The Art of Far and Near (Chapter Seven)
Rating: (for safety)
Word count: ~ 2,900
Warnings: ngst, magic, canon-type(ish) violence.
Summary: welve steps to immortality: this is the pinnacle of alchemy, of all alchemists. Ianto has reached final goal, and all he feels is empty.
A/N: Hello! This is me abandoning canon the same way a rat does a sinking ship. Not that there's anything wrong with canon (at least until you get midway through series two), but I kind of want to explore my own universe a bit. Sad, huh? Therefore, to whoever is still reading this, I'll be dragging you along for the ride. Apologies for that, and for the insanity that this chapter became. It's...rather odd. -.-"
The Art of Far and Near
Chapter Seven
The sound of the bells is nearly deafening. Louder, louder, louder, until Ianto has to clap his hands over his ears and duck his head, cowering from the sound. It's too much, ringing through the rows of towering, silent trees, even though it doesn't so much as disturb a single leaf. The noise aches inside of Ianto's head, a vibration that is more than sound, but something less than magic.
"The bells," says the old woman, "are announcing another death."
(A moment from the end is no place to start. Rewind.)
Maddox stands with Ianto, directly on his right. There are alchemists in front of them, twenty, maybe thirty, men and women who do not look anywhere near old enough to hold the positions that they do.
Men and women who all bear the ourobouros.
"Ianto Jones," the man in the center chair says, leaning forward. He looks no older than Jack, at the very most - perhaps closer to Ianto's age. But his smile has a depth that only age could have given, and there's a shining darkness in his eyes. "Ianto Jones, you're truly one of us now. Welcome to the fold, brother."
Ianto bows his head, because there's really no other response he can make, and feels Maddox's large, calloused hand settle at the top of his spine.
"Dante," Maddox says warmly. "We thank you."
A young woman Like Tosh, Ianto thinks dazedly, before he remembers that she is doubtless decades older, maybe even centuries - approaches like a dancer, quiet and graceful, carrying a bowl of ink and a set of needles.
"Where would you like the mark?" she asks Ianto, smiling gently. Her blue eyes also hold that darkly brilliant depth, and Ianto wonders if he'll gain the same, in time.
Then her question registers, and Ianto realizes the answer instantly.
There's only one choice, really.
(Alchemy has always before bee his, omething he's used only for himself. But here and now, in this moment, Ianto can only remember the look on Jack's face when he grew the tiny tree that's still rooted in his desk, when he turned the cog door to wood and then to water, when circles burned beneath his feet and blood covered his hands and Lisa was a pile of ash but everyone else wa safe.
That's what his alchemy is for. That's wha he s for, now and forever.
His mind is Jack's, his soul is Jack's, his alchemy belongs to Jack.)
"Here," he says, and pulls away his neatly ironed shirt, letting it fall to the ground. "Here," he says, laying one hand over his heart.
For Jack, he thinks, and h is.
(Run it forward; that's too far back.)
UNIT calls them, which is a surprise - but then, UNIT consists almost entirely of normal humans, all with their potential still unrealized, and Torchwood is magical almost to a man.
Jack takes the call with a minimum of gloating, for which Ianto gives him another cup of coffee on the sly. It seems that people have been disappearing in a small town outside of Merthyr Tydfil, and UNIT's best teams can't find the cause.
"The sidhe again?" Gwen asks as they load the SUV. "Could it be?"
"It's not just children disappearing," Ianto reminds her. "The sidhe only take thier chosen ones, and I've found no weather patterns like the ones when Jasmine was taken."
"Maybe something's eating them and UNIT's just too stupid to see it," Owen suggests. Tosh is next to him, struggling with an unwieldly computer case, and without even seeming to notice, he grabs one end and helps her heft it into the back. Her blush is almost luminescent, though Owen doesn't seem to notice, and Ianto wonders if there will be an opportunity to bash his head against the idea of a steady relationship on this jaunt. After all, Owen and Gwen have been over for several weeks now, and Owen's temper is steadily declining in a way that means he's not getting laid, so he should be open to the idea.
"Or," Jack cuts in, emerging from the elevator, "there's something hiding whatever's doing this from human eyes."
Ianto bats him away when he goes to slide into the driver's seat. "No," he orders sternly. "Detective Swanson politely requested that I never allow you behind the wheel if there's any help for it. I'll drive."
Jack's pout is getting a workout these days, it seems.
(Skip.)
The forest is dark and utterly still, no wind to shake the branches or set the leaves to dancing. Or -
"Bells," Tosh murmurs, looking up. "There are bells tied onto all of the branches."
