Ficlet: Waiting For Death

[badly_knitted]

 

Title: Waiting For Death

Author: badly_knitted     

Characters: Jack. Ianto, Alice, Emily, Alex, Others.

Rating: PG

Spoilers: Fragments.

Summary: In the aftermath of the bombs going off, Jack lays in the wreckage, trapped and waiting to die.

Word Count: 428

Written For: juliet316’s prompt ‘Torchwood, Jack/Ianto, As I lay dying,’ at fic_promptly.

Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters. They belong to the BBC.

As Jack lay dying in an abandoned warehouse, beneath a pile of rubble, his mind flitted back through the years and the deaths, all the little moments that had brought him to this place and time. He drew another shallow, laboured, pain-filed breath. The slow deaths were always the worst; they allowed far too much time for thoughts and reminiscences. It was true that your life flashed before your eyes at times like this.

Once again he saw himself reviving in a filthy alley, a broken bottle jammed in his belly, and two women watching him with dispassionate curiosity. He’d tried to flirt with them, but they’d restrained and chloroformed him, and the next time he’d revived he’d been tied to a chair in some sort of basement.

If he’d thought bleeding out from a gut wound was bad, it was nothing to what those two women, Alice and Emily, had put him through in the days and weeks that followed, until he’d eventually agreed to work for their organisation, Torchwood, just to make them stop. They’d proven very inventive when it came to inflicting pain.

His thoughts moved on.

He remembered an alehouse, and a girl with Tarot cards, her eyes far too old for her face. She’d told him how long he would have to wait before he found his Doctor again, and his heart had sunk with the knowledge. A hundred years. It might as well have been eternity

Year after year of his interminable life flowed by as he waited to breathe his last breath. Estelle, Michael, Greg, Lucia and their baby, hundreds of names and faces swept past him in an endless stream. Finally, the eve of the Millennium loomed and in his mind, he relived the moment he returned to the Hub only to find all his colleagues dead, gunned down by their leader. Alex had turned his gun on himself, but not before telling Jack that he’d seen the future and they just weren’t ready for what was to come.

He recalled building his own team then, recruiting Suzie, Tosh, Owen, Ianto…

Oh, Ianto. Was his lover also trapped in the wreckage, or had he got out? Was he even still alive? The last thing that passed through Jack’s mind before death claimed him was a silent prayer that Ianto, and the rest of his team, would be alright.

OoOoOoO

Elsewhere in the warehouse, pinned beneath half the ceiling, Ianto regained consciousness, fingers scrabbling for purchase among the shards of masonry and splinters of wood as he tried to pull himself free.

The End