Jack's Capture (Part Two)
Fandom: Torchwood
Rating: R (for swearing, mostly)
Warnings: Swearing, death, mentions of torture...
Word Count: 1815
Summary: Post season one. Jack's returned from travelling with the Doctor, only to be snatched away again - and this time there's nothing voluntary about it.
Part 2, probably of 3. (With the option of an epilogue)
Prompt: 019. White.
Jack's Capture
Part One
Part Two
“Why don’t you tell them?”
Jack didn’t even open his eyes. The cell was cold, and lacked the character of those at Torchwood Three. All bland white walls, an empty little space with nothing to sleep on and a tiny cubicle in one corner for calls of nature. Again, all white. It had crossed his mind briefly that it must be hell to keep clean (he’d been around Ianto too long - but he’d crushed that thought as soon as it had crept up on him. He couldn’t stand to think of Ianto now) but, judging by the bloodstains in the far corner, smeared faintly on the wall and the glass front of his cell, perhaps no one even bothered.
“You may as well just talk - they already know such a lot, and they’ll stop hurting you if you co-operate.”
His white clothes were irritating him. How was he meant to put up with a single layer of thin synthetic material, when he’d got so used to piling on cotton and wool like there was no tomorrow? If he wasn’t immortal he’d be concerned about catching cold. Something else Ianto would have said, laughing.
“All you have to do is answer their questions and the pain will stop…”
“It’ll never stop.”
It took Jack a few moments, in the silence that followed, to realise he’d been the one who’d spoken.
“Of course it will,” the woman said, pressing a hand against the glass and staring intently at him when he opened his eyes, gazing ahead at nothing and trying to blank his mind again. He found himself shaking his head, saying, “No, no. They killed him. The bastards killed him.”
“Killed who?” she asked, frowning in confusion, and he looked up, then laughed bitterly.
“You hypocrites. Arrest me for interfering in time and then shoot one of my team?”
She blinked at him, surprised, brushing her white-blonde hair away from her face, and said, “They can’t have killed him. Their orders were to get you out with minimum effect on the timeline. Force was never meant to be employed…”
Jack closed his eyes again, hiding tears as he said, in tones of finality, “They killed him. You killed him. I’ll tell you nothing.”
“It doesn’t have to be like this!” she said, somewhat desperately, pressing both hands against the glass now. “They’ve already cut you to pieces six times, do you really think they’ll stop now unless you start talking?”
“Do you really think they’ll stop even if I tell them everything?” Jack asked her, opening his eyes and looking at the binders on his hands. “They hate me. They’ll keep torturing me as long as they think they can get away with it.”
“We’re not all like that,” she told him quietly. “You seem to think all Time Agents are just out to make your life miserable. We’re not, really. We’re just trying to do our job!”
Jack stared at the binders a little more intently, saying, “No. Not all of you. The others are afraid that if they don’t take every chance to hurt me, the Agency will suspect them of sympathising, and do the same to them as it did to me. They’d kill me to save themselves.”
“That’s not true,” she said, glaring at him, and he looked up, smiling oddly.
“Maybe I should just save them the trouble,” he suggested, and raised his hands to his mouth. She started forwards, asking nervously, “What are you doing?” then her eyes widened as he pulled out a short stretch of thin wire. He grinned at her a little, watching her press the alarm as she suddenly remembered how he’d stumbled and fallen on the way back to the cell. A simple trick, low-tech and infuriatingly obvious now he had the wire, broken from the back of an ID marker on someone’s belt.
He twisted the wire and went to shove it into the lock on the binders. She yelled, and hit another button outside, flooding his cell with knockout gas.
When the security team, three more Time Agents, clearly itching to use their guns, arrived a few seconds later, they saw Jack lying crumpled on the floor of his cell, bound hands hidden beneath him, the gas being drawn back out through the ventilators in the ceiling, and the female Time Agent watching him nervously.
“He tried to short-circuit the binders,” she told them quickly, and they exchanged glances, then one of them grabbed a device from the back of his belt and pressed it against the glass.
“He’s alive. If he’d managed to disrupt the energy flow the backlash would have killed him.”
She nodded, saying, “I didn’t have any luck convincing him to talk, but we’ll have to keep a closer eye on him from now on. He’s sharp,” as she punched in a code on the keypad next to the cell, and the glass door opened, sliding up into the ceiling with a hiss.
“It’ll be another minute before he wakes up,” she told them, two of them following her into the cell. She knelt by Jack and reached out to shove him onto his side, her hand already going to pluck the wire from his fingers before she registered that the faint purple energy beam of the binders was not in place.
