First and Last 4/7
Title: First and Last 4/7
Authors:
leofuller and
the9thdoctor
Pairing: Jack/Ianto
Rating: 15ish
Spoilers: All of S1 and 2. Set Post-Exit Wounds.
Summary: An early morning phone call brings bad news to Torchwood only weeks after the loss of Tosh and Owen - the police have found the SUV burnt out at the foot of a cliff, and Torchwood have to carry on without Ianto.
Jack refuses to accept that Ianto’s not coming back despite all the evidence to the contrary - but maybe there’s more to the crash then they realise…
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Ianto slammed the boot of the SUV shut, unable to get the picture out of his mind. The corpse... Martha had taken the top of his head off to remove the parasite and stitched it back together again roughly. A bloody and jagged line stretched across the young man's forehead and Ianto was slammed back into terrible memories.
Lisa.
Goddamn...
He couldn't breathe, and loosened his tie. The plan was already fully formed in his mind even before he had forced himself to climb back in the SUV. He glanced at the clock on the dashboard. It was already two in the morning, and Jack had told him he was going out on a Weevil stake-out for the night. It could work. It had to work.
He gunned the engine of the SUV and sped down the road back to Cardiff.
As he drove, the memories threatened to overwhelm him. Combined with the loss of Tosh and Owen, it was almost too much. He couldn't stay here. Not now.
He practically ran into the Hub, lit only by the emergency lighting, which thankfully signalled that he would be alone for the job that needed to be done.
He made his way directly to the autopsy bay, wrenching open the door to the small cupboard that contained DNA samples of the team. Ianto spun the holder full of test tubes, grabbing his own and yanking out the stopper.
He stared at the dark red liquid. His blood. Had he thought of everything? What would they do? Gwen would be convinced by the body, he knew that. Her bloody-mindedness and persistence only extended to things she was unable to understand. A car wrecked at the bottom of a cliff and a body burnt beyond all recognition should be enough for her.
Jack though... He was another story. Jack would try to rip the world apart to find him, and Ianto knew that he was going to have to pull off every trick in the book to keep him off the scent.
He made a sudden move to the sink, upending the small tube and pouring the liquid away. They would check the DNA, that was certain, and this should throw them off. He pulled out another small phial, containing a second amount of blood, this time from the corpse still stashed in the boot of the SUV. Ianto shut his eyes briefly, and then transferred the blood into a clean tube and quickly printed a fresh label for it.
So, he had the scientific side covered. The SUV would go up in flames with such force that there would be very little of the body left.
Finishing up in the autopsy bay after carefully removing all traces of his visit, Ianto made a mental list of all the tech that would be available to him. He knew he needed to be careful not to take things that anyone would notice that were missing, but he had that covered - hidden in the darkest corner of the archives was a large rucksack. He'd stashed it away during the first few months of his tenure at Cardiff. In it, there were a number of devices - alien tech scanners, a tiny box that seemed to have the same effect as the stone covering the invisible lift, everlasting power sources, anything he could think of that might be useful.
The bag had been hidden for almost two years, and Ianto had forgotten about it...
That thought made him nauseous.
He shouldered the bag and ran through a final check in his mind as he headed back up. He'd covered the DNA angle and he needed to wipe the CCTV records for his little trip. He didn't think that they would check them after the SUV was discovered, but it was best to be safe. He had all the tech he thought he would need...
Ianto sighed and took one last look round the Hub. He was ready to fake his own death. Next, he thought, he needed to give both Jack and Gwen a reason to believe it.
He pushed open the door to his flat and glanced around. It was tidy. More tidy than usual, Ianto had to admit, but he was glad of that. He didn't want to be faced with all the little things that he knew he wouldn't be able to take with him.
Ianto crossed to a cabinet in the corner of the living room and pulled out a sheet of paper and a pen before sitting down at his small dining table and composing his suicide note.
Fortunately Matthew Harrison - Ianto's unwitting stunt double - was scheduled to tragically jump from a cliff. If his body was never found then Jack and Gwen wouldn't be suspicious.
He thought hard about what to say, deciding that something short would be the best bet. Something that sounded specific while remaining vague about his reasons. An apology and an 'I can't do this anymore' seemed right, but he wanted to say something to Jack.
It took nearly half an hour to come up with a few words to say goodbye. A quick reassurance that the body he was supposed to be getting rid of had been dealt with - even when faking his own death, Ianto wasn’t one to leave his tasks unfinished - and an apology. An apology meant for Gwen, for adding to her pain when she’d so recently lost Owen and Tosh, and an apology to Jack, for bailing out instead of facing him and telling him why he had to leave.
He couldn’t say that, of course, but he meant it.
Ianto pulled a bag down from the top shelf of his built in wardrobe and selected a few things to take with him. A few changes of clothes, not too many items - he wanted the drawers and shelves to look like nothing was missing. Not that he thought Jack would notice if Ianto was short by a few pairs of socks, but this had to be done right.
