Fanfic - The Waters and the Wild 1/3 [Torchwood: Jack/Ianto]
Fandom: Torchwood
Pairing: Jack/Ianto
Rating: NC-17 (for sex and violence)
Warnings: Alternate canon; violent imagery; torture; implications of slavery and Stockholm Syndrome; faerie!Ianto
Summary: The Torchwood team comprises Jack, Owen, Tosh and Gwen. They've just encountered the faeries of Small Worlds. Unfortunately, they've also caught the eye of another type of faerie, and he's rather intrigued by Jack.
The Waters and the Wild
-bluebells and roses-
They take the girl-child with them.
With them the mortals. One. Two. Three. Four.
One.
Not mortal.
Taste the air. Not mortal. And yet human.
Closer. Closer. Breathe.
This one.
This one is intriguing.
Take it.
He has been many people, worn many faces through a long lifetime. At the moment, he is Captain Jack Harkness, who has once lost good men and is now losing more. This time, he knows it is his fault.
His team refuses to look at him as they return to the SUV. The girl’s mother has been Retconned, will never remember the awful truth of what happened to her daughter and family. Her mind will build reasons, will create a truth that is palatable to her.
This is how the human mind works. It will always surprise him with its resilience.
“What else could I do?” he demands.
Silence. He expects it, and yet it hurts him to the quick.
What else could I do, he repeats silently. One girl for the world. One girl who wanted to leave. They could never have taken her otherwise.
When they return to the Hub, the team exits the SUV in sullen silence, still refusing to look at him. Captain Jack Harkness sits in the empty vehicle, slowly losing his armour. It is Jack who finally leaves, finally makes his way down to the Hub. For the first time in years, he is not looking forward to returning.
He watches as Toshiko and Owen confer by her workstation. He suspects he knows what they are speaking of. He knows he does not want to hear it. They pack their bags, call up to Gwen. She exits from the conference room, mouth set in a grim line.
What else could I do, Jack wonders. It has been a long time since he has felt so betrayed. By his team. By himself. There is, he thinks, little difference between the two. One defines the other too completely.
He does not remember what it is to be himself.
They walk towards him. Or not. They walk towards the exit, which happens to be in line with him. Jack looks at them and pretends that they are looking back. That they are meeting his eye, that they understand. Then he steps aside so that they will not have to detour around him. If they wish to pretend he does not exist, who is he to stand in their way?
“Who are you?” someone asks. The voice sounds like it is dyed with wind.
Jack freezes. His team whirls.
(Suddenly, he is being acknowledged.)
“What was that?” Gwen demands.
“Who are you?” the voice repeats. The air is suddenly thick with the scent of flowers. It does not smell like roses.
Jack swallows. “Who wants to know?” he asks, stepping away from the team. (Away from them, don’t hurt them, not them.)
“Me-I-we,” the voice sings, and it is suddenly a multitude of voices and Jack winces at the way the sound tears at his ears. “Who are you? Who-are-you-who-are-you-who-are-you -”
“Captain Jack Harkness,” he says with a confidence he doesn’t feel. The voices fall abruptly silent.
“Jack,” Toshiko says urgently. She looks terrified as she looks at her computer screen. When, Jack wonders, had she gotten over there? “I’m registering an anomaly here in the Hub. According to the monitors, we’re standing in a forest.”
Jack swallows. “Who are you?” he asks. “What do you want? You’ve got the girl, what more do you want?”
A laugh, like an eagle cresting through sunlight. “They took the girl-child,” the voice sing-songs. “Took her away to dance with them.”
Jack moves further away from the team, feeling somehow that the heavy presence is following him. “You’re saying you’re not one of them?” he asks sceptically. Get out, he thinks desperately at his team. Why are you still here?
“Noooo,” the voice drawls. Jack feels abruptly like he is talking to a five-year-old. A five-year-old who could kill him where he stands. Might even be able to make it stick.
“Then who are you?” he asks.
“Who are you?” the voice replies.
“I’ve told you,” Jack says. “Captain Jack Harkness.”
“Liar,” the voice accuses him.
“That’s who I am,” he maintains, feeling icy fear trickle through his stomach. He wants an alien. He wants a Slitheen. He wants a Weevil. He wants something tangible he can fight. He wants something he understands.
“Liar,” the voice repeats, and this time it’s changed. It sounds adult. Male. It still sounds like it is accented with wind and water.
“This is who I am,” Jack repeats with conviction.
The air thickens around him. He can’t breathe for the smell of flowers. Then there is something in his throat and his lungs and then he simply can’t breathe at all.
The last thing he sees before he falls into blackness is the vague outline of a face, shimmering in ghostly light.
Jack gasps back into life surrounded by his team. Two of said team are looking like they’ve seen a ghost. They aren’t, he thinks fuzzily, too far off. Gwen helps him sit up and for once, he is thankful that at least one of them knows his secret.
“You were dead,” Owen says, jabbing a finger towards him. “You were dead. You weren’t breathing. You had no pulse.”
Jack tries to speak and finds himself gagging on petals. He shakes Gwen off, turns on his side, spits them out. Blue, but ripped as they are, he cannot tell what flowers they came from. “Accident,” he says shortly, pulling himself up. “Long ago. Short version is that I can’t die. Just doesn’t stick.”
“You can’t die,” Owen repeats in disbelief.
“Seriously?” Toshiko asks, eyes wide.
“It’s true,” Gwen says. “I saw Suzie shoot him in the head. Also saw him get up after that.”
Jack takes a deep breath. The only flowers he smells comes from the petals he has spit out. Sweet and cloying, but now faint. The heavy presence has vanished.
“What happened?” he asks, not quite meeting anyone’s eyes.
Toshiko shakes her head. “You just - started gasping,” she says.
“Mouth wide open,” Owen adds, apparently recovering. “Kind of unattractive.”
“Not what I hear from most people,” Jack says, brushing off his coat, avoiding Gwen’s solicitous touches. It takes a moment for his meaning to dawn on Owen, who then gives him the most disgusted look he can muster.
“And then you collapsed,” Toshiko says. “The wind stopped and we were able to get to you.”
“Wind?” Jack asks.
“Didn’t you feel it?” Gwen asks incredulously. “There was this amazingly strong wind blowing around. We couldn’t move against it.”
“His coat wasn’t moving,” Owen says. “I don’t think he felt it at all.” He looks expectantly at Jack.
Jack feels adrift, cut off from what he knows and expects. Perhaps, he thinks, the shock of a (sort of) immortal leader will set in later. After they have dealt with the faeries. Again.
He wants to rest. He wants sleep. He wants to not dream of roses and tunnels, of the creaking sway of railway tracks, their lullaby rhythm.
Rock-a-bye baby on the tree-top
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock
When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall
And down will come baby, cradle and all.
“Jack?” Gwen asks, giving him a strange look. They all are, actually, and that is when he realises that he has been singing the lullaby under his breath.
“Ever wonder about that song?” he asks. “Kind of morbid for a lullaby, isn’t it?”
“What’re you talking about?” Toshiko asks.
“Never mind,” Jack says. “Toshiko, did you get anything from the monitors?”
She looks glad to be of use, falling back instantly into a professional demeanour. Owen should take lessons from her. “As I mentioned earlier,” she says. “The monitors were registering the forest here in the Hub.”
“The forest?” Jack asks, sitting down. His legs suddenly feel weaker than they should be. As if he has just run a marathon. Perhaps, he thinks, he has.
“Yes,” Toshiko says. “Trees, birds, insects, the whole lot. None of our equipment or the outside world was being picked up at all.”
“How is that possible?” Owen asks.
“Don’t know,” Toshiko says. “That thing must have done something.”
“Pulling through,” Jack whispers, and only realises he has spoken aloud when they all turn to him.
“What’s that?” Gwen asks, frowning.
