Title: Penitence (The Long Goodbye Series)
Author: Syberina5 or tsarcasm
Word Count: 1,587; Complete
Beta: Delightful, delicious lj user="freakykat"/lj.
Summary: Twenty minutes to break out of death with an in voluntary gasp filled with the musky earth and loaminess that sent him grappling with once lose dirt for air as the terror and soil filled him sending him back down into the darkness that wasn't lack of sunlight or mounds of ground cover but nothingness. Dead. Again.
Disclaimers: Jack McAngstyPants is mine I tell you. Mine.
Author's Notes: I'd blame this on some TW li user="mclachlan"/lj fic but I really can't. This is my fucked-up mind enjoying the fucked-uppedness of others—fictional or not. This messiness did not kick off the series when it was being actually written, it was second and now it's here. Before long it'll go somewhere else.
pen·i·tence pɛnɪtəns/ [pen-i-tuhns] –noun
the state of being penitent; regret for one's wrongdoing or sinning; contrition; repentance.
Origin: 1150–1200; ME ( OF) ML pēnitentia, L paenitentia a regretting. See penitent, -ence
—Synonyms
See regret, remorse.
—Antonyms
1. shamelessness, innocence, indifference.
For awhile he'd counted. He'd lost track of course. He couldn't even remember around what number. Then, as they lowered his body temperature bit by bit, freezing him out, he'd tried to do the math.
Say it took twenty minutes to do a cycle. That's three times an hour, 72 times a day. A year, that would have been 25,915 times. He hadn't gotten that far before he'd passed out and woken up again in the 21st century.
2,591,500 times a century. 25,915,000 times in a millennium and he'd been down there for nearly two.
That wasn't counting leap years. And what if it was 15 minutes? Four times an hour and 96 times a day. And then all the other variables that Tosh would think up; Owen suggesting they could kill him see how long it took him to actually die and snap back out of it 'cause they'd never timed it before. Ianto would just pull out his stopwatch of one thousand one uses and smirk. Gwen would defend his honor: He's not a lab rat, she'd go on, we aren't going to kill him for science and study him. We don't even do that to the Weevils. It's inhuman, inhumane.
He heard himself laugh, really laugh and realized he'd been smiling. His team, the ones he'd chosen or who had chosen him. The closest he'd been to family in a very, very long time.
How fitting that it was his real family that had all but wiped them out, stolen them from him. Tosh frozen somewhere in the depths beneath him. Owen rotting slowly, animate but dead and—even if they could get him out of the facility without flooding the area with radiation—more radioactive than 60 nuclear warheads. Ianto more silent and immoveable than ever. Unattainable. And Gwen. Gwen giving everyone space to sort themselves out, Gwen pitching-in still with the PCs, liaising with seven different departments, offices, possibly even a ministry. But not slowing down for herself, for Rhys, for the baby she'd said they'd decided to try for.
Half of his people were living. He'd learned a long time ago that it was enough at the end of a battle that you were still standing. That was all you needed to celebrate.
*
He'd gone out to the compound one of those nights. One of those many interminable nights where he'd sit in the hub after having kicked Ianto and Gwen out and just look for trouble.
He'd stood there naked—his body would rid itself of the radiation but his clothes wouldn't. He'd stood and put his hand on the door, willing Owen to realize he was there. To know that he wasn't alone at in the vastness of time, it would be the two of them. Neither quite living or quite dead.
Course after a bit he'd gotten angry and assaulted every entrance into the place he could find trying to break Owen out.
Somehow or other—possibly radiation poisoning or that cut the glass had given him—he'd managed to die twice before the sun came up and he headed for one of the Hazmat stations that was still there for the teams monitoring the reactor.
*
Ianto put fresh mug of coffee before him and he tried to highjack the math to figure out how many cups of coffee Ianto had brought him in two years.
He swallowed when it failed, trying to force himself not to think of numbers at all but the familiar figures danced in his head, taunting. And, like it had recently, the coffee smelled loamy when he forced himself to drink it.
*
Ianto was still milling around. Still waiting for Jack to waltz in and playfully swat him on the ass, make some bizarrely philanderous comment, or just hold him. To be Jack. To want him. To need him.
And every time Jack just looked the other way Ianto just got more understanding and patient.
