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nothing_rhymes_with_iantoTitle: In Losing What I Am, I Become Who We Are (Part 3)
Authors:
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://www.scp-wiki.net/ ), where we found a key plot element.
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.'
Owen had to clamp his teeth together to keep his mouth from falling open. Instead, he let his doctor instincts take over and began to examine the situation, and Ianto, objectively. Ianto seemed to be okay. Fear and surprise were bright in his eyes, but those emotions were mirrored in everyone else’s expressions as well. His face was pale, his hands clenched around the empty coffee mug. They needed to figure out what the thing—the Archive wanted, why it was talking now. He stood up.
Ianto blinked, and suddenly the blankness was gone from his eyes. Owen turned to the girls.
“Tosh, I want you to go through all of our files and find what you can on Torchwood One’s archives and their archiving system. Gwen, I suppose you should call Archie or whoever’s over at Torchwood House and ask them if they’ve ever encountered anything like this. If they ask where Jack is, derail. We don’t want to let on that we’re on our own here.”
“But what about—?” Gwen gestured wordlessly at Ianto, still trying to comprehend. Tosh had a look on her face like she wanted to open up Ianto’s skull and poke around at the computer inside, and Owen felt a bizarre need to protect Ianto.
“It’s okay. We’ll deal with it.” He turned, beckoned Ianto, and strode out of the station area towards Jack’s office. Ianto followed. Turning, he pointed at the mug in Ianto’s hand.
“Alright, go make three of those.”
“What, are you going to make me chug all of them?”
“No, one for me because I’m hopelessly addicted and watching you drink the stuff has made me want more. And two for you. I know it sucks having an audience. I want to talk to the archive one on one and figure out what it wants.”
“Help. It wants help.”
“Yeah, I know that. But we don’t know why. And we don’t know how to help it. I’m a doctor; it’s my job to help things that need it. And maybe helping it will fix you. So hop to it!”
Ianto rolled his eyes and retreated to the kitchen area. The smell of coffee rose and swirled and Owen’s curiosity reared its odd little head. What kind of creature —other than the team itself— was fuelled by coffee? Was that a design by Torchwood, or an evolutionary tactic by the archive itself? Ianto drank coffee all the time, why didn’t it show itself before? What the hell was going on?
Ianto returned with a tray of coffee and followed Owen down to the medical bay. Owen gestured to his computer chair.
“Not the table?” Ianto asked.
“It’s uncomfortable. I mean, unless you really want to…”
“No, no, it’s okay. Just, where are you going to sit?”
“I’ll stand. Seriously, I can stand for hours at a time.” He took a drink of his coffee and looked pointedly at the mugs on the table near Ianto’s elbow. “Now drink.”
Ianto did. It was mesmerizing to watch the slow change as he sipped the coffee. At first he was completely present, face wary, grip solid. Then his face began to slacken into a blank inexpressive slate, his eyes lost their presence as something new and logical came forward, his grip on the coffee mug loosened so that Owen had to catch it to keep it from falling and place it on the table.
Owen crouched and peered up into Ianto’s face. “Ianto? You still there?”
Ianto’s throat worked. “Yes.” The reply was slow to come and unsteady.
“Can the archive hear me?”
Ianto’s eyes seemed to flicker. “YES.” The voice was different from Ianto’s, lacking an accent or any proper inflection.
“You are the Torchwood One Archive?”
“INCORRECT. WE ARE THE TORCHWOOD ONE ARCHIVE.”
“We? You mean Ianto and you?”
“YES. WE ARE TORCHWOOD ONE ARCHIVE.”
Owen let the confirmation settle in his head. Torchwood One had put an archive of biotechnology into the head of at least one of their employees. He already knew Torchwood had been experimenting with the limits of cyborg technology, but the fact that they’d gone so far as to use their own employees as substitute motherboards was shocking in a rather dark way.
“You said you’re dying. What are you dying of?”
“ERROR: QUERY UNCLEAR.”
So it thought logically; it really was closer to a computer. “What is causing your death?”
“BIOLOGICAL INCOMPATIBILITY. SYMBIONT CHEMICAL BALANCE IS INSUFFICIENT.”
“The chemicals in his body—no, his brain—are at levels that are damaging to you.”
“CORRECT.”
“I’m sorry, but we can’t go changing the chemicals in his body for you to live. It might kill him.”
“INCORRECT. BIOLOGICAL CHEMICALS ARE IN CONSTANT FLUX. PRODUCTION OF CHEMICAL LEVELS NEEDED POSSIBLE. APPROXIMATE LEVELS HAVE BEEN REACHED BEFORE.”
“You work when he drinks coffee. What chemicals cause you to function?”
“COMPOUND C8H10N4O2 AND COMPOUND C7H8N4O2.”
“I’m sorry. You’re going to have to restate that in colloquial English.”
“CHEMICALS CAFFEINE AND PARAXANTHINE.”
“And you don’t acquire enough even with all the coffee he drinks? Wow.”
“NO.”
“That—that was a rhetorical question.”
“You can’t be sarcastic with it, Owen.” Ianto’s strained voice mumbled. “It’s a computer.”
“You can’t just have him drink coffee all the time?”
“ERROR. CRITICAL ERROR.” Owen shoved the second mug of coffee into Ianto’s hand. Ianto drank it automatically. “INTAKE OF SUBSTANCE: COFFEE INSUFFICIENT. INTAKE INTERMITTENT. EFFECTS TEMPORARY.”
“So you need the chemicals that coffee provides in stronger doses.”
“INCORRECT. CHEMICAL COMPOUNDS SATISFACTORY BUT NOT COMPLETE.”
“What do you mean?”
“COMPOUNDS NEEDED FOR FULL FUNCTIONING ARE NON-NATIVE TO PLANET EARTH. SUBSTANCE: COFFEE CONTAINS CLOSEST APPROXIMATION.”
“So we have to find those chemicals, or a supply of them?”
“CORRECT.”
“I’m losing it again,” Ianto said, sounding almost relieved. He shook his head, blinking. Ianto alone was present again; the blank stare of the archive was gone.
“Let me get you another coffee,” Owen said, starting toward the stairs.
“No.”
Owen turned back, frowning. “But we still don’t know what the chemicals that it needs are. Or why it’s failing. Or how to help it properly.”
Ianto’s jaw set mulishly. “It can wait.”
“Yeah, alright. We’ve been pushing you a bit hard, haven’t we? But you’ve figured out the balance, yeah? Why don’t you just keep sipping coffee, and we can ask the archive for more information as we need it.”
Ianto shook his head. “No. Just—let it sleep for now.”
“But—”
“I need a break, Owen. I need a chance to think about everything. And I need to be alone in my own head to do it.”
“Okay. Alright.”
Ianto sighed, dropping his head into his hand for a moment before jerking away again like he’d been burned. “Bloody Torchwood. You know, I thought I understood how fucked up working for this place was—how bad it could mess you up, the unreasonable expectations they put on you, the madness—but this?” He gestured at his head again, looking pained. “I can’t believe they did this to me.”
Owen leaned against the wall. “Well, London was known to be the one that did all the creepy experiments and okayed the bad ideas. I mean, look what happened.”
“London was bad, but really, do you think it's all that different here? If he felt it was necessary, do you think Jack wouldn't sacrifice any one of us?"
Owen scratched at his forehead, moving back into the medbay and pulling the little stool towards him. It was difficult to articulate what he felt about Jack; he barely understood it himself. But Jack had saved him, and Jack was—had been— the most stable thing he’d had in his life for a long time, Jack was the kind of person he wished he could be.
“Jack…he fixes the broken ones. I mean, Tosh, when she first got here, she was a nervous wreck. They had her locked in isolation in UNIT for god knows what and Jack got her out of there. She was freaked out and lost and couldn’t do anything without practically breaking down. And Torchwood made her feel useful and made her think about other things and made her better.
“He takes the people who are useless and dysfunctional beyond belief out there in the real world and makes them useful. And it’s better than, you know, dying in a cell or suicide. I don’t think he’d fuck that up by sacrificing one of us in front of everyone else.”
Owen looked up to see Ianto scrutinizing him. He felt weirdly exposed for some reason, despite the fact that he’d essentially said nothing new. Ianto’s expression narrowed, then relaxed. “You really respect Jack, don’t you?”
His chest felt tight. All of this boiling over at once was too much and he’d never been all that successful when it came to self-preservation. “Well, he recruited me, what do you expect?”
“Anyone with half a brain would’ve recruited you. You’re a medical genius.”
Owen scoffed. Ianto had to know how many people they’d failed to save. How many people he’d failed to save. “Yeah, a genius, all right. ‘Cause half the time I deal with patients who are already dead, and the other half of the time they’re on their way there. Or we’re going to have to make ‘em dead by the end of the day. Living people, I’m not so much of a genius. Can’t even keep them alive most of the time.”
Ianto frowned at him again, expression somewhere between analytical and gentle. “What happened to you, Owen? How did you get involved with Torchwood?”
Owen’s stomach clenched. It always hurt to talk about Katie. He had never gotten over her death, even when he fell in love with Diane. Hell, he hadn’t spoken of her to anyone in years. But Ianto would understand; he knew exactly what it was like to lose a lover because of Torchwood. Still, it felt awkward to pull the cover off of that particular hurt and let it see the light of day. A ragged breath in, and he was still stilted and skewed when he began talking.
“Katie. She was my fiancée. She started having, I dunno, memory lapses suddenly. We thought it was Alzheimer’s even though she was only twenty-four. I couldn’t believe it. I made them do more tests, and they found a tumour. Turns out it was an alien in her brain. It killed her when they tried to do surgery. Jack was there but-but he didn’t save her. He made it look like I was mad. Then he hired me a month later.”
Ianto’s face softened, and for a moment it looked like he was going to pity him, and Owen was ready to go on the defensive. Then the archivist’s expression turned to realization.
“Oh, hell. So when you saw this thing in my head…”
“Yeah.” Owen looked at his hands, plucking at the weave of his jeans.
“But if Jack…framed you, made everyone think you were mad, why did you decide to work for him?”
“Well, I didn’t have anywhere else to go, did I? Anyway, I punched him in the face a couple times and then he convinced me to come work for him. Said I could save more lives working for Torchwood than I could working for the NHS. Not all that accurate, but hell, I was too fucked up to care.”
Ianto sighed and raised an eyebrow in his ever-present sarcastic manner. “Well, he does seem to inspire poor decisions. And punching.”
Owen thought back to all the shitty decisions he’d made with Torchwood, all the times he’d punched Jack. They amounted to quite a lot. But the sound of gunshots still rung in his ears and he ran a hand across his face. “Or more than punching. Man, I fucked up, didn’t I?”
Ianto blinked at him, then frowned, looking extremely confused. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I started it. I got all worked up and I shot him, then I opened the Rift and killed him again. Really, it’s a wonder he didn’t fire me twice. And then he just disappeared. Because of all the shit I did.”
“Owen, we all had a hand in Jack leaving. It wasn’t just you. And,” he added wryly, “I’m pretty sure we all wanted to shoot him at one time or another as well. Hell, now that we know he can’t die, I’m tempted to shoot him myself when he comes back. If he comes back.”
