Fanfic - A Man of Goodwill [Torchwood: Ianto/Lisa]
Title: A Man of Goodwill
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Ianto/Lisa
Warnings: angst, weird formatting, spoilers for Cyberwoman
Summary: There are many ways that Ianto Jones' life could have gone.
Author's Notes: Experimenting with formatting here, as you'll clearly see. I've checked it on Firefox, Chrome, IE and Safari, and it seems to work fine. Hopefully it'll load all right for everyone.
Muchas gracias, Areale, for all your help with the technobabble. Tosh's section wouldn't exist without you. ♥
A Man of Goodwill
Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation. - Graham Greene
On Gwen’s first day at Torchwood, she discovered the miracle that was Ianto Jones’ coffee.
She didn’t even like coffee. Too much time spent serving it to her superiors, she suspected. Just the smell of it made her think of boring conferences and budget meetings. Ianto’s coffee, though, both smelled and tasted like nothing she’d ever had. The amount of milk and sugar in it was perfect, cutting the bitterness just enough to suit her palate.
“Ta, love,” she said, smiling as he set her second cup of the day down. A quick test-sip proved that it was just as good as the first had been.
He smiled at her and moved on over to Toshiko with his tray. The coffee was a tad too hot, so she let it sit for a few minutes before trying it again. Just right, and she drained half the cup in one go.
The third cup of coffee arrived at exactly the right temperature. Gwen barely noticed, absorbed as she was in trying to read the piles of what Owen had termed ‘newbie info.’
Ianto smiled a faint, ghost-like smile as he set the cup down, then disappeared into the archives.
The thing about Ianto was that he was very good at disappearing. He arrived punctually at work at seven. He made coffee thrice daily, and occasionally more when asked for. He processed any artefacts that had been discovered and did the paperwork. He kept up the tourist centre cover. He ended each day cleaning up the Hub and left at around nine. At seven the next day, he was back in the Hub, getting things ready for the others.
Ianto was part of the background. He wasn’t as prodigiously intelligent as Toshiko, as important as Owen, as oddly knowing as Jack or as vivacious as Gwen. Ianto was simply there, with a cup of coffee or replacement stationery, whisking away completed work and providing food and emptying rubbish.
The first week that Ianto had worked at Torchwood Three, the team had gone out together for drinks twice. The first time had been four days after he’d begun. They hadn’t asked him if he’d like to go along. On the third day after Gwen began at Torchwood Three, the team went out together for drinks. She’d left with Jack’s arm around her shoulders and babbling happily to Toshiko and Owen.
The thing about Ianto was that he was very good at disappearing.
Sometimes, Ianto wonders what other paths his life might have taken, had he simply made a few different decisions. He sits down and writes lists that he burns afterwards.
Toshiko sighed in frustration as the computer informed her that the programme she’d been trying to write had yet another bug in it somewhere. She’d spent days trying to work out this new system, but it simply refused to cooperate.
Ianto set a cup of coffee down on her table, along with a plate of chocolate biscuits. “Trouble?” he asked politely.
She waved absently at the screen, picking up her coffee. “Doesn’t want to work,” she complained. “See, it’s throwing me null pointer exceptions - or the equivalent, anyway. And then this pointer obviously got messed up here, because I’m getting garbage from it, right? So it looks like the pointer got lost, or I’ve run out of space, or the alien tech isn’t migrating properly to the IDE I’m using.”
Ianto looked thoughtful. “Have you tried that tech migration tool you said you used the last time? The one you -”
“No,” Toshiko interrupted in frustration. “It’s not really equipped for this. I modded it a lot, but this one, I’ve had to actually do some bit-banging, really low-level stuff.”
Ianto blinked. “Wow.”
Toshiko smiled at him, sipping at her coffee. “Fun stuff, right? Anyway, I cobbled together some device drivers, but…”
“Memory problems?” Ianto offered.
Toshiko blinked, slowly adopting an intent look. “You know, the drivers access specific parts of the memory and the processor pins, since they’re basically custom-made - you know, like virtual ports?”
Ianto didn’t know the first thing about virtual ports, but he gave her an encouraging look. “Right, so…”
“So!” Toshiko said with growing enthusiasm. “I just need to look through the compiler and figure out where it’s allocating that space… see if it’s conflicting with something else…” She set her coffee down and dove back into work with renewed energy. “Thanks, Ianto.”
She didn’t look up to see the small smile on Ianto’s face. Consequently, she also missed the way it faded when Owen bellowed for his coffee.
Everyone ate at work. That much was a given. If they hadn’t brought their own food, Ianto would order what they wanted. Generally, they tried to plan their work schedules around lunch, so that they all had an hour or so to relax with each other. Even Owen reluctantly took part in these gossip-fests, though he admittedly spent most of the time taunting everyone and unsubtly flirting with Gwen.
One afternoon every week, Ianto joined them. It served to prevent any suspicions being raised about him. He staggered the days, but couldn’t bring himself to eat with them any more frequently. Being around them made him nauseous, sometimes.
He never had dinner at the Hub, though, even if he was working overtime. Dinners were reserved for home, where he would put together one of the five dishes he knew how to make. He would, while cooking, remember being taught how to make that particular dish. He would remember the laughter, the burned meat, the soggy vegetables, the culinary disaster that he had once been. That he still was, save for these five dishes. She had taught him to be otherwise.
Dinners were for home, for the place Lisa would come back to soon. And after he’d finished eating, had finished cleaning up and had showered, Ianto went back out.
Most of the team only knew of two entrances to the Hub - two lifts, one invisible and the other leading to the cog door. The second lift stopped at three levels, one at the tourist information centre and the other two at subterranean private car-parks that gave Torchwood the privacy to bring aliens into the Hub. Those two were more than enough for most.
