Out of Place Chapter 23
Mar. 13th, 2009 01:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
galadriel1010Author's Note: An explanation. Jack Saturday and Jacob Glass are the main characters of one of my favourite stories, which is called 'Jack Saturday Can't Fail'. They're vampires, and it's possibly, nay probably, the most awesome vampire story you will ever read. *Stops gushing* All you really need to know is that the Hunt Club is like a vampire mafia who are starting a war, so Jack and Jacob are trekking across the USA to warn other groups of vampires or stir them up or just piss them off. Oh, and Jack and Jacob are gay. And I can’t write story summaries. Seriously, read JSCF, it's brilliant
Contextually within the story, this chapter is set about a month after the last one, Jasmine is back in the UK. Within the wider story arc, Lost Souls and Unexpected Future have both happened and Jack and Ianto are on their honeymoon in the USA. Any questions, feel free to ask me, I don't bite (unless you ask nicely)
Praise be to Miss Bob, who beta'd this chapter for me and introduced me to the wonderful works of Jesse Hajicek.
If you’re aware of him already, then the answer to “Did you just do what I think you just did?” is probably ‘yes’. I’m very nearly shameless
I just lost the game by the way
I open one eye cautiously and groan, biting my lip in annoyance when I realise the stupidity of the action. When no one comes to investigate I allow myself to cover my face with my hands and roll over. Suddenly I am aware that I am on the floor, and I wasn’t a moment ago. Also, I am naked, which I was a moment before. I shouldn’t be naked, I should be in that silk T-Shirt that Jacob loves and with guns and knives and things. Not naked, definitely not naked. Although, considering where we are I shouldn’t be surprised.
There’s a thump and muffled “ow” from behind me and I pick myself up, grabbing the sheet that had covered me, wrapping it toga-style as I locate the source of the aggravated tone. It takes a moment to get the lock open, during which time there is shuffling and cursing and more than a hint of panic coming through the bond, then the door is open and I can see and feel his overwhelming relief. “What the fuck?”
Straight to the point as always, and so eloquent. I reply in kind, “It’s gone bad.”
“How bad?” I thumb over my shoulder and he turns over (a difficult process in such a confined space) and raises himself on his elbows to see past me easier, “Jack.” He swallows and looks up at me, almost begging me to tell him he’s delusional, “Where are we?”
I smile, trying to reassure him, but it probably comes out as a grimace, “Morgue.”
And I can feel and see his “Oh shit.” Before he says it.
Something wasn’t right with these records. Someone had tried to remove Jacob Glass from the system, but they weren’t quite up to date with the latest system or something so the ‘suicide’ was less than convincing. His counterpart over in the Minneapolis lab had picked up on it and flagged him up on the Liberty Towers system; not quite unconvincing enough to tell the world that he was missing, but enough to make sure that someone was looking out for him. And considering he’d come from Minneapolis and arrived in the company of Jack Saturday, yes he could understand why they’d chosen the Liberty Towers system.
Archie sighed and pulled up the CCTV coverage of the morgue, resigning himself to minimal official work once again as he did so. He grabbed a loop of footage as soon as he was certain that there was no one in there and prepared to cover, then paged Nick to come over and set the footage recording straight onto the secure server. One of the bodies in the morgue covered his face, then rolled over and landed on the floor. Archie chuckled; at least he wasn’t the only one for whom it would be a long night.
I pull on one of the dresses that they put corpses in; identical to the one that Jacob was wearing, and have an abortive search for our stuff. Jacob seems to be fascinated by the whole idea of being in a morgue, now that he’s got over the fact that we’re in a fucking morgue. He looks up at me suddenly with a worried frown, “You didn’t get autopsied, did you?”
I snort a laugh and pull the collar of the dress away so that I can look down at my chest, “Nope, all functions appear nominal.” He frowns, not getting it, so I sigh, “Not yet anyway, but I don’t see how we’re going to get out of here now we’re in the system. Fuck.”
A face appears in the glass panel of the door and looks at us with irritated amusement. He raises a finger, then fiddles with the door, so I figure he isn’t supposed to be in here any more than we were, and pushes it open, standing with his feet slightly apart and hands on his hips in a classic power stance. I roll my eyes and raise my hands theatrically, “Officer.”
I can feel the worry rolling off Jacob in waves, but he covers it well and stalks past me with his hand outstretched, “I’m Jacob, this is…”
“The famous Jack Saturday?” I glare at him in my shock, “I’m Nick Stokes, with the Crime Lab and Liberty Towers.”
“I should have known.” I bark out a laugh, “The place is still running then?” He nods with a smile, “And is the nutty teenage fag hag still in charge, Lady?”
