(![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png)
blucougar.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
antigwenallies Apr. 30th, 2014 08:52 pm)
blucougar.livejournal.com posting in antigwenallies Apr. 30th, 2014 08:52 pm)Title: Adaption
Chapter Six: Second Meeting
Author: blucougar57
Summary: A new rift victim proves to be a revelation to the Torchwood team, and then some.
Rating: T
Warnings: More angst
Chapter Six
“Good morning,” Ianto greeted Jack the next morning as he joined his lover in the dining room. The residents had already had breakfast, but Jason had yet to appear. Jack smiled up at Ianto, and accepted a light kiss gladly.
“Good morning. Sleep well?”
“Mm. It helps that the rooms here are fully soundproofed, of course,” Ianto mused.
Jack nodded wordlessly. He knew understood what Ianto wasn’t saying, not wanting to seem tactless. Many of the residents, Jonah Bevin notwithstanding, were in the habit of making a lot of noise throughout the night, through no fault of their own. The very first time Ianto had needed to stay overnight, courtesy of a nasty squall that had made the bay too dangerous to cross, he had come home the next day having had no sleep and with his nerves stretched almost to breaking point. Not long after, Jack had found himself signing off on the requisition of materials and labour to have all the rooms at the Flat Holm facility sound-proofed.
It was a costly task that had nevertheless proven its worth, with Helen reporting that the less severely affected residents were experiencing a noticeable improvement in temperament purely for the fact that they were now able to sleep undisturbed.
He hoped that Jason had experienced a similarly restful night after the upsetting revelations of the previous night’s talk.
“Jason hasn’t surfaced yet,” Jack said as he set aside the paperwork he’d been looking through.
“Helen said,” Ianto answered. “I hope he’ll be okay. It must be quite a bad shock to the system, having to accept that there is no way to go home.”
“It is,” Jack murmured, thinking back to the times that he had experienced the same displacement.
“I forget, you know what it’s like, don’t you?” Ianto said quietly. “To be in a strange place, out of your comfort zone, with no way to get back to what’s familiar.”
“I do know what it’s like,” Jack agreed. “It’s the hardest thing in the world to be torn away from everything and everyone you love, and land in a time and place that’s as alien as any world in the known galaxies. Jason is lucky, to a point. He’s been parachuted into our world from a parallel world that doesn’t seem to be all that different. It’s going to hurt, to be separated from his family and friends, and I think that shock hasn’t quite hit home yet. He’ll adjust, though. I’m sure of it. It’s just going to take time and understanding.”
“Jack, what are we going to do with him?” Ianto asked softly. “Assuming he’ll get the all-clear to leave here, what do we do with him then? He’s sixteen years old, so it’s not as though we can adopt him out, but we can’t just turn him out onto the streets, either. He should have a chance to finish school, go to university… all the things he was planning or dreaming for himself back in his own reality.”
“Hey,” Jack said, reaching out to catch hold of Ianto’s hand in a tender grip, effectively silencing the younger man. “I meant what I said last night. He’s our responsibility, and I’m not going to just shove him out the door and tell him to fend for himself. I was thinking about it most of the night, actually, and I think I have an idea, if you’re willing to go along with it.”
“What idea?” Ianto asked, sounding noticeably calmer already. It never ceased to amuse Jack how easily Ianto could switch his emotions on and off. One moment it had looked as though Ianto was going to lose his cool and blow a proverbial gasket. The next, he was the personification of the mild mannered butler once more. Knowing that Ianto was waiting for an answer, Jack went on to explain, all the while hoping fervently that it didn’t set Ianto off again. He really did not want to be relegated to the couch when they got home that night.
“I was thinking, there’s a spare bedroom in your flat, right?”
“Our flat, and yes. There is. Why…? Oh… You’re thinking of bringing him home with us?”
Jack snorted with amusement.
“You’re making him sound like a stray puppy, but yeah. That’s the idea. Sure, we could rent a flat for him, and set him up maybe with a part-time job somewhere while he finishes his schooling, but I get the feeling that he’s not quite ready to be on his own just yet. If he stays with us, he’ll have a fair degree of independence, while also having us as a safety net. Does that make sense…? Or am I going to be sleeping on the couch tonight?”
Ianto smiled, then, and it was the kind of smile that thoroughly warmed Jack from the inside out. It was the smile that said, ‘you’re brilliant and I love you’.