He didn’t take any of his suits, in the end. They were awkward to carry, and anyway he was leaving all that behind. He’d be able to replace anything he wanted, once he got settled.
He stood in the doorway of his flat, taking one last look around at everything he was leaving behind. It was nearly 4am and he still had to leave his ID and keys in Harrison’s pockets and set up the crash.
Just before he closed the door, Ianto changed his mind and went back to add a post-script to his note.
P.S. Please remember, you're not a monster. You never have been.
Turning his attention to the technicalities of getting a corpse to drive over a cliff, Ianto left his old life behind without looking back.
The SUV made an impressive sight as it burnt at the foot of the cliff. Ianto stood for a while, peering over the edge as the flames consumed the vehicle. He felt a small stab of guilt as over a quarter of a million pounds went up in smoke, but eventually shrugged to himself and adjusted the bag slung over his shoulder. He walked for a while - he needed to get as far away from the scene of the 'accident' as possible before hitching a lift. He'd carefully doctored a thermos of coffee with retcon that he could offer to anyone who stopped. There was no sense in leaving people to remember the affable young Welshman they gave a lift to one morning.
He refused to think about what he had just done, focusing instead on the future. He endlessly thought through lists in his mind, calculating the cash he still had in his emergency stash, the loose ends he might have left behind in Cardiff, anything he might have left behind that would lead Jack to search him out.
Occasionally though, he found his thoughts drifting back to the letter. He had left the postscript as a message for Jack, mostly hoping that it would serve as a re-enforcement - something that Jack would understand better than a vague apology - but there was a small voice in the back of his mind, one that he tried to ignore even as Mr John Llewellen, telesales administrator to the Swansea area, gave him a detailed account of his eldest daughters wedding. It told him that he'd left it as a clue.
Mr Llewellen was suitably sympathetic when he dropped Ianto off in the centre of Swansea, to visit his dying grandmother, and Ianto decided not to retcon him. He didn’t want Mr Llewellen to fall asleep at the wheel on his way up to Fishguard, after all.
Ianto caught the next National Express Coach, doubling back the way he’d come to counteract any problems just in case Mr Llewellen did remember him. Somehow Ianto doubted that there would be a publicised search for him, but there was no harm in a little extra subterfuge.
The coach spent fifteen minutes waiting in Cardiff. Ianto slumped against the window with the hood of his sweater pulled up, pretending to sleep, even though it was only late morning and the chances were that Jack hadn’t even found the note yet.
He got off the coach in Bristol, because it was lunch time and there was really no reason to go rushing off across the country when he’d just faked his own death. If Jack did suspect that he was alive, and did go looking for him, then he was bound to assume that Ianto had gone as far away as possible, and was far more likely to start looking in Dover or Newcastle.
In fact, Ianto considered as he worked his way through a large bowl of pasta, surprisingly hungry under the circumstances, there was no reason why he shouldn’t stay right here in Bristol, get himself a job and a flat, start over.
~~~
Ianto groggily pulled on his trainers and double checked his pockets for his keys, wallet, phone and one of the small devices that he had taken from the Hub - the one that would let him know if anyone was looking for him. So far it hadn't alarmed in the two months he had been living in Bristol, but there was no use in growing complacent.
He yanked open the front door, kicking the mat which had yet again wrinkled up and wedged under the door. He'd deal with it later. As he stepped out into the hallway, he noticed Marie unlocking her own door. Her small yappy dog strained at its lead as it noticed Ianto. He gave them both a small smile.
“Hello Ian, are you being alright this morning?”
“I'm fine, thanks.” Ianto replied, “How are you two?”
Marie bent down and picked up the Yorkshire Terrier. “Andrei and I are both well, thank you. Are you going to work now?”
Ianto glanced down at his watch. “Oh, yes, got to go! See you later!”
“Goodbye, Ian.” Marie waved Andrei’s paw at Ianto, and Ianto absent-mindedly waved back as he stepped over the heap of junk mail that nobody had got round to moving from the front door.
He’d met Marie the weekend he’d moved into the furnished flat - she’d knocked on his door and absolutely insisted that he come round for a cup of tea. She’d also persistently misheard his name, until he’d given up and accepted that since he was technically on the run and in hiding, he might as well have an alias.
Marie had introduced him to his new neighbours - all of whom she seemed to know well - as “Ian”, and he was on the paperwork as “Ian Jones” in the coffee shop where he worked five shifts a week.
He hadn’t had any particular plans regarding getting a job, just a vague idea that he wanted to do something normal for once, and so when he’d seen the ‘staff wanted’ notice in the window of Coffeespoons, he’d applied, been given a short practical test by the slightly eccentric deputy manager, and been hired within twenty minutes.
Ianto was mostly happy. He had made a few friends - no one particularly close, but he could at least count on them for a few drinks after work. He enjoyed his job, he knew he was good at making coffee, and nothing had tried to kill him yet which was always a good sign.
He tried to stop thinking about Torchwood. It was difficult though. Years of memories don't just vanish overnight...
