Adam (Part 6/6)
Title: Adam (Part 6/6)
Disclaimer: Being a bloke who likes to slash pretty men doesn't make me RTD, I don't work for the BBC, and as much as I might like to, I don't own Jack or Ianto or any part of Torchwood. I do, however, order pizza under that name on principle.
Pairings: Jack/Ianto, and maybe a bit of Owen/Gwen if you squint.
Rating: We're back in R territory for sex and explosions.
Notes/Summary: Based on/inspired by a very short vignette of the same title I did in June and promised some folks I'd come back to after finishing "Hatful of Hollow." So yeah, here it is. Special thanks to damalan for being attentive and patient and kind and encouraging with me while I drafted this. Comments, criticism, and additional Britpicking welcome. (And I promise I don't have an alternate Ianto fetish. Really!)
They’d done it twice more since the incident in The Room. Both times Adam left after without so much as a word. This was good, Jack supposed. At the very least it meant that he could choose not to fully acknowledge his actions. Just over a month since Ianto’s disappearance, and already he’d betrayed the man more deeply than the others ever could.
When he heard footfalls above his quarters at 3 AM, he closed his eyes and pretended not to notice, half-hoping Adam would turn away and fade into the Hub again.
“Jack?”
He sighed, rose from his bunk, and tugged on his trousers. He left the braces slack but buckled his belt, then ascended the short ladder into his office.
Adam waited quietly in the bluish near-dark next to Jack’s desk. His face was shrouded with fatigue and desolation beyond the simple loneliness that had been there before. And yet, when the Captain stepped in closer to try and kiss away that wretchedness, the younger man pushed him away and pressed a small black and silver USB key into Jack’s palm.
“The audio.”
Jack paused, turning it over in his fingers before logging into his workstation and loading the file.
The recording had a spectral quality to it, the result of being drawn from too many sources. At first, it was simply an echo of footsteps and doors. He listened to the sounds of Ianto shuffling about, opening boxes. He smiled in spite of himself when the warm, low voice swore quietly at some object or other, but that sound was followed by a crash that rattled the speakers. Ianto’s voice was in pain now, hissing and keening as boxes fell or were smashed. Three minutes of agony, followed by gurgling sounds and an abrupt silence. And then a shuffle of boxes and footsteps that beat a rapid pace out of the archive.
He closed the media player and turned to look at Adam. He’d closed his eyes and balled his hands into fists, shoving them as far into his pockets as he could. Jack watched him hesitate before he spoke, as if he wished his voice were not like the phantom that bled from the speakers.
“I don’t care how you find out. I don’t care how long it takes. I don’t care what you do to me. I just need to know if I did this.”
Jack did not hesitate. He stood and approached the safe where he kept the secure archive. He dialed in the combination and eased the heavy door open to retrieve a sealed containment box with a metal “Not For Use” seal looped through the closure. Jack snipped it away with his office scissors before handing the box to Adam.
“I assume you know and understand how to handle that?”
“Yes sir.”
# # #
The blood on the concrete was dark and dull and beginning to gather dust. Crushed boxes lay in their places, inert and pathetic in their silence. Whatever happened here no longer felt just under the surface. Somehow, in the last month, the scene had shifted solidly into the past.
They stood face to face, holding the Ghost Machine between them. Each thumbed a button, ready to engage the device.
“Do you think this thing will work?” Adam asked. He loosened and tightened his grip on the handle. His hands were sweating.
“I don’t know,” was Jack’s honest reply. “It’s impossible to control or predict. It could easily show us something useless, or even something that hasn’t happened yet. All we can do is hope that whatever happened to Ianto was the most intense thing that’s ever happened in here, and that the machine homes in on that.”
They locked eyes and counted down, then pressed their respective buttons in unison. The world blurred briefly as the machine sought out in both directions. Scraps of unfamiliar scenes shifted around them, and Jack twisted his wrist as if he were trying to steer. The room focused as suddenly as it blurred, and Adam was afraid the device had failed until he heard a man sigh.
# # #
Ianto sat on the table, fingers pressed between his eyes. His head hurt - he’d been overdoing it again, working too late and starting too early - and what he really needed was a nap. Still, it was Friday. If nothing crash-landed into the Bay or came up out of the sewers or caused the police any undue alarm, he might actually get a nice, long lie-in with Jack.
