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nothing_rhymes_with_iantoTitle: In Losing What I Am, I Become Who We Are
Authors: ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
qafkinnetic & solvingfor42
Characters/Pairings: The Torchwood Team, sans Jack.
Word Count: 43,192
Rating: R
Warnings/Spoilers: Warning for violence and major character death.
Beta: 
snarkymuch, Neil's parents, Tumblr user consultingmidgardian.
Summary: The discovery of a mechanical Weevil beneath Cardiff starts a chain of events that threatens to destroy Torchwood. Jack is still missing, Ianto seems to be going mad after an injury and Owen is forced to confront his worst fears. When the people of Cardiff start turning into clockwork automatons, things seem hopeless. And then, when Owen decides to investigate Ianto’s strange behaviour, they get worse.
Note: This story was written as part of the Torchwood Collaboration Festival. For more information, please visit here: 
tw_collab_fest
Authors' Notes: SO MUCH LOVE for our betas: snarkymuch and Neil's parents, and our Brit-picker, consultingmidgardian. We'd also like to thank The SCP Foundation (http://
This fic was supposed to be short -- we decided to aim for a thousand words, expecting it to expand to two or three times that. But Neil tends to write mostly novel-length fics, and Lex wanted an actual plot, and we found all these great ideas, and the next thing we knew it was over 40,000 words! As Neil said when we were trying to think of a title: 'Somehow I think “The Epic Fic that Would Not End Oh God” would convey the wrong mood.'
The hiss and ping of pipes echoed through the narrow tunnels, masking the sounds that might have helped Ianto navigate. There was almost no visibility, despite the ultra-bright torch he held alongside his gun. Twenty, maybe thirty feet of visibility at a time before the tunnels turned or a nest of pipes screened the next section.
“The signal originates from about 200 yards ahead of your position,” Tosh said, voice crackling slightly over the comm.
“And you're sure it's not a Weevil?” asked Gwen.
“Definitely not a Weevil,” Tosh confirmed. “Or at least, not just a Weevil.”
“What the bloody hell is that supposed to mean?” That was Owen, of course. They were spread out through the tunnels, directed by Tosh from back at the Hub, but Ianto could see the irritated expression on Owen's face as clearly as if he were right there next to him.
“The signal's not clear. It has some of the same magnetic form resonance we see with Weevils, but the ionisation is completely different.”
“Well, that cleared everything right up.” Owen retorted.
Ianto tuned them out and concentrated on his surroundings. This was part of an old pump station, long abandoned. The tunnels connected to part of the Torchwood vaults about a mile southwest of here, but Ianto had never been through that section himself. He eased around a corner, careful not to brush against the pipes—some of them were still being used, God only knew for what, and he'd learnt the hard way that several of them were scorching hot.
The tunnel opened into a largish chamber and he paused to play the beam of his torch over it. Pipes circled the walls and crisscrossed the ceiling, and puddles of liquid had collected in all the dips and hollows of the cement floor. A pile of rags and unidentifiable items covered one corner. He approached it cautiously, but it didn't seem to be anything more than it appeared. Kicking at it just dislodged some rats, which scampered off with indignant squeaks.
“I've found a room,” he said into the open comm. “Looks empty, but something's definitely been living here.”
“I'm coming up on it, too,” Owen said. A moment later Ianto saw the light of his torch precede him into the room.
“The signal's still up ahead,” Tosh said. “It's—wait. It's coming back toward you.”
“Stay where you are,” Gwen said. “Tosh, do I have a direct path to them?”
Ianto glanced at Owen while Tosh rattled off directions, and Owen nodded back. They drifted to opposite sides of the chamber and each covered one of the two tunnels most likely to be the target's approach.
“ETA?” Ianto asked.
“It's moving slowly. Probably ninety seconds.”
“Behind you,” Gwen said. The comm echoed her.
Ianto glanced behind him to confirm her position.
“I see it,” Owen said.
Ianto held the gun steady and peered into the gloom. Something lurched into view. Biped, humanoid, hairless, prominent cranial ridge, well-developed carnivorous dentition.
It was a Weevil. Ianto fought down a wave of relief mixed with disappointment.
“You need to check out your equipment, Tosh,” Owen growled. “You just sent us all down here on high alert for a bloody Weevil.”
“Oi,” Gwen said. “Leave off her, Owen. I made the call.”
Something wasn't right. Ianto cut across their bickering with a sharp “Wait.” For one thing, the Weevil hadn't attacked yet. It was just standing there, looking confused. He moved closer.
“What is it?”
“Shine your torches on it—I need a closer look.”
“It's just a Weevil, Ianto. Nothing we haven’t seen a thousand times before.”
“Just do it, Owen,” Gwen said before Ianto had to.
The Weevil blinked and held up a hand to block the sudden glare. Ianto froze. The arm wasn't flesh. A copper plate curved halfway around two bronze tubes arranged in imitation of a radius and an ulna. The wrist was a complicated array of gears, and the fingers looked like articulated steel. Its face, half in shadow, was covered in a partial mask of what looked like leather, some kind of lens covering up one eye. This looked familiar.
“No one touch it,” he said.
“Holy shit.” Owen moved up next to him and gave him an exasperated glare when Ianto put out an arm to keep him going farther. “Someone's been modifying it.”
“No...” Ianto said. He'd seen this before—something was setting off major alarm bells. But where? Case after case scrolled through his mind, but none of them matched. He called up the archive listings, as clear in memory as if he were looking at the screen, but nothing there referenced this, either. Was it from Torchwood One? Ianto closed his eyes, trying to concentrate on remembering.
“Ianto,” Owen said, his voice dark with warning.