Ianto smiled at that thought. Of course memories vanish overnight, but that wasn't his problem now, was it? It was the memories that appeared overnight that were the trouble. He would be standing there, at work, taking orders from a bunch of office workers, and one of them would order coffee the way Tosh used to prefer it, or wear earrings like Lisa used to and it would spark all those memories back to life.
And once he started thinking about Tosh, or Lisa, or Owen or a dozen other people from the past few years, the memory of Jack was never far behind.
It was a fairly ordinary Wednesday. There was the usual rush of commuters grabbing caffeine-to-go on the way to work, followed by the post school-run mums filling the ground floor with pushchairs and toddlers.
Ianto was wiping tables and tucking chairs away neatly during the lull before lunch. At first he thought that he’d forgotten to set his mobile to silent, and that the buzzing was a text message from Marie, or a call to say that the book he’d ordered had come in to the shop. Suddenly he realised that it wasn’t his mobile - it was his alien tech alarm.
Ianto froze for a moment, then jammed his hand into his pocket to grip the device tightly. With the depths of self-control that working for Torchwood had taught him, he finished wiping the last tabletop and excused himself.
“Just nipping to the loo, Gerry!” he called over his shoulder as he headed back to the small staff area behind the counter. When he got to the cubicle and securely locked the door behind him, he pulled out the small box and noticed that his hand was shaking. The device had been designed to run on 'silent' mode while scanning the area for other pieces of tech that weren't compatible with the 21st century. Nobody else using similar technology would be able to track him with it, but it wasn't impossible that Torchwood had found him regardless.
He took a deep breath and glanced down at the screen.
His heart, which had been pounding in his ears, settled back into his chest as he examined the details of what the scanner had picked up. It was alien, that was clear, but he could also see that it wasn’t Torchwood.
It wasn’t Torchwood, and neither was Ianto now, so it wasn’t his problem. Ianto cleared the screen, put the device back into his pocket, and went back to work.
The rest of the day was just as uneventful as the start. Ianto worked until five, went for a pint with Gerry, and popped into Sainsbury’s on the way back to his flat.
He watched Top Gear and a documentary on the Falklands War on television, and had an early night.
Just another average day.
The screaming woke him at ten to four in the morning. He sat bolt upright in bed, staring around and trying to get his brain and breathing under his control. He had been dreaming. Dreaming of metal monsters stomping through the corridors of a London tower block. The screams had belonged to Lisa in his dream, but now he realised that they were coming from the flat next door.
Flinging on a t-shirt and jamming his pistol in the back of his pyjama bottoms, he was halfway out the door to his flat before he remembered that he was Ian Jones, barista, and not a Torchwood agent who was legally allowed to carry a gun and break into his neighbours’ houses.
Still, Marie sounded like she was in trouble, and no matter what he did for a living or the name on his wage slip, Ianto Jones wasn't the sort of person who could ignore a friend when they screamed in the middle of the night.
He padded silently down the hall to Marie’s flat. He hovered for a moment by her door, uncertain if it was really a good idea to burst in when he was supposed to be an ordinary guy and there was always the chance that Marie had just had a nightmare.
Marie solved his dilemma by opening the door. She didn’t seem in the least bit surprised that Ianto was standing in the hall in t-shirt and pyjama bottoms, and instead burst into tears and flung herself into Ianto’s arms. She sobbed out an explanation, of which the only words Ianto could make out were “Andrei” and “kitchen”.
Suddenly she grabbed at his hand and dragged him into her flat, pulling him through the living room and into the tiny kitchen. Ianto stopped dead in the doorway and stared at what lay on the floor in front of the cooker.
Whatever had happened, the pile of fur and bones that was lying on the mat seemed to be all that was left of Andrei.
Ianto covered his mouth with his free hand, and clutched Marie's tightly with the other. “What happened?” he asked quietly.
Marie sniffed, seeming on the verge of hysterics again. Ianto decided it was probably best not to continue this line of questioning in the kitchen. He gently led the woman back into the living room and installed her on her couch. He crouched down in front of her and patted her hand.
“What happened?” he asked again.
Marie blinked up at him. “I was getting drink.” she hiccupped. “It was dark.”
Ianto nodded, but his mind was racing, automatically running through his mental catalogue of aliens that would do something like this. He could almost kick himself. How many times in the past months had he promised himself that he had left Torchwood behind? Now here he was, cold metal of a gun at his back, consoling a victim of an alien attack. He even caught himself wondering how easy it would be to dose Marie with retcon.
Ianto narrowed his eyes and glanced back in the direction of the kitchen. Whatever was doing this was going to be very sorry indeed that it had chosen Ianto's apartment block to do it in.
Marie explained in her halting English that she’d gone into the kitchen in the dark and had almost stood on Andrei’s remains. As she described the feel of fur against her toes, she started to get hysterical again and Ianto had to calm her down. He poured her a large measure from one of the collection of vodka-based spirits Marie kept on the bookshelf, and waited until the sobbing had settled down to the occasional hiccup before going back to the kitchen.
