Truth is so rare that it is delightful to tell it (Torchwood, Suzie Costello)

[used_songs]

Title: Truth is so rare that it is delightful to tell it
Author: used_songs 
Fandom: Torchwood
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: swearing, dark themes, death
Prompt: Prompt: 72) I was learning the importance of names -- having them, making them -- but at the same time I sensed the dangers. Recognition was followed by oblivion, a yawning maw whose victims disappeared without a trace. -- Josephine Baker (1906-1975), African-American expatriate singer, dancer and actress.
Summary: Suzie Costello has come back and she has no intention of leaving.
Author's Notes: Thank you to my betas blue_fjords , redsnake05 , and santousha  who helped make this fic what it is.


Coming back is like an explosion, like being sucked back into your body. Like the reverse of drowning. I wonder for a moment if this is how Jack feels every time, but then the heavy agony of the back of my skull being gone hits me full force and every beat of my heart – every beat of my heart, I’m dizzy with it, my heart is stumbling back to life, blood forced through shriveled veins and every opening is an agony – every beat of my heart wrings a longing pressure of pain through my head and I don’t have the strength to wonder any more. The yawning hole back there that I am not hard enough and not crazy enough to reach back and touch. The touch. The touch of the world is like … I don’t know. I had forgotten what things felt like. What feeling was. What it was to forget. In the timeless nothingness, the darkness, I hung there without feeling and now … now pain, nerves exploding, sluggish blood, skin knitting back together. Now. I have forgotten how to be. I was in a place without time; now time is ticking and it’s so alien and strange. Because I am alive.

Like closing a circuit, the lights flick on. I have an instant to decide how to play it because, after an eternity of timelessness, I know I only have a few seconds to shape the moments to come. And I am going to fuck with Jack. I’ve always been good at that.

“There’s a knife in my chest! Did you kill me?” I accuse and meet Jack’s startled, defensive gaze.

“Oh my God, I shot myself,” I continue, my voice anguished and frantic and I’m only partly acting which gives it quite the edge, and now they’re feeling guilty and that’s good. “Wait a minute, didn’t I kill you?” But I remember everything, Jack, and you are too easy to get around. You always have been. When I was hanging in the dark during all that endless frantic nothingness, I measured the volume of the darkness inside me and it was vast, Jack. You are no match for me.

I can’t even feel the knife, although I do feel the cold burning of the fingers of the glove – my glove, Jack, how could you let them touch it – and I feel the heat of Gwen Cooper – Jack’s new me – wafting out of her and into me, little tendrils like an innocent vine, clinging to me, wrapping around my bones, pouring through my veins, tingling in my nerves. She – they – won’t realize until it’s too late because I am too fucking clever by half and I have made plans. Me. My glove. My bones. Me. My plans. My body that I got back. I am and it is words that brought me back, far more than human touch or alien technology. I am. And my words will uncoil the spring and move the world, bend it to my will.
Then my eyes shut and the world falls into pieces and I am lost and I want to scream against the dark but no I am just dreaming, pale shadow of death. Pictures move here and I am not alone, resting in the wide and comforting current.

When I return I am reclining in a wheelchair they have dug up from somewhere in this dank hole. My head feels like it is splitting again and I feel slow. Frightened. Like everything is splintering and I can’t hold on tight enough to keep myself together. Channel that fear into words to turn them to my purpose. “When can I die? I just want to go.” Out of the corner of a half closed eye I see Jack wince – he would’ve saved me, even after I killed him. The others? Disembodied voices, unable to look at me, to look into the void turned inside out and come to haunt them. Just Jack and behind me Cooper. Listening to them try to figure it out, figure me out, I want to laugh. “Can I see my father?”

If they only knew the lengths that I would go to. Have gone to. Three months gone, though, that’s a shock. What if he’s already dead?

She complains of a headache and I hide a smile. “That’s the glove, Gwen,” I say mildly.

I let my eyes flicker open, school my features to hide both the pain and the necessary deception.

“Jack.” Like a stroke victim I am drawling, but I am being repaired. Phoenix, burning away what is imperfect. All of the bits of me gathered back together by a loving metal hand. Everything is cut up into pieces, splicing memories with the shards of life that cut into my skin now. If I can build the bones up, pull all the vagrant memories back inside and hide them, I can walk in the light again.

“Suzie.”

It’s strange to see him here. I looked for him on the other side, but of course I didn’t see anybody there. I know he came back to life on the Plas, his skin sewed up the red eye I made in the center of his forehead, and of course I had suspected that Jack was different from the rest of us. Maybe he’s seen his share of darkness since I’ve been gone. Gone. Torchwood is about the killing and the dying. But there’s nobody there. Nothing. It’s dark. So lonely and cold that your body distorts and tries to fade and your mind goes in circles. Darkness. How many times has Jack, my captain going down with the ship, been there? How does he get back?

