donutsweeper (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
donutsweeper) wrote2007-08-16 10:47 pm
donutsweeper) wrote2007-08-16 10:47 pm
Entry tags:
Poison and Painful History
Title: Poison and Painful History
Rating/Warning: PG/ if you haven't seen "Dalek" and "The Long Game" you might be a tad confused
Word Count: 2266
Summary: Jack is poisoned and Torchwood can't help him. Will they accept help from Martha and the Doctor?
Author's Notes: This began in response to the "Jack hurt-fic" prompt at![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
wintercompanion and sort of mophed from there.
A/N2: This is the story from Torchwood's perspective. The story from the Doctor's perspective can be found here: Painful History and Past Mistakes
Rating/Warning: PG/ if you haven't seen "Dalek" and "The Long Game" you might be a tad confused
Word Count: 2266
Summary: Jack is poisoned and Torchwood can't help him. Will they accept help from Martha and the Doctor?
Author's Notes: This began in response to the "Jack hurt-fic" prompt at
wintercompanion and sort of mophed from there.A/N2: This is the story from Torchwood's perspective. The story from the Doctor's perspective can be found here: Painful History and Past Mistakes
They were walking across the Plass when it happened. A wild looking unkept man ran up to Jack. "You traveled with him!" he screamed, "But can he save you now?" And then he opened a vial and sprayed a glittery mist at Jack before running off.
"Oh god," Jack said quietly, staring as the glittery film dissipated.
"We have to stop him!" Gwen started to run off after the assailant before Jack grabbed her arm.
"We don't have time!”
“But we can catch him!” she yelled, watching as the man disappeared into the crowd.
“Not before it’s too late for me. If it’s not already...” He quickly activated the invisible lift while pulling off his coat. "Phloriantian poison," he explained, "the infected burn up." Blank looks surrounded him. "I mean literally, they burn up, till there's nothing left but ash." He headed toward autopsy. "Gwen, Owen and Tosh, in the sub-basement, the room next to the emergency supplies, there's a tub-like chamber. Get it up here, now." The others ran off and he turned to Ianto, tossing him his phone as he continued to undress. "This has something to do with the Doctor. Martha might be in danger. She's number seven on speed dial. Call her and tell her everything that happened. Maybe she knows how to contact him. Maybe he can protect her. When they get the chamber up here put me in, seal it with the lever on the side and flick the blue switch, got it?" Ianto nodded, his eyes wide. "I don't know if I can come back from this. Doubt it anyway, but that's okay. If I stop my circulation it might slow down the poison," he explained before shooting himself through the heart. The last thing he heard before the blackness overtook him was Ianto screaming his name.
It was only seven minutes later when Jack's phone rang. Ianto stared at it a second before answering it, but before he could say anything a male voice started speaking. "It's the Doctor. Martha's told me everything. You're with Jack now? I'm homing in on this signal and will materialize in a second. I... just wanted to warn you."
"That was the Doctor," Ianto started to explain, "he's coming..." his voice was drowned out by a weird whooshing noise and a wind whipped around the autopsy room.
"Hullo?" called a voice from the doorway, "friendly helpful alien here. Don't shoot."
The man was followed by a woman who made the introductions, "I'm Martha Jones, this is the Doctor, and you lot much be Torchwood. Jack told us all about you." Her voice faded away when she saw that Owen had pulled out a gun. “Hold on, what’re you doing? You called us!”
“We called you.” Ianto said. “Jack wanted me to warn you. I didn’t think you’d come here. Not with.. him.” Ianto gestured at the Doctor.
“I can help,” the Doctor said quietly.
Ianto stared at him for a second before making up his mind. “Owen,” Ianto cautioned, “Put it down.”
“But...”
“He’s right Owen, we can’t.” Tosh put her hand on his arm. “Not now. Not if...”
Owen lowered his weapon and the Doctor and Martha walked into the room.