Ianto had studied the layout of the Hub for a week before bringing Lisa in. As such, he knew about the seventeen other entrances and exits hidden throughout the place. It was through one of these that he came back into the Hub that night. The Torchwood Three Hub was considerably more extensive than most of the team realised, and Ianto had grown inexplicably fond of the catacombs he now traversed.
Lisa stayed deep in the lower levels of the Hub, safely hidden away from prying eyes. On her more lucid days, she joked about the mildew and how much money it would take to keep a place like this heated. On her more morbid days, she talked about how she felt like she’d already been entombed.
“Hello, love,” Ianto said, dropping a kiss on her lips. They were dry again, and he made a note to bring some lip moisturiser with him next time. The strawberry-flavoured stuff. She loved that, and he loved licking it off her lips, so it all worked out fine.
She blinked at him slowly. Long, lazy sweeps of her lashes.
“I think I might have found someone,” Ianto said, settling down beside her. He took her hand. “An expert on cybernetics. I’m going to do a little more research on him, see if I can’t find some leverage to get him to be quiet.” He smiled. “I’ll find something, don’t worry. Everyone has something they don’t want known.”
Lisa’s lips moved slightly, as if struggling to curve upwards. It took her almost a minute to manage the smile.
“From what I’ve read about him, he’ll be able to help you,” Ianto went on, smiling back at her. “If he seems safe, I’ll email him and see what he says. All right?”
“Okay,” Lisa said hoarsely, painfully, as if she couldn’t quite remember how to speak.
“Okay,” Ianto said, positively beaming at her. “He’ll get you back to normal soon, Lisa, you wait and see. And then we’re out of here. No more bloody Torchwood. Go live on a farm somewhere, what d’you say?”
“City girl,” Lisa panted out. Her eyes were laughing.
“Fine, fine,” Ianto said. “But somewhere quiet. No more machines and things.” He frowned in distaste at the conversion unit to which Lisa was strapped, at the tubes and pumps keeping her alive.
“You know our ways,” Lisa said, her voice sounding nothing like her voice. Her hand clenched convulsively around Ianto’s, and he jumped.
“Lisa?” he asked hesitantly.
“I - I, god, it hurts,” she cried. “Ianto!”
He jumped to his feet, checking the morphine levels in the drip. Given how much she already had in her system, he couldn’t safely increase the dosage. “I’m sorry, love,” he whispered. “I can’t give you any more painkillers.”
“It hurts,” she said, shuddering as tears ran down her face. They trailed over brown skin and almost immediately stopped at protruding metal. Ianto reached out and wiped them away, hating the way metal framed Lisa’s face. He’d loved her earrings once, those big silver hoops she liked to wear. When she got better, he thought he might ask her to throw them away.
“Ianto,” she said. “Help me.”
“There’s nothing more I can do,” Ianto said, holding her hand tightly. “Ride out the pain, Lisa, I’m so sorry, there’s nothing more I can do.”
As he watched, he could see lucidity slip from her eyes. “You know our ways,” she said in that same, distant voice. “You are a rogue element.” Then, mercifully, she fell unconscious again, her fingers going slack in his grip.
Ianto stared at her in terror. She’d sounded nothing like his Lisa just then. And he remembered, god how he remembered those implacable voices, delete, delete, delete the rogue elements.
Delete, exterminate, all fire and dust in the end.
She couldn’t be. She couldn’t.
This was the first time it had happened, Ianto told himself sternly. It had been the pain. A slight slip, no more. She would soon be healed and then they could leave this nightmare behind them. This was only the first time it had happened (that he knew of, a sly voice told him, sounding suspiciously like Jack); they still had time.
“Rogue element?” Ianto murmured in confusion. The phrase sounded familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it, his mind skittering away from deciphering its meaning. “I suppose I am, at that.” He took a deep breath and stroked what little of her skin was available to him. She was cool to the touch, a kind of cool that had nothing to do with the dampness of their surroundings. Metal-cold. Ianto wanted desperately to rip the metal off her, touch warm flesh again.
But he’d have to wait. He would talk to Tanizaki, and Tanizaki would come and help Lisa. Even if he had no humanitarian impulse, the lure of studying a partially-converted Cyberman would surely bring him to Cardiff. And he would be able to help her, and then they could finally escape this bloody place, could finally get on with their lives. Find their happy ending.
Ianto checked Lisa’s vitals once more, kissed her goodnight, then left the way he’d arrived.
Owen Harper was hung-over.
This was not an uncommon state of affairs, though he had admittedly gotten a bit better after the time when Jack had lost his patience and yelled at Owen. Making Jack lose his patience through unprofessional behaviour was a legendary feat in and of itself. Jack, after all, wasn’t really the epitome of professionalism himself. For Owen to have pushed him that far, everyone agreed, Owen had really buggered things up.
In any case, Owen had stopped coming to work drunk since then, and had reduced the number of times he came to work hung-over. It wasn’t quite fair, he thought, to expect more of him. It didn’t take all that much concentration to chop up an alien body anyway.
He made the final stitches, sewing the dead Weevil back up together. It had died from a hit-and-run, all right, and no surprise that the driver hadn’t stopped, if he’d seen what it was he’d run over.
Ianto waited until Owen had finished scrubbing his hands clean, then handed over the cup of coffee. “Team meeting in the conference room now,” he told Owen. “Jack wants to hear your report on this guy.” He nodded at the dead Weevil. “And Tosh has a presentation to give.”
“Wonderful,” Owen grumbled, stalking past Ianto with his coffee. Ianto eyed the dead Weevil speculatively, then sighed and began the difficult work of transferring it into the morgue. After a few minutes of struggling with the heavy body, he managed to get it into the drawer and sent it down. He’d deal with it later, he decided, and headed to the conference room, slipping in just as Owen was wrapping up his brief report.
“Bruising and internal injuries all consistent with vehicular trauma,” Owen reported. He looked a bit more alive after getting some caffeine into his system. “Judging from the location of the bruising and broken bones, I’d say it was a truck, or at least a biggish van.”
