Torchwood: Fanfic: Destructive power

[m_findlow]

Title: Destructive power
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 921 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for o'neill's prompt "Any, any, now I see the destructive power of ego" at fic_promptly
Summary: In the end, ego was their undoing

Jack cursed again, nearly tripping over the object underfoot in the darkness. He swallowed hard before risking turning his torchlight downwards to see what he'd trodden on. In truth, he knew what it was and he really didn't want to see it. Despite that, he sucked in another breath and slowly lowered his gaze. She couldn't have been more than twenty five. At least she was still whole, he thought. That had to count for something. What a horrible, wicked waste of life.

He was angry, in a way that he'd rarely ever been angry these past hundred years. This was the kind of angry that made him feel sick to his stomach.

Rumors were that the Doctor had been here, and had saved them all from a deadly invasion of daleks and cybermen, but what he'd seen so far hadn't convicted him that anyone had been saved. Everywhere he turned, there was nothing but death. Bodies, bits of bodies, metal scraps, blood, carnage. Perhaps this was why they called him the oncoming storm. Jack swallowed again, pulling his beam of light away from the bloodied, stricken face of the young woman, not wanting to see anymore, and not wanting to think about how she might have felt at him seeing her like this. Better that the ugliness be hidden in the darkness where it belonged. Eventually he'd have to come back for her, and he would. He owed her that much. He wanted to make sure that she was taken away with some vestige of dignity and respect.

'Another one?' came the voice approaching from behind him out of the darkness, also wielding a torch.

'Leave her,' he instructed.

The man nodded briefly and continued past him. Shortly behind followed three more just like him, their red caps bobbing down the darkened halls. He left them to their task. They were only interested in the alien bits, and that was fine by him. There was no way his small team could have dealt with it all. He was there to make sure that nothing else left the building without his express permission. He hadn't had to ask for them to be called in. For once, the two agencies were happy to coordinate, and they'd lost more than a few of their own in the process. He could respect their need to take care of their own.

Left to his own devices, he continued to seethe. He was angry at them for leaving him to pick up the pieces, and equally angry at himself. He'd hated everything Torchwood One had stood for, and he'd been delighted the day he'd finally succeeded in emancipating his branch from their organisation. Now he regretted that he hadn't kept better tabs on them. Perhaps if he'd stayed on and fought harder for what he believed in, even though he would have been at loggerheads with them endlessly, things might not have turned out like this. He could have stopped this. He knew he could have.

Once upon a time, he'd been just like them, cold and heartless, selfish and self interested. He'd taken their money and done their dirty work. But over the years he'd come to see that there was so much more to it. The Doctor had taught him to be better than this. But no matter how hard, there was just no getting through to London. And now looked what had happened. This was the destructive power of ego. How many more dead would he find? None of the senior management or leaders had yet been found. No doubt they were the first to be converted. Perhaps a fitting end to be trapped in the body of a cold, unfeeling machine. Some may not have known the difference.

It was a mess, and a mess in more than one sense. The twenty first century was when everything changes, and it had. There wouldn't be a soul in London who wouldn't remember the day the machines came to take over. How many more had lost loved ones in the crossfire? He thought back to the body of the young girl. She would have had a mother and father. Maybe she had a sister, or a boyfriend, or someone who was waiting for her to come home and never would. And they'd be left to pick up the pieces and try to get on with their lives, just as Jack would have to.

Torchwood. It was supposed to be the last line of defence against whatever the universe threw at it, and now it was just him. Him and his army of three. What could they hope to do that a vast organisation of thousands had failed to? If he'd felt overwhelmed at being handed the helm of the Cardiff branch at the turn of the century, it was nothing compared to the enormous shoes he'd have to fill as the head of the entire Torchwood Institute.

He couldn't fix the mess that Torchwood One had left in its wake, nor hope to rebuild it and recast it in his own image. The best he could do would be to raze the entire thing to the ground. Buildings could be rebuilt and memories could be erased, but there was no bringing back the lives that had been lost.

Feeling the sudden weight of despair crash down on him, he slid down the wall and slumped on the floor, switching off the torchlight and joining the mess in the darkness where it couldn't be seen.