But Ianto almost had it now. He chased after the thought, the strain of not losing it almost physically uncomfortable. It was organic, not an external modification. Alien, yes, but not alien technology. And it wasn't the creature itself that was dangerous. It was...
“Ianto!”
Something slammed into him, driving him sideways and crashing with him to the floor. And suddenly he remembered where he'd seen this before. It was a—
His head slammed into the cement floor. A moment later, something inside his head snapped and pain blossomed not where he'd hit his skull but right behind his eyes. It felt like the time he'd torn a ligament in his knee—a deep, sickening pop, the sense that something was wrong almost worse than the pain.
The weight that had pinned him to the floor disappeared, and he heard shouting and gunfire above him, but for the moment all he could do was clutch his head and try not to vomit. By the time the pain subsided, it was all over.
“Ianto! Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I'm fine.” He waved Gwen back and got shakily to his feet. The Weevil lay sprawled in the centre of the floor. It was hard to tell in the torch light, but the pool of liquid spreading out around it looked too dark to be blood.
“Let me look,” Owen said.
Ianto shook his head. The pain was disappearing with incredible speed, leaving only a sick taste in his mouth and an ache on the side of his skull. “Really, I'm fine.”
“You could have a concussion,” Owen protested.
Ianto felt strange, off balance, but not like he had a concussion. And he'd had more than his share in the past. “It can wait. Did it touch any of you?”
Owen and Gwen glanced at each other. “I—I'm not sure,” Gwen said.
Owen looked at the corpse suspiciously. “Why?”
Ianto knelt next to the puddle and stared at the body. Whatever connection he'd made before he hit his head, it was gone now. “I don't remember.”
It wasn’t the most disgusting autopsy he’d ever performed, but it might’ve been on the top of his list for the weirdest. Though he had the feeling that it was only weird because this Weevil was decidedly not normal. Even before he’d opened it up that had been obvious. An entire limb was made of metal, the joints clusters of gears, the limb itself a mass of metal and leather and plastic and wood, glinting in the harsh light of the autopsy room, and in place of the Weevil’s eye, there seemed to be a strange sort of rotating camera lens.
Slicing through into the chest of the Weevil proved to be even stranger. The ribs seemed to be made of solid wood, but he cracked them open and separated the cage in order to get a better look at the inside of the creature. An apparatus made of gears and plastic tubes and something close to air pumps had forever stilled its attempt at an imitation of a heart. As he poked about the corpse, he found that everything else was made of synthetic material as well. He worked a couple of gears free from their shafts and tugged a few plastic tubes loose, setting them aside for testing. He poked his head up from the sunken-in autopsy bay, tugging down the mask Ianto had insisted he wear.
“So this is weird…” He waited for the inevitable congregation outside of his autopsy bay. Ianto was absent, hovering a good distance from the medbay but obviously listening. “This Weevil isn’t a normal Weevil. I’m not sure why, but its insides are inorganic materials: metal, plastic, wood, glass. Mostly different types of metals, it seems.” Gwen opened her mouth, but he cut her off. “It’s not a fake Weevil, if that’s what’s you’re about to ask. Its inner structure is exactly the same as that of a regular Weevil, but nearly every organ has been replaced by gears or pumps or tubes or flasks.”
Tosh frowned, tapping her pen on the railing. “How? Someone hasn’t been operating on Weevils, have they?”
“No, I don’t think so. There doesn’t seem to be any scarring, or obvious areas where organic material stops and other materials begin.” He gestured to the gears and tubes in a petri dish sitting on the other table, ready to be tested. “I’m gonna run some tests and things, doctor stuff, see if there’s anything I can pick up. Meantime, I suppose we should keep an eye out for any more of these things.”
“I can mark the unique ionisation we saw with this Weevil and designate a program to alert us if any more come up on our radar.” Already talking programming to herself, Tosh went back to her station, fingers soon furiously tapping at her keyboard. Gwen tapped out a beat on the railing with her palms.
“I suppose I’ll let the local force know to contact us if there’s anything else like that around.”
“Tell your cop buddy to quit nosing around in our business while you’re at it.”
Gwen frowned at him, looking slightly irritated. He grinned inwardly. “You know very well that I can’t. He’s my main contact with the force. And he believes aliens exist.”
“He calls them spooky-do’s, Gwen.”
“At least he doesn’t write them off as Halloween pranks in the middle of June!”
“All right, go on. Indulge yourself.”
“Oh, piss off.” Gwen rolled her eyes and went up to the gantry to make her call.
Owen looked at the mess of his autopsy room and decided that it was time for Mr. Weevil to go into the temporary morgue so he could save it for more testing later.
“Oi! Ianto!” he called to the Welshman, who was fastidiously cleaning the area around Tosh’s workstation. “I know you’re the biggest neat freak this side of the hemisphere, but you need to come help me prep this guy for the morgue. Takes more than one of us to move this beast.”
“Mask,” Ianto insisted as he approached. “I won’t do it unless we wear masks.”
“All right, all right! Don’t get your knickers in a twist. Here.” Ianto took the proffered mask and hooked it round his ears, then pulled on a pair of gloves, still eyeing the corpse even as he joined Owen in the autopsy bay.
“I still don’t think we should be messing with it,” Ianto commented, trying to touch it with the smallest area of his body that he could, so that he was practically pinching it between thumb and forefinger.
“Why?”
“I—I don’t remember. It just feels like there’s something we’re missing, like we should be careful around it.”
“I doubt it’s going to jump up and eat us, Ianto. It looks like something out of an H.G. Wells novel.”
They heaved it onto the other gurney together and slid it into the storage drawer in the wall. Ianto practically ran back up the stairs, ripping off his mask and gloves as he passed Tosh’s desk and shoving them into the bin.
