Just Imagine...

Talk to me

Jack couldn't remember anything. Well, that wasn't entirely true, he could remember some things. The exact things he'd wanted to forget. Things like the feeling of Gray's hand slipping out of his. His father's voice, shouting at him to run. His mother's face when she realized her husband and one of her beloved children were both dead. And the worst part was, Jack didn't know what had brought those memories up. He'd suppressed them for so long, why were they bothering him now? Had something happened in the past few days that nobody could remember what happened in for some reason? Jack just didn't know. All he knew was that he was hurting, immensely. And he had to talk to somebody about it.
Jack's first choice for conversations like these was Ianto, but Ianto seemed shaken up by the fact that he couldn't remember anything from the past few days and Jack didn't want to add anymore stress on him. Tosh and Owen were busy figuring out where those flowers had come from, and Gwen was frantically trying to contact Rhys and find out what had happened. That left one option, and Jack was okay with that option, in all honesty.
"Mom? Dada?" Jack said when he arrived at his renthers' house, "can I... can I talk to you?"
Sam and Jay shot each other a worried look, then Sam nodded.
"Of course, Jacksie," Jay murmured, "c'mon in."
Hanna and Alexa were playing outside in the yard, Jack could hear them laughing. Lucas was upstairs in his crib, and the thought of his new baby brother made Jack cringe internally. He sat down on the piano bench, across from his parents on the couch. Zephyr padded across the room and sat on the floor near Jack's feet, chuffing and flicking her whiskers in concern.
"So, I, uhhh..." Jack tried, feeling the words stick in his throat as his chest got tighter.
"It's okay, son, just take your time." Sam said encouragingly. She and Jay both looked concerned, but almost as if they had been expecting this. Jack took a deep breath.
"I've been having weird thoughts recently," he said, "memories are coming up. Memories I... don't need or want."
There was a flash of panic across Sam's face that disappeared immediately, but Jack saw her reach for Jay's hand and grip it tightly.
"Memories of what?" Jay asked softly.
"My past," Jack choked out, "I... I... I lost everything and it was all my fault!"
Jack crumpled, folding in on himself and covering his face as a strangled sob escaped him. Tears flooded his eyes and streamed down his cheeks in rivers.
Jay and Sam were at his sides in an instant, arms around him as he tried and failed to stop himself from lapsing into sobs.
"Jacksie, it's alright," Sam soothed, "go ahead and cry. Just let it out, baby."
And Jack did. He cried until his ribs ached and his face and hands were soaked in tears. The whole time, he remembered.
He remembered it all.

