A first chapter and a general plea for help
I'm getting a little bit desperate, and this is such a close-knit group of great writers that I hate to barge in, but at the same time I'm especially interested in getting help from these particular quarters. The lowdown: I started writing a Supernatural/Torchwood/Doctor Who crossover at the beginning of last November, in an attempt to see if I could carry a totally cracky fic concept through 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo. I made the 50K and the damn thing just kept going. So now it's six months later and I've got 75K, looking at 100K for the finished product, and I haven't posted a word of it in public. I have exactly two readers, rainweaver13, who betas the Supernatural half, and one friend at college who just squees, she doesn't beta. (She provided the original crack idea.) And I really want to start posting it before I turn 40 (or both shows end without me -- I started this before Torchwood series 2 began, and now both it and SPN season 3 have ended!), but I don't want to let it out of my sight without a thorough betaing. More than that -- a thorough Britpicking. I've put out a beta/Britpicker request at tw_betas but no one has responded yet.
I'm really proud of this story and want to send it out into the world to fend for itself, but I don't want to fall flat on my face over some stupid colloquialism that a man from Wales would never say. Or anything like that.
So... I'll post my first chapter now, so you guys can see if it looks even marginally interesting. If no one's interested, I can resume my search elsewhere. If more than one person is interested, I'll keep posting chapters here so I can get a range of responses. If only one person is interested, maybe I can get in touch with them through email or something.
Title: Theseus' Paradox
Fandoms: Supernatural, Torchwood, Doctor Who
Timelines/Spoilers: Story is set after SPN 3x04 "Sin City," Torchwood series 1, and Doctor Who series 3 -- assume major spoilers for all of the above
Summary: The crack concept that began it all: Guest actress Caroline Chikezie played both cyber-girlfriend Lisa Hallett on TW and married demon-hunter Tamara on SPN. Assume they're the same person. Chaos and time-bending ensues.
Ianto was standing outside a tent, arms clasped round himself as if his posture could keep out the drizzle of rain that kept speckling his glasses and making it impossible to see.
The tent was familiar, but it was the glasses that made him know this was a dream. He’d only worn contacts ever since the time Dafydd had punched him on the nose when he was thirteen, and one of his glasses lenses had shattered and glass had gotten in his eye. He’d had to have surgery. Now he had a more than a slight twinge of phobia towards anything glass or sharp near his eyes.
The tent was the tent Lisa had picked out when they’d decided to take their saved-up leave together to go camping.
Yours is the only civilized race in the universe that goes camping; celebrate your own uniqueness, Jack had said.
We wore our coats and shared a sleeping bag to keep warm, Lisa had said.
Ianto looked around at the birch woods, kicked at the sparse undergrowth by his foot, and wondered why his mind was showing him this. Level one psychic training at Torchwood London had made his dreams sharper and more lucid, but no less inscrutable.
He took his glasses off to clean them on a bit of dry shirt hem, but everything went dark without them on, like a world seen through tinted, wavy glass. He fumbled the glasses back on, heart racing with the unexpected spike of adrenalin, and everything went back to normal. He focused on breathing. Dark, dark, something’s moving in the dark, Suzie said. Something’s moving and it’s still there. Abaddon’s dead and it’s still there.
Off in the distance there was a tendril of black smoke rising through the trees. Ianto took a hesitant step or two in that direction, but a part of him screamed that it didn’t want to go that way. It wanted to turn and run, to hurt himself until he woke up.
“Ianto, give me a hand?”
Lisa’s laughing voice. Ianto looked back at the tent and saw that it was half taken down already, and Lisa had their packs open on the ground, stakes already piled into one. She pulled ineffectually at the heavy khaki canvas and gave a breathless laugh. Her eyes fell on him, and it was like...
“I don’t know you,” Ianto said, something huge twisting in his chest. He felt like he wanted to kill her for being here again, after all this time, after lying to him and making him think she had ever been anything but a machine. It hadn’t been her, and he didn’t want to want her back as much as he did right now.