Owen didn’t know what had gotten into his teammate, but for now there were more interesting and important things to focus on. He placed one of the gears into a beaker, covered it in sterilized water, and stuck it under the scanner for Mainframe to analyse. He cut a bit off of the plastic tube, then sliced it open and flattened it between two slides. Under a microscope, it had the smooth, slightly grooved surface of plastic, and yet as he zoomed further in, it seemed more porous and muscle-like. Owen frowned and replaced the plastic piping under the microscope with the metal gear. Once again, it had the craggy, grained appearance of metal until he zoomed in closer, and it became obviously porous and stretched like muscle. He frowned and wished the Mainframe would analyse faster.
He started to play a computer game to combat his boredom as he waited but ended up watching Ianto instead. The man was meticulously neatening and straightening and wiping down everything he could get his hands on. Owen knew the Welshman had always been tidy, but this was bordering on obsessive. Not only that, but he was acting strangely around alien corpses he’d seen a million times, and he was insisting on doing things for reasons he didn’t even seem to know himself. Owen wondered if their leader’s absence had hit Ianto harder than the man had let on.
Ianto’s head was hurting again. He was starting to get worried, not that he would ever admit that to Owen or any of the rest of them. If Jack were here… But he wasn't. Ianto shoved the thought, and the pang of hurt that accompanied it, back into its accustomed slot. It didn't seem to fit.
He'd just banged his head good, of course it hurt. But his thoughts were all jumbled together, sloshing round inside his skull like flotsam round the piers, and he couldn't concentrate. Or couldn't stop concentrating, he wasn't sure which.
He wandered over near Owen's workstation. He had a solitaire game up on his monitor, but he wasn't playing it. He was tapping his hands arrhythmically on his thighs and watching Ianto. Ianto gave him a tight smile —Everything's fine, stop checking up on me, doctor— and asked, “Any results from your tests, yet?” They needed to figure out what had happened to the Weevil. It was important. If only he could remember.
“Still waiting on Mainframe. How're you feeling? Ready for me to check you over?”
Ianto shook his head. “No need. It was just a little bump.”
There was a spot on the edge of Owen's desk, spilled coffee maybe, and he reached out to wipe it off with his thumb. It was dried on, tacky and stiff against his skin, but eventually he flaked it off. The laminate was stained underneath, and he rubbed at it. Back and forth, harder, until the friction of it heated the edge of his thumb.
“—anto. Ianto.” Owen grabbed his wrist, fingers painfully tight, and shook it.
Ianto shook his head and frowned. How long had Owen been trying to get his attention? Maybe he did have a concussion. He pulled his hand free of Owen's grip.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
“Shit!”
Ianto turned to see Tosh grab frantically for her mug of pens and miscellaneous tools. She knocked it over at least three times a week, bumping it with a stray elbow when she got absorbed in her work. She was too slow this time. It glanced off her fingers and rolled across her workstation, scattering tools like shrapnel. Gwen choked back a laugh from across the room and then yelled an unapologetic, “Sorry, Tosh!”
Tosh just muttered something annoyed under her breath and started gathering her things. She scooped up everything on the desk and dumped it back in the mug, then got up and started picking up the stuff on the floor. She was elbow-deep in her rubbish bin when Ianto remembered he'd tossed his dirty gloves and mask in there.
“Tosh!” he said, voice sharp with panic.
She froze. “What?”
“The Imprefly species is a bispacial parasite of rudimentary intelligence,” he said.
“What?” she said again, this time sounding more irritated than scared.
Ianto echoed the question in his own head. Sudden panic squeezed his throat shut. He hadn't meant to say that. He'd never even heard of the Imprefly species, as far as he knew.
His head throbbed in sick waves. “I don't know,” he said. What the hell was happening to him?
“Ianto….what was that?”
“Really. I don’t know.”
Owen gripped his teammate’s wrist again. “Ianto. Tell me you’ve randomly acquired nerd-boy Tourette’s, or that you’ve not slept in 72 hours and you’re going mad. Or something. Where did that come from?”
Ianto shook his head, obediently following the medic back down into the sunken room. “I really, really don’t know, Owen.”
A shaft of worry lanced through Owen’s gut, and he pushed Ianto down into a chair. It was one thing to have a periodically anal-retentive team member who knew everything, having a team member who spouted useless information without knowing why was a whole new can of worms.
Suddenly Ianto looked up again, panicked face turned towards Toshiko, who had restarted her exploration of the rubbish bin. “Tosh, don’t! I put my mask and gloves in that bin.”
“So?”
“Just…don’t. They might be contaminated?” He frowned as he finished his sentence, like he didn’t know why he thought that. Tosh pulled her hands from the bin and put them cautiously onto her keyboard, still watching Ianto.
Owen put a hand on Ianto’s shoulder. “Listen, mate. I think you got knocked pretty hard out there.”
“I didn’t. It barely hurt.”
The alarm went off as Owen opened his mouth to respond. He sighed. “Another one?”
“Yeah.”
“I should stay here at the Hub. Mainframe will be done with the analysis soon, maybe it can tell us something we don’t already know. Ianto, you up for taking my place?”
“I told you, I’m fine.”
Ianto got up and, grumbling, trudged towards the kitchen to get his gun. Owen turned to Tosh. “Keep an eye on him, alright? I don’t know what’s going on. But I really don’t like it.”
“Will do.”
Ianto slid into the back seat of the SUV and slammed the door behind him. Tosh rode shotgun, Rift monitor in hand, and Gwen had insisted on driving—a decision he couldn't argue with, considering.
He tried to focus on the matter at hand, on this new creature they were about to go after and what the vitally important thing he couldn't remember was, but if he was honest with himself—God forbid— he was terrified. His head still hurt, long, rolling shudders of pain that travelled from the nape of his neck up to his hairline and exploded behind his eyes like flares. He was unravelling the threads from his jacket cuff, one colour at a time, and laying them across his knee and he didn't even know why.