“I think that’s a brilliant idea, Jack, at least as a temporary measure. It’ll give him a chance to get his bearings, and work out what direction he wants his life to go in. In the meantime, he’ll be able to finish school, as you say, and know that he’s being supported.”
Ianto trailed off, a slight frown creasing his brow that Jack wanted nothing more than to kiss away.
“What is it? What haven’t I thought of?”
“Nothing,” Ianto murmured. “I mean, it’s not nothing… It’s just, we don’t know how he feels about gay relationships. For all we know, he might have come from a world that doesn’t tolerate same sex couples. I don’t want to be fighting for acceptance in my own home, Jack.”
“You won’t have to,” Jack assured him. “If he has that attitude, then we’ll simply find somewhere else for him to go. Anyway, here’s our chance to test the waters.”
“What do you mean?”
“He just walked in. Don’t look. Just kiss me, and make it a good one.”
Ianto rolled his eyes, but leaned in to snog Jack nonetheless, proceeding to kiss the other man long and languorously. It was all too easy to get caught up in the pleasures of each other’s mouths, and both men were startled out of the moment when an embarrassed cough broke the quiet. While Ianto attempted to straighten his now rumpled look, Jack merely lounged back in his seat and smiled at the teen.
“Sorry. Didn’t notice you come in.”
Jason, however, smirked as he sat down.
“Yeah, you did. You did that to test my reaction, didn’t you?”
“You’re pretty observant,” Jack commented. “Did that bother you at all?”
“No,” Jason answered dismissively, only to immediately look worried and borderline panicky. “Should it have? Oh god, don’t tell me I’ve landed in a universe where being gay is a crime?”
“No,” Ianto assured him. “At least, not here in the UK. Some nations still consider it a crime, but it’s getting better slowly.”
Jason let his breath out in a rush, looking sincerely relieved.
“Thank God. I’m glad to hear that.”
“Are you gay?” Jack asked, somewhat bluntly, but if Jason was thrown by the question he didn’t let it show.
“No, I’m straight. At least, I’ve never met a guy that I was attracted to. I won’t say I’ll rule it out, because you never know, right? It’s not necessarily the gender. It’s the person.”
“That’s a very pragmatic perspective,” Ianto said with a smile. Jason shrugged.
“My parents made sure that I knew from a pretty young age that sexuality wasn’t an issue. Gay, straight, bi, whatever. It didn’t matter. Also, I had a friend a few years back… maybe five or six years, I think… He was gay and even though he didn’t advertise it, people seemed to know. I guess there must have been a lot of people around who were uncomfortable or unsure of their own sexuality, because they made life hell for him. I got black eyes and bruises more than once defending him from some clown who’d want to beat him up for supposedly looking at him in the gym locker room.” Jason shook his head in disgust, unaware of the relieved smiles being shared by his audience. “Couldn’t make them understand that a gay guy isn’t attracted to every single male he sees, just like a straight guy isn’t attracted to every single girl he sees. It didn’t matter what I said or did. I guess the final straw was when I was ambushed and attacked for being a… well, I won’t repeat what they called me, but it was pretty ugly. It put me in the hospital, actually. Broken arm, cracked kneecap... It was bad. I identified the guys that beat me up and they were charged over it, but I guess it was just too much. A week later, my friend and his folks had left Angel Grove. I was pretty angry about it, but I got an email from him when they got where they’re going, thanking me for everything I’d tried to do for him. It didn’t exactly make everything better, but I at least knew he’d taken something positive away with him when he left.”
“Jason, we have a proposition for you,” Jack said suddenly, “dependent on you passing the evaluation and getting the go-ahead to leave Flat Holm. We’d like to offer you a place to stay in our flat. We can arrange for you to go to school, if that’s what you want to do, and you’ll have somewhere to live where you don’t need to worry every time you open your mouth that you’ll say the wrong thing.”
Jason looked incredulous, to say the least.
“That is really generous,” the teen stammered. “Why would you do that? I mean, don’t get me wrong. I appreciate it, I really do. But you must have had lots of people come through the Rift like me. I bet you haven’t offered any of them what you’re offering me now.”
“True,” Jack agreed. “Not all of them showed the maturity and understanding and empathy that you just showed to us. That’s really important to us, and a big factor in choosing to make this offer.”
