{rp} Will you follow me into fire? Will you follow me into darkness? Will you follow me into death?
Suzie's chosen a relatively isolated spot -- no point in possibly knocking anyone else out when Thane comes to get her -- and is sitting comfortably, leaning back against a tree, browsing The Complete Emily Dickinson. (Paper books, at last!) The Dickinson calms her down, and the tree ought to spare her any undignified toppling over when she's
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"You were an idiot to trust him," Thane says, voice gaining some good humor. "But then, you walked up to me. I thought you said you were fond of surviving. Either you're just not very good at it, or the lady doth protest too much."
The faint shadow releases her, steps back. You think we're better? -I'm not better. Can't say for him. He wasn't better 'cause I was him. He was me. I'm not better. What we do - sorry's the last thing we have and then we don't even have that.
We can protect our own, that's all we can do as long as we're Agency, as long as we're this, it goes on, and then stalls. And it's Jack who picks up the thread.
And sometimes we can't do that.
Thane is looking her up and down. Still cool. Still uninvested, but his eyes are more relaxed, his expression a fraction more open. He's seen her as blood and breath and bone, posture and reaction, and now he's looking at something else. Something constructed, hair and clothes and purse, things to hide behind, things to be armored in.
If we're lucky we can hold what we've got, Jack snarls, the beast flickering around him, too far down to manifest. This fell around you and you thought of it as safety. Look where you are. Look where you've come to. I retain the right to kill you. I would have torn you apart if you had threatened him.
Utilitarian clothing, mostly. Oh, not entirely. Enough nods to fashion to pass in society, nothing too unusual, nothing he hasn't seen the like of every day he was on the street reading this world. Except one element.
Love has never been enough to save, or change, anything, Jack says. All we can offer and at that, very little. But I, being poor, have only my dreams.
Too simple, in a way, too crude in another. Out of place but central, something sentimental. He holds out his hand.
"Give me your necklace."
Refuse.
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Maybe she does protest too much. Maybe she doesn't know what she wants anymore, maybe she's not sure whether she wants Thane as something to overcome, or something to be destroyed by.
Maybe she's found something more important. Maybe the only way out of this is through it. This place, this situation, this person she's become.
The girl-shadow lets go, looks up at Jack with wide, frightened eyes, then slowly, so very slowly, reaches up to place a hand over the suggestion of crossed arms, over his heart. I know.
No condemnation. Just fact. We don't get to be safe. But this is close. It's... She bites her lip, trying to find the right word. It's fair.
Suzie's hand goes to the necklace without conscious thought. One thing. One person, in all the world, who did something for her before Jack and Malek, long gone and barely-remembered, a ring stolen from a dusty box when she left home.
The girl-shadow's head swivels, her gaze fixing on Suzie, on the necklace, on Thane, though she never once breaks contact. ...Mum.
"No. Not this." She's sacrificed pieces of herself for him, she's stripped herself down to things she never wanted to know and other things she never wanted to remember, but this... This isn't yours.
She meets his eyes, expecting the worst, but she'll stand firm on this for as long as she's able.
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There are far better people than me, he says, You think no one will care because you haven't looked. You haven't looked because you won't admit they'd exist. Not for you. I was worse than you were and with less reason to be. And you want to sacrifice yourself for me.
The faint shadow looks up at him, for a moment bitter pain twisting his face into something like Thane's, then twisting it past. No one was willing to sacrifice anything for us. Down, dog...
You make your own damnation. Or your own salvation.
Thane's smile grows, and his posture changes again. He relaxes, comfortable and confident both, and one tension has snapped from the air to be replaced with another. "Good," he says, and the message is twofold: the first, You've earned my interest. For now. The second, Then that's one more thing for me to take from you whether you want me to or not.
He goes on cleaning the rifle, but his eyes are fixed on Suzie. His fingers don't falter as he works on the weapon, and that too is a demonstration: This is precision. This is delicacy. This is me taking something down to its component pieces and putting it together so only I know I was there, or I could leave this scattered on the floor and walk away from it. This is what you are asking for.
I have never worked with someone I have not tried to take apart, Jack says under him. That I should know you inside-out is the posture of command for me, and your only insurance in me.
"Your father," Thane says, and now it's a game. Let's wander through your psyche. Let's toy with your demons. Let's see how far you'll crawl to me and how far I'll have to hunt you. Do you want to start the hunt now, little prey? Are you more afraid of coming to me or having me chase you?
I can't save you. I can destroy you. Remake you in my image. This is what I do and what I would have done.
Old torturers never die. They just get disappeared.