“Not the best place to compare notes, don’tcha think? I’ve called Liberty Towers to get you out of here, but you’ll have to sit tight until then. You can stay at my place, especially seeing as it’s not mine.” I catch the key. Now there’s an invitation I would take up in a shot if Jacob weren’t around, and if the smooth Texan drawl wasn’t a pretty good indicator of exactly how he’d take my interpretation of the invitation.
“Thank you.” I remember to say – nice, polite Jack, politeness gets you things – “I’m assuming you want us to stick around?”
He shrugs, “Up to you, but if you’ve got the time you’re welcome to. With the Hunt Club on the move…”
“How the fuck do you know that?”
He laughs and moves to the door, “I’ve only been doing the legwork for Liberty Towers for a couple of months, I still read all the memos they send me. I’ve got to get back to work, someone should be along for you before very long, and you’re already flagged up so you won’t get autopsied or anything. When you get to the house you can do what you like, as long as you don’t wake Greg. He’s in the second room you come to upstairs. If he’s already awake, tell him I’ll be back late.”
Jacob frowns, “Just so we know, which room is your room?” Nick just smirks and disappears and Jacob looks at me with his head on one side, “Second one you come to upstairs I assume.”
I snort, “I’d say so. Should have guessed really, Liberty Towers has a tradition in that department; it's a secret alien hunting organisation by the way." I say in reply to his quizzical stare, "Come on, we’d better put you back in your drawer.”
He groans, but complies, dragging me down for a goodnight kiss before I roll him in and shut the door. It’s a bit tricky getting myself onto the table as I was before, but I manage it and try to slip back into sleep. Times like this I wish the bond was stronger, so that we could communicate without words, cos this is going to get Dull.
Nick chuckled into the lab and leaned on the back of a chair to look down at Archie, “Dude, I just met Jack Saturday.”
He laughed and finished covering up the action down in the morgue, “Is he as cool as the legends say?”
“Dunno, ask me when I’m not totally star-struck. And on a completely different subject, have you got the files from that scan for me?”
“Yeah, have a look at that.” He passed over a printed set of emails, “Your girl was lying, she knew him extremely well.”
“Am I reading email sex?” He looked through it and raised his eyebrow, “Now, that’s when technology gets weird. Why use email when you can use a phone?”
“Do not want to know, but they did both. I’ve sat through three hour-long phone sex sessions. No indication in any of their communication that they actually met face to face though.”
“So she might not have recognised him, thanks Archie, I’ll take these and have a word with her.”
“No problem. Oh, Nick?” The older man turned back with a questioning smile, “How’s Greg? I haven’t seen him in a while, anyone would think he’d changed shifts.”
Nick sighed heavily but with a fond smile, “I’ll get him to pop by later then. He’s good, not sleeping all that well, but I don’t think we’ll be doing this long anyway. I’ll tell you about it later, I assume you’re coming round to the house?”
“Yeah, I’ll see you round there.” He turned back to his computer and concentrated on getting the files cleaned for Catherine.
I clench my fists under the sheet and tense as the movement wakes me, swearing as fluently and freely as I like in my mind. As soon as the doors slam shut and we start moving, I let rip vocally, “Shit, fuck, arse, bollocks.”
There’s a laugh that isn’t Jacob’s and someone tugs the covers down just enough to see my face, “You’re a very rude corpse.”
I frown as scarily as I can at the idiotic girl in front of me and resist the urge to hit her until she stops smiling, “I’m a corpse, I’m allowed to be rude.”
She shrugs and slips as the van takes a corner too sharply, “Fuck Brian, I’m moving here! Goddamnit.”
“Sorry Lizzy-Lou.”
“And don’t call me Lizzy Fucking Lou, my name is Elizabeth. If you really can’t manage that, then just Bet. Simple, easy to remember.” She flips him the finger and turns back to us, lunging across the space, “I’ll find your clothes.”
I sit up and pull at the sheet covering Jacob, strangely sad at seeing him looking so… dead, then poke him firmly to wake him up, “You’re a not very polite breather.” I point out as Jacob blinks at me.
She swears again as she is thrown against the wall, then she hurls my clothes at me and Jacob’s at him before grabbing onto the back of the seat and hurling another tirade of abuse at Brian. She’s certainly got the gift of the gab.
Jacob and I exchanged bemused glances, his more anxious than mine, and dress hurriedly. Elizabeth seems to be more concerned with berating her companion than eyeing us up – although she does plenty of that too – and by the time she turns back, the air now decidedly bluer than it was when I first woke up, we’re dressed and watching her in anticipation. Jacob breaks the silence, “Who are you?”
“Elizabeth Warren, I work for Liberty Towers, and this is my useless brother Brian.”