He rapidly ran through the options, and decided that if he got rid of Andrei’s remains as quickly as possible, he would be able to convince Marie the following morning that Andrei had been hit by a car and had limped home to die, and that what she had seen in the kitchen had been all of Andrei and not just fur and skeleton.
He persuaded Marie to take a sleeping pill, which combined with the small amount of alcohol she’d had should leave her memories of the evening a little fuzzy, and got her to go to bed.
With Andrei carefully and securely wrapped up in black bin bags - the best he could do for the small dog under the circumstances - Ianto took the remains back to his own flat. He would arrange some sort of appropriate burial when he knew what Marie wanted, but for now he wasn’t going to run the risk of her seeing what was left of her beloved pet again.
Ianto popped back over to Marie’s flat to check on her one last time. He stopped dead just inside her door, his hand automatically going to his gun.
Andrei was sitting in the middle of the rug, wagging his tail.
“Err... Hello?” asked Ianto, only vaguely aware that he was addressing a dog that was currently very much deceased and in his flat.
Andrei cocked his head to one side and whined. Ianto crouched down and stuck out his hand. “Here doggie...”
Andrei licked his palm and made an almost questioning noise.
“Have you got a twin brother?” asked Ianto, wiping his hand down his t-shirt.
The dog wagged his tail again. It thumped on the rug.
Ianto stood up, running though his options once more. Andrei seemed to be alright, so what had he just taken into his flat? He hurriedly left Marie's apartment, pulling the door closed behind him. Hopefully his neighbour would think everything had been a nightmare.
The bag containing the sad remains from Marie's kitchen lay exactly where he had left it and Ianto hefted it onto his dining table and pulled on his washing-up gloves. They weren't ideal, but surprisingly he had forgotten to pick up something more suitable for an impromptu autopsy the last time he had visited the supermarket.
He undid the bags, wrinkling his nose as he did so, and wondering why he was bothered by this so much.
The pile of fur and bones that they had though was Andrei turned out not to be bits of a terrier, but rather a complete, incomplete terrier. There was no sign of any damage, no sign of anything having been done to the animal, and yet it was literally skin, bones and fur, nothing else. It could never have lived, it had no organs.
Ianto wracked his brains for anything he could remember from the Torchwood archives that might help. The only thing that even came close was a story that had been going around the staff room at Torchwood One, about a piece of cloning technology that nobody had managed to operate successfully.
Maybe there was some kind of alien experimentation going on. Either way, Ianto had a feeling that he was going to have to get involved somehow.
In the wardrobe in his bedroom, at the bottom, underneath a pile of jumpers was the rucksack he had brought with him from the Hub. It had been full of things that he had never hoped he would need, but now it looked like they were going to become more and more useful than he had ever thought. He pulled out a few bits and pieces and dropped them on his bed along with his alien tech scanner. He knew he could boost the signal it put out by wiring it into the power pack from the radio signal jammer.
He sat cross-legged on his bed with a screwdriver and set to work. If the aliens that had created the Andrei-clone were still nearby, Ianto was going to know about it.
He carried the equipment up to the roof of his apartment building and set it up. Ianto still wasn't sure what had happened, or even why he was bothering to find out, but there was some kind of alien out there and it was doing something it shouldn't be. The moment it had picked Andrei to experiment on, it had involved Ianto in its schemes and he just hoped that there was something he was going to be able to do about it.
He nervously activated the control on the scanner. Ianto was well aware that what he was doing would draw attention to himself - either from the aliens themselves or from other people who might have cause to notice an alien tech scanner. He refused to let himself think about Torchwood in that category - focusing instead on how he could convince any UNIT operatives that might turn up to go away and not reveal his whereabouts. He probably should have packed more retcon.
The data stream came back a few seconds later and Ianto studied the peaks and troughs of the graph on the display screen, trying to make sense of the readings.
It looked like whatever it was had left - there was evidence of a fading energy signal, which indicated the presence of either an alien craft or some kind of transfer system. Either way, from the remaining levels it had been gone for over an hour.
When Ianto logged onto the internet, he was intending to look for reports of local incidents which could be connected, check the local papers for strange goings-on at farms and missing pets.
He hadn’t intended to start making lists of other possible alien activity, unrelated to animals or cloning. He hadn’t intended to set up scans for other alien energy and data.
By the time the sun came up, Ianto had admitted to himself that Torchwood had made more of a lasting impact on him than he liked. Now that he knew there was alien activity in Bristol, now that it had touched his new life, he was going to have to get involved. Torchwood had made him into the kind of person who couldn’t just walk away.
Luckily, he reflected as he headed for the shower, it had also made him into the kind of person who could hunt aliens all night and still go to work the next morning without a hair out of place.
He had a feeling that skill was going to come in handy.
~*~*~*~*~*~
So... Have any of your theories changed?
Please let us know what you think - We've heard some wonderful ideas so far, and we're fascinated!