A quiet shuffling caught his attention. He sighed and hoped he’d imagined it. The Hub and its tunnels were a bit like a mausoleum. Some sound was inevitable, but unexpected noises tended to mean trouble. He stood and peered into the next room, hoping to spot a culprit.
The space was small and unremarkable. He’d worked his way down this corridor for the last few weeks, sorting and cataloging and re-filing. He’d been appalled at the sheer lack of care and organization in this section. The 1970s were not a good decade for alphabetizing, apparently.
He took stock of the boxes - mostly small cardboard affairs on a shelving unit, though there were also some larger ones stacked in a corner - and noticed the sound again. Sort of a crackling.
Ianto’s jacket was off in a flash and promptly deposited on the table in the other room. He opened his safety kit and put on a pair of exam gloves, goggles, and a breathing mask. It wouldn’t do to be injured down here with the others out in the field. He took off his Bluetooth earpiece to better accommodate the goggles, switching it off and tucking it into his trouser pocket.
With careful hands, he started removing items from the box and checking them for moving parts, leaks, or other features which might cause it to make noise. Each “safe” object - which was to say, every object which did not appear to be an immediate danger - went onto the shelves to be properly sorted afterward. It was not his preferred solution - he’d rather be working with a table and tagging equipment - but it would allow him to narrow down the active device from the others and take care of it before it did something that would keep them in all weekend.
He was retrieving something that looked a bit like a small portable television when he felt a sharp pain in the back of his hand. He swore under his breath and pulled his hand away before pulling off his gloves to get a look at the injury.
Blood dripped onto the floor and his eyes went wide. Blood plus alien tech was a potentially fatal combination. He started to reach for his earpiece to call for help when the convulsions began. He toppled hard into the shelves. His safety glasses cracked against his face and fell to the floor. He bit into his bottom lip, and blood seeped into his mouth. He tried to spit through gritted teeth. His cut hand felt like it was made of rubber bands, and the feeling was spreading up his arm. Tissue breakdown, he thought. He managed to tear the mask away from his face in hopes of helping the blood drain away rather than pool in his mouth and nose and drown him.
It hurt, and it spread, and his body was not his own. He tried to stumble onto his feet but pitched instead into some boxes in the corner with a crunch. He heard but did not entirely feel several things shatter beneath him. In his guts, he something started to come unglued. His breathing became erratic, and he began to choke on his own blood and saliva. His eyes went pure, shiny black. As his vision left him, Ianto thought of Jack. I don’t want to die. I’m not ready to leave him.
He shook and seized and after a few final agonizing moments was still.
A thread of golden particles leaked from the boxes beneath him. They seemed to flit and light on his body, tasting and making comparisons before swarming and bathing him in light, nearly lifting him up. His hand flexed and stretched. He gasped suddenly, sucking in a brand new lungful of breath.
The glow subsided gradually except around his left iris, which was still stained. The particles buzzed and tried to clear away the darkness, limiting it to a small ring of abstract shapes.
Ianto sat up. He felt woozy and confused and couldn’t think. There was something wrong with his head. He stumbled up and made a beeline for his jacket. What he needed was a good cup of coffee.
# # #
Adam collapsed into Jack’s arms and let the Captain lower them to the floor. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t move. He sobbed and shook and let Jack hold him and stroke his hair and say his name over and over again.
“Ianto. Oh Ianto. I’m so sorry.”
# # #
Jack held down two buttons on his vortex manipulator. He’d worked with nanogenes before, though never this version. Fortunately, the basic controls seemed the same. He couldn’t force a proper reset or switch them off, but he could give them a bit of a nudge.
Damned Chula technology.
It wasn’t until he’d seen them get into Ianto’s system that he put two and two together. It was a relatively simple matter to help them finish repairing Ianto’s left iris. Whatever the hell that toxin had been, it was nasty stuff. He made a mental note to go clear out The Room on his own in the next couple of days.
“Is that it?” Ianto asked, blinking a little.
“Looks like it. I’m not sure if I managed to switch them off or not, or if they’ll dissipate on their own now that you’re fixed. Either way, I wouldn’t take any unnecessary risks if I were you.”
“Duly noted, sir.”
Ianto still hadn’t changed out of his Adam clothes, and it was all Jack could do not to run into his quarters and offer him his spare suit.
“You did the right thing, you know. All of you.”
