[fic] Continues.
Title: Team B: Marching Orders
Fandom: Torchwood
Word Count: 16,255
Rating: PG-13 for swearing and mild sex.
Pairing: None, really, not so much.
Warnings: I warned you before, I shan't be doing it again.
Disclaimer: All these characters belong to the BBC, whom I don't currently trust to do anything awesome with them.
Notes: In some way, this is Ande's fault. It is also Emma's fault, and Cat's fault. They are all better writers than me, but refused to do it and thus, thus … I had to. I actually broke the habit of a lifetime and did some research for this, but it is no doubt riddled with factual inaccuracies. My defence is: It's fucking Torchwood, how much research do you think the writers on the show do?
INTRODUCTION
MISSION 0001: COLD COMFORT .
"Do it again," John said, from around a mouthful of borscht. The artificial lights flickered and blinked, struggling against the gloom outside and not really succeeding. John's skin looked slightly green, although that might have been the aeroplane breakfast making itself known.
"Raxacoricofallapatorius," Mickey repeated.
"Ooh, that's good. Do it again!" John let the spoon fall back into the borscht and picked up the label-less vodka bottle from between his knees to pour them both a shot. Mickey raised his eyebrows.
"It's ten in the morning, John."
"Do it again!" John gestured with the top of the bottle.
Mickey sighed and put down his greasy, limp, McDonald's burger. "I'm beginning to understand why Ianto hates you so much."
"He doesn't hate me for my boundless joie de vive," John said sagely, downing a shot of eye-watering vodka without so much as a flinch, "he hates me because I'm beautiful." He poured a second shot. "Also, I fucked his boyfriend." John stared into space with a distant expression as a heavy truck ground and barked down the road outside, toying with his next vodka shot, and added dreamily, "a lot."
"I don't want to know," Mickey said for maybe the millionth time since meeting Captain John Hart.
They'd arrived in Anadyr two hours ago, leaving Ianto to check them into the hotel while John satisfied his apparently endless craving for local foodstuffs (he'd spent the flight annoying everyone in the vicinity by eating plantain chips and dried sea urchin as loudly as a dog chewing coal) and neat spirits. Mickey was still unimpressed with this inauspicious start to their career as Torchwood Three-B - a title which he wasn't happy with him and to which John was flatly refusing to answer - and he couldn't work out whether the mission itself or the team was the more ludicrous; at Heathrow, preparing for the first leg of their journey, people had stared, and it wasn't even as if K-9 or the BFG had been with them there, as they were being shipped as cargo.
"We’re not exactly the most inconspicuous group," Mickey had muttered as John started making eyes at a teenage girl - all elbows and shyness - in WHSmiths.
"If you just look at this like a rock band we look perfectly normal," John insisted, smiling at the girl like a shark smiles at a lost seal pup.
"Stop that," Mickey growled. He wasn’t exactly convinced; John might have looked like some 1960s rock star, but Mickey was acutely aware that he himself looked a lot less glamorous, more like the ugly one out of a boy band, and if Ianto was a popstar he was clearly moonlighting from the opera - possibly after having his house burnt down, judging by his expression.
"Alright," John smirked, apparently reading his mind, "I'm the big fucking rockstar," he redistributed his weight from one foot to the other, deliberately poking his hips out, "and you two are … bodyguard and manager. Bodyguard and mmmanager."
"Which is which?" Mickey asked. He knew immediately he was going to regret it, but at least John wasn't disturbing the shit out of him by perving on thirteen-year-olds anymore. There was a limit to how Rolling Stones someone could be before Mickey started wanting to be sick in his mouth.
John rolled his eyes. "Which one of you is wearing the suit, fuckhead?"
Mickey sighed. "I'm going to have to sit in the middle, aren't I?"
John shrugged. "Or you could try to explain to the stewardess why my manager just choked me to death half-way through The Bridges of Madison County."
"Believe me if they're showing that it's not you I'm going to be choking," Ianto snapped, and Mickey started, unaware that he'd even been in earshot. Ianto's little Alfred Pennyworth impression was unnerving him already.
Receiving their first proper mission hadn't been much more of an edifying and adult experience:
"There have been increased reports of werewolf activity and human fatalities in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug," Gwen said, handing a folder wrapped in multicoloured elastic bands to Ianto, not to Mickey. Even though Mickey was standing right by the desk and it would have been easier and was she actually going to acknowledge his presence at all? Apparently not.
Gwen was holding a cup of Jones-brewed coffee with determination - probably because it was the last she was going to get for quite some time, and she looked a little pale, a little tired, and a little plumper than usual.
"Werewolves," Mickey said, trying to avoid any intonation whatsoever.
Gwen gave him an I Don't Make This Shit Up, I Just Report It look and Mickey almost felt sorry for her. On the other hand, he was going to Siberia and she was staying in Cardiff with her husband, and with Jack and Martha, and with an entire arsenal of alien weapons and a cooperative and even occasionally friendly police force. He didn't feel that sorry for her.
"'Werewolf' can apply to any one of three hundred and seventy-eight shape-changing species known to have visited the Sol System, Master," K-9 beeped helpfully.
"Thank you, K-9," Mickey groaned. "That really narrows down how to deal with this."
"Sarcasm noted, Master."
"We can get you to Anadyr," Gwen continued, looking even more green around the gills, "you need to meet up with a biologist called … called … ugh, it's in the file. She's from Chechnya or somewhere like that, they've had a whole team of international scientists out at Lake … why are all these places unpronounceable? Lake El'gygytgyn. Ow, my throat." She took a sip of the coffee. "It's all in there. Some of her team were killed by the … the you know what."
"Werewolves," Mickey finished, trying not to sound too incredulous. "Right. Um. Where's … where's John?"
"Being forcibly restrained from the armoury," Martha said, entering with her own coffee and a pen stuck in her hair. "He's trying to convince Jack he needs every single ceramic weapon we have to get through airport security, and Jack's trying to explain that John doesn't need any weapons, and I don't know who's going to win, but there's probably going to be some broken glass in a minute."
Sitting in a cheap café in Anadyr, Mickey still wasn't sure who'd won: the geom wasn't in evidence, but John had this way of appearing to be armed to the teeth when he was wearing a bath-towel. Mickey had tried to avoid the Hub showers after that.
"So," Mickey pushed his burger away across the table-top. He'd thought he'd be happy to go back to junk food after all that time with activism and veganism on the run with Jake, but either his tastebuds had changed or MacDonald's had; it tasted disgusting and sat in his stomach like a lead weight. "We need to make contact with this Dr. … Dr. … Zakharov, find out exactly what happened to the rest of her team."
He realised John probably wasn't listening. There was a fruit machine in the corner, with unfamiliar Cyrillic characters flashing on achingly familiar bright plastic buttons as they lit up from behind, and John was eyeing it with palpable avarice.
"So I was thinking of sending Ianto to do that," Mickey went on, "since he's the most approachable of us, and maybe I should - "
"Can he speak Russian?"
"Oh, you are listening."
"I'm always listening," John said, still transfixed by the fruit machine. "I hear every single word that drops out of your mouth, especially if that word is 'Ianto'."
"You're seriously fucking creepy," Mickey growled.
"He doesn't, by the way," John put his foot on the chair opposite him. "And I do." There was a ten-ruble coin in John's hand now, spinning up and down the line of his knuckles like a giddy child on the waltzers.
"I'm not sending you to talk to her on your own," Mickey shuddered. "We need her alive and not pressing charges. We'll have to all go." A thought occurred to him as John started flipping the coin in a calculatedly infuriating fashion. "How do you know she doesn't speak English, anyway?"
The door opened. The café owner didn't bother to look up, but Mickey and John's heads snapped around like the crack of a cattle whip.
It was, of course, Ianto. He looked faintly ridiculous with a thermal survival jacket in green and grey over his suit, but less so than John had in the enormous fur coat that was now draped awkwardly over the back of his plastic chair like an Eskimo's duvet. Mickey's own red survival jacket hung more easily down the back of his chair; he gave Ianto an enquiring look, but Ianto ignored him - something of a theme was beginning to emerge there - and made a beeline for the tiny counter.
