Pretender to the Throne: Part One (Pretender/Torchwood)
In celebration for surviving a job interview today, I'm starting yet another one.
Pretender to the Throne Part One
A Pretender/Torchwood crossover
by mhalachaiswords
Summary: In 1992, an American corporation known as 'The Centre' isolated a young pretender named Ianto, and exploited his genius for their research.
Two years later, Torchwood came to take back what was theirs.
Disclaimer: Russell T. Davis and the BBC own Torchwood. Pretender belongs to NBC.
Rating: PG-13 for language, violence
Setting: Post Torchwood season 2; twelve years after the start of Pretender (ignoring the movies for the most part)
Characters: Team Torchwood, Jarod, Miss Parker
Words: 5,425
~~~
"I know everything. And it says so on the bottom of the screen."
--Ianto Jones, Sleeper
Jarod stared at the morgue attendant. "I'm sorry, what did you say?"
"I said, 'no'," the young Welshman repeated. He handed back Jarod's fake ID with no small amount of annoyance on his face. "Torchwood got here first. The case is in their hands now, and that's all I have to say."
Jarod didn't know what to say. He had planned for every contingency, every possible argument, but he had no idea what to say to this complete denial.
Possibly worse, he had no idea how to bluff about 'Torchwood'.
The morgue attendant, content in his dismissal, pivoted to move lackadaisically to the doors separating the morgue proper from the front desk. Jarod followed, wondering if he would have a better chance of getting in by speaking with 'Torchwood' directly.
The wide metal door swung open under the young man's touch, revealing a scene familiar to Jarod -- the steel table and draped corpse would have fit in any autopsy room in Jarod's past. However, the young man standing over the corpse was no doctor. A immaculate dark suit gave the air of an undertaker.
The door began its pendulous swing shut. Just before the door closed all the way, the young man looked up from the body and directly at Jarod with clear blue eyes, and then the door closed with a soft whuff.
Jarod blinked. Something about the young man was incredibly familiar, but was it? Jarod flipped through his memories, trying to recreate the circumstances in which he had seen the man (but surely, it must have been years ago, when the man had been a boy) when the door swung open from the inside.
The young man in the suit all but shoved the morgue attendant back into the front area. "We'll take it from here," the man said in precise words. "Why don't you go get a cup of tea? Take about an hour."
The morgue attendant glared daggers at the man. "What's this 'we', then?" he demanded.
The young man (where had Jarod seen him?) glanced briefly at Jarod, a flick of the eyes that was more warning than explanatory. "My colleague will be joining me in the examination."
"But he didn't say he was with you!" the attendant protested.
The young man quirked an eyebrow at the attendant. "You know Americans, notoriously demure and hesitant to impose upon people." He waited a beat. "Go."
The attendant shook his head and slumped off towards the corridor. As he passed, Jarod distinctly heard him mutter, "Bloody Torchwood."
The young man with the familiar blue eyes pushed the door open wide. "Are you coming in?" he asked.
Jarod narrowed his eyes. "And why would I be doing that?" he asked, unwilling to move any closer to the man until he could figure out where they had met.
The man gave Jarod a look that was almost pitying. "You came here to look at the body, are you going to leave without an examination?"
"You called me your colleague," Jarod said. "I believe you have the advantage of me."
The pity slid away into a smile. "We are, Jarod. Or were, at one time." The smile grew. "You don't remember me."
With a step back, the man let go of the door. Jarod took one step forward, then another, and he was inside the morgue, with its cold air and sickly smell of disinfectant and lingering death.
The man moved back beside the shrouded body, and in spite of his hesitance, Jarod drew closer. This, right here, was why he had left the safe anonymity of London, to travel to Cardiff in the aftermath of the terrorist bombings, to attempt to help in the wave of mysterious killings. And now he was standing in the morgue with one of those bodies, and most of his attention was on the young man in front of him.
Where had he seen this man before?
As Jarod puzzled, the man picked up a small black device about the size of his hand and fiddled with it until several blue lights pulsed. Then he exchanged the device for a notebook. "Do you have any experience at being a medical examiner or a doctor?" he asked, and all of a sudden everything clicked into place.
He wasn't asking if Jarod was a doctor, he was asking about ability, about skill, about playing pretend, and that slid into a memory of sixteen years before.
Jarod walked beside Sydney on the way back from the SimLab, the concrete walls of the Centre pressing in on him more than normal. Maybe, Jarod thought, breathing evenly in an effort to avoid panicking, as he aged, the walls would keep pressing in until he was trapped in a coffin, unable to do anything other than scream.
With Sydney watching Jarod out of the corner of his eye, Jarod forced his voice to be light and casual in conversation. Sydney could not see, could not know how very much Jarod had to get out of this place.
A flash of something new caught Jarod's attention, drawing him back to himself. Coming down the hall was another of the Centre doctors, Bryce, with a new boy. The child walked stiffly, warily, just out of Bryce's reach.
Jarod's eyes narrowed. He knew human emotion when he saw it, and this boy radiated unease. Knowing something was wrong, Jarod didn't change course, just came to a halt in the middle of the hallway, blocking the boy's path.
The boy stopped also, again just out of reach. He looked up at Jarod with a mix of curiosity and unhappiness. Beside them, the two doctors slowed and stopped, out of the circle and out of mind.
The boy spoke first. "Who are you, then?" he asked. Soft Welsh vowels slid through the air on the boy's young voice. "You another of these doctors who want me to show off for the cameras?"
There was no pride or pain in the words, only sullen annoyance, and something in Jarod's gut twisted. They were experimenting on this boy as they had experimented on Jarod, just another test subject for the Centre.
The walls were moving again. Jarod breathed deeply. "I'm not a doctor, I'm Jarod." He smiled down at the boy. When had he gotten so old? "I'm a Pretender."
The boy was unimpressed. "So? I can pretend things too."
"We're on our way to the SimLab," Bryce said in his nervous, weedy way. "It's time for his first Simulation."
"I have a name," the boy said sharply, glaring at Bryce.
"It's nice to meet you," Jarod said. He held out his hand, remembering other times he had reached out to other children, and how those children inevitably went away.
The boy lifted his bright blue eyes to Jarod's face, scrunching up his nose a little. Perhaps reassured, he stepped closer and took Jarod's offered hand with dignity. "And you, sir." He gave Jarod's hand a clumsy shake. "I'm Ianto. Ianto Jones."
Jarod breathed deeply, and then wished he hadn't as the morgue smell sank into his lungs. He forced a smile onto his face. "I've been a coroner before, Ianto Jones."
Ianto smiled briefly. "Good. I'm afraid that our medical officer was killed recently and with the recent surge in activity, I'm all we have in examining the body. Would you be able to lend your expertise?"