“Makes sense,” Jack said thoughtfully. “I can’t see even a car killing a Weevil. Knocking it out, yeah, injuring it, yeah. Killing?”
“Doesn’t seem likely, does it?” Toshiko said, smiling.
“I’m still having a hard time believing anything keeps those things down,” Gwen said.
“Well, now we know what it takes,” Owen said. “Nice, big truck.”
“Is it at all possible a car could kill a Weevil?” Jack asked.
“If you’re lucky,” Owen said. “Or if the Weevil’s unlucky, however you want to look at it. It depends on where you hit it and how fast, whether you cause internal trauma or not.”
“And it’s the bleeding on the inside that counts,” Ianto murmured, but so softly that no one heard him.
When Ianto sleeps, he dreams of fire and metal. In his dreams, his skin is painted in red and orange. He cannot tell where the blood ends and the flames begin. His skin splits and he bleeds lava, fiery molten streams that cool and harden into dull silver. In his dreams, he sees Lisa standing before him as she was, human, whole. She watches him with unspeakably sad eyes as he screams. Lisa, Lisa, help me, he screams, and she watches with her sad truffle eyes.
When Ianto sleeps, he dreams of the future. Lisa will be healthy again. Her skin will bear faint traces of scarring where metal was once grafted on it. The scarring does not disturb them. It serves merely as a reminder of what is past. They have survived this and now they know they will survive anything. A child rounds Lisa’s belly and the scars flex protectively over it, a starburst cradling their baby.
When Ianto sleeps, he dreams of Torchwood. His first day at work had been regimented, controlled, boring. His other first day at work had been chaotic, hectic, and positively anarchist. He relives both days, One and Three, one after the other, other after the one, both at once. He redreams both days and wakes up forgetting who he is.
“You life-saver, you,” Jack sighed thankfully.
“Part of my job, sir,” Ianto said, handing Jack his cup of coffee. He set the last plate down on Jack’s desk and folded the empty tray against his chest.
“What’s that?” Jack asked in interest.
“New kind of cake from that bakery you like,” Ianto told him. “I thought you might like to try it.”
“Is it chocolate?” Jack asked, picking up a fork and slicing into the cake.
“Chocolate and coffee,” Ianto said. “A little like tiramisu. Owen asked me to tell you that he’s finished the autopsy on the Hoix from last week. Would you like to keep the body or incinerate it?”
“Burn it,” Jack said. “We know all we need to about Hoixes. How’d it die?”
“It did, in fact, poison itself,” Ianto said neutrally. “Apparently, a car battery is lethal even for a Hoix.”
“Always good to know,” Jack said. “Mm, good cake.”
“Tosh also asked me to pass on a message,” Ianto went on. “She’s finished writing the new security programme, and wants to know if she can set up a dummy server to distract the government hackers. She thinks she can make it look realistic enough - without giving anything important away - to keep them from realising they’ve been duped.”
“Hm, it’s a good idea,” Jack said thoughtfully. “As things are now, she spends more time fending off attacks than doing her own work.”
“You’d need to go through a list of what she can offer them,” Ianto said. “Probably the harmless tech, things like that.”
“Yeah, I’ll talk to her,” Jack said. “Anything else?”
Ianto inclined his head slightly. “Gwen believes that she might have a lead on the ghost sightings in the Norwegian Church. She’s picked up traces of transposition energy in the region.”
“Someone’s got a teleport,” Jack filled in, tapping his fork against his lips.
“It would appear so,” Ianto said. “She’s looking for a pattern. If she finds it, she wants to stake out the place and see if she can’t catch whoever it is before they can get away again.”
“Not alone,” Jack said. “Tell her to take Tosh or Owen with her if she’s going.”
“Of course, sir,” Ianto said.
“And anything from you?” Jack asked.
“Not much,” Ianto said. “The reorganisation of the archives is proceeding according to schedule. I’ve updated the database with a number of species discovered pre-2000. Would you like me to organise the items catalogue when I’m done with that?”
“Yeah, why not,” Jack said, scraping the last bits of chocolate frosting off the plate. “See if you can come up with a better system than what we’ve got now.”
“Considering the present system appears to be ‘toss them wherever there’s space,’” Ianto said politely, “I doubt that will be difficult.” He picked up the empty plate and turned smartly on his heel, leaving a chuckling Jack behind him.
The problem with living a double life is that you don’t get enough sleep. Ianto reflects on this as he checks Lisa’s medicines again. He gets by on four hours of sleep each day. Five, if he’s lucky. He doesn’t like leaving Lisa alone for longer than is absolutely necessary.
He knows she appreciates these visits, though her lucid periods are few and far between now. Ianto finishes altering the dosages and settles down beside her with a book.
“Bond,” she says. “Again?”
“Good literature,” Ianto tells her. “Very deep, philosophical questions.”
She looks like she wants to laugh. Ianto pretends she’s capable of it. He opens to the first page, begins to read out loud to her.
“The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning,” he reads. He pretends to continue reciting from the page. “The same could be said of secret agencies, James thought, but you’d have to add stale coffee to the mix. At least he would be able to continue the lovely alliterative ‘s’s, the pattern of which pleased him.”
Lisa makes a gurgling sort of sound. Ianto takes it to mean laughter.
“See,” he says. “He’s a person who thinks about important things.” He glances down at the book. “Soul-eroding gambling and all that. Maybe we could go to Las Vegas when you’re better. Lose a bit of money at cards, get married by Elvis.”
“Ring,” she says, and he smiles.
“Well, it’s been burning a hole in my pocket for the past five months,” he says casually. “What’s a few more?”
Lisa’s eyes widen, first in surprise, then in something like horror. He has the barest moment to wonder if he shouldn’t have said that, and then her eyes go dead.
“Lisa?” he breathes in horror.
