her one day why she's so calm. "It's death," she says, her eyes empty (he imagines them with vortexes in them before thinking perhaps he's watched too many sci-fi movies). "There's nothing to be afraid of anymore." That's when she pulls to him, kisses him so quick and passionate that it steals his breath away and he wonders if it's the same girl that he knew, the one who would hide in any open corner in the Torchwood hub, the one who brought him sandwiches wordlessly. He wonders a lot. There's a lot of time in death, he realizes. And it's now that he realizes he has no idea what to do with all of it. It almost feels like a bad Hollywood line: Death is eternal. Everlasting. Infinite. He snorts at himself, looks around to see if anyone hears him, but no one's paying attention.
Afterwards, they travel together. He spies relatives of his, but he tries to avoid them. It's been so long anyway, they can't recall his name. It's one day when he reaches for Tosh's hand that he realizes that maybe death has helped him to realize that he needs people. He shakes his head at the sentimentality, but a nagging voice lingers within him: When is it good for you to be sentimental then, you git? Death's the end of the line. He tells himself to sod off, appropriately, and just walks with her, through the endless sea of people who wander without names, without memories, and drag themselves to the crevasse and back, ever and again, ever and again. He wonders if this is where ghosts come from.
"Do you think that'll happen to us, Tosh?" he asks, shuffling along, waiting for dust to kick up from the ground (but it doesn't, it's endless, endless). "Forget everyone and everything?" He feels bold, presses a kiss to her neck to punctuate his sentence.
"It happens to everyone, Owen," she says, and it feels odd to him, like an echo. "It's not like one moment we'll stop being dead and return." She pauses, stops breathing. "You just wander here. Forever. You'll forget things eventually." They watch the tide of people flow back and forth from and to the crevasse for -- Owen remembers there's no time in death. He assumes it's five minutes, but time is arbitrary here.
"Don't you...feel for these people?" He shoots her a pointed glance.
"I--" She doesn't finish the sentence, presses her fingers to her lips.
He gets used to her, gets used to traveling in circles with her. She's his lifeline to, well, his life. He sees people he doesn't want to talk to (just like before), and tons of people he doesn't know. People from the 1800s, Christopher Columbus, King George, Marie Antoinette (she amuses him the most when he takes to watching them - always touching her neck to make sure, just to make sure). They all go through their motions here as well. Different, but the same. There's no booming voice of God, no--nothing. It's a pit of nothingness, punctuated with a deep line, a pit that falls down into the living Universe.
He walks around with his fingers twined with hers, chats with her a lot about what he would've done differently until one day she snaps at him. "What does it matter, Owen? You can't change anything now." (He thinks this might be because he said he'd take her out on a real date, thinks it's because he said he wanted to posthumously thank her for the sandwich, with a chuckle, and she just turned her back to him, turned her back like he was nothing, and now he wonders, now he wonders...)
"Tosh?"
"Yes?"
"Are you..." He turns away from her at the last second, shakes his head. She walks up behind him, touches his forearm (he thinks of human terms, radius, ulna, terms for the bones that no longer can rebuild themselves), gives him a soft smile. "Never mind."
"No," she says, softly. "Tell me." He shakes his head at the thought of him being so weak. He doesn't want to--he's not sure what he wants and doesn't want anymore. "Am I what?"
"I love you," he says. He presses a kiss to the inside of her wrist, and it all feels like a play. So much like a play. Something Tennessee Williams or, or, or --she feels so fragile and so not, and he's afraid of wounding her and being wounded at the same time. She jumps towards him and he lifts his arms to catch her, sagging under her weight and glad that he feels. Glad that he feels something. Anything. "I love you," he repeats and he thinks if his heart were beating, it would pound angrily against her skin, his pulse thrumming a cadence that spelled out all his weaknesses and anger and bitterness that contrasted with the sweet steadiness of hers. Heartbeats make up so much and they've lost so much. "I hope I still don't break your heart," he whispers against her skin later, when their skin is sticky with sweat and they lie on the neutrality of the plateau. (He wished for tall grasses, things pricking at his flesh, but it was all just plateau, simple plateau with a thousand eyes and no one watching.)