“Well, it’s different now that we know. I thought he was just like any of us…that just makes it worse. I shot him and I thought he was mortal. I thought he’d stay dead and I didn’t bloody care! And now I’m the messed up one. Everyone probably thinks I’m going to freak out and shoot the whole team. You’re probably all scared of me.”
It was strange to be admitting these private things aloud. But now that he’d started, he couldn’t stop. The plug had been pulled and at least he knew Ianto wouldn’t pity him afterward. At least not outwardly.
Ianto’s expression told him that something had fallen into place in the Welshman’s mind, like he’d finally figured something out. He wanted it to hurt, he wanted that to make him angry, but he simply felt mildly intrigued as to how his rambling had changed Ianto’s perception of him. The archivist leaned forward, face solemn.
“You’ve been blaming yourself this whole time, haven’t you? You’re not a monster. That demon screwed with all our heads. That’s what demons do. We’re not scared of you, Owen, and we don’t hate you.”
Ianto’s proclamation actually made Owen feel a little better. Because really, what could be better than being left by your lover and your leader, with no leads on a case that’s killing your coworker, and you learn that your colleagues don’t actually hate you?
He chuckled darkly, staring at his hands twisted and pale in his lap. “Shit. You know you’re pathetic when the best thing that can be said for your life is that your coworkers don’t hate you and probably aren’t going to try and kill you. This sucks.”
Ianto put a hand on Owen’s arm, looking up into his face. “This is going to sound horribly cheesy, but it’s true. We’re not just your coworkers. We’re your friends. I’m your friend. I thought you knew that.”
“You’re right. It is horribly cheesy. Though I doubt you could come up with anything better on your own.”
“Well, you are an intolerable wanker, but I like you anyway.”
“Thanks,” Owen mumbled, really meaning it this time. They paused there for a moment, a vignette of friendship and odd, dark camaraderie. Then Ianto stood quickly and cleared his throat, jerking Owen from his daze.
“Listen, I want to go think this over.”
“Oh. Oh, yeah. Yeah, go do that.” With a nod, Ianto departed for the archives and Owen was left staring after him, his thoughts swirling around in his head.
Just being in the cool silence of the archives made everything feel a little less overwhelming. Ianto breathed in the smells of dust and damp stone and picked a random direction. The neatly labelled and cross-referenced shelves of the stacks marched in even rows on either side of him. The chaos of the universe collated and arranged into patterns. Into something that made sense. If only he could do the same with his life.
Well, he had a name, at least. Artandex. The species that the creature in his head was built from. Surely he'd read something about it at some point. He tried to call up a memory of it, but got nothing. Not even any related data. The drip of water in a distant tunnel and the hum of the mainframe echoed round him, and his mind felt just as hollow, just as empty.
He stopped abruptly as he realised what he was doing. The room seemed to sway in his vision, on the verge of spinning, as if he were about to faint. He sat down instead, the cement floor jarring his spine.
He'd always had an eidetic memory. Even as a kid, once he'd seen or heard or read something he could remember it forever, as clear in his mind as if it were right in front of him. But these last few years, since he'd taken over the archives at Torchwood Three, he'd been able to remember things he could swear he'd never run across before. And even when he couldn't remember the exact thing he was looking for, his mind would fill with a thousand related bits of information.
It wasn't supposed to work like that. It had started so gradually, and he'd been so messed up after Canary Wharf and Lisa, that he hadn't noticed the change. But it wasn't him remembering that data, was it? It had never been him. It was the thing in his head.
‘WE ARE THE TORCHWOOD ONE ARCHIVE’, it had said.
What else had it changed about him? His love for coffee — was that because of it, too? He'd been a typical, tea-loving Welsh boy before Torchwood. He'd put the shift down to exposure —everyone at Torchwood drank coffee by the litre— and maturing tastes, but this thing required it, didn't it? What about his intelligence? It would be a poorly designed implant, he thought bitterly, if it didn't have extra processing capability built in to augment analysis of the expanded data. How much of him was him, and how much was this alien inside him?
He put his forehead down against his knees and tried to hold himself together. He still couldn't comprehend that they'd done this to him, implanted some experimental alien-computer hybrid in his brain without his permission or even knowledge. They must have done it his second year with Torchwood London, when he'd been in hospital having that emergency adenoidectomy. He knew they'd had access to the hospitals.
Betrayal sat in his stomach like a bitter seed he'd swallowed, only a thin husk of denial preventing it from sprouting creeping tendrils of rage to perforate his organs.
He didn't know what to do. He didn't know how he could ever accept this. How could he, when he was left not even knowing who he was?
Owen wandered around his medbay, generally tidying up and moving things about. It wasn’t something he would normally do, but he had nothing to autopsy and he was still lost in thought. Part of him was still hitting himself over the head with guilt about Jack’s disappearance and Katie’s death, while the other part was trying to get his attention to focus on the case. It resulted in a rather weird jumble of half-formed and not at all articulated thoughts slip-sliding through his head.
Ianto fought down the panic clawing its way up the back of his throat. His fit of anguish down in the archives felt stupid now, immature and self-indulgent. Tosh could be dying right in front of them. “What do you need me to do?”
“Help me move her.” Owen ordered.
It only took the two of them to carry her into the autopsy bay. Gwen ran ahead to make sure everything was ready. As soon as they slid her onto the table, Owen turned away to pull out the portable defibrillator.
“CPR!” he barked over his shoulder.
Ianto folded his hands over the centre of Toshiko's chest and began to pump. Her ribs felt strange under his palm in a way he couldn't define. Gwen bent over to blow air into Tosh's lungs.
Owen came up beside him and clipped something onto Tosh's hand. The steady, ominous tone of a flatlined heart rate monitor filled the room.
“Clear!” Owen yelled.
Ianto fell back. Owen slammed the pedals down. Tosh arched violently as the current surged through her.
“No pulse,” Owen announced, gesturing for the two to continue CPR as he charged the defibrillator again. Losing Tosh was not on his list of priorities for the day. He’d do anything he could to save her. He placed the paddles against Tosh’s chest again. “Clear!”
Tosh’s body seized again, but this time the thud of her back hitting the table was accompanied by Ianto’s sigh of relief. “Pulse is back.”
Owen glanced at the screen that monitored Tosh’s heart rate. It was all over the place. “It’s too irregular. If it doesn’t stabilize, she’s not going to make it.”
“Her pulse is still dropping, Owen!” Ianto’s voice was frantic once more as he checked the monitor clipped to her hand.
“Oxygenation’s at eighty percent and going down,” Gwen informed him. Her voice was the flat tone of someone trying to keep as detached as possible in an insane situation.
The defibrillator did nothing as Tosh arched again. Owen’s brain scrambled for another possibility as he watched the numbers plummet on the screens around him. The technician was limp on the table, her chest no longer heaving with the struggle to breathe, and he watched as the beeping slowed, the numbers sliding down to the single digits, and stopped. A silence filled the room, punctuated only by the unending whine of the flatline.
Owen jumped into action, the only movement in the room as the other two stood in shock. Opening a cabinet, he grabbed a laryngoscope and tracheal tube.
“Gwen!” he barked, “Hold this. Give it to me when I say so.”
She approached, taking the tube from him. He stepped behind Tosh’s head, pressing her lower jaw open with his left thumb and keeping her lips back with the index and middle fingers of his right hand. Then he moved his hand so that his thumb and index finger were keeping her mouth open, using his left hand to slide the laryngoscope in and keep her tongue out of the way.
“Gwen.” She handed him the tube, and he slid it down her throat and into her trachea with practised ease. It was something A&E doctors never forgot how to do. He attached the tube to a breathing circuit and handed the bag off to Gwen, who began pumping.
Owen charged the paddles once more. “Clear.” Tosh tensed off the table as the electricity surged through her and thudded back down. The whine of the monitor did not change.
“Ianto!” The Welshman came over and Owen shoved the paddles into his hands. “Standby with the defib.” He rushed to the cabinet again, pulling out a large syringe.
“Epipen?” Gwen asked, confused.
“Yeah. Move.” She shifted to the side, biting her lip as Owen uncapped the needle and stabbed it into Tosh’s chest, pressing the plunger.
Tosh’s body jerked, and simultaneously, the monitor began beeping again. She coughed around the tracheal tube, eyes still closed.
“She’s still unconscious, Owen.”
“Yeah. Yeah. She’s all right, though. She’s trying to breathe on her own. That’s good. You can stop that now,” he indicated Gwen still pressing the inflated bag. “Ianto, get the oxygen and mask, will you?”
Owen slid the tube out of Tosh’s throat, handing it off to Ianto, who gave him the oxygen mask in trade. The Welshman placed the tube in the sink. Owen fitted the mask around Tosh’s nose and mouth. The heart monitor beeped steadily.
“Jesus christ.” Owen’s legs felt wobbly. He braced himself on the table to keep from falling over. He hadn’t had an emergency that had scared him that much since his first years working for A&E.
“Yeah,” Ianto agreed. Gwen nodded. Owen was still shaking. He’d gone into doctor mode, shoving the shock and terror away in order to keep working, keep moving, and now that it was all over, his brain was sliding away from him.
“Keep–keep an eye on her.” He stumbled up the stairs and into the bathroom. Turning on the tap, he splashed cold water on his face, trying to stave off the shakes that were threatening to overtake him. He couldn’t even save his own teammate without freaking out. What did that say about his ability to save all the others? And what about Ianto? Hell, he still had no idea what was going on with anybody. This was completely mad.
Ianto couldn't look away from Tosh's face. They'd come so close to losing her, and it felt like if he looked away for even a moment she might slip away. His pulse was thumping a syncopated counterpoint to hers, two or three beats for every beep from the monitor.
Gwen slid the stool over next to the table and collapsed onto it. “That was close,” she said.
Ianto nodded.
“She's going to be okay now. We got her through it.”
“I should've been paying attention,” Ianto said. “We all knew she was sick. I let myself get distracted by my own problems when I should have been noticing hers.”
Gwen hesitated, smoothing Toshiko's hair. Finally, she shook her head. “It doesn't matter. We—”
The heart monitor shrieked a sudden alarm. Tosh spasmed brutally and arched as if she were being shocked by the defibrillator again. Ianto threw himself forward, onto her, trying to keep her from bucking off the table.
“What the hell's going on in here?” Owen shouted as he ran in.
“I don't know!” Gwen said. “She was fine, and then everything just went crazy!”
Ianto didn't have room to pay attention to anything except holding on. The small body that thrashed under his was uncannily powerful, well beyond the wiry strength Tosh normally possessed. A flailing arm caught him across the cheek and knocked him off onto the floor.
“Get out of my way!’ Owen snapped.
Ianto scrambled to the side and onto his feet. Owen grabbed the defibrillator paddles, rubbed them briskly together and slapped them onto Tosh during a split second in which she stopped moving.
Nothing happened. Her muscles didn't even tighten— at least, no more than they already were.
“Did one of you turn this off? Hold her still, damn you!”
Ianto lunged. He kept his feet on the floor this time and tried to control her arms. One of her legs lashed out and caught the edge of the cart that held the heart monitor and defibrillator. It skidded away across the tiled floor, yanking the paddles out of Owen's hands and pulling the sensor off Tosh's finger. The alarm cut out and Tosh's breathing sounded loud in the sudden silence.
