(no subject)
Some abandonned fic pieces. I ended up writing from a completely different vantage point so none of this fits anymore.
Within the Christmas tree shaped hierarchy at Torchwood London, Sam Sutton was the furthest needle on the lowest bough. He was assigned to ten project groups, five recovery teams, and was even beholden to the lower levels of the accounting department. He might, in fact, have been more like the dried up needles that fall forgotten to the floor underneath the presents and cause house fires. But Sam was a cheerful kind of guy, and even though all twenty four of his immediate superiors routinely forgot his name, they were always happy to see him.
Ianto Jones knew everybody’s name. He acknowledged everyone, regardless of rank, with the same level of breezy efficiency and effortless manners. Such was his professionalism that nobody had dared believe the rumour that he was in a relationship with someone from another project group until gift-wrapped cleaning products began arriving for him via the internal post.
He almost never saw Sam, except to receive deliveries of copy paper and biros from general supply, reams of interoffice memos still warm from the Xerox, and occasionally, a bottle of all-purpose cleaner with jaunty bow and inside joke sticky-noted to the side. Each interaction ended in precisely the same manner, Ianto calling “Thank you Sam” while each rushed off to his next bit of work.
Afterwards, Ianto would think it strange that Sam was among the first of the images to come to him, faces and personalities scraping painfully across his memory to be filed as lost.
~*~*~*~
When Jack had been gone for a week, Ianto put the watch, still counting, into a size two hazard containment box. He put the the box on Jack's chair and sat down on the floor by the desk to rest. It was before the team had started to realize how much time he spent alone in the Hub after hours, and he was more than a little bit drunk.
Gwen rousted him the next morning, frantically pulling on his clothes and telling him he had to leave right fucking now, there was a bomb on Jack's chair. Ianto hadn't even noticed how much the watch's persistent ticking was echoed in the box. It always sounded that loud and ominous to him.
The amplified stopwatch had been the first of a few embarrassing explanations Ianto was forced to make to the team, most of which were summed up as not having a life outside of work. Work, they would say, never Jack, because nobody wanted to admit they gave anything up for the man who abandoned them.
There were times when Ianto couldn't make himself leave the Hub at all, for days at a go and the others were surprisingly accommodating. Owen went around to Ianto's place and brought back half his clothes during a particularly long stretch and Tosh reprogrammed the stasis settings in the Hub to keep it warm at night. For her part, Gwen occasionally brought them all meals from home and had things been going better at work, there would have been a lot of jokes about stealing her boyfriend away for his culinary skills.
Truthfully, they all spent a lot more time at the Hub, rebuilding what they could and cordoning off what they couldn't make safe. They managed to guilt Gwen into going home to Rhys as often as possible but she'd taken it on herself to organize the rebuilding efforts and she was happiest when she felt she was being helpful. The Rift was quiet, and they ignored any calls that could be explained away by Owen's “The People of Wales are Insane” theory. Tosh spent two decontamination days living in the conference room after wandering into a damaged section of the archives without proper protective gear. Owen found the missing weevil in Sub-basement Four when it tore off a chunk of his forearm one evening. The Hub was home, even more than usual, and Ianto couldn't say he minded the company.
With Jack gone, they started experimenting with different coffee blends, different take-away food and different work styles. They strayed from traditions where they could and clung to them where they felt shaky.
Despite being relieved of his errand boy status, Ianto still went to the organic market for coffee beans and sandwiches every second Tuesday, just like he had when Jack was there, because nobody told him to stop. And when there was too much food for four people, they all helped clear up so nobody was left staring at Jack's uneaten share. Ianto didn't like to leave the Hub for the same reason he always brought an extra sandwich. He didn't assume Jack would come back, but he didn't want to be caught off guard if it happened. Every second Tuesday he went to the organic market and didn't expect to be surprised. Until he was.