"No," she says. "You don't." But she rolls away from him, her back to him, and he wonders if she's picked up his penchant for lying.
They wander the plateau freely after that, hands always intertwined, talking of different things (but they never did speak the same language, did they?). She talks of quantum physics, quantum mechanics, mathematics that he can barely understand, but he talks of skeletal structure, how to recognize various diseases, and never do they talk of their families. Until one day he takes a misstep by John Lennon, falls down the crevasse, and she tumbles down after him. Like rabbit holes.
They end up in Cardiff, outside the Millennium Centre, looking straight at Captain Jack. Tosh goes to embrace him, but finds herself incorporeal, all of a sudden. "Jack?" she sniffles, and he keeps himself solid, stoic.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
"I miss you," she whispers.
"How are you doing?" he wants to say, but it never bubbles out of his throat. Jack just looks at them.
"The Rift," he says, as if it will explain everything. (Too bad it does.) "You know what has to be done."
And then they are spirits whooshing back into the emptiness of the plateau, the single hue of dusky red and bleak gray, already missing the shades and depth of the earth, of the universe, of the living. "Goodbye, goodbye," their voices float on the wind down. Jack closes his eyes in silent penance for the people he had to kill again.
One night (but there is no night or day, no light, just the heavy footfalls and breathy gasps, choking sobs of grief), he lies next to her. She still sleeps with her back to him. He twines his fingers in her hair. "I never asked you to be perfect, you know."
"You were there," he says. "That was enough expectation."
She wrinkles her mouth, stands up, brushes imaginary dirt off. She spies something, shouts something in Japanese. The man walks over and it's only then that Owen realizes it's a samurai. He stands in front of her, listens to her request, bows. Tosh paces anxiously behind him, wrings her hands. He rubs at his face. "Tosh."
"I've thought about it, you know. The way we were before--" she waves her hands indiscriminately. "Before all this."
"What?" he deadpans. "Death?"
She narrows her eyes. "You never paid attention to me. You never--I loved you, Owen, and you just shook me off. You slept with Gwen before you even so much as looked at me!"
"Come on," he wants to say. "Be fair." But she is. She's being fair and honest with him, for a change, and he wonders how long all this bitterness has been collecting in her like a bloody pus.
"Au nowa wakari no hajimari," she mutters. (To meet is the beginning of parting.) She wonders when she became so poetic. "Asa no kougan, yuube no hakkou." (Rosy faces in the morning, white bones in the evening; today red, tomorrow dead.) It's all true - everything she ever refused to believe in, superstition and luck and ... it all tumbles in front of her eyes at breakneck speed until she can't breathe and she stops pacing, pushes past the samurai. "Owen, just--I need time."
"Fine," he says, back going rigid. "That's something we have a lot of."
She wanders away and he imagines an Impressionist painting, the woman wading through the reeds, past the willow - always leaving.
She braves the crowd, imagining them mad trenches. She wishes she could find a small, quiet spot to sit and think, become acquainted with her own thoughts. But she's not sure that would work either. She sits, sighs with her head in her hands. She recites the digits of pi in her head. She closes her eyes, imagines budding cherry blossoms, falling delicately onto the ground. Imagines twining her grandmother's delicate bone hair pin up beautifully through her hair for a wedding. But if anything's the opposite of a wedding, a funeral is. She exhales sharply. She probably never even had a funeral, just to protect the sanctity of Torchwood and its work.
She never married. That's the thing. Never had a life. She saved the world, and no one knows who she is; she saved the world and died a nobody.
She returns to him (by the wild grasses that aren't there) later that night. Sits with her arms clasped over her knees, youthfully, girlishly, morbidly. "I loved you for the longest time, you know." But I've grown thoughtful now.
"Loved? As in past?"
She throws her head back in bitter laughter. Something about being dead is so freeing. "No. Not past."
He looks in her eyes, sees the shadows of his ghosts echo in the pools of her dark eyes. Blinks, sees her own begin to emerge and consume his own.
The years tick by until he no longer counts them. They don't grow old together, they don't grow closer together. They grow asymmetrically. He grows closer and she grows further apart. Like a strange mutated photosynthetic syndrome.