When I was little I climbed trees when I could find them and the bark tore my skin and I watched the line of red bubbles that rose like tiny seeds and I sat in the wet grass and pulled the cool blades between my fingers milking off the moisture and touching it to my tongue. I ran my fingers over the cracks in the pavement and loosened brick and mortar in the wall, digging out hollow spoons in the soft concrete.

I think the glove was speaking to me, Jack, whispering fingers warning me, instructing me. No, it was singing to me. It was. It knew me, recognized something in me. Singing to me about the darkness and about the dark road back, the road the bullet made through my skull. And now I’m coming back over that road, the grass is creeping over to fill in the gaps and cracks. I made you bring me back, Jack. You just don’t know it. When I saw you stand up with my bullet hole still in your forehead, I knew the glove was right; it told me there was a surfeit of life in you. And then it told me I would be safe in the dark, so I was able to go unafraid … but I would be afraid to go there now. That black place is more horrible than the bullet. More horrible than feeling the brain unhinge and drip down and words vanish and even myself disappear.

“Suzie.” Jack again, the sound of his voice pulling fragments together.

And all of a sudden, something in my head shifting again, I am ready to reclaim life. I feel Gwen – Gwen bloody Cooper – stagger so slightly she doesn’t even know it, feel her drop a thought carelessly, never to recover it knowingly. I feel strength leeching into my limbs. The horror. I felt the bullet and then the darkness and I take my mind and I force the thought away, dig fingers into my cerebral cortex and rearrange the thought away, pat gray matter into a pleasing shape like dough. I have always been good at walking away from pain.

I want to retake my place in the world, but there is someone standing there wearing my shadow. Oh, Gwen. I am so very glad it was you, although I would love to take Jack’s life force away, feel it burn through me and remake me, and would he come back and be my captain once again? Flinch away from me. My team. The dark. They can’t look at me. Because you took my place and I am nothing now.

Everything I know now was planted as a seed when I was young. Someone took my place when I was small and helpless. I was next to my father’s heart and then someone came and I was nothing. And then she died and he was angry all the time. And all I did was hide. Make myself invisible and even smaller but I was never small enough. My father has a lot to answer for.

I can still feel the barrel of the gun, hot from the shot that killed Jack, that didn’t kill Jack, burning my skin. The horror. I destroyed myself. Madmen, lovers, poets, shot dead in their seething brains, brains blown wider than the sky.

The other ones that die, falling into the wild night, I think they must’ve flowed past me around me through me there in the dark or is everyone’s dark different, an oblivion we all carry deeply inside ourselves? I don’t want to disappear. But the glove, the glove said make plans, set traps, be ready, the glove said, “Trust me.” I didn’t trust you, Jack, why should I? You are a prince of lies.

I cannot stop for death, Jack. And I have no intention of waiting around. Do you know how long ago it was that I set the trigger? You are so ignorant, Jack, inexcusably so. We thrive under your disregard. And now I am death, I am stopping you, locking you in your underground room with all of the people you cannot save from the dark.

I am going to kill my father, send him into the darkness. Let him hang there in the nothingness. After that? I don’t know. But I am going to kill him. It’s time. He is going to pay for making me feel small, making me feel like I was nothing, unimportant. Make him pay for hurting me. Oh, Jack. You trusted me. You relied on me. I destroyed that. I am unreliable. I let you down. I betrayed you. Won’t we all?

I am going to kill him. I have been without words for so long, twisting in meaninglessness, lost even to my animal self. I just want you to bring me back into the warmth, Jack. Welcome me back and I could stay with you for as long as forever. But I also have to deal out the death I promised. That’s why I’m here.

It’s so easy. She’s weaker now. I lure her, lie to her, say what she wants to hear, play upon her pity and her revulsion. I manipulate her, bend her to my ever-strengthening will. She’s a flat shadow dancing across the cell walls. None of this is real. She thinks she conceived the idea of breaking me out, running away from Jack, hastily and silently bundling me into the car. And then I just have to make sure they are trapped inside, the lock. She sees the word father and she sees love and happiness and the real pain of loss. She thinks she knows me. I look at her as she turns the key and say from a thousand miles away, “Thank you, Gwen.” And she smiles at me.

I almost want to like Gwen in a distant kind of way. She wants to like me. But I am consuming her. “What do you want me to say?” as we hurtle through the darkness, a wet black ribbon that shines under streetlamp glow. She dreams of white light, heaven, her grandmother. She dreams that there is something but there is nothing. And I? I know why the ones we brought back couldn’t tell us anything. Because there is nothing to tell.