“No,” Jack said quietly. “Not all of us.”
“Yes, all of you.” Ianto kissed him softly and took his hand. “Though I suspect I owe you a good strangling.”
Jack smiled weakly. “So now what?”
“Hm?”
Jack stroked Ianto’s left brow. “Well, you’re normal again. The others will be coming in soon. They’ll need to know you’re…well, you. They’ll want an explanation.”
Ianto looked thoughtful for a moment. “Retcon me.”
“What? Ianto, no. No.”
“Just the last month, Jack. Let me wake up somewhere crazy. Maybe a park somewhere. You find me, we tell the team I was ‘exchanged’ by benevolent-yet-inept aliens, Owen makes jokes about anal probes for a week, and when I start to remember, you show me the report.”
Jack looked dumbfounded. “You mean make it look like none of this ever happened?”
“Pretty much.”
“You’d do that for us? After…after everything?”
“Torchwood needs me. Cardiff needs Torchwood. And I need you.”
Jack laughed his relief, pressing his forehead against Ianto’s. “You’re insane.”
“Must be the work environment, sir.” Ianto smirked.
# # #
“For fuck’s sake, Harkness. Do we have to fucking trek through the sewers every time someone flushes something alien down the toilet by accident?” Owen was filthy and irritable. Jack, meanwhile, had managed to come out of the whole thing wholly unscathed. This merely served to infuriate their doctor, who stormed off to the showers.
“You find it, then?” Ianto asked, watching the others file in grumpily behind Owen.
“Yep.” Jack grinned and tossed the brooch into the air and caught it. “Amazing what people drop when they’re having a delicate moment. This is why we don’t install auto-flush.”
“I lost a mobile like that once at a tube station.”
“Ouch.”
Ianto smirked.
“So, anything exciting happen while we were away?”
“Oh, the usual,” he said, loading the coffee tray. “Telephone messages. Tourists. Filing. Got a nasty papercut.” He held up his fingertip.
Jack took his hand and gently pressed his lips to the injury. He thought he felt a bit of a tingle. When he drew away he flinched. The skin was whole.
“Ianto?” Jack’s eyebrows went up.
Ianto winked. “Coffee, sir?”
===
Prev. Ep: 5/6
Disclaimer: Being a bloke who likes to slash pretty men doesn't make me RTD, I don't work for the BBC, and as much as I might like to, I don't own Jack or Ianto or any part of Torchwood. I do, however, order pizza under that name on principle.
Pairings: Jack/Ianto, and maybe a bit of Owen/Gwen if you squint.
Rating: We're back in R territory for sex and explosions.
Notes/Summary: Based on/inspired by a very short vignette of the same title I did in June and promised some folks I'd come back to after finishing "Hatful of Hollow." So yeah, here it is. Special thanks to damalan for being attentive and patient and kind and encouraging with me while I drafted this. Comments, criticism, and additional Britpicking welcome. (And I promise I don't have an alternate Ianto fetish. Really!)
They’d done it twice more since the incident in The Room. Both times Adam left after without so much as a word. This was good, Jack supposed. At the very least it meant that he could choose not to fully acknowledge his actions. Just over a month since Ianto’s disappearance, and already he’d betrayed the man more deeply than the others ever could.
When he heard footfalls above his quarters at 3 AM, he closed his eyes and pretended not to notice, half-hoping Adam would turn away and fade into the Hub again.
“Jack?”
He sighed, rose from his bunk, and tugged on his trousers. He left the braces slack but buckled his belt, then ascended the short ladder into his office.
Adam waited quietly in the bluish near-dark next to Jack’s desk. His face was shrouded with fatigue and desolation beyond the simple loneliness that had been there before. And yet, when the Captain stepped in closer to try and kiss away that wretchedness, the younger man pushed him away and pressed a small black and silver USB key into Jack’s palm.
“The audio.”
Jack paused, turning it over in his fingers before logging into his workstation and loading the file.
The recording had a spectral quality to it, the result of being drawn from too many sources. At first, it was simply an echo of footsteps and doors. He listened to the sounds of Ianto shuffling about, opening boxes. He smiled in spite of himself when the warm, low voice swore quietly at some object or other, but that sound was followed by a crash that rattled the speakers. Ianto’s voice was in pain now, hissing and keening as boxes fell or were smashed. Three minutes of agony, followed by gurgling sounds and an abrupt silence. And then a shuffle of boxes and footsteps that beat a rapid pace out of the archive.