He had finally stopped looking for glimpses of the coat dipping behind shins in a crowd or the tips of spiky brown hair on a head that was tall, but not too tall. He was finally starting to notice other things. The girl at the sandwich counter smiling at him in a more than friendly fashion, the couple that met in the street with a hug, the familiar-looking young man drinking coffee in the cafe, watching Ianto pick up his order.
Watching? Decidedly, Ianto realized, and he tried to place the man's face. He was smaller, skinny. About Owen's size with some of the angles smoothed over. Dark hair, plain features with the exception of a mouth even Jack would admire. His eyes flicked back towards Ianto at the wrong time and they were caught staring at one another. Ianto nodded once, in case he was supposed to know the man from somewhere, but ducked out the moment his order was handed over. There was always a chance the people he recognized were Retcon cases or at least persuasion jobs, though Ianto felt mildly nauseous if this meant he'd finally lied to enough people over the years that he'd stopped remembering their faces.
Mind reeling, trying to place the face from the shop, Ianto didn't realize how far he'd walked until he wound up stranded on a curb during a traffic light. Looking back over the pedestrian crowd behind him, he thought for a moment he saw the man again. Frowning, he straightened up and tried to see over the nearest faces, but the light changed and he had to finish crossing. He'd not taken five more steps before a nervous feeling overtook him. He flipped out his mobile and, shifting the carry bags to one hand, auto-dialled Tosh.
The CCTV search didn't pick anything up, but he started a long detour anyways, Owen and Gwen picking up tailing him until they all decided either the cafe guy gave up or was never following Ianto in the first place. Just to be sure, Gwen and Owen disappeared over a certain paving stone and Ianto let himself into the Tourist Office, freeing his hands by setting down the bags the moment he was inside and moving his gun out from his jacket to his belt. A quick look back through the door, scanning street level for feet, then he closed the door, locked up and headed downstairs with lunch.
"I'm sorry," he told the others, even as he laid out their food for them and served drinks, but Gwen and Owen waved it off and Toshiko was just happy to have been able to really test their renewed CCTV connections for the first time in weeks. They settled down for lunch in the new quiet way they'd developed. Without Jack's raucous storytelling, their meal breaks had turned into a kind of meditative silence, with over-ritualized politeness that paid tribute to Ianto's ways more than anything. If they'd each taken over some of the vacant leadership role, this was the part that belong to Ianto, reflection and civilized discussion.
"Did you get much of a look at him? Could you describe him?" Gwen asked.
Ianto deflected the question and although he still thought differently, he suggested it was just stress and an overactive imagination playing tricks on him.
"I could look back to the footage from right before you called," Tosh offered, but again Ianto eased them off the topic, though he was honestly relieved at how easily they believed him.
While they were clearing up, Owen asked him if he'd be in the archives for the afternoon. The cameras were spotty from all the electrical damage to the Hub and too many things had shaken loose for anyone to stray too far without safety precautions. If Ianto had said yes, they would have had him checking in every half hour.
"I think I need to stay topside for a while," Ianto said, however, and Owen nodded, looking somewhat relieved.
The tourist information desk actually had some of the more impressive high-tech gadgetry; monitoring systems that mimicked the look of the desk's natural wood surface from every angle but Ianto's, voice-activated security features, and a number of other items that meant Ianto could work on classified files in relative security above the ground. It allowed him to lose himself in the paperwork, a fate worse than death as far as Owen was concerned, but Ianto found it relaxing. Even with the overcast sky and the sub-street level bearings, the office felt different than the rest of the underground lair of the Hub, and it was his, really. They always let him have that space.
Most of the paperwork of late was as earthbound as anything they deal with at Torchwood Three. Truthfully, Ianto's work usually was. Requisitions forms and finances-- the guideline was up to two decimal places and the document belongs on Ianto's desk, anything more finite was Tosh's realm, although she delegated a fair share of paperwork to Ianto as well.
After a soothing hour or so of paperwork, Ianto unlocked the door and pulled it open a few inches. He wouldn't be able to keep it that way for long. The air inside the Tourist office was stale but at least it was warm. The wind sweeping off the Bay and through Mermaid Quay was another story. He stood just inside the doorway and took a few breaths of fresh air until a pamphlet or two shuddered and threatened to leave the wall display.