“Seventy-three parsecs from the Mandora Galaxy, and one point seven light years from the planet Aftorecora,” his mouth said. Gwen and Tosh exchanged significant glances but didn't say anything to him. That was something, at least. Now he wasn't even stating complete thoughts. He worried at the missing information like his fingers worried at the hem of his cuff.
“We're closing in on the signal, Owen,” Gwen said. “Can you pull the CCTV and let us know what exactly we're heading into?”
“It looks like it's just outside a shopping arcade. Lots of people about.”
“Shit! Shit, shit, shit! Are there any civilians down?”
“We're not coppers, Gwen.”
“Owen! Are there?”
“Not that I can see.”
“Thank God.”
The SUV swerved round a corner, throwing Ianto up against the door. Tosh yelled something at Gwen, but Ianto missed it as another huge wave of pain clenched his teeth together. He closed his eyes and tried to ride it out as they slammed to a stop.
“We're here.”
“Try to take this one alive, yeah? I might be able to learn more from it if it's still ticking, so to speak.”
“We'll do our best.” Gwen replied. “Ianto! Come on!”
Ianto opened his eyes. The pain was draining away again, leaving him dizzy with relief. He pulled his gun out—whatever Owen said, he wasn't going to let this thing get close to him. And then he froze.
“Ianto!” Tosh came up to his window, wearing a frown that somehow contained both irritation and concern. “Come on,” she said.
He stared at the inside of the door with mounting panic. The arrangement of buttons and levers looked utterly alien, a confusing system he couldn't begin to untangle. He knew it was a door. He knew he needed to open it. He could remember opening this exact same door thousands of times before. He met Tosh's eyes though the glass, ignoring the pale, mad face of his reflection.
“What's wrong?” she asked. “Open the door and get out here!”
He swallowed. “I don't know how.”
“Tosh, just leave him there! The creature’s on the move.”
“Alright.”
As Owen watched, the little blinking dot indicating Tosh moved away. He yanked nervously at the bottom of his coat, half-wishing he was out there. Ianto’s breathing was harsh and loud in the comm. in his ear. Worry was clawing at his belly now, a weird panicked anxiety that this wasn’t something he could easily fix.
“Ianto.”
“Owen,” Ianto’s voice was strained. “The Yggbrixia galaxy is shaped like an enormous tree and holds over five thousand planets.”
The pounding of feet from Gwen or Tosh’s comm sounded in his ear, a yell of rage. He blocked them out despite their volume.
“Okay. That’s nice.” He took a deep breath and steeled himself to sound much calmer than he felt. He could feel sweat sliding down the side of his face. “Ianto, you’re going to need to calm down for me. Don’t talk. Just breathe, all right? Sit in the car and breathe. It’s gonna be okay.”
Ianto’s loud breathing quieted to rasping huffs as Owen typed commands for Mainframe into his computer.
“Ianto, I’m searching your symptoms on Mainframe. Not sure if I’ll get anything back, but I’m trying.”
“I don’t know. I’m going mad, Owen.”
“Just sit tight. We’ll figure it out.”
“The Capetae are a species of alien that spend half of their lives hibernating in a web-like cocoon. Shit!”
Owen frowned. “Figuring out faster.”
The other computer monitor beeped. He tapped in commands and brought up the window. His lips curled in concentration, he read through the information, deciphering Mainframe’s techno-medical-babble as fast as if it was English. “What? That has to be wrong. Run it again.” He repeated the command. A mechanical voice told him that the results were the same.
“Owen?” Tosh was out of breath. “What’s wrong?”
“Well, either Mainframe has gone as crazy as our Ianto, or something is very weird here.”
“Mainframe is never wrong.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
The harsh shrill of screams and a roar echoed through the comms and Owen flinched instinctively. Ianto’s quiet groaning was barely audible, and Owen wondered if he was maybe covering his mouth to muffle the terrified sounds.
“Owen?” Tosh was yelling down the comm. line, voice frantic. “What’s going on?”
“The gears I took from the Weevil. They’re not inorganic. They’ve got the Weevil’s DNA and everything. They grew inside the Weevil, naturally. Like a tumour or something.”
“Run the tests again.”
Owen punched in the command for a full test repeat.
Ianto breathed. He didn't think about the screams coming from outside the SUV, or the suddenly unfamiliar door that trapped him as effectively as a cell, or the test results Owen was telling them about, or the random facts spilling from his lips. He closed his eyes, and he breathed.
Who knew Owen's voice could be so reassuring? He was only humouring the madman, but Ianto didn't care. Frankly, this was more than he could deal with. The inside of his own head had been the one place he'd always been safe. Had been.
The pain took over again, and Ianto couldn't even remember to breathe. It squeezed out everything. Filled him up, then hollowed him out. When it passed, he couldn't have said whether he'd been swallowed up by it for a minute or an hour.
But he remembered how to work the door. It made sense again, as inexplicably as it had become alien before. And he would be damned if he was going to sit in here with nothing to distract him from his fear when Tosh and Gwen were out there risking their lives.
He opened the door and ran toward the screaming.
“Tosh?”
“What?”
“Ow.” Owen shook his head to get the reverberations of Toshiko’s yell out of his ears. “I’ve rerun the tests. Something is very wrong.”
“With Mainframe?”
“No. With our creature and our Weevil.” The sense of dread in his stomach was doing the exact opposite of what he wished it would do. It would’ve been fine if Jack was here. If Jack was here, he’d know something about this insanity, or at least know how to figure something out. As it was, he was missing, and Owen’s hands were shaking so badly he could barely type.