"Oh Jack," the Doctor sighed, staring at his friend incased in the crystalline chamber. "The things you get yourself into. Right, so how long from when he was poisoned till you got him in there?"
"He killed himself less than three minutes after being sprayed, and we had him in the chamber within another two." Ianto answered. "He said the lack of circulation might help, but he wasn't sure..."
"I...we don’t know what to do. The chamber was supposed to help but it’'s not doing enough," Owen interrupted, "he's dead but his temp's up to 61º and it's still rising. He’s still going to burn up."
"I might be able to help him, if you'll let me." The Doctor was uneasy, understandably so, considering his welcome and his last encounter with Torchwood. Seeing the worry and tension in the Torchwood team he took that as a tacit agreement. "All right, let's get him into the TARDIS."
Before long Jack was enveloped within a stasis field in the ship's medical bay, wired to more complicated machines than any of the Torchwood team had ever seen before. The Doctor started to explain what everything did, but soon realized they were too focused on Jack and not paying the slightest bit of attention to him so he trailed off. They were not the Torchwood he had expected, not at all like the people he encountered at Canary Wharf. He was beginning to understand why Jack had been so anxious to return to them. He could see that they certainly were loyal to him.
Eventually he broke the silence, "while we wait.. I have to know how this happened, who did this..."
Tosh looked up, her red eyes bright red. "There's probably CCTV footage. I'm sure one of the cameras must have caught him." She stood, but seemed hesitant to leave.
"Toshiko, please. I need to know if Martha is safe, if the others I've left behind are safe. Nothing will happen to Jack while you are gone."
She returned in a few minutes, "this is the best picture of the assailant I could find."
She held it out, but didn't let go until the Doctor looked her straight in the eye. "No change yet, I'm sorry. But, this is Jack, we're talking about! He'll pull through, nothing to worry about!" He forced a confidence into his voice that he did not really feel. Tosh regarded him for a moment, seeing through his façade, and handed over the paper and walked over to put her arm around Ianto.
"Now let's see this mystery man! Hmm... he’s such a mess... Wait a minute... He looks familiar. Oh no!!" He ran a hand through his hair. "No, no, no, no, no...." The Doctor gripped the photo so hard it was crushed into a ball.
"Doctor?" Martha worried as she saw how pale the Doctor had become.
"Adam. Adam Mitchell. Rose and I met up with him in 2012, he traveled with us for a bit."
"What happened?
"Things went... badly. He, he betrayed my trust and had surgery to put a computer interface port in his forehead! I was..." He paused, trying to get himself under control. "I dropped him off back and home and told him to live a quiet life or someone'd find out about it and dissect him."
"You just left him. At home. With a computer thingy in his head?" Martha shook her head, looking horrified.
The Doctor stared at her, wide eyed, almost like she'd slapped him. "No, you don't understand, it wasn't like that. I. No. How could I have... I didn't think... Margaret was right." Tosh looked at Martha questioningly, but Martha merely shrugged. "I'm always the first to leave, always moving on and I never look back."
"But, wait..." Ianto interrupted. "You returned Adam to 2012?"
"Yes, but he must have been able to access some of the knowledge from the Game Station, or Statten had more than one vault. Oh, of course Statten could have easily had another vault and Adam would have known about it! All that time and all those toys.... How could I have been so stupid! "
"We could...help you look for him..." Gwen suggested. "I've got contacts with the police and Tosh could use the CCTV's to..."
"No, this is my problem. I'll find him, besides Jack'd kill me if anything happened to any of you on my watch." He touched some of the panels on the console and a small screen popped up. "The TARDIS is monitoring Jack; you can watch his progress on that. He's doing fine, rise in temperature almost leveling off, but it's slow work getting that poison out of him. I'll be back before long before there's any change."
"Doctor, wait." Martha grabbed his coat and whispered something in his ear.
"Oh right," he said sheepishly, hitting a few more panels. Couches slipped out of the walls. "No reason you can't be more comfortable while waiting." And with a sweep of his coat, he was gone, Martha trailing in his wake.
