Ficlet: Monsters
I’m way behind in posting my fan_flashworks challenge fics to my journals, so here’s the first, which also happens to be the only Torchwood one.
Title: Monsters
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Jack, mentions Torchwood
Rating: G
Word Count: 364
Spoilers: Mostly small ones for Day One, Small Worlds, Something Borrowed and bigger ones for Meat.
Summary: Which monsters are the most monstrous? Jack can’t decide.
Written For: Challenge 85 - Monsters at fan_flashworks
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.
The Rift brought them monsters of all shapes and sizes; Weevils, Hoix, Nostrovites, gaseous aliens that fed on orgasmic energy of all things. There was never a shortage. Some were intelligent, others were simply displaced creatures, hunting and killing by instinct. It didn’t make them any less monstrous or the carnage they left behind any less horrific, but their behaviour was at least comprehensible.
Then there were the creatures with whom humanity shared the planet. Exactly who the earth belonged to had at times been violently contested, especially between mankind and the Silurians, but there existed far worse monsters than even them, lurking outside of time. The Fae, the Mara; whatever label humanity gave them it did nothing to lessen the fear they could inspire. They were so far beyond human understanding that there could never be any reasoning with them. Quick to anger and lethal in the retaliation they meted out for crimes against themselves or their chosen ones, they were truly the stuff of nightmares.
And yet, Jack reflected, they were not the worst monsters Torchwood had ever faced. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
Surely the true monsters were not the aliens with their often-unfathomable ways, but the humans who could look on something as miraculous and wonderful as this gentle, noble creature and see only a cash cow, something they could butcher for profit. They carved out and sold its flesh while it lived, not giving a thought for the suffering they were inflicting on an intelligent being that had never harmed a living soul, and they did it simply for the money.
There had been plenty of occasions when Jack had considered himself a monster, times when others had accused him of being soulless, heartless, the worst monster of them all and he’d agreed, ashamed of his own actions. Now he was faced with a choice: to slaughter these human monsters, as they deserved, or to let them continue to live out their lives with no memory of the last few months.
Once again he was faced with a choice he didn’t want to make. He just didn’t know which course of action would be the least monstrous.
The End