And then, it's on to Chapter 4
Authors:
leofuller and
the9thdoctor
Pairing: Jack/Ianto
Rating: 15ish
Spoilers: All of S1 and 2. Set Post-Exit Wounds.
Summary: An early morning phone call brings bad news to Torchwood only weeks after the loss of Tosh and Owen - the police have found the SUV burnt out at the foot of a cliff, and Torchwood have to carry on without Ianto.
Jack refuses to accept that Ianto’s not coming back despite all the evidence to the contrary - but maybe there’s more to the crash then they realise…
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Ianto slammed the boot of the SUV shut, unable to get the picture out of his mind. The corpse... Martha had taken the top of his head off to remove the parasite and stitched it back together again roughly. A bloody and jagged line stretched across the young man's forehead and Ianto was slammed back into terrible memories.
Lisa.
Goddamn...
He couldn't breathe, and loosened his tie. The plan was already fully formed in his mind even before he had forced himself to climb back in the SUV. He glanced at the clock on the dashboard. It was already two in the morning, and Jack had told him he was going out on a Weevil stake-out for the night. It could work. It had to work.
He gunned the engine of the SUV and sped down the road back to Cardiff.
As he drove, the memories threatened to overwhelm him. Combined with the loss of Tosh and Owen, it was almost too much. He couldn't stay here. Not now.
He practically ran into the Hub, lit only by the emergency lighting, which thankfully signalled that he would be alone for the job that needed to be done.
He made his way directly to the autopsy bay, wrenching open the door to the small cupboard that contained DNA samples of the team. Ianto spun the holder full of test tubes, grabbing his own and yanking out the stopper.
He stared at the dark red liquid. His blood. Had he thought of everything? What would they do? Gwen would be convinced by the body, he knew that. Her bloody-mindedness and persistence only extended to things she was unable to understand. A car wrecked at the bottom of a cliff and a body burnt beyond all recognition should be enough for her.
Jack though... He was another story. Jack would try to rip the world apart to find him, and Ianto knew that he was going to have to pull off every trick in the book to keep him off the scent.
He made a sudden move to the sink, upending the small tube and pouring the liquid away. They would check the DNA, that was certain, and this should throw them off. He pulled out another small phial, containing a second amount of blood, this time from the corpse still stashed in the boot of the SUV. Ianto shut his eyes briefly, and then transferred the blood into a clean tube and quickly printed a fresh label for it.
So, he had the scientific side covered. The SUV would go up in flames with such force that there would be very little of the body left.
Finishing up in the autopsy bay after carefully removing all traces of his visit, Ianto made a mental list of all the tech that would be available to him. He knew he needed to be careful not to take things that anyone would notice that were missing, but he had that covered - hidden in the darkest corner of the archives was a large rucksack. He'd stashed it away during the first few months of his tenure at Cardiff. In it, there were a number of devices - alien tech scanners, a tiny box that seemed to have the same effect as the stone covering the invisible lift, everlasting power sources, anything he could think of that might be useful.
The bag had been hidden for almost two years, and Ianto had forgotten about it...
That thought made him nauseous.
He shouldered the bag and ran through a final check in his mind as he headed back up. He'd covered the DNA angle and he needed to wipe the CCTV records for his little trip. He didn't think that they would check them after the SUV was discovered, but it was best to be safe. He had all the tech he thought he would need...
Ianto sighed and took one last look round the Hub. He was ready to fake his own death. Next, he thought, he needed to give both Jack and Gwen a reason to believe it.
He pushed open the door to his flat and glanced around. It was tidy. More tidy than usual, Ianto had to admit, but he was glad of that. He didn't want to be faced with all the little things that he knew he wouldn't be able to take with him.
Ianto crossed to a cabinet in the corner of the living room and pulled out a sheet of paper and a pen before sitting down at his small dining table and composing his suicide note.
Fortunately Matthew Harrison - Ianto's unwitting stunt double - was scheduled to tragically jump from a cliff. If his body was never found then Jack and Gwen wouldn't be suspicious.
He thought hard about what to say, deciding that something short would be the best bet. Something that sounded specific while remaining vague about his reasons. An apology and an 'I can't do this anymore' seemed right, but he wanted to say something to Jack.
It took nearly half an hour to come up with a few words to say goodbye. A quick reassurance that the body he was supposed to be getting rid of had been dealt with - even when faking his own death, Ianto wasn’t one to leave his tasks unfinished - and an apology. An apology meant for Gwen, for adding to her pain when she’d so recently lost Owen and Tosh, and an apology to Jack, for bailing out instead of facing him and telling him why he had to leave.
He couldn’t say that, of course, but he meant it.
Ianto pulled a bag down from the top shelf of his built in wardrobe and selected a few things to take with him. A few changes of clothes, not too many items - he wanted the drawers and shelves to look like nothing was missing. Not that he thought Jack would notice if Ianto was short by a few pairs of socks, but this had to be done right.