Lisa just made a face at him as if he’d made a joke, and heaved at the tent again. “You better help, mister, or you’ll wish you didn’t know me,” she huffed.
Without really feeling himself do it, Ianto walked over to her side and picked up the opposite corner of the tent. “Three,” he said, and they counted down and hefted together.
“Remind me never to suggest camping again,” Lisa panted after they’d gotten everything folded and packed.
“I did,” Ianto said.
“And rain now,” she grumped. “But you’re cute like that.” She tipped towards him and gave him a friendly kiss on the corner of his mouth. He flicked the tip of his tongue over the spot and tasted warm iron and cold steel.
“This is different,” said dream-Ianto, not knowing what he meant by it. “You’re older.”
“I look good for my age,” Lisa quipped. Her hands hand found his hips and she was pulling them together in a way he wanted much more than he could stand: love and sex and friendship and love and love and love in that movement, all the different loves the Greeks could name, it didn’t matter. It was Lisa and she was real.
“I always wanted you to take me to where you grew up,” Ianto murmured. “And to meet your parents. I thought I was going to ask you to marry me.”
“Chatham next time we have leave, then?” she said.
“You said you lived in Ipswich,” he replied.
“My parents died when I was little,” she sighed.
“They’re in Ipswich, with the cat,” he said, getting desperate. “The cat you talked about missing all the time. Postcode, because you found him under a post box.”
“Posey loved the flat in Chicago,” Lisa said, smiling benignly.
Chicago?
“I read your personnel files,” Ianto said wretchedly. “I shouldn’t have, but I wanted to know anything I could use to make you happy. I loved you.”
“I love you too, Ianto,” she said, kissing the tip of his nose.
“I don’t know you at all,” he said, and the huge thing was still twisting in his chest, like hatred and love and fear all at once. “You tried to kill me.”
“Human point two,” said Lisa.
Ianto pushed her back. Her legs were encased in metal now. She looked down at herself, seemed to shrink in fear, and brought her pleading gaze back to Ianto.
“Help me,” she moaned.
Ianto staggered back. He’d done all he could. She wasn’t Lisa anymore. Maybe she never had been.
Chicago?
Something moving in the dark --
Lisa’s eyes were black holes now and blood seeped out of the corners and from around the edges of where metal met flesh. A strangled cry escaped Ianto’s throat, a cry that wanted to be a scream, a scream that wanted to be thunder, but it wouldn’t come out, it wouldn’t budge from his throat and he was choking on it --
And he woke up, tangled in sweaty sheets, choking on the dryness in his parched throat, pillow pressed half under him so that there was an uncomfortable pressure on his chest. He rolled onto his back and gasped for air. Water, screamed his brain.
Ianto got up and stumbled through the dark of his flat into the bathroom, where he poured and inhaled three glasses of water in a row before he felt like he could breathe again. He left the tap running and put his hands under the flow. They were shaking a little bit.
“Not real,” he murmured.
But the lingering ghost of pressure against his chest wouldn’t leave him alone.
Chicago?
--------
“I’ll help you clean up the paperwork,” Jack offered. He looked flushed and disheveled and thoroughly illicit.
Ianto raised an eyebrow at him.
“I’ll hand you stuff while you re-file everything I knocked over,” Jack amended.
Ianto put an affectionate hand on Jack’s chest and pushed. Jack stood up reluctantly and gave Ianto room to slide off the desk. Jack Harkness was like a typhoon in a bottle, trapped down here in this hole, underground, out of his own time and his own element. Ianto couldn’t imagine unleashing him on the whole of time and space. Hopelessly mangled paperwork would be the least of the universe’s problems.
“You can make the coffee,” said Ianto, “while I clean.”
This time it was Jack’s brows that shot up. “I thought you valued your stomach lining.”
Ianto groaned. “Then go up to the Plass and buy a round. The others will be in soon, anyway.” He’d managed to find his trousers, but getting them right-side-out was another matter.
