Title: More than a dream
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 2,265 words
Content notes: None
Author notes: Written for Challenge 447 - Amnesty using Challenge 144 - Memory
Summary: Tosh’s memories are stirred up by a strange dream.


Jack pulled the SUV into the quiet Cardiff street, by default on the lookout for anything untoward, even if he wasn't expecting to see anything. His abundance of caution was disproved by the fact that the street remained quiet and unmoving, just as it should have been were it not for the fact that it sat in the middle of a city poised underneath a rift in time and space. Not tonight, though, Jack told himself. Tonight he was only attending a callout of a personal nature.

He used his own keys to get through the main front door of the six apartment complex before taking the stairs to the first floor and knocking gently at the door. It opened a moment later, Tosh standing there in a fluffy dressing gown and equally fluffy slippers. Not dressed and ready to go anywhere, but then it was two in the morning.

‘Good morning,’ Jack greeted.

Tosh blushed slightly. ‘I was about to call you and tell you not to worry. I know it’s silly.’

Jack didn’t let Tosh’s good nature put him off. ‘It’s not silly if you thought to call me,’ he assured her. ‘Anything that’s worth calling me at two in the morning is worth coming over to make sure you’re okay.’ And he meant that. Plus, it wasn’t as if he slept a whole lot, trying to find other ways to fill in the hours when his team weren’t there to amuse him.

‘Can I at least make you some tea?’

Jack nodded, following her into the perfectly manicured flat, watching her flip the kettle on before retrieving two mugs from a cupboard. Jack took off his coat and draped it over a stool around the kitchen island and then settled on the one beside it and let the silence hang until she was ready to talk.

‘So I had this dream. I know, crazy. Why am I calling you because of a dream?’

Jack shrugged it off. ‘Depends what kind of dream it was.’

Tosh tugged on her dressing gown tie, tightening it around her middle. ‘See, that’s the thing. It was sort of a dream but not a dream.’ She paused as the kettle bubbled and boiled, tipping water into a teapot, letting it brew rather than using tea bags like everyone else. ‘Do you remember that trip to the Himalayas a little while back? Of course not,’ she said, answering the question for herself. ‘It was whilst you were gone. Only…’

Jack waited, wondering where this was going. He’d read their reports from the time he’d spent away travelling with The Doctor, committing the details to memory and feeling guilty that he’d left them in the first place.

Tosh chewed her lip, dragging a loose strand of hair back behind her ear. ‘Only it was different from how I remembered it. I woke up part way through, except it feels like I remember there being more than what happened in my dream. Like I left the dream before I could see the rest, yet it feels like it’s still there somewhere, tucked away.’

Jack tensed. The Year That Never Was had been just that. A year in which the things that transpired had been erased. Once the paradox machine that the Master had built was destroyed, reality had reverted back to the moment before it had been activated. The Master’s year-long reign of terror was removed from the timeline of history. Jack still remembered it because he’d been in the eye of the storm when it happened, but could his team’s exposure to rift technology have caused a second set of memories to remain deeply embedded in their subconscious?

Jack took the teapot and began pouring for them both, steam rising from the top of the mugs in mesmerising swirling patterns. ‘What do you think you remember, Tosh?’

She watched the amber liquid filling both mugs before retrieving milk from the fridge and offering it to Jack, keeping her own mug strong and black as he tipped in a dash of milk. ‘You know that we only went there because UNIT asked us to,’ she began. ‘They seemed to think that when we opened the rift, releasing Abaddon, that we somehow created a secondary rift tear over Pakistan, somewhere near the summit of K2. Of course we had to go and check it out. We were responsible, after all.’

Jack nodded. He was the one who was ultimately responsible, even if he hadn’t been the one to press the button. He sipped the tea too soon and felt it burn his tongue, reminding him that he probably deserved it.

‘We trekked out there, expecting UNIT to meet us there, but there was no one, so we kept going up the mountains, trying to locate the spot they’d given us so that we could set up some equipment to see if there really was rift activity. As soon as we activated it, there was this robotic doll thing, made to look like you that sprung up out of nowhere. That’s when we knew it must have been a set up, though we couldn't understand why. That’s when I woke up.’

‘You think you remember who set you up?’ Jack asked, curious to know where Tosh was going with this.

She wrapped her hands around the mug and leaned her elbows on the counter. ‘That’s just it. I know that we descended to the base of the mountains and camped out there for two days waiting for someone to pick us up and take us back to civilisation, except… it doesn't feel like that’s what really happened. It feels too simple. As in, why lure us all the way up there and then there’s nothing there?’

Jack frowned. ‘Where did you get to in your dream before you woke up?’

‘Just after the robot bit. We were just packing up ready to head back down. Then…’ she paused, as if trying to remember what happened next again. ‘No, that’s not right. I remember it getting colder and windier all of a sudden. Owen looked across the valley in between the mountains and we could see these huge storm clouds rolling in. We were really far up the mountain and we knew there was no shelter. If we didn’t make it back down before the storm arrived…’

The mug made slow circles on the kitchen counter as Jack fidgeted with it. There’d been no mention of storms in any of their reports.