He didn’t take any of his suits, in the end. They were awkward to carry, and anyway he was leaving all that behind. He’d be able to replace anything he wanted, once he got settled.
He stood in the doorway of his flat, taking one last look around at everything he was leaving behind. It was nearly 4am and he still had to leave his ID and keys in Harrison’s pockets and set up the crash.
Just before he closed the door, Ianto changed his mind and went back to add a post-script to his note.
P.S. Please remember, you're not a monster. You never have been.
Turning his attention to the technicalities of getting a corpse to drive over a cliff, Ianto left his old life behind without looking back.
The SUV made an impressive sight as it burnt at the foot of the cliff. Ianto stood for a while, peering over the edge as the flames consumed the vehicle. He felt a small stab of guilt as over a quarter of a million pounds went up in smoke, but eventually shrugged to himself and adjusted the bag slung over his shoulder. He walked for a while - he needed to get as far away from the scene of the 'accident' as possible before hitching a lift. He'd carefully doctored a thermos of coffee with retcon that he could offer to anyone who stopped. There was no sense in leaving people to remember the affable young Welshman they gave a lift to one morning.
He refused to think about what he had just done, focusing instead on the future. He endlessly thought through lists in his mind, calculating the cash he still had in his emergency stash, the loose ends he might have left behind in Cardiff, anything he might have left behind that would lead Jack to search him out.
Occasionally though, he found his thoughts drifting back to the letter. He had left the postscript as a message for Jack, mostly hoping that it would serve as a re-enforcement - something that Jack would understand better than a vague apology - but there was a small voice in the back of his mind, one that he tried to ignore even as Mr John Llewellen, telesales administrator to the Swansea area, gave him a detailed account of his eldest daughters wedding. It told him that he'd left it as a clue.
Mr Llewellen was suitably sympathetic when he dropped Ianto off in the centre of Swansea, to visit his dying grandmother, and Ianto decided not to retcon him. He didn’t want Mr Llewellen to fall asleep at the wheel on his way up to Fishguard, after all.
Ianto caught the next National Express Coach, doubling back the way he’d come to counteract any problems just in case Mr Llewellen did remember him. Somehow Ianto doubted that there would be a publicised search for him, but there was no harm in a little extra subterfuge.
The coach spent fifteen minutes waiting in Cardiff. Ianto slumped against the window with the hood of his sweater pulled up, pretending to sleep, even though it was only late morning and the chances were that Jack hadn’t even found the note yet.
He got off the coach in Bristol, because it was lunch time and there was really no reason to go rushing off across the country when he’d just faked his own death. If Jack did suspect that he was alive, and did go looking for him, then he was bound to assume that Ianto had gone as far away as possible, and was far more likely to start looking in Dover or Newcastle.
In fact, Ianto considered as he worked his way through a large bowl of pasta, surprisingly hungry under the circumstances, there was no reason why he shouldn’t stay right here in Bristol, get himself a job and a flat, start over.
~~~
Ianto groggily pulled on his trainers and double checked his pockets for his keys, wallet, phone and one of the small devices that he had taken from the Hub - the one that would let him know if anyone was looking for him. So far it hadn't alarmed in the two months he had been living in Bristol, but there was no use in growing complacent.
He yanked open the front door, kicking the mat which had yet again wrinkled up and wedged under the door. He'd deal with it later. As he stepped out into the hallway, he noticed Marie unlocking her own door. Her small yappy dog strained at its lead as it noticed Ianto. He gave them both a small smile.
“Hello Ian, are you being alright this morning?”
“I'm fine, thanks.” Ianto replied, “How are you two?”
Marie bent down and picked up the Yorkshire Terrier. “Andrei and I are both well, thank you. Are you going to work now?”
Ianto glanced down at his watch. “Oh, yes, got to go! See you later!”
“Goodbye, Ian.” Marie waved Andrei’s paw at Ianto, and Ianto absent-mindedly waved back as he stepped over the heap of junk mail that nobody had got round to moving from the front door.
He’d met Marie the weekend he’d moved into the furnished flat - she’d knocked on his door and absolutely insisted that he come round for a cup of tea. She’d also persistently misheard his name, until he’d given up and accepted that since he was technically on the run and in hiding, he might as well have an alias.
Marie had introduced him to his new neighbours - all of whom she seemed to know well - as “Ian”, and he was on the paperwork as “Ian Jones” in the coffee shop where he worked five shifts a week.
He hadn’t had any particular plans regarding getting a job, just a vague idea that he wanted to do something normal for once, and so when he’d seen the ‘staff wanted’ notice in the window of Coffeespoons, he’d applied, been given a short practical test by the slightly eccentric deputy manager, and been hired within twenty minutes.
Ianto was mostly happy. He had made a few friends - no one particularly close, but he could at least count on them for a few drinks after work. He enjoyed his job, he knew he was good at making coffee, and nothing had tried to kill him yet which was always a good sign.
He tried to stop thinking about Torchwood. It was difficult though. Years of memories don't just vanish overnight...