Stretching his neck a little he contemplated making Owen do a workstation ergonomics report. It's in Owen's employment contract, or at least it's in the contract Ianto made up and told him he'd agreed to, but Ianto likes to avoid anything that calls attention to the sedate nature of his work. A sore back from slouching over procurement forms would be far too much fodder for Owen.
It was a subtle shift in air pressure that grabbed Ianto's attention, not a noise, which was unusual since his best and simplest security measure has always been the series of loud chimes hanging off the tourist office door. He could have sworn someone had entered, but of course it was impossible, so with a shake of his head, he turned to answer the instant message that popped up on his screen. Gwen, about to leave for home.
IANTO: Give me a moment to sync up the feeds. I'll give you a CCTV escort to your car.
GWEN: Still on-edge then?
IANTO: Strange feeling. Might just be the weather.
GWEN: Try sleep, Ianto.
He smiled and held back the standard “how would you know anything about sleep” in favour of a short “goodnight” and pulled up the three camera views Tosh had shortcut to everyone's desktop. He watched Gwen step off the paving stone and start across the Plass before he caught some movement in the office with the corner of his eye. Without moving from the shoulders up, he moved a hand towards the shelf to his right under the desk, wrapped his fingers around the cold steel of his gun and tried to look calm as he watched Gwen get into her car safely. With his other hand he tapped a short combination of keys and initiated a level three scan of the office. It would alert Owen and Tosh down in the Hub as well as pick up anything out of place.
There was a lone rat skulking along the outside wall of the tourist office, the only thing picked up by the scan, but just as Ianto was about to send an all-clear message to the others, the man from the cafe stepped forward as if materializing out of smoke. For a split second, Ianto thought about playing it cool, sticking to his tourist office script. Can I help you find anything? Tosh would come up from the Hub and Owen would take the lift out to the Plas and circle the long way around. Back-up was as close as that, but anything that could bypass a level three scan was serious. Ianto stood and raised his gun, so fast that his chair fell over behind him.
“Who are you? How did you...”
The man wavered in front of Ianto, glinting like a mirage. He heard Owen hit the loose plank outside and stop, heard a muted version of Tosh's comms voice in the corridor behind the door to the Hub, and was hit with a sudden flash of recognition.
“Sam?”
The figure of the man seemed to smile at Ianto's stuttered acknowledgement before flickering away to nothing just as the locks on the front door magically clicked open and Owen burst in, Tosh appearing in the other doorway a second later. Guns raised, they swept their focus methodically across the room.
“What is it? Where’s it gone?” Owen shouted at Ianto without looking his way. The man was gone and Ianto was too stunned to answer.
“Ianto” Tosh began in a gentler voice, but kept her gun trained at chest height, kill zone for any human and most alien threats. “Are you okay?”
He blinked twice, mouth still open, waiting for the image to reappear, but he somehow knew that Sam had gone.
“I... I’m sorry,” he muttered finally. “I think it was a false alarm.”
~*~*~*~
“Go home,” Owen said, after a while.
Tosh was running energy readings on the Hub and surroundings, down to the smallest levels, including static electricity. Owen had done five layers of bioscans only to discover that an ordinary earth-species rat had probably lurked outside the tourist office around the time Ianto called in the cavalry. Ianto had tried to denounce the whole thing as shot nerves after a long day or possibly too much coffee, as if the very concept of over-caffeination wasn’t ludicrous to him. Owen had even made two failed attempts to scan Ianto for brain damage without his knowledge. And then Owen decided that he would be in charge for a moment.
“Go home, Tosh. Go home, Owen. Go home, Ianto,” Owen repeated. ”Especially go home Ianto.”
Tosh snorted and exchanged a look with Ianto that clearly said “Just this once we’ll let him pretend we care what he says.” But she wasn’t one to look a gift horse in any of its major orifices, and she grabbed her coat before hurrying for the door.