“Upgrading is incomplete,” she says. “Processing.”
“No, no, no,” he cries frantically, darting to the life-support systems, trying to make sense of the new readings screaming at him. He shuts down the sounds, terrified that he’ll draw attention. The pneumatic compresser that keeps Lisa’s lungs inflated wheezes asthmatically at him. He works feverishly, changing terminals, ports, anything to stop what he knows is happening.
“Upgrading paused,” Lisa says, and Ianto nearly collapses where he stands.
“Upgrading is incomplete,” she says. “Processing.”
“No!” he cries, the book tumbling unnoticed from his lap as he runs to the monitors. She’s beginning to fade and he frantically digs through his stolen cache of medicine. Finally, he finds the stimulant and injects it into her. Even if he had a crash cart here, there’s no telling how the cybernetics would react to an electrical pulse, so this is all he can rely on.
“Not losing you now,” he says, disabling the alarms for fear that someone will hear them. “I can’t lose you now, please!”
“Lisa?” he asks.
She doesn’t respond. Her eyes are open - a side-effect of the medication, he knows. She isn’t seeing him, not anymore. Cold certainty grips at his heart as he remembers something he doesn’t want to.
You know our ways. You are a rogue element.
“Oh, Lisa,” he whispers, kissing her lips softly. He caresses her face for a few minutes. Pushes her eyelids down gently. She looks like she is sleeping, cradled in protective armour.
It takes him an hour before he can bring himself to move from her side.
It takes him another half an hour to bring himself to turn off the life-support.
It takes one minute for Lisa to die.
He moves towards her slowly, terrified but hopeful. Her eyes are wide open, though only as a side-effect of the medication. Lisa’s asleep now, safely protected in her own mind.
“I’ll e-mail Tanizaki tomorrow,” Ianto promises her, nervously checking the life-support systems. “I’ll bring him here, whatever it takes.”
(Stop the story. We know how this ends.)
She breathes deeply, suddenly. Ianto checks her heart-rate. Still unsteady, still uncertain. He doesn’t dare give her any more medicine, and so tries changing some of the ports instead. Interrupting the process might slow the attack, give her time to fight back. And she will, she’s strong, he knows that. She’ll fight to stay with him.
Lisa’s eyes fly wide open. Ianto hardly dares to breathe as he makes his way over to her again.
“Lisa?” he asks, tentatively.
Her eyes stay open, unseeing. He reaches out and touches her metal-cold skin. It takes a great effort for him to turn and check the monitors.
Cold green words tell him what he doesn’t want to know. She’s gone. He couldn’t save her and she’s gone.
“Lisa,” he whispers.
It is a long time before he can think again. Slowly, methodically, he begins to dismantle the conversion unit. Jack cannot be allowed to know what has been kept here in his basement all this while. At the very least, he can shield the team from this horror. The metal comes apart easily in his hands, bits and pieces of a shattered life.
The incinerator is two levels up. Ianto carefully packs all the metal fragments together and brings them up, firing up the incinerator and making sure everything is completely destroyed. The alien tech incorporated into the machine ensures that even the metal is turned to ashes, not just melted down.
But Lisa’s body. Lisa’s body. What is he to do with Lisa’s body?
She has a grave, a grave with no body. He could bring her there, he thinks wildly. He could bury her in the grave she already has. And then cold logic takes over, laughs at the impossible suggestion. There is only one thing he can do.
He can barely see through the tears as he heaves her body into the incinerator.
What now? What does he have left to him, now that she’s gone?
“Ianto!” Jack called. “Any chance of a coffee?”
“I’ll put it on now,” Ianto said. “Anyone else?”
“Yeah, and make it strong,” Owen said.
“I’ll take one too,” Gwen said.
“Me too,” Toshiko said.
“Of course,” Ianto said, heading towards the kitchenette. Behind him, he could hear Jack talking to the others.
“Okay, time for a meeting,” Jack said. “I want to hear how your projects are going. Ianto! Bring the coffees to the conference room!”
“Yes, sir,” he replied without looking back. In the kitchenette, he measured out the coffee carefully, hesitating only when it came to adding enough for the fifth cup. After a moment’s consideration, he left out the extra couple of spoonfuls. A few minutes later, four perfect cups of coffee sat on the tray. In the centre, he placed a plate with an assortment of biscuits. Chocolate for Toshiko, almond biscotti for Gwen, pecan for Owen, lemon shortbread for Jack.
Balancing the tray neatly, he headed for the conference room. He slipped in quietly as Toshiko explained the new detectors she’d been working with. Coffee to each person, biscuits on the table, and Ianto retreated as silently as he’d entered.
Outside the room, the sounds and sights of the Hub pressed down on him. Squaring his shoulders, his eyes carefully blank, Ianto picked up a rubbish bag and began to clean up.
~fin
Constructive criticism is always welcome!
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Ianto/Lisa
Warnings: angst, weird formatting, spoilers for Cyberwoman
Summary: There are many ways that Ianto Jones' life could have gone.
Author's Notes: Experimenting with formatting here, as you'll clearly see. I've checked it on Firefox, Chrome, IE and Safari, and it seems to work fine. Hopefully it'll load all right for everyone.
Muchas gracias, Areale, for all your help with the technobabble. Tosh's section wouldn't exist without you. ♥
A Man of Goodwill
Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation. - Graham Greene
On Gwen’s first day at Torchwood, she discovered the miracle that was Ianto Jones’ coffee.
She didn’t even like coffee. Too much time spent serving it to her superiors, she suspected. Just the smell of it made her think of boring conferences and budget meetings. Ianto’s coffee, though, both smelled and tasted like nothing she’d ever had. The amount of milk and sugar in it was perfect, cutting the bitterness just enough to suit her palate.
“Ta, love,” she said, smiling as he set her second cup of the day down. A quick test-sip proved that it was just as good as the first had been.