Watching Ianto attempting to order coffee in signs and very broken Russian (with a very clear "кофе" audible amongst the confusion) was so entertaining that for a moment neither John nor Mickey thought to mention that the old woman in the Cats sweatshirt spoke pretty decent English, or at least understood it; when he finally had his steaming paper cup Ianto sat down as far away from John as he could get without actually sitting at a different table altogether.
"I've left a message with her landlady," Ianto said abruptly. He sipped his coffee and pulled an eloquent face.
"Already?" Mickey was a little surprised. He hadn't even known they knew where the doctor was staying in Anadyr; Ianto had hogged the folder for the entire flight to Beijing, the stopover at Beijing, the flight to Vladistok, the stopover in Vladistok, and the flight to Anadyr. Mickey had been getting quite annoyed by the end of the journey, and not least because he'd had to sit in the middle every bloody time while John chatted up the stewardesses, stewards, and other passengers with varying success.
"No sense in wasting time," Ianto said primly. He clearly meant 'the sooner we can get this done the sooner I can go home'.
"So we just wait around the hotel until she gets back to us?" Mickey sighed. He'd been hoping they could get on with proving they were an adequate team right off the bat.
About twenty minutes later he was sat on a single bed in a room of three of them, as John paced around the room complaining about the lack of a minibar - in the face of the bottle of vodka poking out of his coat pocket like a mast - and Ianto rather clumsily hit the communications dial on the wristpiece that had previously been John's. He was intrigued to see that bad connections had the same effect on a visual transmission as an audio one - Anadyr must have been a black spot for the frequencies the Vortex Manipulator communications band used; Jack and the foot or so of Hub background that they could see around him as he projected at half-size into the hotel room kept jumping and spitting into fizzy pale blue nothingness.
"Is everything alright back there?" Ianto asked as soon as Jack came into focus. Mickey got the distinct impression he'd rather that John and Mickey were elsewhere for this conversation; the set of Ianto's shoulders was quite hostile.
"Very quiet," Jack assured him. "Even the - crack, fizz - considering training pro- fizzpop - progress, okay? No trouble?" He slid back into focus as if he was coming from two different parts of the room at once.
"I'm not happy with this bloody name," John interrupted from the windowsill. He sounded downright affronted. "Torchwood Three-B? We sound like a school. Or a pencil. It's ridiculous. We're an elite investigative team, we need an elite name!"
"You're not going to start making a fuss about that again, are you?" Mickey groaned, putting a hand over his own eyes. "Not now."
"We're not Torchwood," John persisted. "I don't see why we have to just be some annexed subclause to Torchwood. We're not even Torchwood Five! We're just Jack's fucking appendage!"
"We are Torchwood," Ianto corrected icily.
"You might be, Eye-Candy, but I'm not." John strode over to his enormous shaggy bearskin coat, lying across one of the beds like a recently-slaughtered animal, and popped the vodka bottle out of the pocket like a pea from a pod. "I'm not wanking about Russia under the 'Torchwood' banner."
"We could have a code name, I suppose, but we're wasting ti-" Mickey began. Unsurprisingly, everyone ignored him. Again.
"Excalibur was a good name," John insisted, apparently addressing Jack to the exclusion of everyone else. "I don't know why you didn't just go with that. I mean, listen to it. Excalibur! Or Torchwood. Ridiculous."
"Because Excalibur was a Time Agency potential subdivision and this isn't and you stole all the Excalibur funding anyway," Jack snapped, smacking the desk. The projection jumped violently. "Will one of you shut him up and tell me - fizzbanghiss - contact yet?"
Mickey exchanged a pained look with Ianto. "C'mon, John, we can argue about this later, it's not important."
"I've left a message for Dr. Zakharov with her landlady," Ianto repeated, "but her landlady hasn't seen her for a week so I don't know how soon - "
The image of Jack vanished abruptly as Mickey's cell phone rang. Mickey blinked. "I didn't know this int - "
Ianto snatched the phone out of his hands and hit 'speaker'. "привет?"
"Hello," said a rough alto voice rendered strange by the phone's tinny speaker capability. "Your accent is shitty, Ianto Jones." She pronounced 'Ianto' as 'Yanntoo', but no one commented on that. "This is Irana Zakharov. You are interested in what happened to my research team." She did not phrase it as a question.
"Your landlady lied to me," Ianto muttered.
"She lies to everyone for me. It costs money." Irana was economical with her syllables, biting them off as if to conserve air. "You want to see where we were working, you will need a helicopter. Can you fly, Ianto Jones?"
Ianto looked at Mickey. Mickey made a 'so-so' motion with his hand. His take-offs and landings were a bit sticky, he knew, but he could keep control while in the air and plot a fairly accurate course when necessary. Funny, all these things he'd learnt when there was someone around who believed he already knew how to do them. With a pained frown, Ianto turned his gaze on John.
"Who, me? Of course I can fly a bloody helicopter," John said, wiping the mouth of his vodka with the palm of his hand. Mickey wondered what that was supposed to achieve, the disinfection of his palm on the alcohol, or the spreading of germs onto the glass. "When do we start?"
"Would you mind sobering up first?" Ianto asked acidly.
On the phone, Irana Zakharov barked a short, half-humourless laugh that sounded like cigarettes and a garrotte had gone into its making. "He will be a good enough pilot as he is. Our last pilot was a drunk too."
"What happened to him?" Mickey asked, because if the answer was 'he crashed into a mountain while drunk', he wasn't getting in the helicopter until John had had two cold showers and a kick in the nuts.
'
"She was eaten by wolves, in the end," Irana said. There was something like dark, dry amusement in her voice. Mickey had hear a little about the infamously black sense of humour that was supposedly typical in Russians; he wondered if it was so with Chechens too, and what kind of offense Irana might take at the comparison.
"Where should we meet you?" Ianto asked, motioning for Mickey and John to shush despite them not actually saying anything at this point. "And when?"
Irana gave them an address, and a time. "Bring food supplies, and first aid. The rest will still be there, in the trailers." She sounded almost bored. "There are no thieves at Lake El'gygytgyn, only wolves, and sometimes elk. Lost elk."
The call cut out abruptly, and John swigged from his vodka bottle again. "She sounds like a real party animal."
"Shut up," said Mickey at almost the same time as Ianto. He looked at John's ridiculous boots, and Ianto's carefully polished black brogues. "You … might want to wear different shoes."
The helicopter pad turned out to be an empty lot surrounded by a gappy chainlink fence and some dead plants among the breize blocks that littered the place. A lone cat washed itself indolently on a small pile of rubble and barely stopped to look at them as they approached; the H on the crumbling tarmac seemed to have been painted on by hand, by someone with Parkinson's and a limited supply of light grey paint.
The helicopter itself didn't look like it had any business ever taking to the air. It looked like it had been built by Leonardo da Vinci out of vintage car parts and chewing gum and hope; there was a faded red hammer and sickle on the tail attesting to its age.
"That's us, is it?" Ianto asked, shouldering a heavy ruck-sack full of dried rations and fresh water in iodine-cleaned bottles.
"Looks like it," Mickey sighed. John bounded over, clanking - he'd refused to change his boots, and his concession to 'bring supplies' amounted to stuffing so many bottles of vodka into the pockets of his enormous bearskin coat that he sounded like a milkfloat on collection day - and Ianto examined the threatening off-white skies with a blank face.
"We're all going to die," he said flatly.
"Probably," Mickey agreed.
"The circus is here," the raspy alto voice greeted them as its owner stepped out from behind the nose of the helicopter. She had evidently gone to the Jack Harkness and John Hart School of Dramatic Entrances. Dr Irana Zakharov was tall, taller than John, roughly the same height as Ianto, and she was beautiful only in the way that a knife might be; her face was sharp and hard, her lips thin, and her shock-blue eyes were like ice spears, cold and piercing. She certainly looked like the kind of woman who could fend off a wolf attack in the frozen wilderness - not so much slim as wiry, and she stood as if she'd been taught to walk by a drill sergeant. "How drunk is your pilot?"