"Should we really trust this bloke?" Owen asked.
"I don't think we have a choice," Tosh answered. "There was nothing we could do to help Jack, right?" Owen couldn't quite meet her eyes, but nodded. "He seems to know what he's doing."
"But he's the Doctor, I mean, he's the reason there is a Torchwood!"
"Owen," Ianto warned.
"Right. Sit down and shut up, Harper. I can do that."
So, they waited. They waited for the TARDIS to tell them something new. They waited for the Doctor to return. They waited for Jack to wake up. They waited for him to laugh at them all for worrying so.
It was few hours later when a very subdued Doctor and Martha slipped back into the medical bay. Owen and Gwen were asleep, stretched out on the couches. Ianto had brought a chair in from the Hub and was sitting vigil next to Jack while Tosh stood behind him, keeping an eye on Ianto while reading the information as it scrolled across the monitor.
Without looking at the Doctor or Martha she said, "His temperature's dropped almost fifteen degrees since we put him in there. Once it's down enough he'll be able to come back, right?"
"He hasn't disappointed me yet."
"Did you find him?" Ianto asked quietly.
"Yes," the Doctor replied tersely.
Ianto and Tosh looked at him, expecting some sort of explanation but when none was forthcoming Ianto asked, "He won't hurt Jack again?"
"No." The Doctor smiled sadly. "No one will have to worry about him ever again."
"All right then," Ianto said, turning away from the Doctor and Martha to resume his vigil with Jack.
"You don't need to know what happened?" Martha asked, patently surprised.
"I suppose those two would," Tosh answered, gesturing at Gwen and Owen. "But... Jack's safe?”
"Yes," the Doctor answered firmly.
"And your ship'll make him better?"
"Yes."
"That's all we need to know." Tosh looked at Ianto for a moment, who nodded in ascent. "You owe the truth to Jack, not us. He'll tell us if he thinks we need to know."
The Doctor smiled warmly. "No wonder he wanted so desperately to return to you lot." Within a few minutes he and Martha had dragged in chairs as well, joining in the vigil around their fallen comrade.
And so the waiting continued. After what seemed like an eternity the TARDIS beeped, reporting that Jack's temperature had dropped to 45º and the Doctor explained it was time to remove the stasis field. "Now it's up to him." He gestured at Jack. "He still has quite a bit of healing to do." Tosh woke Gwen and Owen, so they were all there around his bed when Jack finally gasped and came back.
The Doctor watched the reunion between Jack and his team from the doorway. Not because he didn't want to intrude, but because for once in his very long life he wasn't sure what to say. Thoughts and doubts swirled about what he did and what had happened and how bad things might have been... It was only when Ianto touched his shoulder that he realized they'd been trying to get his attention.
"Sorry." He gave his head a shake and plastered a smile on his face. "So, how's the patient?"
"Jack would like a word with you," Ianto said quietly, "and he's sent us back to work. We'll be outside if he needs us. Come on, Martha, we'll show you around."
And with that the two old friends were alone. After the din of the team all talking at once the silence was deafening. The Doctor stepped forward slowly, uncertain where to begin, but thankfully it was Jack who broke the silence first.
"So how'm I doing Doc?" His tone was carefree, but there was a tired drag to his voice the Doctor couldn’t remember having heard before.
"Well." He looked at the monitor. "You still have a bit of a fever, there must have been just the slightest trace of the poison left when you came back to life." He reached out hesitantly to feel Jack's brow. "But, the worst of it is over now, you should bounce back in a day or so." Jack smiled slightly, but didn't speak again.
Suddenly the dam burst. "Jack," the Doctor practically sobbed, "I made a mistake. A terrible mistake and it nearly killed you. I'd left someone behind and never looked back. I've left people behind my whole life, just like I left you, but this time, this person couldn't take being abandoned. He went mad, he wanted revenge. Somehow he came across a picture of us here a few years back: you, the old me, Rose and Mickey the Idiot. They were safe from him, but he found you and..." His voice cracked, pain and desperation bleeding through.