“It was trying to pull me through,” Jack says, getting up again. He is tired, but he needs to pace. “That’s not possible, that shouldn’t be possible. They don’t take adults!” He knows what the faeries are, he knows their connection to children.
Then he sees the bluebell on the desk. It was not there a moment ago.
Unlike most adults, he does not wear a shield of disbelief. And yet, his age should be protection. He cannot be turned. He is not Chosen.
He is not Chosen.
But faeriekind does not need reasons to meddle with human lives.
Jack sends the team home. Inside him, like a hard kernel or a tumour, is the knowledge that whatever was in the Hub with them, it only wants him. Away from him, the team is safe.
He hopes.
Those hopes are shattered when, half an hour later, he receives a call from a frantic Toshiko. There are bluebells in her house, she cries, bluebells all over her furniture, in her kitchen, her living room, her bedroom.
Ten minutes after that, a call from Owen. He curses a lot more than Toshiko, but relays the same message.
And five minutes after, Gwen. The same.
“Why are you doing this?” Jack whispers.
“Who are you?” a childish voice asks him.
“Jack Harkness,” he says, and this time adds, “That’s who I am now. I don’t remember who I used to be.”
A pause. “Not a lie,” the voice concedes.
“I know I’m not him,” Jack says desperately. “But that’s all I know how to be now.”
“Not a lie,” the voice says again. “Jack Harkness. Jack Harkness. Jack Harkness.” A laugh, high and bell-like. This, Jack thinks, must be what Estelle thought of her faeries. This must by what she heard. It is impossible to believe such a sound could be made by a creature of evil.
“Jack Harkness,” he repeats. “Who are you?”
“Not them,” the voice says.
“You’re not the ones that took Jasmine,” Jack says. He suddenly knows that this is the truth, but the depth of his belief takes him by surprise. He is immediately suspicious of how easily he believes that fact.
“No need for the girl-child,” the voice says dismissively. Out of the corner of his eye, Jack thinks he sees light. Light, and a figure in the light.
“Then what do you want?” Jack asks, desperate now to find something to keep his team safe.
The answer, when it comes, is not what he was hoping for.
“You.”
Blink, and the bluebells vanish.
Rhys will wake up the next morning and not remember the bluebells that covered him as he slept. Gwen will explain away her red eyes as the product of a late night. She will feel the distance between her and her loyal boyfriend grow with every lie she is forced to tell him. His love suffocates her in guilt. Only when she leaves the house, stepping out into the crisp morning air, does she finally feel like she can breathe.
Owen wakes from an uneasy sleep. He is curled away from a faceless woman (not Katie), his clothes strewn around her room. He crawls out of bed, his head pounding insistently as he collects his clothes and throws them on. He wakes the woman up before he leaves, not because he cares for her, but because he will not leave her door unlocked behind him. That much is all he is capable of giving her.
Toshiko has spent the night at a hotel. She dreads going home in the morning, considers going straight in to work. But Jack will want to know what has happened, and so she cautiously pushes the door open, half-expecting a faerie to jump out at her. She is greeted instead by a pristine apartment. The faint smell of bluebells hangs in the air, but there are no flowers in sight. She carefully shuts the door again and tries not to shiver all the way to the Hub.
Morning comes to Jack only in the slow progression of a clock’s hands. Time means nothing in the Hub, which sees no light, no seasons. A moment is eternal, and it is in the moment that Jack lives. He has not slept the entire night, and so has felt the bluebells caressing his body. Has felt each petal as it was laid to rest on him.
It does not feel malignant.
He feels like a fish, considering a baited hook.
Slowly, he rises, feeling the bluebell petals slide off him like lovers’ hands. Work, he tells himself. There is work to be done, and no time for distractions.
A whisper of a laugh comes to him on the still air.
“What’s happening, Jack?”
Unsurprisingly, it is Gwen who asks the question. Jack looks at her for a moment, wishing he could understand her. She is too far removed from him. Sometimes he wishes he could close that gap, could relearn what it is these people around him seem to instinctively grasp.
Mostly, he is glad for the distance. Without it, he would have been driven insane long ago.
“Are you asking me to explain the faeries?” Jack asks, looking away from her, to his left. “Sorry. Can’t be done.”
“When I went home, all the flowers had disappeared,” Toshiko says quietly. She is looking down at her Starbucks cup. She has not been able to bring herself to drink so much as a sip. Every time she does, the smell of coffee is replaced by the sweet smell of bluebells. It is only in her mind, she knows it is only in her mind, but she cannot help herself.
“I don’t think it will come after you any more,” Jack says. He is not looking at any of them, fixing his gaze on some far-off spot instead.
“How do you know that?” Owen demands. “Or, more to the point, it came after all of us last night. What about you?”
Jack’s eyes skitter over Owen, never quite landing on him. He feels distant, cut off from his own body. Disconnected. “Bluebells,” he says. “And a conversation.”
“It talked to you?” Gwen asks, eyes widening. She looks like a startled mouse.
“In a manner of speaking,” Jack says, looking once again off to the left.
“Dammit, Jack,” Owen growls. “Can’t you even look at us?”
“Do you want me to?” Jack asks calmly. He cannot feel the emotions he thinks he should. Shock, perhaps, and he tries to analyse himself. Not in the clinical sense of the word. But this will catch up to him later. Perhaps.
“Why wouldn’t we?” Toshiko asks, upset but trying not to show it.
“Yesterday, none of you wanted to look at me,” Jack points out.
“You shouldn’t have given Jasmine up,” Gwen states.
“What else could I do?” Jack asks, eyes fixed on that empty space to his left. Still, he refuses to look at them.
“Something,” Owen says. “Anything else. We could have fought them.”
“They aren’t alien,” Jack says. “They aren’t human. They’re creatures of time and myth, get that through your heads. There’s nothing we can do against them.” His voice drops. “And she wanted to leave. That was the only way we could have kept her, if she’d wanted to stay.”
“Why wouldn’t she have stayed?” Gwen asks in frustration. “She had everything here.”
“Obviously not,” Jack says. “And there’s nothing we can do about it now. Do we have any actual work to do?”
“What about your faerie stalker?” Owen asks.
“It won’t bother any of you again,” Jack says.
“And you?” Toshiko asks pointedly.
“I don’t know,” Jack says. “But really. What’s it going to do?” His lips twist in a mocking smile. “Kill me?”
There are pros and cons to travelling out into the countryside. On the one hand, it is a chance to get away from the Hub and the memory of bluebells. On the other hand, the journey will take them further into faerie domain. Possible faerie domain. They are not everywhere, though some days, it seems like it.
In the end, he decides that they will go after all. It looks like an easy case. A chance for them to feel good about what they do, feel empowered in the wake of their recent helplessness.
Afterwards, Jack will decide that this was not his best idea to date.
“Tell me,” he hisses down at the bastard he’s got pinned. Gun in one hand, knee ready to dig into the open wound at any provocation. It almost scares him how easy it is to slip back into his old role, his old job. It would scare him if he did not have something to do.
A bluebell laugh on the wind as he hot-wires a tractor and crashes it through the wall. Toshiko, beautiful Toshiko, on her knees and bloodied, Gwen and Owen looking half-dead on their feet. It is simplicity itself to cock the gun and fire again, again, again, switching to his handgun when he runs out of ammunition. He can barely hear himself screaming.
He does hear the encouraging voice of the wind.
A last shot. They sprawl there before him, wounded, the fight having left them. Predators turned prey. He wants to kill them, wants them to bleed. With great difficulty, he forces himself not to slit their throats where they lie.
Gwen has been shot. Toshiko has been beaten. Owen is possibly the only one not injured, other than Jack himself. Shock is settling in for all of them, and Jack struggles to keep down the rage as he deals with the incompetent local law enforcement (why didn’t you notice, why didn’t you stop this) and tardy ambulances.
