Fic: Here in the Light of Dead Stars
Title: Here in the Light of Dead Stars
Author: magistrate (
draegonhawke)
Characters: Jack Harkness
W/C: 1050
Rating: ...let's go with Hard R.
Summary: A lot of darkness welled up in Jack's fight with Rose. He's getting it out of his system.
Notes: ANGST. ANGST EVERYWHERE. And some, er, serious self-harm.
Disclaimer: I am not the BBC, and thus do not own Jack. I'm not profiting from this fic. No, seriously, even emotionally? I think this counts as a debit.
-
When Rose ran he stood for almost four minutes, staring dumbly at the door. His mind was a cacophony of rage and recriminations, tied so tightly to things he'd never let out that all they could do was mantle and rail.
When he started moving it was half-instinct and half-mania, needing neither plan nor explanation. It was as though the idea had always been there, filed away in a list of contingencies, ready to execute at a moment's notice.
He locked the door and jammed a chair under the knob. He didn't hesitate as he crossed the room, rifling through the drawers in his room's kitchenette. He'd told Gwen to clear them out in the rehab rooms; he might as well find out what he was keeping from everyone else.
As it turned out, the drawers were not terribly well-stocked. The heaviest cutting implement was a steak knife, and a cheap one, at that.
He still hadn't had the chance to shower or change. Other peoples' blood still soaked his clothing, and cracked when he pulled the clothes off. He stripped down, leaving a dusting of gore on the floor behind him, and carried the knife into the shower.
Cutting releases beta endorphins and can trigger the production of adrenaline. The Time Vortex reacts to an imbalance of cognitive energy tending toward the negative and corrects the imbalance with an influx of energy. Temporal energy in an organic system tends toward the creative, restorative, regenerative.
He closed the shower door, turned the water on hot and full-blast. He hissed, or maybe it was the showerhead hissing, as the spray hit his skin; steam billowed up around him, filling the bathroom.
He curled his fist around the knife, and brought it hard into his side.
Fuck!
His body shuddered, convulsing at every serration. He doubled over, tightening the muscles around the blade, feeling the flesh and organ walls as they were ripped through. Fuck! F--
Pulled the knife out again. Colors were screaming through his vision, screaming in his ears, and the wound was one gnarled knot of pain pulsing in his senses.
Blood was seeping from the gash, rolling out onto his skin and down the inside of his thigh where it was caught in the shower spray and washed down the drain. It made a pinkish swirl as it went, to which the delirious quality of his vision lent a tinge of dusty red. How appropriate. Rose.
He brought the knife back in, tearing through the muscle of one shoulder this time, making more stars genesis and burn and nova in his eyes. This wasn't suicide if he couldn't die, and it wasn't even torture--he knew torture inside and out, and this was a crime of passion, if anything.
Again. Again. Again.
He didn't die easily. Not from cuts like this, that were meant to wound instead of kill; even when the stuff running off him went from pale rose to translucent red, even when he started to stagger against the walls, he was upright, he was standing, and pain and adrenaline and a feeling like falling floating flying were cresting over him and he wouldn't have it any other way.
When he brought the knife into his ribcage it snapped, knife breaking before knifeman, and he brought the hilt and its inch and a half of blade tearing over his neck and let go. The world was reeling around him, tilting and whirling like a ship on full inertia, and the cool tile at his back as he slid down the wall teamed with the hot water coursing over him to split his world apart.
You were supposed to see your life flash before your eyes, right before death. Jack had only ever gotten moments, thirty-second clips, jumbled and garbled, one event--maybe two. No great panoply. He was
pinned, pressed against a wall, just like this one, in fact, with a tall chula agent kneeling over and on him with a knee in his side, hands tight around his throat, her head tilted and expression impassive--
--hand slipping against the bare skin of her left shoulder, without any leverage or purchase by which to push her off, the colors dancing in starbursts as he struggled to get in oxygen--
--the quick release of her fingers when the sergeant came in, looking over them both, fixing him with a sigh because when hadn't he started it, when hadn't he ever--
--"what are you doing, jarek?", calling him by a different alias, a different identity he'd dropped by the side of the road a long time ago, a--
--"just - getting it out - of my system, sir;" the only answer he'd given and the only answer he could give, gasping as the oxygen rushed back.
and he'd looked up at the sergeant's face, but he couldn't remember that face now. all he could remember was the way the light behind him seemed, in the narrow escape from death, to grow and grow and grow
and it was growing, except that this time it was growing deeper and darker and more luminously black.
-
He was naked, crumpled in a corner, with rain pouring down on him like a baptism. Disoriented, because he was always disoriented right when he came back from the dead; disoriented enough that he didn't notice, for a minute, that the rain wasn't rain at all. Enough that he didn't remember what he'd done or why until he stood up and knocked the knife with his foot.
But it was all a bit more distant, now. Death did that, sometimes: put a wide line between Now and Before, even if it was fuzzy and tended to fade. What had been a ravenous fire was now a dull ache, and except for the two halves of the broken knife, all evidence of the solution had washed down the drain.
He reached to the knobs and turned the water off.
He stepped out, toweled himself off, and pulled on the only clean set of clothes he had--the matte-black, hopefully-not-a-torturer's uniform from his encounter with Sark. His other clothes would need a lot of cleaning. Everything needed a lot of cleaning up.