"Comfortably," John grinned. "Captain John Hart." He ratcheted his grin up a few notches, but did not salute. Jack, Mickey though, would have saluted.
"Captain of what?"
"Oh, this and that." John offered her his vodka. Mickey was expecting her to decline - she looked like she might - but Irana took an impressive chug from the bottle and passed it back to him without so much as a flicker on her face.
"Flying in this is not pleasant," Irana explained. "You should drink. It will cushion you a little. Not much."
"I like you," John said, scrambling into the pilot's seat with the open bottle swinging from his from his left hand. "I like her," he informed Mickey. "We need to meet more women like her."
"No," Ianto muttered, "you need to be segregated from humanity for humanity's good."
"Give me your bags," Irana said, kicking the side door open with considerable force. They climbed inside. It smelt quite overpoweringly of fuel, with a backdrop of chickens, and - no doubt thanks to John - home-distilled vodka.
Mickey tried to make himself comfortable as the helicopter's engine began, louder than the gates of Hades slamming shut, and Ianto said over the roar, "Tell us what happened, doctor …"
Irana put a finger to her lips and pointed towards the roof - with a lurch and a bump the ancient machine left the ground and started to climb into the skies. "Who do you people represent?" she asked curtly, before Ianto could repeat his question. "I tried to explain to the authorities in Anadyr, they did not take an interest. Wolves eat people all the time, especially out there."
"We come from Torchwood - " Ianto began.
"No we don't," John shouted from the front. Mickey wasn't wholly surprised to discover that the man's hearing was a lot better than he had been pretending it was.
"Pay no attention to him," Mickey advised.
"What are Torchwood?" Irana glanced briefly at Mickey, which was about all the recognition he'd had from anyone in quite some time. It was Ianto who answered, although thankfully not with any of Jack's usual and highly embarrassing, 'outside the government' spiel: Mickey didn't think Irana would be impressed by that. Or indeed by anything short of a live volcano erupting inside the helicopter.
"We investigate events like this," Ianto said tactfully. He looked about as relaxed as a man can with bits of Soviet machinery jabbing into his back. "Things which are not very normal … things that don't come with a logical explanation."
"There is a very logical explanation," Irana suggested. "I hallucinated. They were just wolves. Shock caused a false memory to form."
Mickey frowned at her. She didn't appear to believe what she was saying herself, either. "Do you think that's likely?"
The woman replied with a thin smile. Her eyes stabbed at him like blue bayonets. "No. I am not shocked by wolves. I have seen them eat the bodies of people before." She settled back on the uneven wall. "Fifteen years ago I watched them feed on the bodies of Russian soldiers, and rejoiced. Now I am older, and I know the world is bigger than two countries, but I remember those animals. And these animals at Lake El'gygytgyn, they were not wolves."
Mickey stared at her in the deafening thunder of the helicopter's bowels, mentally translating the things she hadn't said. It was easy to see her with an automatic weapon, although strangely not unsettling. He was pretty sure those soldiers hadn't gone to the wolves willingly, perhaps not even dead, but that was none of their business. They were here to find whatever alien beings were hunting in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, and to send them away from the earth by any means necessary.
He risked a glance at Ianto, who had - really - just whipped out a notebook and made a note of this. "Assuming that we can trust your memory of events, then - what happened?"
Irana closed her eyes and said almost sleepily, "We had been out at the lake for only a week. We were to monitor levels of blue-green algae, to see if they were on the increase - Lake El'gygytgyn is almost free of - "
"Yawn," John interrupted from the front.
" - we were to be there for several months," Irana went on, acknowledging his interruption without acknowledging. "It was night, we had been drinking of course, and we were soon to go to sleep, when the noises started."
"What noises?" Mickey tried to alleviate the pressure on his spine and back muscles by leaning on his ruck-sack, but it was full of tines. He was rapidly starting to think that Ianto might well be the softest thing in the back of the helicopter.
"You realise we're going to have to fly all night in this rust bucket?" John complained from the pilot's seat. "It's going so slowly I can't even believe it stays in the fucking air."
"Russia is a big country," Irana said.
"I know, but if you at least had a fushion-powered wave-coll-"
"Would you mind shutting up?" Mickey growled.
"Charming," John muttered, taking a pull on his vodka. "This has almost run out," he complained, "I've only got two more. There'd better be some more at these trailers of yours or I'm going to be in a bad mood."
"There will be some," Irana assured him. "But I had to burn the rest to keep the animals away from me." She turned back to Ianto and Mickey. "The noises from outside, they sounded like perhaps something had got into our storage bins. As leader of the expedition, I was to go out and see; I took a torch and my shotgun, I stepped outside, there was nothing by the storage bins."
Mickey tried to settle himself against the tins of food in the hope that their smooth sides would be less awkward against his back.
"I went to make sure they were secure, something hit me in the back, very hard, and I lost my torch, my shotgun. I called for help," she sighed. "I got up just in time to see Jing Yuhao from Beijing University become two halves of a corpse. The animals, they were dark, stayed in the shadows - it was as if the shadows were with them, this was otherwise a very bright night, a … a fat moon, not quite full - I don't know the English for this -"
"Gibbous," Ianto said under his breath.
" - I could not see them clearly, only what they did. When you arrive you will see, there is nowhere for shadows to come from."
"How did you escape?" Mickey asked, because asking what they did seemed like a step too far. Irana looked at the back of John's seat for a long time.
"I hid in the lake. The water there is cold, but not was not frozen then. It is cold enough to kill in minutes, so I must have only been in there for seconds. It felt longer." She shuddered. It looked eerie on her, as if a robot had just cried, or a statue chuckled to itself. "I climbed out, I burnt all our emergency firewood, I burnt the vodka, I burnt the coverings for the bins, to warm myself and to make a signal to the animals that they should not come near." Irana dragged her gaze away from the back of the seat and looked at Mickey with the kind of stare he'd only ever seen on combatants before. "When the dawn came I found my torch. I found my shotgun. I packed our supplies, and I began to walk. It took nearly two weeks to find a village."
Ianto cleared his throat awkwardly. "And you didn't get to see what they looked like?"
"They were in darkness, all the time," Irana said distantly. "But I know they were not wolves."
"How?"
She smiled the ghost of a knife-wound smile. "In the morning, even the clothes my team had been wearing were gone. I have seen wolves eat human bodies before, Ianto Jones." She closed her eyes again. "Those were not wolves."
Mickey dozed for most of the flight, and woke up in pain; opposite him Irana's eyes were open, and she sat with her hands dangling from the wrists between her raised knees, in perfect silence.
He sat up. John was talking, though in such a low voice that Mickey couldn't work out what he was saying. Ianto's voice, however, was clear. All he was saying was, "Shut up. Shut up. SHUT UP. Shut. Up," over and over and over.
"What?" Mickey mumbled, brushing sleep from his eyes.
"We're here," John said, much louder and more clearly. "Or we're where the lovely doctor says the trailers are and - " he broke off. Mickey could only assume he was drinking more of his rocket fuel, " - there are two down there. They might be different ones, of course."
Irana got to her feet in one go, and leaned over the seat. "Yes," she said. "This is right. Land."
"Somehow I didn't think it was going to be somewhere else," John drawled.
Letting John land a helicopter made primarily of rust while reeking of spirits ranked quite high on the list of "stupidest things Mickey has done in his life so far", and it was appropriately painful and loud. By the time he got his feet back on the solid, icy-crunchy, almost grassless ground again, Mickey thought he'd developed a permanent phobia of flying, and several grey hairs.
As he took his bag down from the helicopter and looked about him, Mickey realized just how sarcastic John had been being; there was nothing but nothing as far as the eye could see, with a sodding great lake in it and a lot of wind. Right out in the distance, across the lake, there was some sort of mechanical tower thing, like an oil rig but tiny, and white.