Owen accompanies Gwen in one ambulance. Jack wants to go with Toshiko, but he cannot afford to leave the SUV behind. Instead, he turns his fury into an escort for both ambulances, blazing through the roads at speeds far beyond legal.
Hospital bathrooms are drab and unbelievably repulsive. Jack stands there before the mirror, smelling meat and blood and the stink of fear.
“Jack Harkness,” says the voice.
Jack closes his eyes. “Not now,” he whispers.
“Jack Harkness,” the voice insists. “Do you seek justice?”
Jack’s eyes snap open. He starts to speak, then stops. The pieces fall into place. He knows what is being offered. What he does not know is what his response should be. To refuse is to inflict more suffering on himself, and he has never been a masochist. To accept is to allow something he has spent so long trying to unlearn.
He remembers the slick blood under his fingers, the exact, soft spot to stimulate every pain receptor in the vicinity with the mildest of pressures. He remembers the force with which he’d dug into that yielding flesh. It had been so easy.
“Do you seek justice, Jack Harkness?”
Jack takes a deep breath, staring at the light he can see in the mirror. If he turns, he knows it will vanish. But like this, through a half-glimpse in a mirror, he thinks he can see a face. Blue eyes. Bluebell eyes.
“Yes,” he says.
When the news comes that the cannibals were all found suffocated in their cells, Jack is not surprised. His team is, until further news comes in. They were all found to have bluebell petals stuffed down their throats. In their lungs.
Jack endures the questions he cannot answer. He loves his team dearly, but they refuse to accept that there are some things beyond their ken. Beyond human perception.
He can feel Toshiko’s retreat. His poor girl. She has always sought solace in the safety of numbers. Now, more than ever, their reliability reassures her. She loses herself in her work, and only rarely lifts her head to wonder if she smells bluebells.
Until Mary.
Jack feels the flare of anger burn through him again. Suzie. Toshiko. Why does his team keep betraying him? They’re going, he tells himself morbidly, in the order they were hired. He wonders when it will be Owen’s turn, or Gwen’s.
He sends Mary to the centre of the sun and hears a satisfied trill of laughter.
Suzie. Again.
The Hub is in lockdown and Jack is panicking quietly. He is going to have to have words with Gwen when they get her back. He refuses to think of the alternative. He scripts out her formal reprimand. There is a reason he is the leader. His team cannot keep going behind his back.
“Jack Harkness,” sings that familiar voice. Toshiko and Owen jerk sharply.
“Yes?” he asks.
“Do you seek justice?”
The words die on his tongue. There are so many ways this could go. So many possibilities. So many things to consider. One mistake here could cost him everything.
“Do you seek justice, Jack Harkness?”
He forces out the word. “No.”
Toshiko is able to cobble together a signal that gets them through to Swanson. Jack is in no mood for the little band she gathers to laugh at their predicament. A few biting words about their lack of concern for the fact that there is a serial killer loose on their streets convinces them to work with rather than against Torchwood.
The scent of bluebells follows Jack wherever he goes. He takes to avoiding Toshiko, who cringes every time the scent hits her.
Shooting Suzie does no good. Shooting the Glove does. Jack feels a moment of sick, vindictive pleasure as Suzie dies again.
“I thought the faeries were done with,” Toshiko says.
“With you, yes,” Jack replies after a moment.
“And you didn’t think we should know?” Owen asks angrily.
“There’s nothing you can do about it,” Jack says. “And they won’t bother you.”
“But it’s not safe having them around!” Gwen exclaims.
“Actually,” Jack says thoughtfully. “I think it’s just one.”
“Because that makes it so much better,” Owen says.
Jack shrugs. “It’s definitely from a different clan than those that took Jasmine.” He eyes the wide screen as if it will provide him with the answers he longs for. “Do you know what bluebells mean?”
“Constancy and gratitude,” Toshiko says. Jack slants a surprised look at her and she blushes. “I looked it up after…”
Jack nods slowly. “Either kindness or gratitude. Specifically, a bluebell means you want to say something special.”
“The last I checked,” Owen interjects. “Red roses meant love, not death.”
“Depending on who you ask,” Jack says. “Red roses also signify a job well done.”
The words hang between them heavily.
“I’m sure they thought it was,” Gwen murmurs, finally.
“Well, if a bluebell means saying something special,” Toshiko says. “What’s this faerie trying to say?”
“If we figure that out, we might be able to figure out how to get rid of it,” Gwen says eagerly. Even Owen looks pleased at the prospect.
Jack shakes his head. Once again, they are falling into the trap of believing that the faeries are explicable creatures. He knows that they are not, and that believing they are is the first step to being entrapped by them. “It might have a message for me,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean it’s going to tell me. Or that it’s something I’ll want to hear.”
A chuckle, like a sigh through the trees. The team flinches. Jack doesn’t.
He sees the light more frequently now. Half-glimpses, only peripherally visible. Dots and sparks that spin away in maddening circles when he tries to focus. In the end, he resigns himself to what will happen. As long as his team is safe, it no longer matters.
He seldom sleeps. When he does, he wakes up to a bluebell on his chest. He burned the first one, stamped out the ashes in childish fury. The subsequent ones fare better. In their glass vase they sit beside his bed, never wilting. Drooping towards him. He imagines them brushing his face, soothing him to sleep.
Dangerous, to believe that a faerie might provide comfort.
Even so. Even so.
He gasps to life. There is a Weevil on the ground next to him. Dead. Dead, having torn out his throat. He puts a hand to his neck, touches the freshly-healed wound. His shirt is soaked in blood, but save a small smear on his skin, there is no evidence of the mortal injury.
“Not mortal,” whispers the wind. “Human, but not mortal.”
“Yeah,” Jack says, standing unsteadily. He will have to get the Weevil back to the SUV somehow, without falling over. It will not be easy. He feels drunk. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
A laugh. It sounds friendly. Jack catches himself. That way lies madness.
Strong arms wrap around him from behind. He stiffens, his back arched in panic. It feels like a human body that is pressed up against him. He knows it is not.
“What do you want?” he asks, teetering on the knife-edge of terror.
“You,” the voice replies.
“But why,” he says, and there it is, all that emotion he has not been feeling, all packed into those two little words. He feels like he is standing on a cliff-edge and the rocks are crumbling beneath him. He cannot find the strength to step back. Step back? Into what?
But what else can he do?
He takes a deep breath, shudders, and relaxes all at once into the arms holding him. A breathy chuckle sounds in his ear. Jack closes his eyes and imagines that he can taste sunlight.
Every time he dies and comes up, the faerie returns. At some point, Jack thinks, something will have to give. He has already stepped halfway into the faerie’s trap. The consequences of that decision remain to be seen.
On Christmas Eve, the tightrope snaps.
Jack comes back to life in Toshiko’s car. Gasps in that fatal air, barely manages to get out before he is overwhelmed again. He comes back to life for the second time on the cold, dirty floor.
Toshiko is not happy to hear that John Ellis has decided to kill himself in her car. Jack decides not to tell her that he sat with John while he did so.
“Time-lorn,” the wind advises him.
“So was I,” he says petulantly.
The wind ruffles his hair playfully, snatching away the smell of petrol and replacing it with bluebells. The scent, Jack finds, is oddly comforting.
“Mine,” whispers the wind, and dances away, laughing.
Jack suddenly feels cold.
No one notices anything abnormal about the young man standing by the water tower. He is impeccably dressed in a suit. His skin is fair and his cheeks are pinking in the sun. His dark hair is neatly arranged, short tufts pushed into place. His eyes are clear, pale blue, but in the right light, they seem to darken into the exact shade of a bluebell.
He looks as if he has simply stepped out of the office for lunch.
Jack knows otherwise.
“I thought your kind never showed themselves,” he says, standing exactly five feet away. He cannot bring himself to move closer.
