Pray Me Home (1/5)

[starandrea]

Yay! Wait, boo! ::frowns:: This is a hard story to introduce, so first I'll say that I haven't totally (even temporarily) been distracted by books. I'm working on Team Building with Jack Landors over at pr_au100, and many thanks to lttledvl and shurimon for inspiring the story's continuation with their challenge ♥

Then there's this ^_^ I take zero responsibility for the premise of this story, which is an amazing (-ly depressing) SPD AU by scifislasher called Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow. I'm sorry to say that reading that story probably won't make this one make any more sense, and that is completely on me. But I can't get her universe out of my head, and she has kindly given me permission to share the results ♥ Love!

Pray Me Home (1/5)
by *Andrea

It was another two days before he got up the courage to call Sky's mom. Catherine had always loved him--but then, so had Sky, and look how that had turned out. She had let this happen, and that more than anything made him wary of the reception he'd find at the Tate house. But he couldn't let it go.

His Sky was dead, and damned if he'd accept it just because they told him to.

Catherine didn't answer the phone. She didn't return his call, either, and the whole thing made him irrationally paranoid. He'd left all his new friends behind at Nebula, and the old ones were either gone or under orders not to talk to him. It was almost like he was the one who didn't exist anymore.

She opened the door for him when he showed up on her front steps the next day, and that nearly made it worth the trip right there. "Hello," she said, with a casual friendliness that made him want to look over his shoulder. "Can I help you?"

"Hey," he said, lifting his hand a little in greeting. "I'm, uh, Jack? Jack Landors?"

A brief smile touched her face, though she didn't step away from the door. "Don't be silly, Jack. Of course I remember you."

"Ah," he said, sticking his hands back in his pockets. "Well, that makes one of you, then."

Her smile fell away, and he saw her fingers whiten on the door. "I can't talk about the lawsuit, Jack. You know that."

He blinked. "Lawsuit? What lawsuit?"

Catherine gave him a look so much like Sky's that it made his heart ache. "I don't know, Jack; what possible reason could I have for suing the organization that took my son from me?"

"Oh," he said. His hand went to his chest, an involuntary reaction to the spasm that felt like something inside unknotting. "You didn't know."

She stared at him, and he felt like the lowest creature on Earth. "God, I'm sorry," he blurted out, the words tumbling over each other. "I'm so sorry. I just found out; I would have come sooner... god.

"We didn't mean it, Catherine, you have to believe me." He was horrified to feel tears in his eyes. "We never meant for any of this to happen."

"He was only seventeen," she said softly.

He lowered his head, pressing his knuckles to his mouth, trying to breathe. To his surprise, he felt a hand squeeze his shoulder. "You should come in," she murmured. "Come inside, Jack."

She made tea while he prowled around the kitchen, trying to get himself under control. He couldn't count the number of times he'd been here, and never once had he thought it might come to this: that he would ever be here without Sky, that he would have to keep it a secret, that he and Catherine would be afraid of being seen together. She was his boyfriend's mom. They were the closest thing he had to family--and he'd already lost one of them.

"When did you get back?" she asked at last, pulling a couple of mugs out of the cupboard.

"Almost a week ago," he muttered. He couldn't stop moving, restless with this sudden freedom. There was no one listening now but her, and she knew. She understood.

"Saw him the first day," he added. "No one told me, Catherine; I swear. I had no idea."

"I'm sorry," she said, surprising him. "That must have been...

She trailed off, then said quietly, "They posted a notification to our account. Like it was some kind of... 'Schuyler Tate, medical intervention. Cadet's mental imbalance has been--'"

The metal teapot clattered onto the stove, and he looked over in time to see her shake her head. "When did we start treating emotions like diseases, Jack? When was that, because the road to hell..."

"Begins with good intentions," he whispered. Clearing his throat, all he could do was stare helplessly at her. "I'm so sorry. If we'd ever thought anything like this could happen..."