Ianto smiled at that thought. Of course memories vanish overnight, but that wasn't his problem now, was it? It was the memories that appeared overnight that were the trouble. He would be standing there, at work, taking orders from a bunch of office workers, and one of them would order coffee the way Tosh used to prefer it, or wear earrings like Lisa used to and it would spark all those memories back to life.
And once he started thinking about Tosh, or Lisa, or Owen or a dozen other people from the past few years, the memory of Jack was never far behind.
It was a fairly ordinary Wednesday. There was the usual rush of commuters grabbing caffeine-to-go on the way to work, followed by the post school-run mums filling the ground floor with pushchairs and toddlers.
Ianto was wiping tables and tucking chairs away neatly during the lull before lunch. At first he thought that he’d forgotten to set his mobile to silent, and that the buzzing was a text message from Marie, or a call to say that the book he’d ordered had come in to the shop. Suddenly he realised that it wasn’t his mobile - it was his alien tech alarm.
Ianto froze for a moment, then jammed his hand into his pocket to grip the device tightly. With the depths of self-control that working for Torchwood had taught him, he finished wiping the last tabletop and excused himself.
“Just nipping to the loo, Gerry!” he called over his shoulder as he headed back to the small staff area behind the counter. When he got to the cubicle and securely locked the door behind him, he pulled out the small box and noticed that his hand was shaking. The device had been designed to run on 'silent' mode while scanning the area for other pieces of tech that weren't compatible with the 21st century. Nobody else using similar technology would be able to track him with it, but it wasn't impossible that Torchwood had found him regardless.
He took a deep breath and glanced down at the screen.
His heart, which had been pounding in his ears, settled back into his chest as he examined the details of what the scanner had picked up. It was alien, that was clear, but he could also see that it wasn’t Torchwood.
It wasn’t Torchwood, and neither was Ianto now, so it wasn’t his problem. Ianto cleared the screen, put the device back into his pocket, and went back to work.
The rest of the day was just as uneventful as the start. Ianto worked until five, went for a pint with Gerry, and popped into Sainsbury’s on the way back to his flat.
He watched Top Gear and a documentary on the Falklands War on television, and had an early night.
Just another average day.
The screaming woke him at ten to four in the morning. He sat bolt upright in bed, staring around and trying to get his brain and breathing under his control. He had been dreaming. Dreaming of metal monsters stomping through the corridors of a London tower block. The screams had belonged to Lisa in his dream, but now he realised that they were coming from the flat next door.
Flinging on a t-shirt and jamming his pistol in the back of his pyjama bottoms, he was halfway out the door to his flat before he remembered that he was Ian Jones, barista, and not a Torchwood agent who was legally allowed to carry a gun and break into his neighbours’ houses.
Still, Marie sounded like she was in trouble, and no matter what he did for a living or the name on his wage slip, Ianto Jones wasn't the sort of person who could ignore a friend when they screamed in the middle of the night.
He padded silently down the hall to Marie’s flat. He hovered for a moment by her door, uncertain if it was really a good idea to burst in when he was supposed to be an ordinary guy and there was always the chance that Marie had just had a nightmare.
Marie solved his dilemma by opening the door. She didn’t seem in the least bit surprised that Ianto was standing in the hall in t-shirt and pyjama bottoms, and instead burst into tears and flung herself into Ianto’s arms. She sobbed out an explanation, of which the only words Ianto could make out were “Andrei” and “kitchen”.
Suddenly she grabbed at his hand and dragged him into her flat, pulling him through the living room and into the tiny kitchen. Ianto stopped dead in the doorway and stared at what lay on the floor in front of the cooker.
Whatever had happened, the pile of fur and bones that was lying on the mat seemed to be all that was left of Andrei.
Ianto covered his mouth with his free hand, and clutched Marie's tightly with the other. “What happened?” he asked quietly.
Marie sniffed, seeming on the verge of hysterics again. Ianto decided it was probably best not to continue this line of questioning in the kitchen. He gently led the woman back into the living room and installed her on her couch. He crouched down in front of her and patted her hand.
“What happened?” he asked again.
Marie blinked up at him. “I was getting drink.” she hiccupped. “It was dark.”
Ianto nodded, but his mind was racing, automatically running through his mental catalogue of aliens that would do something like this. He could almost kick himself. How many times in the past months had he promised himself that he had left Torchwood behind? Now here he was, cold metal of a gun at his back, consoling a victim of an alien attack. He even caught himself wondering how easy it would be to dose Marie with retcon.
Ianto narrowed his eyes and glanced back in the direction of the kitchen. Whatever was doing this was going to be very sorry indeed that it had chosen Ianto's apartment block to do it in.
Marie explained in her halting English that she’d gone into the kitchen in the dark and had almost stood on Andrei’s remains. As she described the feel of fur against her toes, she started to get hysterical again and Ianto had to calm her down. He poured her a large measure from one of the collection of vodka-based spirits Marie kept on the bookshelf, and waited until the sobbing had settled down to the occasional hiccup before going back to the kitchen.