“Come with me,” Jack said.
“That would defeat the entire purpose of your getting out of the way while I clean, sir,” said Ianto, and pulled on his shirt. Jack’s expression told Ianto everything about his low opinion of clothing.
“Still ‘sir,’” Jack murmured.
“Yes, sir,” Ianto said, and a small smile teased its way out of him without him meaning it to, and not for the first time he wondered what the hell he was doing.
Jack kissed him lightly on the corner of his mouth. It unsettled Ianto more than it should have. “I should sue you someday,” he tried to joke, but it sounded flat to his own ears.
“Slap me instead,” grinned Jack, still far too close for comfort. Ianto pushed him away again, more gently than he wanted to.
“Go buy the coffee, sir. I’ll still be here when you come back.”
Jack made a discontented sound and started getting dressed. From somewhere below them came the clanging sound of the hatch opening, and female voices chattering. Ianto made a mental note to wipe the CCTV footage before he fixed the filing. He turned his back to his boss.
Not ten seconds later, Jack lunged for the desk and dragged every bit of paper into a huge, crumpled pile, snatched it all up and --
“Jack!” Ianto cried.
-- threw it all into the air. Amid the fluttering reports and affidavits and memos shone Jack’s triumphant face. “Now I know you’ll still be here,” he said smugly, and Ianto seriously considered punching him --
Owen shoved a stapled sheaf of papers under Ianto’s nose.
The doctor returned to his seat, Jack’s seat, the chair behind Jack’s desk. Owen’s desk. The boss’s desk. Owen couldn’t run Torchwood from the autopsy bay, and as much as he hadn’t wanted to move into Jack’s office, after three weeks has passed and Jack was still nowhere to be found...
Torchwood needed a leader.
“Dunno how you think we’ll get on with only three,” Owen said viciously. There was a definite twinge of fear under the meanness now, though. It had been easier to see ever since Jack vanished.
“We aren’t getting on with only four, if you hadn’t noticed,” Ianto said. “It won’t make a difference.”
“Sign the bloody papers, then,” Owen snapped, and sat back to look at the computer screen.
Ianto picked up a clipboard from Jack’s desk, reached into his jacket for a pen, and went downstairs to do the paperwork.
Two weeks’ leave. He’d saved up more; he’d never missed a day of work since Canary Wharf. But he didn’t feel right taking more than two weeks at once.
He didn’t know why he couldn’t get his dreams out of his mind -- or the one dream, rather, that he’d had four times now. Sometimes Lisa was in full armor from the beginning, and sometimes she was agonizingly normal, but she always laughed and acted human. She always asked him to save her, and she always talked about Chicago. At first he’d tried to put it out of his mind, but when the feeling that he was missing something got too strong, he started to check through back records and personnel files. He re-read the surface file he’d skimmed guility all those years ago, and it still said the same things about her. But those things didn’t match up with what she said in the dreams, and he knew he couldn’t discount his basic psychic training; his dreams always meant something, always, even if they were naked-in-the-classroom dreams or dreams with purple koalas climbing in Gwen’s hair.
So he’d dug. And he’d found Chicago.
No real information -- just a passing reference to it in the context of a mission that Lisa had done the write-up for. But it felt like a sign, the same place showing up all over. The rest of the write-up mentioned America in general, but Chicago was the only city named.
Some dates regarding her age didn’t match up, either. There were four missing years that he didn’t understand. She’d never told him when she’d graduated from university, she’d just talked about it with fondness, and had never mentioned a time after, so he’d assumed she’d come straight to Torchwood One -- been recruited from the brightest of her class or something.
And her life before those four missing years was just... a blur. There were photos of her as a little girl, photos of her with her grandmother, photos of her as a tall youth no more than fourteen. But nothing really between that and her Torchwood official headshots, nothing between Torchwood and the pictures of her with Ianto and their mates.