"I'll do what I can to catch this killer," Jarod countered. "If you answer one question."
Ianto finished making a note. "And what is that?"
"What's Torchwood?"
Ianto laid down his notebook. "An agency of the Crown. I'm here for a reason parallel to yours."
"But not the same reason," Jarod noted.
"Are any two people ever working towards the same goal for the same reason?"
Jarod's hands curled around the edge of the metal table. "A child is dead, and you're concerned about semantics?"
Ianto put his own hands on the table and leaned over the body to look Jarod in the eye. "I need to be clear," he said in a low voice, so different from how Jarod remembered the boy. "This is not the Centre. In Cardiff, Torchwood is in charge. This is my case--"
"You're fighting about jurisdiction?" Jarod pushed back from the table. He couldn't believe what he was hearing.
The cold expression on Ianto's face froze any further words from Jarod. "This is Torchwood's case because it's too dangerous to remain in the hands of the police," Ianto said. "The police cannot handle this."
"And what is this?" Jarod asked, anger now warring with confusion. What couldn't the police handle? All he had read in the newspapers were vague details of the murders of three people.
In response, Ianto pulled back the sheet on the body.
It was a good thing Jarod had steeled himself for the worst, because the body under the sheet was wrong.
He turned away, slamming doors on his Pretender instincts to understand what the victim felt as she died. Instead, Jarod reached into his repertoire of mental disguises and pulled himself into the role of emotionless coroner. Dispassionate, intelligent, all-seeing, unfeeling.
Squaring his shoulders, Jarod turned back to the body. Ianto spoke as though nothing had happened, pulling on gloves with an absent air. "This is Mary Trevelyan, age eight years and five months. She's been dead for thirty-six hours."
"When was the body found?" Jarod asked as he donned his own gloves.
"Yesterday at three in the morning," Ianto said.
"By whom?" Jarod stared down at the little body, now utterly without purpose.
"A drunk on the way home through a wooded path near the river. He was so far gone that he doesn't remember much."
Jarod folded the sheet down carefully over Mary's hips, leaving the body bare from the torso up. "Did the parents informed the police of Mary's disappearance?"
"They didn't know she was gone until the morning when her mother went to wake her for school." Ianto moved back against the wall, letting Jarod have full access to the body. "There were no signs that she was removed from her room. The front door was dead-bolted in the morning, and the police found the latchkey in Mary's pocket. Mrs. Trevelyan said that she had an argument with Mary about going to a friend's house for some sort of event, and Mary had gone to bed at the usual time of ten o'clock. The parents retired at eleven, and Mrs. Trevelyan is adamant that Mary was in her bed at that time."
"How adamant?" Jarod adjusted the light over Mary's body so the bright beam shone directly upon the neck wound, so very different than those on the torso.
"She went into Mary's room and kissed Mary on the cheek. The girl was either sleeping or pretending, but she was certainly alive." Ianto's dry recitation filled the cold room, making things impersonal. "The police are interviewing Mary's friends to see if the girl's story had any substance. In any event, some time between eleven o'clock and three in the morning, Mary was killed in the woods."
"Was the body moved?"
"Unlikely. The ground was soaked with blood. And if this case is like the other victims, the killer took what it wanted and left the bodies where they fell."
Jarod paused, running back over Ianto's words. "Why do you say 'it'?"
Ianto pushed off the wall. "You'll note that the throat is cut, a wound independent of the other injuries," he said, ignoring Jarod's question. "The attack pattern is the same in all the victims. As far as we can tell, the cause of death was exsanguination from the neck injury. The other injuries occurred after."
"You're not sure?" Jarod asked as he moved the head. Whatever had cut the throat had gone deep enough to sever the main veins and arteries in one contiguous blow. Death would have been nearly instantaneous.
He moved his attention to the torso. As savage as the wounds were, none of the edges seeped much blood. Jarod let out a breath he hadn't known he was holding. Mary hadn't been alive when her killer dug into her abdomen.
"As I said, our medical officer was killed recently. I don't have much experience in actual autopsies."
Jarod gave the man a look. "Didn't you try on your own?"
Ianto returned the look. "I'm not a Pretender," he said.
And that, Jarod thought privately as he bent back over the body, was too close to a lie.
Ianto continued on his recitation. "I was about to take stock of the organs before you arrived."
"Organs?" Jarod frowned as he stared at the opened body. "Hasn't the coroner looked at the body."
"No." Ianto removed his jacket and placed on a hook by the door. "The body has been held until we could get to it." He rolled up his shirtsleeves.
"A little girl has been murdered, and you don't let the coroner do his job?" Jarod demanded.
"She's still dead," Ianto said. His face was expressionless. "You're free to walk out that door if you find that so distasteful."
Jarod continued to stare at Ianto, not sure what he should do. He shouldn't walk away, not when this little girl was dead, but Ianto was hiding a wealth of secrets, secrets that Jarod would need to know to properly avenge this child's death.
Ianto picked up a metal retractor from the tray laid ready on the table. "If you could please move the light an inch to the left." When Ianto placed the retractor against one edge of the gashes in Mary's torso, his hands shook ever-so-slightly. Jarod did some mental math. He had met Ianto sixteen years before when the boy was young, not even ten years of age. That meant Ianto was now no more than twenty-five.
Too young to be alone in a room with a murdered child.
"Let me help," Jarod said reluctantly. "It's easier with an extra set of hands."
Ianto nodded in acknowledgement of the offer. He handed the retractor to Jarod. The criss-cross of gashes on the body had gone through skin and muscle, bisecting the abdominal cavity itself. Once the cavity was opened enough for access, Ianto pulled back the stomach and large intestine, letting the light shine on the liver.
Or rather, the space where the liver should have been.
"He took her liver," Jarod said, feeling faintly ill.
"Liver and gallbladder," Ianto corrected. "Removed in one piece. That was all it wanted." He let the organs slide back into place. "Just like the others."
Jarod slowly removed the retractors from the body. "You said Mary was killed where she was found? Someone might have seen the killer removing the organs--"
"No, they wouldn't have." Ianto stripped off his gloves. "It would have been gone in under thirty seconds."
"With those precise cuts, without slicing through any other organ?" Jarod argued. "That sort of precision isn't possible."
"It is in this case." Ianto pulled the sheet over Mary's body.
"How?"
Ianto sighed. "Like this." He circled around the table to stand in front of Jarod. With a shock somewhere in the back of his head, Jarod realized that Ianto was almost as tall as Jarod himself. And he had been such a tiny child.