Owen had stopped moving. Ianto looked at him, still wrestling with Tosh's upper body, and saw him staring at Tosh's leg. A new dose of panic jolted through him. “What?”
Owen's only response was a quiet, “Shit.”
“What is it? Owen?”
“This isn't blood. She's bleeding, but this...” He held up a hand, palm and fingers glistening black. “I think it's oil.”
Tosh sucked in a breath, harsh and juddering, and froze. Ianto let go in surprise. She shuddered all over, then the breath whooshed out of her and she collapsed limply onto the table.
Seeming to shake himself out of his daze, Owen grabbed her wrist. “She has a pulse!” he announced. “Wait.”
Caught between relief and dread, Ianto could only watch him.
“That's... That can't be right. Gwen– thank you,” he said when he saw she was already pushing the cart back over to him. He found the sensor and clipped it back on her finger.
The steady, reassuring pulse of a heartbeat sounded almost immediately. Putting a hand down on the edge of the table to steady himself, Ianto let out the breath he'd been holding. Then he heard it. The thing that was bothering Owen. The rhythm was... wrong. Too fast, for one, though it hadn't seemed odd at first considering how fiercely Ianto's own heart was pounding. And too even. You couldn't hear the comforting bumBUM, bumBUM of a normal heartbeat through a monitor, but now even the sense of it was missing. He found Tosh's wrist, fingers slipping in the greasy liquid Owen's fingers had left behind. Her pulse was easy to find, strong and steady. Mechanical. Even skin against skin, it reminded him of nothing so much as the steady ticking of a wind-up toy.
“Oh my God,” Gwen said.
“I know,’ Owen said.
“No. What's happening to her face?”
Almost against his will, Ianto looked. What he saw made him wish he could turn off his perfect recall— though he suspected that even if he had a normal, fallible memory that image would haunt him forever. It looked like the skin on the left side of her face was melting. What it exposed wasn't bone, but rather a brass skull. He could see the jut of her cheekbone, the large gear that replaced her temporomandibular joint, the even steel knobs of her teeth. A thin sheet of copper grew out from her left ear, covering her cheek, and several articulated plates clicked out from its lower edge, attaching to the bronze that now covered her jaw. The skin that covered the left side of her forehead seemed to wither and age, darkening to deep brown. Leather. It covered her eye socket but, as he watched, a hole appeared in the centre of it and dilated like a camera lens. As it opened, her right eye fluttered and opened as well.
“What—” Her voice was hoarse, uneven, but it still sounded like her. “What happened? My mouth feels strange.”
Panic and self-hatred and terror and a horrible doubt of his own capabilities were battling for dominance, roiling Owen’s stomach. The sight of Tosh’s face now distorted and replaced by an approximation of angles and gears and metal bits terrified him. He had watched her change and he hadn’t been able to do a thing to stop it.
He could feel the meltdown in process, the tension riding its way from the top of his head all the way down his body, the tell-tale prickle at the back of his eyes. He cleared his throat.
“Gwen, why don’t you get Tosh a cup of tea and let her know what’s just occurred?”
“Alright,” Gwen agreed, helping Tosh off the table. “Come on, Tosh.”
Tosh hobbled up the stairs with Gwen at her elbow. Tosh was looking resolutely forward but all of them had to look at her, couldn’t bear to look at her, couldn’t stand the fear. Owen waited until they were well out of earshot before sinking into a chair, tugging at his hair.
“I can’t do this. This is fucking mad. I’m not a good enough doctor for this stuff. I spend most of my time here killing things or looking at dead things. I’m no good at keeping the living alive. And I have no idea what’s going on. I’m useless.”
He felt Ianto shift beside him. “Owen—”
“No, seriously, mate, I don’t get it. Why are all of you depending on me? I haven’t got a clue what the fuck I’m doing, and when I do figure it out, I’m shit at it anyway. You should be relying on someone, but that sure as hell shouldn’t be me.” Owen kicked the leg of the table. “I didn’t have a clue what to do back there. And now Tosh is…like that, and we have no idea what happens when it gets worse. And then there’s you… I’m rubbish. I won’t be able to save anyone.”
He ran both hands down his face in attempt to calm himself. It didn’t work. The words were still spilling out at an alarming rate and he had the feeling he’d regret this meltdown later, but it certainly wasn’t going stop now.
“You and Tosh are best friends, you’re shagging Jack, even you and Gwen have a laugh. Me, I’m just here by m’self. And you lot are clever. You and Tosh figure things out or know things in an instant, Gwen goes off and investigates things and talks to people, and Jack is just fucking omniscient. I let the computer do the work, and when I actually have to do things, well, you saw what happened.
“Everyone else is so bloody good at compartmentalizing and thinking things through and knowing when shit doesn’t matter and I just go mad. That machine that we found when Gwen first got here? The one with the two halves? After I saw…what I saw, I couldn’t think of anything else. It was decades old and I couldn’t do a thing about it but I couldn’t get it out of my head. So I went out of my head and just…you know. Felt like shit after, but that’s how it works with me. You all can control yourselves, your reactions, the way you handle the shit you see. I just can’t and then I fuck everything up.”
Owen wasn’t even going to mention his enormous reaction to Diane’s departure or the out of control drinking sprees he’d gone on after Ianto’s cyber-girlfriend had destroyed the place and when they’d gotten home from Brynblaidd.
“My life is just a sodding mess.” He muttered. “I’m incapable of helping any of you. Really, you should find someone more competent. Jack was right for firing me. I would have done.”
The image of Jack’s solemn face as he forgave him came to his mind and he felt guilt and self-loathing clench his gut and claw at his chest. He hadn’t deserved forgiveness, not for opening the Rift, not for killing Jack, not for so royally fucking things up.
“Oh, stop bloody whinging already,” Ianto snapped. He was still feeling sick and shaky from Tosh's crisis, and Owen was losing it completely, standing there feeling sorry for himself and about to give up, and suddenly Ianto just couldn't take it anymore.
Owen's head whipped round. “Oi!”
Ianto spoke right over the top of him. He was furious— at Owen, at himself, at Torchwood, at the whole damned mess. “This isn't about you, Owen. You think you're the only one who's scared? You think you're the only one who doesn't know what to do?”
“You don't understand—”
“No, I think I do.” His hands curved into fists and he turned away abruptly and stalked across the room. “You want to give up. It's all gotten to be too much for poor little Owen and you want to run away and go lick your wounds.”
Owen glared. “I'm no coward,” he snarled.
“You bloody well sound like one!” Ianto shouted. “Well, guess what? You don't get to quit, none of us do. You have responsibilities here— Tosh almost died. And she's sitting out there right now, drinking tea through a mouth that’s half made of metal.”
“I know that!”
“You think she doesn't want to go home and have a nice dinner and not have to worry about Torchwood? Instead she's here, working on saving everybody else's arses when we don't even know if she'll be human by morning!”
“I can't fix her!”
“So what? That's no excuse to give up on her!” Owen had gone dead white, his eyes like black holes in his face. Something dark twisted in Ianto's gut, guilt or pity or fear, but he couldn't stop. He wasn't even sure that he was yelling at Owen, now, or if Owen just happened to be a convenient target. “You selfish bastard. You shouldn't even be thinking about your own pathetic little problems! They don't matter. Deal with your crap on your own time, but the team comes first. You forget that and you really are a worthless piece of shit!”
With an incoherent sound of rage, Owen charged. He knocked Ianto to the floor with one shoulder, landing on top of him. Ianto got an elbow up. The shoulder seam of his suit jacket ripped. Owen's hand clamped round his throat and Ianto lashed up with one knee. It met the taut line of muscle instead of the soft testicles he'd been aiming for. A fist slammed into his cheek and pain exploded across his face. Damn, it felt good. Another fist struck his ribs. He bucked up, hit Owen in the nose with his forehead.
Owen howled and rolled off of him, and Ianto followed, catching him under the jaw with a right hook. He could taste blood, sweet and metallic, and realised he was grinning madly. Owen wrapped his arms around Ianto's shoulders, pinning his arms down where he couldn't use them. Someone's foot caught the crash cart and spun it across the room to slam into the exam table. The fight degenerated into a contest of strength as they each struggled to keep the other pinned whilst freeing themselves.
“What the hell?” Gwen's voice, floating down from the doorway, sounded livid.
Owen let his head fall back against the floor and Ianto stopped trying to choke him.
“It's nothing,” Owen said wearily.
“You're trying to kill each other!”
Ianto let himself collapse boneless across Owen's chest. “We're fine, Gwen,” he called.
She still sounded angry. “I can't believe you two thought this was an appropriate time for this kind of behaviour.”
Owen chuckled, bouncing Ianto's head up and down. “You wouldn't understand, sweetheart,” he said.
“Men,” Gwen huffed, but she left.
Owen craned his neck to look down at Ianto, smirking. “Are you hard?”
He was, actually. It had been too long since he'd been wrapped round another body, and adrenaline from the fight still zinged along his nerves. He groaned and rolled off of Owen onto his back.
“You're fucked up,” Owen said, conversationally.
Ianto smiled wryly at the ceiling. “I can't argue with that.”
Owen stood and held out a hand. “Let's go get cleaned up, yeah?”
§
Ianto's reflection stared back at him mournfully. His cheek was swollen and split, and his face covered in blood— his and Owen's both. His jacket was torn and filthy, his shirt stained with more blood, his tie askew and his hair a complete disaster. At least he kept a spare set of clothes here.
He walked past Owen, who was scrubbing his face under the tap, and got it. He stripped off his ruined suit and used the back of the shirt, which was still relatively clean, as a flannel to wipe off his face and chest.
“Ouch,” Owen said, poking at his nose. “You fight dirty.”
Ianto smiled. “Rugby.”
“Bloody Welsh.”
“Hey.” Ianto paused, water dripping off his chin, to figure out what, exactly, he should say. “I shouldn't have said that to you.”
Owen snorted. “Which part?”
“All of it. Well, most of it, anyway.”
Owen shrugged, shoulders stiff and jerky. “You were right.”
He was closing himself off again, trying to hide his fear and uncertainty away where the rest of them couldn't see it. Where it would fester. Ianto put a hand on his shoulder and turned him so he could see his face. “I wasn't. I wasn't even talking to you, really.”
“Yeah? You had some pretty damned accurate hits for shooting blind, mate.”
“I wasn't shooting blind. I was aiming at myself.” Owen was looking everywhere but at him. Ianto sighed. “We're all just muddling through, Owen, no matter what it looks like to you. Even Jack. I've heard the nightmares he has when he actually sleeps. Seen him when he's falling apart and doesn't know what to do and is sure he's screwing up.”
“This would be an easier conversation to have if you'd put some clothes on,” Owen said.
“No, it wouldn't.” But Ianto let go of him and pulled his shirt on. “All I'm saying is, you're not doing any worse than any of the rest of us.”
Something crumbled in Owen's face, some last defence or desperate pretence, and he finally met Ianto's eyes. “But I am,” he said. “I know it's not easy on any of us, I know you all struggle. But I fall apart. I just can't keep doing this.”
Ianto considered as he finished buttoning his shirt. “Maybe you just can't keep doing it the way you have been,” he said as he pulled on clean pants and reached for his trousers.
“What do you mean?” It sounded like Owen wanted to be suspicious, but it just came out sounding tired.