“The other point,” Ianto said, “is that it isn’t often that someone comes through the Rift like you did, who has good prospects for recovery and rehabilitation. We want to help you in any way we can.”
“Wow,” Jason murmured. “Thank you. And I guess, assuming I pass the evaluation period, I’d like to accept that offer.”
“That’s good,” Jack said enthused. “Now, how about some breakfast? Afterwards, if you feel up to it, we just have a few more things we need to talk to you about.”
“Sure,” Jason agreed. With fresh enthusiasm, Jason tucked into the breakfast that had been brought out for him, not stopping until he’d all but inhaled the plateful.
“Getting your appetite back?” Jack asked with a grin. Jason reddened slightly, but didn’t shie away from the question.
“Yeah, I guess I am. I’m a third dan black belt in karate, and I tend to burn up a lot of calories. I try to be mindful of what I eat but yeah, I usually eat a lot.”
“Karate?” Ianto mused. “Perhaps you might be willing to teach me some techniques. I have a feeling it might just come in handy.”
“Just say the word,” Jason said cheerfully. “I ran classes back home with my friend, Tommy. We’re going to…” He faltered, his smile fading a little. “I mean, we were planning on starting our own dojo. I was going to study business at college when I finished high school, so we could set it up properly.”
“You can still do that if you really want to,” Jack assured him. “You still have that option open to you.”
“Thanks,” Jason murmured, his previous enthusiasm visibly fading. Jack and Ianto exchanged looks and, without a word spoken aloud between them, they decided it was time to deal with the remaining matters to do with Jason’s arrival in their little corner of reality.
“Are you up to answering a few more questions?” Jack asked. “There are just a couple of things we still have to clear up.”
Jason nodded, shaking himself out of his momentary funk.
“Sure. What did you want to know?”
Jack looked across at Ianto, who set two metallic items down on the table in front of Jason.
“We were hoping you’d be able to tell us what these are.”
Jason’s gaze fixed on the two items in front of him and any remnants of good humour vanished in the blink of an eye. For long seconds he stared at the objects, looking utterly stricken. Then, before either Jack or Ianto had a chance to say a word, Jason launched himself out of his chair and fled to the bathroom.
“Now I really want to know what they are,” Jack muttered. Ianto spoke as he stood and went to wait outside the bathroom door with a glass of water in hand.
“Let’s not jump to conclusions, Jack. At least wait and hear what he has to say.”
Jack held his hands up defensively.
“I’m not making assumptions. All I’m saying is that these clearly aren’t tourist trinkets.”
As much as Ianto wanted to point out that that in itself was an assumption, he couldn’t. Jason’s dramatic reaction was enough to tell them that whatever the objects were, they certainly were not child’s toys.
Jason emerged from the bathroom looking slightly pasty-faced and wiping self-consciously at his mouth. He gratefully accepted the glass of water that Ianto offered him.
“Thanks,” he mumbled as they sat back down. When he met Jack’s gaze again, the stricken look on the boy’s face was too genuine for Jack to want to go aggressive with his questioning.
“I gather you weren’t expecting to see these?” he asked. If Jason heard the cool tone in Jack’s voice, he didn’t give any sign of it.
“No, I wasn’t. I thought they must have come off and been left behind. At least, I hoped they had been.”
“Any particular reason why?” Ianto asked. Jason was silent for just a few seconds before looking at them both and speaking with a visible weariness that should never have existed in someone so young.
“I’m a Power Ranger. Or, at least, I was a Power Ranger. My friends and I were chosen to fight against evil aliens who were trying to invade Earth. I know, it sounds crazy…”
“Jason, you came here through a wormhole, and we work for an alien investigation agency,” Jack pointed out dryly. “You’d have to go a lot further than that for it to sound crazy to us.”
A weak smile passed briefly over Jason’s face.
“Right. I didn’t think of it like that. So basically, that’s my communicator. Billy made those from scratch so that we could stay in contact, no matter where we were. He was able to tweak them later on so that we could teleport back and forth from the Command Centre whenever we needed or wanted to, so we didn’t need to wait for Zordon or Alpha to do it for us.”
“Zordon and Alpha?” Ianto echoed.
“Yeah. Alpha is the robot assistant and Zordon is the being who created the Power Coins.” Jason reached out and picked up the shield-like object off the table. “This is my morpher. It lets me morph into a Power Ranger. I’m the Red Ranger, with the power of the Tyrannosaur. But… I don’t know whether it will work here. I don’t know whether the morphing grid exists in this world.”
