All the King's Horses
Title: All the King's Horses
Written for torchwood_reset
Prompt: Missing Scenes, 6. When John finds Gray and realises who he is
Rating: 12
Spoilers: End of Torchwood S2
Notes: Thanks to forrent and
kel_reiley for the beta.
John Hart isn’t a complete bastard. No, seriously. He’ll admit that he’s about 90% bastard, maybe rising to 98% on a good day but he does have some limits. He’s heard about the war on Boeshane. Or at least he would have heard about the war on Boeshane except that after the trouble with the Agency, and his arsehole ex-partner abandoning him on some shitty planet, he’s decided that as far as Captain John Hart is concerned that man doesn’t exist. So he can’t have heard about the Boeshane War from him. The whole thing is giving him a headache to be honest and he considers just shooting the fat merchant speaking to him and solving the problem that way. But then again the man is so deliciously round.
Later, in bed, the merchant mentions it again. John really is reaching for his gun this time, the sex was good but not that good and he doesn’t want any reminders of that other man. Then the merchant mentions the fee for this little scavenger trip. Maybe John doesn’t have any limits after all.
And that’s how he ends up scouring the ruins of Darshay. The merchant thinks that the things that used it as a prison camp may have left behind some of their technology so here he is, rooting through bones to find it. He’s not come across tech yet but it’s not all bad; there’s been a very nice chain of diamonds and an even nicer wrist com, as well as some decent gold jewellery. To be honest, it’s the gleam of the chains and not the man he notices at first. The man could be another corpse and he’s seen so many of those walking up this sodding mountain that he’s stopped registering them. The shine on the chains, though, draws him closer, magpie-like. He’s almost standing on top of it when the body stirs.
“Fuck!” He has a moment of wild panic thinking of walking corpses and the crap copies of 21st century horror movies he never watched with a man he’s not going to think about ever again. Then he looks, really looks, at the body that isn’t quite dead. The creature is chained to a post, starving and naked. Normally naked and chained are two of his favourite things but even he can’t muster anything but pity for the thing on the ground. He doesn’t think it can survive. He walks closer, pulling out a morphine cylinder, but his shout and his approach must have roused it, because it starts to moan and pull against its chain. He’s seen things, done things, but that sound is like nothing else in the universe. He can see a crust of dried blood around the arm cuffs and odd glimpses of raw pink flesh underneath. Even he doesn’t have a heart hard enough to let its last moment be made of such terror.
“Shh, it’s okay; I’m only human, shhh.”
It stills and now that it’s slightly calmer he walks forward with the morphine to put it out of its misery. The thing moves much faster than he thinks possible and grabs the gun at his hip. It’s obvious that the creature is no threat, it’s already turning the gun round on itself. All John can think later is that it’s because of the eyes. Just before it pulls the trigger it opens its eyes and before Hart has a chance to think, to remind himself that it can’t survive and trying to save it is just cruel, he’s moving forward, knocking the gun away and pining it to the ground. It struggles against him and then goes limp and John is holding a sobbing man against his chest and rocking him and whispering nonsense words, like he used to do for his sister when she was young. He finds the electrical lock-free in his pocket from the last time he came up against chains and undoes the restraints. He lets go of the man, who curls up on himself.
“I’m getting some water. Do you understand?” He retrieves the pack he dropped in his panic and grabs his water bottle and a blanket. He returns to the man and drops the blanket over him. It’s only a camp blanket, rough and coarse and it must scratch against the welts and cuts all over the stranger’s body but he pulls it close anyway. John holds the bottle to his lips and watches him drink (he really hopes he remembered to swap the hypervodka for water before he set off on this job).
John Hart doesn’t do maternal, he doesn’t do compassion and he doesn’t do empathy. Except now he seems to be lumbered with an invalid. He can’t leave the man here, and he’s in no state to be taken back to civilisation and set loose. There is still the morphine but the thought makes him feel slightly queasy now. Besides, the man might have tried to shoot himself but Hart can see a path someone has made through the bodies to a shallow dip where water has collected and he has to try really hard not to see the bite marks and missing flesh on the corpses nearest to his companion. The survival instinct has kept him going, left here alone among an army of dead. So Hart holds the man to him and gets the hell out of there.
He’s planning to dump his Anon at the nearest hospital and scarper but that bastard merchant must have put a trace on his port signal because as soon as he’s back the fucker is there, asking about his bloody tech. Hart would mind less if he didn’t still have the invalid in his arms. After he explains the situation, the merchant’s eyes gleam and he promises an obscene amount of money if Hart can keep the man alive and fix him. The merchant claims that it’s to find out what his invalid saw during his captivity and see if he can identify any of the tech but Hart is starting to suspect he just has a major war kink and is looking for wank material. Shame he doesn’t just admit that, because Hart knows there are easier ways to get off.
