Torchwood: Fanfic: Keeping out the ghosts

[m_findlow]

Title: Keeping out the ghosts
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 258 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for badly_knitted's prompt "any, any, to a ghost, walls and doors don't exist" at fic_promptly
Summary: You can't keep out the ghosts, but you can discourage them

Jack likes his bunker beneath his office in the hub. It's a little bit dark, and a little bit messy, both of which could have been remedied if he could really be bothered. What he liked about it was that fact that it was small. Cosy probably wasn't the right word, but the closeness of the walls does provide a comfort of sorts.

After so many years, he's lived all over the place, but nothing has ever felt properly like home, and he admits, probably never will. But this tiny space does come close. It's the proximity of every wall and piece of furniture that makes it feel like he's surrounded by a protective layer of sorts. It seems silly to think that he needs protection, but there's one thing he can't ever get away from. It's the ghosts.

They've been following him for over a hundred and fifty years. Ghosts of people he's loved, people he's worked with, good and bad, people he couldn't save and people who got caught up in the whirlwind that is his life, whether they wanted to or not. That's what he strives to protect himself from.

But the problem with ghosts is that they don't believe in walls and doors. The most heavily fortified bunker in the world can't stop them from coming in and reminding him of things long forgotten, and of things he wishes he could forget. But the enclosed space does leave less room for them to encroach upon, and perhaps for now, that's all he can do.

Comments

[bk_forever]

*pets Jack*

This is brilliant, not at all what I was expecting from the prompt but it works so well for Jack's own particular kind of haunting. His ghosts are memories, so really he can never escape them because he carries them with him, but sometimes he can hide from them in the dark.

Thank you for the fill!

[m-findlow.livejournal.com]

Yeah, bit a random idea, don't know where it came from, it was just there when I saw the prompt.
It was one of a handful of short pieces I wrote that day, and they were all a bit grim and melancholy because I wrote them at work (when I should have been working, but no guilt as they haven't really been in my corner for a while now and I didn't want to be there).

Hopefully will post some lighter ones soon. At this rate it's still going to take me weeks to post all the contest week fics.

[bk_forever]

I've still got fics to post from the Contest Week before last,and probably the one before that, lol! I think I've even still got a few from 2014 that haven't bee posted yet! I'll get there eventually.

Sucks to be working somewhere you don't want to be *hugs*