Disclaimer: The characters belong to Naughty Dog; the song segment is property of Coldplay. Also, the little quotes are pretty much taken directly from the game. Silly Underground soldiers.

For the Jak Fanfic LJ contest-Explain a plothole from the games.

Plothole: Jak 3-where does Torn go when he's not handing out missions?

Summary: Jak is sent to find Torn when he is missing from Headquarters, and learns of his stargazing habit.

Notes: Melding together a few obsessions-Jak 3, War Angst, and the song "White Shadows" by Coldplay. Hopefully, the catharsis of writing will get at least one of these out of my system.

But I won't hold my breath.

Song lyrics removed to prevent deletion.

"Ah! I'm hit!"

"I've got a clear shot…"

"Get Torn on the line, now!"

"Torn will get us out of this mess…"

The elf they called for curls his knees in closer to his chest, pushing is aqualine nose against a leather-covered knee. The clothing is both strange and familiar to him—he wears the outfit often, yet it usually seems heavier, thicker, more necessary. He wonders why his clothes feel different, because he feels different, up on a rooftop with the cool night air all around him. How could this other him know how his clothes are supposed to feel?

Torn supposes he knows this the same way his downstairs-self remembers that the roof is the only place to find fresh air. A high roof, with gleaming, old blue sheets of metal pounded flat. Nothing but stars and reflections of stars and himself. He feels incredibly removed from his peers, from the war and their cause. When he looks down upon them, he no longer understands why they fight—is it for survival, or because they don't know how else to live? Is it for territory or rights or moral obligation? Torn couldn't believe any of it. No one would want to fight over Haven City, which was doing little to live up to its name.

It certainly isn't survival or human rights—the damn civilians walk around as though nothing at all is happening. They'll run from a fight if they see it, but unless you point a gun at them, they hardly acknowledge the war. It's hard, thinking about that ignorance. On his rooftop, Torn is removed from battle, isn't still a part of the war, but he acknowledges it. It's a part of him, part of the downstairs-Torn and the rooftop-Torn, because they might be the same person. Rooftop-Torn is human—he thinks about the war and what it means and how many men will die because downstairs-Torn isn't around. The other him, the one presented below the pounded metal, is a soldier. He sits at a desk and looks at maps and makes important decisions. He tells people what to do, and therefore few people tell him what he should be doing. Downstairs-Torn knows exactly what he should be doing, and he does it.

Rooftop-Torn, this Torn, doesn't know what to do. Mostly, he waits for sunset and stares at the blackening sky, thinking about how it looked burnt as the sun left, and charred when it was gone, but becomes watery in the daylight.

There is no moon. No tides. The oceans do not change their movements in any sort of pattern. Some of them d not even move. Torn doesn't know this though, because he's never seen an ocean. He knows where they were-outside the wall. He is intimately familiar with the shape of each shore, drawn in dark ink upon his maps, but he has never walked such beaches.

Certain books talk about the moon, how certain planets were circled by smaller spherical shapes that caught the light of a sun and reflected it. Pale, round shapes in the night sky. Eerie like a blind eye, hiding behind clouds you wouldn't know were there, save for their hiding of the moon.

None of the books mention the stars. On principle, they speak of the Daystar, which is more moon than star or sun, for it waxes and wanes in the corner of his eye. A pulsing, unnatural scar upon the night, somehow light and dark at the same time. During the day, like all discomforts, he pushes it from his mind, but the rooftop is where his mind flourishes, and he cannot do so any longer. Whiter lights captivate him, when he can find them, but always in the back of his vision iss that deep, glowing velvet.

There is a sound, quieter than anything in his world. Not soft, not like the wind around him, or his own breathing, or the blood in his temples. It is a quick, hard, solid sound, drowning in a world of harder, quicker, less solid sounds. The click of a metal heel on metal plates.

"Kor, your armor is littered all over those stairs," the elf in the shoes says. "What are you doing up here without it? It isn't safe…"

Torn looks at him, takes in the shorn hair, the wind-roughened features, the skin that looks more and more like desert sand. He sees the bright eyes in a soft face, the dipping nose, the finely arched brows. It is the yellow-green of his locks that set him apart in a crowd, and those eyebrows that set him apart up close. The eyebrows immediately remind one of youth. It used to be only travelers went without them, for the wind soon chapped all hair from the face. Now we remove them as a right of passage—one we never earned. They seem thinner now than before, perhaps he'll bring us back to the good old days just by being.

"It's perfectly safe, if not safer. Nothing can reach us up here, and armor would just make noise," he responds, after a moment. Jak's eyebrows lift, but Torn sees the movement behind the hairs, the way his ears pull back with the rest of his face, and his eyes narrow slightly, fighting the openness of his expression. Finding it comical, the minute stubbornness of those eyes, he chuckles in the dark air.

The soft, not soft noises move toward him. The roof is alight with white reflections, and the repeated stars are repeated further in Jak's amber-colored armor. When the young elf draws near enough, Torn reaches out and removes a shin-guard. Rooftop-Torn's hands recall its weight as the one they miss, and are reluctant to let go, at first. He sets the crafted metal down gently, and reaches for the other leg.