“The makeup of the gears and tubes inside our clockwork Weevil is exactly the same as DNA of the Weevil itself. The tests came back the same. Whatever’s made the Weevil like that is organic. And it grows and changes. And it’s not in our files.”
There were a few bodies on the ground, some of them still moving, but none of them were Tosh or Gwen, so Ianto just jumped over them. He'd learnt he couldn't stop and think about the casualties until after or he'd freeze up, but he couldn't help but cringe at the thought of how much Retcon it was going to take to sort this mess out. As he ran, he realised he was screaming, “Known as 'The Oncoming Storm', though the reasons for this moniker are unknown,” as if it were a battle cry.
“Ianto? What are you doing? Get your arse back in the car! I told you to stay put!”
“Not now, Owen.” He wasn't some fainting maiden to be protected, and he wasn't going to wait on the sidelines and let his teammates take a bullet for him.
He found Tosh and Gwen round the corner, at the mouth of a service alley. They had the creature cornered against a skip. It wasn't a Weevil, this time. It was hard to tell exactly what it was, or more accurately, what it had been, but something about the tilt of the head made Ianto think it had once been a large dog. Now it was some kind of steampunk nightmare.
Tosh spun round at the sound of his approach. “Ianto!”
“Tosh, focus!” Gwen yelled. “Owen, nothing we've tried to subdue this thing has even made it blink. We're going to have to go for the kill.”
“Do it.”
Ianto skidded to a stop and took aim. Tosh and Gwen fired at almost the same instant he did. The rattle of ricocheting bullets echoed round the alley. The dog-shaped automaton gave a furious screech, the sound of metal scraping against metal, and charged.
They scattered. Ianto ended up pressed against a wall next to Gwen. The creature went after Tosh, leaving its flank exposed, and Ianto squeezed off another shot. A dent appeared in the brass plate that covered its side, but the thing didn't even seem to notice.
“Shit,” Gwen said, half under her breath. “Our guns are useless. What the hell are we supposed to do now?”
Owen ran through the material on the screen, his eyes skimming across reams of information. Things added up, but they were still strange. Urgency gripped him as the facts on the screen became clear.
“Get out of there, guys. Seriously, get out.”
“But—”
“Get out.” He gripped the edge of the desk like it would help him control the events he was hearing through his earpiece. “Mainframe came back with more test results. Whatever’s converting these animals is a biological agent of some sort. You need to retreat and get back here.”
Biological agent. That was the key. Even as Gwen and Owen shouted at each other, even as he bolted from his hiding place, emptying his clip at the automaton to distract it long enough for Tosh to get out, he was rummaging through his memories, searching for the thread he'd had and lost in the old pump station. They were halfway to the SUV when he found it. He chased it down, other data skimming past the surface of his mind as he located what he was looking for.
“It's a virus!” he shouted.
Tosh looked back at him, still running. “Is he doing it again?” she asked Gwen.
“No!” Ianto stopped, held his head. The pain was coming back, he could feel it. It was going to be a bad one. He could hear the clang and hiss of the creature behind him. “This thing— whatever's turning things into these clockwork replicas— it's a virus.” He looked up, met Tosh's eyes, saw Gwen gesturing frantically from the front of the SUV. “It's contagious.”
His head split open and darkness spilled out, filling up his vision.
Owen watched the sleeping figure on the ratty sofa. Tosh was sitting nearby, wringing her hands the way she did when she was worried. Owen tapped a foot against the leg of the desk and drummed the top in counterpoint. Ianto slept on.
“Maybe it’s just the concussion.” Owen wished Tosh would act a bit more Torchwood and assume the worst first rather than the best. It generally helped morale when what was assumed was the last thing that actually occurred.
“I hope so. I still want to do a bunch of scans on him. He’s acting weird. Well, weirder than usual. I need to make sure that if it is the concussion, there’s no permanent brain damage.”
The man on the sofa groaned softly and stirred, eyelids fluttering. An arm slid off the cushions and dangled in the air, fingertips nearly brushing the floor. Owen scooted his chair closer, tapping Ianto gently on the cheek.
“Ianto? You alive in there?”
“Nnggh.” Ianto’s eyes opened and he blinked up at them. “Wha’ happened?”
“You collapsed. You’re a lucky bugger, too. You landed on Tosh, so you managed not to hit your head a second time.”
Tosh smiled nervously. She had scrapes on her elbows. “Happy to be of service.”
Owen shook his head, brushing aside her failed attempt to lighten the situation, and turned back to his patient. Putting a hand under one shoulder, he helped Ianto to sit up.
“What was all that about back there? You said the biological agent in the Weevil was a contagious virus.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Maybe he did hit his head,” Tosh offered.
“All right, Ianto. Let’s go to the medbay and I’ll give you a good old-fashioned brain scan.”
“With alien tech.”
“With alien tech, yes. But still, it feels like a normal brain scan. Can you stand?”
“Yeah.” He stood with only a slight wobble.
Owen resisted the urge to take Ianto by the arm and lead him into the medbay. He generally tried not to treat his patients like invalids, but sometimes it was almost impossible not to feel like they might fall over and break.
Ianto settled himself on the autopsy table-cum-examination bed and folded his arms over his chest. Efficient, even in the face of insanity. Owen pulled over the alien-modified CAT scan machine and set it up above Ianto. Instead of a full-circle machine that the patient was passed through, it was a half-circle that was passed over the patient, and the alien tech did the rest. It helped for big aliens and claustrophobic patients, and Owen liked it because it was mobile and didn’t crowd out his examination area.
“Just stay as still as you can, alright?”
“Got it.”