He smiled at her and moved on over to Toshiko with his tray. The coffee was a tad too hot, so she let it sit for a few minutes before trying it again. Just right, and she drained half the cup in one go.
The third cup of coffee arrived at exactly the right temperature. Gwen barely noticed, absorbed as she was in trying to read the piles of what Owen had termed ‘newbie info.’
Ianto smiled a faint, ghost-like smile as he set the cup down, then disappeared into the archives.
The thing about Ianto was that he was very good at disappearing. He arrived punctually at work at seven. He made coffee thrice daily, and occasionally more when asked for. He processed any artefacts that had been discovered and did the paperwork. He kept up the tourist centre cover. He ended each day cleaning up the Hub and left at around nine. At seven the next day, he was back in the Hub, getting things ready for the others.
Ianto was part of the background. He wasn’t as prodigiously intelligent as Toshiko, as important as Owen, as oddly knowing as Jack or as vivacious as Gwen. Ianto was simply there, with a cup of coffee or replacement stationery, whisking away completed work and providing food and emptying rubbish.
The first week that Ianto had worked at Torchwood Three, the team had gone out together for drinks twice. The first time had been four days after he’d begun. They hadn’t asked him if he’d like to go along. On the third day after Gwen began at Torchwood Three, the team went out together for drinks. She’d left with Jack’s arm around her shoulders and babbling happily to Toshiko and Owen.
The thing about Ianto was that he was very good at disappearing.
Sometimes, Ianto wonders what other paths his life might have taken, had he simply made a few different decisions. He sits down and writes lists that he burns afterwards.
- Move to London.
- Work odd jobs.
- Drift. Live an unsatisfactory life. Wonder constantly if there isn’t more out there. More for him. More to him.
- Drift. Eventually, by chance, be noticed by Torchwood. Be recruited.
- Drift. Live an unsatisfactory life. Wonder constantly if there isn’t more out there. More for him. More to him.
- Go to university.
- Graduate a near-failure. Academics have never been an interest. Drift. See 1a.
- Graduate at the top of his class. Be snapped up to a good job. Work hard, get promoted. Become rich. Marry, settle down. Never wonder if there isn’t more out there.
- Graduate an average student, as he is in all else. Drift. See 1a.
- Graduate a near-failure. Academics have never been an interest. Drift. See 1a.
- Get mugged his first night.
- Get killed.
- Get robbed of all his money. No rent. No flat. No food. No friends. Live on the streets, panhandling for change.
- Find help in the form of a kind Samaritan. Brown skin, sweet eyes, big smile.
- Get killed.
- Be recruited by Torchwood.
- Remain a junior staff member forever.
- Scale the ranks rapidly. What they call a meteoric rise. Don’t think about meteors crashing, burning.
- Remain a junior staff member forever.
- If 1c(iii)., 1d.: Meet Lisa.
- Make a fool of himself.
- Impress her.
- Make a fool of himself, but somehow still leave a good impression.
- Make a fool of himself.
- If 1e.: Ask Lisa out.
- Crash and burn.
- She accepts. The beginning of a life shapes itself. See 1b(ii).
- Crash and burn.
- If 1d., 1e(ii)./(iii)., 1f(ii).: Be in Torchwood Tower when the Battle begins.
- Die.
- Be converted.
- Be converted, and then killed.
- Be deleted.
- Be exterminated.
- Escape.
- Find Lisa, alive. Escape.
- Find Lisa, dead.
- Find Lisa, half-converted.
- Die.
- If 1g(vii).: Escape Torchwood. Run and never look back. See 1b(ii).
- If 1g(viii).: See 1a(i)/1c(i).
- If 1g(ix): Save her.
- Work odd jobs.
- Stay in Newport.
- Be killed by his father.
- Kill his father.
- Turn out like his father.
- Kill himself.
- Be killed by his father.
Toshiko sighed in frustration as the computer informed her that the programme she’d been trying to write had yet another bug in it somewhere. She’d spent days trying to work out this new system, but it simply refused to cooperate.
Ianto set a cup of coffee down on her table, along with a plate of chocolate biscuits. “Trouble?” he asked politely.
She waved absently at the screen, picking up her coffee. “Doesn’t want to work,” she complained. “See, it’s throwing me null pointer exceptions - or the equivalent, anyway. And then this pointer obviously got messed up here, because I’m getting garbage from it, right? So it looks like the pointer got lost, or I’ve run out of space, or the alien tech isn’t migrating properly to the IDE I’m using.”
Ianto looked thoughtful. “Have you tried that tech migration tool you said you used the last time? The one you -”
“No,” Toshiko interrupted in frustration. “It’s not really equipped for this. I modded it a lot, but this one, I’ve had to actually do some bit-banging, really low-level stuff.”
Ianto blinked. “Wow.”
Toshiko smiled at him, sipping at her coffee. “Fun stuff, right? Anyway, I cobbled together some device drivers, but…”
“Memory problems?” Ianto offered.
Toshiko blinked, slowly adopting an intent look. “You know, the drivers access specific parts of the memory and the processor pins, since they’re basically custom-made - you know, like virtual ports?”
Ianto didn’t know the first thing about virtual ports, but he gave her an encouraging look. “Right, so…”
“So!” Toshiko said with growing enthusiasm. “I just need to look through the compiler and figure out where it’s allocating that space… see if it’s conflicting with something else…” She set her coffee down and dove back into work with renewed energy. “Thanks, Ianto.”
She didn’t look up to see the small smile on Ianto’s face. Consequently, she also missed the way it faded when Owen bellowed for his coffee.
Everyone ate at work. That much was a given. If they hadn’t brought their own food, Ianto would order what they wanted. Generally, they tried to plan their work schedules around lunch, so that they all had an hour or so to relax with each other. Even Owen reluctantly took part in these gossip-fests, though he admittedly spent most of the time taunting everyone and unsubtly flirting with Gwen.