“The morphing grid,” Jack murmured. “That’s where you get your power from when you’re… morphed, as you say?”
“Yes,” Jason confirmed bleakly. “That’s right.”
“Well,” Jack said after thoughtful consideration, “why don’t you give it a try?”
The look on Jason’s face teetered precariously between suspicion and disbelief.
“You… want me to try it out?”
“Sure. At best, you can show us what you’re talking about. At worst, nothing happens. So go ahead, kid. Give it a try.”
Feeling incredibly self-conscious all of a sudden, Jason stood up and, taking a deep breath, thrust the morpher out in front of him.
“It’s morphing time!”
Nothing happened. As much as Jason had anticipated it, he couldn’t suppress the deep disappointment he felt when his suspicions were proven. Beyond that disappointment, though, there was a deeper distress that he couldn’t hide, and didn’t even want to try. Sinking back into his seat, he buried his face in his hands and uttered a choked sob.
“Hey, no need to be embarrassed,” Jack reassured him. “Just because it didn’t work here doesn’t mean we don’t believe you.”
“It’s not that,” Jason said, rubbing furiously at his eyes. He plucked the coin out of the centre of the morpher shield and held it up to the light, where it glinted innocuously. “It’s this, right here. My power coin. It’s that it’s here, with me, in this reality. It means that my friends are one Ranger short. I’m replaceable. They could have found someone else to be the Red Ranger but without the coin they won’t be able to. They’ll be one Ranger short, and that means they’ll be one Zord short.”
“Zord?” Ianto queried.
“The vehicles we use to battle when Rita supersizes her monsters. We have rules that we have to follow, and one of them is that we never escalate a fight.”
“No pre-emptive strikes, in other words,” Jack mused, and Jason nodded.
“Right. We use the Zords to battle and, if it becomes necessary, we can combine all five Zords to make a giant robot that’s called a Megazord.”
“I understand,” Jack said soberly. “No coin means no Zord, and no Zord means no Megazord. And no Megazord…”
“Means my friends are in a really bad situation,” Jason said bleakly. “I’ve really managed to screw them over with this.”
“This was not your fault,” Ianto said sharply. “You didn’t want it to happen. You never asked for it to happen and odds are you couldn’t have stopped it from happening. Do not sit there and blame yourself. There is absolutely no point. What’s done is done. Wallowing in guilt will help no one, least of all yourself.”
“I know,” Jason agreed miserably. “But can’t I at least have a few minutes?”
“I think we can allow that,” Jack conceded. “Can you tell us one more thing, though? Why didn’t you tell us any of this before?”
“I made a vow of secrecy when I became a Power Ranger,” Jason said softly. “It’s not easy to break a vow that you’ve kept religiously for eighteen months. As well as that, though, I didn’t know that my morpher had come with me. When I woke up here, and neither Helen nor you guys mentioned that I’d been dressed in a strange uniform when I was found, I assumed I was just in my regular jeans and t-shirt.”
“You were,” Ianto confirmed, “even though they were pretty much shredded beyond repair.”
“The morpher must have come loose and caused me to de-morph when I landed,” Jason murmured, more to himself than to Jack or Ianto. “Anyway, I didn’t know it was with me. As far as I knew, you both thought I was just an average kid caught up in not so average circumstances. If that was the case, and any chance of getting home is as bleak as you say it is, what point was there in my telling you about something that I had no way of proving to be true, and was no longer relevant in my life anyway?”
“Fair enough,” Jack agreed, quietly impressed with Jason’s logic. “That’s a reasonable line of thought.”
“I didn’t tell you not because I didn’t want to you to know. I didn’t tell you purely because I just didn’t think it was relevant.”
“And now?”
Jason shrugged helplessly.
“I don’t know. What does it matter? The coin and morpher are apparently useless here, and there’s no way to guarantee they’ll get to where they need to go if we send them back into the Rift.”
“What else is bothering you?” Ianto asked gently. “Aside from the obvious, of course.”
Jason blinked, and tears that had been welling in his eyes finally spilled over.
“I think it just hit me. I’m never going to see my mom and dad again.”
He broke down finally, sobbing heavily in distress. Jack moved his chair around and pulled the teen into his arms, holding him protectively while he cried out his grief.