“You push us all away, pretend you're too tough to need any help or even any comfort. None of the rest of us does it alone. Gwen has Rhys, and had you for a while. I have Tosh, and sometimes I think maybe I have Jack. Tosh has me, and Jack goes to this bar sometimes— I don't know who he talks to there, but most of the time he comes back calmer, a little more confident.”
Owen turned back to the basin. “And I have no one.”
“That's where you're wrong.” Ianto crossed his arms and tried to will Owen to believe him. “You have all of us.”
A low, bitter laugh answered him. “Yeah, sure. Gwen hates me, even if she did let me fuck her for a while. Tosh is too in love with the idea of me to even see the real me. Jack would never understand, not really, and you...”
“What about me?”
“Like you have any tolerance for dealing with my shit.” Owen hunched over the basin. “If you can't label it, file it and index it, there's no room for it in your life, is there?”
Ianto fought down a surge of defensive anger. Owen lashed out when he felt vulnerable, Ianto knew that, and letting that push his buttons right now would defeat the purpose of making him have this conversation in the first place. He pulled his tie round his neck and focussed on knotting it until his jaw unclenched. Once he could speak without showing his annoyance, he said, “Look. I know we don't always get along. We're not much alike, and the way we deal with stuff is usually diametrically opposed. But I do understand what Torchwood does to a man, and I will listen.”
Owen sneered, but it was half-hearted. “I don't see how talking about it solves anything.”
“You could always just punch me again.”
That startled an actual laugh out of Owen.
“I do reserve the right to hit you back, though,” Ianto clarified.
“Hell, you'll probably headbutt me again.”
“Only if you're being a complete arse.”
“That would be every time, then.” Owen looked up and met Ianto's eyes in the mirror, and they both snickered.
Ianto took a deep breath. “Finding out today what Torchwood did to me . . . it's really shaken me.” He gestured at his head. “I guess I'd still felt, on some level, that Torchwood was something I could believe in. Something I could rely on to make things better. But it's not. Torchwood chases its own agenda, and we're just tools. Human resources. I've always thought that term was overly calculating, but Torchwood takes it to a whole new level.” He twisted his lips and shook his head. “What I'm saying is, all we have is each other. So I promise you here and now— when you need me, I'll be there. Whether you need somebody to talk to, or get pissed with, or an extra set of hands in the lab or backup on a mission, or hell, a chance to mutually beat someone to a pulp. I will be there for you.”
Owen dropped his eyes and stood silently for a long time. Long enough that Ianto began to worry he'd put his foot in it. Finally, Owen spoke to the wall. “I don't know that I'll be able to trust that. Not right away.”
“Then I guess I'll just have to prove it to you.”
The silence this time was companionable. Ianto wetted and combed his hair, enjoying the still calm that had finally settled on him. The eye of the storm— as soon as they went back out they'd have to deal with Tosh and the virus spreading across the city— but for right now, he'd take the sense of peace for however long it lasted. And there, sitting inside him, was a decision he hadn't realised he'd made.
“I'm going to let this thing in my head die,” he told Owen.
“What?”
“The Archive, or whatever it's calling itself. I'm not going to do anything to save it.”
“Are you sure?”
He nodded. “It's an alien. We're not in the business of rescuing aliens, are we? And it's at least half computer, anyway, it's not like it's really alive. Besides, we need to focus on stopping the virus— on saving Tosh. That's what really matters here. Wasting time on a problem that's going to solve itself could cost us the chance to fix the real crisis. And that would be beyond stupid; it would be criminal.”
Owen finished washing up in companionable silence with Ianto and slipped out of the washroom. Somehow, the fight with Ianto and his later support had lifted something from his chest. The tension he’d been riding in waves was calmer now, the fear and doubt crouched at the bottom of his stomach like a menacing ghoul had shrunk back into itself, and his helpless anger had diminished from spitting flames to simple sparks of annoyance at Jack.
He made his way to the main part of the hub, partly entertaining the idea of apologizing to Gwen. He decided against it. The fight had been between him and Ianto, and Gwen didn’t really come into it.
He approached the bank of computers, rounding the flickering screens to find Tosh seated on the sofa, looking in a mirror with Gwen beside her. The doubt came rushing back, little niggling thoughts whispering to him that he wouldn’t be able to save Tosh, and she’d be like this, wrong, forever. That she’d never forgive him. That he’d never forgive himself. It stopped him just short of the top of the stairs.
Tosh heard his feet scuff the cement and looked up at him. She smiled; it looked odd with one half of her face, but it was genuine. “Owen, this is amazing. The mechanisms that have combined to make my face are incredible!” She giggled. “I fascinate myself!”
Owen approached cautiously, still queasy about looking at Tosh’s mutated face. “Are you sure you’re not drunk on shock?”
“Oh, probably a bit. But, really, this is amazing.” She moved her eyes up and down, obviously captivated by the movement of the camera lens that had replaced her eye. “I know it’s weird, but a part of me is thrilled that I get to have an experience like this. I mean, who else has ever had the chance to become the kind of machines they study?”
“You are very weird,” Gwen commented.
“Comes with the territory.”
Owen frowned. “So…you’re okay with it?”
“Well, I mean, it’s not great. But I can still think, I still have sensation, I still have emotion. I’m just…more computer-y. It’s not all bad.”
Something else released inside Owen and he sighed. The feeling that he’d failed Tosh, that he’d destroyed her was gone, leaving behind only a little bit of weary resignation that he might not cure this no matter how hard he tried. He pushed its sluggish tendrils away and smiled at Tosh.
“Well, girls, I’m glad we had that chat. I’m hungry. Anyone else care for some food? There’s Thai in the fridge that we can reheat.”
“Me!” Tosh raised her hand like a schoolgirl. “Whatever this thing is, it seems to take a lot of energy. I’m starving.”
“Me, too.” Ianto joined them, sitting down beside Tosh, who turned to him with a smile and began speaking excitedly. Owen watched them for a moment, then made his way back to the kitchen area to get the cartons and paper plates for everyone.
They’d just finished eating, and were discussing anything and everything that was as far away from the current situation as possible, when Tosh’s computers starting buzzing and beeping and making every sort of racket known to man.
“What’s happening?”
Tosh’s fingers flew across the keyboard, accessing maps and scrolling data and matrices and calculations and garbled news reports.
“It looks like the infection has spread to over half the population. Data’s giving me sixty-one percent infection, but it could be more.”
“Shit!” Owen hit the top of the desk. This was out of control.
Gwen looked on worriedly, then her eyes widened and she grabbed her gun off her desk. “I need to go find Rhys!” she shouted. Ianto reached to stop her, but she brushed him off. “I’ll be fine. I’ve got a mask and gloves.”
The cog door screamed open and closed and she was gone. Owen sagged against the table. Now it was really out of control.
“What can we do?” Ianto asked.
“Well, I don’t know how quickly people are being infected, or how fast the infection is spreading and converting each person’s body, so we’re going to have to monitor that before we can figure it out.”
“Alright,” Owen straightened. “Tosh, why don’t you work your computer wizardry and get a program going that will keep that on watch.”
“Already on it.”
“Thanks.”
Ianto gripped Owen’s arm as he passed. “What if she brings Rhys back here? What are we going to do?”
“We’re gonna scan him for this virus thing. If he’s clear, we make him sit around on the sofa or in the boardroom or something. Just keep him out of our way. If he isn’t…”
“We throw him out on the street?”
“Well, I was going to suggest killing him, but your idea makes Gwen less likely to kill us.”
With Gwen gone, they were stretched too thin to get done half of what needed doing. Owen was in his lab, trying to rush the results on the tests he'd been running on the converted rat. Tosh was focussing on analysis of the virus from an epidemiological standpoint, muttering to herself about R-noughts and vectors of transmission. That left Ianto trying to do both his job and Gwen's. He had Sky News up on one monitor as, on another, he attempted to find something —anything— in the archives that would give them some kind of advantage. Every few minutes, the phone would ring as everyone from the local police to the Home Secretary called to find out what was going on and what the hell Torchwood was doing about it.
None of it looked good.
For now, the police were managing to keep things under control, if barely. There had been some looting in Adamsdown and Canton, but that was hardly surprising, and elsewhere in the city things were strained but still relatively calm. That didn't look like it was going to last long. Automatons were everywhere, some of them attacking people or each other, some just standing there, some acting confused or erratic. Almost two thirds of the people on the news footage showed some evidence of infection.
His search of the archives was turning up nothing. The search-and-analyse Tosh had run earlier was still the best they had, and it was so sketchy it didn't tell him much more than he already knew. Whatever connection Torchwood London had had to this virus, they had covered their tracks thoroughly.
He finally wrapped up his conversation with the Downing Street Chief of Staff, which mostly consisted of him saying “Uh-huh” as the man ranted, and repeating the phrases “We're doing everything in our power to handle the situation” and “I'll inform you as soon as we have any news whatsoever, sir” as often as necessary. Damn Jack for running off and leaving them, anyway.
There was just no way he was going to be able to do this without coffee. He'd been avoiding the thought as long as he could, but coffee was his comfort, the thing that steadied him and made him believe that he could manage, no matter how bad the situation was. Just the smell of it made him feel calmer and more in control. The fact that this thing in his head had complicated that —had ruined it— probably pissed him off more than anything else about the situation.
He didn't take the time to do anything complicated, as much as he wanted to. Just a mug of regular brew with a splash of cream. It was enough. He started sipping it as he walked back to his workstation. Slowly— he couldn't afford to let the interloper take control of his brain. It tasted absolutely fantastic.
He dove back into his work as soon as he got there, though. He decided the phone could just ring, no matter who was on the other end of the line, and focussed on squeezing information out of the archives. That was what he was best at. That was how he was most likely to make a difference.
[ATTEMPT A SEARCH WITH PARAMETERS ' ASHTON-UNDER-LYNE' AND 'RODERICK']
The voice was so quiet he almost didn't notice it. He found himself opening a new search window and typing in the terms before he realised the source of the idea. He clicked it closed. [Bugger off!] he thought viciously
[ASSISTANCE REQUESTED YES NO?]
[What does that even mean?]
[ATTEMPTING. I. I AM ATTEMPTING]
Was it glitching again? Was he going to start spewing random information again? Blacking out?
[I AM ATTEMPTING TO . . . HELP YOU]
Nausea cramped his stomach. God, it was trying to talk to him. Like a . . . person.
[I AM... AM NOT. I AM NOT YOUR ENEMY, IANTO]
Ianto reached out spasmodically and flung his mug to the floor with a violent shove. The crack of the ceramic shattering sounded like breaking bone. The smell of coffee made him want to retch. [Go to hell.] he thought.
Go To Part 4
Authors:
qafkinnetic & solvingfor42Characters/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_festAuthors' 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.'
Owen had to clamp his teeth together to keep his mouth from falling open. Instead, he let his doctor instincts take over and began to examine the situation, and Ianto, objectively. Ianto seemed to be okay. Fear and surprise were bright in his eyes, but those emotions were mirrored in everyone else’s expressions as well. His face was pale, his hands clenched around the empty coffee mug. They needed to figure out what the thing—the Archive wanted, why it was talking now. He stood up.
Ianto blinked, and suddenly the blankness was gone from his eyes. Owen turned to the girls.