“We prefer not to,” the man says in an eminently normal voice.
“But?” Jack asks, raising an eyebrow.
The man smiles at him, holding out a hand. Such human gestures, Jack thinks. “Jones,” he says. “Ianto Jones. I rather like the name. It has a pleasant sound, does it not? And you are the infamous Captain Jack Harkness.”
If he did not know what this creature was, Jack thinks, he would know whose bed he would be in tonight. As it is -
A wicked smirk curves the man’s - creature’s - Ianto’s lips. “You could join me,” he says. “I would be most amenable.”
“Who even talks like that anymore?” Jack scoffs. He ignores the multitude of meanings that lay hidden in Ianto’s words.
“I do,” Ianto says, and takes a step forward, and another, and another. He is almost exactly the same height as Jack, and his lips are so very close. Jack watches as his eyes shift between ice and bluebell.
“I don’t have time for this,” Jack says. “I really don’t.”
A gossamer touch to his lips. Ianto has not moved. It is like being kissed by music. Jack is not sure he remembers how to breathe. He does not know if it is arousal or terror that clutches his lungs. He suspects it is both.
He blinks, and Ianto is gone.
“I’ll take care of you,” he tells Toshiko, and means it. It is not safe to be a Japanese in Britain during the second World War. She is a decoder, will remain so and will remain under his protection.
He imagines, briefly, having to live through this time period again. Poor Toshiko. How will she manage, without the technological toys she has grown so used to? Without the myriad comforts she is so accustomed to, that she will only notice when they are gone? She will age while he remains, unchanging. A friend, then the son of a friend, looking out for those his father cared for. Estelle, again.
Captain Jack Harkness. The real one. His own identity slips a little further away from him. This is who he wants to be. This brave man who will die tomorrow. Who will save his men and will die tomorrow.
He watches as Captain Harkness walks away with his sweetheart.
“You’re mine,” a voice says petulantly in his ear. He turns, thoroughly unsurprised to find Ianto standing there before him.
“You seem to have decided on that,” he replies coolly.
Bluebell eyes narrow. “Mine,” Ianto pronounces with finality. “Remember that.”
This time, Jack takes Ianto’s hand, unwilling to let the creature loose amongst these people. He pulls Ianto along to a quieter corner of the ballroom. Privacy, of sorts. “You have no claim on me,” he says, intently. (why me why are you so fixated on me what is your problem why can’t your kind ever leave me alone you terrify me)
Ianto smiles through him. Jack can feel his heart thumping violently, a bass drum calling to war. Ianto raises a hand and places it delicately over Jack’s chest.
“You’re interesting,” he informs him. “I’m keeping you.”
“I’m not a toy!” Jack hisses.
“Mine,” Ianto says with conviction, and then his eyes grow arctic. “Don’t let him touch you.” And between one heart-beat and the next, he has vanished.
Jack steps back and takes a quick glance around. He hopes that no one has noticed Ianto’s impromptu disappearing act. He would be hard-pressed to come up with a plausible answer at that particular moment. Who is it that Jack is meant to keep a distance from?
His eyes automatically seek out Captain Harkness. His breath stutters momentarily. No. No. No.
Toshiko. He forces his legs to work. He should find Toshiko.
He dances with Captain Harkness.
He kisses him.
In retrospect, it was a remarkably stupid thing to do.
Owen has opened the Rift.
Owen has opened the Rift and Captain Jack Harkness is dead and Jack is so very tired. The absolute last thing he wants is to climb down into his room and be confronted by bluebells.
They are everywhere. Cascading off his furniture in rivers. The thick, sweet smell of them is slowly strangling him. His room is strangely untouched, otherwise. He was expecting overturned chairs, torn papers, broken trinkets. The aftermath of a tantrum. Instead, he finds bluebells. And in the middle of them, Ianto.
“You let him touch you,” Ianto says, as if speaking to a particularly dim-witted child.
“Yes,” Jack says. This is what he has been waiting for. And now that it has come to this, he finds himself calm. His nerves are settled, quiescent. Anger is a whetstone on which he sharpens his words. “I wanted him to.”
“I told you not to,” Ianto says, his eyes flashing blue fire.
“But I wanted him to,” Jack repeats, and then, deliberately adds. “I wanted him. Unlike you.”
Ianto’s face twists into something unpleasant, and Jack knows that he has made an error. Perhaps even a fatal error. He knows this even before he feels his lungs suddenly contract, feels the air rush out of them, replaced by something thick and heavy and sickeningly sweet.
He gasps back to life with petals in his mouth. Ianto is no longer in the room. More than that, he can no longer feel Ianto’s presence near him, the way it has been for the past six months.
He stumbles to his feet. Looks around. The masses of bluebells have disappeared. So too have the bluebells he has been keeping in the vase. The glass vase stares at him accusingly. He tips the water out onto the floor and overturns the vase.
There is a single bluebell left in the room, on his pillow. He picks it up and examines it. Unlike all the others, this one is a deep, vibrant purple. A purple hyacinth.
“Sorrow,” he murmurs. “A request for forgiveness.”
He places the lonely stalk on his table and climbs into bed. There is an empty space next to him where Ianto used to perch. Used to look over his shoulder and watch what he did. He is rid of Ianto now. He is rid of the faerie now. He may have to pay a further price later, but for now, he is safe.
He closes his eyes. Sleep is a long time coming.
In the second before Owen shoots him, Jack sees something like light behind the younger man.
“No!” he yells, and then the bullet slams into his head and he is incapable of doing anything else.
He comes back to life to find that the team has opened the Rift. Have done the one thing he has always forbidden them from doing. Well, he thinks to himself bitterly. He was only waiting on Owen and Gwen, after all.
But they are alive. They are alive and there are no bluebells anywhere to be found. Jack wonders if Owen knows how close he came to death.
There is no time to think of that now. Now - now, he needs to fix what his team has done.
There is something in the darkness.
This is new.
The blackness rolls away just far enough to reveal Ianto standing before him. His arms are crossed and one foot is tapping on the not-floor in a human gesture of impatience.
“Hi,” Jack says.
“Humans,” Ianto says in a tone of absolute disgust.
“We are,” Jack agrees. He tries to sit up, and then discovers that he does not have a body. He considers that. Dismisses it as unimportant.
What is important is Ianto, who is now looking thoroughly displeased. Jack feels as if he is a puppy who has just soiled the carpet.
“I didn’t have any other choice,” he defends weakly.
“Humans,” Ianto repeats, but this time he sighs. Puppies will do what puppies will do. It’s in their natures. He makes a vague sort of gesture with his hand, and then dissolves into light.
Puppies, after all, can be trained.
The pinpricks of light take a long time to fade. Once they do, the darkness presses in on him again.
Jack wakes up to Gwen’s relieved face. He could swear that she was just kissing him. The initial interest has faded now, though, and he allows but does not reciprocate her desperate hug.
It is difficult, he thinks, to feel affection for one who only recently stood by while you were murdered. Condoned your murder.
For that matter, it is harder still to forgive Owen. He goes through the motions, knowing from experience that it is the only way to force reality into shape. Do something frequently enough and it becomes fact. Believe something and it becomes true. Disbelieve in something and sometimes that is all you need to ward it off, even if it is in fact real.
Disbelief, however, is not always sufficient. This is something Jack knows. Neither is belief always sufficient. This too is something Jack knows.
He holds Owen, lets him sob into his shoulder. This is a man who should have died three days prior, he thinks. Would have died gagging on bluebells. Suffocated to death with no external marks on him. Dead from the inside out.
He lets go of Owen, pats him on the back. Sends the team out for coffees. Gwen is reluctant, but he insists.
Alone in the Hub, he calls out Ianto’s name. There is no response, and Jack feels momentarily foolish.
Then he hears a familiar set of engines, and all else is lost to him.