One afternoon every week, Ianto joined them. It served to prevent any suspicions being raised about him. He staggered the days, but couldn’t bring himself to eat with them any more frequently. Being around them made him nauseous, sometimes.
He never had dinner at the Hub, though, even if he was working overtime. Dinners were reserved for home, where he would put together one of the five dishes he knew how to make. He would, while cooking, remember being taught how to make that particular dish. He would remember the laughter, the burned meat, the soggy vegetables, the culinary disaster that he had once been. That he still was, save for these five dishes. She had taught him to be otherwise.
Dinners were for home, for the place Lisa would come back to soon. And after he’d finished eating, had finished cleaning up and had showered, Ianto went back out.
Most of the team only knew of two entrances to the Hub - two lifts, one invisible and the other leading to the cog door. The second lift stopped at three levels, one at the tourist information centre and the other two at subterranean private car-parks that gave Torchwood the privacy to bring aliens into the Hub. Those two were more than enough for most.
Ianto had studied the layout of the Hub for a week before bringing Lisa in. As such, he knew about the seventeen other entrances and exits hidden throughout the place. It was through one of these that he came back into the Hub that night. The Torchwood Three Hub was considerably more extensive than most of the team realised, and Ianto had grown inexplicably fond of the catacombs he now traversed.
Lisa stayed deep in the lower levels of the Hub, safely hidden away from prying eyes. On her more lucid days, she joked about the mildew and how much money it would take to keep a place like this heated. On her more morbid days, she talked about how she felt like she’d already been entombed.
“Hello, love,” Ianto said, dropping a kiss on her lips. They were dry again, and he made a note to bring some lip moisturiser with him next time. The strawberry-flavoured stuff. She loved that, and he loved licking it off her lips, so it all worked out fine.
She blinked at him slowly. Long, lazy sweeps of her lashes.
“I think I might have found someone,” Ianto said, settling down beside her. He took her hand. “An expert on cybernetics. I’m going to do a little more research on him, see if I can’t find some leverage to get him to be quiet.” He smiled. “I’ll find something, don’t worry. Everyone has something they don’t want known.”
Lisa’s lips moved slightly, as if struggling to curve upwards. It took her almost a minute to manage the smile.
“From what I’ve read about him, he’ll be able to help you,” Ianto went on, smiling back at her. “If he seems safe, I’ll email him and see what he says. All right?”
“Okay,” Lisa said hoarsely, painfully, as if she couldn’t quite remember how to speak.
“Okay,” Ianto said, positively beaming at her. “He’ll get you back to normal soon, Lisa, you wait and see. And then we’re out of here. No more bloody Torchwood. Go live on a farm somewhere, what d’you say?”
“City girl,” Lisa panted out. Her eyes were laughing.
“Fine, fine,” Ianto said. “But somewhere quiet. No more machines and things.” He frowned in distaste at the conversion unit to which Lisa was strapped, at the tubes and pumps keeping her alive.
“You know our ways,” Lisa said, her voice sounding nothing like her voice. Her hand clenched convulsively around Ianto’s, and he jumped.
“Lisa?” he asked hesitantly.
“I - I, god, it hurts,” she cried. “Ianto!”
He jumped to his feet, checking the morphine levels in the drip. Given how much she already had in her system, he couldn’t safely increase the dosage. “I’m sorry, love,” he whispered. “I can’t give you any more painkillers.”
“It hurts,” she said, shuddering as tears ran down her face. They trailed over brown skin and almost immediately stopped at protruding metal. Ianto reached out and wiped them away, hating the way metal framed Lisa’s face. He’d loved her earrings once, those big silver hoops she liked to wear. When she got better, he thought he might ask her to throw them away.
“Ianto,” she said. “Help me.”
“There’s nothing more I can do,” Ianto said, holding her hand tightly. “Ride out the pain, Lisa, I’m so sorry, there’s nothing more I can do.”
As he watched, he could see lucidity slip from her eyes. “You know our ways,” she said in that same, distant voice. “You are a rogue element.” Then, mercifully, she fell unconscious again, her fingers going slack in his grip.
Ianto stared at her in terror. She’d sounded nothing like his Lisa just then. And he remembered, god how he remembered those implacable voices, delete, delete, delete the rogue elements.
Delete, exterminate, all fire and dust in the end.
She couldn’t be. She couldn’t.
This was the first time it had happened, Ianto told himself sternly. It had been the pain. A slight slip, no more. She would soon be healed and then they could leave this nightmare behind them. This was only the first time it had happened (that he knew of, a sly voice told him, sounding suspiciously like Jack); they still had time.
“Rogue element?” Ianto murmured in confusion. The phrase sounded familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it, his mind skittering away from deciphering its meaning. “I suppose I am, at that.” He took a deep breath and stroked what little of her skin was available to him. She was cool to the touch, a kind of cool that had nothing to do with the dampness of their surroundings. Metal-cold. Ianto wanted desperately to rip the metal off her, touch warm flesh again.
But he’d have to wait. He would talk to Tanizaki, and Tanizaki would come and help Lisa. Even if he had no humanitarian impulse, the lure of studying a partially-converted Cyberman would surely bring him to Cardiff. And he would be able to help her, and then they could finally escape this bloody place, could finally get on with their lives. Find their happy ending.
Ianto checked Lisa’s vitals once more, kissed her goodnight, then left the way he’d arrived.
Owen Harper was hung-over.
This was not an uncommon state of affairs, though he had admittedly gotten a bit better after the time when Jack had lost his patience and yelled at Owen. Making Jack lose his patience through unprofessional behaviour was a legendary feat in and of itself. Jack, after all, wasn’t really the epitome of professionalism himself. For Owen to have pushed him that far, everyone agreed, Owen had really buggered things up.
In any case, Owen had stopped coming to work drunk since then, and had reduced the number of times he came to work hung-over. It wasn’t quite fair, he thought, to expect more of him. It didn’t take all that much concentration to chop up an alien body anyway.