“Tosh, I want you to go through all of our files and find what you can on Torchwood One’s archives and their archiving system. Gwen, I suppose you should call Archie or whoever’s over at Torchwood House and ask them if they’ve ever encountered anything like this. If they ask where Jack is, derail. We don’t want to let on that we’re on our own here.”
“But what about—?” Gwen gestured wordlessly at Ianto, still trying to comprehend. Tosh had a look on her face like she wanted to open up Ianto’s skull and poke around at the computer inside, and Owen felt a bizarre need to protect Ianto.
“It’s okay. We’ll deal with it.” He turned, beckoned Ianto, and strode out of the station area towards Jack’s office. Ianto followed. Turning, he pointed at the mug in Ianto’s hand.
“Alright, go make three of those.”
“What, are you going to make me chug all of them?”
“No, one for me because I’m hopelessly addicted and watching you drink the stuff has made me want more. And two for you. I know it sucks having an audience. I want to talk to the archive one on one and figure out what it wants.”
“Help. It wants help.”
“Yeah, I know that. But we don’t know why. And we don’t know how to help it. I’m a doctor; it’s my job to help things that need it. And maybe helping it will fix you. So hop to it!”
Ianto rolled his eyes and retreated to the kitchen area. The smell of coffee rose and swirled and Owen’s curiosity reared its odd little head. What kind of creature —other than the team itself— was fuelled by coffee? Was that a design by Torchwood, or an evolutionary tactic by the archive itself? Ianto drank coffee all the time, why didn’t it show itself before? What the hell was going on?
Ianto returned with a tray of coffee and followed Owen down to the medical bay. Owen gestured to his computer chair.
“Not the table?” Ianto asked.
“It’s uncomfortable. I mean, unless you really want to…”
“No, no, it’s okay. Just, where are you going to sit?”
“I’ll stand. Seriously, I can stand for hours at a time.” He took a drink of his coffee and looked pointedly at the mugs on the table near Ianto’s elbow. “Now drink.”
Ianto did. It was mesmerizing to watch the slow change as he sipped the coffee. At first he was completely present, face wary, grip solid. Then his face began to slacken into a blank inexpressive slate, his eyes lost their presence as something new and logical came forward, his grip on the coffee mug loosened so that Owen had to catch it to keep it from falling and place it on the table.
Owen crouched and peered up into Ianto’s face. “Ianto? You still there?”
Ianto’s throat worked. “Yes.” The reply was slow to come and unsteady.
“Can the archive hear me?”
Ianto’s eyes seemed to flicker. “YES.” The voice was different from Ianto’s, lacking an accent or any proper inflection.
“You are the Torchwood One Archive?”
“INCORRECT. WE ARE THE TORCHWOOD ONE ARCHIVE.”
“We? You mean Ianto and you?”
“YES. WE ARE TORCHWOOD ONE ARCHIVE.”
Owen let the confirmation settle in his head. Torchwood One had put an archive of biotechnology into the head of at least one of their employees. He already knew Torchwood had been experimenting with the limits of cyborg technology, but the fact that they’d gone so far as to use their own employees as substitute motherboards was shocking in a rather dark way.
“You said you’re dying. What are you dying of?”
“ERROR: QUERY UNCLEAR.”
So it thought logically; it really was closer to a computer. “What is causing your death?”
“BIOLOGICAL INCOMPATIBILITY. SYMBIONT CHEMICAL BALANCE IS INSUFFICIENT.”
“The chemicals in his body—no, his brain—are at levels that are damaging to you.”
“CORRECT.”
“I’m sorry, but we can’t go changing the chemicals in his body for you to live. It might kill him.”
“INCORRECT. BIOLOGICAL CHEMICALS ARE IN CONSTANT FLUX. PRODUCTION OF CHEMICAL LEVELS NEEDED POSSIBLE. APPROXIMATE LEVELS HAVE BEEN REACHED BEFORE.”
“You work when he drinks coffee. What chemicals cause you to function?”
“COMPOUND C8H10N4O2 AND COMPOUND C7H8N4O2.”
“I’m sorry. You’re going to have to restate that in colloquial English.”
“CHEMICALS CAFFEINE AND PARAXANTHINE.”
“And you don’t acquire enough even with all the coffee he drinks? Wow.”
“NO.”
“That—that was a rhetorical question.”
“You can’t be sarcastic with it, Owen.” Ianto’s strained voice mumbled. “It’s a computer.”
“You can’t just have him drink coffee all the time?”
“ERROR. CRITICAL ERROR.” Owen shoved the second mug of coffee into Ianto’s hand. Ianto drank it automatically. “INTAKE OF SUBSTANCE: COFFEE INSUFFICIENT. INTAKE INTERMITTENT. EFFECTS TEMPORARY.”
“So you need the chemicals that coffee provides in stronger doses.”
“INCORRECT. CHEMICAL COMPOUNDS SATISFACTORY BUT NOT COMPLETE.”
“What do you mean?”
“COMPOUNDS NEEDED FOR FULL FUNCTIONING ARE NON-NATIVE TO PLANET EARTH. SUBSTANCE: COFFEE CONTAINS CLOSEST APPROXIMATION.”
“So we have to find those chemicals, or a supply of them?”
“CORRECT.”
“I’m losing it again,” Ianto said, sounding almost relieved. He shook his head, blinking. Ianto alone was present again; the blank stare of the archive was gone.
“Let me get you another coffee,” Owen said, starting toward the stairs.
“No.”
Owen turned back, frowning. “But we still don’t know what the chemicals that it needs are. Or why it’s failing. Or how to help it properly.”
Ianto’s jaw set mulishly. “It can wait.”
“Yeah, alright. We’ve been pushing you a bit hard, haven’t we? But you’ve figured out the balance, yeah? Why don’t you just keep sipping coffee, and we can ask the archive for more information as we need it.”
Ianto shook his head. “No. Just—let it sleep for now.”
“But—”
“I need a break, Owen. I need a chance to think about everything. And I need to be alone in my own head to do it.”
“Okay. Alright.”
Ianto sighed, dropping his head into his hand for a moment before jerking away again like he’d been burned. “Bloody Torchwood. You know, I thought I understood how fucked up working for this place was—how bad it could mess you up, the unreasonable expectations they put on you, the madness—but this?” He gestured at his head again, looking pained. “I can’t believe they did this to me.”
Owen leaned against the wall. “Well, London was known to be the one that did all the creepy experiments and okayed the bad ideas. I mean, look what happened.”
“London was bad, but really, do you think it's all that different here? If he felt it was necessary, do you think Jack wouldn't sacrifice any one of us?"
Owen scratched at his forehead, moving back into the medbay and pulling the little stool towards him. It was difficult to articulate what he felt about Jack; he barely understood it himself. But Jack had saved him, and Jack was—had been— the most stable thing he’d had in his life for a long time, Jack was the kind of person he wished he could be.
“Jack…he fixes the broken ones. I mean, Tosh, when she first got here, she was a nervous wreck. They had her locked in isolation in UNIT for god knows what and Jack got her out of there. She was freaked out and lost and couldn’t do anything without practically breaking down. And Torchwood made her feel useful and made her think about other things and made her better.
“He takes the people who are useless and dysfunctional beyond belief out there in the real world and makes them useful. And it’s better than, you know, dying in a cell or suicide. I don’t think he’d fuck that up by sacrificing one of us in front of everyone else.”
Owen looked up to see Ianto scrutinizing him. He felt weirdly exposed for some reason, despite the fact that he’d essentially said nothing new. Ianto’s expression narrowed, then relaxed. “You really respect Jack, don’t you?”
His chest felt tight. All of this boiling over at once was too much and he’d never been all that successful when it came to self-preservation. “Well, he recruited me, what do you expect?”
“Anyone with half a brain would’ve recruited you. You’re a medical genius.”
Owen scoffed. Ianto had to know how many people they’d failed to save. How many people he’d failed to save. “Yeah, a genius, all right. ‘Cause half the time I deal with patients who are already dead, and the other half of the time they’re on their way there. Or we’re going to have to make ‘em dead by the end of the day. Living people, I’m not so much of a genius. Can’t even keep them alive most of the time.”
Ianto frowned at him again, expression somewhere between analytical and gentle. “What happened to you, Owen? How did you get involved with Torchwood?”
Owen’s stomach clenched. It always hurt to talk about Katie. He had never gotten over her death, even when he fell in love with Diane. Hell, he hadn’t spoken of her to anyone in years. But Ianto would understand; he knew exactly what it was like to lose a lover because of Torchwood. Still, it felt awkward to pull the cover off of that particular hurt and let it see the light of day. A ragged breath in, and he was still stilted and skewed when he began talking.
“Katie. She was my fiancée. She started having, I dunno, memory lapses suddenly. We thought it was Alzheimer’s even though she was only twenty-four. I couldn’t believe it. I made them do more tests, and they found a tumour. Turns out it was an alien in her brain. It killed her when they tried to do surgery. Jack was there but-but he didn’t save her. He made it look like I was mad. Then he hired me a month later.”
Ianto’s face softened, and for a moment it looked like he was going to pity him, and Owen was ready to go on the defensive. Then the archivist’s expression turned to realization.
“Oh, hell. So when you saw this thing in my head…”
“Yeah.” Owen looked at his hands, plucking at the weave of his jeans.
“But if Jack…framed you, made everyone think you were mad, why did you decide to work for him?”
“Well, I didn’t have anywhere else to go, did I? Anyway, I punched him in the face a couple times and then he convinced me to come work for him. Said I could save more lives working for Torchwood than I could working for the NHS. Not all that accurate, but hell, I was too fucked up to care.”
Ianto sighed and raised an eyebrow in his ever-present sarcastic manner. “Well, he does seem to inspire poor decisions. And punching.”
Owen thought back to all the shitty decisions he’d made with Torchwood, all the times he’d punched Jack. They amounted to quite a lot. But the sound of gunshots still rung in his ears and he ran a hand across his face. “Or more than punching. Man, I fucked up, didn’t I?”
Ianto blinked at him, then frowned, looking extremely confused. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I started it. I got all worked up and I shot him, then I opened the Rift and killed him again. Really, it’s a wonder he didn’t fire me twice. And then he just disappeared. Because of all the shit I did.”
“Owen, we all had a hand in Jack leaving. It wasn’t just you. And,” he added wryly, “I’m pretty sure we all wanted to shoot him at one time or another as well. Hell, now that we know he can’t die, I’m tempted to shoot him myself when he comes back. If he comes back.”
“Well, it’s different now that we know. I thought he was just like any of us…that just makes it worse. I shot him and I thought he was mortal. I thought he’d stay dead and I didn’t bloody care! And now I’m the messed up one. Everyone probably thinks I’m going to freak out and shoot the whole team. You’re probably all scared of me.”
It was strange to be admitting these private things aloud. But now that he’d started, he couldn’t stop. The plug had been pulled and at least he knew Ianto wouldn’t pity him afterward. At least not outwardly.
Ianto’s expression told him that something had fallen into place in the Welshman’s mind, like he’d finally figured something out. He wanted it to hurt, he wanted that to make him angry, but he simply felt mildly intrigued as to how his rambling had changed Ianto’s perception of him. The archivist leaned forward, face solemn.
