Work Text:
Tell My Father
by Lilithangel
Tell my father that his son
Didn't run, or surrender
~John Barrowman
Somehow it was exactly the type of house he expected Jack to have grown up in.
White shutters and a whitewashed fence. Carefully loved lawns and floral borders decorated with the signs of childhood just as proudly displayed.
He watched a young boy fly a model plane around the front yard eyes already drawn to the sky until a woman’s voice called out and the plane carefully carried inside.
It was pure selfishness that led him back three more times to watch the young boy grow eyes always fixed on the sky as gangly limbs filled out into the body he remembered.
His last sight was of a grown man proudly wearing a uniform that would come to define them both hugging family goodbye. He looked so eager and handsome it was all Jack could do not to walk over there and beg him not to go.
His final return was timed to just after another young man in a uniform arrived at the door holding the piece of paper that nightmares traveled on.
He knocked knowing the incomprehensible grief he would find behind that door. He couldn’t fix that grief but he could tell them their son died with honour saving the lives of his men.
Tell them all the things the telegram couldn’t say. That their son cared for his men and wasn’t afraid. That he made them all better men and was loved. That he was the bravest man Jack had ever met.
“Mr Harkness? My name is James Harper. I knew your son.”
END