It was one of those days when the sky was such a brilliant blue it seemed to beckon you outside and into the sunshine. It was summer on the Boeshane Peninsula, and the two suns were beating down on the bright pink sands of the beaches. There was no wind to rustle the spiny grass on the dunes or spin the little pinwheels along the shore, and the only clouds in the sky were big white puffs along the horizon. Perhaps there would be a storm soon. But not today. Today was a good day.
Or at least that's how it had started.
Javic and Gray, then twelve and seven, had slept in late that morning, awoken by their father walking into their room with a big grin on his face. He'd pounced on the bed like a Dune Tiger and tickled them both until Javic thought he would die of laughter.
Breakfast was more of a hurried snack of Rose Fruit, no time to savour the sweet, citrusy flavour of the pink slices. Days like today had to be taken advantage of; they wouldn't last forever and you had to spend as much time outside playing as possible.
The younger children, more Gray's age, would spend the day making intricate circles out of stones and seashells in the sand. The older ones, like Javic and his friends, typically found themselves in the tidepools behind the dunes.
The tides were just right for tidepools today, plenty of critters scurrying in the warm, shallow water left by the retreating ocean in the night.
"Watch out for Dune Tigers," Javic's mom always warned him and Gray, "and for... Them."
It was never anything else. Dune Tigers, which hadn't been spotted nearby in large numbers since Javic was two, and Them. Everyone on the Peninsula knew who - or rather, what - They were. No one ever spoke the name of their species aloud, and most of what Javic and Gray had heard about them was only through stories, but they both knew one thing was certain; They were very very real, and very very dangerous.
They came down from the sky in great, stinking starships. They had laid siege to other villages like Boeshane, leaving trails of black smoke coming from the West stretching across the sky for weeks. They were tyrants, a species that lived on destruction and hungered for power. No one knew where in the universe they came from, but reports came in whenever trading ships from other planets came to take cargo loads of fruit and fish to other places in the galaxy.
They were unstoppable, some said. Each seven feet tall, maybe taller, with pure white skin and blood red eyes and horrifying jagged teeth. They feasted on flesh and fear and misery, burning and bombing cities and capturing people to feed to their overlord - a disgusting three-headed beast that lived on poison air and drank the blood of children.
Javic wasn't sure he believed everything he was told about Them. He'd used to, when he was Gray's age, but not anymore. A lot of that was probably just bedtime stories. Right?
Besides, They weren't the only ones Javic's parents told tales about. For every story about Them there was another about an ancient hero - a ten-foot-tall being with glowing skin clad in gold and white armour. The hero carried a sword with jewels from across the universe on it. They could breathe fire and move oceans and fly high enough to touch the clouds, and they were certainly powerful enough to destroy Them.
The Queen of Hearts, the stories called them. And their story was Javic's favourite. He knew that if everything about Them was true, then someday The Queen of Hearts would show up and save everyone, wouldn't they?
He found out the hard way that he was very wrong on that.
Javic and his friends had been playing with a ball in the tidepools for a few hours when suddenly, a blaring siren began wailing in the distance.
Dewdrop Birds, startled by the noise, took to the air from their perches in nearby Golden Night Flower trees, peppering the sky with blue and yellow polka dots.
"What's going on?" One of Javic's friends screamed. Javic was already racing back up the sand dune.
From the top of the mound of pink sand he could see what had caused the alarm to sound.
There were sixteen massive starships belching smoke approaching the collection of tall white buildings Javic and his family called home. People were running around and screaming in terror. It was happening.
They were here. And The Queen of Hearts was nowhere to be found. No one was going to save them.
A fiery rocket launched from the ship in the front of the procession, hitting a housing complex with a massive explosion.
"RUN!" Javic shouted at his friends, and they all took off in different directions like they had practiced in school. If they stuck together, they'd be easier targets.
Javic found Gray standing by the waterside with his favourite toy - a small Queen of Hearts doll - in his hand, staring at the destruction in terror with his thumb in his mouth.
"C'mon, Gray!" Javic urged, grabbing his little brother's hand, "we have to go, now!"
"But what about Mommy and Daddy?" Gray whimpered, big tears rolling down his cheeks and his blue eyes wide.
"Don't worry about them, I'll take care of you," Javic hissed, "but we have to run!"
He didn't even wait for Gray to move, just started pulling him along across the sand. There were more explosions and more screams behind them, but Javic didn't look back. Not until he heard someone call his name.
"JAVIC!"
"DADDY!" Gray wailed as his and Javic's father stumbled out of the smoke, a bleeding gash across his side.
"RUN, JAVIC!" He yelled, "TAKE GRAY AND RUN! DON'T LOOK BACK, AND NEVER COME BACK HERE!"
Javic did as he was told, gripping Gray's hand tightly in his own and racing across the sand. He ran so far and so fast that his legs ached. He didn't know where to run to or where he was. He didn't even remember when exactly Gray's hand wasn't in his anymore. He just knew there came a point where he just had to rest, he couldn't go any further, and he collapsed in amongst the tangled roots of an ancient tree.
Javic couldn't hear the bombs anymore, or the screams, just the quiet whispers of the wind in the leaves above his head, the waves on the shore, and his own thundering heartbeat mixed with his ragged breath. Just his breath. Javic looked around in shock.
Gray wasn't with him.
"Gray?" He asked, stumbling back out into the open even though his legs screamed in protest. There was no reply. "Gray?" Javic called, a little louder this time. Still, no one answered. Javic was alone in the middle of nowhere. His friends were gone, his father was gone, and now even Gray was gone.
Javic's father had told him to never return to the village, but Javic retraced his frantic footprints back along the sand anyway, shouting his little brother's name repeatedly. But he never found him. All he found was a Queen of Hearts doll covered in soot on the edge of the wreckage of his home, lying amongst the dead bodies on the sand. Javic had no idea if the doll was Gray's or not, as many children had them, but he held onto it as though it were, as if somehow that would bring him back.
They had used the clouds on the horizon as cover, Javic learned when he and his mother were reunited. They had provided the perfect place to hide and slowly advance on the village without being seen.  
Miraculously, not everyone had died, but most people had, and among them was Javic's father. He had found his mother weeping over his lifeless body as it floated in the shallow water at the edge of the sea.
Gray's body was never found, but somehow Javic knew he was dead.
All this horrific destruction, and The Queen of Hearts hadn't come to save them. Why?
That, along with so many other questions, would plague Javic for years. Sometimes he would try to imagine a different ending to that day, one where They never came because the sky was clear from horizon to horizon and the day ended with him and Gray playing with their father on the beach until sunset, then they started a fire on top of a dune and their mother came out with dinner for them to eat under the stars. Or, sometimes They still came to the village, but miraculously The Queen of Hearts did show up and destroyed the fleet with a single slash of their sword. It never ended the way really it had, though. Never. Javic didn't want to think about how it really ended.
Because the way it really ended was all his fault.

"I let go of his hand." Jack whimpered when he finished recounting the story to his parents. He glanced up at them with puffy eyes to see them exchange a horrified look with each other.
Of course they were horrified, they had no idea their adopted son would do this. They had no idea that when they took him in they had brought a coward into their home.
"I told you, it's all my fault." Jack said in a voice barely above a whisper.
"No it's not!" Sam exclaimed fiercely, grabbing Jack's tear-stained cheeks in both her hands and forcing him to look into her shining emerald eyes, green like the leaves of Golden Night Flower trees, "Jacksie, you were twelve years old! There's no way you could have stopped an army!"
"It was never up to you to save a whole village," Jay added more gently, "you got away and survived, that's what matters."
"B-but... but I didn't... I didn't save Gray." Jack stammered.
"You weren't supposed to save Gray," Sam said, "you just had to lead him to safety. And you tried. It's not your fault if those things got him before you could do that. You went back for him after the fight even though you'd been told to stay away. Jacksie, that was courage, that shows how much you cared, how much you loved your brother and your parents and your village. Stop blaming yourself for something that was impossible to predict!"
"What you're experiencing sounds like survivor's guilt," Jay put in, and now Jack looked into his sparkling blue eyes, the same color as the sea on the Boeshane Peninsula, "it's something that happens to people who experience severe trauma - which you have. And you're not the only one who blames themself for something they couldn't control or fix."
Jay gave the slightest glance in Sam's direction. He might have thought Jack didn't notice, but he did.
"What matters is that it's okay," Jay went on, "it's over now, you're safe here and we love you. We always will."
"Until our last breaths," Sam added, "and even beyond that."
"And we're here for you whenever you need to talk." Jay finished.
He and Sam both gripped one of Jack's hands as he fought back a fresh wave of tears, though this time they were tears of joy.
He hadn't felt this safe in a long, long time.