* * * * *
to be continued...
Chapter Six: Second Meeting
Author: blucougar57
Summary: A new rift victim proves to be a revelation to the Torchwood team, and then some.
Rating: T
Warnings: More angst
“Good morning,” Ianto greeted Jack the next morning as he joined his lover in the dining room. The residents had already had breakfast, but Jason had yet to appear. Jack smiled up at Ianto, and accepted a light kiss gladly.
“Good morning. Sleep well?”
“Mm. It helps that the rooms here are fully soundproofed, of course,” Ianto mused.
Jack nodded wordlessly. He knew understood what Ianto wasn’t saying, not wanting to seem tactless. Many of the residents, Jonah Bevin notwithstanding, were in the habit of making a lot of noise throughout the night, through no fault of their own. The very first time Ianto had needed to stay overnight, courtesy of a nasty squall that had made the bay too dangerous to cross, he had come home the next day having had no sleep and with his nerves stretched almost to breaking point. Not long after, Jack had found himself signing off on the requisition of materials and labour to have all the rooms at the Flat Holm facility sound-proofed.
It was a costly task that had nevertheless proven its worth, with Helen reporting that the less severely affected residents were experiencing a noticeable improvement in temperament purely for the fact that they were now able to sleep undisturbed.
He hoped that Jason had experienced a similarly restful night after the upsetting revelations of the previous night’s talk.
“Jason hasn’t surfaced yet,” Jack said as he set aside the paperwork he’d been looking through.
“Helen said,” Ianto answered. “I hope he’ll be okay. It must be quite a bad shock to the system, having to accept that there is no way to go home.”
“It is,” Jack murmured, thinking back to the times that he had experienced the same displacement.
“I forget, you know what it’s like, don’t you?” Ianto said quietly. “To be in a strange place, out of your comfort zone, with no way to get back to what’s familiar.”
“I do know what it’s like,” Jack agreed. “It’s the hardest thing in the world to be torn away from everything and everyone you love, and land in a time and place that’s as alien as any world in the known galaxies. Jason is lucky, to a point. He’s been parachuted into our world from a parallel world that doesn’t seem to be all that different. It’s going to hurt, to be separated from his family and friends, and I think that shock hasn’t quite hit home yet. He’ll adjust, though. I’m sure of it. It’s just going to take time and understanding.”
“Jack, what are we going to do with him?” Ianto asked softly. “Assuming he’ll get the all-clear to leave here, what do we do with him then? He’s sixteen years old, so it’s not as though we can adopt him out, but we can’t just turn him out onto the streets, either. He should have a chance to finish school, go to university… all the things he was planning or dreaming for himself back in his own reality.”
“Hey,” Jack said, reaching out to catch hold of Ianto’s hand in a tender grip, effectively silencing the younger man. “I meant what I said last night. He’s our responsibility, and I’m not going to just shove him out the door and tell him to fend for himself. I was thinking about it most of the night, actually, and I think I have an idea, if you’re willing to go along with it.”
“What idea?” Ianto asked, sounding noticeably calmer already. It never ceased to amuse Jack how easily Ianto could switch his emotions on and off. One moment it had looked as though Ianto was going to lose his cool and blow a proverbial gasket. The next, he was the personification of the mild mannered butler once more. Knowing that Ianto was waiting for an answer, Jack went on to explain, all the while hoping fervently that it didn’t set Ianto off again. He really did not want to be relegated to the couch when they got home that night.
“I was thinking, there’s a spare bedroom in your flat, right?”
“Our flat, and yes. There is. Why…? Oh… You’re thinking of bringing him home with us?”
Jack snorted with amusement.
“You’re making him sound like a stray puppy, but yeah. That’s the idea. Sure, we could rent a flat for him, and set him up maybe with a part-time job somewhere while he finishes his schooling, but I get the feeling that he’s not quite ready to be on his own just yet. If he stays with us, he’ll have a fair degree of independence, while also having us as a safety net. Does that make sense…? Or am I going to be sleeping on the couch tonight?”
Ianto smiled, then, and it was the kind of smile that thoroughly warmed Jack from the inside out. It was the smile that said, ‘you’re brilliant and I love you’.
“I think that’s a brilliant idea, Jack, at least as a temporary measure. It’ll give him a chance to get his bearings, and work out what direction he wants his life to go in. In the meantime, he’ll be able to finish school, as you say, and know that he’s being supported.”
