Title: Picking up the pieces
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack, Ianto
Author: m_findlow
Rating: M (mild gore)
Length: 2,816 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for Challenge 467 - Finger
Summary: Jack puts his body on the line to protect aliens from harm, but it’s Ianto who has to pick up the pieces.



‘Oh, god,’ Ianto muttered as he burst into the room of the Cowbridge meatworks, knowing he’d arrived sixty seconds too late.

It wasn’t the smell that bothered him so much. In fact, considering the place slaughtered hundreds of animals a day, it was actually fairly odourless, with just the faintest whiff of chemicals that must have been used to disinfect the place daily. He’d never quite gotten used to the gore of fresh blood despite how often it cropped up in his line of work. He put it down to longstanding unresolved trauma from having once been very nearly bled and butchered himself, and imagining bits of his body carved up and packed into fridges alongside a shoulder of Owen, some Tosh prime rib and a dozen Jack sausages – insert inappropriate joke here. Give him a good, bloodless dead body any day. Even a smelly one, bordering on rot and decomposition. Just not blood. Hot, sticky, warm blood. Lots of it.

‘A little help here?’ Jack said, standing uselessly by a large piece of machinery, arms held out over the top of it, clutching something covered in blood. At first Ianto thought it must have been the alien, but as he got closer, he could see movement, and the horrible realisation that Jack was holding the squirming creature between his palms, which were ragged, bloody and missing all ten fingers.

‘Jesus,’ Ianto breathed, feeling rooted to the spot. ‘What happened?’

‘It almost ended up as pepperoni,’ Jack said, as if they were discussing the weather. ‘I grabbed it at the last second but I must have nudged a button on the side or something when I leaned against the machine. Saved the alien, but…’

‘Yeah.’ Ianto didn’t need Jack to explain what happened next. The top of the machine was coated in blood, as was the small, once furry, now sopping wet, alien, and horrifying white bone nubs showed amongst the red, signalling where the machine had taken off Jack’s fingers bone and all. The machine still whirred underneath them and clearly Jack had been too scared of losing his grip on the creature if he moved back from the machine whilst it was still spinning blades, lest he drop the thing by accident. Ianto dropped to his haunches beside the side panel, locating a big red button and pressing it, hearing the machine come to a grateful halt. He rose to his feet again and gently, wincing at the sight, took the creature from Jack as it trembled. ‘I’ll get a containment unit for it,’ he said, knowing he had one in the back of the SUV just outside. ‘Just… stay there and don’t do anything until I get back.’

Ianto moved briskly through the facility to the SUV parked around back. The alien was covered in blood – Jack’s blood – and difficult to hold despite its partially frozen, deer-in-the-headlights status, but that didn’t slow him down, bungling the creature into the cage without so much as pausing to worry about the state it was in. He was more concerned about the state Jack was in, slowing only to grab a wet wipe to remove the blood from his own hands before grabbing the first aid kit and jogging it back to where Jack needed him.

‘How's it doing?’ Jack asked as Ianto closed the gap between them.

‘Never mind how it's doing!’ Ianto snapped, wishing it hadn’t come out quite so harshly. ‘You should raise your arms over your head to slow the bleeding.’ Owen had taught him that much at least.

‘And get blood all over my coat?’ Jack looked at him like he was the crazy one. ‘I know how much you hate getting blood out of this coat.’

Ianto was taken aback by the sudden concern for laundry over traumatic open wounds. ‘Okay. Fine. Just ah…’ he considered the next best option. ‘Tourniquet, tourniquet…’ he muttered, almost to himself before looking back up despairingly. ‘Oh, Jack…’

Jack's expression softened at Ianto’s pity and helplessness. ‘It’ll be fine,’ Jack said as blood dripped from his hands down into the stationary blades. ;You should've seen it earlier when it first happened. Fountains, Ianto. Fountains.’

‘Please don't,’ he said, now stuck with the horrific image of Jack's stubby hands spurting great jets of bright red blood. He'd seen so many of the misadventurous deaths and accidents of Captain Jack Harkness, but that didn’t mean that they sat well with him. He’d done his best to come up with ways of, if not dealing with it, at least giving off the calm, reassuring vibe that nothing about it unsettled him at all, and that if he wasn’t panicked about it, neither should be Jack. Not that Jack was appearing in any way panicked now. It was more like a slight amusement, or perhaps a minor inconvenience. There had to have been something fundamentally, psychologically wrong about that.

‘We’ll just…bandage you up,’ he said, unzipping the kit and pulling out a thick roll of white gauze. ‘They'll grow back, right?’ Jack’s body had the incredible ability to heal itself, not immediately, but much faster and more completely than any regular human being. It wasn't quite the perfect good as new type fix as dying and coming back, but it was still eerily unnatural.