"Americans," Irana said, following his gaze. "Drilling for samples. They are not here at the moment. There will be only us in the trailers."
Wind tore across the empty landscape and tugged at her sandy-blonde hair. Ianto swung his ruck-sack onto his shoulders, and without another word the four of them cross the windswept, desolate ground between helicopter and trailers.
"Here," Irana said, pointing to the two black plastic bins sunk into deep holes. They were encircled with a number of metal tent pegs, which must have been holding down the tarpaulin that had covered them. "This is where they knocked me down." She led them on to the door of one of the two trailers. "The wind and rain chase away all tracks. Tomorrow our footprints will be invisible."
The observation struck Mickey as inexplicably morbid.
Inside the trailer was surprisingly similar to a mobile home he'd stayed in on holiday with his Nan once, although without the postcards of Harlan Bay blue-takked to the walls and cupboards, or the flower-print curtains that had apparently been made in the 1970s. Mickey put his bag down with a sigh of relief - even in that short walk over, even with the thick hood of his coat raised, his ears had begun to sting with the chill of the wind.
"The other trailer is our field laboratory," Irana said, sitting on something that could only be called a sofa by the very charitably-minded. "We share with the Americans, with other research teams."
"We're going to have to sort this thing out before anyone else gets eaten," Ianto concluded.
"How?" John asked, sounding grumpy. He'd managed to find something to chew, and he hadn't removed his bearskin. "I wasn't allowed a gun. Not even a little one! Not even a knife. Mickey's power tool penis replacement is back at the hotel. The little robot dog with the silly voice … is back at the hotel. All we have is a shotgun, my incredible good looks, and no information." He slumped against a wall. "Team Useless are here to fail to save the day."
"Er, do you mind?" Mickey sighed.
"No."
"I'm the designated pessimist," Mickey pointed out.
"We can always check the area for traces … hair … residue from injuries," Ianto said, putting his coat hood back up with a look that bordered on resignation. "Come on."
"Alright. I'll take the area around the storage bins, you do the bit the other side of the scorch marks. John?"
"What now?"
"Other side of the trailers. Perhaps that's where they were hiding." Mickey put his hands over his face. "And give me some of that bloody vodka."
"I thought you said you didn't drink anymore?" Ianto said in a low voice as Mick put his coat back on.
"It's either that or freeze. I can make an exception," Mickey held out his hand across the room in a pincher shape and with a sour expression John dug a bottle of vodka from one of his many and capacious pockets.
They spent the rest of the daylight hours going over the area with a fine-toothed comb. Even as he worked, stooped over in the harsh winds, having to dart inside every hour to prevent frostbite from getting a grip on his naked fingers, Mickey was mentally penning his report. It consisted largely of: "Discovered nothing but new horizons on how cold and bored it is possible to get."
By the time the light began to fade all any of them had was a sample of earth stained with possibly-blood, which Ianto had scooped up outside the line of scorched earth, and he'd said several times it was probably boiled sap from the firewood or something. Even the ashes were gone, borne away by the wind in the month-long interval since Irana's desperate stand against the creatures in the darkness.
"We can at least scan that," Mickey said, as they removed their coats in the relative warmth of the trailer, and Ianto raised his eyebrows at the little plastic bag, "with the whatjacallit."
"Vortex Manipulator," John said, picking his teeth.
Ianto touched a couple of buttons on the wide leather strap at his wrist, hesitant, and frowned. Nothing happened. He tried again. "It's not … there's no response from anything. It's not even lighting up."
"Um, yeah." John looked uncomfortable. "There were one or two places on my old travels where it got a bit blocked … wouldn't start … fluctuations in the ionosphere or something."
"Or something?" Mickey demanded.
"I was a field agent, not a technician!" John protested, "I don't know how the bloody thing operates, I just used it!"
"Story of my life," Mickey muttered, disgruntled.
"So we're stuck out here with no way of communicating with Cardiff?" Ianto said in a faint voice. His face could have been the encyclopedia illustration for 'aghast'. "What do we do now?"
Irana, who had been watching the conversation from one of the doorways, inscrutable and silent, said, "Wait for them to come back."
"The animals?" Mickey was starting to think that John's vodka was a perfectly reasonable response to a perfectly impossible situation.
"If they don't come tonight, they will come tomorrow night. They can see the helicopter. They know there is prey for them." She picked up a clear bottle from beneath an empty Karibou bag and added, "in the meantime …"
"More vodka?" Ianto groaned.
"This is samogon," Irana corrected. "One of my graduate students brought it with him from Kiev. His uncle distills it. It is … very warming."
Mickey hung back. "I'm not sure it's a good idea to be hunting werewolves drunk."
"It's a fucking stupid one to try hunting them sober," John said, already dusting off a plastic mug with a kind of feverish eagerness.
It was dark, and the wind howled, but that was all. They ate packet soup, crisp bread, and tinned peaches, and John told them an anecdote about trying to smuggle opium into Singapore. Ianto called him a liar and several other names, his cheeks aglow with the flames of the samogon.
"You're beautiful when you're angry," John informed him, taking another shot of the eye-watering moonshine.
"What … what is between those two?" Irana asked Mickey quietly as Ianto called John something ferocious but so incoherent that Mickey couldn't tell if it was English, Welsh, Russian, or gibberish. Catching Mickey's expression she added, quite sympathetically, "Long story, perhaps?"
"Very short. Very predictable," Mickey sighed. John was waving a mug of samogon under Ianto's nose. Ianto looked queasy.
Irana didn't tell them much about herself, beyond having travelled to America to get her doctorate; instead she told Torchwood's Away Team about the significance of Lake El'gygytgyn, why the Americans had been drilling there.
"Not for oil. Hard to believe, but true," Irana said. Though their 'meal' was over, no one had moved from the tiny table. "This lake is very old - you see on maps that it is very round, too. That is because it was formed by a meteor crash, millions of years ago."
As one man the team sat up and began to pay much closer attention.
"Most lakes have been covered by glaciers, this far north. Further south, wildlife and men stir up the sediments. But here, so far from everywhere, the mud lies undisturbed. For millions of years, there are records for those who can interpret them. That is why the American scientists drill out here." Irana put the lid back on the samogon bottle almost off-handedly. "To tell the world how it has heated up and cooled down in the past. If these changes now are unusual, or usual."
"What," John said in a bored slur, "does this shit have to do with werewolves?"
"Maybe they've been here all along," Mickey suggested.
"What could live out here?" Irana said, ignoring John entirely and fixing Mickey with her intense stare. Whereas earlier this had made him feel as if she was burning him alive with her eyes, Mickey found the samogon had achieved the impossible and softened Irana's gaze to bearability. "There is barely any vegetation, no large mammals, no small mammals. Only three species of fish in the whole lake."
Mickey struggled for words - John had kidnapped the remainder of the murderously potent samogon, and Ianto appeared to have gone to sleep, his head on his folded forearms, making him look too young for his suit - and managed, "I've seen creatures that … don't need the same food as … as us. Things that - "
Irana stood up abruptly. "Come on."
"What?" Mickey peered up at her.
"Come with me," Irana said, heading for the partition door. John snickered, and Mickey kicked him under the table before getting up to follow her. "Torchwood," Irana said, pronouncing it correctly but misplacing the stresses. She shut the partition door behind them, and Mickey saw the two narrow beds, pushed together, and through the samogon fog he understood. "It is a stupid name," Irana said. "Your friend is right."
"He's not my friend," Mickey said hastily.
Irana snorted. "He will be. You are alone." It was not a question.
"And drunk." Mickey thought it was only fair to point this out, although it was fairly obvious.
"So am I." She removed her sweater the same way she walked - mechanically, with a tinge of the military, her movements suggesting somehow something feral. "We are only drunk in short bursts, Mickey Smith. We are always alone."
This is fucking horrible, Mickey thought wretchedly. Stop talking like that..
"You see the truth in that," Irana said baldly. She unlaced her boots as Mickey stood, undecided, his throat working. "Do not deny that you do."
"I do," said Mickey, and he kissed her.