“You’ve been blaming yourself this whole time, haven’t you? You’re not a monster. That demon screwed with all our heads. That’s what demons do. We’re not scared of you, Owen, and we don’t hate you.”
Ianto’s proclamation actually made Owen feel a little better. Because really, what could be better than being left by your lover and your leader, with no leads on a case that’s killing your coworker, and you learn that your colleagues don’t actually hate you?
He chuckled darkly, staring at his hands twisted and pale in his lap. “Shit. You know you’re pathetic when the best thing that can be said for your life is that your coworkers don’t hate you and probably aren’t going to try and kill you. This sucks.”
Ianto put a hand on Owen’s arm, looking up into his face. “This is going to sound horribly cheesy, but it’s true. We’re not just your coworkers. We’re your friends. I’m your friend. I thought you knew that.”
“You’re right. It is horribly cheesy. Though I doubt you could come up with anything better on your own.”
“Well, you are an intolerable wanker, but I like you anyway.”
“Thanks,” Owen mumbled, really meaning it this time. They paused there for a moment, a vignette of friendship and odd, dark camaraderie. Then Ianto stood quickly and cleared his throat, jerking Owen from his daze.
“Listen, I want to go think this over.”
“Oh. Oh, yeah. Yeah, go do that.” With a nod, Ianto departed for the archives and Owen was left staring after him, his thoughts swirling around in his head.
Just being in the cool silence of the archives made everything feel a little less overwhelming. Ianto breathed in the smells of dust and damp stone and picked a random direction. The neatly labelled and cross-referenced shelves of the stacks marched in even rows on either side of him. The chaos of the universe collated and arranged into patterns. Into something that made sense. If only he could do the same with his life.
Well, he had a name, at least. Artandex. The species that the creature in his head was built from. Surely he'd read something about it at some point. He tried to call up a memory of it, but got nothing. Not even any related data. The drip of water in a distant tunnel and the hum of the mainframe echoed round him, and his mind felt just as hollow, just as empty.
He stopped abruptly as he realised what he was doing. The room seemed to sway in his vision, on the verge of spinning, as if he were about to faint. He sat down instead, the cement floor jarring his spine.
He'd always had an eidetic memory. Even as a kid, once he'd seen or heard or read something he could remember it forever, as clear in his mind as if it were right in front of him. But these last few years, since he'd taken over the archives at Torchwood Three, he'd been able to remember things he could swear he'd never run across before. And even when he couldn't remember the exact thing he was looking for, his mind would fill with a thousand related bits of information.
It wasn't supposed to work like that. It had started so gradually, and he'd been so messed up after Canary Wharf and Lisa, that he hadn't noticed the change. But it wasn't him remembering that data, was it? It had never been him. It was the thing in his head.
‘WE ARE THE TORCHWOOD ONE ARCHIVE’, it had said.
What else had it changed about him? His love for coffee — was that because of it, too? He'd been a typical, tea-loving Welsh boy before Torchwood. He'd put the shift down to exposure —everyone at Torchwood drank coffee by the litre— and maturing tastes, but this thing required it, didn't it? What about his intelligence? It would be a poorly designed implant, he thought bitterly, if it didn't have extra processing capability built in to augment analysis of the expanded data. How much of him was him, and how much was this alien inside him?
He put his forehead down against his knees and tried to hold himself together. He still couldn't comprehend that they'd done this to him, implanted some experimental alien-computer hybrid in his brain without his permission or even knowledge. They must have done it his second year with Torchwood London, when he'd been in hospital having that emergency adenoidectomy. He knew they'd had access to the hospitals.
Betrayal sat in his stomach like a bitter seed he'd swallowed, only a thin husk of denial preventing it from sprouting creeping tendrils of rage to perforate his organs.
He didn't know what to do. He didn't know how he could ever accept this. How could he, when he was left not even knowing who he was?
Owen wandered around his medbay, generally tidying up and moving things about. It wasn’t something he would normally do, but he had nothing to autopsy and he was still lost in thought. Part of him was still hitting himself over the head with guilt about Jack’s disappearance and Katie’s death, while the other part was trying to get his attention to focus on the case. It resulted in a rather weird jumble of half-formed and not at all articulated thoughts slip-sliding through his head.
It was difficult to separate the loss of Katie and, really, the loss of Jack, from the impending threat of losing Tosh and possibly Ianto. It was why he’d joined Torchwood in the first place, why he’d come up with the spiky, acerbic demeanour. He’d never been good at self-preservation in some of the more crucial moments, but if he could shield himself from the little hurts, or keep people from getting too close, he might have the chance of not getting hurt when someone left. A thud sounded from the main hub, the familiar sound of a body hitting concrete. He bolted out of the bay towards the computer stations. Tosh was curled in the foetal position on the floor, a hand over her chest, panting shallowly. Her face was ashen, sweat beaded on her forehead.
“Tosh? Gwen!” Gwen appeared a moment later. “Bekaran scanner! Now!”
The tech was tossed to him, followed by Gwen as she dropped to her knees on Tosh’s other side. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. She just keeled over. Scanning now.”
The scanner beeped over Tosh, lights flashing. Owen’s eyes widened as he stared at the image on the screen.
“Owen?” Ianto had heard the commotion and come up from the archives. “What’s wrong?”
“Her internal organs have all been converted. Her heart’s changing now. The mechanics of the Weevil’s machine-heart was much different from the mechanics of a human heart.”
“Will it kill her?”
“I don’t know.”
Ianto fought down the panic clawing its way up the back of his throat. His fit of anguish down in the archives felt stupid now, immature and self-indulgent. Tosh could be dying right in front of them. “What do you need me to do?”
“Help me move her.” Owen ordered.
It only took the two of them to carry her into the autopsy bay. Gwen ran ahead to make sure everything was ready. As soon as they slid her onto the table, Owen turned away to pull out the portable defibrillator.
“CPR!” he barked over his shoulder.
Ianto folded his hands over the centre of Toshiko's chest and began to pump. Her ribs felt strange under his palm in a way he couldn't define. Gwen bent over to blow air into Tosh's lungs.
Owen came up beside him and clipped something onto Tosh's hand. The steady, ominous tone of a flatlined heart rate monitor filled the room.
“Clear!” Owen yelled.
Ianto fell back. Owen slammed the pedals down. Tosh arched violently as the current surged through her.
“No pulse,” Owen announced, gesturing for the two to continue CPR as he charged the defibrillator again. Losing Tosh was not on his list of priorities for the day. He’d do anything he could to save her. He placed the paddles against Tosh’s chest again. “Clear!”
Tosh’s body seized again, but this time the thud of her back hitting the table was accompanied by Ianto’s sigh of relief. “Pulse is back.”
Owen glanced at the screen that monitored Tosh’s heart rate. It was all over the place. “It’s too irregular. If it doesn’t stabilize, she’s not going to make it.”
“Her pulse is still dropping, Owen!” Ianto’s voice was frantic once more as he checked the monitor clipped to her hand.
“Oxygenation’s at eighty percent and going down,” Gwen informed him. Her voice was the flat tone of someone trying to keep as detached as possible in an insane situation.
The defibrillator did nothing as Tosh arched again. Owen’s brain scrambled for another possibility as he watched the numbers plummet on the screens around him. The technician was limp on the table, her chest no longer heaving with the struggle to breathe, and he watched as the beeping slowed, the numbers sliding down to the single digits, and stopped. A silence filled the room, punctuated only by the unending whine of the flatline.
Owen jumped into action, the only movement in the room as the other two stood in shock. Opening a cabinet, he grabbed a laryngoscope and tracheal tube.
“Gwen!” he barked, “Hold this. Give it to me when I say so.”
She approached, taking the tube from him. He stepped behind Tosh’s head, pressing her lower jaw open with his left thumb and keeping her lips back with the index and middle fingers of his right hand. Then he moved his hand so that his thumb and index finger were keeping her mouth open, using his left hand to slide the laryngoscope in and keep her tongue out of the way.
“Gwen.” She handed him the tube, and he slid it down her throat and into her trachea with practised ease. It was something A&E doctors never forgot how to do. He attached the tube to a breathing circuit and handed the bag off to Gwen, who began pumping.
Owen charged the paddles once more. “Clear.” Tosh tensed off the table as the electricity surged through her and thudded back down. The whine of the monitor did not change.
“Ianto!” The Welshman came over and Owen shoved the paddles into his hands. “Standby with the defib.” He rushed to the cabinet again, pulling out a large syringe.
“Epipen?” Gwen asked, confused.
“Yeah. Move.” She shifted to the side, biting her lip as Owen uncapped the needle and stabbed it into Tosh’s chest, pressing the plunger.
Tosh’s body jerked, and simultaneously, the monitor began beeping again. She coughed around the tracheal tube, eyes still closed.
“She’s still unconscious, Owen.”
“Yeah. Yeah. She’s all right, though. She’s trying to breathe on her own. That’s good. You can stop that now,” he indicated Gwen still pressing the inflated bag. “Ianto, get the oxygen and mask, will you?”
Owen slid the tube out of Tosh’s throat, handing it off to Ianto, who gave him the oxygen mask in trade. The Welshman placed the tube in the sink. Owen fitted the mask around Tosh’s nose and mouth. The heart monitor beeped steadily.
“Jesus christ.” Owen’s legs felt wobbly. He braced himself on the table to keep from falling over. He hadn’t had an emergency that had scared him that much since his first years working for A&E.
“Yeah,” Ianto agreed. Gwen nodded. Owen was still shaking. He’d gone into doctor mode, shoving the shock and terror away in order to keep working, keep moving, and now that it was all over, his brain was sliding away from him.
“Keep–keep an eye on her.” He stumbled up the stairs and into the bathroom. Turning on the tap, he splashed cold water on his face, trying to stave off the shakes that were threatening to overtake him. He couldn’t even save his own teammate without freaking out. What did that say about his ability to save all the others? And what about Ianto? Hell, he still had no idea what was going on with anybody. This was completely mad.
Ianto couldn't look away from Tosh's face. They'd come so close to losing her, and it felt like if he looked away for even a moment she might slip away. His pulse was thumping a syncopated counterpoint to hers, two or three beats for every beep from the monitor.
Gwen slid the stool over next to the table and collapsed onto it. “That was close,” she said.
Ianto nodded.
“She's going to be okay now. We got her through it.”
“I should've been paying attention,” Ianto said. “We all knew she was sick. I let myself get distracted by my own problems when I should have been noticing hers.”
Gwen hesitated, smoothing Toshiko's hair. Finally, she shook her head. “It doesn't matter. We—”
The heart monitor shrieked a sudden alarm. Tosh spasmed brutally and arched as if she were being shocked by the defibrillator again. Ianto threw himself forward, onto her, trying to keep her from bucking off the table.
“What the hell's going on in here?” Owen shouted as he ran in.
“I don't know!” Gwen said. “She was fine, and then everything just went crazy!”
Ianto didn't have room to pay attention to anything except holding on. The small body that thrashed under his was uncannily powerful, well beyond the wiry strength Tosh normally possessed. A flailing arm caught him across the cheek and knocked him off onto the floor.
“Get out of my way!’ Owen snapped.
Ianto scrambled to the side and onto his feet. Owen grabbed the defibrillator paddles, rubbed them briskly together and slapped them onto Tosh during a split second in which she stopped moving.
