Abstract Psychopaths by Nemo Baker (Chapter 1)
Title: Abstract Psychopaths
Summary: How do you fight a killer that's only alive when you can't see it? The answer: Don't turn your back, don't look away, and don't blink.
Characters/Pairings: Jack Harkness/Ianto Jones, Gwen Cooper, Toshiko Sato, Owen Harper
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Blink, End of Days
The floor of the dilapidated warehouse was covered in bits of crumbling concrete wall. The loose chunks buckled beneath Ianto’s feet as he walked, and the grey powder clung to his shoes. He aimed his torch at the floor in front of him and kicked aside more debris, listening to the echoes as the pieces bounced.
He was investigating a report of a recent disappearance at this site. Three days ago a woman named Laura Donovan had walked into the building and never come out again. No one had found a body yet. Jack had decided it was worth a look.
Upon their arrival they’d found no odd energy readings, or really anything to suggest something alien was the culprit, only desolation and decay. Ianto had offered to scan the inside of the building while Jack patrolled the perimeter. Night hadn’t fallen quite yet, but the surroundings outside of the torchlight were shrouded in shadow, indistinct. He weaved between crooked rows of empty shelving units, as well as a few desks spread out across the floor.
He pressed his finger to his earpiece. “So far nothing out of the ordinary, Jack.”
“Same here,” came the reply. “I guess check the upper floor, I’ll go around the building once more and meet you in there.”
“Yep.”
More echoes as he climbed the stairs, metallic and hollow sounds that went in time with his steps. On the second floor, muted light streamed in through the broken windows. This floor was almost bare, with only a few shelves pushed against the farthest wall. Although it didn’t look like much to see, he made his way across the threshold anyway. Looking upward, he saw that the high ceiling was coated in cobwebs.
Just as he reached the shelves, he heard the sound of a bird taking flight behind him. He turned around... and saw the outline of something that looked distinctly humanoid. He pulled out his gun and aimed it alongside his torch.
“Show your-,” he cut himself off abruptly and relaxed his stance. The person wasn’t a person at all. It was a stone statue.
Odd thing to have in a place like this.
He approached, wondering if he could discover its origins. It was a depiction of an angel, with large, stone wings folded against its back. The feathers were carved with intricate detail. Its head was bowed, and covered by delicate hands.
It was as if it were weeping.
“Hey, there’s nothing out here. I’m coming up.”
“No, it’s alright. I can come out to you. The only thing in here’s a statue.”
“Statue?”
“Of an angel.”
“Huh. Anything weird about it?”
“Not really, I suppose. I can take pictures of it if you want.”
“Nah, just leave it. I really doubt it’s important, especially if it didn’t appear on the scanner.”
“Mhm. I’ll head down.”
He took one last look at the angel, then turned to meet Jack.
The return of his reverberating footsteps seemed to disturb another bird, as the flapping of wings accompanied his descent.
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“Yeah, I mean it’s still weird,” Jack said, pulling into Torchwood’s garage. “But I really don’t think this is anything to do with us.”
“There’s always the possibility that it’s something new. Our scanners probably can’t detect everything in the universe,” Ianto replied.
“Maybe. We’ll watch the news for similar incidents, and if nothing turns up we’ll drop it.”
“Alright. Chinese, tonight?”
“Mm. Back to your place for desert?”
He rolled his eyes at Jack’s leer. “You’re just a walking cliché, aren’t you?”
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ianto was convinced the Donovan incident wasn’t nothing. Some sort of… displacement he’d felt at that warehouse. He couldn’t explain it, even to himself. But problems of a much more tangible variety soon distracted him as the Rift began a period of relentless hyperactivity.
“I don’t understand it,” Tosh told him tiredly, after the fifth Weevil alerts in twenty four hours. “The Rift Predictor Program should have been able to tell us this was coming.”
“The Rift is dubious, even at the best of times,” he replied.
“Well, yes. But the program isn’t. The only way it could miss something like this is if it wasn’t written to detect it.” She looked annoyed at the idea, and he quelled a smile at her indignation.
“You mean, it could be an entirely new phenomenon?”
“Possibly.”
“Worrisome...”
“Maybe.”
“Need another coffee?”
“Yes, please.”