Ianto follows her gaze, and there are. Hundreds upon thousands of silver bells, one after another, hung from the boughs with crimson thread. There are so many that the trees seem to shimmer silver in the murky twilight, an illusion of purity in the darkness. In the beams from the torches they are unearthly, brilliant, and the glitter goes on as far as Ianto's eyes can see, down the perfectly straight rows of trees and away.
"No noise," Ianto says quietly. "Nothing's moving in here."
The entire forest is as silent and motionless as a tomb.
(Turn it back.)
There is an inn several miles from anywhere, run by an old woman with a lined face and tired eyes. She puts them up, but doesn't speak, and Ianto watches her as she walks away, unsettled and unable to say why.
"Ianto," Jack calls, then, and he turns away.
"Yes?"
(Is that important?
It is.
Skip.)
The ourobouros seems to crawl beneath Ianto's skin, to writhe and twist and turn the way Ianto wants to, but can't, not when he's overwhelmed by sound and trapped in the midst of a silvery cacophony. There is still no wind, nothing that should shake the branches, but the bells are chiming anyway, beautiful but terrible.
"A death," the old woman says again, and they go silent.
Ianto staggers upright and stumbles away from her, falling over his own feet. His palms are itching, his blood is singing, and his head is pounding, but there's no relief here, none to be found in this cursed place.
Here and there amongst the tree roots, Ianto can finally make out glimmers of dusty brown, choked by dirt and rocks.
The stories always lie. Bones aren't white unless they've been bleached by the sun, and no sun can ever enter the Forest of Bells.
"Another victim?" Ianto manages, stomach twisting. The ourobouros is burning, a brand against his otherwise chilled skin, and he knows without looking that it's burning darkly, visible even through the fabric of his shirt.
He's never, ever not been able to use his alchemy before, not since he first woke up with it surging through his veins, and there's a very real possibility that the lack of it will truly drive him mad.
"Another sinner," she corrects, merciless even as her form begins to twist and change. She's growing younger before Ianto's eyes, becoming beautiful, but if anything she looks more terrible like this, more awful when beauty hides the shape within. "There are always sacrifices, always a cost. They've done wrong twice over, and now this is their cost."
Ianto wonders, grimly, who it is that's died now. Really, he can only hope that it's Jack, horrible as that is, and not the man they entered the Forest to protect, not one of the team, so vulnerable to this ghastly place.
He forces his eyes away from the dark rust-red that stains the earth, the stones, the roots of the trees.
There's no time to dwell on things like that.
The woman, now young and lovely, with skin like porcelain and hair like white silk, smiles at Ianto, and it is full of thousands of needle-sharp teeth. "Seven souls every seven years," she sing-songs, like it's some kind of twisted childhood rhyme. "Seven second chances wasted, seven tainted souls taken. The Forest of Bells grows stronger and stronger; the sins of men grow longer and longer."
In the branches above, the bells begin to chime again.
(Something's missing.
Rewind.)
The forest appears out of thin air seven miles from the town. In the space of a single heartbeat, there is suddenly a vast expanse of trees stretching out before them, perfectly uniform in their dark, ruler-straight rows, the trunks completely smooth as they rise from the loamy earth, bare of undergrowth or even grass.
Jack draws his gun, turns on his torch, and, as ever, they follow him.
But one step over the border, where rich green grass turns to bare brown earth, and everything goes wrong.
Ianto sucks in a sharp breath as the ground lurches under his feet, grabbing onto the first solid thing that he can reach - Tosh, in this case. She cries out as well, and all the balance in the world won't help them as everything tilts and whirls.
They fall, a jumbled tangle of limbs and nerves, and scramble back to their feet as soon as they can.
That's when Ianto notices that something's missing.
Always, always before, he's been able to look at things and break them down in his head, identify the component atoms and map out the simplest possible changes he can make to them. Now, though, he looks at Tosh, and instead of immediately picking out the percentage of carbon and oxygen and hydrogen in her body, the composition of each exhalation, all he can see is...
A body.
It's terrifying.
Tosh must recognize the horror on his face - she's seen it before, after all, in Brynblaidd - because she immediately reaches out for him with one hand, reaches for her comm with the other. "Ianto?" she demands. "What's wrong? Jack, are you there? Owen? Gwen?"
There are no sparks leaping from her fingertips, though, no white blankness overtaking her eyes, and Ianto realizes with a sinking sort of dread just what's happened.
"Gone," he whispers. "Our magic - it's gone."
Somewhere deeper in the woods, there's laughter, as bright and silvery as bells, and Ianto and Tosh turn back to back, hearts pounding.
The forest is dark and utterly still, no wind to shake the branches or set the leaves to dancing. Or -
"Bells," Tosh murmurs, looking up.
(Break it off here. Turn the hands back.)