Ianto trailed off, a slight frown creasing his brow that Jack wanted nothing more than to kiss away.
“What is it? What haven’t I thought of?”
“Nothing,” Ianto murmured. “I mean, it’s not nothing… It’s just, we don’t know how he feels about gay relationships. For all we know, he might have come from a world that doesn’t tolerate same sex couples. I don’t want to be fighting for acceptance in my own home, Jack.”
“You won’t have to,” Jack assured him. “If he has that attitude, then we’ll simply find somewhere else for him to go. Anyway, here’s our chance to test the waters.”
“What do you mean?”
“He just walked in. Don’t look. Just kiss me, and make it a good one.”
Ianto rolled his eyes, but leaned in to snog Jack nonetheless, proceeding to kiss the other man long and languorously. It was all too easy to get caught up in the pleasures of each other’s mouths, and both men were startled out of the moment when an embarrassed cough broke the quiet. While Ianto attempted to straighten his now rumpled look, Jack merely lounged back in his seat and smiled at the teen.
“Sorry. Didn’t notice you come in.”
Jason, however, smirked as he sat down.
“Yeah, you did. You did that to test my reaction, didn’t you?”
“You’re pretty observant,” Jack commented. “Did that bother you at all?”
“No,” Jason answered dismissively, only to immediately look worried and borderline panicky. “Should it have? Oh god, don’t tell me I’ve landed in a universe where being gay is a crime?”
“No,” Ianto assured him. “At least, not here in the UK. Some nations still consider it a crime, but it’s getting better slowly.”
Jason let his breath out in a rush, looking sincerely relieved.
“Thank God. I’m glad to hear that.”
“Are you gay?” Jack asked, somewhat bluntly, but if Jason was thrown by the question he didn’t let it show.
“No, I’m straight. At least, I’ve never met a guy that I was attracted to. I won’t say I’ll rule it out, because you never know, right? It’s not necessarily the gender. It’s the person.”
“That’s a very pragmatic perspective,” Ianto said with a smile. Jason shrugged.
“My parents made sure that I knew from a pretty young age that sexuality wasn’t an issue. Gay, straight, bi, whatever. It didn’t matter. Also, I had a friend a few years back… maybe five or six years, I think… He was gay and even though he didn’t advertise it, people seemed to know. I guess there must have been a lot of people around who were uncomfortable or unsure of their own sexuality, because they made life hell for him. I got black eyes and bruises more than once defending him from some clown who’d want to beat him up for supposedly looking at him in the gym locker room.” Jason shook his head in disgust, unaware of the relieved smiles being shared by his audience. “Couldn’t make them understand that a gay guy isn’t attracted to every single male he sees, just like a straight guy isn’t attracted to every single girl he sees. It didn’t matter what I said or did. I guess the final straw was when I was ambushed and attacked for being a… well, I won’t repeat what they called me, but it was pretty ugly. It put me in the hospital, actually. Broken arm, cracked kneecap... It was bad. I identified the guys that beat me up and they were charged over it, but I guess it was just too much. A week later, my friend and his folks had left Angel Grove. I was pretty angry about it, but I got an email from him when they got where they’re going, thanking me for everything I’d tried to do for him. It didn’t exactly make everything better, but I at least knew he’d taken something positive away with him when he left.”
“Jason, we have a proposition for you,” Jack said suddenly, “dependent on you passing the evaluation and getting the go-ahead to leave Flat Holm. We’d like to offer you a place to stay in our flat. We can arrange for you to go to school, if that’s what you want to do, and you’ll have somewhere to live where you don’t need to worry every time you open your mouth that you’ll say the wrong thing.”
Jason looked incredulous, to say the least.
“That is really generous,” the teen stammered. “Why would you do that? I mean, don’t get me wrong. I appreciate it, I really do. But you must have had lots of people come through the Rift like me. I bet you haven’t offered any of them what you’re offering me now.”
“True,” Jack agreed. “Not all of them showed the maturity and understanding and empathy that you just showed to us. That’s really important to us, and a big factor in choosing to make this offer.”
“The other point,” Ianto said, “is that it isn’t often that someone comes through the Rift like you did, who has good prospects for recovery and rehabilitation. We want to help you in any way we can.”