So Hart sets up a second room with a bed and finds a pretty, mousy, mumsey type who wants a bit of danger and spins her a story about his invalid brother and soon has a steady supply of beef tea and rice pudding and other nursery food. Hart goes to sit with his patient each evening and talks to him. He’s never heard the man speak and they’ve been in this routine for a few months so it’s a shock when he hears him laugh for the first time. John’s been telling him about having to escape over the rooftops with one boot and half a pair of trousers on because of a jealous girlfriend. He’s so shocked he stops speaking.
“Carry…on.” He can’t say it’s the most attractive voice he’s ever heard. The man is croaky and hesitant. Hart was beginning to wonder if he would ever speak, he’d been trying to ignore the possibility that maybe his guest had been too young for speech when he was first chained up on that mountain. So he doesn’t know why he has a dopey grin all over his face as he finishes the story.
The man doesn’t speak the next day, or the day after that, or the day after and Hart thinks maybe he just hallucinated the speaking; it’s not like it would be the first time. So it’s a bit of a surprise to hear “Hello John” the next time he walks into the room.
“Hello….”
“Gray. My name is Gray.” He, Gray, speaks slowly, deliberately as though he is repeating a lesson. And John smiles, and sits and talks and misses a really hot date and by date he means shag. And he wonders what the hell is wrong with him.
After six months, Gray is beginning to fill out and look more like a man and less like a corpse. And he’s going to make a hot man and Hart begins to see the potential in this situation. So when he gets home and Gray is sitting on the edge of his bed reading, Hart pushes the book aside and traps Gray’s knees with his legs and kisses him with intent. Gray bucks him off and is practically vibrating from the effort of not bolting and Hart, no matter what the rumours say, has always known how to read the signals, especially when the signal is a bloody great stop sign. So he backs away and runs a thumb down Gray’s face and takes care, for the next few days, to keep in Gray’s sight-line when they’re in the same room and not make any sudden movements.
As Gray gets better he can’t help seeing a resemblance to that man he’s not thinking about. At first he thinks it’s just because he knows Gray is from the same place. Then he tells himself that of course there is going to be some resemblance. The peninsula started off as an exile colony from the mainland, when the mainland was the home of a religious sect, somewhere for the bad boys and girls to live so they didn’t pollute the pure with their presence. It wasn’t a big gene-pool to start with and before the invasion it was decidedly provincial. What passed for transgression on the mainland wouldn’t have raised a single eyebrow in any major city, so there weren’t many incomers. It’s only surprising that Gray doesn’t have webbed feet with all the inbreeding that must have been going on. But it still eats at him. It’s not even that they look the same, although there is a similarity. It’s a thing they both have and it’s driving him bloody mad. So he asks.
“Gray, do you have any family left on Boeshane?” Maybe if he was a different man he would have tried to soften it a little but he isn’t and the kid should be used to him by now. He definitely doesn’t feel guilty when Gray looks up at him.
“No. They’re all dead.” There is silence for a moment. “Is that your way of saying you want me to go?”
“Nah.” He stretches out his leg and taps Gray’s foot from where he’s sitting. “You might as well stick around and pretty up the place.”
He doesn’t really know what happens next. Gray’s as healed as he’s likely to get for now and Hart knows he should call the merchant and collect. But he hasn’t. And Gray will mention, every now and again, that he should get a job and move out but he hasn’t either. Hart’s not the domestic sort and Gray seems to find some comfort in order, which he gets. So when he asks if he can sort the apartment out, John tells him that he’ll make someone a great missus and lets him get on with it. He does sometimes wonder if they’re in one of those weird, sexless, second millennium marriages that everyone jokes about. He’s got used to coming back in the evening, or more often the morning, and Gray being there. He’s got used to the rhythms of someone else living in his space. Which is why he can tell that something is wrong.
“Why do you have a picture of my brother?”
It takes John a moment to process, what with Gray having already said his family was dead and John having thought he’d got rid of any pictures he’d had of that man. But it’s those sodding eyes and John knows who must be in the picture. “You said your family was dead.”
“I thought he was. He never came back, I thought he had to be.”
John knows what they do next. These flashes of inspiration have been useful, occasionally, for someone in his line of work, and he ignores the fact that they’re also responsible for most of the shit he’s found himself in. “We could find him.” Gray looks up and John isn’t sure if the shiver down his spine is because of memories of the first man he knew with those eyes or the expression in them now.
