Flat Holm.
It was a penance, Jack had decided.
He visited once a week on Sunday
afternoons, walked through these chilly concrete corridors and talked to all of
the staff. He checked on each inmate,
went over the details of life in the bunker where time ran by routine's clock.
He knew all the names and stories for those
lost souls tossed back by the Rift...all but one. He'd wondered, seeing the reams of
information dragged up by Gwen and Tosh over a year ago, if by some odd
chance they might have found a name and an identity for Flat Holm's version of
John Doe. He'd wondered, but he hadn't
held his breath; Lyn, after all, wasn't from Earth, Wales, or Cardiff. After almost thirteen years, he didn't even
know if Lyn was really the man's name.
To double-check, he'd gone through the
files late at night after his team had left the Hub silent and cold in their
wake. There was no one among Gwen's
missing that fit the description of Lyn, the tall and skinny stranger who was,
in fact, one of Flat Holm's first two residents.
When he had taken command of the Hub at
Alex Hopkins' suicide, he'd discovered a secret in the vaults. Among the aliens kept locked away beneath the
bay's edge were two damaged humans, spat out by the Rift in one of its restive
periods. The Hub's records showed that
Torchwood had cryogenically frozen many such damaged returnees, but these two
had been instead kept in the vaults, behind locked doors.
Lyn wasn't a returnee, he was a big scary
puzzle.
For one thing, Lyn knew him...somehow.
'Hello, Jack. Long time no see.'
'Wha...who are you? Have we met?
What're you doing down here?'
'Well, I was sleeping 'til you opened
the door. You can call me Lyn. Did you bring food? Where's Alex's little pet...the ginger
girl? She should've been here days ago.'
'Sheila.
She's dead. They're all dead.'
'Damn.
I'm sorry to hear that. I really
liked her, yeah? Look, could you make
sure the woman in the cell next to this one is okay? I haven't heard her stirring for a
while. I'm afraid she might be sick.'
That was Lyn, thinking of others first even
when he was starved and dehydrated.
After a face-to-face conversation with the
man behind that door, Jack had gone looking for information. Everything the stranger told him had checked
out. Lyn knew about the frozen
returnees, knew about the horribly crippled woman in the room next to his. It seemed that Alex Hopkins had spent time
every week talking to the graying off-worlder.
Lyn was the sanest inmate currently living
in Flat Holm, and claimed to be far older than the sixty-something his eyes and
hair suggested. When he found the
stranger who talked as if they knew each other, he had considered leaving him
locked in. Alex's records were sparse
and nearly non-existent for that one man in particular. There was a file on how Lyn was found
in 1997, but no explanation for why he was living fairly comfortable
inside that cell-like room, hidden away from the team that grew and shrank and
grew again with the fluctuation of recruits and deaths.
There had to be a reason for scarred but
sane Lyn being locked in the Hub's sublevels for the better part of three
years, but he'd decided, after weeks of daily conversations with the sea-eyed
refugee, that it would be cruel to leave him behind the bolted door, even if he
did have books and music for company. By
then, he'd set up Flat Holm; he'd arranged for Lyn to be moved to the secret
facility and given his own quarters.
If he let it, the matter of Flat Holm and
its purpose could eat him alive; all those people he could do nothing for, the
families left without answers. He had
good enough reasons to avoid that pitfall and the results of Gwen's little
investigation had reinforced his resolve.
The best he could offer to those damaged lives, from within Torchwood or
anywhere else, was a safe haven where the world was kept at bay by stout walls
and electronic locks.
When he visited Flat Holm, Jack always
stopped by Lyn's room to chat and because those conversations never failed to
leave him unnerved, he made the aging man his last order of business every
Sunday. It was fairly the same, every
Sunday that he'd made this visit for the last nine years.
"Hello, Jack."
"How're you feeling today, Lyn?"
"With my fingers, yeah?"
"Up to a game of chess?"
That was the routine and it never
varied. Over a pot of coffee, they
played chess in Lyn's room and they always talked of books, of movies, of human
nature. He'd formed an idea of what his
gray-haired opponent was, based in the things which slipped out in
conversation, but it seemed as if the other man knew him far
better. He couldn't be sure of
much. He suspected he'd never know for
certain who it was that sat across the board from him, but there was a strange
comfort to be found in the fact that he had a future beyond Earth. He found a point of calm in this gentle,
intelligent man who seemed to know him very well but whose dark gray eyes held
no judgment, only affection.
Lyn, under the veiling swath of dark linen
cloth that he wore wrapped over the lower half of his face and throat, might've
once been handsome. A real looker. But now the only part of his face left
undamaged were his eyes and brow, those features which had escaped whatever
horrific event had thrown the man through the Rift and to Earth, to Cardiff, to
the Bay itself, for Lyn had been flung to this timezone in a fiery crash that
struck the filthy waters with a loud sizzling roar. This had happened when Jack wasn't in Cardiff;
he hadn't been privy to the information.
More than half of Lyn's body had been
scorched when he was pulled free of the ruined 31st century space flitter
swamped in the Bay and within sight of the Hub's employee entrance on Mermaid
Quay. His face from the nose down was
like melted plastic, twisted and ruined, and he preferred to keep the scarred
remains covered. His voice was gorgeous,
deep and like brown velvet might sound if it could talk.
Other than his ruined skin, there wasn't
any reason for Lyn to be living behind a locked door, so he didn't. He worked off the books at Flat Holm and
seemed content to spend the rest of his life under a form of institutionalized
care.
Lyn was entirely cognizant of where and
when he was. He was an enigma that
haunted Jack for hours after each visit; the man seemed to know him very well
but refused to explain, citing that the future was always being rewritten but
also claiming they must be careful to not disrupt the timeline in any large
way. Lyn was from his future, he
was sure of it, for wouldn't he recognize those eyes and that distinct voice if
they'd known each other before?
Each week, they played chess and
talked. Jack told Lyn very little of
what was happening with Torchwood, but that didn't matter, for Lyn seemed to
already know and asked the sort of questions which left Jack with no doubt of
the man's foreknowledge.
Today was no different than any other
visit, until he was leaving.
Lyn stood up to see him out the door but
this time, as he turned to go, the wiry off-worlder tugged him close for a
hug. He stiffened and then relaxed,
letting it happen. He hugged back,
wrapping both arms around the damaged body that trembled against him as in his
ear breathed the raspy whisper.
"Goodbye, Jack. I'm going to miss you."
"Why?
You going somewhere?"
"Today's Sunday, the fifth of July,
yeah?"
"All day long."
"Two days ago, you were in Saint
Helen's hospital, yeah?"
"How do you know about that?"
Lyn's cloth-covered mouth pressed to his
cheek now and the words were repeated, vibrated into his flesh. "Goodbye, then. I'll miss you."
As he left chilly Flat Holm today, climbing
the damp concrete steps back into the warm sunlight of Sunday afternoon, Jack
wondered for just a few brief moments what it was that the other man knew about
tomorrow. Then, he spotted Ianto waiting
with the boat at the dock pylons, leaning against a fibreglass pole with both
hands pocketed.
At the sight of the dark-haired Welshman
who gave a nod as he approached, Jack once again filed away his questions of
Lyn as ultimately unanswerable and went down the grassy path to meet his lover.
The End
brillo pads ^_^
ReplyDeleteI've always thought that Flat Holm needed a return visit. Lyn is an intriguing character, and so is Jack's relationship with him. Lyn is puzzling to Jack, but the visits are somehow oddly comforting in their routine.
ReplyDeleteThe last lines speak simply, but eloquently, to Jack's bond with Ianto. And the foreshadowing of the coming week's events - heartbreaking.