I shouldn’t tell her. I should lie to her, let her keep her illusions. But she is becoming me. I cannot lie to her. She needs to know the truth if she’s going to take my place.

“What’s the point of it all?” she asks me, lost on the dark road with me, streetlights casting bolts of lightning across the windshield.

“This is,” I reply. “Driving through the dark.” It’s funny how I became enlightened there in the dark, how I finally understood. I will do anything to stay here and hide myself in light, far away from that dark understanding. That it will never come again is what makes life bittersweet.

There is something there in the darkness. I lied. Or maybe I just remembered it, as my neurons are strung back together, as fragile and as delicate as lace, as all the orderly things we make in protest against howling chaos. Something in the darkness that wants out, tried to ride me out, has tried to ride Jack out. Wants out. I don’t want to go back. What does it matter if I killed people to get back here? What does it matter if I kill the whole world? We are all alone and I do what I have to in order to live.

Then the road falls away and the car and the streetlights and now Gwen is pushing the wheelchair down a long corridor and she’s leaning heavily on it. I imagine the pain is becoming unbearable, she is weakening and I feel the life flowing through me like all the power I could ever hope to have. We enter his room where he is crouched and pinned to his bed, monster, and Gwen falls back, she touches her head and feels the blood there and I guess that is when she finally accepts the truth, although she cries out no because now she knows, she knows that there is nothing but darkness and, poor thing, she doesn’t want to go.

“Hello, Dad,” I say, looming over him like a shadow. “Good bye.” Send him into the dark with a smile. I see the darkness come up and cover him, wrap fingers around him and drag him down, see him drown.

Then we are running.

I am taking Gwen with me because she understands me. She is the only one who knows me, she is me, and then Jack, Jack bothering me, calling me, trying to trick me to scare me to reason with me. I’m not going to stop, Jack. Why would I? I take Gwen because I can’t leave her there alone crumpled in the dark of the hospital room to wait for death to find her. Maybe I think we can outrun it.

One time, one time only, I sat in the boat and let my fingers draw trails in the water, felt the coolness of it and the dirty blue glassiness of it, the specks of corruption that clung to my hands, but the trails went on forever and I remember thinking that I would leave trails that stretched out forever. And then I pulled my hand out and rested it on the scuffed fiberglass of the boat’s hull and the sun dazzled through the clouds in a perfect unbroken instant and I believed.

I was wrong.

The ferry to the island. Urgency and just running now. I’m not sure where I’m going and Gwen is more and more dead weight and I can barely feel my feet as I run and stumble but I am alive. The air is bright and delicious, blue wonders, and the sound of the water and the breeze and there are so many things in the world to keep one here, but poor Gwen is leaving now. I have to lay her down and thank her and kiss her goodbye. She gave me the gift of life and she’s facing the darkness for me. It’s hard to leave her behind, but I will, a frenzy of air and blood and electricity. The salt water in the air and on my skin.

But then Jack, Jack despising life, not valuing it because he has so much, he wants to kill me, to send me back. “Never gonna die, Jack,” I whisper into the wood because now somehow I am face down on the ground and I can feel the sick invasion of the bullets. He walks up to me then, his boots creaking on the wooden deck, my captain. Cold. Closed. Done.

When I was little, I discovered her, cowering in the empty schoolroom, and when she said words, breaking out of ancient and stinking paper, brittle and old … and young and forgotten too, she spoke to me. She said, “I’m nobody, who are you?” She turned and asked me, “Are you nobody, too?” How did she know? I was nothing, I am nothing, I will be nothing. I ran there to hide from the nothing that I was. I made a temporary warm place where I could huddle with my books and my conundrums so far away from hurt, reaching out for meaning, but then I was seduced and then I fell into the dark. I fall into the dark. This can’t be all there is, this darkness at the heart of all that light, all of us stretched and disappearing into the gravity well. This can’t be all there is.

I fall inside out, tumble backward through my body, an incredible suction that pulls me to pieces and then I’m there, not there, in blackness, shadow, dark, horror, terror, impossible, this can’t be happening to me, this doesn’t happen to me, I am dissolving. An infinity of time ago I felt the bullet wounds and the dock splinters boards, oh bleeding drops of red , wood damp falling gravity pushing the cold air the salt on my lips sunlight words the shift of the dock memory breath hot warmth feeling light light light now I have forgotten everything that ever was and I feel nothing am nothing am gone I am something in the darkness and then I am not.

Comments

[lefaym.livejournal.com]

This is amazing -- you've done a great job of getting inside Suzie's head, I can hear her voice the whole way through.