‘Actually,’ Jack said, pausing to make sure Ianto was meeting his eyes. ‘It’d be better if you…’

Ianto stilled his hands. ‘What?’

‘There’s a good chance for reattachment if we can get them in close proximity.’

Ianto looked at Jack, blinked, looked at the machine, and then back at Jack. He really didn't want to know how Jack knew that. There had been far too many amputations in his life that Ianto didn't care to contemplate. ‘Seriously?’

‘Judging by the blades, it's a slicer rather than a dicer or a mincer. Could have been worse.’ There was something just so disturbing about the way Jack described the machine that had brutalised his hands to the point where they were now useless and mangled.

Ianto thought about it, swallowed, and then knew what he had to do. ‘Okay, but can we please just first get you away from here? Sit you down somewhere?’

‘Good idea,’ Jack said. ‘Only reason I haven't moved is that I'm feeling a little light headed and not sure moving was such a great idea.’

Ianto came around and wrapped two arms securely around Jack so that he could shuffle his lover away from the machinery, finding a small staff lunch room not far away. They moved slowly, Ianto making sure he had Jack’s full weight in case he should drop in a dead faint from the blood loss, leaving a trail behind them of red droplets as Jack's hand continued to bleed, albeit it slower now. Somewhere deep within Jack's physiognomy it was already at work, trying to fix him by coagulating blood, rebuilding tissue and bone, atom by agonising atom. He eased Jack down into white plastic chair at a small table for four.

In a cupboard he found a bowl and, feeling slightly ill at the sight, began holding each hand over the bowl whilst he cracked open tubes of saline solution from the first aid kit, pouring them over the bloody hands.
Jack hissed and winced at the salt stinging in the end of his hands.

‘I know, I'm sorry,’ Ianto apologised. ‘But I need to wash off the worst of it so that we can see what we’re dealing with.’ The bowl underneath was already awash with bright red liquid and more was still oozing from the stubs but at least now he could better see the damage, which was exactly as Jack had described it, fingers removed by sharp industrial blades, the cuts remarkably clean. He patted them dry as best he could using more gauze and tipping away the bowl of blood, whilst finding painkillers in the kit that would, whilst strong, probably do nothing more than take the edge off .

‘You okay?’ Jack asked, stupidly asking the one question Ianto should have been asking him. He must have looked a bit pale and shaky himself.

‘I need to go see if I can…’ He swallowed hard again. ‘You know…’

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Jack promised.

Ianto nodded, and reluctantly left, heading back into the machinery room. It was full of a maze of confusing bits of metal machinery but he had no trouble locating the one machine that was no longer gleaming silver, only now noticing the spatter of blood everywhere around it where Jack's arterial blood had shot forth in all directions. Everything else was spotless, having been washed down and cleaned at the end of shift. Good to know that the city’s meat supply was kept in such hygienic conditions.

‘It's just blood,’ Ianto murmured to himself. Jack had six litres of it and this was, whilst horrific, far from a full body’s worth. He’d be okay. ‘He’s Jack,’ Ianto muttered, moving around the opposite side of the machine where the meat had to exit. ‘He's always okay.’ He found the spot where a chute protruded from the machine, able to sit over a wheeled hopper to collect the processed meat. There, in the incongruously sanitary hopper, awaiting the next day’s produce, were ten human digits.

With a sickening realisation he remembered he hadn't thought to put on a pair of latex gloves, which has been in abundance in his first aid kit. He grimaced as he began plucking the grey, lifeless fingers from the bin, neatly piling them up in his spare hand and then curling his own fingers carefully over them as he carried them back to the lunch room. They were distressingly cold as he clutched them, trying to put warmth back into them by the mere acting of holding them close. He wouldn't throw up, he vowed, re-entering the lunch room and rinsing them in more saline solution over the kitchen sink and keeping them from Jack's view until they were at least slightly less gruesome and no longer covered in blood. Jack must have understood the need to refrain from making light of it by keeping quiet until Ianto reverently carried them across to the table, gently laying them out between them like a round of blackjack. Jack's stumps were still bleeding, but it was being soaked into the folded gauze underneath each hand.

‘Time to pull myself back together,’ Jack said, trying to keep things between them calm. ‘Think you could lend me a hand?’ Jack's ability to resist making jokes had lasted all of five minutes.

Ianto attempted to focus on the task at hand, sorting the fingers into their corresponding sizes. Thumbs and pinkie fingers were easiest, being the shortest and most obvious. Middle fingers were next, being the longest. Jack had beautiful hands, larger than Ianto’s and the fingers thicker but still long and elegant, nails full and kept short and clean as if he’d had them done at a salon. Seeing them like this didn’t make them less beautiful, but forced a feeling of sadness inside him, wondering why Jack had to suffer so much.