He made his way over to the kitchen, Tosh’s mug in hand, and picked up Gwen’s as he passed her desk. She’d gone out with Owen and Jack on the last call, and her eyelids had already been drooping from lack of sleep before she left.
The strain was getting to all of them. Even Jack was getting more irritable as the hours went by, going as far as to rise to Owen’s increasingly immature baiting tactics. Ianto himself was beginning to feel the need to rub the itch of exhaustion from his eyes. Luckily, coffee-making was a task he could do on autopilot. He let his mind wander as he added the grounds and set the machine whirring.
Tosh’s Rift Predictor Program was set up to monitor the regular (if they could be called that) fluctuations of the Rift. The team had found that it seemed to go through somewhat calculable patterns of natural activity, and that if things changed they were normally aware of them a bit in advance.
Yesterday morning, the alarm had blared with no warning whatsoever. A shocked Tosh had announced a gigantic Rift spike near the edge of the city, big enough that Jack thought he would need the entire team out in the field.
They had found absolutely nothing.
Another large spike, as well as the barrage of Weevils, had kept them running around almost constantly since. Again the spike had turned up nothing. However, it wasn’t as if they could ignore them. But what could be causing them?
A moment later, Jack supported a bleeding Owen through the cog door and the question flew from Ianto’s mind.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“There were four of them.”
“Four? Bloody hell, Jack. Why didn’t you call us out?”
“There wasn’t any time,” Jack said frustratedly. “These ones were particularly aggressive. They were on us in seconds.”
“I suppose we should count ourselves lucky Owen’s wounds were pretty superficial, then?” Ianto asked.
“If you say so.”
Ianto looked at Jack’s pale, drawn features. He appeared almost like a spectre, hollow and haunted. His eyes were bloodshot and his hair disheveled. A suspicion formed.
“You died, didn’t you?”
Jack nodded, looking down at his desk. “One slammed into me. Broke my spine.”
That would explain the lack of blood. He reached over the table and placed his hand over Jack’s. After returning from his four month absence, it seemed that Jack’s deaths were much harder on him. On the occasions that Ianto had been present when he revived, the momentary flashes of panic in Jack’s eyes had been painfully evident. It was almost as if he didn’t immediately realize where he was. Ianto still didn’t know what exactly had happened to Jack, but he knew it hadn’t been good.
“You should rest,” he said softly. Jack raised an eyebrow.
“We’re getting alerts left and right, I can’t-”
“Yes, you can.”
“I don’t need-”
“Yes, you do.”
“Ianto-”
“Jack.”
A glare was leveled in his direction, which he returned with an expression of innocent calm. He kneaded his thumb into Jack’s palm, watched as the resolve wavered, and broke.
“Just for a few hours, then.”
“Good.”
“Join me? You need to sleep, too.”
“Alright. I’ll tell the others they can rest a bit as well.”
“Okay.”
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Five blissful hours of unconsciousness later, the alarms blared again. Ianto jolted awake, and heard a groan beside him.
“Another one?” Jack asked, voice muffled by the pillow.
“Most likely,” Ianto said, yawning.
“Lovely.”
They both clambered up the ladder out of Jack’s room. In the main Hub, they saw Tosh and Gwen hunched over the central monitor.
“What’ve we got?” Jack called down to them.
“One of those huge spikes, again,” Gwen said. “But no new Weevil sightings, so that’s something.”
Jack sighed. “Okay, Tosh, Owen’s still out of it so you’re coming with me and Gwen. Ianto, you can coordinate from the Hub.”
“Right.”
“Location?” Jack asked, traipsing down the stairs.
“It’s the old Argall and Baines building, the one you and Ianto checked out last week,” Tosh said.
“Really? Weird.” Jack turned to Ianto. “Coincidence?”
“You’ve trained me not to believe in them,” Ianto answered dryly.
“Right you are,” Jack grinned. “Let’s go, girls.”
They exited, and Ianto was left with a sleeping Owen.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“I’ve got nothing.”
Ianto opened his comm link. “I suppose that’s good. Although it would be nice if we could get a hint as to what’s causing this.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “There was one strange thing, though. You said you saw a statue here last time?”
“Big, stone angel statue. Yeah.”