Jack’s eyes snapped open, and there was a flurry of movement and noise that resulted in Jack edging out of the cell with a sonic blaster aimed at the female Time Agent and the one survivor from the security team, the others already dead. He kicked one of the bodies out of the doorway, then shut the glass on his one-time captors and hit the button for the knockout gas with some degree of satisfaction.
He blasted the camera into nothingness as the gas poured into the cell. When he was sure his two prisoners were unconscious, he darted back in and stripped them of their weapons and communicators, then locked them in again and paused. He looked down at the two blasters he’d clipped to a belt, then stopped and prised off the outer casing on both. Wondering what Tosh would make of the technology, he removed the tracers from the guns and the communicator, wiped the spares out of existence, then put the communicator on, tucking it into his ear and activating it a low volume, and hurried out into the corridors.
~*~
Ianto woke in the autopsy room, and immediately tried to sit up. Owen shoved him back down, none too gently, saying, “Stay still, idiot,” and ignoring Ianto’s gasp of pain.
He stayed still after that, though, not even asking what was going on. His head hurt more than anything else - he could feel bandages round his chest, but everything was either numb (painkillers? Anaesthetics?), or aching dully. Apart from his head, which was aching sharply. He wasn’t quite sure why.
Then he remembered.
“Where’s Jack?” he asked hurriedly, and Owen said, “Not here. What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Ianto said, trying not to panic, and sat up. Owen let him, rolling his eyes impatiently, and Ianto quietly regretted moving too fast, as it made his head spin.
“Tosh is trying to get the CCTV back,” Gwen told him helpfully, standing at the top of the stairs above him. He looked up at her, then at Owen, then down at the bandages on his chest.
“What -”
Owen said, “You were shot. Bloody lucky, though. The bullet didn’t hit anything vital - missed your heart by less than a centimetre. One in a million chance, and you got it.”
“Hey!” Tosh yelled from her workstation, and Gwen ran to see what was the matter. Ianto slid from the operating table, stifling a gasp as a brief jolt of pain suddenly flashed through his chest. He ignored it, just like he ignored Owen swearing at him, and made his way up the stairs.
Tosh glanced round, and waited until the other three had gathered behind her before pointing at one of the screens and saying, “I managed to get the CCTV back for this morning. There was some interference with the feed, I don’t know what, but the alien elements of the system meant that the cameras kept filming, even if the pictures didn’t show up onscreen. I had to do a bit of digging, in the fifth layer of the -”
“Yeah, we get it, Tosh,” Owen said. “You’re a genius, well done, now what the fuck happened?”
“I haven’t played it back completely yet,” she said, and proceeded to do so. They watched Ianto leave, and Jack get attacked, and Ianto return and try to save him, all without comment. Then the sniper turned and shot, and Owen said, “Hold it. Tosh, can you zoom in on that gun?”
She did so, bringing up a larger picture of the weapon on another screen, then continued playing the footage. There wasn’t much more to see. Jack and the strangers vanished without a trace, and Ianto was left lying on the floor, bleeding slowly until the others arrived, found him, and moved him to the autopsy room.
The four of them looked at each other, then Ianto went to Owen’s chair and sat down heavily.
“Jack’s gone,” he said flatly. “He’s really gone this time.”
“We’ll get him back,” Gwen told him, but he didn’t answer.
Owen looked up, frowning, and asked, “You got any idea who they were?” but Ianto simply shook his head.
“Well, whoever they were, they wanted you alive,” Owen said, and the other three blinked at him.
“They shot me,” Ianto pointed out warily, and Owen waved at the picture of the gun.
“Take a look at this. There’s so many enhancements there’s no way they could have missed by accident. That shot was deliberate.”
There was a long pause, and then Gwen said, “That means they won’t try to kill Jack, surely? If they went to so much trouble to take him alive, and not kill anybody else in the process…”
“That doesn’t help us much,” Ianto said quietly. “We still don’t have any way of getting him back.”
Tosh looked round, starting to say something, then stopping herself. When the others looked at her, she hesitated, then said quietly, “There may be a way. If the sensors recorded whatever signals were being bounced around at the time, then maybe I can replicate some of them. We assume they were teleported onto a ship, right? It’s the only sensible thing. So maybe we can call the ship back and remotely activate the teleporters. It’s all a matter of getting the right frequencies.”
They stared at her, then Owen said, “Give it a go. That’s our best bet at the moment.”
Ianto resisted the urge to point out that it was their only bet, while Tosh nodded, and got to work.