"This isn't your fault," she said. She was sharp, suddenly, decisive even in her forgiveness. "He wouldn't have let this happen either, not if they'd given him any chance." She looked up, catching his eye as she turned. "And he wouldn't have let you go."

Jack swallowed, eyes hot and yet another apology on his tongue.

"He loved you," Catherine told him. "He would never have let you go just to get the doctors off his back."

"Maybe he should have," he said, the words catching on the rough edges of his throat. "Then at least he'd still be around to for me to yell at."

Her eyes smiled, the tiniest lightening of her expression as she turned back to the counter and picked up their mugs. "He would have quit, Jack. He would have quit for you. The fact that they didn't give him that chance puts the blame squarely with SPD. There was nothing else either of you could have done, short of being completely different people."

She carried a mug over to the table he stood closest to and set it down, the handle facing him. Resting hers against her other hand for a moment, she added, "I'd do anything to have him back. Anything except wishing for him to be someone other than who he was."

He was quiet for a long moment, watching the steam curl over the lip of his mug. It formed and vanished, reformed and rose and vanished again, going in whatever direction it had to before it was gone. Being what the environment made it.

"Anything?" Jack asked at last.

Day 1

The first day, he thought it was a training exercise. He woke up with what was not quite the worst hangover of his life, a missing morpher, and no clue where he was. Except that the bed seemed strangely familiar. The pillow was red. There were little planets and planes climbing the walls--

He sat up abruptly and his hand went to his head with no more voluntary control that that. Because ow, fuck, what the hell had happened to his head, and why did the rest of his body feel like he was dragging it through grit and molasses? He was tired and in pain and apparently stashed in his old bunk on the Drews' private shuttle.

He was still wearing his uniform. Minus his shoes and his jacket, but the jacket was draped over the ladder and those were clearly his shoes there on the floor beside it. Wincing at the ache, he bent over to retrieve them and found he had to sit down again in order to pull them on. One painful foot at a time.

He pushed himself back up, fist clenching on his jacket as he yanked it off the ladder and tried to shrug into it without hurting his head any more. This was definitely the Drews' shuttle. Only they would have glitter embedded in the kids' bunk ladders. Unfortunately, he wasn't any closer to remembering what he was doing here than he had been before.

It didn't become clear until he dragged himself up the ladder and found Jack Landors in the forward compartment. He groaned, settling himself into the co-pilot's seat without so much as a "hi, how are you" from his new teammate. "This is so stupid," he muttered.

Jack looked up from his comic book at that, studying him with disturbing intensity. "Why do you say that?" he asked.

"What, I'm just supposed to trust you, just like that?" he demanded. "No SPD, no morphers... here we are out in the middle of nowhere, our lives in each other's hands. Do we just drift around out here until we magically bond, or what?"

"Something like that, I guess," Jack agreed, giving him a sympathetic smile.

Goddamn team building exercises, he thought irritably.

Day 2

On the second day, it occurred to him that SPD had plenty of shuttles it could use for team-building exercises. It really didn't need to co-opt private equipment for cadet missions. And the Drews had been acting strangely around him for almost two years now.

"Any idea where the others are?" he asked, when the morning finally dragged into lunch. "They're probably all together somewhere, huh?"

Jack shrugged noncommittally. "Probably," he said.

He narrowed his eyes. "So whose family shuttle do you think they're using?"

But Jack just tilted his head to one side, considering this. "I dunno... you don't think the Drews have another one lying around?"

"Why would SPD be using private shuttles for training missions?" he demanded. "That doesn't make any sense."

"It might if this war is as close to Earth as Galaxy Command thinks it is," Jack pointed out. "You know all official resources are going to the front lines right now."

This gave him pause, because if Jack thought that he knew something about how Galaxy Command was handling the war, then that meant that Jack probably knew something about how Galaxy Command was handling the war. That would make him different from every other cadet on base at SPD Earth.

But then, Jack wasn't from SPD Earth, was he.

Day 3

The third day, he was starting to get a little paranoid. He didn't really know anything about his new team leader. Jack didn't seem to know any more about what they were doing out here than he did... but Jack wasn't asking questions. And if there was one thing SPD looked for in its Ranger-track cadets, it was the ability to ask questions.