Ianto raised his hand, crooking his forefinger and index finger into a curve, almost a hook. "One," Ianto said, lifting his arm over his head and miming a downward slice across Jarod's throat. "Two." The motion changed direction in midair, sliding down and across Jarod's torso in a diagonal slash. "Three." The claw went up and slid across the torso in the opposite direction. "Four." Starting below the navel, the claw moved up in a straight line. Ianto stepped back. "Then the second and third hands pulled the chest open here and here," Ianto poked the air near the imaginary slices in Jarod's chest. "And the cutting claw reached in and slices out the liver in a moment. No more than thirty seconds."
Jarod blinked. Then again. "Did you just say 'third hand'? Was the killer working with an accomplice?"
"No," Ianto said with a calm that was certainly not warranted in this situation. "It was hunting alone."
Before Jarod could ask any more questions, the morgue door opened a crack and a man popped his head inside. "Are you done?" the man asked.
"In a moment," Ianto called, never looking away from Jarod. Almost willing him to believe.
"I need a word before you go." The man hesitated. "Is Torchwood taking the body?"
Ianto turned his head to the man. "No, that won't be necessary."
"Good," the man said, and withdrew.
Ianto went back to the table to pack up his little black device. "Come on," he said to Jarod. "There isn't anything more for us here."
Jarod peeled off his gloves, thinking furiously. He wasn't in control of the situation and that bothered him. The most unsettling part of the whole thing was that Ianto was in control, had all the information Jarod needed. What could he do but go with Ianto?
As soon as Ianto donned his jacket and straightened his tie, he stepped out the door. With one last glance at the sheeted body of Mary Trevelyan, Jarod followed.
The man was cooling his heels by the desk. His uniform and bearing identified him as a police officer, but there was none of the usual inter-jurisdictional tension in the room. Just what was Torchwood?
"Andy," Ianto said in a not-unfriendly manner.
"Ianto." Andy's gaze slid past Ianto to Jarod. "And this?"
"This is Jarod," Ianto said. "He's in to help for a bit."
"A doctor?" Andy nodded his head in greeting. "I keep expecting to see Harper whenever you lot show up down here."
"We're done here," Ianto said. "We'll be in touch with the coroner about the cause of death."
Andy's expression grew cold. "And what exactly will do we tell the parents?" he demanded.
Ianto gripped the handle of his case so hard his knuckles were white. "That she died instantly and didn't feel anything."
"Was she targeted?"
Ianto shook his head. "Like all the others, it was a random attack."
Andy tapped his hat against his leg absently. "What's the media going to do if they get that these people were just randomly mauled to death on the streets? There'll be a panic to keep everyone inside!"
"In a city where something is killed randomly at night, how is that a bad thing?" Ianto retorted. He stepped around Andy and went towards the stairs. "Don't release the details to the media."
Andy let out a large huff. "Where are Jack and Gwen?" he asked Ianto's retreating back.
"Working on a separate angle," Ianto said without turning around. "Jarod?"
"Coming," Jarod said. He held out his hand to Andy. "It was good to meet you."
Warily, Andy took the offered hand. "Another American?" The corner of his mouth quirked up. "I'm not sure Cardiff can take another of you."
"Excuse me?"
"Jarod," Ianto called again from the top of the stairs.
"Good luck," Andy said.
"Thanks, this case will need it." Jarod smiled, hoping that he could cultivate a good relationship with the police in Cardiff, just in case.
Andy shook his head. "I mean with Torchwood."
With that puzzling pronouncement, Jarod found himself running up the stairs after Ianto. He caught up with the younger man in the parking lot. "Why am I going with you?" Jarod wondered aloud.
"I don't know, why are you?" Ianto asked. He paused to unlock a small automobile, placing his briefcase carefully in the backseat before climbing into the driver's seat. Not willing to be left behind, Jarod folded himself into the passenger seat before the young man drove off. "Why are you here?"
Jarod let his eyes drift off to the passing cars as Ianto pulled the car into traffic. "Because three people have died and the police aren't any closer to finding out what did it."
"That's not what I meant."
"And what did you mean?"
Ianto maneuvered the car into a break in the traffic and sped off before the other drivers had the time to express their displeasure. "Why are you in Britain?"
Jarod let out a long breath. He supposed he might gain a bit more leverage with Ianto if he told his story. If anyone would understand wanting to escape the Centre, it would be Ianto. "Twelve years ago--" he began.
Ianto interrupted. "You escaped from the Centre and spent most of your time alternating between helping the downtrodden, tormenting the Centre, and finding your family."
If the car hadn't been going fifty miles an hour, Jarod would have jumped out. As it stood, he seriously considered it. "How do you know that?" Was the boy a Centre plant after all?
The look Ianto threw at Jarod was faintly amused. "I've been monitoring Centre transmissions for the last four years," he said. "Your name crosses the wires with alarming frequency."
Jarod was agog. "You have access to the Centre's internal communications?" Even Jarod himself didn't have access to those communications, hidden behind the most intensive security the Centre had. He'd have given anything to be able to access those lines.
"I have access to everything." Ianto slowed the car and turned onto a side street.
"How? Why?"
The car stopped in a parking lot overlooking the bay. "The how is unimportant. The why... well, for the same reason you'd have done it," Ianto said. He turned off the ignition and sat staring at the bright sunny day.
Jarod looked out at the water. If he had access to the Centre communications, what would be the first thing he would do? Find out information about his family, of course. But Ianto didn't have any family left, Jarod knew. So quite possibly, Jarod's second choice would be Ianto's first.
"You were checking to see if they were coming after you," Jarod said. Ianto didn't respond. "But I thought that you were discharged from the Centre, that's what all the paperwork said."
Ianto quirked an eyebrow at Jarod. "The Centre never gives away what it can sell, Jarod."
The matter-of-fact way he said those words chilled Jarod to the core.
~~~
March, 1992
Ianto slumped in his seat, refusing to pay attention to the science lesson or his teacher or anything. He focused all of his attention on the paper before him, where he was halfway through sketching a three-dimensional outline of a wolf spider. It was way more accurate than the rubbish drawing in the textbook, even though Ianto had only caught a glimpse at a photo of the spider in the nature magazine at the news agents before his aunt dragged him away.
He hated school. He hated the stupid kids and the annoying teachers who just wanted to help the poor troubled orphan and the decaying building and this stupid city. He wanted to go home to Cardiff, but he couldn't because his family was all dead and the only person who could be bothered to take him in, his aunt, lived in Swansea.
A knock at the classroom door interrupted the lesson and pulled Ianto out of his funk. The school secretary stepped into the room and held a whispered conference with the teacher. After about a minute of this, the teacher stepped back and faced the room.
"Ianto Jones," he called. "Pack up your things and get your coat. Come now, boy. Hurry up."