He made the final stitches, sewing the dead Weevil back up together. It had died from a hit-and-run, all right, and no surprise that the driver hadn’t stopped, if he’d seen what it was he’d run over.
Ianto waited until Owen had finished scrubbing his hands clean, then handed over the cup of coffee. “Team meeting in the conference room now,” he told Owen. “Jack wants to hear your report on this guy.” He nodded at the dead Weevil. “And Tosh has a presentation to give.”
“Wonderful,” Owen grumbled, stalking past Ianto with his coffee. Ianto eyed the dead Weevil speculatively, then sighed and began the difficult work of transferring it into the morgue. After a few minutes of struggling with the heavy body, he managed to get it into the drawer and sent it down. He’d deal with it later, he decided, and headed to the conference room, slipping in just as Owen was wrapping up his brief report.
“Bruising and internal injuries all consistent with vehicular trauma,” Owen reported. He looked a bit more alive after getting some caffeine into his system. “Judging from the location of the bruising and broken bones, I’d say it was a truck, or at least a biggish van.”
“Makes sense,” Jack said thoughtfully. “I can’t see even a car killing a Weevil. Knocking it out, yeah, injuring it, yeah. Killing?”
“Doesn’t seem likely, does it?” Toshiko said, smiling.
“I’m still having a hard time believing anything keeps those things down,” Gwen said.
“Well, now we know what it takes,” Owen said. “Nice, big truck.”
“Is it at all possible a car could kill a Weevil?” Jack asked.
“If you’re lucky,” Owen said. “Or if the Weevil’s unlucky, however you want to look at it. It depends on where you hit it and how fast, whether you cause internal trauma or not.”
“And it’s the bleeding on the inside that counts,” Ianto murmured, but so softly that no one heard him.
When Ianto sleeps, he dreams of fire and metal. In his dreams, his skin is painted in red and orange. He cannot tell where the blood ends and the flames begin. His skin splits and he bleeds lava, fiery molten streams that cool and harden into dull silver. In his dreams, he sees Lisa standing before him as she was, human, whole. She watches him with unspeakably sad eyes as he screams. Lisa, Lisa, help me, he screams, and she watches with her sad truffle eyes.
When Ianto sleeps, he dreams of the future. Lisa will be healthy again. Her skin will bear faint traces of scarring where metal was once grafted on it. The scarring does not disturb them. It serves merely as a reminder of what is past. They have survived this and now they know they will survive anything. A child rounds Lisa’s belly and the scars flex protectively over it, a starburst cradling their baby.
When Ianto sleeps, he dreams of Torchwood. His first day at work had been regimented, controlled, boring. His other first day at work had been chaotic, hectic, and positively anarchist. He relives both days, One and Three, one after the other, other after the one, both at once. He redreams both days and wakes up forgetting who he is.
“You life-saver, you,” Jack sighed thankfully.
“Part of my job, sir,” Ianto said, handing Jack his cup of coffee. He set the last plate down on Jack’s desk and folded the empty tray against his chest.
“What’s that?” Jack asked in interest.
“New kind of cake from that bakery you like,” Ianto told him. “I thought you might like to try it.”
“Is it chocolate?” Jack asked, picking up a fork and slicing into the cake.
“Chocolate and coffee,” Ianto said. “A little like tiramisu. Owen asked me to tell you that he’s finished the autopsy on the Hoix from last week. Would you like to keep the body or incinerate it?”
“Burn it,” Jack said. “We know all we need to about Hoixes. How’d it die?”
“It did, in fact, poison itself,” Ianto said neutrally. “Apparently, a car battery is lethal even for a Hoix.”
“Always good to know,” Jack said. “Mm, good cake.”
“Tosh also asked me to pass on a message,” Ianto went on. “She’s finished writing the new security programme, and wants to know if she can set up a dummy server to distract the government hackers. She thinks she can make it look realistic enough - without giving anything important away - to keep them from realising they’ve been duped.”
“Hm, it’s a good idea,” Jack said thoughtfully. “As things are now, she spends more time fending off attacks than doing her own work.”
“You’d need to go through a list of what she can offer them,” Ianto said. “Probably the harmless tech, things like that.”
“Yeah, I’ll talk to her,” Jack said. “Anything else?”
Ianto inclined his head slightly. “Gwen believes that she might have a lead on the ghost sightings in the Norwegian Church. She’s picked up traces of transposition energy in the region.”
“Someone’s got a teleport,” Jack filled in, tapping his fork against his lips.
“It would appear so,” Ianto said. “She’s looking for a pattern. If she finds it, she wants to stake out the place and see if she can’t catch whoever it is before they can get away again.”
“Not alone,” Jack said. “Tell her to take Tosh or Owen with her if she’s going.”
“Of course, sir,” Ianto said.
“And anything from you?” Jack asked.
“Not much,” Ianto said. “The reorganisation of the archives is proceeding according to schedule. I’ve updated the database with a number of species discovered pre-2000. Would you like me to organise the items catalogue when I’m done with that?”
“Yeah, why not,” Jack said, scraping the last bits of chocolate frosting off the plate. “See if you can come up with a better system than what we’ve got now.”
“Considering the present system appears to be ‘toss them wherever there’s space,’” Ianto said politely, “I doubt that will be difficult.” He picked up the empty plate and turned smartly on his heel, leaving a chuckling Jack behind him.
The problem with living a double life is that you don’t get enough sleep. Ianto reflects on this as he checks Lisa’s medicines again. He gets by on four hours of sleep each day. Five, if he’s lucky. He doesn’t like leaving Lisa alone for longer than is absolutely necessary.
He knows she appreciates these visits, though her lucid periods are few and far between now. Ianto finishes altering the dosages and settles down beside her with a book.
“Bond,” she says. “Again?”