Written for torchwood_reset
Prompt: Missing Scenes, 6. When John finds Gray and realises who he is
Rating: 12
Spoilers: End of Torchwood S2
Notes: Thanks to forrent and
kel_reiley for the beta.
John Hart isn’t a complete bastard. No, seriously. He’ll admit that he’s about 90% bastard, maybe rising to 98% on a good day but he does have some limits. He’s heard about the war on Boeshane. Or at least he would have heard about the war on Boeshane except that after the trouble with the Agency, and his arsehole ex-partner abandoning him on some shitty planet, he’s decided that as far as Captain John Hart is concerned that man doesn’t exist. So he can’t have heard about the Boeshane War from him. The whole thing is giving him a headache to be honest and he considers just shooting the fat merchant speaking to him and solving the problem that way. But then again the man is so deliciously round.
Later, in bed, the merchant mentions it again. John really is reaching for his gun this time, the sex was good but not that good and he doesn’t want any reminders of that other man. Then the merchant mentions the fee for this little scavenger trip. Maybe John doesn’t have any limits after all.
And that’s how he ends up scouring the ruins of Darshay. The merchant thinks that the things that used it as a prison camp may have left behind some of their technology so here he is, rooting through bones to find it. He’s not come across tech yet but it’s not all bad; there’s been a very nice chain of diamonds and an even nicer wrist com, as well as some decent gold jewellery. To be honest, it’s the gleam of the chains and not the man he notices at first. The man could be another corpse and he’s seen so many of those walking up this sodding mountain that he’s stopped registering them. The shine on the chains, though, draws him closer, magpie-like. He’s almost standing on top of it when the body stirs.
“Fuck!” He has a moment of wild panic thinking of walking corpses and the crap copies of 21st century horror movies he never watched with a man he’s not going to think about ever again. Then he looks, really looks, at the body that isn’t quite dead. The creature is chained to a post, starving and naked. Normally naked and chained are two of his favourite things but even he can’t muster anything but pity for the thing on the ground. He doesn’t think it can survive. He walks closer, pulling out a morphine cylinder, but his shout and his approach must have roused it, because it starts to moan and pull against its chain. He’s seen things, done things, but that sound is like nothing else in the universe. He can see a crust of dried blood around the arm cuffs and odd glimpses of raw pink flesh underneath. Even he doesn’t have a heart hard enough to let its last moment be made of such terror.
“Shh, it’s okay; I’m only human, shhh.”
It stills and now that it’s slightly calmer he walks forward with the morphine to put it out of its misery. The thing moves much faster than he thinks possible and grabs the gun at his hip. It’s obvious that the creature is no threat, it’s already turning the gun round on itself. All John can think later is that it’s because of the eyes. Just before it pulls the trigger it opens its eyes and before Hart has a chance to think, to remind himself that it can’t survive and trying to save it is just cruel, he’s moving forward, knocking the gun away and pining it to the ground. It struggles against him and then goes limp and John is holding a sobbing man against his chest and rocking him and whispering nonsense words, like he used to do for his sister when she was young. He finds the electrical lock-free in his pocket from the last time he came up against chains and undoes the restraints. He lets go of the man, who curls up on himself.
“I’m getting some water. Do you understand?” He retrieves the pack he dropped in his panic and grabs his water bottle and a blanket. He returns to the man and drops the blanket over him. It’s only a camp blanket, rough and coarse and it must scratch against the welts and cuts all over the stranger’s body but he pulls it close anyway. John holds the bottle to his lips and watches him drink (he really hopes he remembered to swap the hypervodka for water before he set off on this job).
John Hart doesn’t do maternal, he doesn’t do compassion and he doesn’t do empathy. Except now he seems to be lumbered with an invalid. He can’t leave the man here, and he’s in no state to be taken back to civilisation and set loose. There is still the morphine but the thought makes him feel slightly queasy now. Besides, the man might have tried to shoot himself but Hart can see a path someone has made through the bodies to a shallow dip where water has collected and he has to try really hard not to see the bite marks and missing flesh on the corpses nearest to his companion. The survival instinct has kept him going, left here alone among an army of dead. So Hart holds the man to him and gets the hell out of there.
He’s planning to dump his Anon at the nearest hospital and scarper but that bastard merchant must have put a trace on his port signal because as soon as he’s back the fucker is there, asking about his bloody tech. Hart would mind less if he didn’t still have the invalid in his arms. After he explains the situation, the merchant’s eyes gleam and he promises an obscene amount of money if Hart can keep the man alive and fix him. The merchant claims that it’s to find out what his invalid saw during his captivity and see if he can identify any of the tech but Hart is starting to suspect he just has a major war kink and is looking for wank material. Shame he doesn’t just admit that, because Hart knows there are easier ways to get off.