CONTINUES
Fandom: Torchwood
Word Count: 16,255
Rating: PG-13 for swearing and mild sex.
Pairing: None, really, not so much.
Warnings: I warned you before, I shan't be doing it again.
Disclaimer: All these characters belong to the BBC, whom I don't currently trust to do anything awesome with them.
Notes: In some way, this is Ande's fault. It is also Emma's fault, and Cat's fault. They are all better writers than me, but refused to do it and thus, thus … I had to. I actually broke the habit of a lifetime and did some research for this, but it is no doubt riddled with factual inaccuracies. My defence is: It's fucking Torchwood, how much research do you think the writers on the show do?
INTRODUCTION
MISSION 0001: COLD COMFORT .
"Do it again," John said, from around a mouthful of borscht. The artificial lights flickered and blinked, struggling against the gloom outside and not really succeeding. John's skin looked slightly green, although that might have been the aeroplane breakfast making itself known.
"Raxacoricofallapatorius," Mickey repeated.
"Ooh, that's good. Do it again!" John let the spoon fall back into the borscht and picked up the label-less vodka bottle from between his knees to pour them both a shot. Mickey raised his eyebrows.
"It's ten in the morning, John."
"Do it again!" John gestured with the top of the bottle.
Mickey sighed and put down his greasy, limp, McDonald's burger. "I'm beginning to understand why Ianto hates you so much."
"He doesn't hate me for my boundless joie de vive," John said sagely, downing a shot of eye-watering vodka without so much as a flinch, "he hates me because I'm beautiful." He poured a second shot. "Also, I fucked his boyfriend." John stared into space with a distant expression as a heavy truck ground and barked down the road outside, toying with his next vodka shot, and added dreamily, "a lot."
"I don't want to know," Mickey said for maybe the millionth time since meeting Captain John Hart.
They'd arrived in Anadyr two hours ago, leaving Ianto to check them into the hotel while John satisfied his apparently endless craving for local foodstuffs (he'd spent the flight annoying everyone in the vicinity by eating plantain chips and dried sea urchin as loudly as a dog chewing coal) and neat spirits. Mickey was still unimpressed with this inauspicious start to their career as Torchwood Three-B - a title which he wasn't happy with him and to which John was flatly refusing to answer - and he couldn't work out whether the mission itself or the team was the more ludicrous; at Heathrow, preparing for the first leg of their journey, people had stared, and it wasn't even as if K-9 or the BFG had been with them there, as they were being shipped as cargo.
"We’re not exactly the most inconspicuous group," Mickey had muttered as John started making eyes at a teenage girl - all elbows and shyness - in WHSmiths.
"If you just look at this like a rock band we look perfectly normal," John insisted, smiling at the girl like a shark smiles at a lost seal pup.
"Stop that," Mickey growled. He wasn’t exactly convinced; John might have looked like some 1960s rock star, but Mickey was acutely aware that he himself looked a lot less glamorous, more like the ugly one out of a boy band, and if Ianto was a popstar he was clearly moonlighting from the opera - possibly after having his house burnt down, judging by his expression.
"Alright," John smirked, apparently reading his mind, "I'm the big fucking rockstar," he redistributed his weight from one foot to the other, deliberately poking his hips out, "and you two are … bodyguard and manager. Bodyguard and mmmanager."
"Which is which?" Mickey asked. He knew immediately he was going to regret it, but at least John wasn't disturbing the shit out of him by perving on thirteen-year-olds anymore. There was a limit to how Rolling Stones someone could be before Mickey started wanting to be sick in his mouth.
John rolled his eyes. "Which one of you is wearing the suit, fuckhead?"
Mickey sighed. "I'm going to have to sit in the middle, aren't I?"
John shrugged. "Or you could try to explain to the stewardess why my manager just choked me to death half-way through The Bridges of Madison County."
"Believe me if they're showing that it's not you I'm going to be choking," Ianto snapped, and Mickey started, unaware that he'd even been in earshot. Ianto's little Alfred Pennyworth impression was unnerving him already.
Receiving their first proper mission hadn't been much more of an edifying and adult experience:
"There have been increased reports of werewolf activity and human fatalities in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug," Gwen said, handing a folder wrapped in multicoloured elastic bands to Ianto, not to Mickey. Even though Mickey was standing right by the desk and it would have been easier and was she actually going to acknowledge his presence at all? Apparently not.
Gwen was holding a cup of Jones-brewed coffee with determination - probably because it was the last she was going to get for quite some time, and she looked a little pale, a little tired, and a little plumper than usual.
"Werewolves," Mickey said, trying to avoid any intonation whatsoever.
Gwen gave him an I Don't Make This Shit Up, I Just Report It look and Mickey almost felt sorry for her. On the other hand, he was going to Siberia and she was staying in Cardiff with her husband, and with Jack and Martha, and with an entire arsenal of alien weapons and a cooperative and even occasionally friendly police force. He didn't feel that sorry for her.
"'Werewolf' can apply to any one of three hundred and seventy-eight shape-changing species known to have visited the Sol System, Master," K-9 beeped helpfully.
"Thank you, K-9," Mickey groaned. "That really narrows down how to deal with this."
"Sarcasm noted, Master."
"We can get you to Anadyr," Gwen continued, looking even more green around the gills, "you need to meet up with a biologist called … called … ugh, it's in the file. She's from Chechnya or somewhere like that, they've had a whole team of international scientists out at Lake … why are all these places unpronounceable? Lake El'gygytgyn. Ow, my throat." She took a sip of the coffee. "It's all in there. Some of her team were killed by the … the you know what."
"Werewolves," Mickey finished, trying not to sound too incredulous. "Right. Um. Where's … where's John?"
"Being forcibly restrained from the armoury," Martha said, entering with her own coffee and a pen stuck in her hair. "He's trying to convince Jack he needs every single ceramic weapon we have to get through airport security, and Jack's trying to explain that John doesn't need any weapons, and I don't know who's going to win, but there's probably going to be some broken glass in a minute."
Sitting in a cheap café in Anadyr, Mickey still wasn't sure who'd won: the geom wasn't in evidence, but John had this way of appearing to be armed to the teeth when he was wearing a bath-towel. Mickey had tried to avoid the Hub showers after that.
"So," Mickey pushed his burger away across the table-top. He'd thought he'd be happy to go back to junk food after all that time with activism and veganism on the run with Jake, but either his tastebuds had changed or MacDonald's had; it tasted disgusting and sat in his stomach like a lead weight. "We need to make contact with this Dr. … Dr. … Zakharov, find out exactly what happened to the rest of her team."
He realised John probably wasn't listening. There was a fruit machine in the corner, with unfamiliar Cyrillic characters flashing on achingly familiar bright plastic buttons as they lit up from behind, and John was eyeing it with palpable avarice.
"So I was thinking of sending Ianto to do that," Mickey went on, "since he's the most approachable of us, and maybe I should - "
"Can he speak Russian?"
"Oh, you are listening."
"I'm always listening," John said, still transfixed by the fruit machine. "I hear every single word that drops out of your mouth, especially if that word is 'Ianto'."
"You're seriously fucking creepy," Mickey growled.
"He doesn't, by the way," John put his foot on the chair opposite him. "And I do." There was a ten-ruble coin in John's hand now, spinning up and down the line of his knuckles like a giddy child on the waltzers.
"I'm not sending you to talk to her on your own," Mickey shuddered. "We need her alive and not pressing charges. We'll have to all go." A thought occurred to him as John started flipping the coin in a calculatedly infuriating fashion. "How do you know she doesn't speak English, anyway?"
The door opened. The café owner didn't bother to look up, but Mickey and John's heads snapped around like the crack of a cattle whip.
It was, of course, Ianto. He looked faintly ridiculous with a thermal survival jacket in green and grey over his suit, but less so than John had in the enormous fur coat that was now draped awkwardly over the back of his plastic chair like an Eskimo's duvet. Mickey's own red survival jacket hung more easily down the back of his chair; he gave Ianto an enquiring look, but Ianto ignored him - something of a theme was beginning to emerge there - and made a beeline for the tiny counter.