Ianto was just waiting for him.
Waiting for Jack to tell him, show him how finding and losing Gray all at once had left him inside.
Gray.
Gray who had haunted him for so long.
Gray who had hunted him, hated him.
25,915,000.
Gray.
Ianto knocked on his door and Jack refused to look up and see him standing there, holding his 4,163rd cup of coffee for Jack.
So he flipped the page on Rowena Turner's journal and started reading about her encounters on the 5th of May 1734.
*
"Go home Jan." He meant to say it forcefully, without emotional weight. Instead it came out angry and edged, too much like how he felt.
"I've a bit more on Hadley yet."
"It's a corpse. It'll be there tomorrow." His tone was better, less what it had been, more what it was supposed to be. More light hearted, cheery, cheeky Jack Harkness.
"I—"
"Go home." His fist connected with his desk as a punctuation to his barking order. He winced away from himself. Ianto was gone when he whispered, "Go home."
*
"What is this?"
"Chamomile tea, sir." There was a long drawn out silence where Ianto watched him and he stared into the cup, afraid of how the moment would end. "You need to sleep, Jack."
"Thank you, Nurse Jones, That'll be all." He dismissed him trying not to think about how his voice… when he'd said his name—not sir, not captain, his name—he'd practically felt a hand rubbing through his hair, that soothing stroke.
*
"Goddamnit Jack," Ianto's own hand attempting to pierce the table top. Sainted Ianto's understanding had finally run short.
"That's 'Goddamnit Captain.' " He'd tossed in, wagging a finger. Happy to hope that now Ianto would stop trying. Stop waiting.
*
The hot rush of the battle through his veins and the crisp snap of the night air, it's salty tang even this far from the open ocean, had his body signing. The instincts that took over, the training, when death was on the line—even if death was temporary—overrode all the images and pathways in his mind so that, as he flew down the village roadway after the Weevil, he was laughing.
He missed the car turning the corner—he was watching the creature's side crawling gait take him down an alley—and only felt Ianto's body slamming him to the pavers and the tires squealed but drove on.
He was panting and still high from the pursuit when those red pulsing lips took his own and he let them. Encouraged them, gave over to them. Took from them.
He was panting harder when they pulled apart and Ianto used a hand to haul him off the stones. He tried to pull him in and kiss him again, uttering his name—guh, his name—with the tether of his arm. But Jack moved away, smiling coolly, dropped Ianto's hand and ran off to where he'd last seen the Weevil.
*
"Why are you doing this Jack?"
"Doing what, Jones?" He forced himself to look up from the report he was writing.
"You won't talk to me, you won't touch me, you won't," the man paused, eyes full of memories Jack had too, "be with me."
"And that's a problem for you?"
"Well, it's a big bloody change."
Jack sighed. It was. "What is it you expect me to do here, Ianto Jones?"
"I want you to tell me," he raised his shoulders and released them, "to tell me what you want, Jack."
"I want you to do your job," he said with a straight look into those eyes with all their memories and the tears they seemed to know so well. "So that I can do mine."
That night he'd go out to visit Owen again. See if this time he could find a way in or at least a way to communicate.
*
Twenty minutes to break out of death with an in voluntary gasp filled with the musky earth and loaminess that sent him grappling with once lose dirt for air as the terror and soil filled him sending him back down into the darkness that wasn't lack of sunlight or mounds of ground cover but nothingness. Dead. Again.
25,915 times a year.
After a while it hadn't been the soil choking him. The almost constant thrashing, his bodyweight, had packed some of what was around him. He'd been in a kind of cocoon. Each time he returned from nothing there was no oxygen to greet him. It was just another form of suffocation.
25,915 times a year.
Thrust in and out of the darkness. In and out of the nothing. The burning rip from one to the other. 72 times a day.
1874 years—give or take a month or two maybe a hundred leap years—is 48,564,710.
Now, all those deaths later, Ianto was bringing him his fourth cup of the day silently. He set it down just outside the range of the tools he was using to try to fix an astral projector which was flashing and throwing passersby into OOBE chaos.
"Why thank you, Jones," he chirped but didn't look into Ianto's eyes and smirk suggestively the way he would have fifty million deaths ago.