Spook_me 2020 - Haunted - Chapter 34
Oct. 31st, 2020 07:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
Gwen had stood there transfixed through the whole exchange. She’d watched her best friend kill her other best friend, miraculously bring him back to life, only to discover that it had all been in vain. She didn’t know what to do. She’d faced monsters and terrible viruses and all kinds of phenomena but one thing she didn't have an answer for was what to do when something had taken over her friend and wouldn't give him up. If death couldn't fix it, she wasn't sure what could.
She felt her entire body go tense as the gunshot fired. Jack was surely dead straight away, yet Ianto held Jack's body close to him. He stroked Jack’s hair as if he were comforting him as the blood seeped from his chest in a steady stream, soaking through his shirt, whilst a second dark patch formed on the back of his coat. Ianto craned his head close to Jack’s, giving him a gentle kiss as he finally lay Jack’s bleeding, broken body down on the ground. He looked up at Gwen and a jolt of fear ran through her.
‘Don’t worry. He’ll be back,’ Ianto promised her. ‘I’ll take good care of him.’
Gwen used both hands to steady her gun as it shook slightly in her grip. ‘No, you won’t,’ she told him. ‘Stay away from him.’
‘Or what, Gwen?’ he challenged. ‘You’ll shoot me? Have you become a cold blooded killer like Jack now? Maybe I’ll take you first. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You always wanted to be with Jack. You can be together with all of us. Ianto won’t mind sharing. Jack does love threesomes and moresomes.’
‘Stop talking,’ Gwen commanded. She stepped slowly forward, one foot at a time, keeping her gun trained on him. She swallowed down on her doubts. If she had to shoot him, she would. She prayed Jack would forgive her.
Jack’s heaving gasp back into life stayed her hand and diverted her focus. Ianto leaned down to hold him. ‘Shh. It’s alright. I’m here.’ He sounded so much like the old Ianto that it was scary. Would Jack be disoriented enough to believe him?
‘Get away from him!’ Gwen said.’ Get away from him or I’ll empty this gun into you, so help me.’
‘Shh,’ Ianto said, continuing to try and soothe Jack as reality began to coalesce around him again.
‘Don’t!’ Gwen warned and then Jack appeared to jolt and go limp again. Gwen assumed Ianto must have shot him again, but she hadn’t heard the gun go off. When she blinked she realised that Ianto had also gone limp, draped over Jack’s body as he remained conscious underneath him, pushing the pair of them slowly up. Ianto’s body rolled off Jack into a heap next to him.
Gwen looked up to find Father Michael just out of the corner of her eye, having pressed something to Ianto's side - one of their stun guns - rendering him unconscious. The man dressed all in back had become almost invisible in Gwen’s field of vision. How he’d gotten that close without anyone noticing was almost like divine intervention.
Gwen was at Jack’s side in an instant, kneeling beside him. ‘Are you okay?’ Jack nodded feebly, but his attention was focused on the cleric and the unconscious young man crumpled by his side.
‘Where did you get that?’ Jack asked, also noticing the gun clutched in Father Michael’s liver-spotted hand.
‘Gwen gave it to me in case of an emergency. I think this qualifies.’
Jack nodded, still looking unsteady to Gwen’s mind. ‘Yeah.’
‘Jesus Christ, Jack. What do we do?’ she asked. She felt like all of the colour had drained from her face, leaving her cold and shivering.
Jack turned away from her, staring down at his prone lover before lifting his eyes to the cleric standing beside them, looking out of place with his gun. ‘You have to help.’
‘Me?’
‘An exorcism. We have to drive the thing out of him. You've done it before.’
Father Michael gave them a bewildered shake of his head. ‘Once,’ he clarified. ‘Decades ago. And I didn't exactly know what I was doing. I can only try to beseech God to bring him back and expunge the beast within.’
‘Please,’ Jack begged, sounding more desperate than Gwen had ever heard him. Ianto had once gone all the way to hell and back to save Jack, or so Jack would have them believe. His faith had been totally unshakable and his belief that going there - wherever there was - and forgiving Jack was the answer. Gwen hadn’t quite believed that a box of matches had anything to do with hell or the devil or whatever, but the pair of them had barely spoken about what had happened. All Gwen knew was that when Jack refused to share details, there was something terrible he didn’t want them to know about.
Whatever Ianto had done had worked, which was what counted. If that was faith, then that surely meant if anyone deserved to be saved by God it was Ianto. With all that they'd seen, she understood very little about Ianto's faith and they discussed it even less, yet she knew he was observant, at least more than she had ever been. She didn't have time for religion in her life with everything else that vied for her attention. She saw too many unbelievable things to find the time for one more.
‘I can’t just whip up an exorcism,’ Father Michael stated. ‘These things need time to prepare.’
Jack’s expression turned grim. ‘Father, we don't have time. The longer that thing stays inside him, the harder it’s going to be to separate it back out. I don’t know how long it will take before that thing has a permanent grip on him. Gil spent years with it, letting it break down whatever defences he had. And now it’s learning and growing.’
Gwen didn’t want to say that it might already be too late but she prayed it wasn’t.
‘There’s no certainty that exorcism would even work. If it’s alien…’
‘Elias, please!’ Jack begged. ‘You're the one who believes that God sets us all on a path. You came here tonight for a reason. This has to be that reason.’
Father Michael reluctantly nodded in agreement. ‘I need my books. The prayer of St Michael. It's in my study.’
Jack tucked his arms under Ianto’s body and picked him up as if he were nothing more than a rag doll and not a man who must have weighed a hundred and seventy pounds. Gwen moved to help him but he hefted Ianto over his shoulder before she could do anything. Jack was through the back door and the kitchen before she and Father Michael could even catch up with him. He strode right across the foyer and Gwen caught up only just in time to pull open the heavy front doors as he made a beeline for the SUV.
She helped him get Ianto into the back seat and then just as she was about to crawl in beside him, Jack tossed the keys at her head. ‘You drive. Father Michael will give you directions.’ She didn't need telling twice that she was going to push the SUV as fast as it would go and just hope that the priest could keep up. She barely waited for the old man to slide into the passenger seat beside her before she had the tyres biting and skidding through the gravel, hurtling back down the twisting laneway and onto the main road into town. She spared only a fleeting moment to catch Jack’s reflection in the rear vision mirror as he held Ianto’s body close.