Watching Ianto attempting to order coffee in signs and very broken Russian (with a very clear "кофе" audible amongst the confusion) was so entertaining that for a moment neither John nor Mickey thought to mention that the old woman in the Cats sweatshirt spoke pretty decent English, or at least understood it; when he finally had his steaming paper cup Ianto sat down as far away from John as he could get without actually sitting at a different table altogether.
"I've left a message with her landlady," Ianto said abruptly. He sipped his coffee and pulled an eloquent face.
"Already?" Mickey was a little surprised. He hadn't even known they knew where the doctor was staying in Anadyr; Ianto had hogged the folder for the entire flight to Beijing, the stopover at Beijing, the flight to Vladistok, the stopover in Vladistok, and the flight to Anadyr. Mickey had been getting quite annoyed by the end of the journey, and not least because he'd had to sit in the middle every bloody time while John chatted up the stewardesses, stewards, and other passengers with varying success.
"No sense in wasting time," Ianto said primly. He clearly meant 'the sooner we can get this done the sooner I can go home'.
"So we just wait around the hotel until she gets back to us?" Mickey sighed. He'd been hoping they could get on with proving they were an adequate team right off the bat.
About twenty minutes later he was sat on a single bed in a room of three of them, as John paced around the room complaining about the lack of a minibar - in the face of the bottle of vodka poking out of his coat pocket like a mast - and Ianto rather clumsily hit the communications dial on the wristpiece that had previously been John's. He was intrigued to see that bad connections had the same effect on a visual transmission as an audio one - Anadyr must have been a black spot for the frequencies the Vortex Manipulator communications band used; Jack and the foot or so of Hub background that they could see around him as he projected at half-size into the hotel room kept jumping and spitting into fizzy pale blue nothingness.
"Is everything alright back there?" Ianto asked as soon as Jack came into focus. Mickey got the distinct impression he'd rather that John and Mickey were elsewhere for this conversation; the set of Ianto's shoulders was quite hostile.
"Very quiet," Jack assured him. "Even the - crack, fizz - considering training pro- fizzpop - progress, okay? No trouble?" He slid back into focus as if he was coming from two different parts of the room at once.
"I'm not happy with this bloody name," John interrupted from the windowsill. He sounded downright affronted. "Torchwood Three-B? We sound like a school. Or a pencil. It's ridiculous. We're an elite investigative team, we need an elite name!"
"You're not going to start making a fuss about that again, are you?" Mickey groaned, putting a hand over his own eyes. "Not now."
"We're not Torchwood," John persisted. "I don't see why we have to just be some annexed subclause to Torchwood. We're not even Torchwood Five! We're just Jack's fucking appendage!"
"We are Torchwood," Ianto corrected icily.
"You might be, Eye-Candy, but I'm not." John strode over to his enormous shaggy bearskin coat, lying across one of the beds like a recently-slaughtered animal, and popped the vodka bottle out of the pocket like a pea from a pod. "I'm not wanking about Russia under the 'Torchwood' banner."
"We could have a code name, I suppose, but we're wasting ti-" Mickey began. Unsurprisingly, everyone ignored him. Again.
"Excalibur was a good name," John insisted, apparently addressing Jack to the exclusion of everyone else. "I don't know why you didn't just go with that. I mean, listen to it. Excalibur! Or Torchwood. Ridiculous."
"Because Excalibur was a Time Agency potential subdivision and this isn't and you stole all the Excalibur funding anyway," Jack snapped, smacking the desk. The projection jumped violently. "Will one of you shut him up and tell me - fizzbanghiss - contact yet?"
Mickey exchanged a pained look with Ianto. "C'mon, John, we can argue about this later, it's not important."
"I've left a message for Dr. Zakharov with her landlady," Ianto repeated, "but her landlady hasn't seen her for a week so I don't know how soon - "
The image of Jack vanished abruptly as Mickey's cell phone rang. Mickey blinked. "I didn't know this int - "
Ianto snatched the phone out of his hands and hit 'speaker'. "привет?"
"Hello," said a rough alto voice rendered strange by the phone's tinny speaker capability. "Your accent is shitty, Ianto Jones." She pronounced 'Ianto' as 'Yanntoo', but no one commented on that. "This is Irana Zakharov. You are interested in what happened to my research team." She did not phrase it as a question.
"Your landlady lied to me," Ianto muttered.
"She lies to everyone for me. It costs money." Irana was economical with her syllables, biting them off as if to conserve air. "You want to see where we were working, you will need a helicopter. Can you fly, Ianto Jones?"
Ianto looked at Mickey. Mickey made a 'so-so' motion with his hand. His take-offs and landings were a bit sticky, he knew, but he could keep control while in the air and plot a fairly accurate course when necessary. Funny, all these things he'd learnt when there was someone around who believed he already knew how to do them. With a pained frown, Ianto turned his gaze on John.
"Who, me? Of course I can fly a bloody helicopter," John said, wiping the mouth of his vodka with the palm of his hand. Mickey wondered what that was supposed to achieve, the disinfection of his palm on the alcohol, or the spreading of germs onto the glass. "When do we start?"
"Would you mind sobering up first?" Ianto asked acidly.
On the phone, Irana Zakharov barked a short, half-humourless laugh that sounded like cigarettes and a garrotte had gone into its making. "He will be a good enough pilot as he is. Our last pilot was a drunk too."
"What happened to him?" Mickey asked, because if the answer was 'he crashed into a mountain while drunk', he wasn't getting in the helicopter until John had had two cold showers and a kick in the nuts.
'
"She was eaten by wolves, in the end," Irana said. There was something like dark, dry amusement in her voice. Mickey had hear a little about the infamously black sense of humour that was supposedly typical in Russians; he wondered if it was so with Chechens too, and what kind of offense Irana might take at the comparison.
"Where should we meet you?" Ianto asked, motioning for Mickey and John to shush despite them not actually saying anything at this point. "And when?"
Irana gave them an address, and a time. "Bring food supplies, and first aid. The rest will still be there, in the trailers." She sounded almost bored. "There are no thieves at Lake El'gygytgyn, only wolves, and sometimes elk. Lost elk."
The call cut out abruptly, and John swigged from his vodka bottle again. "She sounds like a real party animal."
"Shut up," said Mickey at almost the same time as Ianto. He looked at John's ridiculous boots, and Ianto's carefully polished black brogues. "You … might want to wear different shoes."
The helicopter pad turned out to be an empty lot surrounded by a gappy chainlink fence and some dead plants among the breize blocks that littered the place. A lone cat washed itself indolently on a small pile of rubble and barely stopped to look at them as they approached; the H on the crumbling tarmac seemed to have been painted on by hand, by someone with Parkinson's and a limited supply of light grey paint.
The helicopter itself didn't look like it had any business ever taking to the air. It looked like it had been built by Leonardo da Vinci out of vintage car parts and chewing gum and hope; there was a faded red hammer and sickle on the tail attesting to its age.
"That's us, is it?" Ianto asked, shouldering a heavy ruck-sack full of dried rations and fresh water in iodine-cleaned bottles.
"Looks like it," Mickey sighed. John bounded over, clanking - he'd refused to change his boots, and his concession to 'bring supplies' amounted to stuffing so many bottles of vodka into the pockets of his enormous bearskin coat that he sounded like a milkfloat on collection day - and Ianto examined the threatening off-white skies with a blank face.
"We're all going to die," he said flatly.
"Probably," Mickey agreed.
"The circus is here," the raspy alto voice greeted them as its owner stepped out from behind the nose of the helicopter. She had evidently gone to the Jack Harkness and John Hart School of Dramatic Entrances. Dr Irana Zakharov was tall, taller than John, roughly the same height as Ianto, and she was beautiful only in the way that a knife might be; her face was sharp and hard, her lips thin, and her shock-blue eyes were like ice spears, cold and piercing. She certainly looked like the kind of woman who could fend off a wolf attack in the frozen wilderness - not so much slim as wiry, and she stood as if she'd been taught to walk by a drill sergeant. "How drunk is your pilot?"