"Not your fault," Jack whispered, tiredly. "You came when I needed you."
The Doctor looked away guiltily. "This time. But, before..."
"Was before. Even Time Lords can learn from their mistakes."
"But I left you. I just left you. I knew what happened and I ran. How can you... I have so much to make up for."
"You will."
"You're so certain."
Jack smiled. "Never doubted you. Never will." The Doctor met his eyes for a second before Jack drifted off to sleep.
Author's note: 61ºC = 141.8ºF 45ºC = 113ºF
"Oh god," Jack said quietly, staring as the glittery film dissipated.
"We have to stop him!" Gwen started to run off after the assailant before Jack grabbed her arm.
"We don't have time!”
“But we can catch him!” she yelled, watching as the man disappeared into the crowd.
“Not before it’s too late for me. If it’s not already...” He quickly activated the invisible lift while pulling off his coat. "Phloriantian poison," he explained, "the infected burn up." Blank looks surrounded him. "I mean literally, they burn up, till there's nothing left but ash." He headed toward autopsy. "Gwen, Owen and Tosh, in the sub-basement, the room next to the emergency supplies, there's a tub-like chamber. Get it up here, now." The others ran off and he turned to Ianto, tossing him his phone as he continued to undress. "This has something to do with the Doctor. Martha might be in danger. She's number seven on speed dial. Call her and tell her everything that happened. Maybe she knows how to contact him. Maybe he can protect her. When they get the chamber up here put me in, seal it with the lever on the side and flick the blue switch, got it?" Ianto nodded, his eyes wide. "I don't know if I can come back from this. Doubt it anyway, but that's okay. If I stop my circulation it might slow down the poison," he explained before shooting himself through the heart. The last thing he heard before the blackness overtook him was Ianto screaming his name.
It was only seven minutes later when Jack's phone rang. Ianto stared at it a second before answering it, but before he could say anything a male voice started speaking. "It's the Doctor. Martha's told me everything. You're with Jack now? I'm homing in on this signal and will materialize in a second. I... just wanted to warn you."
"That was the Doctor," Ianto started to explain, "he's coming..." his voice was drowned out by a weird whooshing noise and a wind whipped around the autopsy room.
"Hullo?" called a voice from the doorway, "friendly helpful alien here. Don't shoot."
The man was followed by a woman who made the introductions, "I'm Martha Jones, this is the Doctor, and you lot much be Torchwood. Jack told us all about you." Her voice faded away when she saw that Owen had pulled out a gun. “Hold on, what’re you doing? You called us!”
“We called you.” Ianto said. “Jack wanted me to warn you. I didn’t think you’d come here. Not with.. him.” Ianto gestured at the Doctor.
“I can help,” the Doctor said quietly.
Ianto stared at him for a second before making up his mind. “Owen,” Ianto cautioned, “Put it down.”
“But...”
“He’s right Owen, we can’t.” Tosh put her hand on his arm. “Not now. Not if...”
Owen lowered his weapon and the Doctor and Martha walked into the room.
"Oh Jack," the Doctor sighed, staring at his friend incased in the crystalline chamber. "The things you get yourself into. Right, so how long from when he was poisoned till you got him in there?"
"He killed himself less than three minutes after being sprayed, and we had him in the chamber within another two." Ianto answered. "He said the lack of circulation might help, but he wasn't sure..."
"I...we don’t know what to do. The chamber was supposed to help but it’'s not doing enough," Owen interrupted, "he's dead but his temp's up to 61º and it's still rising. He’s still going to burn up."
"I might be able to help him, if you'll let me." The Doctor was uneasy, understandably so, considering his welcome and his last encounter with Torchwood. Seeing the worry and tension in the Torchwood team he took that as a tacit agreement. "All right, let's get him into the TARDIS."