“Wow,” Jason murmured. “Thank you. And I guess, assuming I pass the evaluation period, I’d like to accept that offer.”
“That’s good,” Jack said enthused. “Now, how about some breakfast? Afterwards, if you feel up to it, we just have a few more things we need to talk to you about.”
“Sure,” Jason agreed. With fresh enthusiasm, Jason tucked into the breakfast that had been brought out for him, not stopping until he’d all but inhaled the plateful.
“Getting your appetite back?” Jack asked with a grin. Jason reddened slightly, but didn’t shie away from the question.
“Yeah, I guess I am. I’m a third dan black belt in karate, and I tend to burn up a lot of calories. I try to be mindful of what I eat but yeah, I usually eat a lot.”
“Karate?” Ianto mused. “Perhaps you might be willing to teach me some techniques. I have a feeling it might just come in handy.”
“Just say the word,” Jason said cheerfully. “I ran classes back home with my friend, Tommy. We’re going to…” He faltered, his smile fading a little. “I mean, we were planning on starting our own dojo. I was going to study business at college when I finished high school, so we could set it up properly.”
“You can still do that if you really want to,” Jack assured him. “You still have that option open to you.”
“Thanks,” Jason murmured, his previous enthusiasm visibly fading. Jack and Ianto exchanged looks and, without a word spoken aloud between them, they decided it was time to deal with the remaining matters to do with Jason’s arrival in their little corner of reality.
“Are you up to answering a few more questions?” Jack asked. “There are just a couple of things we still have to clear up.”
Jason nodded, shaking himself out of his momentary funk.
“Sure. What did you want to know?”
Jack looked across at Ianto, who set two metallic items down on the table in front of Jason.
“We were hoping you’d be able to tell us what these are.”
Jason’s gaze fixed on the two items in front of him and any remnants of good humour vanished in the blink of an eye. For long seconds he stared at the objects, looking utterly stricken. Then, before either Jack or Ianto had a chance to say a word, Jason launched himself out of his chair and fled to the bathroom.
“Now I really want to know what they are,” Jack muttered. Ianto spoke as he stood and went to wait outside the bathroom door with a glass of water in hand.
“Let’s not jump to conclusions, Jack. At least wait and hear what he has to say.”
Jack held his hands up defensively.
“I’m not making assumptions. All I’m saying is that these clearly aren’t tourist trinkets.”
As much as Ianto wanted to point out that that in itself was an assumption, he couldn’t. Jason’s dramatic reaction was enough to tell them that whatever the objects were, they certainly were not child’s toys.
Jason emerged from the bathroom looking slightly pasty-faced and wiping self-consciously at his mouth. He gratefully accepted the glass of water that Ianto offered him.
“Thanks,” he mumbled as they sat back down. When he met Jack’s gaze again, the stricken look on the boy’s face was too genuine for Jack to want to go aggressive with his questioning.
“I gather you weren’t expecting to see these?” he asked. If Jason heard the cool tone in Jack’s voice, he didn’t give any sign of it.
“No, I wasn’t. I thought they must have come off and been left behind. At least, I hoped they had been.”
“Any particular reason why?” Ianto asked. Jason was silent for just a few seconds before looking at them both and speaking with a visible weariness that should never have existed in someone so young.
“I’m a Power Ranger. Or, at least, I was a Power Ranger. My friends and I were chosen to fight against evil aliens who were trying to invade Earth. I know, it sounds crazy…”
“Jason, you came here through a wormhole, and we work for an alien investigation agency,” Jack pointed out dryly. “You’d have to go a lot further than that for it to sound crazy to us.”
A weak smile passed briefly over Jason’s face.
“Right. I didn’t think of it like that. So basically, that’s my communicator. Billy made those from scratch so that we could stay in contact, no matter where we were. He was able to tweak them later on so that we could teleport back and forth from the Command Centre whenever we needed or wanted to, so we didn’t need to wait for Zordon or Alpha to do it for us.”
“Zordon and Alpha?” Ianto echoed.
“Yeah. Alpha is the robot assistant and Zordon is the being who created the Power Coins.” Jason reached out and picked up the shield-like object off the table. “This is my morpher. It lets me morph into a Power Ranger. I’m the Red Ranger, with the power of the Tyrannosaur. But… I don’t know whether it will work here. I don’t know whether the morphing grid exists in this world.”