Ianto slowly gathered his meager possessions from his desk and walked over to the coatroom. He dumped his things into his worn bookbag, pulled his coat from the hook and dragged himself over to the adults. He made himself ignore the mutterings of the other students. They didn't like him, and he didn't like them, and what they were saying didn't matter. They knew better than to hit him now, after he'd had to beat up a few of them when they'd jumped him after class on his second day, but they could still talk.
"Well, Mr. Jones, good luck," the teacher said. He clapped a hand on Ianto's shoulder, which was odd as Ianto planned to be back in class as soon as his crazy aunt's fancy to yank him out of school had passed.
"Thank you, Mr. Thomas," Ianto said, because he at least remembered what his father had taught him of manners, and the secretary took hold of Ianto's shoulder and walked him out of the classroom and into the deserted halls.
The headmaster's office was as dingy and depressed as the rest of the school, more so now as the room was thick with cigarette smoke. Ianto was used to smoke; his aunt was smoking herself into a none-too-early grave, but the woman in the headmaster's office was nothing like his aunt.
Ianto quickly took stock of the situation. The headmaster was ill at ease, moving and adjusting a pile of official-looking papers on his desk. Ianto had been in enough social workers' offices to know custody papers when he saw them.
Turning his attention to the woman, Ianto was, for the first time in a long time, confused. She was thin, annoyed, and was wearing clothes so well-cut they would have even have impressed Ianto's father. She really didn't belong in this setting.
"Ianto, please have a seat." The headmaster gestured at the large chair in front of his desk. Ianto hopped up on the seat, his attention never leaving the annoyed woman by the window. "Ianto," the man tried again, smiling with a mouthful of bad teeth. "There has been a change in your guardianship. Miss Parker will be escorting you to your new school in America."
Ianto gripped the sides of his chair. He wanted to remind the man that Welsh Child Services regulations stated that all non-family custody transfers were supposed to take place in the presence of social worker and a police officer, and this woman certainly wasn't any family of his. He knew all of this because he'd nicked the handbook one day when his aunt dragged him to hospital with broken ribs after he jumped off the roof to test his homemade parachute (which would have worked, too, if he hadn't jumped into the wind) and the social workers 'had attended'.
But there were no social workers here, and Ianto was out of luck.
"Come on, I haven't got all day," the woman snapped, stubbing out her cigarette in an ashtray on the headmaster's desk. "The plane's leaving whether you're on it or not." Her voice was American and husky and made her sound even older than she was.
The headmaster cleared his throat. "Miss Parker, you can't just expect the boy to hop to--"
Miss Parker leaned over the desk and gave the headmaster the iciest glare Ianto had ever seen. It was impressive. "I can, and I do," she said in a low voice.
Ianto stood and went over to the headmaster's desk. He went up on tiptoe to read the upside-down papers. There, in cold black and white, was the evidence that his aunt had signed him, body and soul, over to an agency called 'The Centre' in Delaware, America.
"Kid, let's move," Miss Parker said. She stalked out the door and down the hall.
Ianto looked at the headmaster. "Goodbye, sir," he said, because it wasn't the man's fault he was a spineless moron, then Ianto picked up his bookbag and ran after the gunshot sounds of Miss Parker's high heels on the peeling linoleum. He caught up with the woman by the front door. He had to jog a little to keep pace with her across the parking lot and talking was impossible, but it gave him an opportunity to examine the woman.
She had dark hair and crystal blue eyes, and she would have been very beautiful, except that Ianto also saw the stressed carriage of her shoulders and the tenseness in her mouth, and his own stomach twisted as he found himself imagining what it was like to be Miss Parker. She was sad and angry and defiant, and Ianto understood all of that. Above all, she was desperately unhappy and she was hiding that even from herself.
The car at the edge of the parking lot wasn't a taxi, but it had a driver. Miss Parker jerked her head at the backseat. "Get in," she ordered. Ianto scrambled into the luxurious car, touching the soft leather seats and the shiny edging on the interior as the car pulled away from the school.
Ianto never looked back.
After about ten minutes of being ignored by Miss Parker and the driver, Ianto put his arms on the back of Miss Parker's seat. "Are you going to get my things?" he asked.
"What things?" Miss Parker asked, not looking at him.
"My things, from my aunt's," Ianto said. It wasn't as if he wanted to see the woman, but he would have liked to get a few of his possessions, like the photograph of his family, and the program from their funeral, and the book from which he was teaching himself Hindustani.
"They're in the trunk," Miss Parker said. "Now be quiet and don't bother me."
Ianto subsided. He pulled his legs up onto the seat and hugged his knees. He hadn't ridden in such a nice car since the day his family was buried, and the memory made his stomach ache.
He hadn't liked living with his aunt, and had even contemplated running away a few times, but he knew he wasn't old enough to support himself, no matter how smart he was, so he stayed. He'd had a place to sleep and most days his aunt remembered to feed him, so that was something. Little boys who had seen their whole family massacred by monsters couldn't expect any more, Ianto often told himself.
After a while, Ianto pulled his notebook from his knapsack and began a new drawing. Unlike the other drawings he made, this wasn't something he'd seen in a book or around him. This was the face from his nightmares, the face of the creature that had killed his family.
He hadn't been able to draw it while living in his aunt's flat, but in the car that was speeding rapidly east from Swansea, Ianto found the face quickly taking shape under his pencil.
The road signs had shed their Welsh by the time Ianto finished his drawing. It was past lunchtime and Ianto hadn't even eaten breakfast that morning, as his aunt had shoved him out of the flat before he'd even finished dressing, but Ianto didn't complain. He was so far outside of himself that hunger didn't matter.
He stared at the face of the monster that had thrown his mother against a wall, breaking her neck; had bit so deep into his brother's throat, leaving him to thrash and gurgle on the paving stones; had clawed at his father's exposed back as the man had lifted the seven-year-old Ianto onto the fire escape out of harm's way.
Ianto remembered everything about that day, how his father screamed as the monster clawed him to death, how his brother's gurgles had continued after Da's screaming stopped, how Mam's glassy dead eyes stared up at Ianto as he clung to the fire escape, dangling above the earth as the monster snarled up at him, but then left him alone with the bodies of his family.
It had been hours before someone found the bodies, and then the screaming started again.
"What did you give my aunt to give me up?" Ianto asked into the silence of the car.
"What?" Miss Parker asked, startled into answering.
"What did you give my aunt to give me up?" Ianto asked again.
Miss Parker turned her head to look at Ianto. Unease curled around her, and only Ianto saw it. "I don't know. I'm only taking you back to the Centre."
And you didn't want to know, Ianto thought, closing his notebook. He wondered if they'd had to offer his aunt money, or if getting rid of her sister's surviving offspring had been reward enough.