"Comfortably," John grinned. "Captain John Hart." He ratcheted his grin up a few notches, but did not salute. Jack, Mickey though, would have saluted.
"Captain of what?"
"Oh, this and that." John offered her his vodka. Mickey was expecting her to decline - she looked like she might - but Irana took an impressive chug from the bottle and passed it back to him without so much as a flicker on her face.
"Flying in this is not pleasant," Irana explained. "You should drink. It will cushion you a little. Not much."
"I like you," John said, scrambling into the pilot's seat with the open bottle swinging from his from his left hand. "I like her," he informed Mickey. "We need to meet more women like her."
"No," Ianto muttered, "you need to be segregated from humanity for humanity's good."
"Give me your bags," Irana said, kicking the side door open with considerable force. They climbed inside. It smelt quite overpoweringly of fuel, with a backdrop of chickens, and - no doubt thanks to John - home-distilled vodka.
Mickey tried to make himself comfortable as the helicopter's engine began, louder than the gates of Hades slamming shut, and Ianto said over the roar, "Tell us what happened, doctor …"
Irana put a finger to her lips and pointed towards the roof - with a lurch and a bump the ancient machine left the ground and started to climb into the skies. "Who do you people represent?" she asked curtly, before Ianto could repeat his question. "I tried to explain to the authorities in Anadyr, they did not take an interest. Wolves eat people all the time, especially out there."
"We come from Torchwood - " Ianto began.
"No we don't," John shouted from the front. Mickey wasn't wholly surprised to discover that the man's hearing was a lot better than he had been pretending it was.
"Pay no attention to him," Mickey advised.
"What are Torchwood?" Irana glanced briefly at Mickey, which was about all the recognition he'd had from anyone in quite some time. It was Ianto who answered, although thankfully not with any of Jack's usual and highly embarrassing, 'outside the government' spiel: Mickey didn't think Irana would be impressed by that. Or indeed by anything short of a live volcano erupting inside the helicopter.
"We investigate events like this," Ianto said tactfully. He looked about as relaxed as a man can with bits of Soviet machinery jabbing into his back. "Things which are not very normal … things that don't come with a logical explanation."
"There is a very logical explanation," Irana suggested. "I hallucinated. They were just wolves. Shock caused a false memory to form."
Mickey frowned at her. She didn't appear to believe what she was saying herself, either. "Do you think that's likely?"
The woman replied with a thin smile. Her eyes stabbed at him like blue bayonets. "No. I am not shocked by wolves. I have seen them eat the bodies of people before." She settled back on the uneven wall. "Fifteen years ago I watched them feed on the bodies of Russian soldiers, and rejoiced. Now I am older, and I know the world is bigger than two countries, but I remember those animals. And these animals at Lake El'gygytgyn, they were not wolves."
Mickey stared at her in the deafening thunder of the helicopter's bowels, mentally translating the things she hadn't said. It was easy to see her with an automatic weapon, although strangely not unsettling. He was pretty sure those soldiers hadn't gone to the wolves willingly, perhaps not even dead, but that was none of their business. They were here to find whatever alien beings were hunting in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, and to send them away from the earth by any means necessary.
He risked a glance at Ianto, who had - really - just whipped out a notebook and made a note of this. "Assuming that we can trust your memory of events, then - what happened?"
Irana closed her eyes and said almost sleepily, "We had been out at the lake for only a week. We were to monitor levels of blue-green algae, to see if they were on the increase - Lake El'gygytgyn is almost free of - "
"Yawn," John interrupted from the front.
" - we were to be there for several months," Irana went on, acknowledging his interruption without acknowledging. "It was night, we had been drinking of course, and we were soon to go to sleep, when the noises started."
"What noises?" Mickey tried to alleviate the pressure on his spine and back muscles by leaning on his ruck-sack, but it was full of tines. He was rapidly starting to think that Ianto might well be the softest thing in the back of the helicopter.
"You realise we're going to have to fly all night in this rust bucket?" John complained from the pilot's seat. "It's going so slowly I can't even believe it stays in the fucking air."
"Russia is a big country," Irana said.
"I know, but if you at least had a fushion-powered wave-coll-"
"Would you mind shutting up?" Mickey growled.
"Charming," John muttered, taking a pull on his vodka. "This has almost run out," he complained, "I've only got two more. There'd better be some more at these trailers of yours or I'm going to be in a bad mood."
"There will be some," Irana assured him. "But I had to burn the rest to keep the animals away from me." She turned back to Ianto and Mickey. "The noises from outside, they sounded like perhaps something had got into our storage bins. As leader of the expedition, I was to go out and see; I took a torch and my shotgun, I stepped outside, there was nothing by the storage bins."
Mickey tried to settle himself against the tins of food in the hope that their smooth sides would be less awkward against his back.
"I went to make sure they were secure, something hit me in the back, very hard, and I lost my torch, my shotgun. I called for help," she sighed. "I got up just in time to see Jing Yuhao from Beijing University become two halves of a corpse. The animals, they were dark, stayed in the shadows - it was as if the shadows were with them, this was otherwise a very bright night, a … a fat moon, not quite full - I don't know the English for this -"
"Gibbous," Ianto said under his breath.
" - I could not see them clearly, only what they did. When you arrive you will see, there is nowhere for shadows to come from."
"How did you escape?" Mickey asked, because asking what they did seemed like a step too far. Irana looked at the back of John's seat for a long time.
"I hid in the lake. The water there is cold, but not was not frozen then. It is cold enough to kill in minutes, so I must have only been in there for seconds. It felt longer." She shuddered. It looked eerie on her, as if a robot had just cried, or a statue chuckled to itself. "I climbed out, I burnt all our emergency firewood, I burnt the vodka, I burnt the coverings for the bins, to warm myself and to make a signal to the animals that they should not come near." Irana dragged her gaze away from the back of the seat and looked at Mickey with the kind of stare he'd only ever seen on combatants before. "When the dawn came I found my torch. I found my shotgun. I packed our supplies, and I began to walk. It took nearly two weeks to find a village."
Ianto cleared his throat awkwardly. "And you didn't get to see what they looked like?"
"They were in darkness, all the time," Irana said distantly. "But I know they were not wolves."
"How?"
She smiled the ghost of a knife-wound smile. "In the morning, even the clothes my team had been wearing were gone. I have seen wolves eat human bodies before, Ianto Jones." She closed her eyes again. "Those were not wolves."
Mickey dozed for most of the flight, and woke up in pain; opposite him Irana's eyes were open, and she sat with her hands dangling from the wrists between her raised knees, in perfect silence.
He sat up. John was talking, though in such a low voice that Mickey couldn't work out what he was saying. Ianto's voice, however, was clear. All he was saying was, "Shut up. Shut up. SHUT UP. Shut. Up," over and over and over.
"What?" Mickey mumbled, brushing sleep from his eyes.
"We're here," John said, much louder and more clearly. "Or we're where the lovely doctor says the trailers are and - " he broke off. Mickey could only assume he was drinking more of his rocket fuel, " - there are two down there. They might be different ones, of course."
Irana got to her feet in one go, and leaned over the seat. "Yes," she said. "This is right. Land."
"Somehow I didn't think it was going to be somewhere else," John drawled.
Letting John land a helicopter made primarily of rust while reeking of spirits ranked quite high on the list of "stupidest things Mickey has done in his life so far", and it was appropriately painful and loud. By the time he got his feet back on the solid, icy-crunchy, almost grassless ground again, Mickey thought he'd developed a permanent phobia of flying, and several grey hairs.
As he took his bag down from the helicopter and looked about him, Mickey realized just how sarcastic John had been being; there was nothing but nothing as far as the eye could see, with a sodding great lake in it and a lot of wind. Right out in the distance, across the lake, there was some sort of mechanical tower thing, like an oil rig but tiny, and white.