But, god damn it, this time he was going to do it if it killed him.
Author: magistrate (
draegonhawke)
Characters: Jack Harkness
W/C: 1050
Rating: ...let's go with Hard R.
Summary: A lot of darkness welled up in Jack's fight with Rose. He's getting it out of his system.
Notes: ANGST. ANGST EVERYWHERE. And some, er, serious self-harm.
Disclaimer: I am not the BBC, and thus do not own Jack. I'm not profiting from this fic. No, seriously, even emotionally? I think this counts as a debit.
-
When Rose ran he stood for almost four minutes, staring dumbly at the door. His mind was a cacophony of rage and recriminations, tied so tightly to things he'd never let out that all they could do was mantle and rail.
When he started moving it was half-instinct and half-mania, needing neither plan nor explanation. It was as though the idea had always been there, filed away in a list of contingencies, ready to execute at a moment's notice.
He locked the door and jammed a chair under the knob. He didn't hesitate as he crossed the room, rifling through the drawers in his room's kitchenette. He'd told Gwen to clear them out in the rehab rooms; he might as well find out what he was keeping from everyone else.
As it turned out, the drawers were not terribly well-stocked. The heaviest cutting implement was a steak knife, and a cheap one, at that.
He still hadn't had the chance to shower or change. Other peoples' blood still soaked his clothing, and cracked when he pulled the clothes off. He stripped down, leaving a dusting of gore on the floor behind him, and carried the knife into the shower.
Cutting releases beta endorphins and can trigger the production of adrenaline. The Time Vortex reacts to an imbalance of cognitive energy tending toward the negative and corrects the imbalance with an influx of energy. Temporal energy in an organic system tends toward the creative, restorative, regenerative.
He closed the shower door, turned the water on hot and full-blast. He hissed, or maybe it was the showerhead hissing, as the spray hit his skin; steam billowed up around him, filling the bathroom.
He curled his fist around the knife, and brought it hard into his side.
Fuck!
His body shuddered, convulsing at every serration. He doubled over, tightening the muscles around the blade, feeling the flesh and organ walls as they were ripped through. Fuck! F--
Pulled the knife out again. Colors were screaming through his vision, screaming in his ears, and the wound was one gnarled knot of pain pulsing in his senses.
Blood was seeping from the gash, rolling out onto his skin and down the inside of his thigh where it was caught in the shower spray and washed down the drain. It made a pinkish swirl as it went, to which the delirious quality of his vision lent a tinge of dusty red. How appropriate. Rose.
He brought the knife back in, tearing through the muscle of one shoulder this time, making more stars genesis and burn and nova in his eyes. This wasn't suicide if he couldn't die, and it wasn't even torture--he knew torture inside and out, and this was a crime of passion, if anything.
Again. Again. Again.
He didn't die easily. Not from cuts like this, that were meant to wound instead of kill; even when the stuff running off him went from pale rose to translucent red, even when he started to stagger against the walls, he was upright, he was standing, and pain and adrenaline and a feeling like falling floating flying were cresting over him and he wouldn't have it any other way.
When he brought the knife into his ribcage it snapped, knife breaking before knifeman, and he brought the hilt and its inch and a half of blade tearing over his neck and let go. The world was reeling around him, tilting and whirling like a ship on full inertia, and the cool tile at his back as he slid down the wall teamed with the hot water coursing over him to split his world apart.
You were supposed to see your life flash before your eyes, right before death. Jack had only ever gotten moments, thirty-second clips, jumbled and garbled, one event--maybe two. No great panoply. He was
pinned, pressed against a wall, just like this one, in fact, with a tall chula agent kneeling over and on him with a knee in his side, hands tight around his throat, her head tilted and expression impassive--
--hand slipping against the bare skin of her left shoulder, without any leverage or purchase by which to push her off, the colors dancing in starbursts as he struggled to get in oxygen--
--the quick release of her fingers when the sergeant came in, looking over them both, fixing him with a sigh because when hadn't he started it, when hadn't he ever--
--"what are you doing, jarek?", calling him by a different alias, a different identity he'd dropped by the side of the road a long time ago, a--
--"just - getting it out - of my system, sir;" the only answer he'd given and the only answer he could give, gasping as the oxygen rushed back.
and he'd looked up at the sergeant's face, but he couldn't remember that face now. all he could remember was the way the light behind him seemed, in the narrow escape from death, to grow and grow and grow
and it was growing, except that this time it was growing deeper and darker and more luminously black.
-
He was naked, crumpled in a corner, with rain pouring down on him like a baptism. Disoriented, because he was always disoriented right when he came back from the dead; disoriented enough that he didn't notice, for a minute, that the rain wasn't rain at all. Enough that he didn't remember what he'd done or why until he stood up and knocked the knife with his foot.
But it was all a bit more distant, now. Death did that, sometimes: put a wide line between Now and Before, even if it was fuzzy and tended to fade. What had been a ravenous fire was now a dull ache, and except for the two halves of the broken knife, all evidence of the solution had washed down the drain.
He reached to the knobs and turned the water off.
He stepped out, toweled himself off, and pulled on the only clean set of clothes he had--the matte-black, hopefully-not-a-torturer's uniform from his encounter with Sark. His other clothes would need a lot of cleaning. Everything needed a lot of cleaning up.
But, god damn it, this time he was going to do it if it killed him.