Fic: Oubliette

[entangled_now]

Title: Oubliette
Fandom: Torchwood
Author: Corona
Characters: Tosh
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Gen, horror
Disclaimer: In no way mine or anything to do with me, I own nothing.
Summary: While house sitting Tosh is disturbed by noises from upstairs.
AN: Written for the spookathon


Unfamiliar keys always took a few extra seconds to negotiate and Tosh had to try twice before the door deigned to let her in. So she stumbled a little on the threshold, door swinging out of her grip and bags teetering in her arms. She pushed it shut behind her, went all the way inside.

Gemma's flat was beautiful, it was large, bright and spacious. It was a big friendly flat in the way that indulgently large places sometimes never managed, decorated in reckless splashes of browns and reds that felt warm under the pale-ness of the walls.

It was amazing, and Tosh hadn't a clue why she'd want to leave it for Europe for a month.

Flat sitting wasn't going to be a chore it was going to be an indulgence.

Oh Jack would probably point out that this was perfectly within her budget. Ridiculously within her budget in fact. But it was so big, Tosh would always feel like she was rattling around in here, and no matter how lovely it was she'd rarely be there. Not to mention the commute, which was a little longer than she really wanted.

Gemma had left a note on the fridge. Tosh tugged it off and set her bags down. There were no plants to water and she was to help herself to whatever she wanted from the kitchen. She put it back under the magnet and set about unloading her shopping.

Bread, milk, her favourite coffee and a few extras for sandwiches and quick meals.

Leaving her one indulgence at the bottom of the bag.

A chocolate cake she'd bought on a whim, which would make a lovely addition to the already well-stocked fridge. But this she'd bought herself, and she didn't have to feel guilty about eating it at all. Apart from for the usual reasons.

She smiled at it and put it on the top shelf, where it instantly looked enticing in it's stylised box.

She made herself a sandwich, chose a particularly shiny apple out of the bowl sitting on the side and set them down by her open laptop on the desk

She'd have some cake later, with coffee, and she was almost certain it would be delicious.

She'd barely opened her half finished analysis of Slitheen power systems when a thump from upstairs made her frown and look up.

"I don't care, you're always out, and you never ask me if I want to come too! You just assume I'm going to be bored!"

"You are bored, you're always bored! You always complain after ten minutes that you want to go home! Damn it, the reason-"

The conversation faded as the footsteps moved from living room to kitchen.

Gemma had warned her that the couple upstairs fought, and weren't above throwing things when the mood took them.

Tosh watched the ceiling for a few more minutes, shook her head and went back to her explanation of the high temperature of power manifolds.

At half past five she had to get up and turn the lights on, pull the long, heavy curtains. It was dark outside...and definitely time for cake.

She'd been right, it was delicious, she neglected the computer for ten minutes while she demolished a piece with a fork, then seriously debated whether she could get away with having another tiny piece.

She was on holiday after all.

The phone vibrated across the desk...proving she wasn't entirely on holiday. Not with their responsibilities.

"Hello?"

"Tosh, how's the house?" She smiled and pushed her laptop aside a little.

Jack managed the sort of charm over the phone that most people couldn't pull off in person.

"It's beautiful, and huge, she didn't do it justice when she described it."

"I did tell you, you should buy one of them."

"Oh it's much too big for me. I'm not sure how one person can live in all this space." She glanced around when she said it, because really the place was enormous.

"Some people just naturally take up space."

"Like you?" She pointed out and Jack laughed, soft and amused over the line.

"What can I say I have a naturally weighty sprawl about me."

Someone said something, making Jack laugh louder.

"Owen wants to know if it's tasteful?" She could hear other voices in the background, and Ianto suggesting that Owen was perhaps not the best person to be asking about taste considering where he lived. Which Ianto referred to as his 'glass pimp castle.'

"It's very tasteful, if it were mine I don't think I'd ever leave."

"Just don't use it as an excuse to get all your work done, enjoy the view a little."

"I will," Tosh said quietly, though not without a guilty glance at her laptop.

"You can do a little bit of work," Jack allowed, in a way that told her he knew exactly what she was thinking. "Because I know you'll burst if you don't. Just don't go mad, you're on holiday."