He spent the transatlantic flight watching Miss Parker, wondering what it was like to be her, adult and angry at the world and grown-up enough to do something about it all. He didn't say another word until the plane landed in America.
end part
Pretender to the Throne Part One
A Pretender/Torchwood crossover
by mhalachaiswords
Summary: In 1992, an American corporation known as 'The Centre' isolated a young pretender named Ianto, and exploited his genius for their research.
Two years later, Torchwood came to take back what was theirs.
Disclaimer: Russell T. Davis and the BBC own Torchwood. Pretender belongs to NBC.
Rating: PG-13 for language, violence
Setting: Post Torchwood season 2; twelve years after the start of Pretender (ignoring the movies for the most part)
Characters: Team Torchwood, Jarod, Miss Parker
Words: 5,425
~~~
"I know everything. And it says so on the bottom of the screen."
--Ianto Jones, Sleeper
Jarod stared at the morgue attendant. "I'm sorry, what did you say?"
"I said, 'no'," the young Welshman repeated. He handed back Jarod's fake ID with no small amount of annoyance on his face. "Torchwood got here first. The case is in their hands now, and that's all I have to say."
Jarod didn't know what to say. He had planned for every contingency, every possible argument, but he had no idea what to say to this complete denial.
Possibly worse, he had no idea how to bluff about 'Torchwood'.
The morgue attendant, content in his dismissal, pivoted to move lackadaisically to the doors separating the morgue proper from the front desk. Jarod followed, wondering if he would have a better chance of getting in by speaking with 'Torchwood' directly.
The wide metal door swung open under the young man's touch, revealing a scene familiar to Jarod -- the steel table and draped corpse would have fit in any autopsy room in Jarod's past. However, the young man standing over the corpse was no doctor. A immaculate dark suit gave the air of an undertaker.
The door began its pendulous swing shut. Just before the door closed all the way, the young man looked up from the body and directly at Jarod with clear blue eyes, and then the door closed with a soft whuff.
Jarod blinked. Something about the young man was incredibly familiar, but was it? Jarod flipped through his memories, trying to recreate the circumstances in which he had seen the man (but surely, it must have been years ago, when the man had been a boy) when the door swung open from the inside.
The young man in the suit all but shoved the morgue attendant back into the front area. "We'll take it from here," the man said in precise words. "Why don't you go get a cup of tea? Take about an hour."
The morgue attendant glared daggers at the man. "What's this 'we', then?" he demanded.
The young man (where had Jarod seen him?) glanced briefly at Jarod, a flick of the eyes that was more warning than explanatory. "My colleague will be joining me in the examination."
"But he didn't say he was with you!" the attendant protested.
The young man quirked an eyebrow at the attendant. "You know Americans, notoriously demure and hesitant to impose upon people." He waited a beat. "Go."
The attendant shook his head and slumped off towards the corridor. As he passed, Jarod distinctly heard him mutter, "Bloody Torchwood."
The young man with the familiar blue eyes pushed the door open wide. "Are you coming in?" he asked.
Jarod narrowed his eyes. "And why would I be doing that?" he asked, unwilling to move any closer to the man until he could figure out where they had met.
The man gave Jarod a look that was almost pitying. "You came here to look at the body, are you going to leave without an examination?"
"You called me your colleague," Jarod said. "I believe you have the advantage of me."
The pity slid away into a smile. "We are, Jarod. Or were, at one time." The smile grew. "You don't remember me."
With a step back, the man let go of the door. Jarod took one step forward, then another, and he was inside the morgue, with its cold air and sickly smell of disinfectant and lingering death.
The man moved back beside the shrouded body, and in spite of his hesitance, Jarod drew closer. This, right here, was why he had left the safe anonymity of London, to travel to Cardiff in the aftermath of the terrorist bombings, to attempt to help in the wave of mysterious killings. And now he was standing in the morgue with one of those bodies, and most of his attention was on the young man in front of him.
Where had he seen this man before?
As Jarod puzzled, the man picked up a small black device about the size of his hand and fiddled with it until several blue lights pulsed. Then he exchanged the device for a notebook. "Do you have any experience at being a medical examiner or a doctor?" he asked, and all of a sudden everything clicked into place.
He wasn't asking if Jarod was a doctor, he was asking about ability, about skill, about playing pretend, and that slid into a memory of sixteen years before.
Jarod walked beside Sydney on the way back from the SimLab, the concrete walls of the Centre pressing in on him more than normal. Maybe, Jarod thought, breathing evenly in an effort to avoid panicking, as he aged, the walls would keep pressing in until he was trapped in a coffin, unable to do anything other than scream.
With Sydney watching Jarod out of the corner of his eye, Jarod forced his voice to be light and casual in conversation. Sydney could not see, could not know how very much Jarod had to get out of this place.
A flash of something new caught Jarod's attention, drawing him back to himself. Coming down the hall was another of the Centre doctors, Bryce, with a new boy. The child walked stiffly, warily, just out of Bryce's reach.
Jarod's eyes narrowed. He knew human emotion when he saw it, and this boy radiated unease. Knowing something was wrong, Jarod didn't change course, just came to a halt in the middle of the hallway, blocking the boy's path.
The boy stopped also, again just out of reach. He looked up at Jarod with a mix of curiosity and unhappiness. Beside them, the two doctors slowed and stopped, out of the circle and out of mind.
The boy spoke first. "Who are you, then?" he asked. Soft Welsh vowels slid through the air on the boy's young voice. "You another of these doctors who want me to show off for the cameras?"
There was no pride or pain in the words, only sullen annoyance, and something in Jarod's gut twisted. They were experimenting on this boy as they had experimented on Jarod, just another test subject for the Centre.
The walls were moving again. Jarod breathed deeply. "I'm not a doctor, I'm Jarod." He smiled down at the boy. When had he gotten so old? "I'm a Pretender."
The boy was unimpressed. "So? I can pretend things too."
"We're on our way to the SimLab," Bryce said in his nervous, weedy way. "It's time for his first Simulation."
"I have a name," the boy said sharply, glaring at Bryce.
"It's nice to meet you," Jarod said. He held out his hand, remembering other times he had reached out to other children, and how those children inevitably went away.
The boy lifted his bright blue eyes to Jarod's face, scrunching up his nose a little. Perhaps reassured, he stepped closer and took Jarod's offered hand with dignity. "And you, sir." He gave Jarod's hand a clumsy shake. "I'm Ianto. Ianto Jones."
Jarod breathed deeply, and then wished he hadn't as the morgue smell sank into his lungs. He forced a smile onto his face. "I've been a coroner before, Ianto Jones."
Ianto smiled briefly. "Good. I'm afraid that our medical officer was killed recently and with the recent surge in activity, I'm all we have in examining the body. Would you be able to lend your expertise?"
"I'll do what I can to catch this killer," Jarod countered. "If you answer one question."