The second and ring fingers were proving more difficult. He’d never noticed just how similar they were in terms of length and appearance, let alone being able to tell left from right. It frustrated him that he couldn’t immediately identify them given how much time he spent with them.

‘Does it hurt much?’ Ianto said, not as concerned about Jack being in pain as it was simply something to say to fill in the awkward silence as he puzzled it out. Not that he didn’t care, of course, but he'd have done anything to fill in the void with inane chatter. If there'd been a copy of the Oxford dictionary to hand, he’d probably have given it to Jack and asked him to start reading it aloud, just for the sheer distraction of it.

‘I don't think that’s the right one,’ Jack said, watching Ianto's action far more carefully than he’d realised. He always assumed that Jack took every opportunity just to moon at him when there was nothing else more pressing to be done.

Ianto frowned and studied it for a moment. ‘I saw you chewing that nail yesterday. It was your left hand.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Well, no. Not now that you’ve said that.’

‘It's fine,’ Jack said, trying to be more reassuring. ‘I’m sure if it's not the right one that they’ll eventually grow back to the right spots where they belong.’

‘That’s not as comforting as you might think it sounds,’ he replied, hoping that the light chastisement emphasised that he shouldn’t be so flippant with his physical condition. He pictured Jack with eight fully healed fingers and then two obviously missing ones that were growing back at a rate of one inch every day. ‘How about we aim to get the right ones in the right places, hmm?’

‘It's your call, Ianto,’ Jack said. ‘I’m at the mercy of your puzzle solving skills,’ he said, reiterating his ability to do anything more than sit there whilst Ianto played matchmaker. He started moving the known fingers into position, lining them up one by one with the cleanly cut wounds, checking and double checking that he had the right match before pushing them as close together as he could. He watched with amazement as the sinew and bone began to ever so slowly fuse. He tried not to gawk at it, knowing he still had fingers he hadn’t matched yet, swapping them around a few times to see what looked most right.

‘What do you think?’ he asked Jack, as if asking for an opinion on having moved a sofa from one wall to the other.

‘Switch these two over again?’ Jack asked, referring to the fourth digit of each hand. Jack frowned at the placement and then shook his head. ‘Nope. I think you were right the first time.’

‘I’m so thrilled,’ Ianto replied deadpan, hoping that this would be the first and last time he had such a task, yet knowing it was highly improbable.

‘Another milestone for us?’ Jack asked, causing Ianto to meet his gaze.

Ianto supposed not too many people could say they’d shared an intimate moment of reattaching severed fingers with all the calmness of two people who might as well have been sitting there drinking tea and playing chess, albeit in an empty meat processing plant at ten in the evening. ‘Everything with you is a milestone,’ he replied. They certainly didn't do dull.

He took the last of the fingers and placed it as gently against the raw cut as he could, holding it in place before leaning across the table and kissing Jack, hoping that it might distract him from what had to be excruciating despite all the smiles, painkillers and double entendres. Jack reciprocated and Ianto found himself locked in a long series of kisses and brushes of tongues. It wasn’t until he felt something brush his cheek that he started, before realising it was Jack's hand cupping his face, fingers healed and hand whole. He deepened the kiss and touched Jack's face with his own hand, remembering how much he loved the delicate touch of those fingers against his face, warm and comforting. When he finally pulled back, Jack didn’t let go of his face, brushing the hand up and back through his hair, fingers threading through it

‘Thank you,’ Jack said. ‘I'd fall apart if I didn't have you. Literally.’

Ianto managed a small smile despite the bloody bandages lying between them on the table. ‘You’d fall apart with or without me,’ he replied. ‘It's the being there to put you back together.’

Jack's hand found his across the table and intertwined the perfect fingers with his own. Ianto’s fingers locked together with the strong feeling of them. ‘Just more proof that you’re the one good thing holding us together. Now, think you’re okay to make it back to the SUV and let me drive you home? I’ve still got a blood covered, and traumatised alien to deal with who probably isn't as resilient as you. I doubt it even appreciates the lengths we’ve gone to.’

‘I’m sure it’ll be fine,’ Jack said as if this was just another day. ‘I’ll leave it in your very capable hands.’

‘And give yours the proper time to heal themselves,’ Ianto added. ‘Another few hours won’t hurt to make sure everything is back where it needs to be and not causing you any pain. As much as I admire your speedy ability to heal, I think you rush things far too much.’

‘I’m fine,’ Jack assured him. ‘Believe me, by the time you’ve dealt with our new guest, these fingers will be more than ready to show you just how much they appreciate you.’