Ianto didn’t move a muscle as the crescent passed over him three times, whirring softly. Owen had to give him credit, because it did tend to feel like a giant alien claw was hovering over your head. He tapped him on the shoulder when the scans were done.
“Up. I’m gonna test your reflexes and all that while the scans are compiling.”
“And then what? Take my temperature, check my tonsils, stick your hand up my bum?”
“Not into that stuff, mate. This is general procedure for concussions. Deal with it.”
“I don’t like being prodded.”
“No one does.” Ianto’s leg jumped as the little rubber hammer tapped at his knee. “You’re all right. Checking your pupils and then no more prodding, alright?”
Owen couldn’t decide whether to feel comforted or further concerned as he finished his examination. Ianto didn’t have a major concussion, which was good. He wasn’t acting all weird anymore, but he also couldn’t remember why he’d thought the biological agent was a contagious virus. That was worrying. And probably not good.
He wished for a moment that he didn’t have the Torchwood instinct of assuming the worst, because the worst was not anything he wanted to think about. He and Ianto might not have had the most wonderful of relationships, but they were friends, and family in the loose sense that they spent most of their time with each other, and Owen did in fact care what happened to him.
The computer beeped and displayed all the scans in tiny little boxes on the screen. Owen squinted at them. Then enlarged the first one and frowned. Closed that one and enlarged the next. His frown deepened.
“Owen?”
Ianto was peering at him, but Owen wasn’t listening. His eyes were locked on the screen, breath rising into harsh gulps of air. He’d seen that before. A very visible anomaly was apparent on the scan of Ianto’s brain. A small, twisted shape towards the back of the brain cutting through the usual folds, a tumour-like outline that made his gut clench.
Owen’s body washed hot then cold then hot again. He rushed to the restroom without a word and hunched over the toilet. His lunch came back up with a rush of hot acid and he didn’t know whether it was tears or vomit that burned the back of his throat and forced out a sound that would’ve been embarrassing had he been able to care. He couldn’t go through this again. He couldn’t.
He rested his head against the tiles, the cold porcelain a stark contrast to his own burning skin. He wiped his nose and mouth with the back of his hand and didn’t move. He hadn’t been able to prevent it before, maybe he could now. Still, he felt like he just wanted to hide away until everything was over.
“Owen?” A tentative hand touched his shoulder, then shook him when he didn’t reply. “What was that about? Are you okay? Am I okay?” Ianto’s voice rose in volume and pitch. “I’m not, am I? What’s going on? What’s wrong with me?”
“You—” Owen’s voice creaked and he coughed, wiping at tears he blamed on the gag reflex. “Shit. There’s something in your head. In your brain. Something that’s not supposed to be there.”
“What do you mean?”
Owen turned, studiously ignoring Ianto’s flinch as the Welshman took in his appearance. “I don’t know what I mean. There’s a tumour or a–an alien or something in your head. I don’t know what it is. All I know is that it’s not good.”
Owen's words punched through Ianto's chest like a bullet. Something in his brain? Something Owen couldn't identify? He could feel himself starting to shake a little and shut down that line of thought before it undid him. Owen was pale, sweaty, his eyes sunken and his mouth thinned into a tight grimace of horror. The toilet stank of vomit. He wasn't this upset just because Ianto had something growing inside his skull. Ianto took a deep breath and tried to deal with the immediate situation before he freaked out about the results of the scan.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. This is . . . bad. But we've dealt with worse, right?”
“Of course it's bad! We don't even know how bad!” Owen pulled himself to his feet and stumbled out of the stall. He leant against the basin, turned on the tap and plunged his hands under the water. “And if it's not fucked up enough already, I don't know if there's any way to figure out exactly what that thing in you is. Alien, mineral, vegetable, the usual tumour...”
“Owen. Calm down. We'll figure this out. You're a great doctor, and we have the full Torchwood archives at our disposal. You'll figure it out, and you'll fix it. I have complete confidence in you.”
Owen spun and glared at him. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Ianto,” he said, sarcasm raw and vicious. “But I'm not perfect. I'm basically an alien coroner half the time. I can't fix everything!”
Ianto took a step closer. Owen could be as nasty and violent as he liked— all of Ianto's capacity for fear was currently gibbering in a corner of his mind, still stuck on a tumour or an alien or something in your head. “What's really going on here, Owen?”
“I told you, I don't know. All the scan showed was the anomaly, it didn't identify it. It could be—”
“No. What's going on with you?”
“I don't know what you mean.” Owen sneered and turned back to the basin to splash water on his face.
Ianto narrowed his eyes. “Bollocks. You're just going to give up this easy? This stupid little tumour's too big and scary for you and you're going to let it beat you before you even start to fight?”
“Oh, shut it! You have no idea what you're talking about. Why don't you go and make me a coffee instead of trying to tell me how to do my job?”
“I'm not telling you how to do your job, Dr. Harper. I'm just telling you to do it.”
“Bugger off! You don't know anything!” Owen shouted. He was wild-eyed, breathing in harsh gasps. He yelled an incoherent syllable and slammed a fist into the tiling next to the mirror. Ianto flinched at the dull crack it made. The impact seemed to shock all the rage out of Owen and he sagged against the wall, forehead pressed against the cool porcelain, shoulders shaking.
Ianto let his voice soften and dropped it into the silence. “I know that I need you, Owen. I need you to be your usual cocky, competent self.” He stepped forward and tentatively put his hand on Owen's arm. “I'm terrified.”
Owen gave a strained, unconvincing chuckle. “Me, too, mate,” he said without looking up.
“Why?”
“This happened before and I couldn't do a thing and look where that got me. Stuck in here with you lot. And now it's happening again.”
“It's happened before?” Something cold and sharp coiled through Ianto's gut, something that could have been dread or hope. “What are you talking about?”