Before long Jack was enveloped within a stasis field in the ship's medical bay, wired to more complicated machines than any of the Torchwood team had ever seen before. The Doctor started to explain what everything did, but soon realized they were too focused on Jack and not paying the slightest bit of attention to him so he trailed off. They were not the Torchwood he had expected, not at all like the people he encountered at Canary Wharf. He was beginning to understand why Jack had been so anxious to return to them. He could see that they certainly were loyal to him.
Eventually he broke the silence, "while we wait.. I have to know how this happened, who did this..."
Tosh looked up, her red eyes bright red. "There's probably CCTV footage. I'm sure one of the cameras must have caught him." She stood, but seemed hesitant to leave.
"Toshiko, please. I need to know if Martha is safe, if the others I've left behind are safe. Nothing will happen to Jack while you are gone."
She returned in a few minutes, "this is the best picture of the assailant I could find."
She held it out, but didn't let go until the Doctor looked her straight in the eye. "No change yet, I'm sorry. But, this is Jack, we're talking about! He'll pull through, nothing to worry about!" He forced a confidence into his voice that he did not really feel. Tosh regarded him for a moment, seeing through his façade, and handed over the paper and walked over to put her arm around Ianto.
"Now let's see this mystery man! Hmm... he’s such a mess... Wait a minute... He looks familiar. Oh no!!" He ran a hand through his hair. "No, no, no, no, no...." The Doctor gripped the photo so hard it was crushed into a ball.
"Doctor?" Martha worried as she saw how pale the Doctor had become.
"Adam. Adam Mitchell. Rose and I met up with him in 2012, he traveled with us for a bit."
"What happened?
"Things went... badly. He, he betrayed my trust and had surgery to put a computer interface port in his forehead! I was..." He paused, trying to get himself under control. "I dropped him off back and home and told him to live a quiet life or someone'd find out about it and dissect him."
"You just left him. At home. With a computer thingy in his head?" Martha shook her head, looking horrified.
The Doctor stared at her, wide eyed, almost like she'd slapped him. "No, you don't understand, it wasn't like that. I. No. How could I have... I didn't think... Margaret was right." Tosh looked at Martha questioningly, but Martha merely shrugged. "I'm always the first to leave, always moving on and I never look back."
"But, wait..." Ianto interrupted. "You returned Adam to 2012?"
"Yes, but he must have been able to access some of the knowledge from the Game Station, or Statten had more than one vault. Oh, of course Statten could have easily had another vault and Adam would have known about it! All that time and all those toys.... How could I have been so stupid! "
"We could...help you look for him..." Gwen suggested. "I've got contacts with the police and Tosh could use the CCTV's to..."
"No, this is my problem. I'll find him, besides Jack'd kill me if anything happened to any of you on my watch." He touched some of the panels on the console and a small screen popped up. "The TARDIS is monitoring Jack; you can watch his progress on that. He's doing fine, rise in temperature almost leveling off, but it's slow work getting that poison out of him. I'll be back before long before there's any change."
"Doctor, wait." Martha grabbed his coat and whispered something in his ear.
"Oh right," he said sheepishly, hitting a few more panels. Couches slipped out of the walls. "No reason you can't be more comfortable while waiting." And with a sweep of his coat, he was gone, Martha trailing in his wake.
"Should we really trust this bloke?" Owen asked.
"I don't think we have a choice," Tosh answered. "There was nothing we could do to help Jack, right?" Owen couldn't quite meet her eyes, but nodded. "He seems to know what he's doing."
"But he's the Doctor, I mean, he's the reason there is a Torchwood!"
"Owen," Ianto warned.
"Right. Sit down and shut up, Harper. I can do that."
So, they waited. They waited for the TARDIS to tell them something new. They waited for the Doctor to return. They waited for Jack to wake up. They waited for him to laugh at them all for worrying so.
