Number ten! Sorry I took it dow, but I think this is much, much better than what happened the first time...so...yeah. Read on and review!
Reviews keep the muses awake.
Let the game begin.
"Oh god—" Gwen whirled away from the room, staggering a few more yards down the hall before dry-heaving. Owen turned away with disgust, following Gwen; Jack didn't quite know what to make of the sight, and Tosh didn't even stop to look.
The smell didn't help matters. Warm, intrusive: the kind of rancor that you can feel, that no matter what way you breathe, you can taste the fetid mold and decay of whatever dead thing you have stumbled upon. It was the kind of thing you smelled when you came across a dead animal, the smell that said, stay back, kid. I don't bite anymore, but if you poke me, make sure it's with a long stick. My soul mate is decay, my hide poison. The smell of death and disease, the smell immediately accompanying organic dead bodies.
There were a lot of bodies.
There was also a tape player, hanging from the neck of what looked to be a small calf. It was hard to tell: most of the remaining internal organs hung from the slit belly, a stringy mess of flies and maggots. The majority of what Jack assumed to be the head buzzed, a black mass of insects. It could have been any small four-legged creature.
"Jack? What is it?" Both Gwen's hands covered her mouth as she inched forward.
"Tape player."
Attempting to ignore the smell, Jack stepped in to the room and grasped the player. He pulled it towards him, and the rancid carcass followed; there would be no way to play the tape without dragging the whole dead thing with it. So Jack clicked the tap on with one hand while the other covered his mouth and nose.
"Congratulations, you are still alive. You should by now have figured out that escaping here will not be easy. You are being tested, your will is being tested. Your will to survive."
Jack coughed, spit to the side, and raised the volume on the tape player.
"The bodies you see before you are...a collection, in various stages of decomposition and decay. Among them are a few things you may recognize. You must find that which was left by those that killed your love, Captain Jack Harkness."
Jack let the player and its rotting companion swing lazily back, then turned to see Gwen eyeing him with something akin to concern. She looked as if she wanted to speak, but she was looking at something behind Jack, eyes wide. He faced the room of decay once more; long strips of overhead fluorescents winked on to show the room in the entirety of its macabre. The grey floor beneath was hardly visible beneath the heaps of bones and scattered bodies, animal and human. Some looked freshly dead, others as if they had been rotting here for a few weeks, and longer. Jack's eyes roved over the mess, the horror, and saw what the tape had been referring to. He grimaced behind his hand, dread sprouting with morbid vivacity in his chest.
In the middle of the room, the bodies of rodents formed a circle around three dead humans: Torchwood three's captor had made a grotesque imitation of what the fairies left behind. The humans, however, carried all the trademarks of a death by those ancient creatures. Even though the skin was sunken and the rose petals dried, Jack was unable to suppress the shudder that danced along his spine. He shivered. Gwen noticed.
"You don't have to do this, Jack."
He could tell she knew he'd refuse anything she offered.
"No, I have to do this."
He looked at the three bodies again. Grey skin, wrinkled and lifeless...mouths open, grey hair plastered to the skull. Everywhere dry except for where she lay, that stupid cat sitting there and blinking stupidly as he cradled the dead woman he had fallen in love with all those years ago. Gwen, ever sympathetic, wanting to comfort him. Didn't she understand this was not a matter she could help with at all?
Jack ripped himself back to rancid reality, taking a deep breath of the warm, frowsty air. He let it nauseate his stomach and disgust his throat. He absorbed the putrid stench the way he would absorb an electric shock: with the full anticipation of bodily harm and the promise of a shoddy death. He ignored Gwen asking him to come back, ignored the flies that landed fleetingly on his shoulders, ignored the crunch of insects and the squelch of body matter under his bear feet. His only intent was to get what he needed and prove to this psycho that Captain Jack Harkness was not easily conquerable. Jack had seen death more times than he cared to count. What difference did it make if the way he went happened to be twisted?
The first of the bodies was male and stark naked. Black petals teased Jack from the dried mouth, the man's chest gaped, and the rotted heart beat with a throbbing pulsation of maggots. Adamant that the rasping man from the tapes would never successfully discomfit him, Jack plunged his hand into the nest of nastiness. He felt through the wriggling parasites and sickening, retired organs, for anything that should not be there; a key, a small box, a tape. Anything. And he found nothing. His hands encountered only decomposing human and invasive bugs. He went lower, tearing at the brittle flesh over the sunken belly. He nearly gagged on the stab of warm, fetid gas that roiled off the disturbed corpse. He went on, ignoring it. His search quickened in tempo as he became almost frantic on finding the briefly mentioned clue.
This body had nothing for him; he moved on.
The next body was also male, and he had most of his clothes on. But they were poked with holes, dirty, and crusty were blood and bile that had seeped from animal carcasses hanging above. Jack ripped the flimsy shirt open and stared at the eaten abdomen, pointedly not looking at his hands as he parted the decomposing flesh. His hand brushed against something deceptively solid, and he grasped it, yanking upwards. It was only a dead mouse, the partial skeleton held together by scant sinew. Still determined to beat this, Jack rolled the body closer to the circle of deceased rats. He cried out with triumph when an envelope, encased in a plastic bag, peeked in to view.
He snatched it up, stood, and exited the room.
"Jack what did you—" Gwen turned her head away from him and coughed; Jack walked past her, opening the bag and discarding it. He tore open one side of the envelope and dumped the contents into his palm.
Another tape and another key.
That didn't really explain anything.
Jack growled and dropped the objects into his coat pocket.
"Bloody hell, Jack, what did you do in there?" Owen asked when Jack reached him.
Jack shrugged and kept walking.
"Did you see what he did?"
Gwen halted next to Owen, glanced at Ianto's closed eyes, looked over her shoulder as Tosh passed them silently.
"He dug through two carcasses looking for something, and he found it."
Owen scoffed. "Great. Well, he stinks just as bad as the room did. And now we've got it wherever we go—"
"Owen, just shut up."
"I can still hear you," Jack remarked from in front of them. He stopped, turned around, and smiled. "You think this is bad, you should have seen me during the War."
Gwen returned the grin, but with less ease; Owen rolled his eyes and kept walking.
"What did you find?" he addressed Jack.
"Tape and a key."
"Lovely. Seems to be all we're finding."
"We're making progress."
Owen scoffed again.
They walked in a rough line: Gwen to Jack's left, Owen to his right and a little behind, and Toshiko a decent four yards behind them. The corridor went on in the same fashion the others had, and they fell into silent monotony of grey and failing lights.
After what couldn't have been more than fifteen minutes, there came another dark section. Gwen hesitated, but Owen kept going. Jack threw an arm out to stop him, which Owen avoided, not wanting any stench to cling to himself.
"Jack, what is it?"
"Step back."
Owen rolled his eyes and grumbled something unintelligible, but complied, stepping back and setting Ianto against the bare wall.
"Gah! Damn it! Does anyone have a torch?"