Chicago was the best place to start, he thought. He’d cross-referenced her name and all the nicknames he’d ever heard her use against every apartment complex in the Chicago area and had come up with a few matches; not all of them were his Lisa, of course, as there was more than one Lisa Hallet in America, but he’d narrowed it down. Complexes that allowed pets. Complexes likely to have mixed racial inhabitants. And he’d come up with two -- one woman who lived alone with pet(s), no species mentioned, and another who’d shared an apartment with a man and two cats. Both used an alias Lisa had let slip to him once: T. Daugherty. And both were in the same part of the city.
“Ianto,” said a voice. He looked up from the papers in his hands to see Gwen on hand with a cup of coffee. A peace offering, perhaps. She put it down on the desk nearest his chair and fidgeted a bit. “Please don’t go,” she said simply. “I think we need to stick together.”
“Jack didn’t think so, apparently,” Ianto said. It almost didn’t hurt this time.
“I know it’s been a month, but... he’ll come back, Ianto, he will.”
Ianto shrugged one shoulder and scribbled his small, neat signature at the bottom of the last page of the form he was holding.
“Maybe if... if Jack finds what he’s looking for, things will be better.”
Ianto stood up, graciously picked up the mug Gwen had brought him, and nodded politely to her. “Thank you,” he said, tone making it clear that he only meant the coffee.
She looked like she wanted to say so much more, but she bit her lip. “I hope you find what you’re looking for too, then,” she said weakly, and gave him a quick hug. He returned it with the one arm that wasn’t holding coffee, a little touched despite himself. At least she wasn’t fighting him. He was tired of fighting.
He took Owen the forms, who threw them into a tray without looking at what the tray was labelled or whether Ianto had filled everything out properly. He went back downstairs and drank the coffee Gwen had made him, which was awful, while he straightened up the Hub for the last time. The last thing he did was wash the mug he’d just finished with and put it in the rack to dry. He glanced at the forlorn-looking coffee machine.
“Maybe they won’t break you,” he said without much hope, and patted the top of it before walking out to find his gloves and coat.
This is what you do, Jack, he thought. You make a mess and you believe it ties us down, gives us a common problem. But if we choose to walk away, what then? If we take what you do as our example, instead of what you say?
I’m not fixing it this time. If you come back, it’ll be your problem. And we’ll see how well you do at building rather than destroying.
-----
“What do you think about it?”
Tosh hunched further over her tea and newspaper crossword at her desk, really wishing Gwen would stop hovering. “About what?”
“Ianto leaving. It seems like a bad idea. A really, really...”
“Gwen,” Tosh interrupted, “leave him alone.”
“I’m only saying.” She fidgeted more. “What if Jack comes back while he’s gone?”
“Then we’ll tell Jack he’s gone,” Tosh said easily, adding and see how he likes it in her head.
Gwen pulled over another chair and sat down, putting her head in her hands. “It’s all falling apart,” she said, and she sounded so helpless and raw that Tosh softened a bit. Jack had taken Gwen under his wing, had made her believe that working at Torchwood could be like having an exciting, if eccentric, family. Tosh knew better. Torchwood was just another job, except it was the one job you couldn’t leave. Suzie had been right about one thing -- you couldn’t do anything else after Torchwood. You knew too much and you could never go back.
Gwen was only just now realizing how trapped she was.
“You could take some leave as well,” Tosh suggested gently.
“The rift, though,” said Gwen. “We can’t do this with just three. Three of us could take down a weevil, but not without coordination. And two of us couldn’t take one down even if we were coordinated.”
“Torchwood Glasgow only has a staff of three,” Tosh pointed out. “We’ll phone up and ask how they manage.”
“Glasgow doesn’t have a bloody great rift in time and space running through it though, does it?” Gwen stood up again and began to pace, wringing her hands in agitation.
“Jack would tell you to sit down or he’d be forced to sedate you,” Tosh laughed, breathless and hollow.
