Title: Pocketful of Posies

Summary: We may die alone, she thought, but at least we’ll all be buried side by side, carried to our death and burial ground by Jack. Great, invincible Jack. He would be there years after they were decomposing, bones falling out of their rotting skin and onto each others’ skeletons. Torchwood are transported back to 1329, time of the Black Death.

Pairings: None that aren’t canon (slight Jack/Ianto, etc.), mostly team gen.

Rating: R

Warnings: CHARACTER DEATH. Lots of it.

A/N: POV changes. Writing longer fics is relatively strange to me. I would greatly appreciate any constructive criticism on this story that you might have!

---

They landed on a cobbled street from where the tear among the clouds had opened up and spit them out, stumbling to their feet as they looked around, hands clutching a time-warping device that was no longer there. Stone buildings rose up all around them along the curving street. They started coughing as the stench hit them; the scent of death and burning bodies overpowered them. Jack coughed as his eyes watered, and everyone around him covered their nose and mouth with their collars or sleeves. There was nobody around; the streets clear except a bundle of rags lying in a nearby doorway. Jack looked at the houses around them and turned away when he saw red crosses painted on most of the doors, which brought his gaze back to the pile in the doorway, directly across from him. He looked again, and realized that it was actually a body. A human body.

He turned to Owen, who seemed to be thinking the same thing he was, judging by the look on his face. “Did you happen to see what the date was on that device, Owen?”

“1349,” he replied. The answer to Jack’s unspoken question hangs between them, weighing down the silent air around them like a black hole, seeming to pull all of Jack’s breath out of him and towards it.

The time of the Black Death.

“Owen, what are the odds that we’ve already been contaminated?”

Owen looked at the pile of rags, skin, and bones and swallowed. “I’d say fairly likely to almost definite.”

Jack nodded and shifted his stance. “We can’t risk going back. We can’t risk bringing it back with us.”

“So what, when we all get sick and die are you just going to snog us back to life again?” Owen casted a nervous look at the bundle on the street and shifted closer to Jack, away from it.

“Owen, you know-”

“I know, I know.”

“Sick with what? Where are we?” Gwen asks, eyes wide as Ianto and Toshiko mentally process the date.

“We’re in Europe. Fourteenth century, the time of the Black Death. Killed about a third of Europe’s population.”

“But they have cures for that now, don’t they? They can cure the bubonic plague?”

Owen shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. We can’t leave here to go back anyway, even if we had that bloody machine. We’d bring the disease back with us. We can’t risk that.”

Jack sighed, dropping his hands down to his sides from where they were crossed over his chest. “We’re trapped.” Ianto says softly, and Tosh looks at where the rip in the sky to be, the tear that dropped them down here and trapped them and left them to die.

---

Ianto had to focus hard on their echoing footsteps in the empty street in order to convince himself that they’re really there. The unforgiving stone of the houses-cum graves threw their own footsteps back at them. Nobody looks out their windows at them, nobody makes any noise but them, because there aren’t any people.

They found an empty printer’s workshop diagonal from a graveyard. There was a book lying, half copied, on a scarred table, ink dried and crusted. He ran his fingers through the dried ink trail, rubbing his fingers together when they come back covered in dust.

Tosh rubbed at her temple, searching her pockets as if she hoped to find anything that would help them. Gwen’s cheeks were flushed and her eyes were glassy; Owen watched her like a hawk as she told him it was only shock.

Rats had nibbled the only food they could find, and Toshiko shuddered as they backed away from it. Jack spread his coat down over the floor, and pulled Ianto and himself down on it, everyone else pulled off their coats and spread them out on the floor. None of them would sleep tonight, lying wake unbelieving, still thinking they would be rescued in the morning, Jack more than most. Every time he closed his eyes halfway, he saw the Doctor standing just in the open doorway, in shafts of light falling around him as he saved them.

He shut his eyes tight as close as he could and tried to relax, Ianto shifting closer to him as he tried to breathe. He knew that they’re in trouble, but he still tried to deny it even as he pulled Ianto closer.

They were sleeping across from hundreds of the dead. Jack just couldn’t allow himself to believe that his team might soon join them.

---

“Gwen?” Toshiko asked, leaning over Gwen as she woke up. “What’s on your neck?” With that question, Owen, who was half-asleep, jerked awake and stumbled over to where they sat, eyes sharpening, Gwen trying to look at her own neck. Owen knelt down in front of her and flashed a worried look to Jack, looming behind Gwen.

“Take your shirt off, now, there’s a love,” Owen grinned, teeth flashing, but the tone of it was hollow and his eyes were fixated on her armpit. Not exactly sexy, Gwen mused. He helped her pull her shirt off and pushed her gently back on her back, arms lingering on her shoulders and sliding down her arms. He raised her arms slowly, probing under her arms, face and body tensing as he ran his fingers over black upraised patches of skin.

“What causes that?” Gwen asked, craning her neck. Owen dropped her arms back down and looked at the bubo there.

“Internal bleeding,” he frowned, not looking her in the eyes. She reached out and tipped his chin up so he was looking at her.

“Owen, how bad?” she asked. He looked back down at her neck, and she pulled his chin up again. “How bad?”

He swallowed. “Bad. Have you noticed these anywhere else?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and he started pulling at her trousers. She huffed out a breath of laughter that turned into a cough; Owen felt her forehead and cheeks before shaking his head and returning to her clothes. He cursed when he saw the slightly purple skin of her thighs. “This is moving fast,” he muttered. “No, no, no, it shouldn’t be moving this fast,” he frowned. She looked up at him, eyes wide at the tone in his voice as he stared around at everyone.

Within a day she was completely out of it. The bright red skin of her face led into the mottled purple and black of her neck, making her look like she had been strangled. She was shaking, and Owen draped his coat over her, Jack following suit. Jack couldn’t look at her, facing towards the cemetery and eyes looking somewhere far away. Owen didn’t speak, fussing over Gwen, taking breaks to look at everybody else’s’ necks. The one time he tried to look at Jack’s neck, Jack all but shoved him off and Owen looked at Ianto, a hurt look in his eyes, as the entire team slowly fell apart like Gwen’s body.

---

“You’re not on the rag, are you, Tosh?” Owen asked, staggering back from tree they used as their makeshift toilet. He knew Gwen wasn’t able to make it over to the tree, let alone stand up, and Toshiko was the last over there.

She shook her head, eyes widening as he cursed. He spun around to face Ianto, Jack, and Gwen’s prone figure lying on a pile of their jackets. “Right! I want all symptoms reported to me as soon as you notice them. Blood showing up anywhere it shouldn’t be, black patches of skin, headaches, fever, anything that you don’t normally have. Tosh, how long have you - ” his tirade was cut off as he bent over double with the force of his coughing, fists clenched over his mouth as his legs shook. Ianto looked from him to Jack to Gwen as Toshiko rushed forward to his side, cupping her hand around his elbow and leveling him up even as he waved her off.

“Right, then there’s no question as to how contagious this is, now is there?” he asked, looking at Gwen.

Within hours, Owen was coughing more than he was breathing, and his breaths sounded strained and thick. By the middle of the night, he was coughing near constantly and nobody could sleep.

By the morning, Owen was no longer coughing nor breathing, lying in a pool of blood on the dirty floor near his mouth. What of Owen’s face wasn’t covered with blood that Ianto could see was oxygen-starved blue leading to a purple-mottled neck. Ianto ran his fingers over Owen’s face, wiping away the blood with a dark sleeve. He trailed the back of his finger over one of Owen’s razor-sharp cheekbones, over pale blue lips, along a dark jawline that had nothing to do with 5 o’clock shadow. His skin was hot to the touch, and Ianto didn’t know whether that had to do with the fever or time of death. He hoped it was the first.

Jack didn’t say anything when Ianto woke him, just walked over and bent down and pulled his coat out from under Gwen; she was laying on only the far edge. He left Owen’s jacket, thrown over Gwen’s stomach, on her, and wrapped Owen in his coat, smoothing it down, clutching Owen’s shoulders. He buried Owen alone, shrugging Ianto off, leaving Ianto and Toshiko to watch him as he buried Owen.

---

None of them really believed that this was happening until Owen died. Jack had seen it in his eyes; he was the only one who believed that they would die. Jack still wasn’t sure that he could accept that his team were about to die of a hundred-year old disease. He still wasn’t sure that he could accept that no one could save them. It took Owen’s death and burial, wrapped in Jack’s coat, for the realization that they were all dying to sink in. All dying except for Jack.

---

All of them silently resented Jack for not being able to die, Jack knew. “Poor Jack,” Gwen rasped, dark eyes boring into him, but he knew what she was really saying. “Why can’t you die? Why won’t you get sick? Why won’t you die?”

She said: “We’re supposed to be a team. You’ll be all alone.” She meant: “We’re supposed to be a team. Why won’t you die with us?”

He doesn’t say: “I would if I could, Gwen. Believe me, there’s only one thing I want more; for this to not have happened.”

They had an early night, all going to bed as sunset streaked the sky outside with blood. He leant close to Ianto, brushing his nose against the top of his head, eyes closed, trying to pretend that they were all back at the Hub. Back in 2007. But all he could smell was death and blood and decay, and he was sick of that smell. He had smelled it so much and so often over his life and just when he was finally getting used to not smelling it all the people he loved started dying.

Sometimes, he wished that Rose hadn’t brought him back when she did. Then this never would have happened and he wouldn’t be watching his team slowly die all around him.

---

Nobody’s sure any longer who is sick from whom. Gwen fell ill first, followed by Owen and Ianto and Tosh, but they don’t know who gave it to whom. Whether it’s from the streets or the graveyard or each other, they’re all dying and there’s no one to blame except fate.

---

He cradled Ianto’s head in his lap as he choked to death on his own septum. Most lovers break up because of infidelity, or mutual dislike, or they “just didn’t work out”. Not because one of them was dying of a plague more than 600 years in the past. He pulled his hand up away from Ianto’s hot, sweaty right hand sticking out of a bloodstained sleeve like a bone out of skin, and rested it instead on the side of Ianto’s face.

He turned Ianto’s head to the side as much as he could, and a mixture of blood and bile left a grotesque trail across his red cheek, sliding down across the black skin of his neck. Jack wiped it off, smoothed his thumbs over Ianto’s fever-hot temples and suddenly too-sharp cheekbones.

Suddenly Ianto’s eyes flew open, pupils almost non-existent, one eye filled with blood. It came as a shock to Jack, as Ianto had spent the better part of the last two days with his eyes rapidly rolling underneath his eyelids, calling out Lisa’s name.

“You,” Ianto snarled, chapped lips curling up over blood-dark teeth, face twisting. “It wasn’t enough for you to murder Lisa, you had to have me as well,” he ground out. Jack opened his mouth to argue, to deny, when suddenly Ianto’s eyes widen and his arm twitched, as if trying to reach out to something or someone. His lips moved, mouthing a name that wasn’t Jack’s, and he relaxed, head falling back to rest in Jack’s lap. It’s only after Jack pulled his hands away to brush his eyelids closed that he realized he had been clutching at Ianto’s face so hard that he hand left fingermarks on his already darkened and reddened skin.

He tilted his head back against the wall, unconsciously tightening his grip once more on Ianto. His throat was closing up in a way that had nothing to do with the plague.

Toshiko watched Jack carry Ianto off to the cemetery in the same grave where they laid Owento rest, and set him down carefully on the ground, grabbing a nearby shovel and undigging the grave they so carefully made for Owen, digging further out to the side to include Ianto. She turned her head to the side as far as her protesting neck muscles would allow, and rasped to an unconscious, unresponsive Gwen, “He might as well dig it four meters wide. One meter for each of us.”

Gwen slept on, the uneasy sick of the dying. Toshiko watched Jack unwrap his coat from around Owen and drape it over both Owen and Ianto, now in the last place he would ever go.

Tosh remembered reading that the plague was so infectious that the gravediggers would soon become sick and die, buried next to those they had finally laid to rest under a dirt blanket. But that would never happen to Jack. He alone would live, watching over his team as they sickened and died.

We may die alone, she thought, but at least we’ll all be buried side by side, carried to our death and burial ground by Jack. Great, invincible Jack. He would be there years after they were decomposing, bones falling out of their rotting skin and onto each others’ skeletons.

I wonder if there’s enough room under that coat for all four of us, she thought.

No one would ever know that but Jack.

---

Everything was in hyper-color. Everything Toshiko saw was super-saturated in color, from the mound of blankets around her to the thermometer comically stuck in her mouth, from the box of tissues sitting by her bedside to the color of Jack’s eyes. I must be hallucinating, she thought, eyes widening as Jack pulled a stethoscope out of a pocket in his doctor’s coat and looked up at her.

“I’m sending you to the sun. The heat will help burn off your fever,” Jack grinned, looking away, teeth a caricature of Death’s grin, flesh around his mouth decayed and rotted. Tosh opened her mouth to protest, but as he turned to look at her, eyes suddenly hollow sockets, the words wouldn’t come out. His non-existent lips curved up.

“But don’t worry. I’m sending you there at night.”

Her mouth opened on a scream as her head pounded and her vision swam, but the only noise she could make was a ragged gasp of breath knifing through her lungs. Then, nothing, and Jack was left staring at her, mouth and eyes wide as she collapsed back to the ground from where she had been sitting, arm extended and pointing at Jack as if in accusation, as if he did this. As if he killed her.

He might as well have. He as good as killed her; it’s the least he could do to bury her.

---

Gwen was the first one to get sick and the last one to die. Jack wasn’t surprised. Lovely, strong Gwen, dying hundreds of years before she was even born. All of them did.

Gwen didn’t go quietly, either. She screamed and she moaned and she cursed, and she died on a whimper. Jack was reminded horribly of the T.S. Eliot poem. She went with her eyes closed and blood crusted in her eyelashes, and Jack closed his hand over her neck, where her thumping pulse should be, but it had been swallowed up in split black tumors.

They all fit under his coat in their dark grave, laying on their bloodstained jackets and laying under his. No one would know they were there except him. Jack lay on top of the loosely shoveled dirt, face down and hands clutching, breathing in dirt and dried blood and death. He and his team faced each other, separated by a layer of dirt that Jack could not stand.

All Jack saw was red, his hands and shirt and trousers all streaked with his teams’ blood, breathing in death. He closed his eyes but it wouldn’t go away. Not now, not ever.