Within the Christmas tree shaped hierarchy at Torchwood London, Sam Sutton was the furthest needle on the lowest bough. He was assigned to ten project groups, five recovery teams, and was even beholden to the lower levels of the accounting department. He might, in fact, have been more like the dried up needles that fall forgotten to the floor underneath the presents and cause house fires. But Sam was a cheerful kind of guy, and even though all twenty four of his immediate superiors routinely forgot his name, they were always happy to see him.
Ianto Jones knew everybody’s name. He acknowledged everyone, regardless of rank, with the same level of breezy efficiency and effortless manners. Such was his professionalism that nobody had dared believe the rumour that he was in a relationship with someone from another project group until gift-wrapped cleaning products began arriving for him via the internal post.
He almost never saw Sam, except to receive deliveries of copy paper and biros from general supply, reams of interoffice memos still warm from the Xerox, and occasionally, a bottle of all-purpose cleaner with jaunty bow and inside joke sticky-noted to the side. Each interaction ended in precisely the same manner, Ianto calling “Thank you Sam” while each rushed off to his next bit of work.
Afterwards, Ianto would think it strange that Sam was among the first of the images to come to him, faces and personalities scraping painfully across his memory to be filed as lost.
~*~*~*~
When Jack had been gone for a week, Ianto put the watch, still counting, into a size two hazard containment box. He put the the box on Jack's chair and sat down on the floor by the desk to rest. It was before the team had started to realize how much time he spent alone in the Hub after hours, and he was more than a little bit drunk.
Gwen rousted him the next morning, frantically pulling on his clothes and telling him he had to leave right fucking now, there was a bomb on Jack's chair. Ianto hadn't even noticed how much the watch's persistent ticking was echoed in the box. It always sounded that loud and ominous to him.
The amplified stopwatch had been the first of a few embarrassing explanations Ianto was forced to make to the team, most of which were summed up as not having a life outside of work. Work, they would say, never Jack, because nobody wanted to admit they gave anything up for the man who abandoned them.
There were times when Ianto couldn't make himself leave the Hub at all, for days at a go and the others were surprisingly accommodating. Owen went around to Ianto's place and brought back half his clothes during a particularly long stretch and Tosh reprogrammed the stasis settings in the Hub to keep it warm at night. For her part, Gwen occasionally brought them all meals from home and had things been going better at work, there would have been a lot of jokes about stealing her boyfriend away for his culinary skills.
Truthfully, they all spent a lot more time at the Hub, rebuilding what they could and cordoning off what they couldn't make safe. They managed to guilt Gwen into going home to Rhys as often as possible but she'd taken it on herself to organize the rebuilding efforts and she was happiest when she felt she was being helpful. The Rift was quiet, and they ignored any calls that could be explained away by Owen's “The People of Wales are Insane” theory. Tosh spent two decontamination days living in the conference room after wandering into a damaged section of the archives without proper protective gear. Owen found the missing weevil in Sub-basement Four when it tore off a chunk of his forearm one evening. The Hub was home, even more than usual, and Ianto couldn't say he minded the company.
With Jack gone, they started experimenting with different coffee blends, different take-away food and different work styles. They strayed from traditions where they could and clung to them where they felt shaky.
Despite being relieved of his errand boy status, Ianto still went to the organic market for coffee beans and sandwiches every second Tuesday, just like he had when Jack was there, because nobody told him to stop. And when there was too much food for four people, they all helped clear up so nobody was left staring at Jack's uneaten share. Ianto didn't like to leave the Hub for the same reason he always brought an extra sandwich. He didn't assume Jack would come back, but he didn't want to be caught off guard if it happened. Every second Tuesday he went to the organic market and didn't expect to be surprised. Until he was.
He had finally stopped looking for glimpses of the coat dipping behind shins in a crowd or the tips of spiky brown hair on a head that was tall, but not too tall. He was finally starting to notice other things. The girl at the sandwich counter smiling at him in a more than friendly fashion, the couple that met in the street with a hug, the familiar-looking young man drinking coffee in the cafe, watching Ianto pick up his order.