[used_songs]

Thank you. There's something seductive about getting inside her head.

[rose71.livejournal.com]

This is really powerful--intense and hypnotic, perfect for the character. And I love the way you've woven Emily Dickinson in. When I saw this episode, I didn't think about the poetry, other than the obvious meaning of "I would not stop for death." I really shivered when you got to "I'm nobody."

[used_songs]

Thank you. I felt like Emily Dickinson must've been important to Suzie, that she might've identified with her in some ways.

[loveslashangst.livejournal.com]

Wow.

Just...

Wow.

*applauds*

*goes off to poke beta pointedly to come over here and admire the awesomeness that is this story*

[used_songs]

Thank you! :)

[lareinenoire.livejournal.com]

This is lyrical and hypnotic, as one of the other comments pointed out. I love the references to Emily Dickinson, but it almost feels more like Virginia Woolf -- both of which work so well for Suzie in this context, dying and living at the same time. I love the confusion, the conflation of multiple times, and how everything's so jumbled together, and yet she's making sense of it all.

Wonderful!

[used_songs]

Thank you very much! I was really going for a sense that she is living all of these moments from her life simultaneously as her brain struggles to cope with her situation, so I am very happy to hear that it worked.

[jsks.livejournal.com]

suzie has always struck me as a tragic figure with so much potential. i would have loved to see her in the first few episodes as the glove took her over trying hard to keep the secret, it would have given her death a much bigger impact. tkks was not enough for me. lol, in a way suzie was gwen's first victim.

[used_songs]

I always wished we had had more Suzie and I love fics that include her. She would've been a fascinating character for the show to have explored. Just another example of wasted potential, I guess.

Thank you for commenting!

[adjovi.livejournal.com]

Torchwood is about the killing and the dying.

ain't that the truth...

this was amazing! how you channeled suzie here, the frantic pacing matching the psychosis--just love it completely. wonderful work.

[used_songs]

Thank you! I wrote this well before COE and I must admit as I reread it prior to posting that line stood out for me. Who knew?

[fide-et-spe.livejournal.com]

I love Suzie, and that actress is so wonderful, I saw her in Twelfth Night a few months back. I think this POV is perfect, I can imagine her head is like this, so wonderfully twisted and evil.

I am a little confused as to who she discovered in the classroom? Sorry if I'm being thick. (Is it her experience of reading Emily Dickinson?, just reading the comments, I thought, OK I'm thick..)

Still looking forward to Bright Darkness, not that I'm being stalkery about it or anything.

[used_songs]

I love Suzie too. She was such a cool character, at least from the fascinating glimpses we got of her.

Yeah, I imagined her being a miserable kid and discovering Dickinson one day and having it really mean something to her.

To be honest, I'm trying to get in the right frame of mind after the series of unfortunate events that have gone down in canon. I'm having a very hard time even looking at it. But I will finish it.

[dmarley.livejournal.com]

This is wonderful. Suzie is such a fascinating character, and you've done a great job of getting into her head and exploring what might have made her the person she was. I especially loved how jealous she was at the thought of Gwen touching the glove. It was a nice detail that revealed how deep her obsession was, and also how deeply ingrained her obsessive nature was, as well. It was all really well done, an excellent character study of someone who doesn't get nearly enough time in the fannish spotlight. Thanks so much.

[used_songs]

Thank you! I'm so glad you enjoyed it. I had a lot of fun writing this fic - trying to get into Suzie's head was seductive.

[littlebelleblue.livejournal.com]

This was gorgeous and lyrical - I got the chills. You made Suzie sympathetic and understandable, as well as scary. I also love the relationship Suzie has with Gwen in this, one-sided as it is. This line in particular: I have to lay her down and thank her and kiss her goodbye. She gave me the gift of life and she’s facing the darkness for me. It’s hard to leave her behind, but I will, a frenzy of air and blood and electricity.. Shivers.

[used_songs]

Thank you. I was a rush to write. I'm glad that she was sympathetic. She did horrible things and was a frightening person by the end, but there's a lot about Suzie to admire as well.

[redsnake05.livejournal.com]

I have been saving this up to read, and I wanted to comment here in the comm. I loved how you worked the prompt, and I think you took us on a trip through Suzie's mind that was partly chilling, partly crazy, all parts real and devastating. We're in her mind, following all her streams of thought, and you do a great job of tangling them up and then smoothing them out. I loved it.

[used_songs]

Thank you. I'm glad you like it (as you're the one who inspired me to do this -thon AND your beta work made a HUGE difference in the fic)!

This was a fun one to write from start to finish.