Part Three
Rating: R (for swearing, mostly)
Warnings: Swearing, death, mentions of torture...
Word Count: 1815
Summary: Post season one. Jack's returned from travelling with the Doctor, only to be snatched away again - and this time there's nothing voluntary about it.
Part 2, probably of 3. (With the option of an epilogue)
Prompt: 019. White.
Jack's Capture
Part One
Part Two
“Why don’t you tell them?”
Jack didn’t even open his eyes. The cell was cold, and lacked the character of those at Torchwood Three. All bland white walls, an empty little space with nothing to sleep on and a tiny cubicle in one corner for calls of nature. Again, all white. It had crossed his mind briefly that it must be hell to keep clean (he’d been around Ianto too long - but he’d crushed that thought as soon as it had crept up on him. He couldn’t stand to think of Ianto now) but, judging by the bloodstains in the far corner, smeared faintly on the wall and the glass front of his cell, perhaps no one even bothered.
“You may as well just talk - they already know such a lot, and they’ll stop hurting you if you co-operate.”
His white clothes were irritating him. How was he meant to put up with a single layer of thin synthetic material, when he’d got so used to piling on cotton and wool like there was no tomorrow? If he wasn’t immortal he’d be concerned about catching cold. Something else Ianto would have said, laughing.
“All you have to do is answer their questions and the pain will stop…”
“It’ll never stop.”
It took Jack a few moments, in the silence that followed, to realise he’d been the one who’d spoken.
“Of course it will,” the woman said, pressing a hand against the glass and staring intently at him when he opened his eyes, gazing ahead at nothing and trying to blank his mind again. He found himself shaking his head, saying, “No, no. They killed him. The bastards killed him.”
“Killed who?” she asked, frowning in confusion, and he looked up, then laughed bitterly.
“You hypocrites. Arrest me for interfering in time and then shoot one of my team?”
She blinked at him, surprised, brushing her white-blonde hair away from her face, and said, “They can’t have killed him. Their orders were to get you out with minimum effect on the timeline. Force was never meant to be employed…”
Jack closed his eyes again, hiding tears as he said, in tones of finality, “They killed him. You killed him. I’ll tell you nothing.”
“It doesn’t have to be like this!” she said, somewhat desperately, pressing both hands against the glass now. “They’ve already cut you to pieces six times, do you really think they’ll stop now unless you start talking?”
“Do you really think they’ll stop even if I tell them everything?” Jack asked her, opening his eyes and looking at the binders on his hands. “They hate me. They’ll keep torturing me as long as they think they can get away with it.”
“We’re not all like that,” she told him quietly. “You seem to think all Time Agents are just out to make your life miserable. We’re not, really. We’re just trying to do our job!”
Jack stared at the binders a little more intently, saying, “No. Not all of you. The others are afraid that if they don’t take every chance to hurt me, the Agency will suspect them of sympathising, and do the same to them as it did to me. They’d kill me to save themselves.”
“That’s not true,” she said, glaring at him, and he looked up, smiling oddly.
“Maybe I should just save them the trouble,” he suggested, and raised his hands to his mouth. She started forwards, asking nervously, “What are you doing?” then her eyes widened as he pulled out a short stretch of thin wire. He grinned at her a little, watching her press the alarm as she suddenly remembered how he’d stumbled and fallen on the way back to the cell. A simple trick, low-tech and infuriatingly obvious now he had the wire, broken from the back of an ID marker on someone’s belt.
He twisted the wire and went to shove it into the lock on the binders. She yelled, and hit another button outside, flooding his cell with knockout gas.
When the security team, three more Time Agents, clearly itching to use their guns, arrived a few seconds later, they saw Jack lying crumpled on the floor of his cell, bound hands hidden beneath him, the gas being drawn back out through the ventilators in the ceiling, and the female Time Agent watching him nervously.
“He tried to short-circuit the binders,” she told them quickly, and they exchanged glances, then one of them grabbed a device from the back of his belt and pressed it against the glass.
“He’s alive. If he’d managed to disrupt the energy flow the backlash would have killed him.”
She nodded, saying, “I didn’t have any luck convincing him to talk, but we’ll have to keep a closer eye on him from now on. He’s sharp,” as she punched in a code on the keypad next to the cell, and the glass door opened, sliding up into the ceiling with a hiss.
“It’ll be another minute before he wakes up,” she told them, two of them following her into the cell. She knelt by Jack and reached out to shove him onto his side, her hand already going to pluck the wire from his fingers before she registered that the faint purple energy beam of the binders was not in place.