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Oh, he's good. There's something hungry in her eyes as she watches him. She knows what he's doing, what he's trying to show her, and if this doesn't destroy her completely...
Oh, the things you could teach me.
And what would it be like, being taken apart by a master? She'd never met anyone to surpass her father, and his destruction had been, she knows now, a sign of his own desperation. Not clinical, not thorough, just the reflexive actions of a broken man.
She learned from that, and everyone who tried to break her after, she tried to break in return, or she just laughed as they tried and failed.
He's going to succeed, and he'll do it so beautifully...
Don't be upset, the girl-shadow says, almost pleads. We're hiding. Most of us is. Someplace safe. This is the worst of us. This is what hurts most.
She leans into Jack a little. We'll try to to be better, really. I promise.
"My father," Suzie says, "was a bastard. Mum died and... People were too difficult for him, then. People just died, just left him. So it was just the two of us, and he decided I wasn't to be human anymore. Not his daughter, just his perfect doll, a replacement for my mum and then some." Her voice is tight, angry, and after telling him about the Doctor, it's almost too much, but again, she reminds herself that she will not fall. It may be easy, with the things she's given him, but she damn well won't make it effortless on his part.
"Pushed me, forced me to be the best at everything I tried, and if I wasn't..." No. Not that far. Not that far, not yet. "He started fucking me when I turned thirteen."
She'll give him this much, but not everything. If he wants details, he can bloody well drag them out of her.
It's easier, when you've got that kind of power. When you know them like that. We understand. We've done it. But you use that to protect people. Not just yourself. If you can say we might be that good someday, we might even believe you.
She still hasn't responded to the first thing Jack said, but after another moment's thought, she pulls away and sits on the ground next to him, hugging her legs to her chest, knees tucked up to her chin. There was someone we thought was good, once. And we love her. But she won't trust us now. She'll never trust us again. Not now. Especially not now. We came to him. She'll hate us. She should. This was penance. But it won't be enough, because we wanted it, wanted him.
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The words are idle, curious, a cat batting at something to see if it will roll or run. There's no malice in the tone but no human regard, either; it's a good story, that's all it is, never mind if it cuts her up inside. It's like Thane is deciding that maybe this would be a good way to spend an afternoon.
"So, you and your father. Big empty place that's never big when you want it to be. You're not your mother and you're a pretty piss-poor substitute and that's on his mind every time he fucks you. You get better you think that'll stop? Maybe the point is not for it to stop."
He'll assume things, follow the patterns, apply and then slowly distort a template he's learned from this century, the faint shadow says, turning to Jack with a hand at the collar of his uniform. It sounds for all the world like he's at a recitation exam.
Keep talking, Jack says.
"All right. So you get better," Thane says. "You get better at everything, but you're cobbled together from a handful of habits and survival instincts and your daddy's instructions. The thing with building something on wreckage is that it'll always be mediocre."
Doesn't have a family, Jack says. Learned to hate the idea of families. Learned to hate anyone who had them.
That's what I get for trying to rely on anyone, the faint shadow says. Who cares. Who's ever going to care. At least the Agency gives me quarters and a decent paycheck and people who'll say hello in the halls.
"But you just keep going, that's the thing about you. He gets outpictured and you keep trying to rise to the requirement of the codger who only really needed you to lie down and spread it. You're not trying to get out of it, you're trying to get back into it. Or," he says, with a lopsided grin, "trying to get it back into you."
You're not a survivor, Suzie, Jack murmurs. You want to be. You want to prove to yourself that you are. You'll go chasing your own destruction because you want to evade it. And because there's no such thing as an ultimate danger, things will never end for you - there will always be something worse to imagine, something worse to try to find.
You can't pay penance for things you didn't do, or things done to you. You want this over with and this is the worst you've seen. It's not right - its not the right way to do this. But it doesn't make you a traitor. Coming here was a mistake. It wasn't evil.
"So tell me," Thane says. "In plain terms. Here and now. What do you want?"
Tell him you want to know that there was no way to win.
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And God, she feels small all over again, and her body language reflects it: even at a reasonable height (almost 5'10" in her boots, as practical a heel as she can manage, because she's never without those bloody heels, anything to not feel smaller than she is), she seems tiny in comparison to him, shrinking in on herself.
Always mediocre. That hurts, sandpaper on raw nerves, and even with all the control she can muster in place, there's the slightest of flinches when he says it.
Curled in on itself, the girl-shadow murmurs softly, quoting:
She rose to his requirement, dropped
The playthings of her life
To take the honorable work
Of woman and of wife.