He closed the media player and turned to look at Adam. He’d closed his eyes and balled his hands into fists, shoving them as far into his pockets as he could. Jack watched him hesitate before he spoke, as if he wished his voice were not like the phantom that bled from the speakers.
“I don’t care how you find out. I don’t care how long it takes. I don’t care what you do to me. I just need to know if I did this.”
Jack did not hesitate. He stood and approached the safe where he kept the secure archive. He dialed in the combination and eased the heavy door open to retrieve a sealed containment box with a metal “Not For Use” seal looped through the closure. Jack snipped it away with his office scissors before handing the box to Adam.
“I assume you know and understand how to handle that?”
“Yes sir.”
# # #
The blood on the concrete was dark and dull and beginning to gather dust. Crushed boxes lay in their places, inert and pathetic in their silence. Whatever happened here no longer felt just under the surface. Somehow, in the last month, the scene had shifted solidly into the past.
They stood face to face, holding the Ghost Machine between them. Each thumbed a button, ready to engage the device.
“Do you think this thing will work?” Adam asked. He loosened and tightened his grip on the handle. His hands were sweating.
“I don’t know,” was Jack’s honest reply. “It’s impossible to control or predict. It could easily show us something useless, or even something that hasn’t happened yet. All we can do is hope that whatever happened to Ianto was the most intense thing that’s ever happened in here, and that the machine homes in on that.”
They locked eyes and counted down, then pressed their respective buttons in unison. The world blurred briefly as the machine sought out in both directions. Scraps of unfamiliar scenes shifted around them, and Jack twisted his wrist as if he were trying to steer. The room focused as suddenly as it blurred, and Adam was afraid the device had failed until he heard a man sigh.
# # #
Ianto sat on the table, fingers pressed between his eyes. His head hurt - he’d been overdoing it again, working too late and starting too early - and what he really needed was a nap. Still, it was Friday. If nothing crash-landed into the Bay or came up out of the sewers or caused the police any undue alarm, he might actually get a nice, long lie-in with Jack.
A quiet shuffling caught his attention. He sighed and hoped he’d imagined it. The Hub and its tunnels were a bit like a mausoleum. Some sound was inevitable, but unexpected noises tended to mean trouble. He stood and peered into the next room, hoping to spot a culprit.
The space was small and unremarkable. He’d worked his way down this corridor for the last few weeks, sorting and cataloging and re-filing. He’d been appalled at the sheer lack of care and organization in this section. The 1970s were not a good decade for alphabetizing, apparently.
He took stock of the boxes - mostly small cardboard affairs on a shelving unit, though there were also some larger ones stacked in a corner - and noticed the sound again. Sort of a crackling.
Ianto’s jacket was off in a flash and promptly deposited on the table in the other room. He opened his safety kit and put on a pair of exam gloves, goggles, and a breathing mask. It wouldn’t do to be injured down here with the others out in the field. He took off his Bluetooth earpiece to better accommodate the goggles, switching it off and tucking it into his trouser pocket.
With careful hands, he started removing items from the box and checking them for moving parts, leaks, or other features which might cause it to make noise. Each “safe” object - which was to say, every object which did not appear to be an immediate danger - went onto the shelves to be properly sorted afterward. It was not his preferred solution - he’d rather be working with a table and tagging equipment - but it would allow him to narrow down the active device from the others and take care of it before it did something that would keep them in all weekend.
He was retrieving something that looked a bit like a small portable television when he felt a sharp pain in the back of his hand. He swore under his breath and pulled his hand away before pulling off his gloves to get a look at the injury.
Blood dripped onto the floor and his eyes went wide. Blood plus alien tech was a potentially fatal combination. He started to reach for his earpiece to call for help when the convulsions began. He toppled hard into the shelves. His safety glasses cracked against his face and fell to the floor. He bit into his bottom lip, and blood seeped into his mouth. He tried to spit through gritted teeth. His cut hand felt like it was made of rubber bands, and the feeling was spreading up his arm. Tissue breakdown, he thought. He managed to tear the mask away from his face in hopes of helping the blood drain away rather than pool in his mouth and nose and drown him.