“Well, I think someone must have moved it.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s gone.”
Next
Summary: How do you fight a killer that's only alive when you can't see it? The answer: Don't turn your back, don't look away, and don't blink.
Characters/Pairings: Jack Harkness/Ianto Jones, Gwen Cooper, Toshiko Sato, Owen Harper
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Blink, End of Days
The floor of the dilapidated warehouse was covered in bits of crumbling concrete wall. The loose chunks buckled beneath Ianto’s feet as he walked, and the grey powder clung to his shoes. He aimed his torch at the floor in front of him and kicked aside more debris, listening to the echoes as the pieces bounced.
He was investigating a report of a recent disappearance at this site. Three days ago a woman named Laura Donovan had walked into the building and never come out again. No one had found a body yet. Jack had decided it was worth a look.
Upon their arrival they’d found no odd energy readings, or really anything to suggest something alien was the culprit, only desolation and decay. Ianto had offered to scan the inside of the building while Jack patrolled the perimeter. Night hadn’t fallen quite yet, but the surroundings outside of the torchlight were shrouded in shadow, indistinct. He weaved between crooked rows of empty shelving units, as well as a few desks spread out across the floor.
He pressed his finger to his earpiece. “So far nothing out of the ordinary, Jack.”
“Same here,” came the reply. “I guess check the upper floor, I’ll go around the building once more and meet you in there.”
“Yep.”
More echoes as he climbed the stairs, metallic and hollow sounds that went in time with his steps. On the second floor, muted light streamed in through the broken windows. This floor was almost bare, with only a few shelves pushed against the farthest wall. Although it didn’t look like much to see, he made his way across the threshold anyway. Looking upward, he saw that the high ceiling was coated in cobwebs.
Just as he reached the shelves, he heard the sound of a bird taking flight behind him. He turned around... and saw the outline of something that looked distinctly humanoid. He pulled out his gun and aimed it alongside his torch.
“Show your-,” he cut himself off abruptly and relaxed his stance. The person wasn’t a person at all. It was a stone statue.
Odd thing to have in a place like this.
He approached, wondering if he could discover its origins. It was a depiction of an angel, with large, stone wings folded against its back. The feathers were carved with intricate detail. Its head was bowed, and covered by delicate hands.
It was as if it were weeping.
“Hey, there’s nothing out here. I’m coming up.”
“No, it’s alright. I can come out to you. The only thing in here’s a statue.”
“Statue?”
“Of an angel.”
“Huh. Anything weird about it?”
“Not really, I suppose. I can take pictures of it if you want.”
“Nah, just leave it. I really doubt it’s important, especially if it didn’t appear on the scanner.”
“Mhm. I’ll head down.”
He took one last look at the angel, then turned to meet Jack.
The return of his reverberating footsteps seemed to disturb another bird, as the flapping of wings accompanied his descent.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Yeah, I mean it’s still weird,” Jack said, pulling into Torchwood’s garage. “But I really don’t think this is anything to do with us.”
“There’s always the possibility that it’s something new. Our scanners probably can’t detect everything in the universe,” Ianto replied.
“Maybe. We’ll watch the news for similar incidents, and if nothing turns up we’ll drop it.”
“Alright. Chinese, tonight?”
“Mm. Back to your place for desert?”
He rolled his eyes at Jack’s leer. “You’re just a walking cliché, aren’t you?”
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ianto was convinced the Donovan incident wasn’t nothing. Some sort of… displacement he’d felt at that warehouse. He couldn’t explain it, even to himself. But problems of a much more tangible variety soon distracted him as the Rift began a period of relentless hyperactivity.
“I don’t understand it,” Tosh told him tiredly, after the fifth Weevil alerts in twenty four hours. “The Rift Predictor Program should have been able to tell us this was coming.”
“The Rift is dubious, even at the best of times,” he replied.
“Well, yes. But the program isn’t. The only way it could miss something like this is if it wasn’t written to detect it.” She looked annoyed at the idea, and he quelled a smile at her indignation.
“You mean, it could be an entirely new phenomenon?”
“Possibly.”
“Worrisome...”
“Maybe.”
“Need another coffee?”
“Yes, please.”