It made Gwen stop, though. She and Tosh looked at each other for a long moment. Tosh let a sad little apologetic smile touch her lips, and after a second Gwen laughed, as emptily as Tosh had. “We’re hopeless,” Gwen said.
“Ten letter word for ‘extremely loud,’ second letter ‘t’, eighth letter ‘i’,” said Tosh.
“No bloody idea,” replied Gwen, and plopped back onto her chair, looking much calmer.
“They’ll both be fine and they’ll both come back,” Tosh said with finality. “Five letters across, starts with...”
------
I'm really proud of this story and want to send it out into the world to fend for itself, but I don't want to fall flat on my face over some stupid colloquialism that a man from Wales would never say. Or anything like that.
So... I'll post my first chapter now, so you guys can see if it looks even marginally interesting. If no one's interested, I can resume my search elsewhere. If more than one person is interested, I'll keep posting chapters here so I can get a range of responses. If only one person is interested, maybe I can get in touch with them through email or something.
Title: Theseus' Paradox
Fandoms: Supernatural, Torchwood, Doctor Who
Timelines/Spoilers: Story is set after SPN 3x04 "Sin City," Torchwood series 1, and Doctor Who series 3 -- assume major spoilers for all of the above
Summary: The crack concept that began it all: Guest actress Caroline Chikezie played both cyber-girlfriend Lisa Hallett on TW and married demon-hunter Tamara on SPN. Assume they're the same person. Chaos and time-bending ensues.
Ianto was standing outside a tent, arms clasped round himself as if his posture could keep out the drizzle of rain that kept speckling his glasses and making it impossible to see.
The tent was familiar, but it was the glasses that made him know this was a dream. He’d only worn contacts ever since the time Dafydd had punched him on the nose when he was thirteen, and one of his glasses lenses had shattered and glass had gotten in his eye. He’d had to have surgery. Now he had a more than a slight twinge of phobia towards anything glass or sharp near his eyes.
The tent was the tent Lisa had picked out when they’d decided to take their saved-up leave together to go camping.
Yours is the only civilized race in the universe that goes camping; celebrate your own uniqueness, Jack had said.
We wore our coats and shared a sleeping bag to keep warm, Lisa had said.
Ianto looked around at the birch woods, kicked at the sparse undergrowth by his foot, and wondered why his mind was showing him this. Level one psychic training at Torchwood London had made his dreams sharper and more lucid, but no less inscrutable.
He took his glasses off to clean them on a bit of dry shirt hem, but everything went dark without them on, like a world seen through tinted, wavy glass. He fumbled the glasses back on, heart racing with the unexpected spike of adrenalin, and everything went back to normal. He focused on breathing. Dark, dark, something’s moving in the dark, Suzie said. Something’s moving and it’s still there. Abaddon’s dead and it’s still there.
Off in the distance there was a tendril of black smoke rising through the trees. Ianto took a hesitant step or two in that direction, but a part of him screamed that it didn’t want to go that way. It wanted to turn and run, to hurt himself until he woke up.
“Ianto, give me a hand?”
Lisa’s laughing voice. Ianto looked back at the tent and saw that it was half taken down already, and Lisa had their packs open on the ground, stakes already piled into one. She pulled ineffectually at the heavy khaki canvas and gave a breathless laugh. Her eyes fell on him, and it was like...
“I don’t know you,” Ianto said, something huge twisting in his chest. He felt like he wanted to kill her for being here again, after all this time, after lying to him and making him think she had ever been anything but a machine. It hadn’t been her, and he didn’t want to want her back as much as he did right now.
Lisa just made a face at him as if he’d made a joke, and heaved at the tent again. “You better help, mister, or you’ll wish you didn’t know me,” she huffed.
Without really feeling himself do it, Ianto walked over to her side and picked up the opposite corner of the tent. “Three,” he said, and they counted down and hefted together.
“Remind me never to suggest camping again,” Lisa panted after they’d gotten everything folded and packed.
“I did,” Ianto said.