Ianto finished making a note. "And what is that?"
"What's Torchwood?"
Ianto laid down his notebook. "An agency of the Crown. I'm here for a reason parallel to yours."
"But not the same reason," Jarod noted.
"Are any two people ever working towards the same goal for the same reason?"
Jarod's hands curled around the edge of the metal table. "A child is dead, and you're concerned about semantics?"
Ianto put his own hands on the table and leaned over the body to look Jarod in the eye. "I need to be clear," he said in a low voice, so different from how Jarod remembered the boy. "This is not the Centre. In Cardiff, Torchwood is in charge. This is my case--"
"You're fighting about jurisdiction?" Jarod pushed back from the table. He couldn't believe what he was hearing.
The cold expression on Ianto's face froze any further words from Jarod. "This is Torchwood's case because it's too dangerous to remain in the hands of the police," Ianto said. "The police cannot handle this."
"And what is this?" Jarod asked, anger now warring with confusion. What couldn't the police handle? All he had read in the newspapers were vague details of the murders of three people.
In response, Ianto pulled back the sheet on the body.
It was a good thing Jarod had steeled himself for the worst, because the body under the sheet was wrong.
He turned away, slamming doors on his Pretender instincts to understand what the victim felt as she died. Instead, Jarod reached into his repertoire of mental disguises and pulled himself into the role of emotionless coroner. Dispassionate, intelligent, all-seeing, unfeeling.
Squaring his shoulders, Jarod turned back to the body. Ianto spoke as though nothing had happened, pulling on gloves with an absent air. "This is Mary Trevelyan, age eight years and five months. She's been dead for thirty-six hours."
"When was the body found?" Jarod asked as he donned his own gloves.
"Yesterday at three in the morning," Ianto said.
"By whom?" Jarod stared down at the little body, now utterly without purpose.
"A drunk on the way home through a wooded path near the river. He was so far gone that he doesn't remember much."
Jarod folded the sheet down carefully over Mary's hips, leaving the body bare from the torso up. "Did the parents informed the police of Mary's disappearance?"
"They didn't know she was gone until the morning when her mother went to wake her for school." Ianto moved back against the wall, letting Jarod have full access to the body. "There were no signs that she was removed from her room. The front door was dead-bolted in the morning, and the police found the latchkey in Mary's pocket. Mrs. Trevelyan said that she had an argument with Mary about going to a friend's house for some sort of event, and Mary had gone to bed at the usual time of ten o'clock. The parents retired at eleven, and Mrs. Trevelyan is adamant that Mary was in her bed at that time."
"How adamant?" Jarod adjusted the light over Mary's body so the bright beam shone directly upon the neck wound, so very different than those on the torso.
"She went into Mary's room and kissed Mary on the cheek. The girl was either sleeping or pretending, but she was certainly alive." Ianto's dry recitation filled the cold room, making things impersonal. "The police are interviewing Mary's friends to see if the girl's story had any substance. In any event, some time between eleven o'clock and three in the morning, Mary was killed in the woods."
"Was the body moved?"
"Unlikely. The ground was soaked with blood. And if this case is like the other victims, the killer took what it wanted and left the bodies where they fell."
Jarod paused, running back over Ianto's words. "Why do you say 'it'?"
Ianto pushed off the wall. "You'll note that the throat is cut, a wound independent of the other injuries," he said, ignoring Jarod's question. "The attack pattern is the same in all the victims. As far as we can tell, the cause of death was exsanguination from the neck injury. The other injuries occurred after."
"You're not sure?" Jarod asked as he moved the head. Whatever had cut the throat had gone deep enough to sever the main veins and arteries in one contiguous blow. Death would have been nearly instantaneous.
He moved his attention to the torso. As savage as the wounds were, none of the edges seeped much blood. Jarod let out a breath he hadn't known he was holding. Mary hadn't been alive when her killer dug into her abdomen.
"As I said, our medical officer was killed recently. I don't have much experience in actual autopsies."
Jarod gave the man a look. "Didn't you try on your own?"
Ianto returned the look. "I'm not a Pretender," he said.
And that, Jarod thought privately as he bent back over the body, was too close to a lie.
Ianto continued on his recitation. "I was about to take stock of the organs before you arrived."
"Organs?" Jarod frowned as he stared at the opened body. "Hasn't the coroner looked at the body."
"No." Ianto removed his jacket and placed on a hook by the door. "The body has been held until we could get to it." He rolled up his shirtsleeves.
"A little girl has been murdered, and you don't let the coroner do his job?" Jarod demanded.
"She's still dead," Ianto said. His face was expressionless. "You're free to walk out that door if you find that so distasteful."
Jarod continued to stare at Ianto, not sure what he should do. He shouldn't walk away, not when this little girl was dead, but Ianto was hiding a wealth of secrets, secrets that Jarod would need to know to properly avenge this child's death.
Ianto picked up a metal retractor from the tray laid ready on the table. "If you could please move the light an inch to the left." When Ianto placed the retractor against one edge of the gashes in Mary's torso, his hands shook ever-so-slightly. Jarod did some mental math. He had met Ianto sixteen years before when the boy was young, not even ten years of age. That meant Ianto was now no more than twenty-five.
Too young to be alone in a room with a murdered child.
"Let me help," Jarod said reluctantly. "It's easier with an extra set of hands."
Ianto nodded in acknowledgement of the offer. He handed the retractor to Jarod. The criss-cross of gashes on the body had gone through skin and muscle, bisecting the abdominal cavity itself. Once the cavity was opened enough for access, Ianto pulled back the stomach and large intestine, letting the light shine on the liver.
Or rather, the space where the liver should have been.
"He took her liver," Jarod said, feeling faintly ill.
"Liver and gallbladder," Ianto corrected. "Removed in one piece. That was all it wanted." He let the organs slide back into place. "Just like the others."
Jarod slowly removed the retractors from the body. "You said Mary was killed where she was found? Someone might have seen the killer removing the organs--"
"No, they wouldn't have." Ianto stripped off his gloves. "It would have been gone in under thirty seconds."
"With those precise cuts, without slicing through any other organ?" Jarod argued. "That sort of precision isn't possible."
"It is in this case." Ianto pulled the sheet over Mary's body.
"How?"
Ianto sighed. "Like this." He circled around the table to stand in front of Jarod. With a shock somewhere in the back of his head, Jarod realized that Ianto was almost as tall as Jarod himself. And he had been such a tiny child.