As he races desperately towards the TARDIS, he smells bluebells on the wind.
two: azaleas and yarrow
Pairing: Jack/Ianto
Rating: NC-17 (for sex and violence)
Warnings: Alternate canon; violent imagery; torture; implications of slavery and Stockholm Syndrome; faerie!Ianto
Summary: The Torchwood team comprises Jack, Owen, Tosh and Gwen. They've just encountered the faeries of Small Worlds. Unfortunately, they've also caught the eye of another type of faerie, and he's rather intrigued by Jack.
The Waters and the Wild
-bluebells and roses-
They take the girl-child with them.
With them the mortals. One. Two. Three. Four.
One.
Not mortal.
Taste the air. Not mortal. And yet human.
Closer. Closer. Breathe.
This one.
This one is intriguing.
Take it.
He has been many people, worn many faces through a long lifetime. At the moment, he is Captain Jack Harkness, who has once lost good men and is now losing more. This time, he knows it is his fault.
His team refuses to look at him as they return to the SUV. The girl’s mother has been Retconned, will never remember the awful truth of what happened to her daughter and family. Her mind will build reasons, will create a truth that is palatable to her.
This is how the human mind works. It will always surprise him with its resilience.
“What else could I do?” he demands.
Silence. He expects it, and yet it hurts him to the quick.
What else could I do, he repeats silently. One girl for the world. One girl who wanted to leave. They could never have taken her otherwise.
When they return to the Hub, the team exits the SUV in sullen silence, still refusing to look at him. Captain Jack Harkness sits in the empty vehicle, slowly losing his armour. It is Jack who finally leaves, finally makes his way down to the Hub. For the first time in years, he is not looking forward to returning.
He watches as Toshiko and Owen confer by her workstation. He suspects he knows what they are speaking of. He knows he does not want to hear it. They pack their bags, call up to Gwen. She exits from the conference room, mouth set in a grim line.
What else could I do, Jack wonders. It has been a long time since he has felt so betrayed. By his team. By himself. There is, he thinks, little difference between the two. One defines the other too completely.
He does not remember what it is to be himself.
They walk towards him. Or not. They walk towards the exit, which happens to be in line with him. Jack looks at them and pretends that they are looking back. That they are meeting his eye, that they understand. Then he steps aside so that they will not have to detour around him. If they wish to pretend he does not exist, who is he to stand in their way?
“Who are you?” someone asks. The voice sounds like it is dyed with wind.
Jack freezes. His team whirls.
(Suddenly, he is being acknowledged.)
“What was that?” Gwen demands.
“Who are you?” the voice repeats. The air is suddenly thick with the scent of flowers. It does not smell like roses.
Jack swallows. “Who wants to know?” he asks, stepping away from the team. (Away from them, don’t hurt them, not them.)
“Me-I-we,” the voice sings, and it is suddenly a multitude of voices and Jack winces at the way the sound tears at his ears. “Who are you? Who-are-you-who-are-you-who-are-you -”
“Captain Jack Harkness,” he says with a confidence he doesn’t feel. The voices fall abruptly silent.
“Jack,” Toshiko says urgently. She looks terrified as she looks at her computer screen. When, Jack wonders, had she gotten over there? “I’m registering an anomaly here in the Hub. According to the monitors, we’re standing in a forest.”
Jack swallows. “Who are you?” he asks. “What do you want? You’ve got the girl, what more do you want?”
A laugh, like an eagle cresting through sunlight. “They took the girl-child,” the voice sing-songs. “Took her away to dance with them.”
Jack moves further away from the team, feeling somehow that the heavy presence is following him. “You’re saying you’re not one of them?” he asks sceptically. Get out, he thinks desperately at his team. Why are you still here?
“Noooo,” the voice drawls. Jack feels abruptly like he is talking to a five-year-old. A five-year-old who could kill him where he stands. Might even be able to make it stick.
“Then who are you?” he asks.
“Who are you?” the voice replies.
“I’ve told you,” Jack says. “Captain Jack Harkness.”
“Liar,” the voice accuses him.
“That’s who I am,” he maintains, feeling icy fear trickle through his stomach. He wants an alien. He wants a Slitheen. He wants a Weevil. He wants something tangible he can fight. He wants something he understands.
“Liar,” the voice repeats, and this time it’s changed. It sounds adult. Male. It still sounds like it is accented with wind and water.
“This is who I am,” Jack repeats with conviction.
The air thickens around him. He can’t breathe for the smell of flowers. Then there is something in his throat and his lungs and then he simply can’t breathe at all.
The last thing he sees before he falls into blackness is the vague outline of a face, shimmering in ghostly light.
Jack gasps back into life surrounded by his team. Two of said team are looking like they’ve seen a ghost. They aren’t, he thinks fuzzily, too far off. Gwen helps him sit up and for once, he is thankful that at least one of them knows his secret.
“You were dead,” Owen says, jabbing a finger towards him. “You were dead. You weren’t breathing. You had no pulse.”
Jack tries to speak and finds himself gagging on petals. He shakes Gwen off, turns on his side, spits them out. Blue, but ripped as they are, he cannot tell what flowers they came from. “Accident,” he says shortly, pulling himself up. “Long ago. Short version is that I can’t die. Just doesn’t stick.”
“You can’t die,” Owen repeats in disbelief.
“Seriously?” Toshiko asks, eyes wide.
“It’s true,” Gwen says. “I saw Suzie shoot him in the head. Also saw him get up after that.”
Jack takes a deep breath. The only flowers he smells comes from the petals he has spit out. Sweet and cloying, but now faint. The heavy presence has vanished.
“What happened?” he asks, not quite meeting anyone’s eyes.
Toshiko shakes her head. “You just - started gasping,” she says.
“Mouth wide open,” Owen adds, apparently recovering. “Kind of unattractive.”
“Not what I hear from most people,” Jack says, brushing off his coat, avoiding Gwen’s solicitous touches. It takes a moment for his meaning to dawn on Owen, who then gives him the most disgusted look he can muster.
“And then you collapsed,” Toshiko says. “The wind stopped and we were able to get to you.”
“Wind?” Jack asks.
“Didn’t you feel it?” Gwen asks incredulously. “There was this amazingly strong wind blowing around. We couldn’t move against it.”
“His coat wasn’t moving,” Owen says. “I don’t think he felt it at all.” He looks expectantly at Jack.
Jack feels adrift, cut off from what he knows and expects. Perhaps, he thinks, the shock of a (sort of) immortal leader will set in later. After they have dealt with the faeries. Again.
He wants to rest. He wants sleep. He wants to not dream of roses and tunnels, of the creaking sway of railway tracks, their lullaby rhythm.
Rock-a-bye baby on the tree-top
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock
When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall
And down will come baby, cradle and all.
“Jack?” Gwen asks, giving him a strange look. They all are, actually, and that is when he realises that he has been singing the lullaby under his breath.
“Ever wonder about that song?” he asks. “Kind of morbid for a lullaby, isn’t it?”
“What’re you talking about?” Toshiko asks.
“Never mind,” Jack says. “Toshiko, did you get anything from the monitors?”
She looks glad to be of use, falling back instantly into a professional demeanour. Owen should take lessons from her. “As I mentioned earlier,” she says. “The monitors were registering the forest here in the Hub.”
“The forest?” Jack asks, sitting down. His legs suddenly feel weaker than they should be. As if he has just run a marathon. Perhaps, he thinks, he has.
“Yes,” Toshiko says. “Trees, birds, insects, the whole lot. None of our equipment or the outside world was being picked up at all.”
“How is that possible?” Owen asks.
“Don’t know,” Toshiko says. “That thing must have done something.”
“Pulling through,” Jack whispers, and only realises he has spoken aloud when they all turn to him.
“What’s that?” Gwen asks, frowning.