“And rain now,” she grumped. “But you’re cute like that.” She tipped towards him and gave him a friendly kiss on the corner of his mouth. He flicked the tip of his tongue over the spot and tasted warm iron and cold steel.
“This is different,” said dream-Ianto, not knowing what he meant by it. “You’re older.”
“I look good for my age,” Lisa quipped. Her hands hand found his hips and she was pulling them together in a way he wanted much more than he could stand: love and sex and friendship and love and love and love in that movement, all the different loves the Greeks could name, it didn’t matter. It was Lisa and she was real.
“I always wanted you to take me to where you grew up,” Ianto murmured. “And to meet your parents. I thought I was going to ask you to marry me.”
“Chatham next time we have leave, then?” she said.
“You said you lived in Ipswich,” he replied.
“My parents died when I was little,” she sighed.
“They’re in Ipswich, with the cat,” he said, getting desperate. “The cat you talked about missing all the time. Postcode, because you found him under a post box.”
“Posey loved the flat in Chicago,” Lisa said, smiling benignly.
Chicago?
“I read your personnel files,” Ianto said wretchedly. “I shouldn’t have, but I wanted to know anything I could use to make you happy. I loved you.”
“I love you too, Ianto,” she said, kissing the tip of his nose.
“I don’t know you at all,” he said, and the huge thing was still twisting in his chest, like hatred and love and fear all at once. “You tried to kill me.”
“Human point two,” said Lisa.
Ianto pushed her back. Her legs were encased in metal now. She looked down at herself, seemed to shrink in fear, and brought her pleading gaze back to Ianto.
“Help me,” she moaned.
Ianto staggered back. He’d done all he could. She wasn’t Lisa anymore. Maybe she never had been.
Chicago?
Something moving in the dark --
Lisa’s eyes were black holes now and blood seeped out of the corners and from around the edges of where metal met flesh. A strangled cry escaped Ianto’s throat, a cry that wanted to be a scream, a scream that wanted to be thunder, but it wouldn’t come out, it wouldn’t budge from his throat and he was choking on it --
And he woke up, tangled in sweaty sheets, choking on the dryness in his parched throat, pillow pressed half under him so that there was an uncomfortable pressure on his chest. He rolled onto his back and gasped for air. Water, screamed his brain.
Ianto got up and stumbled through the dark of his flat into the bathroom, where he poured and inhaled three glasses of water in a row before he felt like he could breathe again. He left the tap running and put his hands under the flow. They were shaking a little bit.
“Not real,” he murmured.
But the lingering ghost of pressure against his chest wouldn’t leave him alone.
Chicago?
--------
“I’ll help you clean up the paperwork,” Jack offered. He looked flushed and disheveled and thoroughly illicit.
Ianto raised an eyebrow at him.
“I’ll hand you stuff while you re-file everything I knocked over,” Jack amended.
Ianto put an affectionate hand on Jack’s chest and pushed. Jack stood up reluctantly and gave Ianto room to slide off the desk. Jack Harkness was like a typhoon in a bottle, trapped down here in this hole, underground, out of his own time and his own element. Ianto couldn’t imagine unleashing him on the whole of time and space. Hopelessly mangled paperwork would be the least of the universe’s problems.
“You can make the coffee,” said Ianto, “while I clean.”
This time it was Jack’s brows that shot up. “I thought you valued your stomach lining.”
Ianto groaned. “Then go up to the Plass and buy a round. The others will be in soon, anyway.” He’d managed to find his trousers, but getting them right-side-out was another matter.
“Come with me,” Jack said.
“That would defeat the entire purpose of your getting out of the way while I clean, sir,” said Ianto, and pulled on his shirt. Jack’s expression told Ianto everything about his low opinion of clothing.
“Still ‘sir,’” Jack murmured.
“Yes, sir,” Ianto said, and a small smile teased its way out of him without him meaning it to, and not for the first time he wondered what the hell he was doing.