Jak steps away, faintly alarmed, rather bemused. "Why?" he asks, cutting away the excess words like fat and meat from a roasted lurker. Nothing but the barest bones. Torn wonders for a moment what Jak's bones would look like. Would they be stained that faint, dark, not dark purple? Or would they glow like the moonlit icicles drawn in Torn's books?

He strokes the fabric behind the armor. "It doesn't belong here," he says, and his voice is the new soft, not soft sound. Less like quick footsteps, more like the insistent hum of an insect—a background noise that pierces deep into one's mind. It is, perhaps, the most expressive tone Jak has heard from him in months, and he begins to notice the surreal quality of their surroundings.

Which is what Torn likes about Jak—the boy learns quickly. Too quickly, in some areas. Torn feels like a weary parent, wanting to wean Jak off of the battlefield that he runs to at any beck or call. He wonders how much of Jak's talk, what little of it exists, that is just talk, or if he truly enjoys the missions they send him on. The boy speaks so sparingly, he wonders if there is room in a conversation for pretense. "I'm tired of this war," he admits—a small beginning.

Jak doesn't look at him, but rather watches the stars dance upon their shadows. He sits, slowly, warily, seeming for a moment more animal than elf. Torn blames the odd lighting. The younger elf doesn't say anything, seeming captivated by his surroundings, and by Torn himself.

"Jak?" he pleads hoarsely. The blonde still won't look at him, this other Torn. He sees him in as part of the scene, something new that he must cautiously take in.

Torn repeats the name, and eyes like the ocean-ink of a map return their focus to him. He almost shudders, seeing in those eyes the oceans of the mind and the message on the paper, deep out to sea, "Here there be monsters."

"What's so different?" Jak asks, a childlike wonder mounting on the waves of his face. He's never seen one, but in that moment, Torn desperately wishes for a moon, something to bathe the scene in light. Something to distract them from the stars and Dark Satellites and other distractions.

He answers indirectly, gesturing between them, leaving out the night sky, closing them for the start. "Samos tells me that our kind used to be more like him…like how you were back or forward in your time. We were in tune with nature, with Eco. We cared about the land, and we celebrated it." He looks down at his men, firing weapons that seem strange, though he's carried many himself.

"And now look at us—surrounded by technology, fighting against nature and each other. We're spending all this time on a war, when we should be out in the wasteland, searching for green eco to make it a better place. I don't know how it works, I just know we should be doing something for it." It is something like instinct, he wants to say. It's like the instincts of his ancestors reaching up out of the ground to squeeze his guts.

Jak only nods—he had those instincts himself, had felt them firsthand and taken them for granted. Below, everyone is caught up in the war, everyone wants to spill blood and claim districts and survive—they aren't concerned with the growth of new trees or the nonexistent tides.

He touches Jak's face, a simple gesture, a cool and light thing that a parent would give to a child. He doesn't feel as though Jak is his son, though he feels responsible for what Jak has become. Downstairs-Torn wants Jak to listen to orders and keep his ass out of trouble, and rooftop-Torn just wants to be understood. The touch is to keep his attention, to soothe any homesickness. It was soft, true soft, lovely soft. Jak leans closer, and Torn uses the rapture to his advantage.

"That's what this place is about. Getting back to nature. Nothing but air and sky and stars up here. There's still war and metal and hate, but it all belongs down there," he points toward the trapdoor behind them. "Things are different up here. They're separate, but not. Up here…you can think about anything. You think about things you never did before, you become someone you didn't know you could be. Someone better."

He closes in a whisper, still true soft. Jak is close, close enough for him to smell, and hear his breathing, and the blood in his temples. Close enough that he thinks gravity is stronger between two people. Close enough, that he wants to be closer.

Jak pulls away, and he is momentarily disappointed. "Where are you going," he asks, voice softer and softer with each moment. Voices drowning in the gunfire, which is drowned by the buzzing of stars. Soft, not soft points of light.

He holds up his armor. "Going to put it on the stairs. Can't keep it on if I'm going to be staying up here." He throws a grin back at Torn, who does not turn away to hide his expression. Rooftop-Torn would never do something like that. He realizes that Jak didn't fully understand what he meant—not that the armor didn't belong on the roof, but that it didn't belong on Jak.

But when he returns, so does the closeness. Jak is young, but learning, and a little breathless. "It is better, up here." Then, quieter, "Does it make me good enough," he wonders. Yes, Torn wants to say. Always good enough, but their voices are drowning in a sea, and the Daystar, the night's scar, is a moon, and the tide is pulling them out to sea.

Jak says, his arm against Torn's, "I'm going to destroy that thing. Then there will only be stars, and the planet will survive, and you can teach people to think about the sand and trees. We can live up high, where we don't need the war so much. We can be too busy farming to fight anyone, too busy making everyone happy."

Torn doesn't tell him how impossible that is, or how they need the Daystar to make up for the moon. He does tell Jak that they need one though.

"Then I will get you a moon," he answers plainly, gripping Torn where the armor used to, and he finds it to be a good replacement.

Finds it to be something better.

A/N: No idea where this came from. In case anyone didn't glean it from the story, the answer to the plothole is that Torn sits on the roof and star-gazes when he's away. Jak…just showed up. Pretty people are allowed to do that.