“Good literature,” Ianto tells her. “Very deep, philosophical questions.”
She looks like she wants to laugh. Ianto pretends she’s capable of it. He opens to the first page, begins to read out loud to her.
“The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning,” he reads. He pretends to continue reciting from the page. “The same could be said of secret agencies, James thought, but you’d have to add stale coffee to the mix. At least he would be able to continue the lovely alliterative ‘s’s, the pattern of which pleased him.”
Lisa makes a gurgling sort of sound. Ianto takes it to mean laughter.
“See,” he says. “He’s a person who thinks about important things.” He glances down at the book. “Soul-eroding gambling and all that. Maybe we could go to Las Vegas when you’re better. Lose a bit of money at cards, get married by Elvis.”
“Ring,” she says, and he smiles.
“Well, it’s been burning a hole in my pocket for the past five months,” he says casually. “What’s a few more?”
Lisa’s eyes widen, first in surprise, then in something like horror. He has the barest moment to wonder if he shouldn’t have said that, and then her eyes go dead.
“Lisa?” he breathes in horror.
“Upgrading is incomplete,” she says. “Processing.”
“No, no, no,” he cries frantically, darting to the life-support systems, trying to make sense of the new readings screaming at him. He shuts down the sounds, terrified that he’ll draw attention. The pneumatic compresser that keeps Lisa’s lungs inflated wheezes asthmatically at him. He works feverishly, changing terminals, ports, anything to stop what he knows is happening.
“Upgrading paused,” Lisa says, and Ianto nearly collapses where he stands.
“Upgrading is incomplete,” she says. “Processing.”
“No!” he cries, the book tumbling unnoticed from his lap as he runs to the monitors. She’s beginning to fade and he frantically digs through his stolen cache of medicine. Finally, he finds the stimulant and injects it into her. Even if he had a crash cart here, there’s no telling how the cybernetics would react to an electrical pulse, so this is all he can rely on.
“Not losing you now,” he says, disabling the alarms for fear that someone will hear them. “I can’t lose you now, please!”
“Lisa?” he asks.
She doesn’t respond. Her eyes are open - a side-effect of the medication, he knows. She isn’t seeing him, not anymore. Cold certainty grips at his heart as he remembers something he doesn’t want to.
You know our ways. You are a rogue element.
“Oh, Lisa,” he whispers, kissing her lips softly. He caresses her face for a few minutes. Pushes her eyelids down gently. She looks like she is sleeping, cradled in protective armour.
It takes him an hour before he can bring himself to move from her side.
It takes him another half an hour to bring himself to turn off the life-support.
It takes one minute for Lisa to die.
He moves towards her slowly, terrified but hopeful. Her eyes are wide open, though only as a side-effect of the medication. Lisa’s asleep now, safely protected in her own mind.
“I’ll e-mail Tanizaki tomorrow,” Ianto promises her, nervously checking the life-support systems. “I’ll bring him here, whatever it takes.”
(Stop the story. We know how this ends.)
She breathes deeply, suddenly. Ianto checks her heart-rate. Still unsteady, still uncertain. He doesn’t dare give her any more medicine, and so tries changing some of the ports instead. Interrupting the process might slow the attack, give her time to fight back. And she will, she’s strong, he knows that. She’ll fight to stay with him.
Lisa’s eyes fly wide open. Ianto hardly dares to breathe as he makes his way over to her again.
“Lisa?” he asks, tentatively.
Her eyes stay open, unseeing. He reaches out and touches her metal-cold skin. It takes a great effort for him to turn and check the monitors.
Cold green words tell him what he doesn’t want to know. She’s gone. He couldn’t save her and she’s gone.
“Lisa,” he whispers.
It is a long time before he can think again. Slowly, methodically, he begins to dismantle the conversion unit. Jack cannot be allowed to know what has been kept here in his basement all this while. At the very least, he can shield the team from this horror. The metal comes apart easily in his hands, bits and pieces of a shattered life.
The incinerator is two levels up. Ianto carefully packs all the metal fragments together and brings them up, firing up the incinerator and making sure everything is completely destroyed. The alien tech incorporated into the machine ensures that even the metal is turned to ashes, not just melted down.
But Lisa’s body. Lisa’s body. What is he to do with Lisa’s body?
She has a grave, a grave with no body. He could bring her there, he thinks wildly. He could bury her in the grave she already has. And then cold logic takes over, laughs at the impossible suggestion. There is only one thing he can do.
He can barely see through the tears as he heaves her body into the incinerator.
What now? What does he have left to him, now that she’s gone?
“Ianto!” Jack called. “Any chance of a coffee?”
“I’ll put it on now,” Ianto said. “Anyone else?”
“Yeah, and make it strong,” Owen said.
“I’ll take one too,” Gwen said.
“Me too,” Toshiko said.
“Of course,” Ianto said, heading towards the kitchenette. Behind him, he could hear Jack talking to the others.
“Okay, time for a meeting,” Jack said. “I want to hear how your projects are going. Ianto! Bring the coffees to the conference room!”
“Yes, sir,” he replied without looking back. In the kitchenette, he measured out the coffee carefully, hesitating only when it came to adding enough for the fifth cup. After a moment’s consideration, he left out the extra couple of spoonfuls. A few minutes later, four perfect cups of coffee sat on the tray. In the centre, he placed a plate with an assortment of biscuits. Chocolate for Toshiko, almond biscotti for Gwen, pecan for Owen, lemon shortbread for Jack.
Balancing the tray neatly, he headed for the conference room. He slipped in quietly as Toshiko explained the new detectors she’d been working with. Coffee to each person, biscuits on the table, and Ianto retreated as silently as he’d entered.
Outside the room, the sounds and sights of the Hub pressed down on him. Squaring his shoulders, his eyes carefully blank, Ianto picked up a rubbish bag and began to clean up.
~fin
Constructive criticism is always welcome!