“Wotcha.” The back of a dark head is all we can see of Brian, but he raises a lazy hand in greeting, before demonstrating the Warren family grasp of linguistics when he’s cut up by another driver. All I know for certain is that the other car could be classed as a posemobile.
Elizabeth is watching us with a sort of amused detachment, “Fuck you’re hot, together?” We nod, “Damned shame. So you’re the famous Jack Saturday?”
“My reputation precedes me.” I grin, “You work for the Lady?”
“The Lady?” She purses her lips, then appears to have a brainwave, “Oh, is that an old name for Liberty Towers, like after the Statue?”
“No.” Her face creases up in confusion again, “The Lady ran the place, that’s what they called her. Of course, that wasn’t her real name… She was a Lady.” I frown and click my fingers, trying out names in my head, “Curbishley! She was Lady Curbishley. Ringing any bells?”
”You mean Jasmine Donovan?” Elizabeth has swung around into the front now but is kneeling up on her seat to look back at us, “She’s not used her married name for years, not since she left Liberty Towers, she must have dropped the title before that even.”
“When Roger died I would imagine.” I speculate, faced with the facts of mortality, “He was a nice bloke, him and his boyfriend. Coped brilliantly with Lady.”
“You’re not making a lot of sense.” Jacob pauses to think about this one, “Again.”
I’ve realised this, but he’ll make it up as he goes along, “It’s a long story, I’ll tell you when we’re not being thrown around the place constantly.” This is posing a problem, as we’ve dropped onto the floor of the van (probably an ambulance) but we’re still being slung against the walls and each other regularly, “Are we there yet?”
“Nearly.” Brian answers with a chuckle, “I think.”
”You think!” Elizabeth screeches, deafening us all, “What do you mean you think!?”
“Well if you’d been up front helping me to navigate rather than mooning over the dead boys.”
“You shouldn’t have needed my help, you’re the driver!” She throws her hands up in the air, “And I wasn’t mooning over them, I was watching to make sure they were safe.”
”They’re bloody vampires, they won’t die if they fall off the table.” He points out. An abandoned book slides off the edge of a chair in the wall and hits first me, then Jacob as it passes us to the other wall, “Or if things fall on them. Are you still reading that damned thing?”
“Magical gay outlaws rock. You enjoyed it as much as I did.”
”Correction, I enjoyed it until you liked it.” He growls, “You wreck everything.”
Jacob and I exchange glances, fighting not to laugh. As we slide around again I grab hold of him and lie down, bracing my feet against the opposite wall and one hand against the wall above my head, holding tight to Jacob as I feel the movement of the van jolt us again, “I have a feeling that without the tables crashing around, this could be quite fun.”
“Probably more fun without an audience.” He points out, helping to brace us both and grabbing onto me as Elizabeth laughed at our situation, “Not funny Elizabeth.”
“You have no idea how funny it is.” She argues with a grin, “You look stupid.”
One of the sheets drops on top of us and I growl. “A little help please?”
“You’ll have to wait until DoDo here finds where we’re supposed to be taking you and I dare to move again. Oi Fuckwit, straight lines.”
“Oi, Moron, corners.” He snaps, “Strap yourself in, I don’t want to kill you. No, wait, that’s a lie.”
“Ha ha. Geez.” She is looking over her shoulder out of the windscreen now and spins around suddenly to point. “There it is! That’s the Denali we’re supposed to watch out for.”
Jacob and I slide rapidly towards the front of the van and thump into the back of the seats. We stare at each other for a moment, then scramble for the back door. Jacob tumbles out onto the floor, whilst I jump down more gracefully. Not that I blame him, if he were alive he would be green. “Never again.”
I grin and turn to the brother and sister pain, sorry pair. “Thanks guys.” Brian hasn’t got out of the vehicle, so I realise with relief that they won’t be coming in with us, “We’ll see you around sometime maybe.”
“Yeah, maybe, don’t get in trouble again.” He tips us a mock salute, slaps his sister and pulls away from the kerb, showing us exactly why we’d been thrown around so much.
Jacob shudders, “Never again, I mean it, if we see them coming down the street we leave the city.”
I laugh and tug him towards the door; pulling out the key Nick gave me, “You’re saying you don’t like crazy?”
We get into the living room and he stares around the bright on white explosion, “Jack, they’re more scary-crazy than you are. And you’re a fucking psychopath.”
“Oh God.” A sleepy Californian drawl gets our attention from the doorway and we turn to see a bleached blond in just his boxers leaning on the doorframe, “More wackjobs.”
How do you reply to that? “Hi.” I grin, showing off my fangs, “I’m Jack Saturday.”