“The morphing grid,” Jack murmured. “That’s where you get your power from when you’re… morphed, as you say?”
“Yes,” Jason confirmed bleakly. “That’s right.”
“Well,” Jack said after thoughtful consideration, “why don’t you give it a try?”
The look on Jason’s face teetered precariously between suspicion and disbelief.
“You… want me to try it out?”
“Sure. At best, you can show us what you’re talking about. At worst, nothing happens. So go ahead, kid. Give it a try.”
Feeling incredibly self-conscious all of a sudden, Jason stood up and, taking a deep breath, thrust the morpher out in front of him.
“It’s morphing time!”
Nothing happened. As much as Jason had anticipated it, he couldn’t suppress the deep disappointment he felt when his suspicions were proven. Beyond that disappointment, though, there was a deeper distress that he couldn’t hide, and didn’t even want to try. Sinking back into his seat, he buried his face in his hands and uttered a choked sob.
“Hey, no need to be embarrassed,” Jack reassured him. “Just because it didn’t work here doesn’t mean we don’t believe you.”
“It’s not that,” Jason said, rubbing furiously at his eyes. He plucked the coin out of the centre of the morpher shield and held it up to the light, where it glinted innocuously. “It’s this, right here. My power coin. It’s that it’s here, with me, in this reality. It means that my friends are one Ranger short. I’m replaceable. They could have found someone else to be the Red Ranger but without the coin they won’t be able to. They’ll be one Ranger short, and that means they’ll be one Zord short.”
“Zord?” Ianto queried.
“The vehicles we use to battle when Rita supersizes her monsters. We have rules that we have to follow, and one of them is that we never escalate a fight.”
“No pre-emptive strikes, in other words,” Jack mused, and Jason nodded.
“Right. We use the Zords to battle and, if it becomes necessary, we can combine all five Zords to make a giant robot that’s called a Megazord.”
“I understand,” Jack said soberly. “No coin means no Zord, and no Zord means no Megazord. And no Megazord…”
“Means my friends are in a really bad situation,” Jason said bleakly. “I’ve really managed to screw them over with this.”
“This was not your fault,” Ianto said sharply. “You didn’t want it to happen. You never asked for it to happen and odds are you couldn’t have stopped it from happening. Do not sit there and blame yourself. There is absolutely no point. What’s done is done. Wallowing in guilt will help no one, least of all yourself.”
“I know,” Jason agreed miserably. “But can’t I at least have a few minutes?”
“I think we can allow that,” Jack conceded. “Can you tell us one more thing, though? Why didn’t you tell us any of this before?”
“I made a vow of secrecy when I became a Power Ranger,” Jason said softly. “It’s not easy to break a vow that you’ve kept religiously for eighteen months. As well as that, though, I didn’t know that my morpher had come with me. When I woke up here, and neither Helen nor you guys mentioned that I’d been dressed in a strange uniform when I was found, I assumed I was just in my regular jeans and t-shirt.”
“You were,” Ianto confirmed, “even though they were pretty much shredded beyond repair.”
“The morpher must have come loose and caused me to de-morph when I landed,” Jason murmured, more to himself than to Jack or Ianto. “Anyway, I didn’t know it was with me. As far as I knew, you both thought I was just an average kid caught up in not so average circumstances. If that was the case, and any chance of getting home is as bleak as you say it is, what point was there in my telling you about something that I had no way of proving to be true, and was no longer relevant in my life anyway?”
“Fair enough,” Jack agreed, quietly impressed with Jason’s logic. “That’s a reasonable line of thought.”
“I didn’t tell you not because I didn’t want to you to know. I didn’t tell you purely because I just didn’t think it was relevant.”
“And now?”
Jason shrugged helplessly.
“I don’t know. What does it matter? The coin and morpher are apparently useless here, and there’s no way to guarantee they’ll get to where they need to go if we send them back into the Rift.”
“What else is bothering you?” Ianto asked gently. “Aside from the obvious, of course.”
Jason blinked, and tears that had been welling in his eyes finally spilled over.
“I think it just hit me. I’m never going to see my mom and dad again.”
He broke down finally, sobbing heavily in distress. Jack moved his chair around and pulled the teen into his arms, holding him protectively while he cried out his grief.
to be continued...
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
It's a hellish thing to happen to Jason, but hey, he gets to live with Jack and Ianto...
From:
no subject