Torchwood: Fanfic: The bare essentials

[m_findlow]

Title: The bare essentials
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 621 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for umiyuki's prompt "Any, any, the things that count as luxuries when you're living on the run" at fic_promptly
Summary: Jack is forced to give up a lot in order to do his job.

Jack had been staying in backpacker hostels for weeks now. They were the perfect place to hide out. No one stayed more than a few days and the whole place was run by volunteer residents in exchange for even more heavily discounted rates. Jack liked it for the fact that if someone were following him, he'd recognize them as a regular, and these places didn't do regulars. He could come and go as he pleased at all hours of the day and night and no one would blink an eye.

He could live with the cramped conditions, the terribly thin and yet simultaneously lumpy mattress. It wasn't much different to his cot at home. The food was basic - cereal and toast, or anything that came out of a can that could be microwaved in under three minutes. The communal kitchen was overflowing with such packeted and tinned goods, abandoned by former guests and adopted by incoming ones in some kind of universally accepted system of bartering and paying it forward. He could have gone out to eat at a hundred different restaurants, but he was limiting himself to cash as much possible. Who knew what powers The Committee had to trace his supposedly untraceable credit cards. Forcing himself to come up with new and creative ways to mix and match tinned ravioli with lentils and a muesli bar for dessert kept his mind active. What he truly missed though was coffee. Real coffee. He hated himself for every single cup of horrid instant coffee he drank, to the point where he'd given it up altogether. There were some things it was worth going without, and every cup of coffee reminded him of home and what he'd left behind.

He had bigger problems than coffee however. When he wasn't out pounding the pavements, sneaking into government facilities and scouring archive documents at local libraries, he was attached to his laptop, sitting cross-legged on his cramped bunk bed, hacking into corporate servers, trying to track down connections between alleged Committee members and their activities. It didn't leave much time for sleeping, not that he could. His mind was even more restless than his body. He wanted to go home, but he knew he couldn't. Not until he'd gotten to the bottom of who The Committee were, what their endgame was, and how he could put a stop to it.

He'd slept probably less than an hour, feeling every hour that he hadn't slept in the past few weeks gradually creeping up on him. Regardless, he crawled off the bed and headed for the showers block. The dollar a day towels for hire were threadbare and like sandpaper, in need of a good long soak and a spin in the tumbled dryer. The shower nozzle was pitifully inadequate for its purpose, but what little water did come out was scalding hot and eked out every cramped muscle in his body. If the shower head had any real pressure in it, he might never get out from under it. When he got home, whenever that might be, he was going to reward himself with the longest, hottest bath ever. He'd be wrinkled like a raisin and reeking of lavender before they could coax him out of it.

The travel sized toothbrush and toothpaste had cost him six dollars but had been worth every penny to remove the furry sensation from his mouth. Funny how such a little thing could make him feel human again. He might be sleep deprived, homesick, suffering from caffeine withdrawals and a decent cooked meal, but showered and brushed, he felt ready to face another day on the hunt for The Committee. The rest of life's comforts would have to wait.