If aught she missed in her new day
Of amplitude, or awe,
Or first prospective, or the gold
In using wore away,
It lay unmentioned, as the sea
Develops pearl and weed,
But only to himself is known
The fathoms they abide.
She looks up at Jack, then. Dickinson. This is ours. It never came from him, it never touched him. The poetry. Not much is ours, but that is.
"I want..." Suzie falters, looks up at Thane, and her voice is barely even a whisper. "I want to know there was no way to win. Once and for all, I just want to know..."
D'you really believe that? the girl-shadow asks Jack, still staring up at him.
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And what will that be? asks the fainter shadow, and Jack quiets. When he speaks again, it's to Suzie, not the echo of the person he was.
You want to survive. I can help you survive this. You want to resolve this. I can help you resolve this.
You want to save me. If I knew of any way-
If there is no other way, I can help you find a way to kill me. And if there is no other way, you must surrender to that reality.
I would kill any of you, if I had to.
Thane steps forward, narrowing the distance, a heavy physical presence in his every step. Leans down, just a bit, to take her hand and raise it almost to his lips, and it's control as well as concession. Here he's come to her, larger and stronger; he's reached to her and isn't that better than always coming to him? Or is it?
"Just because you couldn't find it," Thane says. "That would be comforting, wouldn't it? Then it's none of your faults, just the universe arrayed against you. Just a fact, something that couldn't change and had to be. The only way."
He brings her wrist up, close enough that his breath is still warm on her skin, but no closer. Loose enough that she could push toward him if that's the way she's falling. Not loose enough that she could pull away.
"We'll see, won't we?"
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And thank you.
Thane touches Suzie and she starts crying. A tear or two may have escaped before, during the long recitation about the Doctor, about her father -- she can't really remember, either way -- but this is real, earnest crying, her shoulders shaking, though she's completely silent.
That's a skill she's had to learn -- crying without making a sound.
She looks away as he speaks, the shame coming off her in palpable waves, but at those last words, she meets his eyes again. "I suppose we will," she says. Her voice is quiet, almost defeated, but her body's telling a different story, caught in a struggle between closer and away, and she's not sure what the right answer is.
After a moment, she pushes toward him, just a little, the tension evident in that motion. She's fighting herself for it, fighting for every bit of closeness she gets, but needing it at the same time.
...there is no right answer, is there? she tells him wordlessly, still crying as she looks into his eyes. I'm damned either way, and you know it, and you enjoy it. But I won't lie passive, not yet. Breaking, yes, but not broken.
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Don't thank me, Jack says, because he's got some idea of how this is going to go.
"Your father was more wrecked than you are," Thane says. "Sad and powerless and you were easy. Well, that's not the case, any more - but that's not the point any more, because you'll never be the biggest, the strongest. You grow up, get yourself Torchwood, and now there's a new class of bigger and stronger and can't-fight-off. All of a sudden there are people like me, people like the Doctor, and you're too small to stop them."
Everything he says falls in a predatorial grace, a lilt just above cruelty. Slow and steady, he'll excavate all of this, bring it up to ache against the air, and then he'll have his pickings from it.
"You think you've developed a pretty good eye for it," he says. "You have it in the sense that you can pick up a telescope and see the storm on the horizon. Oh, it'll cover you, nothing you can do to stop it, but at least you know it's coming, right?
"So here's something I'll tell you." His thumb is running over her knuckles, just enough pressure to remind her what he has. "It's too late to do you any good now, but once upon a time, it could have saved you." He lets his eyes flick away from her, behind her, just for a moment before returning. "Right behind you, there's a door. And there was a door when you were thirteen, and it wasn't the door you tried to close to stop him. There was a door, and if you thought the light of day would hurt your eyes, you should have seen how it burned him to cinders."
There's always a door when you turn back to look for one, Jack says. There's always a solution if you can step out of the timestream. But that's not an answer, it's a platitude. It solves nothing.
Systems of control, says the fainter shadow, and Jack nods in with a Keep talking. The faint one keeps talking. Help is not considered available to a subject unless the subject is capable of accessing it. A number of obstacles can be placed between the subject and any aid; the most subtle and pervasive of these are mental and physical.
That's an old trick, Jack continues for him. An old, old trick. Shame, guilt, fear, every one of these can be weaponized and deployed into that system of control until you can leave someone on the steps of their embassy and they will not walk inside. I know this. I've done it.
"Yeah. You can pick 'em out of a lineup. Then all you know is 'red sky at morning, sailors take warning,' and for all the good that does you, might as well be 'red sky at morning, sailors deeply fucked'. Look at you," he says, and on that, his voice softens. "You walked up to me and asked for this." And that's that, and his voice sharpens, and his grip tightens. "That's not how it works, Suzie."