"This doesn't bother you?" he asked, after he had tried and failed to get the shuttle nav controls to respond to him for the fifteenth time. "Being stuck somewhere in space, on a shuttle we can't control, with no communication and no instructions?"

Jack looked up from the same comic book he'd been reading for three days straight. He'd fallen asleep with it under his coat, he said. Aside from cards and the Drews' library of hologames and reference materials, it was the only entertainment on the shuttle.

"Kind of," Jack said at last. "But I figure if I'm out here with you, it must be for a reason, right?"

His rational mind knew that this was a relatively logical assumption to make. Jack was SPD, the leader of a new team at a new academy, and it wasn't unreasonable to think that his new commanders might want to test either his loyalty or the confidence of his team. When someone like that found themselves cut off from their former situation with plenty to eat and drink and one of their teammates to keep them company, maybe their first reaction was to sit back and wait it out.

The irrational part of his mind pointed out that Jack had been awake before he was. Jack had his own comic book. And Jack wasn't asking anywhere near enough questions.

Day 4

On the fourth day, he'd had enough.

"I want to talk about this," he said, the moment Jack climbed up the ladder from the other room, rubbing sleep out of his eyes and wearing--

He stared at his team leader. "Are you wearing a different shirt?"

Jack blinked at him, stepping off the ladder and hiding a yawn. "Nothing gets by you, does it," he said at last. "What's for breakfast?"

"How do you have a different shirt?" he wanted to know.

Jack just looked at him. "I brought it with me."

"How did you bring it with you?! I woke up here with a splitting headache and nothing except what I was wearing when I went to bed!"

"Ah," Jack said, lifting a finger in his direction. "Not true. You weren't wearing your jacket or your shoes when you went to bed."

Shrugging at his obvious outrage, Jack added, "I had a little more warning."

"How much more warning?" he demanded. "What the hell is going on here?"

Weirdly, this made Jack brighten. "You really want to know?"

He threw up his hands. "No, Jack, I'd rather be kept in the dark about a stupid game that SPD invented to prove to me that you're trustworthy, or to prove to you that I'm trustworthy, or whatever they're trying to do other than slow down our training and keep a squad off of streets that could really use us right now!"

"Oh." Jack appeared to take this seriously. "Well. Your choice."

"Tell me what's going on," he snapped.

Jack shrugged. "I kidnapped you."

"Very funny," he said, eyes narrowed.

"I'm not kidding," Jack replied, turning away. "But I am kind of hungry, so. You want anything?"

"Answers," he said curtly. "What do you know about this?"

"Pretty much all of it," Jack said, tapping something into the synthesizer. "Since it was my idea. I'm hoping you're going to start remembering something soon, since Kat tells me you haven't spent more than three days in a row off base for the last two years."

He stared at the back of Jack's head, suspicion warring with anger at the mention of Kat's name. "What does she have to do with this?" he growled. Kat Manx had never liked him.

"Nothing," Jack told him. "Nothing at all. I just asked her for a little background information, you know... sort of a 'getting to know my teammates' thing."

"She doesn't know the first thing about me," he informed Jack.

Jack gave him the oddest look, but all he said was, "She used to."

"What are you talking about?" he scoffed.

"It's like this." Jack removed his plate from the synthesizer and set it on the little table. "You were mindwiped. It didn't go so well, and a lot of people are really pissed about it. I volunteered to try and reverse it."

He rolled his eyes. "Okay, first off, I wasn't mindwiped. Second, you can't reverse something like that; that's the whole point."

"Sometime yes, sometimes no," Jack remarked. "You're really stubborn, you know? Memories wouldn't stay suppressed, so Kat thinks they've been drugging you. Or blocking you telepathically. Hard to say."

"Have you been talking to my mom?" he demanded. "She says crazy stuff like this all the time. She's like an SPD conspiracy theorist or something; I don't know what's gotten into her."

Jack paused, and there was that weird look again. "As a matter of fact, yes."