He made his way over to the kitchen, Tosh’s mug in hand, and picked up Gwen’s as he passed her desk. She’d gone out with Owen and Jack on the last call, and her eyelids had already been drooping from lack of sleep before she left.
The strain was getting to all of them. Even Jack was getting more irritable as the hours went by, going as far as to rise to Owen’s increasingly immature baiting tactics. Ianto himself was beginning to feel the need to rub the itch of exhaustion from his eyes. Luckily, coffee-making was a task he could do on autopilot. He let his mind wander as he added the grounds and set the machine whirring.
Tosh’s Rift Predictor Program was set up to monitor the regular (if they could be called that) fluctuations of the Rift. The team had found that it seemed to go through somewhat calculable patterns of natural activity, and that if things changed they were normally aware of them a bit in advance.
Yesterday morning, the alarm had blared with no warning whatsoever. A shocked Tosh had announced a gigantic Rift spike near the edge of the city, big enough that Jack thought he would need the entire team out in the field.
They had found absolutely nothing.
Another large spike, as well as the barrage of Weevils, had kept them running around almost constantly since. Again the spike had turned up nothing. However, it wasn’t as if they could ignore them. But what could be causing them?
A moment later, Jack supported a bleeding Owen through the cog door and the question flew from Ianto’s mind.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“There were four of them.”
“Four? Bloody hell, Jack. Why didn’t you call us out?”
“There wasn’t any time,” Jack said frustratedly. “These ones were particularly aggressive. They were on us in seconds.”
“I suppose we should count ourselves lucky Owen’s wounds were pretty superficial, then?” Ianto asked.
“If you say so.”
Ianto looked at Jack’s pale, drawn features. He appeared almost like a spectre, hollow and haunted. His eyes were bloodshot and his hair disheveled. A suspicion formed.
“You died, didn’t you?”
Jack nodded, looking down at his desk. “One slammed into me. Broke my spine.”
That would explain the lack of blood. He reached over the table and placed his hand over Jack’s. After returning from his four month absence, it seemed that Jack’s deaths were much harder on him. On the occasions that Ianto had been present when he revived, the momentary flashes of panic in Jack’s eyes had been painfully evident. It was almost as if he didn’t immediately realize where he was. Ianto still didn’t know what exactly had happened to Jack, but he knew it hadn’t been good.
“You should rest,” he said softly. Jack raised an eyebrow.
“We’re getting alerts left and right, I can’t-”
“Yes, you can.”
“I don’t need-”
“Yes, you do.”
“Ianto-”
“Jack.”
A glare was leveled in his direction, which he returned with an expression of innocent calm. He kneaded his thumb into Jack’s palm, watched as the resolve wavered, and broke.
“Just for a few hours, then.”
“Good.”
“Join me? You need to sleep, too.”
“Alright. I’ll tell the others they can rest a bit as well.”
“Okay.”
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Five blissful hours of unconsciousness later, the alarms blared again. Ianto jolted awake, and heard a groan beside him.
“Another one?” Jack asked, voice muffled by the pillow.
“Most likely,” Ianto said, yawning.
“Lovely.”
They both clambered up the ladder out of Jack’s room. In the main Hub, they saw Tosh and Gwen hunched over the central monitor.
“What’ve we got?” Jack called down to them.
“One of those huge spikes, again,” Gwen said. “But no new Weevil sightings, so that’s something.”
Jack sighed. “Okay, Tosh, Owen’s still out of it so you’re coming with me and Gwen. Ianto, you can coordinate from the Hub.”
“Right.”
“Location?” Jack asked, traipsing down the stairs.
“It’s the old Argall and Baines building, the one you and Ianto checked out last week,” Tosh said.
“Really? Weird.” Jack turned to Ianto. “Coincidence?”
“You’ve trained me not to believe in them,” Ianto answered dryly.
“Right you are,” Jack grinned. “Let’s go, girls.”
They exited, and Ianto was left with a sleeping Owen.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“I’ve got nothing.”
Ianto opened his comm link. “I suppose that’s good. Although it would be nice if we could get a hint as to what’s causing this.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “There was one strange thing, though. You said you saw a statue here last time?”
“Big, stone angel statue. Yeah.”
“Well, I think someone must have moved it.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s gone.”
Next