Broken Space

Jack should've known, really. The universe--any universe, for that matter--surely wouldn't allow him to be happy or content for any decent length of time. Gods and other assorted dieties forbid. But things had been going so well for him that he doesn't immediately get that sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach when his walk along the beach is sidetracked by the thump of a period military boot against cardboard.

More fool, him.

He drops to his knees and starts brushing sand away, revealing a perfectly nondescript lid to a file folder, the same kinds of boxes Torchwood always uses to store their files. The sand is loose around it, more heaped up than buried, and it doesn't take him long to unearth the whole ting--and discover that it is a Torchwood box. Even the familiar logo on the side doesn't fill him with dread, simply curiosity as he sits back, box at his side, and opens the lid.

On top are a few bright, colourful drawings, clearly done by a child. His breath catches as he reads the labels beneath the drawn figures on one of the drawings. 'Me' 'Mom' and 'Uncle Jack'. And 'Uncle Jack' is wearing a very familiar coat. He carefully sets the drawings aside, heart beating a little faster, and digs into the box again, finding photos, postcards, a tied stack of letters. He isn't surprised to recognise the people in the photos. Everything in the box is familiar, all of the things he'd saved and kept hidden in his private quarters in the Hub. Everything to do with Alice and Steven.

He reads through some of the letters, some of the postcards, and he's smiling by the time he finishes reading a story Steven wrote for him. The smile is still there as he glances into the box and notices an official Torchwood file. He's never read through the entire file on Alice and Steven, though he's had to update it himself several times, through the years. He flips to the end, to catch up on the most recent entry--and freezes, going very pale.

[Time Agent traumatised on the beach! Spoilers for Torchwood: Children of Earth will be unavoidable in the threads.]

The morning dawns cool, a light mist clinging to the tops of the trees. A small dinosaur on a harness darts into the underbrush and a man wearing a smart looking suit and matching waistcoat appears shortly after. Ianto hasn't given up on the idea of lead-training Angharad. He and the dinosaur have reached a truce on the issue, each one understanding the other's motivations and desires, but each one not wanting to give in.

As he went over a rise, following Angharad from a distance, he could see the ocean to his left, and the jungle to his right. He follows the well-worn path near the coastline and thinks that this is one of the only things on the island that make him think of Wales. Walking the rocky coastline in the early morning used to be an escape for him then, as it is now. A time where he's alone with his thoughts, which frequently need sorting. He watches the waves break against the shore, and thinks, only half seriously, how they're a metaphor for his own emotional state.

That's when he sees it.

A once proud ship lies beached on the sand, the wood bleached silver from the sun. A tattered flag--red, with a gold lizard emblazoned--blows in the light wind, listlessly. Ianto draws nearer, remembering the Viking boat he and Fionchadd had made love in last summer (Christ, had it been a year already?). He looks over the ship with a faintly sad expression--another casualty of the Rift, it was obvious. But where was its captain?

Between the sheep, goats, pigs, chickens, and cows (the horses were allowed to roam free), there was plenty of work to go around. Bran and Kaeldra had divided morning and evening chores between them and so each morning, she rose before dawn, when it was still cool and the heat was not yet upon them, and took care of the animals in the barn.

This morning is no exception. Kaeldra sings softly as she moves from stall to stall, checking water and food levels. When she reaches the stall at the end, she picks up the water bucket and sets out for the nearby spring. On her way back, she hears a sound--like wingbeats. Something she hasn't heard in a long time. She cranes her neck, shading her eyes with one had as she searches the skies. Nothing.

Bright-Rush

Kaeldra turns around, and the bucket falls to the ground, water spilling everywhere. Pryo--she'd recognize him anywhere--stands, smoke curling from his nostrils, looking extraordinarily proud of himself.

Pyro, she thinks, her mind searching for his, but there's nothing--a wall where there used to be a door. "Pryo," she says aloud, and watches as his tail lashes back and forth, his head cocked to one side as if he too is feeling the confusion of their lost connection. He waddles towards her, his stomach as large as she remembered even though it must have been many months now, and makes a soft sound of recognition, and acknowledgment, and then another sound--another one that she remembers. A calling.

There's a rustling in the bushes behind Pyro, and then two green dragons appear from the bushes. Embyr. And Synge--oh, Synge that had been lost to her. She drops to her knees as the tears start to fall and they set upon her, rubbing against her back and shoulders, thrumming in welcome. She can't sense her confusion like she used to, but she can see it, and she laughs to show them she's not hurt--that it's joy and not sorrow that brings the tears to her eyes.


[Kaeldra's "item" has arrived]

Like basically everybody else on the island, Bright had developed a kind of routine. Most of his wouldn't surprise anybody--surfing, eating, hanging out on the beach, eating again, shooting some hoops, harassing people into having parties. The only part that would was where he got up early and read something. It didn't matter much what, and a lot of the time he didn't understand it anyway, but after the first couple months of what was basically an endless summer vacation, he'd kind of felt like he was reverting back to being dumb. He was used to being dumb, but he didn't really like it, so he tried to learn stuff. He figured this would be a prime opportunity for Ephram to make fun of him--and Delia, though Bran and his vet books probably wouldn't--so he woke up early, didn't tell anybody he was doing it, and finished the whole thing off by catching some early morning waves.

That was most mornings. This morning, he wandered out of his room and saw her.

"Baby!" Bright ran over to his lost love and threw his arms around her. "I missed you!"

"Beep-beepeep eep!" she said, because she was a totally cool vintage Ms Pac-Man arcade game and that was pretty much all she ever said. Ephram had brought her home from a party once and Bright was totally devastated when he'd gone and sold her to buy a piano. Oh, sure, he understood, Ephram, piano, blah blah blah.