"I know, and thank you Jack."

"For what?"

She opened and closed her mouth a few times.

"Oh everything," she said at last and suspected she sounded like she didn't know where she was going. But Jack laughed anyway, loose and relaxed.

"We'll see you on Monday."

"Yes, Monday, I'll be in."

"Bye."

"Bye Jack."

She set her phone down on the desk and sat for a moment trying to decide whether to get back to work or take Jack's advice and enjoy the place for a little while. She'd already made a huge dent in her first report.

A dent which could be significantly bigger by tonight.

She tugged her computer back within reach and maximised her document.

A few minutes typing and a dog started barking somewhere in the building. A wild, frenzied barking which normally signified things like burglars, or postmen. It made a strange audio over her typing. Until it cut off a few minutes later in a loud yelp that seemed almost startled.

Tosh's fingers paused over the keys.

The dog didn't create again, suggesting it had been dragged into another room, or perhaps even smacked with a rolled up newspaper.

But all that she could hear now was the soft humm of a vacuum and the murmur of voices from upstairs.

But something was still strange, and she wasn't entirely sure what.

It pulled the tiniest of frowns to her face.

Her fingers hovered in mid-air, frozen while her mind worked, and it took another long second to click.

The woman next door had been hoovering for almost three hours.

That seemed a little extreme even for a woman intent on living with clean carpets. Tosh suspected that even Ianto would call that 'a little excessive.' In his careful understated way.

Tosh started typing again.

She smiled all the way through a paragraph about the structure of power cells in Slitheen ships. Jack would, perhaps, take a slightly different track if she mentioned as much and he'd manage to insinuate more with his eyebrows than Tosh could manage with a black marker and a white board full of flow charts.

Not that you often had flow charts for that sort of thing.

Well except that one time when they'd tried to explain how human reproduction had worked and that hadn't turned out so well.

"-I don't care how many times you've said it. You never mean it! You never-what? What is that?"

There was a thud from upstairs, something falling and it was loud enough that Tosh could hear its after echoes through the walls.

Her typing speed had slowed again, why did people insist on building relationships on conflict? She didn't understand, life was hard enough as it was. There were enough things you had to push for without-

"Robert! Robert!"

The panicked voice cut off in a sharp shrill scream.

Tosh's hands smacked the keyboard and she looked up instinctively because she'd had the opportunity to learn what a terrified scream sounded like, she'd heard far too many of them.

Gemma hadn't said anything about the couple upstairs being violent.

The screaming was still going on though and she reached out instinctively for her phone, because this seemed like something the police should deal with.

Her thumb was over the 9 when the whole flat shook like something had slammed into the floor upstairs. A great boom of sound and fury. Tosh lost her phone and was nearly crushed when her chair slammed into the desk hard enough to make both her knees complain and her left hand go numb.

Her head was ringing and she wasn't entirely sure where the sounds were coming from any longer.

"Robert, Robert oh my god no! You can't take him, you can't take him-"

The words broke into screaming sobs and the hard juddering boom echoed through the flat again in one hard wave.

Buildings couldn't move like this, physics proved that buildings couldn't move like this. They shouldn't be able to throb like skin.

The woman upstairs was still screaming but now they were thin high wails that had slid all the way past terrified and were now just desperate, horrible noises of survival.

Tosh scooped her phone off of the floor and dialled Torchwood.

The phone apologetically told her that there was no signal.

She dropped it, turned the keyboard the right way up and opened her E-mail. It took her less than a minute to word something Jack would react to and leave the address before hitting send.

Only for the computer to tell her she wasn't connected to the internet.

Which was impossible, she'd been on the internet since lunchtime. She put her hand flat on the desk, bent down and looked underneath.

The phone socket was gone....

It hadn't been unplugged or destroyed, it was simply gone, wall flat and smooth where it should have been, cord dangling against the surface.

The woman upstairs abruptly stopped screaming. There was no pause for breath she just stopped and Tosh was left staring at the ceiling, listening to her own breathing, waiting desperately for something, anything.

There was another great bang, and this one was hard enough to shake the desk she was sat at, to make it bang where it was pressed against the wall.