‘We left marker flags along the way up in case we lost GPS signal, except when we started back, we couldn’t find the first flag, or the second. They weren’t where we’d left them. I can’t remember when we realised it must have been a trap.’ She took a sip of tea and then looked down into its depths, searching for more. ‘The storm was on us before we knew it. The wind was so strong it threatened to blow us right off the edge, but we knew we had to keep going.’ Tosh gasped and Jack was startled by the noise. ‘Oh god, the avalanche!’

Jack’s hands tightened around the mug so much his knuckles turned white and threatened to shatter the ceramic.

‘One second we were all there and then there was this huge roar. I thought maybe it was a helicopter or something coming looking for us and then there was this enormous wall of white. I think we only caught the very edge of it, but Gwen was behind me on the ledge and then when the air cleared again, she wasn’t there.’ Tosh’s face drained of all its colour. ‘I don't even remember if I heard her scream.’

Jack swallowed hard. He’d never gotten the full story from the Master as to what had happened to his team. He’d been toyed with for weeks and months. He didn't believe most of what he said because he was a madman, baiting Jack and hoping he’d react just to use it as an excuse to hurt him even more. What he didn't understand was that just hearing how his team was being hurt or tortured was the greatest pain the Master could inflict. Everything else was just white noise.

‘What happened after that?’ He didn’t think he wanted to hear it but he had to know. Had to find out the truth, no matter how awful it would be to hear it.

‘I…’ Tosh had to pause, pulling the memories from a place where they shouldn't belong. ‘I felt myself being crushed by snow. It was everywhere and I had no idea if I was digging myself out or just digging a hole to fall straight through into nothingness, but if I didn't I was going to freeze to death up there. I kept digging and eventually managed to break the surface. Owen was there to help pull me out. He and Ianto had missed the worst of it, but Ianto had this huge gash on his leg. He said it was from falling on sharp rocks when the snow came down and it was really deep but the snow had stopped it from bleeding really badly. The storm wasn't letting up so we tried to keep going, but we’d lost the route we used to come up and we could barely see more than a foot in front of us. Ianto was really struggling to keep up and then he sat down and Owen couldn't get him to stand back up. He said he couldn't feel anything below his knee and the wound was all crusted with ice and turning black. I looked at Owen and I think we both must have known he was going to lose his leg.’ She shivered visibly at the memory. Jack swallowed hard.

‘Owen said I should keep going. He’d stay with Ianto and do what he could until I could go and bring back help and–’ Her hand flew to her mouth and her eyes welled instantly with tears as she recalled the rest with perfect clarity. ‘Oh god, I left them behind! I left them there to die. I tried to keep going but it was so cold and I was so tired and I just sat down for a moment…’

Jack flung himself from the kitchen stool to wrap his arms around her trembling body as the terrible truth revealed itself. They were all dead except for Tosh, alone up in the mountains, struggling to stay alive. Jack wanted to be sick, imagining the terror of it all. Ianto frostbitten to the point he could no longer walk because his leg was already dead; Owen, who chose to stay with him because he couldn’t bear to let him die there in the cold on his own, knowing he was sentencing himself to death; Gwen, who perhaps had been the most fortunate of all, never having more than a few seconds to realise her fate; and Tosh – poor Tosh – sobbing in his arms as he clutched her tight, wracked with the guilt of abandoning them all to their fates in the vain hope that she might survive long enough to bring help, but who, like Owen would have given in to the subzero temperatures, closing her eyes and thinking that she would wake up once she'd had a chance to regain her strength.

None of it would have happened if Jack had just stayed where he was, not gone chasing after his Doctor looking for a way to fix himself, even though he now knew he didn’t want fixing. All the pain and suffering he’d put his team through as a consequence of unleashing the Master from his memory prison. I did what I had to do, the voice in his head told him, knowing he could never have just gone on living without knowing the answer as to how and why he was the way he was. Did you? A second voice answered him as he still clung tightly around Tosh. Did you really think being made mortal again would change things for the better? Perhaps all you wanted was to escape, and to leave behind these people you call friends.

No, that wasn’t what he’d done. They were his friends. More than friends. They were all he had in this world, immortal or not, and this was how he repaid their loyalty. ‘I’m so sorry, Tosh,’ Jack said, burying his face in her hair.

‘It really happened, didn’t it?’ came her muffled words.

‘Yes, I think so,’ he replied with a heavy heart. There was too much detail in what she’d described to be anything else, let alone just some made up dream. The Master had tricked them into going out there, knowing how dangerous it would have been to ascend the mountains even in good conditions, but deadly in a snowstorm, hundreds of miles from any kind of rescue or aid. Worse than being captured and knowing you were being tortured was the kind of torturous knowledge that your death was certain but that you couldn’t fathom how things had gone so wrong. That there was nothing Jack could have said or done that would have spared his team their fate only made the pain worse.

He clutched Tosh for a long while, just savouring the feel of her warm body against his, knowing she was alive and whole, but also that he could never take such things for granted. Dreams had a habit of becoming nightmares when you took for granted the people you loved.