Jack kissed him lightly on the corner of his mouth. It unsettled Ianto more than it should have. “I should sue you someday,” he tried to joke, but it sounded flat to his own ears.
“Slap me instead,” grinned Jack, still far too close for comfort. Ianto pushed him away again, more gently than he wanted to.
“Go buy the coffee, sir. I’ll still be here when you come back.”
Jack made a discontented sound and started getting dressed. From somewhere below them came the clanging sound of the hatch opening, and female voices chattering. Ianto made a mental note to wipe the CCTV footage before he fixed the filing. He turned his back to his boss.
Not ten seconds later, Jack lunged for the desk and dragged every bit of paper into a huge, crumpled pile, snatched it all up and --
“Jack!” Ianto cried.
-- threw it all into the air. Amid the fluttering reports and affidavits and memos shone Jack’s triumphant face. “Now I know you’ll still be here,” he said smugly, and Ianto seriously considered punching him --
Owen shoved a stapled sheaf of papers under Ianto’s nose.
The doctor returned to his seat, Jack’s seat, the chair behind Jack’s desk. Owen’s desk. The boss’s desk. Owen couldn’t run Torchwood from the autopsy bay, and as much as he hadn’t wanted to move into Jack’s office, after three weeks has passed and Jack was still nowhere to be found...
Torchwood needed a leader.
“Dunno how you think we’ll get on with only three,” Owen said viciously. There was a definite twinge of fear under the meanness now, though. It had been easier to see ever since Jack vanished.
“We aren’t getting on with only four, if you hadn’t noticed,” Ianto said. “It won’t make a difference.”
“Sign the bloody papers, then,” Owen snapped, and sat back to look at the computer screen.
Ianto picked up a clipboard from Jack’s desk, reached into his jacket for a pen, and went downstairs to do the paperwork.
Two weeks’ leave. He’d saved up more; he’d never missed a day of work since Canary Wharf. But he didn’t feel right taking more than two weeks at once.
He didn’t know why he couldn’t get his dreams out of his mind -- or the one dream, rather, that he’d had four times now. Sometimes Lisa was in full armor from the beginning, and sometimes she was agonizingly normal, but she always laughed and acted human. She always asked him to save her, and she always talked about Chicago. At first he’d tried to put it out of his mind, but when the feeling that he was missing something got too strong, he started to check through back records and personnel files. He re-read the surface file he’d skimmed guility all those years ago, and it still said the same things about her. But those things didn’t match up with what she said in the dreams, and he knew he couldn’t discount his basic psychic training; his dreams always meant something, always, even if they were naked-in-the-classroom dreams or dreams with purple koalas climbing in Gwen’s hair.
So he’d dug. And he’d found Chicago.
No real information -- just a passing reference to it in the context of a mission that Lisa had done the write-up for. But it felt like a sign, the same place showing up all over. The rest of the write-up mentioned America in general, but Chicago was the only city named.
Some dates regarding her age didn’t match up, either. There were four missing years that he didn’t understand. She’d never told him when she’d graduated from university, she’d just talked about it with fondness, and had never mentioned a time after, so he’d assumed she’d come straight to Torchwood One -- been recruited from the brightest of her class or something.
And her life before those four missing years was just... a blur. There were photos of her as a little girl, photos of her with her grandmother, photos of her as a tall youth no more than fourteen. But nothing really between that and her Torchwood official headshots, nothing between Torchwood and the pictures of her with Ianto and their mates.
Chicago was the best place to start, he thought. He’d cross-referenced her name and all the nicknames he’d ever heard her use against every apartment complex in the Chicago area and had come up with a few matches; not all of them were his Lisa, of course, as there was more than one Lisa Hallet in America, but he’d narrowed it down. Complexes that allowed pets. Complexes likely to have mixed racial inhabitants. And he’d come up with two -- one woman who lived alone with pet(s), no species mentioned, and another who’d shared an apartment with a man and two cats. Both used an alias Lisa had let slip to him once: T. Daugherty. And both were in the same part of the city.
