Chapter Nineteen
*****November 5th 2007****
When we got back to the hub, Jack sent everyone home telling them to come in late the next day. He didn't want to see anyone before ten, and he didn't want to see Gwen at all since she was on a forty-eight hour leave of absence due to her injury. When she got back, and handed in her after action report, Jack would make the decision on whether he was going to suspend or punish her and Owen for questioning him when faced with a hostile situation.
Once Owen had double checked my injuries when we got back to the hub, Jack helped me into the shower.
"Do you want to talk about it?" Jack asked softly, keeping a supporting hand at my waist while helping me rub shampoo into my hair since Owen said I wasn't to lift my arms above my head for at least five days, allowing the ribs to settle and begin to heal – if I disobeyed he would bind the top of my arms to my side.
"I… not yet." I admitted.
"Okay." Jack nodded his agreement.
With the shampoo in my hair Jack grabbed the body wash. Unfortunately, the beatings I had taken had finally caught up with me now I was relaxing with Jack, and my legs gave out the moment he let go of my waist. Jack reacted quickly, wrapping his arms around my waist and lowering me to the shower floor in a controlled manor instead of the fall I would have otherwise taken. The warm shower water was still falling down on us, so I learnt against Jack breathing deeply.
"Have the pain killers run out?" he asked concerned.
"It's nothing I can't handle. But I used my legs to shield my body as best I could. I think my muscles have given up." I admitted sheepishly.
"Then we'll just have to get you clean like this." Jack shifted us so I was leaning against his leg which he had bent to support my back.
"Thanks." I said quietly, accepting the abandoned body wash while he gentle carted his fingers through my hair to get rid of the shampoo.
Jack's free hand was gently running over his name on my hip. He had seen it a few weeks before and told me it was his name, although he hadn't told me what it meant. He had shown me my birth name on his inner wrist which he normally kept hidden with the vortex manipulator. He hadn't known it was me until he had seen his own name on me, and I had confirmed that I had legally changed my name. I didn't mind that Jack wasn't his real name because he was, and will always be, Captain Jack to me because that was who he had chosen to be. Just as I had chosen to be Raven.
"I once had a lover who was disabled. He had lost the use of his legs because of a bullet to the spine." Jack began softly.
I smiled slightly, I loved hearing stories about Jack's past, even when he was talking about past lovers. He had lived for over a hundred years, a lover here and there was to be expected. The fact that he felt comfortable enough to speak about his life and his loves also relieved me. Jack carried so much darkness around with him that I feared he would drown under it if he didn't let some of it go.
"He refused to let the house be adapted for him, he was stubborn like that." Jack chucked softly. He seemed to be attached to the stubborn ones. "Wanted to do everything the same way he did before he was shot. He could still cook, still clean. He moved from the army to being a teacher, and finally a head teacher at a privet boarding school. So, he could still work. But the one thing he couldn't do was take a proper shower. We lived in a flat without a bath, and he refused to fork out the money to get it adapted. So, whenever he wanted a shower, I would have one as well." Jack smiled at me as I rested my head on his shoulders, allowing the water to relax my muscles now that I was clean of all the blood and dirt that had been collected through the day.
"How long were you together?" I asked curiously.
"Oh, two and a half years. We broke it off when he found another man he liked more. I didn't mind, I couldn't give him the same stability and I was going to have to move on soon. People would have started to notice my lack of aging." Jack smiled.
There was no sadness or bitterness in his tone so I believed him when he said they ended on good terms. There were a couple of past loves were that didn't happen, and they always hurt him the most, especially if he had revealed his immortality to his lover. Jack is who he was, even if he hadn't chosen to be immortal, he had made the best out of a bad situation, even if he had slipped a couple of times into what some would consider a depressive state.
Jack turned off the shower and got to his feet before bending down and picking me up in his arms. Instead of drying off properly he just grabbed a couple of towels to wrap each of us up in before carrying me to bed. Once we were both comfortable, my head resting on Jack's chest so that I could hear the steady beating of his heart I decided it was my turn to talk.
"Sometimes there are no words, no clever quotes to neatly sum up what's happened that day. Sometimes you do everything right, everything exactly right, and still you feel like you failed." I began softly pulling on my memory of so long ago. It was a TV show, I was sure, a series in which a team of Crime fighters tracked down 'unsubs'. In this particular episode, I remember vividly, homeless people were going missing – hundreds of them – and the police didn't care. But one man stood up, a soldier, and refused to be turned away. In the end, the team had tracked the murders to a rural farm, where they found piles of shoes, all that was left to identify so many victims. The parallels between that TV show and what had happened were too sharp for me to ignore.
"Did it need to end that way? Could something have been done to prevent the tragedy in the first place? Seventy-three murders in a small village, the deaths of the cannibals make seventy-eight lives snuffed out. Kieran will go home and try to recover, to reconnect with his family but he'll never be a child again. That makes seventy-nine lives forever altered, not counting family and friends, or those we couldn't find. And what about the team? How many more times will they be able to look into the abyss? How many more times before they won't ever recover the pieces of themselves that this job takes? … Sometimes there are no words or clever quotes to neatly sum up what's happened that day. Sometimes, the day just ends."
"For when you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks into you." Jack quoted back, recognising what I was trying to say.
The entire team had been hurt by what they had seen. They dealt with monsters and aliens on a nearly daily basis, but the true monsters in their world was actually humans. I had seen such atrocities before and I knew people were capable of cannibalism but I never thought I would come across such people in Cardiff. That horrible realisation that they could be anywhere, combined with the team's fear and horror, and the feeling of death and lust and hunger that had been slamming into me for so long had taken a toll on the walls I had built around my emotions.
"What do I do now?" Jack asked sadly. He had seen so many Torchwood teams come and go, but this was the first team that was truly his and he wasn't prepared to lose anyone else – not after Suzie – not yet.
"We keep going. We rebuild, better and stronger than we were before we were broken." I answered simply.
