fandomweekly | [#135] Jack's Bad Morning (Torchwood)

Theme Prompt: #135 – Out Of Sorts
Title: Jack's Bad Morning
Fandom: Torchwood
Rating/Warnings: PG
Bonus: Yes.
Word Count: 1000
Summary: Jack’s day got off to a bad start and only seems to be getting worse...

Jack was feeling out of sorts. He didn’t feel ill or anything; one of the benefits of being immortal was that even if he did happen to catch whatever virus was currently making the rounds, nine times out of ten the vortex energy coursing through him would eradicate it before he felt any effects from it. He didn’t even have a headache or random muscle pains and over-sensitised nerves from resurrecting, because he hadn’t died in several weeks. He was simply... off, in an undefinable yet annoying way. He couldn’t seem to do anything right.

Normally, he wasn’t a klutz. His fifty-first century reflexes meant he could avoid the clumsiness that plagued regular humans on occasion, but today...

When he’d showered this morning, freshening up after a Weevil chase that had taken up most of the previous night, the soap had slipped from his grasp. He’d juggled it for several desperate seconds before it had escaped him entirely, shooting over the top of the shower curtain, and when he’d tried to go after it, he’d tripped on the edge of the bathtub. Trying not to fall, he’d grabbed for the nearest thing and pulled the curtain rail down, ending up still wet and soapy, tangled in waterproof fabric. Where the soap had gone he couldn’t say, because despite crawling around on the bathroom floor after turning the shower off, he hadn’t found it, although he had bashed his head on the washbasin.

All of that would have been bad enough, it wasn’t an auspicious start to his day, but apparently whatever was jinxing him had only just begun making his life difficult. Getting dressed, he’d buttoned his shirt wrong twice, then caught his shirt tail when he was zipping up his pants, tearing a hole in the fabric. To cap that one of his braces had pinged as he was fastening it, and slapped him across the nose, bringing tears to his eyes.

At least he’d managed to get his boots on and tied without mishap, but he’d banged his head on the edge of his bunker as he climbed the ladder up to his office. He went up and down that ladder several times a day, he knew where the edge was without having to look. Obviously it must have moved somehow.

Thinking he’d be safer sitting at his desk, and hoping to gain a few brownie points with Ianto, he’d decided to while away the time before the team came in by doing paperwork. As much as he hated it, he had to admit if was less of an ordeal if he dealt with things as they came across his desk instead of letting them pile up. An hour, five papercuts, a broken fingernail, and a painful pinch from a paperclip later, everything from his inbox had been shifted to his outbox, even if there were ink smudges on a couple of reports from his pen developing an unexpected leak. He had ink on his shirt cuff as well, not to mention all over his hands, but when he stood up to go and wash them, he tripped over the wastepaper basket. Now there was a partial handprint in blue ink on his office floor. What Ianto would say about that was anybody’s guess.

“Maybe I’m dehydrated,” Jack muttered to himself as he tried to scrub the ink off his fingers. It faded a bit, but they still looked blue, and of course some of the ink came off on the towel when he dried his hands. If it had been one of the blue towels it might not have mattered, but it was a white one, which now had random blue streaks across the middle, plus a steak of red from his torn fingernail, which he’d caught and ripped again.

Back in his office, Jack checked his watch and saw there was still a half hour before Ianto would be in, so he went to the kitchenette and got a bottle of water out of the fridge. The cap didn’t want to come off, and when it finally did, he spilled water all down himself.

Jack whimpered. He’d already changed his shirt twice; he couldn’t go through that again! It was only water this time though, uncomfortable but not a serious problem. It would dry if he just left it. He drank the rest of the water and dropped the bottle in the recycling bin. It bounced out again and rolled across the floor. Frustrated and annoyed beyond endurance, he kicked at it viciously, whereupon it sailed through the air, rebounded off the wall and hit him right in the groin. Hard.

When Ianto arrived a few minutes later, he found Jack curled up on the floor of the kitchenette, clutching himself and groaning. He was immortal, he healed quickly from any injury, but pain like that doesn’t just go away.

“Jack? What happened?” Ianto dropped to his knees beside his stricken lover.

“Everything hates me!” Jack whimpered, uncoiling just enough to gaze piteously up at Ianto from tear-filled eyes. At Ianto’s puzzled look, Jack regaled him with the sorry tale of his disastrous morning. “I don’t even know what I did to make the universe mad at me!”

“It’s just one of those days, Jack. We all have them sometimes, when it feels like we can’t do anything right.”

“Not you,” Jack insisted. “The universe loves you; you’re prefect in every way.”

Ianto snorted. “Hardly. A couple of weeks ago, I got up, opened the bedroom door on my foot and skinned two toes. Then the shower tap got jammed on cold, I dropped my toothbrush down the loo, went back to the bedroom, trod on my phone and broke it. I must’ve knocked it on the floor getting out of bed.”

“What did you do?”

“Went back to bed of course, which is what you should do. You’ll find a few hours’ sleep works wonders.”

Jack nodded “Okay.”

“Try not to fall out of bed.”

The End

[#135] Jack's Bad Morning (Torchwood)

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