He rapidly ran through the options, and decided that if he got rid of Andrei’s remains as quickly as possible, he would be able to convince Marie the following morning that Andrei had been hit by a car and had limped home to die, and that what she had seen in the kitchen had been all of Andrei and not just fur and skeleton.
He persuaded Marie to take a sleeping pill, which combined with the small amount of alcohol she’d had should leave her memories of the evening a little fuzzy, and got her to go to bed.
With Andrei carefully and securely wrapped up in black bin bags - the best he could do for the small dog under the circumstances - Ianto took the remains back to his own flat. He would arrange some sort of appropriate burial when he knew what Marie wanted, but for now he wasn’t going to run the risk of her seeing what was left of her beloved pet again.
Ianto popped back over to Marie’s flat to check on her one last time. He stopped dead just inside her door, his hand automatically going to his gun.
Andrei was sitting in the middle of the rug, wagging his tail.
“Err... Hello?” asked Ianto, only vaguely aware that he was addressing a dog that was currently very much deceased and in his flat.
Andrei cocked his head to one side and whined. Ianto crouched down and stuck out his hand. “Here doggie...”
Andrei licked his palm and made an almost questioning noise.
“Have you got a twin brother?” asked Ianto, wiping his hand down his t-shirt.
The dog wagged his tail again. It thumped on the rug.
Ianto stood up, running though his options once more. Andrei seemed to be alright, so what had he just taken into his flat? He hurriedly left Marie's apartment, pulling the door closed behind him. Hopefully his neighbour would think everything had been a nightmare.
The bag containing the sad remains from Marie's kitchen lay exactly where he had left it and Ianto hefted it onto his dining table and pulled on his washing-up gloves. They weren't ideal, but surprisingly he had forgotten to pick up something more suitable for an impromptu autopsy the last time he had visited the supermarket.
He undid the bags, wrinkling his nose as he did so, and wondering why he was bothered by this so much.
The pile of fur and bones that they had though was Andrei turned out not to be bits of a terrier, but rather a complete, incomplete terrier. There was no sign of any damage, no sign of anything having been done to the animal, and yet it was literally skin, bones and fur, nothing else. It could never have lived, it had no organs.
Ianto wracked his brains for anything he could remember from the Torchwood archives that might help. The only thing that even came close was a story that had been going around the staff room at Torchwood One, about a piece of cloning technology that nobody had managed to operate successfully.
Maybe there was some kind of alien experimentation going on. Either way, Ianto had a feeling that he was going to have to get involved somehow.
In the wardrobe in his bedroom, at the bottom, underneath a pile of jumpers was the rucksack he had brought with him from the Hub. It had been full of things that he had never hoped he would need, but now it looked like they were going to become more and more useful than he had ever thought. He pulled out a few bits and pieces and dropped them on his bed along with his alien tech scanner. He knew he could boost the signal it put out by wiring it into the power pack from the radio signal jammer.
He sat cross-legged on his bed with a screwdriver and set to work. If the aliens that had created the Andrei-clone were still nearby, Ianto was going to know about it.
He carried the equipment up to the roof of his apartment building and set it up. Ianto still wasn't sure what had happened, or even why he was bothering to find out, but there was some kind of alien out there and it was doing something it shouldn't be. The moment it had picked Andrei to experiment on, it had involved Ianto in its schemes and he just hoped that there was something he was going to be able to do about it.
He nervously activated the control on the scanner. Ianto was well aware that what he was doing would draw attention to himself - either from the aliens themselves or from other people who might have cause to notice an alien tech scanner. He refused to let himself think about Torchwood in that category - focusing instead on how he could convince any UNIT operatives that might turn up to go away and not reveal his whereabouts. He probably should have packed more retcon.
The data stream came back a few seconds later and Ianto studied the peaks and troughs of the graph on the display screen, trying to make sense of the readings.
It looked like whatever it was had left - there was evidence of a fading energy signal, which indicated the presence of either an alien craft or some kind of transfer system. Either way, from the remaining levels it had been gone for over an hour.
When Ianto logged onto the internet, he was intending to look for reports of local incidents which could be connected, check the local papers for strange goings-on at farms and missing pets.
He hadn’t intended to start making lists of other possible alien activity, unrelated to animals or cloning. He hadn’t intended to set up scans for other alien energy and data.
By the time the sun came up, Ianto had admitted to himself that Torchwood had made more of a lasting impact on him than he liked. Now that he knew there was alien activity in Bristol, now that it had touched his new life, he was going to have to get involved. Torchwood had made him into the kind of person who couldn’t just walk away.
Luckily, he reflected as he headed for the shower, it had also made him into the kind of person who could hunt aliens all night and still go to work the next morning without a hair out of place.
He had a feeling that skill was going to come in handy.
~*~*~*~*~*~
So... Have any of your theories changed?
Please let us know what you think - We've heard some wonderful ideas so far, and we're fascinated!
And then, it's on to Chapter 4