Nothing happened. Her muscles didn't even tighten— at least, no more than they already were.
“Did one of you turn this off? Hold her still, damn you!”
Ianto lunged. He kept his feet on the floor this time and tried to control her arms. One of her legs lashed out and caught the edge of the cart that held the heart monitor and defibrillator. It skidded away across the tiled floor, yanking the paddles out of Owen's hands and pulling the sensor off Tosh's finger. The alarm cut out and Tosh's breathing sounded loud in the sudden silence.
Owen had stopped moving. Ianto looked at him, still wrestling with Tosh's upper body, and saw him staring at Tosh's leg. A new dose of panic jolted through him. “What?”
Owen's only response was a quiet, “Shit.”
“What is it? Owen?”
“This isn't blood. She's bleeding, but this...” He held up a hand, palm and fingers glistening black. “I think it's oil.”
Tosh sucked in a breath, harsh and juddering, and froze. Ianto let go in surprise. She shuddered all over, then the breath whooshed out of her and she collapsed limply onto the table.
Seeming to shake himself out of his daze, Owen grabbed her wrist. “She has a pulse!” he announced. “Wait.”
Caught between relief and dread, Ianto could only watch him.
“That's... That can't be right. Gwen– thank you,” he said when he saw she was already pushing the cart back over to him. He found the sensor and clipped it back on her finger.
The steady, reassuring pulse of a heartbeat sounded almost immediately. Putting a hand down on the edge of the table to steady himself, Ianto let out the breath he'd been holding. Then he heard it. The thing that was bothering Owen. The rhythm was... wrong. Too fast, for one, though it hadn't seemed odd at first considering how fiercely Ianto's own heart was pounding. And too even. You couldn't hear the comforting bumBUM, bumBUM of a normal heartbeat through a monitor, but now even the sense of it was missing. He found Tosh's wrist, fingers slipping in the greasy liquid Owen's fingers had left behind. Her pulse was easy to find, strong and steady. Mechanical. Even skin against skin, it reminded him of nothing so much as the steady ticking of a wind-up toy.
“Oh my God,” Gwen said.
“I know,’ Owen said.
“No. What's happening to her face?”
Almost against his will, Ianto looked. What he saw made him wish he could turn off his perfect recall— though he suspected that even if he had a normal, fallible memory that image would haunt him forever. It looked like the skin on the left side of her face was melting. What it exposed wasn't bone, but rather a brass skull. He could see the jut of her cheekbone, the large gear that replaced her temporomandibular joint, the even steel knobs of her teeth. A thin sheet of copper grew out from her left ear, covering her cheek, and several articulated plates clicked out from its lower edge, attaching to the bronze that now covered her jaw. The skin that covered the left side of her forehead seemed to wither and age, darkening to deep brown. Leather. It covered her eye socket but, as he watched, a hole appeared in the centre of it and dilated like a camera lens. As it opened, her right eye fluttered and opened as well.
“What—” Her voice was hoarse, uneven, but it still sounded like her. “What happened? My mouth feels strange.”
Panic and self-hatred and terror and a horrible doubt of his own capabilities were battling for dominance, roiling Owen’s stomach. The sight of Tosh’s face now distorted and replaced by an approximation of angles and gears and metal bits terrified him. He had watched her change and he hadn’t been able to do a thing to stop it.
He could feel the meltdown in process, the tension riding its way from the top of his head all the way down his body, the tell-tale prickle at the back of his eyes. He cleared his throat.
“Gwen, why don’t you get Tosh a cup of tea and let her know what’s just occurred?”
“Alright,” Gwen agreed, helping Tosh off the table. “Come on, Tosh.”
Tosh hobbled up the stairs with Gwen at her elbow. Tosh was looking resolutely forward but all of them had to look at her, couldn’t bear to look at her, couldn’t stand the fear. Owen waited until they were well out of earshot before sinking into a chair, tugging at his hair.
“I can’t do this. This is fucking mad. I’m not a good enough doctor for this stuff. I spend most of my time here killing things or looking at dead things. I’m no good at keeping the living alive. And I have no idea what’s going on. I’m useless.”
He felt Ianto shift beside him. “Owen—”
“No, seriously, mate, I don’t get it. Why are all of you depending on me? I haven’t got a clue what the fuck I’m doing, and when I do figure it out, I’m shit at it anyway. You should be relying on someone, but that sure as hell shouldn’t be me.” Owen kicked the leg of the table. “I didn’t have a clue what to do back there. And now Tosh is…like that, and we have no idea what happens when it gets worse. And then there’s you… I’m rubbish. I won’t be able to save anyone.”
He ran both hands down his face in attempt to calm himself. It didn’t work. The words were still spilling out at an alarming rate and he had the feeling he’d regret this meltdown later, but it certainly wasn’t going stop now.
“You and Tosh are best friends, you’re shagging Jack, even you and Gwen have a laugh. Me, I’m just here by m’self. And you lot are clever. You and Tosh figure things out or know things in an instant, Gwen goes off and investigates things and talks to people, and Jack is just fucking omniscient. I let the computer do the work, and when I actually have to do things, well, you saw what happened.
“Everyone else is so bloody good at compartmentalizing and thinking things through and knowing when shit doesn’t matter and I just go mad. That machine that we found when Gwen first got here? The one with the two halves? After I saw…what I saw, I couldn’t think of anything else. It was decades old and I couldn’t do a thing about it but I couldn’t get it out of my head. So I went out of my head and just…you know. Felt like shit after, but that’s how it works with me. You all can control yourselves, your reactions, the way you handle the shit you see. I just can’t and then I fuck everything up.”
Owen wasn’t even going to mention his enormous reaction to Diane’s departure or the out of control drinking sprees he’d gone on after Ianto’s cyber-girlfriend had destroyed the place and when they’d gotten home from Brynblaidd.
“My life is just a sodding mess.” He muttered. “I’m incapable of helping any of you. Really, you should find someone more competent. Jack was right for firing me. I would have done.”
The image of Jack’s solemn face as he forgave him came to his mind and he felt guilt and self-loathing clench his gut and claw at his chest. He hadn’t deserved forgiveness, not for opening the Rift, not for killing Jack, not for so royally fucking things up.
“Oh, stop bloody whinging already,” Ianto snapped. He was still feeling sick and shaky from Tosh's crisis, and Owen was losing it completely, standing there feeling sorry for himself and about to give up, and suddenly Ianto just couldn't take it anymore.
Owen's head whipped round. “Oi!”
Ianto spoke right over the top of him. He was furious— at Owen, at himself, at Torchwood, at the whole damned mess. “This isn't about you, Owen. You think you're the only one who's scared? You think you're the only one who doesn't know what to do?”
“You don't understand—”
“No, I think I do.” His hands curved into fists and he turned away abruptly and stalked across the room. “You want to give up. It's all gotten to be too much for poor little Owen and you want to run away and go lick your wounds.”
Owen glared. “I'm no coward,” he snarled.
“You bloody well sound like one!” Ianto shouted. “Well, guess what? You don't get to quit, none of us do. You have responsibilities here— Tosh almost died. And she's sitting out there right now, drinking tea through a mouth that’s half made of metal.”
“I know that!”
“You think she doesn't want to go home and have a nice dinner and not have to worry about Torchwood? Instead she's here, working on saving everybody else's arses when we don't even know if she'll be human by morning!”
“I can't fix her!”
“So what? That's no excuse to give up on her!” Owen had gone dead white, his eyes like black holes in his face. Something dark twisted in Ianto's gut, guilt or pity or fear, but he couldn't stop. He wasn't even sure that he was yelling at Owen, now, or if Owen just happened to be a convenient target. “You selfish bastard. You shouldn't even be thinking about your own pathetic little problems! They don't matter. Deal with your crap on your own time, but the team comes first. You forget that and you really are a worthless piece of shit!”
With an incoherent sound of rage, Owen charged. He knocked Ianto to the floor with one shoulder, landing on top of him. Ianto got an elbow up. The shoulder seam of his suit jacket ripped. Owen's hand clamped round his throat and Ianto lashed up with one knee. It met the taut line of muscle instead of the soft testicles he'd been aiming for. A fist slammed into his cheek and pain exploded across his face. Damn, it felt good. Another fist struck his ribs. He bucked up, hit Owen in the nose with his forehead.
Owen howled and rolled off of him, and Ianto followed, catching him under the jaw with a right hook. He could taste blood, sweet and metallic, and realised he was grinning madly. Owen wrapped his arms around Ianto's shoulders, pinning his arms down where he couldn't use them. Someone's foot caught the crash cart and spun it across the room to slam into the exam table. The fight degenerated into a contest of strength as they each struggled to keep the other pinned whilst freeing themselves.
“What the hell?” Gwen's voice, floating down from the doorway, sounded livid.
Owen let his head fall back against the floor and Ianto stopped trying to choke him.
“It's nothing,” Owen said wearily.
“You're trying to kill each other!”
Ianto let himself collapse boneless across Owen's chest. “We're fine, Gwen,” he called.
She still sounded angry. “I can't believe you two thought this was an appropriate time for this kind of behaviour.”
Owen chuckled, bouncing Ianto's head up and down. “You wouldn't understand, sweetheart,” he said.
“Men,” Gwen huffed, but she left.
Owen craned his neck to look down at Ianto, smirking. “Are you hard?”
He was, actually. It had been too long since he'd been wrapped round another body, and adrenaline from the fight still zinged along his nerves. He groaned and rolled off of Owen onto his back.
“You're fucked up,” Owen said, conversationally.
Ianto smiled wryly at the ceiling. “I can't argue with that.”
Owen stood and held out a hand. “Let's go get cleaned up, yeah?”
§
Ianto's reflection stared back at him mournfully. His cheek was swollen and split, and his face covered in blood— his and Owen's both. His jacket was torn and filthy, his shirt stained with more blood, his tie askew and his hair a complete disaster. At least he kept a spare set of clothes here.
He walked past Owen, who was scrubbing his face under the tap, and got it. He stripped off his ruined suit and used the back of the shirt, which was still relatively clean, as a flannel to wipe off his face and chest.
“Ouch,” Owen said, poking at his nose. “You fight dirty.”
Ianto smiled. “Rugby.”
“Bloody Welsh.”
“Hey.” Ianto paused, water dripping off his chin, to figure out what, exactly, he should say. “I shouldn't have said that to you.”
Owen snorted. “Which part?”
“All of it. Well, most of it, anyway.”
Owen shrugged, shoulders stiff and jerky. “You were right.”
He was closing himself off again, trying to hide his fear and uncertainty away where the rest of them couldn't see it. Where it would fester. Ianto put a hand on his shoulder and turned him so he could see his face. “I wasn't. I wasn't even talking to you, really.”
“Yeah? You had some pretty damned accurate hits for shooting blind, mate.”
“I wasn't shooting blind. I was aiming at myself.” Owen was looking everywhere but at him. Ianto sighed. “We're all just muddling through, Owen, no matter what it looks like to you. Even Jack. I've heard the nightmares he has when he actually sleeps. Seen him when he's falling apart and doesn't know what to do and is sure he's screwing up.”
“This would be an easier conversation to have if you'd put some clothes on,” Owen said.
