rm | [TW fic] The Use of Bones (Jack; PG-13)

Title: The Use of Bones
Characters: Jack, Jack's family, Gwen, Ianto
Rating: PG-13
Notes: Written for

writerinadrawer 4.09. I wrote this on a train two hours before the deadline. I like it a lot for a quickie, but egads, that was a scary plan-free sort of experience. I have made some corrections from the original posting of this. This story was largely inspired by this post about antibiotic availability in 1943 from

jonquil.

Sitting by sick beds is one of those things Jack gets used to as a child. No one grows up in a backwater outpost of a backwater colony on a backwater planet and doesn't. Boeshane had been, will be, is the sort of place the 20th century describes as the end of the world.

Because of that, the peninsula is very beautiful. But beauty – and the future – can only do so much about accident and disease when you're nowhere near anything, and everything is different.

*

When the great flu comes several decades into his exile on earth, Jack is prepared for the motions and ritual of it, and, in some weird way, it almost isn't that bad simply because there is nothing to be done for it. It's not as if he, or Torchwood, has the resources to stop it, and so there is, thankfully, little matter of picking and choosing between.

Jack thinks that the flu comes on like a lottery no one wants to win. Except him. Maybe. Too bad he can't.

A lot of people die.

Some of them he loves.

*

As a boy, Jack is sickly. On the peninsula a lot of children are, and no amount of immunization or mother's milk can do much about a place as eager to colonize them as they are to colonize it.

But it is all right, Jack knows born weak means grown strong, and no one ever coddles him about it; they just sit by his bed and wait with him through fevers that can't but end one way or another.

Through his illnesses his mothers read to him, and his father talks of his life before the colony, before Boeshane, and what is simple home to the man seems like a grand adventure out beyond the Western Starlight Mists to the boy.

On Earth, just after the flu, Jack thinks his father at least would laugh at the disease he needs a doctor for now.

*

When penicillin arrives, it is an unexpected misery, this miracle grown on bread. At the Academy Jack learns it simply as a matter of it is and, before then, it is not, and so it is best to always be prepared when visiting the 20th century.

But Jack is not taught to expect things like shortages and reserves, like women phoning up the newspapers to ask reporters to beg the medication in their columns and stories – Mary, Mrs. Llewellyn Davies, has already lost two babies, and with her husband in the service, how can she be, in the face of this new miracle drug, condemned to lose one more?

Jack hates the glee with which the newspaper men print the articles and later report the deaths. Most pleas go conspicuously unanswered, and he thinks of them while he steals – from soldiers and scientists – for Torchwood.

*

The worst crime on the peninsula of his childhood is doing anything to harm the colony's limited resources. You don't damage communications, you don't touch the stores of emergency food, and you never, ever use a medical supply you don't need to survive or that triage has not said you might have.

For a place with a lot of love (his mothers; his father; his father's lover; and the older cousins who kiss behind boat sheds along the beach, covetous, not of privacy, but of shade), the colony values life ruthlessly.

And another six months is nearly never worth it.

*

When you kill an animal, you use all its parts. Jack remembers his father teaching him this as he teaches him to clean fish and open oysters. If nothing else, bones can be ground into soil to make it stronger. And so tomatoes and melons, he learns, are made of fish.

Later, in wars sometimes, this conversation is all Jack can think of as the bombs fall and the gas chokes, and he wonders how best to use all the parts of him.

*

Each death is different; Jack knows this more intimately than most. Some people give themselves up; some people are pulled under. The mechanism of disease seems not to matter, and Jack recognizes with shame that he only knows how to be lost in flesh and not from it.

*

Once, when his brother is sick and Jack, having mostly outgrown such risks, is not, he breaks into the locker in the domed room in the center of the houses that map the heart of his family's life and steals foil packets full of things for fever and for pain.

Jack is eight-years-old and his father catches him and beats him for it.

He returns the medicine and shows his father how he got past the lock.

Gray lives anyway.

And Jack is so proud. On the peninsula most people lose siblings first, lovers later, children inevitably.

But Jack?

Jack's going to be different.

*

The people Jack falls for always assume that he is some sort of irrevocably damaged, either by the things he sees in war or by some massive number of people he has supposedly watched die of old age. Occasionally, the assumptions are slightly smarter, and, in the dark, he is asked questions about plague and about AIDS as fingers trace lightly through the hair of his thighs.

It's those smart ones that make it difficult for Jack to enjoy pillow talk. They are like the newspaper writers, aroused and romantic, in the face of the morbid inevitable.

*

"No one should die alone, and no one should die in denial," Jack announces one day to the vault of the Hub at-large. His voice is both cheerful and hard because Gwen has scolded Ianto for acknowledging his likely Torchwood lifespan.

Later, Jack grabs her elbow and hisses in her ear, "Don't you dare undermine his personal certitude."

"How can you stand it?" She asks sharply, twisting out of his grip.

"I can't," he replies through grit teeth.

When Gwen looks shamed, Jack wishes he has a fish so that he might teach her to clean it and grow gardens with its bones.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

yamx

This is very dark, and yet somehow hopeful. I can see the lessons Jack learned as a boy following him.

Each death is different; Jack knows this more intimately than most. Some people give themselves up; some people are pulled under. The mechanism of disease seems not to matter, and Jack recognizes with shame that he only to knows how to be lost in flesh and not from it.
Beautiful.

(Pssht - I think it should be "had" in the last sentence.)

From:

a devotion to vanishing things

[TW fic] The Use of Bones (Jack; PG-13)

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags