Title: Hollow
Author: Bitterfig
Fandom: Torchwood
Pairing: Owen/Jack
Summary: How do you live with being dead?
Beta Reader: Fedink
Word Count: 770
Rating: R
Warnings: This story is relentlessly depressing. Also contains gore, sex, and spoilers for Season 2 and…charitable necrophilia?
Author’s Note: My first Torchwood fic. Written for slashthedrabble Challenge #171: Wound/Wounded.

When Owen came in the examination room Jack didn’t look up from whatever alien molecular reading machine he was fiddling with.  Of course he didn’t, Owen thought with a grim smile.  Walking corpses made people uncomfortable, especially when it was their fault the corpse was walking.

 

Jack said he needed another test.  Yet another examination to determine he was really most sincerely dead, to check the body for deterioration on a cellular level, for unearthly energies or something.  There was always something to be tested and why the fuck not?  What else did he have to do?

 

Ever since Katie died, work had been the main thing but Jack had suspended him and due to his condition his usual distractions were denied him.  There were no meals to break the day with taste and satiation, no alcohol-induced euphoria or sexual conquests to occupy him, no drifting off to sleep.  He couldn’t even enjoy a good shit any more.  Might as well let Jack hook up the electrodes and test him for whatever.

 

Was that all his life had been?  A job and a series of diversions he used to kill the time.  It hardly seemed like a life at all. 

 

“Ready?”  Jack asked.

 

“Whenever you are,” Owen said and took off his shirt. 

 

Underneath he was pale, deathly pale but hadn’t he always been, even when he was alive?  The only difference was the wound, the bullet hole straight through his heart. 

 

*****

 

Jack couldn’t take his eyes off the hole in Owen’s chest.  The wound transfixed him, drew him like the gravity of a black hole. 

 

Black holes.

 

The Doctor had told him about the time he and Rose had orbited a black hole, felt its irresistible pull but somehow gotten away.  That was the Doctor for you, skirting the abyss, lightly tripping along the edge of oblivion then dashing away more or less unfazed. 

 

Once upon a time, Jack had been like that.  No more.  The black holes had sucked him in. 

 

Seeing Jack staring, Owen glared at him.   His eyes brimming with rage and blame, two more black holes. 

 

“What are you gaping at?”  Owen snapped.  “I’m sure you’ve had ever so much worse.”

 

“Yeah, I have.”  Jack answered coldly.  He hoped Owen would drop it but knew he wouldn’t.

 

“Of course when you get one of these it just closes up on its own, heals right over good as new.” Owen went on, practically spitting out the words.  “No fuss no bother.  `fraid we can’t all be so lucky.” 

 

“Shut up. Owen.  Let’s just get this over with.” 

 

“So I can get on with my life?”

 

“Yes, so you can get on with your life.  You are alive.”

 

“No, I’m not,”   Owen said quietly.  “I’m dead.  It’s cold and dark and I’m all alone.  That’s what death is.  You know that.”

 

Jack wished to God Owen would be snide and nasty again or that he’d scream and rage.  Without his anger protecting him it really did seem as though he was made of glass, too fragile to breathe on. 

 

He shuddered, when Owen’s hands closed around his.  They felt more like rubber gloves than human hands, stiff and cold, broken fingers at unnatural angles.

 

“Would you touch me?”  Owen asked, his voice shaking.  “Please, touch me.”

 

“I will,” Jack said.  He reached out, reached for the wound that captivated him so.  He laid his hand over the hole.  The damaged tissue was soft and pulpy.  Cool to the touch.  If he had wanted to, he could have reached his fingers in and touched the still, muscular walls of Owen’s heart. 

 

It made his head spin to think about it.  

 

Owen was pressed against him, dead weight against his living flesh.  His damaged hands groped awkwardly over Jack’s crotch and chest.  He needed something, like an infant needs milk or maybe like a vampire needs blood.  He was begging, his voice bereft of hope.

 

“Please Jack, I’m so alone…I’m hollow inside…”

 

It was his fault.  He had done this thing to Owen.  The least he could do was allow the man whatever sliver of comfort he had the power to give. 

 

He caressed Owen’s cheek, feeling the bone knife sharp under the flesh.

 

“It’s all right,” Jack whispered.  “I know what you want.  You don’t need to ask.” 

 

*****

 

Lying under Jack, Owen didn’t bother to go through the motions of a pleasure he didn’t feel.  He only lay there, clutching tight to Jack’s heaving body in the desperate hope that the heat and blood of life might somehow fill the emptiness inside him.