Jack’s eyes snapped open, and there was a flurry of movement and noise that resulted in Jack edging out of the cell with a sonic blaster aimed at the female Time Agent and the one survivor from the security team, the others already dead. He kicked one of the bodies out of the doorway, then shut the glass on his one-time captors and hit the button for the knockout gas with some degree of satisfaction.
He blasted the camera into nothingness as the gas poured into the cell. When he was sure his two prisoners were unconscious, he darted back in and stripped them of their weapons and communicators, then locked them in again and paused. He looked down at the two blasters he’d clipped to a belt, then stopped and prised off the outer casing on both. Wondering what Tosh would make of the technology, he removed the tracers from the guns and the communicator, wiped the spares out of existence, then put the communicator on, tucking it into his ear and activating it a low volume, and hurried out into the corridors.
~*~
Ianto woke in the autopsy room, and immediately tried to sit up. Owen shoved him back down, none too gently, saying, “Stay still, idiot,” and ignoring Ianto’s gasp of pain.
He stayed still after that, though, not even asking what was going on. His head hurt more than anything else - he could feel bandages round his chest, but everything was either numb (painkillers? Anaesthetics?), or aching dully. Apart from his head, which was aching sharply. He wasn’t quite sure why.
Then he remembered.
“Where’s Jack?” he asked hurriedly, and Owen said, “Not here. What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Ianto said, trying not to panic, and sat up. Owen let him, rolling his eyes impatiently, and Ianto quietly regretted moving too fast, as it made his head spin.
“Tosh is trying to get the CCTV back,” Gwen told him helpfully, standing at the top of the stairs above him. He looked up at her, then at Owen, then down at the bandages on his chest.
“What -”
Owen said, “You were shot. Bloody lucky, though. The bullet didn’t hit anything vital - missed your heart by less than a centimetre. One in a million chance, and you got it.”
“Hey!” Tosh yelled from her workstation, and Gwen ran to see what was the matter. Ianto slid from the operating table, stifling a gasp as a brief jolt of pain suddenly flashed through his chest. He ignored it, just like he ignored Owen swearing at him, and made his way up the stairs.
Tosh glanced round, and waited until the other three had gathered behind her before pointing at one of the screens and saying, “I managed to get the CCTV back for this morning. There was some interference with the feed, I don’t know what, but the alien elements of the system meant that the cameras kept filming, even if the pictures didn’t show up onscreen. I had to do a bit of digging, in the fifth layer of the -”
“Yeah, we get it, Tosh,” Owen said. “You’re a genius, well done, now what the fuck happened?”
“I haven’t played it back completely yet,” she said, and proceeded to do so. They watched Ianto leave, and Jack get attacked, and Ianto return and try to save him, all without comment. Then the sniper turned and shot, and Owen said, “Hold it. Tosh, can you zoom in on that gun?”
She did so, bringing up a larger picture of the weapon on another screen, then continued playing the footage. There wasn’t much more to see. Jack and the strangers vanished without a trace, and Ianto was left lying on the floor, bleeding slowly until the others arrived, found him, and moved him to the autopsy room.
The four of them looked at each other, then Ianto went to Owen’s chair and sat down heavily.
“Jack’s gone,” he said flatly. “He’s really gone this time.”
“We’ll get him back,” Gwen told him, but he didn’t answer.
Owen looked up, frowning, and asked, “You got any idea who they were?” but Ianto simply shook his head.
“Well, whoever they were, they wanted you alive,” Owen said, and the other three blinked at him.
“They shot me,” Ianto pointed out warily, and Owen waved at the picture of the gun.
“Take a look at this. There’s so many enhancements there’s no way they could have missed by accident. That shot was deliberate.”
There was a long pause, and then Gwen said, “That means they won’t try to kill Jack, surely? If they went to so much trouble to take him alive, and not kill anybody else in the process…”
“That doesn’t help us much,” Ianto said quietly. “We still don’t have any way of getting him back.”
Tosh looked round, starting to say something, then stopping herself. When the others looked at her, she hesitated, then said quietly, “There may be a way. If the sensors recorded whatever signals were being bounced around at the time, then maybe I can replicate some of them. We assume they were teleported onto a ship, right? It’s the only sensible thing. So maybe we can call the ship back and remotely activate the teleporters. It’s all a matter of getting the right frequencies.”
They stared at her, then Owen said, “Give it a go. That’s our best bet at the moment.”
Ianto resisted the urge to point out that it was their only bet, while Tosh nodded, and got to work.
Part Three