Owen didn't even seem to hear him. “Jack knew what was going on and he could've saved her. He could've. But he—”
“Could have saved who?”
“I was useless. I just stood there whilst she was dying. Just stood there! And Jack came in and none of it made any sense—”
“You're not making any sense. Owen, what happened? Someone died from this? Jack was involved? When was this?”
“I can't do this again. I just can't.”
Ianto tried desperately to tamp down on the panic rising inside of him. “Owen, calm down. Talk to me. You have to tell me what happened.”
“It doesn't matter.”
“I think it does!”
Owen turned on him, angry again, but this was more of a cold, bitter anger, not the wild, frantic rage of before. “Leave it, Ianto. I don't want to talk about it.”
“If this has anything to do with what's wrong with me—”
“It doesn't. It can't be connected. This is my own shit, teaboy. It's none of your business.”
“Owen—”
“You're not the only one whose girlfriend was killed by Torchwood, okay?” Owen glared at him, then shoved him aside and stalked out.
Ianto stood alone in the toilet, staring at the door Owen had slammed behind him. The only sound was his own breath echoing off the tiled walls. He didn't know how Owen had come to work at Torchwood. It was in the archive, but he'd never bothered to specifically look it up. He tried to call it to mind now, but his concentration was still shot from the fight and . . . everything.
Everything. God. His hand drifted up to his scalp and hovered without touching it. There was something in there. In his brain. His skin twitched and his gut twisted in on itself. He clenched his hand and forced it back to his side, though he wanted to start clawing at his head. Get it out. he prayed— to whom, he had no idea. Owen, maybe. Please, get it out of me right now.
He supposed having some kind of tumour or alien parasite was better than simply going mad. At least he had a reason for how he'd been acting, right? He swallowed and straightened his waistcoat. Right. He was going to keep thinking that until he started to believe it.
He smoothed his hair, wiped the fear-sweat off his face with a towel, tightened his tie, and checked himself in the mirror. There was an entirely separate crisis going on out there right now, and he needed to help Tosh and Gwen deal with it. A thought froze him halfway to the door. Was it totally separate? Whatever it was turning Weevils and animals into automatons . . . they didn't know how it started. Owen said Ianto himself had told them it was a contagious virus right before he blacked out. Could he…
The idea of turning into one of those half-alive machines flushed over him in a cold sweat of panic. Not that. Anything but that. To end up like all his friends in London had, like Lisa— He closed his eyes and tried to breathe through the overwhelming wave of nausea that choked him. When he was reasonably sure he wasn't about to sick up all over himself, he strode out of the toilet and headed for the autopsy bay. He needed to talk to Owen.
Owen clattered about in his medbay, slamming tools around and tossing things into the bin with excessive force. It was bad enough that Jack was missing and Ianto was messed up. Now he had to be slapped in the face with the visceral reminder of his dead fiancée in the form of his colleague’s brain scan. He thought he’d joined Torchwood to avoid shit like this.
“Owen?” Ianto appeared on the steps in front of him, leaning heavily on the railing. His face was white with flushes of colour high on his cheeks. He was breathing shallowly, sweat beaded on his upper lip. “I just had a thought.”
“What?” He looked away from Ianto, down at his hands clenched on the tabletop. He didn’t like seeing that fearful edge of hysteria and pain on the Welshman’s face, eyes red from keeping tears at bay. It was what Katie had looked like for weeks after she’d first started showing symptoms.
“That Weevil we have. The mechanical virus. What if—” Ianto stopped, his throat working like he couldn’t get the words out, like there was something stuck in his throat or trying to come up.
Owen looked up. “What if…?”
“What if…” Ianto gestured to his own head, flinching back from touching it.
Oh. Oh.
Owen’s mind shied away from that possibility just as vehemently as it had from the other one, but he nodded, hoping his fear didn’t show on his face.
“Okay. I don’t know. I didn’t check the Weevil’s brain, only its torso. If I do a brain scan of some sort, maybe we can compare it with yours.”
Ianto nodded and half-turned on his heel. “I–I like that idea. In the meantime, I think I’ll try to restore a little normality and make some coffee.”
Owen watched him walk away, back ramrod straight, fists balled up at his sides, face stoically impassive. Ianto was strong, much stronger than the rest of them. Certainly stronger than him. He didn’t know what the team would do without Ianto to quietly hold them together. He pushed that thought forcibly away.
The coffee came down as he was pulling the Weevil from its body bag. He was wearing a mask and gloves and full smock. When he looked up to thank Ianto, the Welshman was also wearing gloves and a mask.
“Why—”
“Just a precaution, Owen. I just…I don’t want to be responsible for any of you getting infected.”
“If anyone’s going to be responsible, it’s this guy.” Owen pointed at the dead Weevil before him. “But I’m about to do a brain scan and we’ll figure it out.”
“How do we cure it, if that’s what’s in me?”
“I don’t know. You’re Mr. Genius. You tell me, since you were babbling about it so much before.”
“I don’t remember anything about it. I don’t know how I knew that. I mean, maybe I read it somewhere. I always remember everything I read. But now I can’t remember at all.”
“Well, we’re about to find out. You know—”
Alarms blared from the area around Tosh’s station. A clatter and a string of curses preceded the technician as she ran back to her chair. Her hands flew over the keyboard as her eyes flicked back and forth from screen to screen.
“There’re reports coming in. Signals of the ionisation of the virus-infected individuals are bouncing back from all over the city. Most of the signals coming back seem to be—” She paused, swallowing. “Seem to be human.”
Owen hit the table with a hand. “Shit!”
“What can we do?” Gwen asked, tossing the bottle of retcon she’d been distributing to the locals who saw the dog-thing they’d tried to catch onto her desk. “As far as we know, there’s no cure. Or at least, we don’t know about one.”