Ianto raised his hand, crooking his forefinger and index finger into a curve, almost a hook. "One," Ianto said, lifting his arm over his head and miming a downward slice across Jarod's throat. "Two." The motion changed direction in midair, sliding down and across Jarod's torso in a diagonal slash. "Three." The claw went up and slid across the torso in the opposite direction. "Four." Starting below the navel, the claw moved up in a straight line. Ianto stepped back. "Then the second and third hands pulled the chest open here and here," Ianto poked the air near the imaginary slices in Jarod's chest. "And the cutting claw reached in and slices out the liver in a moment. No more than thirty seconds."
Jarod blinked. Then again. "Did you just say 'third hand'? Was the killer working with an accomplice?"
"No," Ianto said with a calm that was certainly not warranted in this situation. "It was hunting alone."
Before Jarod could ask any more questions, the morgue door opened a crack and a man popped his head inside. "Are you done?" the man asked.
"In a moment," Ianto called, never looking away from Jarod. Almost willing him to believe.
"I need a word before you go." The man hesitated. "Is Torchwood taking the body?"
Ianto turned his head to the man. "No, that won't be necessary."
"Good," the man said, and withdrew.
Ianto went back to the table to pack up his little black device. "Come on," he said to Jarod. "There isn't anything more for us here."
Jarod peeled off his gloves, thinking furiously. He wasn't in control of the situation and that bothered him. The most unsettling part of the whole thing was that Ianto was in control, had all the information Jarod needed. What could he do but go with Ianto?
As soon as Ianto donned his jacket and straightened his tie, he stepped out the door. With one last glance at the sheeted body of Mary Trevelyan, Jarod followed.
The man was cooling his heels by the desk. His uniform and bearing identified him as a police officer, but there was none of the usual inter-jurisdictional tension in the room. Just what was Torchwood?
"Andy," Ianto said in a not-unfriendly manner.
"Ianto." Andy's gaze slid past Ianto to Jarod. "And this?"
"This is Jarod," Ianto said. "He's in to help for a bit."
"A doctor?" Andy nodded his head in greeting. "I keep expecting to see Harper whenever you lot show up down here."
"We're done here," Ianto said. "We'll be in touch with the coroner about the cause of death."
Andy's expression grew cold. "And what exactly will do we tell the parents?" he demanded.
Ianto gripped the handle of his case so hard his knuckles were white. "That she died instantly and didn't feel anything."
"Was she targeted?"
Ianto shook his head. "Like all the others, it was a random attack."
Andy tapped his hat against his leg absently. "What's the media going to do if they get that these people were just randomly mauled to death on the streets? There'll be a panic to keep everyone inside!"
"In a city where something is killed randomly at night, how is that a bad thing?" Ianto retorted. He stepped around Andy and went towards the stairs. "Don't release the details to the media."
Andy let out a large huff. "Where are Jack and Gwen?" he asked Ianto's retreating back.
"Working on a separate angle," Ianto said without turning around. "Jarod?"
"Coming," Jarod said. He held out his hand to Andy. "It was good to meet you."
Warily, Andy took the offered hand. "Another American?" The corner of his mouth quirked up. "I'm not sure Cardiff can take another of you."
"Excuse me?"
"Jarod," Ianto called again from the top of the stairs.
"Good luck," Andy said.
"Thanks, this case will need it." Jarod smiled, hoping that he could cultivate a good relationship with the police in Cardiff, just in case.
Andy shook his head. "I mean with Torchwood."
With that puzzling pronouncement, Jarod found himself running up the stairs after Ianto. He caught up with the younger man in the parking lot. "Why am I going with you?" Jarod wondered aloud.
"I don't know, why are you?" Ianto asked. He paused to unlock a small automobile, placing his briefcase carefully in the backseat before climbing into the driver's seat. Not willing to be left behind, Jarod folded himself into the passenger seat before the young man drove off. "Why are you here?"
Jarod let his eyes drift off to the passing cars as Ianto pulled the car into traffic. "Because three people have died and the police aren't any closer to finding out what did it."
"That's not what I meant."
"And what did you mean?"
Ianto maneuvered the car into a break in the traffic and sped off before the other drivers had the time to express their displeasure. "Why are you in Britain?"
Jarod let out a long breath. He supposed he might gain a bit more leverage with Ianto if he told his story. If anyone would understand wanting to escape the Centre, it would be Ianto. "Twelve years ago--" he began.
Ianto interrupted. "You escaped from the Centre and spent most of your time alternating between helping the downtrodden, tormenting the Centre, and finding your family."
If the car hadn't been going fifty miles an hour, Jarod would have jumped out. As it stood, he seriously considered it. "How do you know that?" Was the boy a Centre plant after all?
The look Ianto threw at Jarod was faintly amused. "I've been monitoring Centre transmissions for the last four years," he said. "Your name crosses the wires with alarming frequency."
Jarod was agog. "You have access to the Centre's internal communications?" Even Jarod himself didn't have access to those communications, hidden behind the most intensive security the Centre had. He'd have given anything to be able to access those lines.
"I have access to everything." Ianto slowed the car and turned onto a side street.
"How? Why?"
The car stopped in a parking lot overlooking the bay. "The how is unimportant. The why... well, for the same reason you'd have done it," Ianto said. He turned off the ignition and sat staring at the bright sunny day.
Jarod looked out at the water. If he had access to the Centre communications, what would be the first thing he would do? Find out information about his family, of course. But Ianto didn't have any family left, Jarod knew. So quite possibly, Jarod's second choice would be Ianto's first.
"You were checking to see if they were coming after you," Jarod said. Ianto didn't respond. "But I thought that you were discharged from the Centre, that's what all the paperwork said."
Ianto quirked an eyebrow at Jarod. "The Centre never gives away what it can sell, Jarod."
The matter-of-fact way he said those words chilled Jarod to the core.
~~~
March, 1992
Ianto slumped in his seat, refusing to pay attention to the science lesson or his teacher or anything. He focused all of his attention on the paper before him, where he was halfway through sketching a three-dimensional outline of a wolf spider. It was way more accurate than the rubbish drawing in the textbook, even though Ianto had only caught a glimpse at a photo of the spider in the nature magazine at the news agents before his aunt dragged him away.
He hated school. He hated the stupid kids and the annoying teachers who just wanted to help the poor troubled orphan and the decaying building and this stupid city. He wanted to go home to Cardiff, but he couldn't because his family was all dead and the only person who could be bothered to take him in, his aunt, lived in Swansea.
A knock at the classroom door interrupted the lesson and pulled Ianto out of his funk. The school secretary stepped into the room and held a whispered conference with the teacher. After about a minute of this, the teacher stepped back and faced the room.
"Ianto Jones," he called. "Pack up your things and get your coat. Come now, boy. Hurry up."
Ianto slowly gathered his meager possessions from his desk and walked over to the coatroom. He dumped his things into his worn bookbag, pulled his coat from the hook and dragged himself over to the adults. He made himself ignore the mutterings of the other students. They didn't like him, and he didn't like them, and what they were saying didn't matter. They knew better than to hit him now, after he'd had to beat up a few of them when they'd jumped him after class on his second day, but they could still talk.
