m_findlow

Title: Casualty
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters/Pairings: Jack, OCs
Word Count: 500 words
Rating: PG
Notes: Written for Challenge 137 - Arm at anythingdrabble
Summary: Jack wakes up to a terrifying new reality.

In some ways it was lucky that Jack didn't see the mortar shell before it hit. He hadn't heard it either, but that was because they'd been falling so frequently that the cacophonous din made it completely indiscernable. For so many, that was probably the saving grace. Death claimed them before they even knew it.

Not for Jack, though. Death just kept coming for him, but it could never sink its teeth in deep enough to drag him down permanently.

When he woke he was in a world of agony. Everything hurt as if his body had been set to maximum inside a wartime tumble dryer. Cuts and bruises stung and throbbed, but it was nothing compared to the sensation of his right arm being on fire.

Out of the corner of his eye he caught the flurry of doctors and nurses rushing around in a seas of green canvas. He was in some kind of field hospital, though he didn't know how he'd gotten there. He'd been barely half a mile over the top, but still deep enough into u nclaimed territory that few men struck down by enemy fire ever made it back unless they got there on their own two feet.

He turned his head to the right to try and work out why his arm hurt so much. When he saw it, he nearly choked on the bile that shot up the back of his throat, gagging him violently. His arm was gone from the elbow down.

A nurse rushed over and helped raise his head enough to cough it up. 'Easy.'

'My arm,' he said.

'Lost when you were shelled, I'm afraid,' the nurse said, as if he'd done no more than lose a pocket watch.

'Put it back! Stitch it back on!' he wailed insensibly, staring at the spot where it had always been. It didn't occur to him for a moment that no one would ever find his arm, left abandoned out there in the battlefield somewhere, let alone be able to tell it apart from the hundreds of other blown apart body parts.

His arm. He'd died so many times and come back again, but he'd never lost a limb, not even so much as a toe. He wasn't dead either. Would it come back? Could it come back? Would he have to die first? If he died without it, would he come back without it? Goddesses, what would happen if it never came back? He had forever to live it seemed. How could he live forever without his arm?

'Just you calm yourself down,' the nurse said, wiping his brow with a damp cloth.

'You were lucky, son,' the doctor said, studying the end of the wound as he came over at the sound of the commotion. 'Cauterised the wound cleanly. Not much chance of infection, but we'll clean it up and ship you back home. Your war is done.'

Jack shook his head. No. His war was only just beginning.