He jiggled the joystick. The game beeped again. "Score," he crowed. "Still doesn't even need quarters!"

Half an hour later, he was still playing.

Tory's been scouring the library for Torchwood stuff. It's a pretty standard day for him and one that generally keeps his mind occupied, which is good at this point. He's so intent on finding research materials that he's wholly unprepared for the 8 1/2 by 11, black, spiralbound journal that falls into his hands.

He doesn't even have to open it up to know what it is. But he does anyway, fingers tracing the faded lettering:

Saturday, September 25th. Somewhere in the vicinity of 12:41 A.M. to 1:25 A.M., Colin Stephens moved into 346 68th St., Woodridge, Queens, NY. But who can remember the time of this event precisely?

Tory closes it quickly, heart pounding, hands trembling slightly. How in the world? It's impossible. He pushes the books on the shelf out of the way, wondering if there's some sort of magic portal to his bedroom closet behind them. But it's only the wood of the bookshelf.

"What the hell is going on here?" He says out loud, to nobody in particular.

Misato had grown up in Tokyo--before Second Impact one of the densest population centres on the planet, and after Second Impact...well, still one of the densest population centres on the planet, just that the population itself was considerably smaller. Which means one would think that she would miss the city, and she does; the retractable spires of Tokyo-3, neon everywhere and the crackling energy of the city, the view from her apartment, the dark little club she and Ritsuko used to go to after work. Ramen. Professional Laundry. Pen-Pen.

But she likes this, too. The quiet, at first unsettling, has become peaceful, and the sky, without skyscrapers and city lights to cloud it, is wider and beautiful and infinite. At night, she finds, she can just lie on the beach and stare up at it and feel connected, wondering if the Lance is floating there somewhere, if Unit 01 still drifts away from Earth's lazy orbit.

And in the daytime, she takes off her shoes and walks through the sand, listening to the discordant caws of jungle birds in palm trees and the lap of the waves against the shore. There's a part of her that had always wanted to go somewhere tropical, but after Second Impact, there weren't many options. The only person she'd told had been Kaji, who had done his best to fulfil that fantasy (like most of her others) by making pina coladas and getting them grass skirts and a horrible CD of some kind of Caribbean folk music.

College had been a simpler time, in a lot of ways, but that's probably true of everybody. Of course childhood was even simpler than that, and that...is not true of everybody. Her pilots, for instance. But most people?

She flops down into the sand and starts digging. This is another new pasttime--sand castles, because she'd never made them when she was little and there's something really satisfying (and possibly mentally damaged) about watching the tide come in and wash them away. She builds miniature versions of Tokyo-3, because then either she can pretend the collapse is just the buildings sliding back underground, or it doesn't matter because whatever damage the water does is nothing compared to what it's already been through.

There's the Metropolitan Government Tower, and Tokyo Tower, and Mount Fuji off to one side--okay, so the model isn't really to scale--and a road going through, and it's going to require a bit of extra sand to make NERV HQ so she digs a big old handful out of the ground at the water's edge and comes up with a rapidly shrinking handful sliding through her fingers, a clump of slimy broad seaweed, and a silver cross on a cord.

It's the last that surprises her, and she sits back hard on her heels and just watches it swing like a pendulum from her hand, the sunlight glinting off the cold metal, until the last few grains of wet sand fall through her fingers like an hourglass running out of time.

It's your average sort of day on the island, and Alec's got to where he's settled into a basic routine--coffee and breakfast, whether he makes it himself or somebody else does, wander by the lab and see if anything new's happened, take a shower, find something time-wasting to do for a bit to keep from going insane.

It isn't much of a routine, but there are a lot of hours in the day when you don't have real responsibilities. There's Torchwood, but even Alec can only maguyver computer parts for so long before he goes kind of nuts, and Lilly, who is more like a partner-in-crime in the whole time wasting gig, and working on a D&D adventure for when they all get tired of Risk. (It may or may not bear a certain resemblance to things that actually happened, but he's got to start somewhere.)

He's on a walk out by the trees, getting some exerise--he's never been a runner like David or Darrell, but he was used to getting outside most days, back home, and he figured a hike would help him clear his head a bit. Now he's sweaty and getting tired and heading home, eyeing the trees around him for a good candidate for a walking stick. He used to have a staff he'd taken on camping trips, one David has made for him--it had an iron tip and a leather grip, and some spell poem thing David had burnt into it in Norse runes.

Which is beside the point at the moment, except that he wants a walking stick and stops to see if he can't pull a good branch off one of the trees. Palm trees don't really look promising on that front, but there's something that looks like it might work, and he's in the middle of pulling it out of the leaves to get a better look when something hits him on the head.

Oh. Yeah. The one David made him looked like that.

He grumbles and rubs his head, but picks it up. The last time he saw it was in Galunlati, and the whole thing was a blur of pain and fire and the stench of death and burning blood, a memory that still makes him gag a bit. His fingers close around the leather grip of the runestaff, here and intact, complete with the protection rune David had made up--

Whoever holds to hinder here
from Road that's right, from Quest that's clear
Think not to trick with tongue untrue,
nor veil the vision, nor the view;
Look not to lose, nor lead astray
who wields this Warden of the Way.

These runes were wrought, these spells were spun
by David, son of Sullivan.

Wow, what a load of crap that ended up being, he thinks ruefully. He hadn't known what to make of it when David gave it to him, but he'd clearly put a lot of work into it, and it was something his best friend made, how could he not be proud of it? But his best buddy's spellcraft left something to be desired.

The palms of his hands stinging memory, Alec stops walking and sinks down onto the ground, the staff across his knees. Any head-clearing is pretty well demolished now, and he just sits there for a while, thinking.