fandomweekly | [#195] From Bad To Worse (Torchwood)

Theme Prompt: #195 – Bad Day
Title: From Bad To Worse
Fandom: Torchwood
Rating/Warnings: PG
Bonus: Yes
Word Count: 1000
Summary: Some days start off bad and just keep getting worse. Jack just wishes he could start this day over and do things differently.

Some days were simply doomed, starting out bad and going downhill from there; Torchwood just seemed to do it to extremes. To make everything so much worse., this one had started out being terrible at a ridiculously early hour, with a Rift alert coming through on Jack’s wrist strap a little after four in the morning. The sole saving grace was that he and Ianto had managed to get to bed early the night before, if midnight could really be described as early.

Jack would have willingly handled the alert by himself, but Ianto had insisted on going with him on the grounds that he was awake now anyway, and that with two of them searching, they could locate whatever had come through in half the time. He’d very nearly been right, because finding the latest Rift Gift had taken them less than half an hour. On this occasion, however, if might have been better if it had taken longer, because Jack was barely three feet from it, and crouching down to see what it was, when it exploded. To say that it made a mess of him would have been a serious understatement.

Unsurprisingly, he was killed instantly; no one would survive having most of their head blown off. Then Ianto had to sit with his lover’s body for almost an hour while the missing parts regenerated. It wasn’t a pretty sight, but then it wasn’t exactly fun for Jack either, especially since he revived before he was fully healed.

As if all that wasn’t enough to deal with, Jack had no sooner made it shakily to his feet, assisted by Ianto, when there came a loud clap of thunder, a dazzling flash of lightning, and the heavens opened. The wind had already been blustery, but now it slammed into them so hard that Jack would have fallen again if Ianto hadn’t still been holding onto him.

“Oh, today’s off to a great start,” he muttered sarcastically as Jack clung to him, shivering from the sudden downpour. “Come on, we’d best head back to the car. At least the rain should wash all the blood away.” Working for Torchwood, sometimes you had to look on the bright side, even if was often hard to find one.

Holding tightly to each other, heads down against the wind and the driving rain, already nearly soaked to the skin, they set off towards where they’d left the SUV. Naturally, thanks to roadworks, construction, and the inconvenient spot the Rift had chosen to deposit its latest find, they’d ended up having to walk the last mile or so to the point of arrival. Even taking the shortest route possible, which meant cutting through some of the city’s darkest and dankest alleyways, wasn’t going to make much difference distance-wise, but they took the chance anyway, which, in retrospect, was a mistake.

On any other night, with better weather, and when Jack wasn’t still recovering from a particularly harrowing death, running into a couple of Weevils wouldn’t have been a problem. But the Weevils weren’t enjoying the storm any more than the humans were, and visibility was so bad that Jack and Ianto didn’t know they were there, hunkered down behind a skip, until they were almost on top of them. With no Weevil spray, sedatives, wrist-clamps, or hoods to hand, and their guns holstered, it was far from an even fight, and although Jack managed to drive them both off, by the time he did, Ianto was already down.

Finding Ianto’s phone, Jack called Owen and ordered him to meet them at the Hub. Then he picked his lover up, carried him to the SUV, tended his injuries as best he could, and drove back to base as fast as he dared. By the time he got there it was almost six in the morning.

Jack spent the next couple of hours helping Owen treat Ianto’s wounds. He’d lost a lot of blood, and Owen had to use every drop of Ianto’s blood type he had available, plus some of Jack’s since he, like most fifty-first century humans, was a universal donor. When the girls arrived, Owen was just finishing up. Ianto was still in serious condition, but he was stable.

The storm continued to rage outside all day, and the Rift seemed to be following its example, inundating Cardiff with random objects almost continuously. Owen obviously needed to remain at the Hub with his patient, and Jack would have preferred to stay by his lover’s side, but he couldn’t leave all the work to Tosh and Gwen. Sometimes he hated being the boss.

So all day long, the three of them were in and out, collecting the objects the Rift bestowed on them, getting repeatedly drenched, barely having time to toss their clothes into the dryer and get into something dry before having to go outside again. It was like being trapped in a waking nightmare.

Every time he returned to base, Jack immediately went to the medical bay to check on Ianto, and every time the news was the same: he was stable, but still in critical condition. Despite dying twice more during the course of the day, Jack kept trying to breathe life into his lover, hoping that he could pass on some of his own regenerative energy and help Ianto to heal. He didn’t know if it was making any difference, or even if he had enough to spare, but he had to keep trying because if he’d insisted on handling that morning’s Rift alert alone, Ianto wouldn’t have been injured in the first place.

“How’re you holding up?” Tosh asked, offering Jack a cup of coffee from the café across the Plas.

“I just want today to be over, or better yet, to never have happened,” Jack admitted. He’d had bad days before, when nothing seemed to go right, but this was one of the worst he could remember.

“Ianto will be fine. He’s strong.”

“I hope you’re right.”

The End