“It was trying to pull me through,” Jack says, getting up again. He is tired, but he needs to pace. “That’s not possible, that shouldn’t be possible. They don’t take adults!” He knows what the faeries are, he knows their connection to children.
Then he sees the bluebell on the desk. It was not there a moment ago.
Unlike most adults, he does not wear a shield of disbelief. And yet, his age should be protection. He cannot be turned. He is not Chosen.
He is not Chosen.
But faeriekind does not need reasons to meddle with human lives.
Jack sends the team home. Inside him, like a hard kernel or a tumour, is the knowledge that whatever was in the Hub with them, it only wants him. Away from him, the team is safe.
He hopes.
Those hopes are shattered when, half an hour later, he receives a call from a frantic Toshiko. There are bluebells in her house, she cries, bluebells all over her furniture, in her kitchen, her living room, her bedroom.
Ten minutes after that, a call from Owen. He curses a lot more than Toshiko, but relays the same message.
And five minutes after, Gwen. The same.
“Why are you doing this?” Jack whispers.
“Who are you?” a childish voice asks him.
“Jack Harkness,” he says, and this time adds, “That’s who I am now. I don’t remember who I used to be.”
A pause. “Not a lie,” the voice concedes.
“I know I’m not him,” Jack says desperately. “But that’s all I know how to be now.”
“Not a lie,” the voice says again. “Jack Harkness. Jack Harkness. Jack Harkness.” A laugh, high and bell-like. This, Jack thinks, must be what Estelle thought of her faeries. This must by what she heard. It is impossible to believe such a sound could be made by a creature of evil.
“Jack Harkness,” he repeats. “Who are you?”
“Not them,” the voice says.
“You’re not the ones that took Jasmine,” Jack says. He suddenly knows that this is the truth, but the depth of his belief takes him by surprise. He is immediately suspicious of how easily he believes that fact.
“No need for the girl-child,” the voice says dismissively. Out of the corner of his eye, Jack thinks he sees light. Light, and a figure in the light.
“Then what do you want?” Jack asks, desperate now to find something to keep his team safe.
The answer, when it comes, is not what he was hoping for.
“You.”
Blink, and the bluebells vanish.
Rhys will wake up the next morning and not remember the bluebells that covered him as he slept. Gwen will explain away her red eyes as the product of a late night. She will feel the distance between her and her loyal boyfriend grow with every lie she is forced to tell him. His love suffocates her in guilt. Only when she leaves the house, stepping out into the crisp morning air, does she finally feel like she can breathe.
Owen wakes from an uneasy sleep. He is curled away from a faceless woman (not Katie), his clothes strewn around her room. He crawls out of bed, his head pounding insistently as he collects his clothes and throws them on. He wakes the woman up before he leaves, not because he cares for her, but because he will not leave her door unlocked behind him. That much is all he is capable of giving her.
Toshiko has spent the night at a hotel. She dreads going home in the morning, considers going straight in to work. But Jack will want to know what has happened, and so she cautiously pushes the door open, half-expecting a faerie to jump out at her. She is greeted instead by a pristine apartment. The faint smell of bluebells hangs in the air, but there are no flowers in sight. She carefully shuts the door again and tries not to shiver all the way to the Hub.
Morning comes to Jack only in the slow progression of a clock’s hands. Time means nothing in the Hub, which sees no light, no seasons. A moment is eternal, and it is in the moment that Jack lives. He has not slept the entire night, and so has felt the bluebells caressing his body. Has felt each petal as it was laid to rest on him.
It does not feel malignant.
He feels like a fish, considering a baited hook.
Slowly, he rises, feeling the bluebell petals slide off him like lovers’ hands. Work, he tells himself. There is work to be done, and no time for distractions.
A whisper of a laugh comes to him on the still air.
“What’s happening, Jack?”
Unsurprisingly, it is Gwen who asks the question. Jack looks at her for a moment, wishing he could understand her. She is too far removed from him. Sometimes he wishes he could close that gap, could relearn what it is these people around him seem to instinctively grasp.
Mostly, he is glad for the distance. Without it, he would have been driven insane long ago.
“Are you asking me to explain the faeries?” Jack asks, looking away from her, to his left. “Sorry. Can’t be done.”
“When I went home, all the flowers had disappeared,” Toshiko says quietly. She is looking down at her Starbucks cup. She has not been able to bring herself to drink so much as a sip. Every time she does, the smell of coffee is replaced by the sweet smell of bluebells. It is only in her mind, she knows it is only in her mind, but she cannot help herself.
“I don’t think it will come after you any more,” Jack says. He is not looking at any of them, fixing his gaze on some far-off spot instead.
“How do you know that?” Owen demands. “Or, more to the point, it came after all of us last night. What about you?”
Jack’s eyes skitter over Owen, never quite landing on him. He feels distant, cut off from his own body. Disconnected. “Bluebells,” he says. “And a conversation.”
“It talked to you?” Gwen asks, eyes widening. She looks like a startled mouse.
“In a manner of speaking,” Jack says, looking once again off to the left.
“Dammit, Jack,” Owen growls. “Can’t you even look at us?”
“Do you want me to?” Jack asks calmly. He cannot feel the emotions he thinks he should. Shock, perhaps, and he tries to analyse himself. Not in the clinical sense of the word. But this will catch up to him later. Perhaps.
“Why wouldn’t we?” Toshiko asks, upset but trying not to show it.
“Yesterday, none of you wanted to look at me,” Jack points out.
“You shouldn’t have given Jasmine up,” Gwen states.
“What else could I do?” Jack asks, eyes fixed on that empty space to his left. Still, he refuses to look at them.
“Something,” Owen says. “Anything else. We could have fought them.”
“They aren’t alien,” Jack says. “They aren’t human. They’re creatures of time and myth, get that through your heads. There’s nothing we can do against them.” His voice drops. “And she wanted to leave. That was the only way we could have kept her, if she’d wanted to stay.”
“Why wouldn’t she have stayed?” Gwen asks in frustration. “She had everything here.”
“Obviously not,” Jack says. “And there’s nothing we can do about it now. Do we have any actual work to do?”
“What about your faerie stalker?” Owen asks.
“It won’t bother any of you again,” Jack says.
“And you?” Toshiko asks pointedly.
“I don’t know,” Jack says. “But really. What’s it going to do?” His lips twist in a mocking smile. “Kill me?”
There are pros and cons to travelling out into the countryside. On the one hand, it is a chance to get away from the Hub and the memory of bluebells. On the other hand, the journey will take them further into faerie domain. Possible faerie domain. They are not everywhere, though some days, it seems like it.
In the end, he decides that they will go after all. It looks like an easy case. A chance for them to feel good about what they do, feel empowered in the wake of their recent helplessness.
Afterwards, Jack will decide that this was not his best idea to date.
“Tell me,” he hisses down at the bastard he’s got pinned. Gun in one hand, knee ready to dig into the open wound at any provocation. It almost scares him how easy it is to slip back into his old role, his old job. It would scare him if he did not have something to do.
A bluebell laugh on the wind as he hot-wires a tractor and crashes it through the wall. Toshiko, beautiful Toshiko, on her knees and bloodied, Gwen and Owen looking half-dead on their feet. It is simplicity itself to cock the gun and fire again, again, again, switching to his handgun when he runs out of ammunition. He can barely hear himself screaming.
He does hear the encouraging voice of the wind.
A last shot. They sprawl there before him, wounded, the fight having left them. Predators turned prey. He wants to kill them, wants them to bleed. With great difficulty, he forces himself not to slit their throats where they lie.
Gwen has been shot. Toshiko has been beaten. Owen is possibly the only one not injured, other than Jack himself. Shock is settling in for all of them, and Jack struggles to keep down the rage as he deals with the incompetent local law enforcement (why didn’t you notice, why didn’t you stop this) and tardy ambulances.