"You've been talking to my mom?" he repeated incredulously. "Great. That's just great!" And he had the Drews' shuttle... "You're not even from Nebula, are you."

"No." Jack seemed pleased with this statement, just for a moment. Then he frowned. "Oh. I told you that, didn't I."

"Did Kylee Drew hire you?" he wanted to know. "That's what this is about, isn't it. They're trying to get me away from Earth long enough to take the whole thing to court. I can't believe this! I told them, nothing happened!"

"They're not trying to get you away from Earth," Jack snapped, and it was the first time he'd been snippy about any of this. "They're trying to get you away from SPD."

Just like that, his "team leader" went from enigmatic ally to weirdly fanatic enemy. Anyone who went to this much trouble to infiltrate a military organization was being paid an exorbitant amount of money, and probably had more private backing than any one person could combat alone. Which meant that he needed SPD on his side--the one organization this guy was apparently going to great lengths to separate him from.

"Why you?" he asked, wary and more than a little worried. "Why did they pick you?"

The man shrugged it off. "Friend of the family," he said.

He glared for a long moment, during which time Jack did nothing more threatening than pick up a spoon and start eating his cereal. So he turned and headed for the forward compartment. He would find out soon enough just how much freedom he really had here.

Day 5

By the fifth day, it was clear that someone with a lot more skill than an SPD cadet had rigged the shuttle controls. The good news was that they were coded to Jack's voice authorization, which meant that at least the shuttle could be rerouted. The bad news was that he'd had zero success in overriding them, which meant that the chances the shuttle would be rerouted were... uncertain.

He still wasn't sure what Jack was getting out of all this.

"Has it occurred to you," he asked, frowning over at the man sprawled out with that same comic book, "that you might want to get my side of whatever story they told you?"

Jack looked up from his place by the door to the rear compartment. He'd wandered up front, keeping an eye on the efforts to circumvent the authorization lockout but not making any move to stop them. He got out of the way when ordered, moving from chair to chair and then finally into a boneless sprawl on the floor--looking more amused with each relocation. He was clearly not afraid of losing control of the shuttle, and that was more annoying than not being able to get control of it in the first place.

"It's occurred to me," Jack said seriously. Serious enough to be mocking, if it came right down to it. "Unfortunately, since you don't remember your side of the story, I didn't see much point in asking for it."

"I haven't lost my memory!" he exclaimed. "I think I would know if there were mysterious gaps I can't explain!"

"Oh yeah?" Jack was propped up on one elbow, but he managed to nod in the general direction of his wrist. "Who gave you that bracelet?"

He looked down, but the only thing on his wrist was the Tangarian coil Dru had given him years ago. "It's not a bracelet," he said. "It's a--"

"Tangarian friendship coil," Jack parroted along with him. "Yeah, believe me, I've heard it before. Take it off."

He resisted automatically. "No."

"Why not?" Jack wanted to know. "It's not like I'm not gonna steal it or anything."

"Yeah, and I know that because of your stellar record when it comes to not committing serious crime," he shot back.

Jack just raised his eyebrows at him, and he grimaced. It was a fair point, as far as he was concerned, but it did seem slightly juvenile in light of the subject matter. He pulled off the coil reluctantly and offered it to Jack. If nothing else, the guy wasn't going to go anywhere with it.

Jack stood up, taking the thing and turning it over. "See that?" he asked, holding it up. "Remember where that came from?"

He frowned, first at Jack, then at the coil. "A friend of mine gave it to me."

"Yeah, Dru Harrington," Jack said impatiently. "I remember. I'm not talking about the bracelet. I'm talking about those scratches, right there."

He blinked. "What do you mean, you remember?"

"Where did the scratches come from?" Jack demanded, lifting the coil higher.

He shook his head irritably. "How should I know? I've probably banged it a million times; I'm surprised it looks as good as it does."

"I put them there," Jack informed him. "I was trying to prove it wasn't real silver, remember? I said it wouldn't scratch, because it wasn't real silver, and I hit it with a rock."

