Disclaimer: Naughty Dog owns the entire Jak and Daxter series and all characters therein.
"Attention!"
Non-committal grunts in the back. Some shuffling, and a few murmurs follow that sound suspiciously like curses. When Torn finally lifts his eyes to inspect the motley crew before him, he saw just what he expected. Many were still blinking off sleep, trying to hide their exhaustion beneath insubstantial glaring. Some looked promising in that they brushed off their lack of rest in order to stand up straight. Most all of them looked like they didn't give a damn.
He really needed to talk to the recruitment officers about the weird hours.
The Undergrounds biggest problem had never been getting people to join; shortages weren't permanent when a cause like freedom echoed off every wall. It was more a matter of getting the right people to join. Recruiters had never been particularly picky, but that didn't mean some who came weren't more qualified than others. Most recruits were young, many of them too young to do any real good without training, just old enough and tall enough to join but lacking experience in any kind of department except drunken brawling and sloppy stealing.
Every month it was the same. Handfuls of rabble-rousers, hooligans, and street-rats would stream in, clustered in the front room in haphazard groups like the debris of the city: mismatched, volatile and stupid, attentive only because of the desire for radical change. Every single influx was given the same recruitment speech, had the same misgivings, coughed up the same deliberate brushing-off of orders — far be it from him, ex-soldier that he is, to tell a bunch of kids how to fight organized — and by the end of another month there would be the list of houses and shacks to visit with consolations for families of the dead.
Arrogance mixed with ignorance was a heavy sedative for sense. Sometimes each kid seemed exactly like the one that had come before.
If he was lucky, a group would get the message after the first week of training and continue on, or go home and engage in less lethal ways to coax a new era into being. If there was a miracle to spare, a few might even come in with the knowledge of what they were joining for, and would settle in for a hardy physical regimen with complaints about the pain and every intention of getting the job done.
On the short list of singularities, Torn remembers two in particular. With the blood they'd spilled together and shared through transfusions, they could've been brothers. They had been the youngest of his men at the time, their bond born out of the aforementioned fact. Deep into the night they'd sit and talk, smoking with their feet propped up on some nearby surface, reclining like kings amongst the din and squalor of the Underground bases they moved through. He used to watch them sometimes and wonder how they managed. He'd been young when he'd joined the operation, but not like them. Not at the age when the worst decision of the day should've been which class of education to skip or how worth it it would be to sneak out for a night of fun.
Every step of the way he'd doubted whether they were fighting for the city or for themselves, taking up the first cause they'd heard of because the world was still a small place to them. Young recruits meant more fire power, a bolster in numbers and a brief boost in morale, but it sure as hell didn't mean the Underground was stronger. They'd tripped constantly, been helped up willingly (if not roughly) by others, and then shoved forward to continue. Sometimes they broke down badly, usually alone, or with the other by their side breaking the same. They'd complain about weather, the food, and the weird hours they were called on to watch. They were particularly vocal about the difficulty of the missions they got put into in their first years, unable to understand that the moment they'd entered they were just as qualified as those around them to complete their objective.
They were strong, able-bodied and trustworthy men by the time he came to them with the mission to get the Baron's flag from Dead Town. It'd struck him then, when they'd accepted their mission with a solemn salute, that they were no longer the pair of punks he'd once had to hit over the head every week. Complaint had bled into compliance, both of them accepting reality for what it was and deciding to move on. They were willing to do whatever it took to see their home freed, all the while keeping the taint of hopelessness and rage at bay with the company of each other and a handful of other members. It wasn't often he saw kids make it to such a place, even if they were strong enough to engage an enemy.
He hadn't said a word then, but he'd never been prouder.
And it still hadn't been enough. Two nights later when he'd thought he would get some sleep for once, someone actually had the audacity to knock on the door of the base. Guns at the ready, he'd expected an invasion, but only got one of their night watchmen holding up two Underground bandanas covered with mud, Dark Eco and Mar knew what else. He'd taken the offering in silence, shut the door and told everyone to go back to bed; an order accepted with nothing more than a few yawns and the shuffling of tired bodies. No one was surprised by death now. Most of the team from when he'd first joined was dead, and the few still living were too numb to the reality to conjure more than a hollow look, a few blinks, and trudging footsteps back to their cots.
If asked at any point, Torn will say the long and the short of it is that when you're fighting for freedom people die on both sides. Might as well get used to it. But that didn't make it any easier to find Jak grinning like he'd outsmarted the world, holding the Baron's flag high above his head, ignorant of the what the rubble around him used to represent. Loved ones lost. Homes razed. Hundreds of lives cut brutally short, all for the sake of one man's arrogant ambition.
He'd had to remind himself more than once that the boys he'd sent to retrieve the banner hadn't had Eco powers. They'd just been two normal guys trying to do some good, and sometimes in spite of everything, the good guys take a shot between the eyes. He'd also had to remind himself (every day now) that Jak had endured solitude and torture and stayed alive in spite of it all. Most of Torn's men couldn't last more than a few days in that prison.
All the same, resentment settled in deep during that mission and in the ones to follow, watching the blonde elf all but strut in and out of the base, ignorant to everything but his own insatiable need for revenge. Having problems, being a problem, was something Torn knew well; he had ran a base full of them. But the qualification for the arrogant short-stack's rage was lost on him. Many of his people had watched their comrades — teachers, gunslingers, news-bringers, men and women, young and old — die slowly over years and years of trying and setbacks for much longer than Jak had been alive. Everyone here had to live with the survivor's guilt, years crawling by until nothing but a shell was left, shunting out work and bullets and repeating the same thing because there had to be an end to the mayhem that breathed down the necks of the citizenry.
Torn put up with Jak for the sake of the cause and The Shadow. But as far as he was concerned, Jak knew nothing.
A/N: I got tired of seeing this sitting in my doc box so I threw it onto the site as an incentive for later correction.
Jak II was an awesome game. It was an interesting turn of events to see a gentler, quieter character become a gun-toting, hell-raising vigilante. Jak's attitude, however, had always rubbed me the wrong way. During my first playthrough I had nothing but deepest sympathy for Torn and how he'd had to deal with this trigger-happy ball of anger until the revolution was over.
Everyone in that game had their own lovely personality flaws to deal with (plus my memory on the game is a bit fuzzy), so if nothing else you can just read this as Torn's biased opinion on Jak, whom he sees as a volatile nuisance at worst and a crazy that gets stuff done at best.
I really, REALLY hope this was believable enough. I welcome critiques about any and everything in this story with open arms!
Thank you for reading!