Watching? Decidedly, Ianto realized, and he tried to place the man's face. He was smaller, skinny. About Owen's size with some of the angles smoothed over. Dark hair, plain features with the exception of a mouth even Jack would admire. His eyes flicked back towards Ianto at the wrong time and they were caught staring at one another. Ianto nodded once, in case he was supposed to know the man from somewhere, but ducked out the moment his order was handed over. There was always a chance the people he recognized were Retcon cases or at least persuasion jobs, though Ianto felt mildly nauseous if this meant he'd finally lied to enough people over the years that he'd stopped remembering their faces.
Mind reeling, trying to place the face from the shop, Ianto didn't realize how far he'd walked until he wound up stranded on a curb during a traffic light. Looking back over the pedestrian crowd behind him, he thought for a moment he saw the man again. Frowning, he straightened up and tried to see over the nearest faces, but the light changed and he had to finish crossing. He'd not taken five more steps before a nervous feeling overtook him. He flipped out his mobile and, shifting the carry bags to one hand, auto-dialled Tosh.
The CCTV search didn't pick anything up, but he started a long detour anyways, Owen and Gwen picking up tailing him until they all decided either the cafe guy gave up or was never following Ianto in the first place. Just to be sure, Gwen and Owen disappeared over a certain paving stone and Ianto let himself into the Tourist Office, freeing his hands by setting down the bags the moment he was inside and moving his gun out from his jacket to his belt. A quick look back through the door, scanning street level for feet, then he closed the door, locked up and headed downstairs with lunch.
"I'm sorry," he told the others, even as he laid out their food for them and served drinks, but Gwen and Owen waved it off and Toshiko was just happy to have been able to really test their renewed CCTV connections for the first time in weeks. They settled down for lunch in the new quiet way they'd developed. Without Jack's raucous storytelling, their meal breaks had turned into a kind of meditative silence, with over-ritualized politeness that paid tribute to Ianto's ways more than anything. If they'd each taken over some of the vacant leadership role, this was the part that belong to Ianto, reflection and civilized discussion.
"Did you get much of a look at him? Could you describe him?" Gwen asked.
Ianto deflected the question and although he still thought differently, he suggested it was just stress and an overactive imagination playing tricks on him.
"I could look back to the footage from right before you called," Tosh offered, but again Ianto eased them off the topic, though he was honestly relieved at how easily they believed him.
While they were clearing up, Owen asked him if he'd be in the archives for the afternoon. The cameras were spotty from all the electrical damage to the Hub and too many things had shaken loose for anyone to stray too far without safety precautions. If Ianto had said yes, they would have had him checking in every half hour.
"I think I need to stay topside for a while," Ianto said, however, and Owen nodded, looking somewhat relieved.
The tourist information desk actually had some of the more impressive high-tech gadgetry; monitoring systems that mimicked the look of the desk's natural wood surface from every angle but Ianto's, voice-activated security features, and a number of other items that meant Ianto could work on classified files in relative security above the ground. It allowed him to lose himself in the paperwork, a fate worse than death as far as Owen was concerned, but Ianto found it relaxing. Even with the overcast sky and the sub-street level bearings, the office felt different than the rest of the underground lair of the Hub, and it was his, really. They always let him have that space.
Most of the paperwork of late was as earthbound as anything they deal with at Torchwood Three. Truthfully, Ianto's work usually was. Requisitions forms and finances-- the guideline was up to two decimal places and the document belongs on Ianto's desk, anything more finite was Tosh's realm, although she delegated a fair share of paperwork to Ianto as well.
After a soothing hour or so of paperwork, Ianto unlocked the door and pulled it open a few inches. He wouldn't be able to keep it that way for long. The air inside the Tourist office was stale but at least it was warm. The wind sweeping off the Bay and through Mermaid Quay was another story. He stood just inside the doorway and took a few breaths of fresh air until a pamphlet or two shuddered and threatened to leave the wall display.