“Ianto,” said a voice. He looked up from the papers in his hands to see Gwen on hand with a cup of coffee. A peace offering, perhaps. She put it down on the desk nearest his chair and fidgeted a bit. “Please don’t go,” she said simply. “I think we need to stick together.”
“Jack didn’t think so, apparently,” Ianto said. It almost didn’t hurt this time.
“I know it’s been a month, but... he’ll come back, Ianto, he will.”
Ianto shrugged one shoulder and scribbled his small, neat signature at the bottom of the last page of the form he was holding.
“Maybe if... if Jack finds what he’s looking for, things will be better.”
Ianto stood up, graciously picked up the mug Gwen had brought him, and nodded politely to her. “Thank you,” he said, tone making it clear that he only meant the coffee.
She looked like she wanted to say so much more, but she bit her lip. “I hope you find what you’re looking for too, then,” she said weakly, and gave him a quick hug. He returned it with the one arm that wasn’t holding coffee, a little touched despite himself. At least she wasn’t fighting him. He was tired of fighting.
He took Owen the forms, who threw them into a tray without looking at what the tray was labelled or whether Ianto had filled everything out properly. He went back downstairs and drank the coffee Gwen had made him, which was awful, while he straightened up the Hub for the last time. The last thing he did was wash the mug he’d just finished with and put it in the rack to dry. He glanced at the forlorn-looking coffee machine.
“Maybe they won’t break you,” he said without much hope, and patted the top of it before walking out to find his gloves and coat.
This is what you do, Jack, he thought. You make a mess and you believe it ties us down, gives us a common problem. But if we choose to walk away, what then? If we take what you do as our example, instead of what you say?
I’m not fixing it this time. If you come back, it’ll be your problem. And we’ll see how well you do at building rather than destroying.
-----
“What do you think about it?”
Tosh hunched further over her tea and newspaper crossword at her desk, really wishing Gwen would stop hovering. “About what?”
“Ianto leaving. It seems like a bad idea. A really, really...”
“Gwen,” Tosh interrupted, “leave him alone.”
“I’m only saying.” She fidgeted more. “What if Jack comes back while he’s gone?”
“Then we’ll tell Jack he’s gone,” Tosh said easily, adding and see how he likes it in her head.
Gwen pulled over another chair and sat down, putting her head in her hands. “It’s all falling apart,” she said, and she sounded so helpless and raw that Tosh softened a bit. Jack had taken Gwen under his wing, had made her believe that working at Torchwood could be like having an exciting, if eccentric, family. Tosh knew better. Torchwood was just another job, except it was the one job you couldn’t leave. Suzie had been right about one thing -- you couldn’t do anything else after Torchwood. You knew too much and you could never go back.
Gwen was only just now realizing how trapped she was.
“You could take some leave as well,” Tosh suggested gently.
“The rift, though,” said Gwen. “We can’t do this with just three. Three of us could take down a weevil, but not without coordination. And two of us couldn’t take one down even if we were coordinated.”
“Torchwood Glasgow only has a staff of three,” Tosh pointed out. “We’ll phone up and ask how they manage.”
“Glasgow doesn’t have a bloody great rift in time and space running through it though, does it?” Gwen stood up again and began to pace, wringing her hands in agitation.
“Jack would tell you to sit down or he’d be forced to sedate you,” Tosh laughed, breathless and hollow.
It made Gwen stop, though. She and Tosh looked at each other for a long moment. Tosh let a sad little apologetic smile touch her lips, and after a second Gwen laughed, as emptily as Tosh had. “We’re hopeless,” Gwen said.
“Ten letter word for ‘extremely loud,’ second letter ‘t’, eighth letter ‘i’,” said Tosh.
“No bloody idea,” replied Gwen, and plopped back onto her chair, looking much calmer.
“They’ll both be fine and they’ll both come back,” Tosh said with finality. “Five letters across, starts with...”
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