"Americans," Irana said, following his gaze. "Drilling for samples. They are not here at the moment. There will be only us in the trailers."
Wind tore across the empty landscape and tugged at her sandy-blonde hair. Ianto swung his ruck-sack onto his shoulders, and without another word the four of them cross the windswept, desolate ground between helicopter and trailers.
"Here," Irana said, pointing to the two black plastic bins sunk into deep holes. They were encircled with a number of metal tent pegs, which must have been holding down the tarpaulin that had covered them. "This is where they knocked me down." She led them on to the door of one of the two trailers. "The wind and rain chase away all tracks. Tomorrow our footprints will be invisible."
The observation struck Mickey as inexplicably morbid.
Inside the trailer was surprisingly similar to a mobile home he'd stayed in on holiday with his Nan once, although without the postcards of Harlan Bay blue-takked to the walls and cupboards, or the flower-print curtains that had apparently been made in the 1970s. Mickey put his bag down with a sigh of relief - even in that short walk over, even with the thick hood of his coat raised, his ears had begun to sting with the chill of the wind.
"The other trailer is our field laboratory," Irana said, sitting on something that could only be called a sofa by the very charitably-minded. "We share with the Americans, with other research teams."
"We're going to have to sort this thing out before anyone else gets eaten," Ianto concluded.
"How?" John asked, sounding grumpy. He'd managed to find something to chew, and he hadn't removed his bearskin. "I wasn't allowed a gun. Not even a little one! Not even a knife. Mickey's power tool penis replacement is back at the hotel. The little robot dog with the silly voice … is back at the hotel. All we have is a shotgun, my incredible good looks, and no information." He slumped against a wall. "Team Useless are here to fail to save the day."
"Er, do you mind?" Mickey sighed.
"No."
"I'm the designated pessimist," Mickey pointed out.
"We can always check the area for traces … hair … residue from injuries," Ianto said, putting his coat hood back up with a look that bordered on resignation. "Come on."
"Alright. I'll take the area around the storage bins, you do the bit the other side of the scorch marks. John?"
"What now?"
"Other side of the trailers. Perhaps that's where they were hiding." Mickey put his hands over his face. "And give me some of that bloody vodka."
"I thought you said you didn't drink anymore?" Ianto said in a low voice as Mick put his coat back on.
"It's either that or freeze. I can make an exception," Mickey held out his hand across the room in a pincher shape and with a sour expression John dug a bottle of vodka from one of his many and capacious pockets.
They spent the rest of the daylight hours going over the area with a fine-toothed comb. Even as he worked, stooped over in the harsh winds, having to dart inside every hour to prevent frostbite from getting a grip on his naked fingers, Mickey was mentally penning his report. It consisted largely of: "Discovered nothing but new horizons on how cold and bored it is possible to get."
By the time the light began to fade all any of them had was a sample of earth stained with possibly-blood, which Ianto had scooped up outside the line of scorched earth, and he'd said several times it was probably boiled sap from the firewood or something. Even the ashes were gone, borne away by the wind in the month-long interval since Irana's desperate stand against the creatures in the darkness.
"We can at least scan that," Mickey said, as they removed their coats in the relative warmth of the trailer, and Ianto raised his eyebrows at the little plastic bag, "with the whatjacallit."
"Vortex Manipulator," John said, picking his teeth.
Ianto touched a couple of buttons on the wide leather strap at his wrist, hesitant, and frowned. Nothing happened. He tried again. "It's not … there's no response from anything. It's not even lighting up."
"Um, yeah." John looked uncomfortable. "There were one or two places on my old travels where it got a bit blocked … wouldn't start … fluctuations in the ionosphere or something."
"Or something?" Mickey demanded.
"I was a field agent, not a technician!" John protested, "I don't know how the bloody thing operates, I just used it!"
"Story of my life," Mickey muttered, disgruntled.
"So we're stuck out here with no way of communicating with Cardiff?" Ianto said in a faint voice. His face could have been the encyclopedia illustration for 'aghast'. "What do we do now?"
Irana, who had been watching the conversation from one of the doorways, inscrutable and silent, said, "Wait for them to come back."
"The animals?" Mickey was starting to think that John's vodka was a perfectly reasonable response to a perfectly impossible situation.
"If they don't come tonight, they will come tomorrow night. They can see the helicopter. They know there is prey for them." She picked up a clear bottle from beneath an empty Karibou bag and added, "in the meantime …"
"More vodka?" Ianto groaned.
"This is samogon," Irana corrected. "One of my graduate students brought it with him from Kiev. His uncle distills it. It is … very warming."
Mickey hung back. "I'm not sure it's a good idea to be hunting werewolves drunk."
"It's a fucking stupid one to try hunting them sober," John said, already dusting off a plastic mug with a kind of feverish eagerness.
It was dark, and the wind howled, but that was all. They ate packet soup, crisp bread, and tinned peaches, and John told them an anecdote about trying to smuggle opium into Singapore. Ianto called him a liar and several other names, his cheeks aglow with the flames of the samogon.
"You're beautiful when you're angry," John informed him, taking another shot of the eye-watering moonshine.
"What … what is between those two?" Irana asked Mickey quietly as Ianto called John something ferocious but so incoherent that Mickey couldn't tell if it was English, Welsh, Russian, or gibberish. Catching Mickey's expression she added, quite sympathetically, "Long story, perhaps?"
"Very short. Very predictable," Mickey sighed. John was waving a mug of samogon under Ianto's nose. Ianto looked queasy.
Irana didn't tell them much about herself, beyond having travelled to America to get her doctorate; instead she told Torchwood's Away Team about the significance of Lake El'gygytgyn, why the Americans had been drilling there.
"Not for oil. Hard to believe, but true," Irana said. Though their 'meal' was over, no one had moved from the tiny table. "This lake is very old - you see on maps that it is very round, too. That is because it was formed by a meteor crash, millions of years ago."
As one man the team sat up and began to pay much closer attention.
"Most lakes have been covered by glaciers, this far north. Further south, wildlife and men stir up the sediments. But here, so far from everywhere, the mud lies undisturbed. For millions of years, there are records for those who can interpret them. That is why the American scientists drill out here." Irana put the lid back on the samogon bottle almost off-handedly. "To tell the world how it has heated up and cooled down in the past. If these changes now are unusual, or usual."
"What," John said in a bored slur, "does this shit have to do with werewolves?"
"Maybe they've been here all along," Mickey suggested.
"What could live out here?" Irana said, ignoring John entirely and fixing Mickey with her intense stare. Whereas earlier this had made him feel as if she was burning him alive with her eyes, Mickey found the samogon had achieved the impossible and softened Irana's gaze to bearability. "There is barely any vegetation, no large mammals, no small mammals. Only three species of fish in the whole lake."
Mickey struggled for words - John had kidnapped the remainder of the murderously potent samogon, and Ianto appeared to have gone to sleep, his head on his folded forearms, making him look too young for his suit - and managed, "I've seen creatures that … don't need the same food as … as us. Things that - "
Irana stood up abruptly. "Come on."
"What?" Mickey peered up at her.
"Come with me," Irana said, heading for the partition door. John snickered, and Mickey kicked him under the table before getting up to follow her. "Torchwood," Irana said, pronouncing it correctly but misplacing the stresses. She shut the partition door behind them, and Mickey saw the two narrow beds, pushed together, and through the samogon fog he understood. "It is a stupid name," Irana said. "Your friend is right."
"He's not my friend," Mickey said hastily.
Irana snorted. "He will be. You are alone." It was not a question.
"And drunk." Mickey thought it was only fair to point this out, although it was fairly obvious.
"So am I." She removed her sweater the same way she walked - mechanically, with a tinge of the military, her movements suggesting somehow something feral. "We are only drunk in short bursts, Mickey Smith. We are always alone."
This is fucking horrible, Mickey thought wretchedly. Stop talking like that..
"You see the truth in that," Irana said baldly. She unlaced her boots as Mickey stood, undecided, his throat working. "Do not deny that you do."
"I do," said Mickey, and he kissed her.
CONTINUES