Stretching his neck a little he contemplated making Owen do a workstation ergonomics report. It's in Owen's employment contract, or at least it's in the contract Ianto made up and told him he'd agreed to, but Ianto likes to avoid anything that calls attention to the sedate nature of his work. A sore back from slouching over procurement forms would be far too much fodder for Owen.
It was a subtle shift in air pressure that grabbed Ianto's attention, not a noise, which was unusual since his best and simplest security measure has always been the series of loud chimes hanging off the tourist office door. He could have sworn someone had entered, but of course it was impossible, so with a shake of his head, he turned to answer the instant message that popped up on his screen. Gwen, about to leave for home.
IANTO: Give me a moment to sync up the feeds. I'll give you a CCTV escort to your car.
GWEN: Still on-edge then?
IANTO: Strange feeling. Might just be the weather.
GWEN: Try sleep, Ianto.
He smiled and held back the standard “how would you know anything about sleep” in favour of a short “goodnight” and pulled up the three camera views Tosh had shortcut to everyone's desktop. He watched Gwen step off the paving stone and start across the Plass before he caught some movement in the office with the corner of his eye. Without moving from the shoulders up, he moved a hand towards the shelf to his right under the desk, wrapped his fingers around the cold steel of his gun and tried to look calm as he watched Gwen get into her car safely. With his other hand he tapped a short combination of keys and initiated a level three scan of the office. It would alert Owen and Tosh down in the Hub as well as pick up anything out of place.
There was a lone rat skulking along the outside wall of the tourist office, the only thing picked up by the scan, but just as Ianto was about to send an all-clear message to the others, the man from the cafe stepped forward as if materializing out of smoke. For a split second, Ianto thought about playing it cool, sticking to his tourist office script. Can I help you find anything? Tosh would come up from the Hub and Owen would take the lift out to the Plas and circle the long way around. Back-up was as close as that, but anything that could bypass a level three scan was serious. Ianto stood and raised his gun, so fast that his chair fell over behind him.
“Who are you? How did you...”
The man wavered in front of Ianto, glinting like a mirage. He heard Owen hit the loose plank outside and stop, heard a muted version of Tosh's comms voice in the corridor behind the door to the Hub, and was hit with a sudden flash of recognition.
“Sam?”
The figure of the man seemed to smile at Ianto's stuttered acknowledgement before flickering away to nothing just as the locks on the front door magically clicked open and Owen burst in, Tosh appearing in the other doorway a second later. Guns raised, they swept their focus methodically across the room.
“What is it? Where’s it gone?” Owen shouted at Ianto without looking his way. The man was gone and Ianto was too stunned to answer.
“Ianto” Tosh began in a gentler voice, but kept her gun trained at chest height, kill zone for any human and most alien threats. “Are you okay?”
He blinked twice, mouth still open, waiting for the image to reappear, but he somehow knew that Sam had gone.
“I... I’m sorry,” he muttered finally. “I think it was a false alarm.”
~*~*~*~
“Go home,” Owen said, after a while.
Tosh was running energy readings on the Hub and surroundings, down to the smallest levels, including static electricity. Owen had done five layers of bioscans only to discover that an ordinary earth-species rat had probably lurked outside the tourist office around the time Ianto called in the cavalry. Ianto had tried to denounce the whole thing as shot nerves after a long day or possibly too much coffee, as if the very concept of over-caffeination wasn’t ludicrous to him. Owen had even made two failed attempts to scan Ianto for brain damage without his knowledge. And then Owen decided that he would be in charge for a moment.
“Go home, Tosh. Go home, Owen. Go home, Ianto,” Owen repeated. ”Especially go home Ianto.”
Tosh snorted and exchanged a look with Ianto that clearly said “Just this once we’ll let him pretend we care what he says.” But she wasn’t one to look a gift horse in any of its major orifices, and she grabbed her coat before hurrying for the door.