Tosh skidded back a few feet on reflex- and watched in stunned horror as the desk started to sink into the wall. Metal and wood sliding through it like it was made of quicksand.

"Oh my god," her voice sounded hoarse and stunned.

She reached wildly for her discarded phone and videoed what she was watching, the gradual slide of the desk into the wall, dragging computer, speakers, monitor and keyboard inescapably with it. Her laptop slid in too with the tilt of the desk, and she didn't dare reach forward to try and retrieve it.

She was sliding back on the carpet, heels digging up tiny patches because she wasn't entirely sure how powerful that insistent pull actually was, and any experiments were very likely going to end up with her-

She wouldn't think about that.

Though she thought she knew where Robert had gone, and his wife, and the dog, and the hoovering neighbour.

Tosh dragged herself off of the floor, standing in the middle of the flat breathing too hard and listening to the creak and shift of a building that had slipped from mundane into terrifying in seconds.

For what seemed like no reason at all.

Though what was happening, she didn't have a clue.

It was time to perform some scientific experiments with what was on hand.

Tosh lifted a vase from the table and hurled it at the wall, watched in fascination as it shattered on impact, only to be absorbed fractions of a second later, some loose shards rained down, too quick for the pull to catch.

The time between impact and absorption was not enough, she couldn't risk touching the wall at all.

She hefted something heavier, a bronze statue of a cat and flung it at the window as hard as she could. The glass bowed, rippled, and swallowed the statue whole.

Tosh made a quiet sound of distress, but to be fair she'd expected as much.

Smashing a window was not a possibility either it seemed.

It also suggested that it was the whole building, not just the walls, not just a few random pockets of what looked like some sort of molecular decay or purposely produced phase space.

Careful steps took her to the door and suddenly every bare space was terrifying. The walls, the ceilings, the soft pale floorboards under the heavy maroon rug.

She didn't take a chance on the door latch, dragged it open with the loop of a tea towel. The material sank into the wood a few seconds later and she let go with a short noise of distress.

The hallway was long and deserted but it still felt exposed, and she was horribly aware that the carpeted floor was still part of the building, still party to the same horrible physics.

She dragged her phone out of her pocket again while watching her feet, taking short hurried steps and expecting at any moment to be pulled into the floor. Too frightened to stop for long, too frightened to be able to stop.

She dialled and then cursed the repeated utter lack of signal.

"Damn it Jack!" The phones were supposed to be carrying upgrades that made this sort of thing impossible.

A crunch to her left nearly sent her sprawling and she watched a door break into pieces, then be absorbed into the wall either side of it.

The idea of the stairwell with its concrete fall was even more terrifying than the lift, but she'd never get out of the building any other way.

Every corner was an exercise in bravery and her brain was working frantically on what exactly was going on.

The best she could fathom was that building was taking itself ever so slightly out of phase, so it could more easily absorb people and...she wasn't sure but she assumed digest them. Oh god- which definitely made it a job for Torchwood because buildings that could absorb people were not a natural phenomenon.

She knew she had to go down but the possibility of reaching Jack through her phone from the roof was an option she had to consider. If she couldn't get out by going down it may be her last chance.

"Hello! Hello is anyone here!" She couldn't chance banging on doors, couldn't chance checking room by room with so many walls in-between her and an exit but she couldn't do nothing, it was a whole block of flats. A whole block of flats that people lived in.

"Hello can anyone hear me?"

"Help me!" She came to a stop, the voice was pained but close.

She found out how close when she rounded the next corner and found a man in a tidy business suit slumped halfway inside the wall, hands clinging desperately to the frame of a door.

"Oh my god!" She was close enough that when he flailed with a hand she caught it on instinct, pulling immediately, pulling hard. Both hands had a nail deep grip on the sleeve of his jacket. But she was making no difference at all, he wasn't moving an inch, in fact he was edging ever deeper into the wall. He was sinking and her weight, her desperation, was having no effect.

There was nothing she could do. All this had accomplished was dragging her terrifying closer to the wall, where the man was now disappearing, the material of his jacket gone taut behind him, his waist sinking, disappearing too.