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Strangely, the fact that he remains entirely unmoved by the tears is almost comforting. They get her nothing, they cost her nothing more than she's already giving. That's... soothing, somehow.
The rest of what he says is anything but, the casual tone of his words ripping open every festering wound, every buried truth too painful to look at. And the parallels, Thane and the Doctor, the fact that he's evoking all the right imagery...
Oh, she knows exactly what he's doing, and it's working anyway, and she knows it, the knowledge coming through in eyes and posture, an understanding levelled at Thane that would like to be accusatory, but can't quite make it. She takes Jack's words into herself, confirmation of things she already knew, but on the surface, they don't seem to penetrate. They can't seem to penetrate. And anything she'd want to say, could ever think to say, gets shoved back so hard and so deep that to her it's buried.
She's only vaguely aware of the girl-shadow, of its words, of how it might be twisting her meanings into deeper truths than she wants.
And it's working now, the shadow says. We've known for a long time there were ways out, but we were too afraid to take them then and too proud now, and he can use that. You can do that, because when this is done, you won't have this anymore. You'll have that. She nods at Thane. That's the power you'll have. Don't think we don't know. Don't think we aren't giving you this, as well, and this is the trust we're placing in you, Jack... Not that you succeed in any of this, but that you try.
The form's still that of a little girl, Suzie before she was shattered, but there's too much knowledge in her eyes, and too much age in her voice. These are the things it's up to her to say, because no one else can. Not the Kali-shadow, which has too much violence, too much pain behind it. Not Suzie herself, who forgot how to trust and is trying to learn. Just her.
And that, in itself, is another sacrifice.
It's Thane's tenderness, just before the end, that wounds most, and it pulls a noise from her, somewhere between gasp and whimper, a sound that screams prey to anyone who knows how to interpret it.
You're the monster under the bed, Jack, the thing in the closet. You're the nightmare that eats nightmares. And you've been leashed but never tame. Not even your friends are safe, because sometimes, you still get hungry, don't you? Sometimes there aren't any nightmares left except the ones inside you. She leans up on tiptoe, searching the suggestion of a face, looking for eyes that she can meet.
It's okay. There's quiet conviction in those two words. Loving people doesn't have to make sense. And I think... Sometimes... Maybe... People just hurt without meaning to? That last is uncertain, a concept only dimly grasped, but Suzie and Jack have both left wounds on each other, and neither of them can afford pretence here, not in this place.
It is, perhaps, a beginning.
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If we're not evil, neither are you. Every monster has a reason. And there's more to being good than holding yourself to a standard not even the Doctor can meet. You said something about making your own salvation. Even monsters can. And right now you are. You're eating yourself alive just so you can see us through this, so you can destroy us in a way that we're still walking at the end. Don't think we don't know. We learned to take people apart, too. But we don't want to hurt you. Not you. We will anyway, and we're sorry. And you'll hurt us, and you'll be sorry even when you think you can't afford to be. She leans up further, whispering. We'll try to do better if you will. Promise. No lies here, Jack.
Thane's grip tightens, and Suzie goes rigid, breath freezing in her throat... There's the fear, deep and primal, and there's nothing intentional in the way the walls behind her eyes crack open to reveal it, not this time.
No no nonononoNO! something wails, and it's not Suzie. It flickers inside her, towering over her for a moment and then shrinking down smaller than she is, caught easily in Thane's grip.
Suzie forces herself to breathe, forces the walls back up, something hard in eyes and posture. It's brittle iron pretending to be steel, but it's there, coming just as quickly as the fear, and just as unexpectedly.
She speaks, and her voice comes out like it was dragged over broken glass and rusted razors. "And just how. Does it. Work?"
For all the harshness of her tone, it sounds like a plea.
The girlshadow gasps, the appearance of age abandoned, and she bolts, running behind Jack, hands on him, looking for anything to grab on to, forehead pressed to the small of his back, hiding. Jack...
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I'm human, Jack pleads.
Only human? The faint shadow steps toward Jack, hesitating and then sidling half a step away. That's all and what I was. Only human. But you're something different, something that scares me more that Mr. How Far I Fell, and whatever you started as, you're not human, and you're not me. Can't you just look at yourself and see that?
And Jack shifts. Doesn't step back, not with the girlshadow there behind him, but he surrenders ground.
...I wasn't supposed to be this way.
No, the faint shadow yells, you weren't, none of us were ever supposed to be this way! Not me, not you, not the bastard tearing apart someone who deserves it less than we do, and every chance we had-
Now the tarshadow is laughing, viscous as cold blood. So stop your heart. Cut your breath. Dash yourself against the rocks.