“And we can’t go out and kill everyone who gets infected. That’s too much damage.”
Owen nodded. “So we all agree that we should stay here and try to figure this out.” Nods all around. “Tosh, keep an eye on those signals. Hunt around in Interpol files and such, see if there’s anything there. Ianto, I’d feel a lot safer if you stayed up here with me, just in case. That all right? Good. That means you, Gwen, have to go down in the archives and look for anything at all that might be relevant.”
“Don’t mess up my files!” Ianto called as Gwen marched down to the basement archives.
Ianto took his coffee up onto the walkway that overlooked the autopsy bay, where he could watch what Owen was doing but didn't have to worry as much about what germs he was breathing out when he took his mask off to drink.
Owen was setting up the scanner around the body of the infected Weevil. Whatever he found in the creature's skull, it wouldn't be good news. Either Ianto was infected with the same virus— one they didn't have a name for, let alone a cure— or he had something else in his head that they had no clue about. But he still couldn't keep from watching. He wanted to know, one way or the other.
He buried his face in the steam from his mug, inhaling the rich comfort of coffee smell. Coffee didn't fix anything, but it made everything look a bit more manageable. He wanted to drink it slowly, to savour it, but once he tasted it he couldn't bear to stop. He drained the mug. He could just go make himself another once Owen finished—
Everything went black.
Owen couldn’t decide what to hope for: that the thing in Ianto’s brain was the strange virus and they might be able to fight to create a cure, or that it was something entirely new that they could figure out how to fix. He concentrated on the work in front of him and tried futilely to keep his hands from shaking.
“Come on, Harper,” he muttered to himself. “Do your job!”
The Weevil was lying on the table, and Owen pulled the modified CAT scanner over. He could feel Ianto’s eyes on him from above; he didn’t have the heart to tell him not to watch. As he punched numbers in, a part of his mind happily pondered over the possibility that it could be a glitch in the system. He wanted to punch himself in the head. He was a doctor; he knew that denial wasn’t going to help anyone.
The scan started up with a soft beep. Then a crash sounded from above, the sound of coffee waterfalling through the grate to the floor below echoing far too loud in Owen’s ears.
He couldn't see anything. Couldn't hear anything. Couldn't feel anything. He couldn't even tell if he was still breathing. Was he dead? Had he had an aneurism or something? Everyone they'd brought back with the glove had described death as darkness, emptiness. The thought of being stuck like this forever choked him with claustrophobia.
And then words formed. He didn't hear them, exactly. It was more like he thought them— but they weren't his. They resounded around and within him.
[ERROR]
[CRITICAL ERROR]
Information cascaded through his mind, too fast for him to process. Diagrams. Text. Cranial cross-sections, most of them of nonhuman brains. Karyotypes.
[INTERFACE FAILURE]
It sounded like a computer, but Ianto could feel a presence behind the voice.
[DEATH IMMINENT]
It took him all of three seconds to drop everything and race up the gantry to Ianto’s side. The archivist was still as a statue, face devoid of emotion or presence. Owen gripped him by the shoulders and turned him. He came easily, still perfectly posed and completely absent.
“Ianto?” He passed a hand over the young man’s eyes. His gaze did not move, didn’t follow. It was as if he’d gone catatonic. Then his mouth opened.
“Error.”
“What the fuck?”
“Critical error.” Ianto’s voice was emotionless, without inflection. It reminded Owen of a computer. It terrified him.
Owen was near to hyperventilation as he shook his teammate in attempts to jerk him back to awareness. Fear was dancing up and down his spine, clawing at his stomach. This was nothing like Katie, nothing like the crazed steampunk Weevils and dog-like automaton things they’d seen. This was completely new and Owen was terrified.
“Death imminent.”
That shook him to the core. “Oh no, no, no, no, no. You’re not dying on my watch. I’m not losing another person to some fucking alien in their head. Ianto!” He grabbed the Welshman by the shoulder and began to jerk him back and forth. “You are not dying if I can help it! What the hell does that even mean? Wake up. Ianto!”
Ianto’s eyes slammed shut and his whole body stiffened like a board. Owen could barely feel the pulse under his fingertips as he put a hand to Ianto’s wrist. Everything was still.
With a gasp, Ianto plunged back into the world. Owen was standing next to him, shaking his arm and shouting something into his face. The lights were bright, disorientating, blinding. He sagged against the railing and nearly fell, his muscles not braced for still being on his feet. He pushed weakly at Owen.
“What—what just happened?” he asked.
“Oh, thank God,” Owen said. “And I could ask you the same thing!”
The clang of hard-soled shoes against the metal grating sounded like automatic weapons fire. “What's going on?” Tosh asked sharply from the doorway.
“Ianto just had some kind of fit,” Owen said.
“Oh my God,” she said.
Ianto stood back up and brushed Owen's hands away in annoyance. “I'm fine,” he said. And now that he'd had a second to adjust, he was. It had felt like being jerked awake in an unfamiliar place and the feeling was fading fast. But if he concentrated, he could still sense that presence at the very edge of his consciousness. He shook his head.
“Back up and tell me what happened,” he said to Owen.
“I don't know, mate. You dropped your coffee cup and just stood there. Blank. Completely blank. And then you spoke, but your voice had gone all funny. Flat, like.”
“What did I say?”
Something shifted behind Owen's eyes, and he looked away.
“Tell me the truth, Owen. I can take it.”
Owen sighed. “You said, ‘Critical error. Interface failure.’”
Ianto tightened his jaw and nodded. He repeated the last phrase: “‘Death imminent.’”
Go To Part 2
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Date: 2012-06-27 04:55 pm (UTC)