There are disappearances everywhere, all the time. There's no real way to pick out which ones mean more than the others, no matter how good the Torchwood team tends to be at their jobs.
This time, though, Ianto thinks they've found the common thread.
"They were all reformed criminals," Tosh says, laying the folders out on the scarred, listing table. "Though for a certain value of 'reformed.' Six of them, all turning over a new leaf and then backsliding - there's got to be some sort of connection there."
Ianto hands another set of papers to Jack. "And there's only one other man who fits the criteria in this area. We think he's the next target."
Andrew Michaels stares up from the paper, dark and scared.
He never meant to live the life of a criminal.
(Now he's going to die as one.)
(Wait.)
Ianto wakes up in Jack's bed for the third morning running, deliciously tired and even more wonderfully sore, the aftermath of sex like a silken bruise all up and down his body. Jack lies next to him, deeply - no matter what he tells Gwen - asleep, with one arm thrown over Ianto's hips and his head curled on Ianto's chest.
For an endless, too-brief moment, Ianto doesn't move, staring up at the ceiling of the bunker and...simply wondering.
How this has become his normal, how this has become his life - Ianto couldn't say if asked, but nevertheless, it' glorious.
He shifts a little, repositioning, and manages to free one arm enough to card his fingers through Jack's soft, fine hair. Jack murmurs softly at the first touch, but quickly settles, and there's a feeling in Ianto's chest like his heart is several sizes too large to comfortably fit.
But he swallows it down, swallows back the words that spring forth, and simply breathes "Forever," nto the stillness of the early morning air.
Jack murmurs a sleepy agreement into his skin, and then subsides.
(Play the end now; let it run.)
There are skeletons rising from the earth, scattered bones pulling together, with bits of flesh and tendons still clinging to them, bloodstained as though some messy eater has been at them. They assemble themselves around the trees, beneath the gently chiming bells, and stride forwards with macabre grace. Ianto is entirely unashamed to admit that he runs from them, ducks behind trees and dodges around upthrust rocks as skeletal hands grab for him. they snag at his shirt, tear it with bony fingers, and Ianto lets them have it, wriggles out of the tattered cloth with an ease learned in street fights as a child.
But there are more of them than there are of him, so many more, and for the first time there is no alchemy-itch in his palms, wanting to be used, no magic singing in his muscles and blood.
A bony hand slam into his jaw, knocking him sideways, and Ianto falls hard, tumbling and rolling until he crashes into the roots of a great tree. There are more hands waiting there, grasping through the dirt to seize his arms and pull him down. Ianto cries out, struggles as hard as he can, but it's no use. He can't break free.
No alchemy, Ianto thinks desperately Does that mean no immortality?
Am I going to die here?
The gunshot is deafening.
Above them, the bells go mad. This is no carefully uniform chiming, this is a tree shaken by a hurricane, all branches thrashing, insanity and fury and terror all woven together.
But the skeletons let go.
"Come on!" Jack cries, and there are hands on Ianto again living ands, pulling him to his feet and into a run. Tosh is on one side of him, Owen gripping her hand, with Gwen in front of them, and they run flat-out, sliding around stilled skeletons and skirting the body of the pale-haired woman, who lies sprawled out with a bullet hole in the center of her forehead.
But the edge of the wood is in sight, getting closer, and still the bones of the Forest's victims aren't moving.
They stumble over the border, all five of them pale and shaking, and the rush of power suddenly flooding back into Ianto's veins is like nothing he's ever felt before, drugs and sex and freefall and a near miss with death all at once and in a single second. Ianto gasps, sucks in air that is seventy-eight percent nitrogen and twenty percent oxygen and one percent argon, and less than one percent neon, helium, and krypton, and other trace amounts of various other elements.
It' freedom.
Jack is still clinging to his hand, breathing hard, head bowed. When Ianto manages to gather his strength and raise his head, Jack meets his eyes, full of warmth and relief and something that Ianto doesn't dare name, not now.
"Michaels?" he asks instead.
"Dead," Gwen manages, wiping a hand over her face and holstering her gun. "We never saw what got him."
Ianto looks back at the Forest of Bells, and somehow he's unsurprised to see the young woman standing there, hands neatly clasped in front of her, her toes at the very edge of the bare earth.
"You're not to come back," she tells them, and Ianto feels it as all of Jack's muscles go taut. "This is a place for the dead, and you're not welcome here, either of you."
There is no rush of magic, no flicker, no spell. The Forest simply...fades away.
Jack scrubs a hand over his face, blows out a short, hard breath, and says, "Let's go home."
(The entire walk back to the SUV, he doesn't let go of Ianto's hand, and Ianto doesn't ask him to.)
(Hold the scene a moment longer.
Fade out.)