“No, it wouldn't.” But Ianto let go of him and pulled his shirt on. “All I'm saying is, you're not doing any worse than any of the rest of us.”
Something crumbled in Owen's face, some last defence or desperate pretence, and he finally met Ianto's eyes. “But I am,” he said. “I know it's not easy on any of us, I know you all struggle. But I fall apart. I just can't keep doing this.”
Ianto considered as he finished buttoning his shirt. “Maybe you just can't keep doing it the way you have been,” he said as he pulled on clean pants and reached for his trousers.
“What do you mean?” It sounded like Owen wanted to be suspicious, but it just came out sounding tired.
“You push us all away, pretend you're too tough to need any help or even any comfort. None of the rest of us does it alone. Gwen has Rhys, and had you for a while. I have Tosh, and sometimes I think maybe I have Jack. Tosh has me, and Jack goes to this bar sometimes— I don't know who he talks to there, but most of the time he comes back calmer, a little more confident.”
Owen turned back to the basin. “And I have no one.”
“That's where you're wrong.” Ianto crossed his arms and tried to will Owen to believe him. “You have all of us.”
A low, bitter laugh answered him. “Yeah, sure. Gwen hates me, even if she did let me fuck her for a while. Tosh is too in love with the idea of me to even see the real me. Jack would never understand, not really, and you...”
“What about me?”
“Like you have any tolerance for dealing with my shit.” Owen hunched over the basin. “If you can't label it, file it and index it, there's no room for it in your life, is there?”
Ianto fought down a surge of defensive anger. Owen lashed out when he felt vulnerable, Ianto knew that, and letting that push his buttons right now would defeat the purpose of making him have this conversation in the first place. He pulled his tie round his neck and focussed on knotting it until his jaw unclenched. Once he could speak without showing his annoyance, he said, “Look. I know we don't always get along. We're not much alike, and the way we deal with stuff is usually diametrically opposed. But I do understand what Torchwood does to a man, and I will listen.”
Owen sneered, but it was half-hearted. “I don't see how talking about it solves anything.”
“You could always just punch me again.”
That startled an actual laugh out of Owen.
“I do reserve the right to hit you back, though,” Ianto clarified.
“Hell, you'll probably headbutt me again.”
“Only if you're being a complete arse.”
“That would be every time, then.” Owen looked up and met Ianto's eyes in the mirror, and they both snickered.
Ianto took a deep breath. “Finding out today what Torchwood did to me . . . it's really shaken me.” He gestured at his head. “I guess I'd still felt, on some level, that Torchwood was something I could believe in. Something I could rely on to make things better. But it's not. Torchwood chases its own agenda, and we're just tools. Human resources. I've always thought that term was overly calculating, but Torchwood takes it to a whole new level.” He twisted his lips and shook his head. “What I'm saying is, all we have is each other. So I promise you here and now— when you need me, I'll be there. Whether you need somebody to talk to, or get pissed with, or an extra set of hands in the lab or backup on a mission, or hell, a chance to mutually beat someone to a pulp. I will be there for you.”
Owen dropped his eyes and stood silently for a long time. Long enough that Ianto began to worry he'd put his foot in it. Finally, Owen spoke to the wall. “I don't know that I'll be able to trust that. Not right away.”
“Then I guess I'll just have to prove it to you.”
The silence this time was companionable. Ianto wetted and combed his hair, enjoying the still calm that had finally settled on him. The eye of the storm— as soon as they went back out they'd have to deal with Tosh and the virus spreading across the city— but for right now, he'd take the sense of peace for however long it lasted. And there, sitting inside him, was a decision he hadn't realised he'd made.
“I'm going to let this thing in my head die,” he told Owen.
“What?”
“The Archive, or whatever it's calling itself. I'm not going to do anything to save it.”
“Are you sure?”
He nodded. “It's an alien. We're not in the business of rescuing aliens, are we? And it's at least half computer, anyway, it's not like it's really alive. Besides, we need to focus on stopping the virus— on saving Tosh. That's what really matters here. Wasting time on a problem that's going to solve itself could cost us the chance to fix the real crisis. And that would be beyond stupid; it would be criminal.”
Owen finished washing up in companionable silence with Ianto and slipped out of the washroom. Somehow, the fight with Ianto and his later support had lifted something from his chest. The tension he’d been riding in waves was calmer now, the fear and doubt crouched at the bottom of his stomach like a menacing ghoul had shrunk back into itself, and his helpless anger had diminished from spitting flames to simple sparks of annoyance at Jack.
He made his way to the main part of the hub, partly entertaining the idea of apologizing to Gwen. He decided against it. The fight had been between him and Ianto, and Gwen didn’t really come into it.
He approached the bank of computers, rounding the flickering screens to find Tosh seated on the sofa, looking in a mirror with Gwen beside her. The doubt came rushing back, little niggling thoughts whispering to him that he wouldn’t be able to save Tosh, and she’d be like this, wrong, forever. That she’d never forgive him. That he’d never forgive himself. It stopped him just short of the top of the stairs.
Tosh heard his feet scuff the cement and looked up at him. She smiled; it looked odd with one half of her face, but it was genuine. “Owen, this is amazing. The mechanisms that have combined to make my face are incredible!” She giggled. “I fascinate myself!”
Owen approached cautiously, still queasy about looking at Tosh’s mutated face. “Are you sure you’re not drunk on shock?”
“Oh, probably a bit. But, really, this is amazing.” She moved her eyes up and down, obviously captivated by the movement of the camera lens that had replaced her eye. “I know it’s weird, but a part of me is thrilled that I get to have an experience like this. I mean, who else has ever had the chance to become the kind of machines they study?”
“You are very weird,” Gwen commented.
“Comes with the territory.”
Owen frowned. “So…you’re okay with it?”
“Well, I mean, it’s not great. But I can still think, I still have sensation, I still have emotion. I’m just…more computer-y. It’s not all bad.”
Something else released inside Owen and he sighed. The feeling that he’d failed Tosh, that he’d destroyed her was gone, leaving behind only a little bit of weary resignation that he might not cure this no matter how hard he tried. He pushed its sluggish tendrils away and smiled at Tosh.
“Well, girls, I’m glad we had that chat. I’m hungry. Anyone else care for some food? There’s Thai in the fridge that we can reheat.”
“Me!” Tosh raised her hand like a schoolgirl. “Whatever this thing is, it seems to take a lot of energy. I’m starving.”
“Me, too.” Ianto joined them, sitting down beside Tosh, who turned to him with a smile and began speaking excitedly. Owen watched them for a moment, then made his way back to the kitchen area to get the cartons and paper plates for everyone.
§
They’d just finished eating, and were discussing anything and everything that was as far away from the current situation as possible, when Tosh’s computers starting buzzing and beeping and making every sort of racket known to man.
“What’s happening?”
Tosh’s fingers flew across the keyboard, accessing maps and scrolling data and matrices and calculations and garbled news reports.
“It looks like the infection has spread to over half the population. Data’s giving me sixty-one percent infection, but it could be more.”
“Shit!” Owen hit the top of the desk. This was out of control.
Gwen looked on worriedly, then her eyes widened and she grabbed her gun off her desk. “I need to go find Rhys!” she shouted. Ianto reached to stop her, but she brushed him off. “I’ll be fine. I’ve got a mask and gloves.”
The cog door screamed open and closed and she was gone. Owen sagged against the table. Now it was really out of control.
“What can we do?” Ianto asked.
“Well, I don’t know how quickly people are being infected, or how fast the infection is spreading and converting each person’s body, so we’re going to have to monitor that before we can figure it out.”
“Alright,” Owen straightened. “Tosh, why don’t you work your computer wizardry and get a program going that will keep that on watch.”
“Already on it.”
“Thanks.”
Ianto gripped Owen’s arm as he passed. “What if she brings Rhys back here? What are we going to do?”
“We’re gonna scan him for this virus thing. If he’s clear, we make him sit around on the sofa or in the boardroom or something. Just keep him out of our way. If he isn’t…”
“We throw him out on the street?”
“Well, I was going to suggest killing him, but your idea makes Gwen less likely to kill us.”
With Gwen gone, they were stretched too thin to get done half of what needed doing. Owen was in his lab, trying to rush the results on the tests he'd been running on the converted rat. Tosh was focussing on analysis of the virus from an epidemiological standpoint, muttering to herself about R-noughts and vectors of transmission. That left Ianto trying to do both his job and Gwen's. He had Sky News up on one monitor as, on another, he attempted to find something —anything— in the archives that would give them some kind of advantage. Every few minutes, the phone would ring as everyone from the local police to the Home Secretary called to find out what was going on and what the hell Torchwood was doing about it.
None of it looked good.
For now, the police were managing to keep things under control, if barely. There had been some looting in Adamsdown and Canton, but that was hardly surprising, and elsewhere in the city things were strained but still relatively calm. That didn't look like it was going to last long. Automatons were everywhere, some of them attacking people or each other, some just standing there, some acting confused or erratic. Almost two thirds of the people on the news footage showed some evidence of infection.
His search of the archives was turning up nothing. The search-and-analyse Tosh had run earlier was still the best they had, and it was so sketchy it didn't tell him much more than he already knew. Whatever connection Torchwood London had had to this virus, they had covered their tracks thoroughly.
He finally wrapped up his conversation with the Downing Street Chief of Staff, which mostly consisted of him saying “Uh-huh” as the man ranted, and repeating the phrases “We're doing everything in our power to handle the situation” and “I'll inform you as soon as we have any news whatsoever, sir” as often as necessary. Damn Jack for running off and leaving them, anyway.
There was just no way he was going to be able to do this without coffee. He'd been avoiding the thought as long as he could, but coffee was his comfort, the thing that steadied him and made him believe that he could manage, no matter how bad the situation was. Just the smell of it made him feel calmer and more in control. The fact that this thing in his head had complicated that —had ruined it— probably pissed him off more than anything else about the situation.
He didn't take the time to do anything complicated, as much as he wanted to. Just a mug of regular brew with a splash of cream. It was enough. He started sipping it as he walked back to his workstation. Slowly— he couldn't afford to let the interloper take control of his brain. It tasted absolutely fantastic.
He dove back into his work as soon as he got there, though. He decided the phone could just ring, no matter who was on the other end of the line, and focussed on squeezing information out of the archives. That was what he was best at. That was how he was most likely to make a difference.
[ATTEMPT A SEARCH WITH PARAMETERS ' ASHTON-UNDER-LYNE' AND 'RODERICK']
The voice was so quiet he almost didn't notice it. He found himself opening a new search window and typing in the terms before he realised the source of the idea. He clicked it closed. [Bugger off!] he thought viciously
[ASSISTANCE REQUESTED YES NO?]
[What does that even mean?]
[ATTEMPTING. I. I AM ATTEMPTING]
Was it glitching again? Was he going to start spewing random information again? Blacking out?
[I AM ATTEMPTING TO . . . HELP YOU]
Nausea cramped his stomach. God, it was trying to talk to him. Like a . . . person.
[I AM... AM NOT. I AM NOT YOUR ENEMY, IANTO]
Ianto reached out spasmodically and flung his mug to the floor with a violent shove. The crack of the ceramic shattering sounded like breaking bone. The smell of coffee made him want to retch. [Go to hell.] he thought.
Go To Part 4
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