m_findlow

Title: Haunted
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack, Gwen, Ianto, OCs
Author: m_findlow
Rating: M
Length: 50,847 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for spook_me 2020 Prompt - Ghost
Summary: The team investigate rumours of a haunted house in rural Wales.

‘You went off your meds, didn't you? Back in 1983.’ Jack couldn't help himself. He just had to know more about what had gone wrong between them that had caused things to end so tragically. He had to know if his actions had ultimately led to this point.

‘I didn't think I needed them. They made it hard to concentrate on my work. How could I work if I couldn't tell what day it was? When I stopped taking them, it was like a fog finally lifted. I realised I didn't need them to make me feel better. I only needed you. You made me so happy.’

Jack shook his head in disagreement. ‘That's not how I remember it.’ There were times when Jack could barely get the man to speak to him. Other times he raged at Jack for absolutely no reason. Yet none of it stopped Jack from being totally in love with him. Jack assumed that the mood swings were a by-product of such a mind being misunderstood by so many who were unable to see the world the way Gil saw it.

The melancholy drove Jack mad and he wanted to shake it out of the man when it came to linger, causing an insurmountable barrier between them. But then it would disappear, like clouds parting to let through daylight, and in those moments they had been happy. Jack had lived for those moments when the real Gil came out of the shadows. He was the single most brilliant mind Jack had ever known. He was also a troubled soul that just needed someone to love him enough. Jack knew that deep down he could make that sadness go away for good if he just persisted.

‘It wasn't just the depression, was it? Bipolar? A breakdown?’

Gil's smoky aura moved around Jack as he paced, considering the question as if for the first time. ‘The doctors said it was schizophrenia. A psychotic break. There were so many pills, Jack. I scarcely remember most of those years in prison. A decade passed in the blink of an eye. All my best years and hard work stolen away.’

‘And then?’

‘Then I got better. They put me on things that let me think a little bit. People didn't understand it back then. Lock you up and medicate you into oblivion, that was the solution. It took years of the right medications, the endless appointments with psychiatrists. To them I was an experiment. Three long years before they would let me so much as borrow a book to read. Another year before I could have a pen to write with. They wanted me to write down how I felt, what I was thinking. They gave me my first real challenge. How to write what they wanted to hear, appear as if I was staying on an even keel. And then finally the review board let me go. A new identity, a reprieve from a sentence for a crime I was hardly guilty of.’

Jack hardly felt surprised by the admission. Some people he'd met, whilst brilliant, had lacked any emotional quotient. They were awkward in social settings and didn't understand body language or social cues. Gil wasn't like that. He saw everything and understood it. It was just a shame he didn't have the courage to not let the opinions of those less adept dictate how he lived his life. He cared too much about how everyone else felt and ignored his own feelings on the matter.

Jack felt the black haze begin to wrap around him, enclosing him in a screen of smoke. ‘You never came and saw me, Jack.’

Jack tensed, feeling they'd reached a tipping point. ‘You were in a psychiatric unit, Gil. It broke my heart the day you left me standing there outside your door and never came back. I had to find out what happened to you by reading it in the newspaper like everyone else. I refused to believe what they said. I went through every police file and piece of evidence trying to find the truth, but in the end I had to accept it. You killed a man in cold blood. I hated myself for letting you become so broken.’

‘I was broken before you came along.’ Jack felt a wisp of cold air brush his cheek. ‘You were the one good thing.’

Why? Jack thought to himself. Why did he keep screwing up people's lives? ‘When you were released why didn't you try to make contact?’

‘I just wanted to be left alone. People always hated me for one thing or another, for being too smart, too depressed, for being a queer, for being a murderer. I tried to write you a letter a hundred times, to explain that I wasn't the evil person everyone thought I was. I was so alone but I thought about you every single day. Nothing else from my old life brought me joy anymore so I filled the house with art and history and tended the natural world. I did all of that until I couldn't bear the pain of it anymore.’

‘You hung yourself.’ Jack felt his heart breaking over again at the thought of Gil out here all on his own. Prison would have been a nightmare for someone like Gil, intellectually starved and emotionally isolated. Small wonder he'd come out here and spent his days tending garden beds and avoiding human contact. He'd had so much promise to give the world and the world had given him nothing in return.

‘Why all of this?’ Jack finally asked. ‘Why not just show yourself?’

‘I had to find out who you were. What had become of the man I knew. I've seen everything I need to know now.’

‘Wait. You did all this? It was some kind of test? I've been dragging myself around this house trying to figure out why the hell I couldn't get out and it was you?’

‘I wanted you to know what it felt like to be trapped like I had been. To know that the only way out was death. I loved you, but Torchwood always came first.’

‘That's not true,’ he said, knowing it was a lie and that Gil would see straight through it. Torchwood had to come first. Not because Jack wanted it that way, but because he didn't have a choice in the matter. ‘And where are my friends? What have you done with them?’

‘They are near. And getting closer. You'll all be back together soon, I promise. I needed time alone with you first.’

Jack didn't understand the response. Had they gone outside to look for him? Had Gil altered their perceptions as well, leading them by the nose in whatever designs he had for all of them?

Jack tried to come to grips with what he was seeing as the tendrils of Gil’s form moved around him. ‘What are you, now? A ghost? What else is here in this place?’ Gil didn't look anything like what Jack expected the dead might look like if their souls remained behind. Gil was a picture of horror, a face enshrouded in a veil of shadow and hard edges. If Jack hadn't known what he'd been before he'd become this thing, he might have been more frightened. Jack didn't believe in ghosts. He'd dug up bodies from a graveyard on All Hallows Eve in Victorian times and never been troubled by a single spectre. The only things that haunted him were memories and guilt.

‘I'm more than that,’ Gil replied smoothly. ‘And the others shan't bother us. They have not troubled the occupants of this house for a very long time now.’

Jack paused to try and collect his thoughts. ‘Okay, so I get that you're smart enough to be able to warp time and space. Maybe even right down to the atomic level.’ How else to explain the way Jack had been transported around this house without any other intervention? It had been Gil’s life's work, unraveling the very fundamental principles of physics, developing new theories on how the universe worked and was formed. It was revolutionary stuff, concepts that wouldn't be readily accepted until the twenty third century. Now Jack knew why. Because none of Gil's work would ever come to fruition.

Gil’s smoky form unraveled itself from around Jack, becoming more fixed in place as he instead paced around him, like he'd been wont to do when he enjoyed their intellectual debates long ago. ‘Am I? Is that what you saw? Or did I just make you see something and let you believe the rest?’

Jack checked his watch against his vortex manipulator. Both were perfectly in sync once more. He couldn't really have just imagined all of that - the freezing cold, the shifting of the house, corralling him where it wanted him, the death he'd suffered, hung in mid-air like a man over the gallows. He hadn't imagined death.

A smirk played across Gil’s handsome features. ‘How does it feel, Jack? Not knowing what's real and what isn't?’

Next chapter...