"Well, Mr. Jones, good luck," the teacher said. He clapped a hand on Ianto's shoulder, which was odd as Ianto planned to be back in class as soon as his crazy aunt's fancy to yank him out of school had passed.
"Thank you, Mr. Thomas," Ianto said, because he at least remembered what his father had taught him of manners, and the secretary took hold of Ianto's shoulder and walked him out of the classroom and into the deserted halls.
The headmaster's office was as dingy and depressed as the rest of the school, more so now as the room was thick with cigarette smoke. Ianto was used to smoke; his aunt was smoking herself into a none-too-early grave, but the woman in the headmaster's office was nothing like his aunt.
Ianto quickly took stock of the situation. The headmaster was ill at ease, moving and adjusting a pile of official-looking papers on his desk. Ianto had been in enough social workers' offices to know custody papers when he saw them.
Turning his attention to the woman, Ianto was, for the first time in a long time, confused. She was thin, annoyed, and was wearing clothes so well-cut they would have even have impressed Ianto's father. She really didn't belong in this setting.
"Ianto, please have a seat." The headmaster gestured at the large chair in front of his desk. Ianto hopped up on the seat, his attention never leaving the annoyed woman by the window. "Ianto," the man tried again, smiling with a mouthful of bad teeth. "There has been a change in your guardianship. Miss Parker will be escorting you to your new school in America."
Ianto gripped the sides of his chair. He wanted to remind the man that Welsh Child Services regulations stated that all non-family custody transfers were supposed to take place in the presence of social worker and a police officer, and this woman certainly wasn't any family of his. He knew all of this because he'd nicked the handbook one day when his aunt dragged him to hospital with broken ribs after he jumped off the roof to test his homemade parachute (which would have worked, too, if he hadn't jumped into the wind) and the social workers 'had attended'.
But there were no social workers here, and Ianto was out of luck.
"Come on, I haven't got all day," the woman snapped, stubbing out her cigarette in an ashtray on the headmaster's desk. "The plane's leaving whether you're on it or not." Her voice was American and husky and made her sound even older than she was.
The headmaster cleared his throat. "Miss Parker, you can't just expect the boy to hop to--"
Miss Parker leaned over the desk and gave the headmaster the iciest glare Ianto had ever seen. It was impressive. "I can, and I do," she said in a low voice.
Ianto stood and went over to the headmaster's desk. He went up on tiptoe to read the upside-down papers. There, in cold black and white, was the evidence that his aunt had signed him, body and soul, over to an agency called 'The Centre' in Delaware, America.
"Kid, let's move," Miss Parker said. She stalked out the door and down the hall.
Ianto looked at the headmaster. "Goodbye, sir," he said, because it wasn't the man's fault he was a spineless moron, then Ianto picked up his bookbag and ran after the gunshot sounds of Miss Parker's high heels on the peeling linoleum. He caught up with the woman by the front door. He had to jog a little to keep pace with her across the parking lot and talking was impossible, but it gave him an opportunity to examine the woman.
She had dark hair and crystal blue eyes, and she would have been very beautiful, except that Ianto also saw the stressed carriage of her shoulders and the tenseness in her mouth, and his own stomach twisted as he found himself imagining what it was like to be Miss Parker. She was sad and angry and defiant, and Ianto understood all of that. Above all, she was desperately unhappy and she was hiding that even from herself.
The car at the edge of the parking lot wasn't a taxi, but it had a driver. Miss Parker jerked her head at the backseat. "Get in," she ordered. Ianto scrambled into the luxurious car, touching the soft leather seats and the shiny edging on the interior as the car pulled away from the school.
Ianto never looked back.
After about ten minutes of being ignored by Miss Parker and the driver, Ianto put his arms on the back of Miss Parker's seat. "Are you going to get my things?" he asked.
"What things?" Miss Parker asked, not looking at him.
"My things, from my aunt's," Ianto said. It wasn't as if he wanted to see the woman, but he would have liked to get a few of his possessions, like the photograph of his family, and the program from their funeral, and the book from which he was teaching himself Hindustani.
"They're in the trunk," Miss Parker said. "Now be quiet and don't bother me."
Ianto subsided. He pulled his legs up onto the seat and hugged his knees. He hadn't ridden in such a nice car since the day his family was buried, and the memory made his stomach ache.
He hadn't liked living with his aunt, and had even contemplated running away a few times, but he knew he wasn't old enough to support himself, no matter how smart he was, so he stayed. He'd had a place to sleep and most days his aunt remembered to feed him, so that was something. Little boys who had seen their whole family massacred by monsters couldn't expect any more, Ianto often told himself.
After a while, Ianto pulled his notebook from his knapsack and began a new drawing. Unlike the other drawings he made, this wasn't something he'd seen in a book or around him. This was the face from his nightmares, the face of the creature that had killed his family.
He hadn't been able to draw it while living in his aunt's flat, but in the car that was speeding rapidly east from Swansea, Ianto found the face quickly taking shape under his pencil.
The road signs had shed their Welsh by the time Ianto finished his drawing. It was past lunchtime and Ianto hadn't even eaten breakfast that morning, as his aunt had shoved him out of the flat before he'd even finished dressing, but Ianto didn't complain. He was so far outside of himself that hunger didn't matter.
He stared at the face of the monster that had thrown his mother against a wall, breaking her neck; had bit so deep into his brother's throat, leaving him to thrash and gurgle on the paving stones; had clawed at his father's exposed back as the man had lifted the seven-year-old Ianto onto the fire escape out of harm's way.
Ianto remembered everything about that day, how his father screamed as the monster clawed him to death, how his brother's gurgles had continued after Da's screaming stopped, how Mam's glassy dead eyes stared up at Ianto as he clung to the fire escape, dangling above the earth as the monster snarled up at him, but then left him alone with the bodies of his family.
It had been hours before someone found the bodies, and then the screaming started again.
"What did you give my aunt to give me up?" Ianto asked into the silence of the car.
"What?" Miss Parker asked, startled into answering.
"What did you give my aunt to give me up?" Ianto asked again.
Miss Parker turned her head to look at Ianto. Unease curled around her, and only Ianto saw it. "I don't know. I'm only taking you back to the Centre."
And you didn't want to know, Ianto thought, closing his notebook. He wondered if they'd had to offer his aunt money, or if getting rid of her sister's surviving offspring had been reward enough.
He spent the transatlantic flight watching Miss Parker, wondering what it was like to be her, adult and angry at the world and grown-up enough to do something about it all. He didn't say another word until the plane landed in America.
end part