Forget the Light; The Darkness Will Set You Free

Title: Forget the Light; The Darkness Will Set You Free
Author: mistojen
Genre: gen
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters/Pairings: Owen Harper, mentions of Toshiko Sato
Warning: Spoilers for 2x13 - Exit Wounds
Prompt: prompt_five #9 - Among the ruins
Rating: R for language
Word Count: 924
A/N: feedback is ♥love♥! If you're interested in making a claim at prompt_five, keep checking back; we'll be opening it to the public soon. :) Beta-read by lady_entropy17



With a grunt intermixed with pain, confusion, grogginess, and discomfort on many different levels, Owen Harper opens his eyes slowly. He looks around the room, at first unable to bring anything into focus. The smoking wreckage of computers, large television screens, and wires fills his eyes as he becomes more conscious to his surroundings. Now he remembers.

Tosh.

Owen takes a deep, ragged breath. “Tosh...?” he asks, his voice broken and jagged, like gravel on glass, and he slowly gets to his feet, brushing himself off. “Tosh, I’m...well, not alive...” he mutters. When she doesn’t answer, he furrows his brow. “Tosh?”

He gives up on her for a moment, glancing downward at himself, looking for any bodily harm. He should be dead-dead, shouldn’t he? The radiation should’ve completely decomposed his body. He shouldn’t be standing, thinking this — he should be, for all intents and purpose, actually gone to the world.

But, you can’t die twice, he reminds himself.

His eyes wander over his arms; down his legs. He lifts his shirt. Maybe he is really and truly dead; maybe this is some strange afterlife and perhaps there isn’t merely darkness awaiting them at the end of their time on Earth.

But no, there is still a gaping wound in his chest, looking a bit more sickly than he remembers, but there none the less. Something tells Owen that if he were really dead — and not in the walking, talking, not-really-alive, but not-really dead sense — his body would be completely in tact. Like he’d be in a dream-like state where no harm could or would or had ever come to him. But, the bullet hole is still there, not oozing, not bleeding; just there, staring back at him like some freakish, misshapen eye.

“Tosh?” he tries again absently as his fingers glide over the wound, prodding lazily into it. He can feel pressure, but not pain. It’s exactly as it had been before the nuclear meltdown, or whatever the hell that had been. He’s still himself — not really dead, but not really alive, either. No change.

And Tosh still isn’t answering her comm.

Maybe, because his body was essentially dead, the radiation had nothing to decompose. Owen has no living tissue; no blood pumping. No oxygen flowing in and out of his lungs. Maybe there was nothing left to ruin.

There’s got to be a way out...can’t very well stay here forever... he thinks to himself as he looks back at the locked down door. Tosh would know. Why wasn’t she answering him? Was she too stunned by his “survival” of this mess to speak?

“Tosh, I know it’s hard to believe, but believe, okay? I need your help. You need get me out of here,” he says. Still nothing. No breathing; no static. No sound at all.

He furrows his brow. “Fine. You don’t want to help me,” he mumbles to himself in frustration as he closes his fists around the handle of the door, “then, I’ll just have to do it myself.”

Grunting again, this time with exertion, Owen pulls with all his might, but the door doesn’t budge. “Bollocks,” he swears angrily.

There’s got to be another way out, though. There can’t just be this one single door. Or, even if it is just this door, there’s got to be a way out, anyway; must be some over-riding protocol, in case the door goes haywire and locks someone in here without the threat of radiation. The only problem is that all the computers seem to be down. Some of them are smoking listlessly, while others have simply shut down. No way was he getting them to work without Tosh’s help. Owen’s not a stupid man, by any means, but that’s not to say that he has the type of technologic knowledge to get the damn machines running again.

So, he looks around the room some more. ...and then he sees it.

Among the ruin and the disarray, across the room and on the floor in a corner, nearly hidden, is a manhole. His first thought pops into his head as he pries its cover off and tosses it carelessly aside. He can’t fucking believe that after saving Cardiff — the world, perhaps — he’s going to have to escape by climbing around in the sewers with the Weevils and the city’s waste.

His second thought, as he’s climbing down the ladder and into the sewer, is that maybe it won’t be so bad, save the smell wafting up, pungent and rank into his nostrils. He is, after all, King of the Weevils, he thinks to himself with a smirk. They’re not going to bother him. Hell, maybe they’ll help him.

As he drops off the ladder and lands in a puddle, splashing murky water — and God knows what else — all over himself, Owen turns and looks into the thick, cloaked darkness around him. He wrinkles his nose at the smell and pauses to allow his eyes to adjust to the blackness.

He lets out a heavy sigh and begins to trek through the tunnels. His third thought comes to him while he’s running a hand across the grimy stone walls to keep his balance in the disorienting darkness. He’s both annoyed and slightly (albeit involuntarily) amused.

This is really shit... Just wait until I see Tosh again; just wait. I’ll bloody kill her for ignorin’ me and making me take this route back to the Hub. I really, really will.


End.