"Of course it's real silver," he said tightly.

"Well, now we know," Jack said with a shrug. "You never thought maybe those scratches looked like initials?"

He snatched the coil back. "How the hell do you know who gave me this?" he growled, jamming it onto his wrist. "I find it hard to believe that was part of Dr. Manx's 'getting to know your teammates' report."

"You'd be surprised," Jack said with a sigh. "But no, it wasn't. She didn't have to tell me that, because I was there. We were roommates for three years, so I'm sorry if hearing you say you'd know if there were things you don't remember rings a little hollow."

He folded his arms uneasily. Maybe this guy had him confused with someone else. It was possible that he was more delusional than fanatic. "Bridge Carson is my roommate," he said, for whatever good it would do.

"For the last two years," Jack agreed. "What about before that?"

He frowned a little. "I didn't have a roommate."

"Why not?" Jack demanded. "Isn't double occupancy SPD policy?"

He hesitated. "I--my father was a Ranger. The Red Ranger. I got special treatment."

Jack snorted. "Oh, yeah, that really sounds like SPD. What about your team, then? Who was on your team before B Squad?"

"Is there a point to this?"

"Name your teammates," Jack challenged.

He rolled his eyes. "Charlie Carrera, Bridge Carson, Gibbs tel Far, and Syd Drew."

"That was C Squad," Jack said. "Who was on D Squad with you?"

"The same people," he said impatiently.

"Nuh-uh." Jack pointed at him. "Bridge and Syd are new. They joined two years ago, and you know it. D Squad was you, Charlie, Gibbs... and who?"

"Dru," he said. Of course. So it had slipped his mind. If he'd been expecting a background check, he would have studied up.

"And?" Jack prompted.

"That was it."

"Can you count?" Jack demanded. "How many people is that? Don't you ever think about these things? If they'd fed you some kind of story, that would be one thing, but as far as I can tell you just don't care enough to ask questions!"

That stung, and he made more of an effort to remember. If only to prove Jack wrong. D Squad seemed like a long time ago, now, but there was Charlie with her stupid red streak. Gibbs, always getting between the two of them... Dru. Flirting. Needling Charlie every chance he got. So very gay. Older and obnoxious and exotic, he might actually have given the pilot a shot if it hadn't been for--

He frowned, glancing down at his bracelet.

"You're saying that you were my teammate," he said abruptly. "My roommate. For... what? How long?"

"Since I got to the academy," Jack replied. "From the time I arrived to the time they made me transfer. Three years."

"And you think SPD made me forget." Still easily the most ridiculous thing he'd heard in weeks. Months. Maybe years.

Since your mom made the same accusation, some traitorous part of his brain whispered. Yeah, fine. The most ridiculous thing he'd heard since his mom went crazy. No surprise there.

"Believe me," Jack told him, "I'm more than happy to blame someone else, but since Cruger actually admitted it when I confronted him last week--yeah. I'm pretty sure it was SPD."

"Why?" he demanded. "Hypothetically speaking. Why would anyone do that? What's the point? What are you, some kind of super secret agent? Who's so important that SPD would try to erase any trace of them?"

"No one," Jack said, holding his gaze with an eerie look of knowing that might have made him wonder. If he hadn't been kidnapped by a crazy man who thought SPD was running some kind of black ops program on the side. "I was no one."

"Then what are you doing here?" he exclaimed, frustrated.

"Because you weren't," Jack told him.

"I wasn't what!"

"You weren't no one," Jack said simply.

Day 6

On the sixth day, Jack only said one sentence to him all day.

He was up first, back at work in the forward compartment, and he heard Jack at the synthesizer almost an hour later. The man wandered up front soon after, bringing his breakfast with him. Jack settled in to watch, and this time, he resolved not to talk to his potentially disturbed captor at all.

Jack made that easy. His spoon clattered in his bowl when he was done, and there was a pause measured in seconds. Then he said, "I wasn't just a family friend."

Without waiting for a reply, the man got up and took his dishes out back. He stayed there the rest of the day.

Day 7

It was the seventh time in a row he found himself waking up on the Drews' damn shuttle, and it was the first time he woke up afraid. His heart was pounding. The darkness was loud and menacing and full of people who kept reaching for him, clawing at him, trying to--

His breath came out in a sob, and the sound of it shocked him back to reality. Just a dream. Just a nightmare. Just the shadowy fear of the unknown, prompted by his current helplessness.

He swallowed hard, fumbling for the wall, vowing not to sleep with the lights off again. Jack must have turned off the ones upstairs. He couldn't see anything, and he flinched back from the cold touch of the bunk where he didn't expect it.

Light poured in from above, and he froze.

"Hey," a voice called down the ladder. Gentle and strange and not at all like the Jack he knew, the sleep-fogged words were still frighteningly familiar. "You okay, Sky?"

He drew back, eyes wide, back pressed against the wall.

You okay, Sky?

They were reaching for him, holding him down. Jack, he thought desperately. They were everywhere. Everything he tried to hold onto slipped away, disintegrating, caving in on itself until there was nothing left and he was falling. Jack.

He didn't realize he'd said it aloud until he heard feet on the ladder, skin skidding over embedded glitter--coming closer. Reaching for him. He lashed out with an inarticulate cry, landing a glancing blow and scrabbling frantically for the lights.

The room lit up, revealing an expression of anguish twisting features that were too dark, too serious... too old. "Jack," he whispered, horrified. That figure started forward, unquestioning, unafraid, and he flinched away from the hands that reached for him. "Get back!"

"Okay." He did, too. Jack backed up against the far wall and kept his hands in full view, repeating, "Okay. It's okay. No one can hurt you here."

"What did you do to me!" he shouted. "What the fuck am I on! You put something in the food, you've been drugging me, I've got this--what's in my head, Jack! I'm fucking hallucinating!"

"It's okay," Jack murmured. "I didn't, I'm sorry, Sky. I didn't do anything. You're okay now... it's gonna be all right."

"It's not okay," he spat. "It's a fucking long way to okay from here, and it starts with you turning this damn shuttle around!"

Jack's eyes were bright in the artificial daylight that blazed all around them, but the shadows seemed to cling to his skin, making him look vaguely sinister in this kid-cute room. "I'm sorry," he said softly. "I can't do that."

He refused to eat or drink anything for the rest of the day.

By lunchtime, Jack had started to argue with him. "Come on," Jack insisted, "what the hell do I know about synthesizers? How could I possibly be doing anything to the food? To the water? At least drink something."

"Making this entire exercise pointless," he snapped. "Water is the most logical choice. We can go for weeks without eating, but no one can go more than three days without drinking something."

"Oh, great," Jack retorted, "so we're now on day one of you trying to kill yourself? How does that make sense? What does that prove?"

"It proves that you're more concerned with money than with--" He stopped just short of saying "me," because, obviously. It was stupid to even say it. What did this guy care about him, after all? Jack wasn't even his team leader; he was just someone hired to keep him out of the way for as long as it took.

"I don't know why you think I'm getting paid for this!" Jack exclaimed. "All I get out of it is the end of my career, a longer criminal record than before, and a hell of a lot of attitude from you!"

"Too bad you didn't think of that first," he sneered.

"Believe me, I thought of it." Jack was suddenly grim. "I knew exactly what I was doing."

He scoffed. "Then why do it at all?"

"Because you're worth it," Jack told him.

He might as well try to get some more work done before dehydration made him feverish. He hadn't had any luck overriding the nav controls, but he thought he was on to something with the comm system. It kept him busy.

***

"You've been gone so long, all that you know
Has been shuffled aside as you bask in the glow
Of the beautiful strangers who whisper your name
Do they fill up the emptiness?
Larger than life is your fiction
In a universe made up of one

"'Cause you have been drifting for so long
I know you don't want to come down
But somewhere below you there's people who love you
And they're ready for you to come home
Please come home"

--Sarah McLachlan
"Drifting"