It was few hours later when a very subdued Doctor and Martha slipped back into the medical bay. Owen and Gwen were asleep, stretched out on the couches. Ianto had brought a chair in from the Hub and was sitting vigil next to Jack while Tosh stood behind him, keeping an eye on Ianto while reading the information as it scrolled across the monitor.
Without looking at the Doctor or Martha she said, "His temperature's dropped almost fifteen degrees since we put him in there. Once it's down enough he'll be able to come back, right?"
"He hasn't disappointed me yet."
"Did you find him?" Ianto asked quietly.
"Yes," the Doctor replied tersely.
Ianto and Tosh looked at him, expecting some sort of explanation but when none was forthcoming Ianto asked, "He won't hurt Jack again?"
"No." The Doctor smiled sadly. "No one will have to worry about him ever again."
"All right then," Ianto said, turning away from the Doctor and Martha to resume his vigil with Jack.
"You don't need to know what happened?" Martha asked, patently surprised.
"I suppose those two would," Tosh answered, gesturing at Gwen and Owen. "But... Jack's safe?”
"Yes," the Doctor answered firmly.
"And your ship'll make him better?"
"Yes."
"That's all we need to know." Tosh looked at Ianto for a moment, who nodded in ascent. "You owe the truth to Jack, not us. He'll tell us if he thinks we need to know."
The Doctor smiled warmly. "No wonder he wanted so desperately to return to you lot." Within a few minutes he and Martha had dragged in chairs as well, joining in the vigil around their fallen comrade.
And so the waiting continued. After what seemed like an eternity the TARDIS beeped, reporting that Jack's temperature had dropped to 45º and the Doctor explained it was time to remove the stasis field. "Now it's up to him." He gestured at Jack. "He still has quite a bit of healing to do." Tosh woke Gwen and Owen, so they were all there around his bed when Jack finally gasped and came back.
The Doctor watched the reunion between Jack and his team from the doorway. Not because he didn't want to intrude, but because for once in his very long life he wasn't sure what to say. Thoughts and doubts swirled about what he did and what had happened and how bad things might have been... It was only when Ianto touched his shoulder that he realized they'd been trying to get his attention.
"Sorry." He gave his head a shake and plastered a smile on his face. "So, how's the patient?"
"Jack would like a word with you," Ianto said quietly, "and he's sent us back to work. We'll be outside if he needs us. Come on, Martha, we'll show you around."
And with that the two old friends were alone. After the din of the team all talking at once the silence was deafening. The Doctor stepped forward slowly, uncertain where to begin, but thankfully it was Jack who broke the silence first.
"So how'm I doing Doc?" His tone was carefree, but there was a tired drag to his voice the Doctor couldn’t remember having heard before.
"Well." He looked at the monitor. "You still have a bit of a fever, there must have been just the slightest trace of the poison left when you came back to life." He reached out hesitantly to feel Jack's brow. "But, the worst of it is over now, you should bounce back in a day or so." Jack smiled slightly, but didn't speak again.
Suddenly the dam burst. "Jack," the Doctor practically sobbed, "I made a mistake. A terrible mistake and it nearly killed you. I'd left someone behind and never looked back. I've left people behind my whole life, just like I left you, but this time, this person couldn't take being abandoned. He went mad, he wanted revenge. Somehow he came across a picture of us here a few years back: you, the old me, Rose and Mickey the Idiot. They were safe from him, but he found you and..." His voice cracked, pain and desperation bleeding through.
"Not your fault," Jack whispered, tiredly. "You came when I needed you."
The Doctor looked away guiltily. "This time. But, before..."
"Was before. Even Time Lords can learn from their mistakes."
"But I left you. I just left you. I knew what happened and I ran. How can you... I have so much to make up for."
"You will."
"You're so certain."
Jack smiled. "Never doubted you. Never will." The Doctor met his eyes for a second before Jack drifted off to sleep.
Author's note: 61ºC = 141.8ºF 45ºC = 113ºF
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