Owen accompanies Gwen in one ambulance. Jack wants to go with Toshiko, but he cannot afford to leave the SUV behind. Instead, he turns his fury into an escort for both ambulances, blazing through the roads at speeds far beyond legal.
Hospital bathrooms are drab and unbelievably repulsive. Jack stands there before the mirror, smelling meat and blood and the stink of fear.
“Jack Harkness,” says the voice.
Jack closes his eyes. “Not now,” he whispers.
“Jack Harkness,” the voice insists. “Do you seek justice?”
Jack’s eyes snap open. He starts to speak, then stops. The pieces fall into place. He knows what is being offered. What he does not know is what his response should be. To refuse is to inflict more suffering on himself, and he has never been a masochist. To accept is to allow something he has spent so long trying to unlearn.
He remembers the slick blood under his fingers, the exact, soft spot to stimulate every pain receptor in the vicinity with the mildest of pressures. He remembers the force with which he’d dug into that yielding flesh. It had been so easy.
“Do you seek justice, Jack Harkness?”
Jack takes a deep breath, staring at the light he can see in the mirror. If he turns, he knows it will vanish. But like this, through a half-glimpse in a mirror, he thinks he can see a face. Blue eyes. Bluebell eyes.
“Yes,” he says.
When the news comes that the cannibals were all found suffocated in their cells, Jack is not surprised. His team is, until further news comes in. They were all found to have bluebell petals stuffed down their throats. In their lungs.
Jack endures the questions he cannot answer. He loves his team dearly, but they refuse to accept that there are some things beyond their ken. Beyond human perception.
He can feel Toshiko’s retreat. His poor girl. She has always sought solace in the safety of numbers. Now, more than ever, their reliability reassures her. She loses herself in her work, and only rarely lifts her head to wonder if she smells bluebells.
Until Mary.
Jack feels the flare of anger burn through him again. Suzie. Toshiko. Why does his team keep betraying him? They’re going, he tells himself morbidly, in the order they were hired. He wonders when it will be Owen’s turn, or Gwen’s.
He sends Mary to the centre of the sun and hears a satisfied trill of laughter.
Suzie. Again.
The Hub is in lockdown and Jack is panicking quietly. He is going to have to have words with Gwen when they get her back. He refuses to think of the alternative. He scripts out her formal reprimand. There is a reason he is the leader. His team cannot keep going behind his back.
“Jack Harkness,” sings that familiar voice. Toshiko and Owen jerk sharply.
“Yes?” he asks.
“Do you seek justice?”
The words die on his tongue. There are so many ways this could go. So many possibilities. So many things to consider. One mistake here could cost him everything.
“Do you seek justice, Jack Harkness?”
He forces out the word. “No.”
Toshiko is able to cobble together a signal that gets them through to Swanson. Jack is in no mood for the little band she gathers to laugh at their predicament. A few biting words about their lack of concern for the fact that there is a serial killer loose on their streets convinces them to work with rather than against Torchwood.
The scent of bluebells follows Jack wherever he goes. He takes to avoiding Toshiko, who cringes every time the scent hits her.
Shooting Suzie does no good. Shooting the Glove does. Jack feels a moment of sick, vindictive pleasure as Suzie dies again.
“I thought the faeries were done with,” Toshiko says.
“With you, yes,” Jack replies after a moment.
“And you didn’t think we should know?” Owen asks angrily.
“There’s nothing you can do about it,” Jack says. “And they won’t bother you.”
“But it’s not safe having them around!” Gwen exclaims.
“Actually,” Jack says thoughtfully. “I think it’s just one.”
“Because that makes it so much better,” Owen says.
Jack shrugs. “It’s definitely from a different clan than those that took Jasmine.” He eyes the wide screen as if it will provide him with the answers he longs for. “Do you know what bluebells mean?”
“Constancy and gratitude,” Toshiko says. Jack slants a surprised look at her and she blushes. “I looked it up after…”
Jack nods slowly. “Either kindness or gratitude. Specifically, a bluebell means you want to say something special.”
“The last I checked,” Owen interjects. “Red roses meant love, not death.”
“Depending on who you ask,” Jack says. “Red roses also signify a job well done.”
The words hang between them heavily.
“I’m sure they thought it was,” Gwen murmurs, finally.
“Well, if a bluebell means saying something special,” Toshiko says. “What’s this faerie trying to say?”
“If we figure that out, we might be able to figure out how to get rid of it,” Gwen says eagerly. Even Owen looks pleased at the prospect.
Jack shakes his head. Once again, they are falling into the trap of believing that the faeries are explicable creatures. He knows that they are not, and that believing they are is the first step to being entrapped by them. “It might have a message for me,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean it’s going to tell me. Or that it’s something I’ll want to hear.”
A chuckle, like a sigh through the trees. The team flinches. Jack doesn’t.
He sees the light more frequently now. Half-glimpses, only peripherally visible. Dots and sparks that spin away in maddening circles when he tries to focus. In the end, he resigns himself to what will happen. As long as his team is safe, it no longer matters.
He seldom sleeps. When he does, he wakes up to a bluebell on his chest. He burned the first one, stamped out the ashes in childish fury. The subsequent ones fare better. In their glass vase they sit beside his bed, never wilting. Drooping towards him. He imagines them brushing his face, soothing him to sleep.
Dangerous, to believe that a faerie might provide comfort.
Even so. Even so.
He gasps to life. There is a Weevil on the ground next to him. Dead. Dead, having torn out his throat. He puts a hand to his neck, touches the freshly-healed wound. His shirt is soaked in blood, but save a small smear on his skin, there is no evidence of the mortal injury.
“Not mortal,” whispers the wind. “Human, but not mortal.”
“Yeah,” Jack says, standing unsteadily. He will have to get the Weevil back to the SUV somehow, without falling over. It will not be easy. He feels drunk. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
A laugh. It sounds friendly. Jack catches himself. That way lies madness.
Strong arms wrap around him from behind. He stiffens, his back arched in panic. It feels like a human body that is pressed up against him. He knows it is not.
“What do you want?” he asks, teetering on the knife-edge of terror.
“You,” the voice replies.
“But why,” he says, and there it is, all that emotion he has not been feeling, all packed into those two little words. He feels like he is standing on a cliff-edge and the rocks are crumbling beneath him. He cannot find the strength to step back. Step back? Into what?
But what else can he do?
He takes a deep breath, shudders, and relaxes all at once into the arms holding him. A breathy chuckle sounds in his ear. Jack closes his eyes and imagines that he can taste sunlight.
Every time he dies and comes up, the faerie returns. At some point, Jack thinks, something will have to give. He has already stepped halfway into the faerie’s trap. The consequences of that decision remain to be seen.
On Christmas Eve, the tightrope snaps.
Jack comes back to life in Toshiko’s car. Gasps in that fatal air, barely manages to get out before he is overwhelmed again. He comes back to life for the second time on the cold, dirty floor.
Toshiko is not happy to hear that John Ellis has decided to kill himself in her car. Jack decides not to tell her that he sat with John while he did so.
“Time-lorn,” the wind advises him.
“So was I,” he says petulantly.
The wind ruffles his hair playfully, snatching away the smell of petrol and replacing it with bluebells. The scent, Jack finds, is oddly comforting.
“Mine,” whispers the wind, and dances away, laughing.
Jack suddenly feels cold.
No one notices anything abnormal about the young man standing by the water tower. He is impeccably dressed in a suit. His skin is fair and his cheeks are pinking in the sun. His dark hair is neatly arranged, short tufts pushed into place. His eyes are clear, pale blue, but in the right light, they seem to darken into the exact shade of a bluebell.
He looks as if he has simply stepped out of the office for lunch.
Jack knows otherwise.
“I thought your kind never showed themselves,” he says, standing exactly five feet away. He cannot bring himself to move closer.
“We prefer not to,” the man says in an eminently normal voice.