It hurt, and it spread, and his body was not his own. He tried to stumble onto his feet but pitched instead into some boxes in the corner with a crunch. He heard but did not entirely feel several things shatter beneath him. In his guts, he something started to come unglued. His breathing became erratic, and he began to choke on his own blood and saliva. His eyes went pure, shiny black. As his vision left him, Ianto thought of Jack. I don’t want to die. I’m not ready to leave him.
He shook and seized and after a few final agonizing moments was still.
A thread of golden particles leaked from the boxes beneath him. They seemed to flit and light on his body, tasting and making comparisons before swarming and bathing him in light, nearly lifting him up. His hand flexed and stretched. He gasped suddenly, sucking in a brand new lungful of breath.
The glow subsided gradually except around his left iris, which was still stained. The particles buzzed and tried to clear away the darkness, limiting it to a small ring of abstract shapes.
Ianto sat up. He felt woozy and confused and couldn’t think. There was something wrong with his head. He stumbled up and made a beeline for his jacket. What he needed was a good cup of coffee.
# # #
Adam collapsed into Jack’s arms and let the Captain lower them to the floor. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t move. He sobbed and shook and let Jack hold him and stroke his hair and say his name over and over again.
“Ianto. Oh Ianto. I’m so sorry.”
# # #
Jack held down two buttons on his vortex manipulator. He’d worked with nanogenes before, though never this version. Fortunately, the basic controls seemed the same. He couldn’t force a proper reset or switch them off, but he could give them a bit of a nudge.
Damned Chula technology.
It wasn’t until he’d seen them get into Ianto’s system that he put two and two together. It was a relatively simple matter to help them finish repairing Ianto’s left iris. Whatever the hell that toxin had been, it was nasty stuff. He made a mental note to go clear out The Room on his own in the next couple of days.
“Is that it?” Ianto asked, blinking a little.
“Looks like it. I’m not sure if I managed to switch them off or not, or if they’ll dissipate on their own now that you’re fixed. Either way, I wouldn’t take any unnecessary risks if I were you.”
“Duly noted, sir.”
Ianto still hadn’t changed out of his Adam clothes, and it was all Jack could do not to run into his quarters and offer him his spare suit.
“You did the right thing, you know. All of you.”
“No,” Jack said quietly. “Not all of us.”
“Yes, all of you.” Ianto kissed him softly and took his hand. “Though I suspect I owe you a good strangling.”
Jack smiled weakly. “So now what?”
“Hm?”
Jack stroked Ianto’s left brow. “Well, you’re normal again. The others will be coming in soon. They’ll need to know you’re…well, you. They’ll want an explanation.”
Ianto looked thoughtful for a moment. “Retcon me.”
“What? Ianto, no. No.”
“Just the last month, Jack. Let me wake up somewhere crazy. Maybe a park somewhere. You find me, we tell the team I was ‘exchanged’ by benevolent-yet-inept aliens, Owen makes jokes about anal probes for a week, and when I start to remember, you show me the report.”
Jack looked dumbfounded. “You mean make it look like none of this ever happened?”
“Pretty much.”
“You’d do that for us? After…after everything?”
“Torchwood needs me. Cardiff needs Torchwood. And I need you.”
Jack laughed his relief, pressing his forehead against Ianto’s. “You’re insane.”
“Must be the work environment, sir.” Ianto smirked.
# # #
“For fuck’s sake, Harkness. Do we have to fucking trek through the sewers every time someone flushes something alien down the toilet by accident?” Owen was filthy and irritable. Jack, meanwhile, had managed to come out of the whole thing wholly unscathed. This merely served to infuriate their doctor, who stormed off to the showers.
“You find it, then?” Ianto asked, watching the others file in grumpily behind Owen.
“Yep.” Jack grinned and tossed the brooch into the air and caught it. “Amazing what people drop when they’re having a delicate moment. This is why we don’t install auto-flush.”
“I lost a mobile like that once at a tube station.”
“Ouch.”
Ianto smirked.
“So, anything exciting happen while we were away?”
“Oh, the usual,” he said, loading the coffee tray. “Telephone messages. Tourists. Filing. Got a nasty papercut.” He held up his fingertip.
Jack took his hand and gently pressed his lips to the injury. He thought he felt a bit of a tingle. When he drew away he flinched. The skin was whole.
“Ianto?” Jack’s eyebrows went up.
Ianto winked. “Coffee, sir?”
===
Prev. Ep: 5/6