...that isn't the person I am, the younger one says.
Tear yourself apart. It's not hard. It's on the tip of your fingers. You say this isn't the person you are but you have NOWHERE to run to, idiot, coward, and time closes down on you like duranium teeth and YOU REFUSE TO DIE. whatdoyouthink, youthinkyoucansurvivethis? We. We. We died long ago.
Stop, Jack says, and both the other shadows stop to look at him. He's looking to the ground, midway between himself and Thane, still but for breathing. But what can he be breathing, here and now?
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... ... ...what I am. This. This doesn't matter. You think that this matters? He drags his head up, looking at one, looking at the other. I remember that anger, he says, to the fainter one. We don't think. We don't reason. No memory. No will. We're just here, sunk under the surface, until she comes to realize us. So you think it matters what you say here, what you call me?
The younger shadow steps back, then back again.
You're the shadow of a man who failed a long time ago, Jarec, Jack says. You turned into him. I met him and destroyed him and the Doctor turned him into me. You're so far back I don't think of you any more, but I guess that he does. And I know that you hate me, and I'm sorry. But we never knew what to do.
Jarec takes another step back, rubbing a hand up his arm. ...I don't want to hate you, he says. But I don't want you. We were supposed to be better than any of this.
Yeah, Jack says, we were.
There's silence, and Jack looks away.
I know enough to know I'm not myself. Say things too easily. Know things I don't know. And I know we can't get close enough to change him, not much, not like we'd need. But there's something else. He looks up, eyeless face tracking for Suzie, slow and blind. One of us can get out, if she survives.
Monster. Yeah, maybe. Probably. Or I'm the whirlpool that sucks you in or the gravity blackwell that you can't see until you're too close and it's tearing you apart. I can only hold you together until I destroy you, but I can hold you that long.
And you. Both of you. You want an end to this. You want peace. So while you still have thoughts, you might as well help me, because Thane'll keep going until something tears him apart, and the last time, he looks to the faint one, only brought us you.
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"I'm Rome in this metaphor. The Doctor is Rome. Everything you run after with your heart in your throat and a tug in your groin is Rome. And you may win over something, out there, but I guarantee you it will undo you."
He's holding her hand steady, holding her gaze, no moving forward, no moving back. I have you on the ropes and twisting. Isn't that lovely. Isn't that sweet. I could read you the history of the Scarlet Empire and you'd listen like it was all the secrets in the world.
"You know why Pyrrus sacked Eryx? Because it wasn't full of stinking Romans. You know why Macedon thought he could break the Gauls? Because the Gauls weren't stinking Romans. Were the Romans still there? Of course there were. One of the things you learn if you study enough time is that there'll always be Romans.
"You look for losing battles," Thane says. "You memorized the terms you lost on and you engage on those terms, again, and again, and again. Is that finding no way to win or is that looking for a way to lose?"
He smiles, wide and young, and slips his hand from her hand.
He sweeps a step back and around her orbit, ambling backward until his back bumps the wall, watching to see how she'll do in the absence of that closeness, that warmth. Look. I've given you structure and taken it away. I've built you a bridge and taken it from you. What do you think you're standing on, chasm? What do you have to hold onto?
I could hold you down while you struggled, but that's a hammer where I want to use a needle. You'll look back at this and remember that every step was one you took to me.
I want you. But I don't want sex and screams and salt tears, I want you, and that's something no one but your father ever had. I'll have it if I have to build it in you.
"You change the game."
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"I really don't know anymore," she says. Takes a step towards him, and it feels like leaving a piece of her behind when she does.
A twist of her mouth.
"And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
"Poets tend to have a better idea than most what they're talking about."
Another step. Another piece of her falling away, and she wipes her eyes, forces herself to stand straighter, to look at him.
Here, Thane. Have a bit of Suzie, gift-wrapped. Tiny offerings from someone with no idea what else to give.
Meanwhile, shadow-hands make their way onto Jack's shoulders. She can't offer much, but she can touch him, and she will. Nosce te ipsum, Jack. You're only halfway there, and you're more than you think you are. I just wish I knew how to show you that.
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"'Good and evil and joy and sorrow and I and you - colored smoke before creative eyes it seemed to me. The creator wanted to look away from himself, - so he created the world. Drunken joy it is for the sufferer to look away from his suffering.'
"And there's something perfect about poetry," Thane says. "Something exact. Perfect little lines with perfect little metres, a perfect little structure that use and reuse and reuse can't wear down."
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