They lie together one day, her head in his lap. Her eyes shine in the dusk. She moves her head, trying to view the stars that aren't there. "It almost feels like we're camping," she says. "Remember the countryside?" He nods. "You and Gwen... in the woods."
He shakes his head. "Tosh..."
"I heard you," she says, voice barely a whisper.
"Nothing happened."
She shakes it off. "Ghosts," she says with a soft laugh, like the tinkling of bells. "We're ghosts that have ghosts."
He wraps his arm around her tightly, offers her a smile. "You--"
"There's nothing wrong with failing. Lots of people fail."
He wonders if he's a corpse or a spirit now, and what Tosh is, and if she's already evolved from one to the other with her dark eyes and stringy hair. He stares at her, she at the sky - it all seems like a twisted joke, she who used to adore him in spite of all his shortcomings. And now, and now --
He turns his face to the sky, expects the pitter patter of heavy rain drops striking his face. But there's no precipitation, no air, no water vapor. "What now?" he shrieks.
The other spirits whip by him in a flurry and he catches their gaze for a split second.
"Now," says Tosh, folding her hands together, maddeningly calm, "we wait."
He kicks at the imaginary dirt and she closes her eyes and fantasizes breathing.
Author: hyacinthian
Rating: PG-13
Author's Note: Inspired by Sigfried Sassoon's The Imperfect Lover. Also, deals with the afterlife in a manner not traditionally thought of? I don't know - it worked well for the purposes of the story. And Tosh and Owen toe the line between being dead/being alive. Angsty Mcangst!
Summary: Life after death is 90% waiting. ToshOwen
The thing is that the afterlife isn't all it's cracked up to be. God, what a great metaphor for life. The entire time, being shepherded off to some strange place with rumors and myths of gold and fluffy clouds and it's just...nothing. They wander around this giant, cosmic plateau, bookended by an enormous crevasse. The newly dead often spend their time there (there is no hunger here, no thirst, no lust), peering past the crevasse back at their lives, watching their friends and family mourn them. It's the strangest of coping mechanisms, to be sure, and when he went through it, it was oddly surreal. But Tosh, Tosh was...calm. And that was what frightened him. He figures if there were dandelions or violets, she'd be picking at them, plucking perhaps at the blades of grass with her thin fingers. In the wake of death, he can see the bags under her eyes more clearly; perhaps they're more pronounced. He wants to laugh (but he isn't sure if there's air here; they are dead) at the thought of death playing a joke on all of them, the dead looking like zombies. He wants to laugh.
But, in death, he feels that things are peaceful. Tosh wanders around with him, still smiles at him sometimes. He's not quite sure how he feels about it. He smiles back, a thin, fragile thing that makes him look menacing. He asks her one day why she's so calm. "It's death," she says, her eyes empty (he imagines them with vortexes in them before thinking perhaps he's watched too many sci-fi movies). "There's nothing to be afraid of anymore." That's when she pulls to him, kisses him so quick and passionate that it steals his breath away and he wonders if it's the same girl that he knew, the one who would hide in any open corner in the Torchwood hub, the one who brought him sandwiches wordlessly. He wonders a lot. There's a lot of time in death, he realizes. And it's now that he realizes he has no idea what to do with all of it. It almost feels like a bad Hollywood line: Death is eternal. Everlasting. Infinite. He snorts at himself, looks around to see if anyone hears him, but no one's paying attention.
Afterwards, they travel together. He spies relatives of his, but he tries to avoid them. It's been so long anyway, they can't recall his name. It's one day when he reaches for Tosh's hand that he realizes that maybe death has helped him to realize that he needs people. He shakes his head at the sentimentality, but a nagging voice lingers within him: When is it good for you to be sentimental then, you git? Death's the end of the line. He tells himself to sod off, appropriately, and just walks with her, through the endless sea of people who wander without names, without memories, and drag themselves to the crevasse and back, ever and again, ever and again. He wonders if this is where ghosts come from.