"Please let me go, please you have to let me go." Her voice was a quiet lean into hysteria, a breath of horrible certainty that she was going to be dragged into the wall after him. Dragged until she was touching, falling, sinking.

A pull sucked the man in another few inches and her heels skidded on the carpet. The man made a hard noise, something wild and terrified.

"Let me go, please, I can't help you, please!" She was getting louder, she sounded breathless and terrified, like the woman upstairs, and all she wanted to do was get away, to desperately get away.

God she was ashamed, so ashamed she was crying because this was what she was supposed to do. She was supposed to help people, she wasn't supposed to let things like this happen.

"Please!" The man grasped frantically for her wrists, fingers too hard and too desperate. Then his eyes met Tosh's, horrible and terrified and hopeless.

They spasmed and then...let her go, sending her sprawling across the carpet gasping and giving short little panicked sobs of relief and horror as the man she didn't know sank into the wall. Until he was just a gaping mouth and a reaching hand, and then...nothing.

In seconds she was upright and running, running for her life in the direction she hoped the stairs were in. She reached a corner and didn't even stop, just flew round it- and smacked straight into something. She couldn't stop the shriek, shock and anticipation of horrible death.

"Hey, hey are you alright?" It only took a fraction of a second to realise the man holding her arm wasn't connected to the wall. "Have you seen what's-" he got a good look at her face. "That's a stupid question of course you've seen. We're trying to get to the lifts."

Tosh blinked, he wasn't alone. A nervous girl and a breathless unshaven man accompanied him. It took her another second to realise what he'd said.

"No!" She caught his arm. "No you can't use the lifts. If they're connected to the rest of the building's structure they could absorb you at will."

"Oh god," the nervous girl said thinly.

"I'm trying-" Tosh swallowed and forced her voice to work. "I'm trying to get to the stairs. Which, though not a good prospect is significantly safer than the lifts."

"Do you know what's going on?"

Tosh shook her head.

"No, no I just know- I'm a scientist," she offered which seemed the quickest, simplest way to explain.

"Well that's already more helpful. I'm Adam and I work in a bank." He waved behind him. "That's Dave and Bridget."

Tosh gave a nervous smile to the little group.

"Toshiko," she supplied, breathless and still shaking.

"I work in packing." Dave supplied. "And I've never seen a wall do what these have been doing."

"I work in Carphone Warehouse," the nervous girl- Bridget said.

"Nice to meet you, under the circumstances," Tosh said awkwardly.

"There were five of us but-" Adam didn't say any more.

"We didn't know not to touch the walls then," Dave said fiercely. He clearly did want to say more but Bridget was shaking her head frantically, like she didn't want to hear it.

"Where are the stairs?" They'd started moving again, that instinctive need not to remain still when every part of the building had become a possible threat.

"Back the way we came, the middle of the building." Adam said and Tosh veered them all as a group back down the hallway.

"I'm house sitting, I don't know the layout at all," she said apologetically, though why she was apologising under the circumstances she had no idea.

Another boom shook the building, a hard echoing vibration that ate up all the sound and air in long terrifying waves.

"Here," Dave said simply, gestured at the shuddering double doors that lay in the middle of the corridor.

After a long careful moment of silence. Dave took a disposable lighter out of his pocket and prodded the doors.

They swayed open with a creak.

It was like something out of a nightmare.

The stairs were shifting, shaking, parts of them breaking off and crashing apart only to be absorbed when they bounced into the walls.

"Oh my god," Adam sounded horrified. Tosh could understand, it was a nightmare, a writhing masonic nightmare.

Her phone beeped in her pocket.

She had a signal, half a foot into the stairwell she had a signal.

She resisted Adam's tug on her arm.

"Wait, wait my phone."

"Toshiko!"

"I have to try," she said simply.

"Oh my god," Bridget said desperately. "Oh my god!"

Tosh dialled with shaking fingers, the floor shuddering and warping under her feet. The signal was weak but it was enough, it had to be enough.

"Jack, Jack can you hear me?!

Tosh couldn't hear a thing over the banging, and Bridget shrieking, and the fall of concrete.