“But?” Jack asks, raising an eyebrow.
The man smiles at him, holding out a hand. Such human gestures, Jack thinks. “Jones,” he says. “Ianto Jones. I rather like the name. It has a pleasant sound, does it not? And you are the infamous Captain Jack Harkness.”
If he did not know what this creature was, Jack thinks, he would know whose bed he would be in tonight. As it is -
A wicked smirk curves the man’s - creature’s - Ianto’s lips. “You could join me,” he says. “I would be most amenable.”
“Who even talks like that anymore?” Jack scoffs. He ignores the multitude of meanings that lay hidden in Ianto’s words.
“I do,” Ianto says, and takes a step forward, and another, and another. He is almost exactly the same height as Jack, and his lips are so very close. Jack watches as his eyes shift between ice and bluebell.
“I don’t have time for this,” Jack says. “I really don’t.”
A gossamer touch to his lips. Ianto has not moved. It is like being kissed by music. Jack is not sure he remembers how to breathe. He does not know if it is arousal or terror that clutches his lungs. He suspects it is both.
He blinks, and Ianto is gone.
“I’ll take care of you,” he tells Toshiko, and means it. It is not safe to be a Japanese in Britain during the second World War. She is a decoder, will remain so and will remain under his protection.
He imagines, briefly, having to live through this time period again. Poor Toshiko. How will she manage, without the technological toys she has grown so used to? Without the myriad comforts she is so accustomed to, that she will only notice when they are gone? She will age while he remains, unchanging. A friend, then the son of a friend, looking out for those his father cared for. Estelle, again.
Captain Jack Harkness. The real one. His own identity slips a little further away from him. This is who he wants to be. This brave man who will die tomorrow. Who will save his men and will die tomorrow.
He watches as Captain Harkness walks away with his sweetheart.
“You’re mine,” a voice says petulantly in his ear. He turns, thoroughly unsurprised to find Ianto standing there before him.
“You seem to have decided on that,” he replies coolly.
Bluebell eyes narrow. “Mine,” Ianto pronounces with finality. “Remember that.”
This time, Jack takes Ianto’s hand, unwilling to let the creature loose amongst these people. He pulls Ianto along to a quieter corner of the ballroom. Privacy, of sorts. “You have no claim on me,” he says, intently. (why me why are you so fixated on me what is your problem why can’t your kind ever leave me alone you terrify me)
Ianto smiles through him. Jack can feel his heart thumping violently, a bass drum calling to war. Ianto raises a hand and places it delicately over Jack’s chest.
“You’re interesting,” he informs him. “I’m keeping you.”
“I’m not a toy!” Jack hisses.
“Mine,” Ianto says with conviction, and then his eyes grow arctic. “Don’t let him touch you.” And between one heart-beat and the next, he has vanished.
Jack steps back and takes a quick glance around. He hopes that no one has noticed Ianto’s impromptu disappearing act. He would be hard-pressed to come up with a plausible answer at that particular moment. Who is it that Jack is meant to keep a distance from?
His eyes automatically seek out Captain Harkness. His breath stutters momentarily. No. No. No.
Toshiko. He forces his legs to work. He should find Toshiko.
He dances with Captain Harkness.
He kisses him.
In retrospect, it was a remarkably stupid thing to do.
Owen has opened the Rift.
Owen has opened the Rift and Captain Jack Harkness is dead and Jack is so very tired. The absolute last thing he wants is to climb down into his room and be confronted by bluebells.
They are everywhere. Cascading off his furniture in rivers. The thick, sweet smell of them is slowly strangling him. His room is strangely untouched, otherwise. He was expecting overturned chairs, torn papers, broken trinkets. The aftermath of a tantrum. Instead, he finds bluebells. And in the middle of them, Ianto.
“You let him touch you,” Ianto says, as if speaking to a particularly dim-witted child.
“Yes,” Jack says. This is what he has been waiting for. And now that it has come to this, he finds himself calm. His nerves are settled, quiescent. Anger is a whetstone on which he sharpens his words. “I wanted him to.”
“I told you not to,” Ianto says, his eyes flashing blue fire.
“But I wanted him to,” Jack repeats, and then, deliberately adds. “I wanted him. Unlike you.”
Ianto’s face twists into something unpleasant, and Jack knows that he has made an error. Perhaps even a fatal error. He knows this even before he feels his lungs suddenly contract, feels the air rush out of them, replaced by something thick and heavy and sickeningly sweet.
He gasps back to life with petals in his mouth. Ianto is no longer in the room. More than that, he can no longer feel Ianto’s presence near him, the way it has been for the past six months.
He stumbles to his feet. Looks around. The masses of bluebells have disappeared. So too have the bluebells he has been keeping in the vase. The glass vase stares at him accusingly. He tips the water out onto the floor and overturns the vase.
There is a single bluebell left in the room, on his pillow. He picks it up and examines it. Unlike all the others, this one is a deep, vibrant purple. A purple hyacinth.
“Sorrow,” he murmurs. “A request for forgiveness.”
He places the lonely stalk on his table and climbs into bed. There is an empty space next to him where Ianto used to perch. Used to look over his shoulder and watch what he did. He is rid of Ianto now. He is rid of the faerie now. He may have to pay a further price later, but for now, he is safe.
He closes his eyes. Sleep is a long time coming.
In the second before Owen shoots him, Jack sees something like light behind the younger man.
“No!” he yells, and then the bullet slams into his head and he is incapable of doing anything else.
He comes back to life to find that the team has opened the Rift. Have done the one thing he has always forbidden them from doing. Well, he thinks to himself bitterly. He was only waiting on Owen and Gwen, after all.
But they are alive. They are alive and there are no bluebells anywhere to be found. Jack wonders if Owen knows how close he came to death.
There is no time to think of that now. Now - now, he needs to fix what his team has done.
There is something in the darkness.
This is new.
The blackness rolls away just far enough to reveal Ianto standing before him. His arms are crossed and one foot is tapping on the not-floor in a human gesture of impatience.
“Hi,” Jack says.
“Humans,” Ianto says in a tone of absolute disgust.
“We are,” Jack agrees. He tries to sit up, and then discovers that he does not have a body. He considers that. Dismisses it as unimportant.
What is important is Ianto, who is now looking thoroughly displeased. Jack feels as if he is a puppy who has just soiled the carpet.
“I didn’t have any other choice,” he defends weakly.
“Humans,” Ianto repeats, but this time he sighs. Puppies will do what puppies will do. It’s in their natures. He makes a vague sort of gesture with his hand, and then dissolves into light.
Puppies, after all, can be trained.
The pinpricks of light take a long time to fade. Once they do, the darkness presses in on him again.
Jack wakes up to Gwen’s relieved face. He could swear that she was just kissing him. The initial interest has faded now, though, and he allows but does not reciprocate her desperate hug.
It is difficult, he thinks, to feel affection for one who only recently stood by while you were murdered. Condoned your murder.
For that matter, it is harder still to forgive Owen. He goes through the motions, knowing from experience that it is the only way to force reality into shape. Do something frequently enough and it becomes fact. Believe something and it becomes true. Disbelieve in something and sometimes that is all you need to ward it off, even if it is in fact real.
Disbelief, however, is not always sufficient. This is something Jack knows. Neither is belief always sufficient. This too is something Jack knows.
He holds Owen, lets him sob into his shoulder. This is a man who should have died three days prior, he thinks. Would have died gagging on bluebells. Suffocated to death with no external marks on him. Dead from the inside out.
He lets go of Owen, pats him on the back. Sends the team out for coffees. Gwen is reluctant, but he insists.
Alone in the Hub, he calls out Ianto’s name. There is no response, and Jack feels momentarily foolish.
Then he hears a familiar set of engines, and all else is lost to him.
As he races desperately towards the TARDIS, he smells bluebells on the wind.
two: azaleas and yarrow