So Hart sets up a second room with a bed and finds a pretty, mousy, mumsey type who wants a bit of danger and spins her a story about his invalid brother and soon has a steady supply of beef tea and rice pudding and other nursery food. Hart goes to sit with his patient each evening and talks to him. He’s never heard the man speak and they’ve been in this routine for a few months so it’s a shock when he hears him laugh for the first time. John’s been telling him about having to escape over the rooftops with one boot and half a pair of trousers on because of a jealous girlfriend. He’s so shocked he stops speaking.
“Carry…on.” He can’t say it’s the most attractive voice he’s ever heard. The man is croaky and hesitant. Hart was beginning to wonder if he would ever speak, he’d been trying to ignore the possibility that maybe his guest had been too young for speech when he was first chained up on that mountain. So he doesn’t know why he has a dopey grin all over his face as he finishes the story.
The man doesn’t speak the next day, or the day after that, or the day after and Hart thinks maybe he just hallucinated the speaking; it’s not like it would be the first time. So it’s a bit of a surprise to hear “Hello John” the next time he walks into the room.
“Hello….”
“Gray. My name is Gray.” He, Gray, speaks slowly, deliberately as though he is repeating a lesson. And John smiles, and sits and talks and misses a really hot date and by date he means shag. And he wonders what the hell is wrong with him.
After six months, Gray is beginning to fill out and look more like a man and less like a corpse. And he’s going to make a hot man and Hart begins to see the potential in this situation. So when he gets home and Gray is sitting on the edge of his bed reading, Hart pushes the book aside and traps Gray’s knees with his legs and kisses him with intent. Gray bucks him off and is practically vibrating from the effort of not bolting and Hart, no matter what the rumours say, has always known how to read the signals, especially when the signal is a bloody great stop sign. So he backs away and runs a thumb down Gray’s face and takes care, for the next few days, to keep in Gray’s sight-line when they’re in the same room and not make any sudden movements.
As Gray gets better he can’t help seeing a resemblance to that man he’s not thinking about. At first he thinks it’s just because he knows Gray is from the same place. Then he tells himself that of course there is going to be some resemblance. The peninsula started off as an exile colony from the mainland, when the mainland was the home of a religious sect, somewhere for the bad boys and girls to live so they didn’t pollute the pure with their presence. It wasn’t a big gene-pool to start with and before the invasion it was decidedly provincial. What passed for transgression on the mainland wouldn’t have raised a single eyebrow in any major city, so there weren’t many incomers. It’s only surprising that Gray doesn’t have webbed feet with all the inbreeding that must have been going on. But it still eats at him. It’s not even that they look the same, although there is a similarity. It’s a thing they both have and it’s driving him bloody mad. So he asks.
“Gray, do you have any family left on Boeshane?” Maybe if he was a different man he would have tried to soften it a little but he isn’t and the kid should be used to him by now. He definitely doesn’t feel guilty when Gray looks up at him.
“No. They’re all dead.” There is silence for a moment. “Is that your way of saying you want me to go?”
“Nah.” He stretches out his leg and taps Gray’s foot from where he’s sitting. “You might as well stick around and pretty up the place.”
He doesn’t really know what happens next. Gray’s as healed as he’s likely to get for now and Hart knows he should call the merchant and collect. But he hasn’t. And Gray will mention, every now and again, that he should get a job and move out but he hasn’t either. Hart’s not the domestic sort and Gray seems to find some comfort in order, which he gets. So when he asks if he can sort the apartment out, John tells him that he’ll make someone a great missus and lets him get on with it. He does sometimes wonder if they’re in one of those weird, sexless, second millennium marriages that everyone jokes about. He’s got used to coming back in the evening, or more often the morning, and Gray being there. He’s got used to the rhythms of someone else living in his space. Which is why he can tell that something is wrong.
“Why do you have a picture of my brother?”
It takes John a moment to process, what with Gray having already said his family was dead and John having thought he’d got rid of any pictures he’d had of that man. But it’s those sodding eyes and John knows who must be in the picture. “You said your family was dead.”
“I thought he was. He never came back, I thought he had to be.”
John knows what they do next. These flashes of inspiration have been useful, occasionally, for someone in his line of work, and he ignores the fact that they’re also responsible for most of the shit he’s found himself in. “We could find him.” Gray looks up and John isn’t sure if the shiver down his spine is because of memories of the first man he knew with those eyes or the expression in them now.