"Jack the building is not a building. I don't know what it is but it has phase capabilities and we're trapped inside. Can you hear me?"

She swayed out of the way of a spear of banister. The walls were rippling in waves that were making the metal screech hideously.

"Jack a little help would be greatly appreciated-"

The wave reached the floor and Adam clearly decided that a little intervention would best be done quickly, and dragged her back through the doors.

The boom shook the hallway.

"Are you sure that's the way out?" Adam sounded dubious.

"I couldn't smash a window, the lifts are contained boxes that may end up being death traps. The roof might be a possibility but we'd still have to go up somehow."

"We couldn't just wait somewhere until it stops?" Dave suggested.

"Would you want to?" Bridget said fiercely, mockingly.

"And there's no guarantee that it will stop," Tosh said carefully. "That it won't just eat the building alive whatever it is. Destroying floor by floor until there's nothing left."

"And us with it," Adam said carefully. "But that doesn't change the fact that the stairs look like suicide."

"I think it's the best choice and I- I intend to go." Tosh had made up her mind. She had to get out if only to warm Jack, to find out why this was happening and stop it.

Because who was to say there weren't people left in their flats, staying away from the walls, terrified, waiting for someone to save them.

How could she do anything less for them.

She took off her shoes, used one of them to push open and wedge the door against its rubber stop. The other she held like a brace. If it touched the wall she could let it go, let it get sucked inside, leaving her free to get away.

"Wait," Bridget said quickly. "I'm coming too."

"Me too." Adam slid in behind her, following her lead. Bridget was wearing heavier boots so it took her a minute to unlace them.

"We're all coming," Dave said reluctantly.

Tosh was stuck suddenly leading the charge into either death or escape. She was shaking and all she had to protect her was a bloody shoe.

She tried desperately to recall everything she'd learned about molecular structure.

"Don't touch the walls, if you do let go of whatever you're holding straight away, don't tread anywhere that looks strange or doesn't have the consistency of concrete."

She swallowed, which utterly failed to help the dryness at the back of her throat, the frantic thump of her pulse.

"We go after a wave, don't panic if you fall on the stairs just stay away from the walls and get straight back up again.

"God how do you know all this?" Bridget's voice was shaking.

"I've done emergency drills for lots of things," Tosh said honestly.

"Ever done one for this?"

"Unfortunately no," she said with a breathless unhappy laugh. But she'd done drills for worse.

The wave swelled through the walls, dislodging chips of stone and sending a ripple through the stairs.

"Now!" Tosh said sharply and hoped to god they were running after her.

They were a clatter of noise and breathing while the stairways boomed around them, chips of concrete crashing off the walls, and the stairs swayed sickeningly under their feet.

Tosh narrowly avoided going down herself when she instinctively reached for the banister and it wasn't there. Stupidity like that would get her killed.

One flight down, two flights and though the stairs weren't stable they were there, they were there and they were solid.

"Ah!" Bridget skidded to her knees and Adam hauled her up again without even looking, they all took the bend of the stairs at dangerous speed, but falling was the least of their worries.

Three flights, one more just one more and the door should come into view, the double doors that led into the building, that she'd pushed open earlier in the day without a second thought.

When they rounded the next bend Tosh saw them and saw that one of them was half open, listing and shining silver in the darkness.

Half open but quickly shutting. Tosh threw herself at the gap, snatching up the door handle on the way past, she dragged it open, dragged it all the way open with her bare hands on a shout of terror. She felt the metal give under her fingers, felt her skin sink in a way that was unnatural and terrifying.

The others surged through the gap.

Bridget caught her waist as she passed, momentum tearing them both away from the building to sprawl painful and awkward on the cold wet grass, still panting, still shaking in a way she couldn't seem to stop.

They all watched, horrified as the staircase started to eat itself.

Tosh's phone started ringing, a sharp cheerful tune where it lay on the cold grass beside her.

She decided she'd answer it in a minute.

Just one more minute.

It stopped ringing, and after a moment of dead silence and relieved noises there was the beep that signalled she'd received a text message from Torchwood.

She swivelled the phone around, and pressed 'read.'

It said 'we're on our way.'

She gave a little laugh and sprawled back on the grass.