"Do you think that'll happen to us, Tosh?" he asks, shuffling along, waiting for dust to kick up from the ground (but it doesn't, it's endless, endless). "Forget everyone and everything?" He feels bold, presses a kiss to her neck to punctuate his sentence.
"It happens to everyone, Owen," she says, and it feels odd to him, like an echo. "It's not like one moment we'll stop being dead and return." She pauses, stops breathing. "You just wander here. Forever. You'll forget things eventually." They watch the tide of people flow back and forth from and to the crevasse for -- Owen remembers there's no time in death. He assumes it's five minutes, but time is arbitrary here.
"Don't you...feel for these people?" He shoots her a pointed glance.
"I--" She doesn't finish the sentence, presses her fingers to her lips.
He gets used to her, gets used to traveling in circles with her. She's his lifeline to, well, his life. He sees people he doesn't want to talk to (just like before), and tons of people he doesn't know. People from the 1800s, Christopher Columbus, King George, Marie Antoinette (she amuses him the most when he takes to watching them - always touching her neck to make sure, just to make sure). They all go through their motions here as well. Different, but the same. There's no booming voice of God, no--nothing. It's a pit of nothingness, punctuated with a deep line, a pit that falls down into the living Universe.
He walks around with his fingers twined with hers, chats with her a lot about what he would've done differently until one day she snaps at him. "What does it matter, Owen? You can't change anything now." (He thinks this might be because he said he'd take her out on a real date, thinks it's because he said he wanted to posthumously thank her for the sandwich, with a chuckle, and she just turned her back to him, turned her back like he was nothing, and now he wonders, now he wonders...)
"Tosh?"
"Yes?"
"Are you..." He turns away from her at the last second, shakes his head. She walks up behind him, touches his forearm (he thinks of human terms, radius, ulna, terms for the bones that no longer can rebuild themselves), gives him a soft smile. "Never mind."
"No," she says, softly. "Tell me." He shakes his head at the thought of him being so weak. He doesn't want to--he's not sure what he wants and doesn't want anymore. "Am I what?"
"I love you," he says. He presses a kiss to the inside of her wrist, and it all feels like a play. So much like a play. Something Tennessee Williams or, or, or --she feels so fragile and so not, and he's afraid of wounding her and being wounded at the same time. She jumps towards him and he lifts his arms to catch her, sagging under her weight and glad that he feels. Glad that he feels something. Anything. "I love you," he repeats and he thinks if his heart were beating, it would pound angrily against her skin, his pulse thrumming a cadence that spelled out all his weaknesses and anger and bitterness that contrasted with the sweet steadiness of hers. Heartbeats make up so much and they've lost so much. "I hope I still don't break your heart," he whispers against her skin later, when their skin is sticky with sweat and they lie on the neutrality of the plateau. (He wished for tall grasses, things pricking at his flesh, but it was all just plateau, simple plateau with a thousand eyes and no one watching.)
"No," she says. "You don't." But she rolls away from him, her back to him, and he wonders if she's picked up his penchant for lying.
They wander the plateau freely after that, hands always intertwined, talking of different things (but they never did speak the same language, did they?). She talks of quantum physics, quantum mechanics, mathematics that he can barely understand, but he talks of skeletal structure, how to recognize various diseases, and never do they talk of their families. Until one day he takes a misstep by John Lennon, falls down the crevasse, and she tumbles down after him. Like rabbit holes.
They end up in Cardiff, outside the Millennium Centre, looking straight at Captain Jack. Tosh goes to embrace him, but finds herself incorporeal, all of a sudden. "Jack?" she sniffles, and he keeps himself solid, stoic.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
"I miss you," she whispers.
"How are you doing?" he wants to say, but it never bubbles out of his throat. Jack just looks at them.
"The Rift," he says, as if it will explain everything. (Too bad it does.) "You know what has to be done."
And then they are spirits whooshing back into the emptiness of the plateau, the single hue of dusky red and bleak gray, already missing the shades and depth of the earth, of the universe, of the living. "Goodbye, goodbye," their voices float on the wind down. Jack closes his eyes in silent penance for the people he had to kill again.
One night (but there is no night or day, no light, just the heavy footfalls and breathy gasps, choking sobs of grief), he lies next to her. She still sleeps with her back to him. He twines his fingers in her hair. "I never asked you to be perfect, you know."
"You were there," he says. "That was enough expectation."
She wrinkles her mouth, stands up, brushes imaginary dirt off. She spies something, shouts something in Japanese. The man walks over and it's only then that Owen realizes it's a samurai. He stands in front of her, listens to her request, bows. Tosh paces anxiously behind him, wrings her hands. He rubs at his face. "Tosh."
"I've thought about it, you know. The way we were before--" she waves her hands indiscriminately. "Before all this."
"What?" he deadpans. "Death?"
She narrows her eyes. "You never paid attention to me. You never--I loved you, Owen, and you just shook me off. You slept with Gwen before you even so much as looked at me!"
"Come on," he wants to say. "Be fair." But she is. She's being fair and honest with him, for a change, and he wonders how long all this bitterness has been collecting in her like a bloody pus.
"Au nowa wakari no hajimari," she mutters. (To meet is the beginning of parting.) She wonders when she became so poetic. "Asa no kougan, yuube no hakkou." (Rosy faces in the morning, white bones in the evening; today red, tomorrow dead.) It's all true - everything she ever refused to believe in, superstition and luck and ... it all tumbles in front of her eyes at breakneck speed until she can't breathe and she stops pacing, pushes past the samurai. "Owen, just--I need time."
"Fine," he says, back going rigid. "That's something we have a lot of."
She wanders away and he imagines an Impressionist painting, the woman wading through the reeds, past the willow - always leaving.
She braves the crowd, imagining them mad trenches. She wishes she could find a small, quiet spot to sit and think, become acquainted with her own thoughts. But she's not sure that would work either. She sits, sighs with her head in her hands. She recites the digits of pi in her head. She closes her eyes, imagines budding cherry blossoms, falling delicately onto the ground. Imagines twining her grandmother's delicate bone hair pin up beautifully through her hair for a wedding. But if anything's the opposite of a wedding, a funeral is. She exhales sharply. She probably never even had a funeral, just to protect the sanctity of Torchwood and its work.
She never married. That's the thing. Never had a life. She saved the world, and no one knows who she is; she saved the world and died a nobody.
She returns to him (by the wild grasses that aren't there) later that night. Sits with her arms clasped over her knees, youthfully, girlishly, morbidly. "I loved you for the longest time, you know." But I've grown thoughtful now.
"Loved? As in past?"
She throws her head back in bitter laughter. Something about being dead is so freeing. "No. Not past."
He looks in her eyes, sees the shadows of his ghosts echo in the pools of her dark eyes. Blinks, sees her own begin to emerge and consume his own.
The years tick by until he no longer counts them. They don't grow old together, they don't grow closer together. They grow asymmetrically. He grows closer and she grows further apart. Like a strange mutated photosynthetic syndrome.
They lie together one day, her head in his lap. Her eyes shine in the dusk. She moves her head, trying to view the stars that aren't there. "It almost feels like we're camping," she says. "Remember the countryside?" He nods. "You and Gwen... in the woods."
He shakes his head. "Tosh..."
"I heard you," she says, voice barely a whisper.
"Nothing happened."
She shakes it off. "Ghosts," she says with a soft laugh, like the tinkling of bells. "We're ghosts that have ghosts."
He wraps his arm around her tightly, offers her a smile. "You--"
"There's nothing wrong with failing. Lots of people fail."
He wonders if he's a corpse or a spirit now, and what Tosh is, and if she's already evolved from one to the other with her dark eyes and stringy hair. He stares at her, she at the sky - it all seems like a twisted joke, she who used to adore him in spite of all his shortcomings. And now, and now --
He turns his face to the sky, expects the pitter patter of heavy rain drops striking his face. But there's no precipitation, no air, no water vapor. "What now?" he shrieks.
The other spirits whip by him in a flurry and he catches their gaze for a split second.
"Now," says Tosh, folding her hands together, maddeningly calm, "we wait."
He kicks at the imaginary dirt and she closes her eyes and fantasizes breathing.