VS3:06 -- "Gordian Knot", Part Two
Gordian Knot -- Part Two
"Jack? Jack, are you there?"
"I don't think he is," JJ said. "It squealed in my ear. Something happened." He felt himself shrinking, in the dark, as though every emergency fixture to turn on took away a vertebra. Ianto was glaring at him with increasingly well-lit intensity, and in JJ's experience, glaring men tended to be unimpressed.
Ianto recovered from his own flinch as the last dim light came on. JJ was sure he had no reason to be afraid, but then he had no knowledge of the expanse's tinier crevices, which had just multiplied exponentially. "Something bad happened," JJ added. "Do you think-"
"Totally normal," Ianto cut him off, standing from his spot at the now-dead computer. "Happens every day."
JJ stood still in place, chewing on Ianto's tone while Ianto moved swiftly back and forth across their side of the Hub, flicking switches, tapping hidden keys. Crevice-shaped shadows played over the back of Ianto's jacket in angular waves. Ianto had sounded serious, almost reassuring, just then. But he couldn't have been serious. So what was he being?
Hopelessly out of his element, JJ tried his earpiece. "Gwen? Are you there?"
"Won't be," Ianto said, carrying something made of ninety-degree angles across the floor. "We're all hooked into Jack, and something, as you just explained, has happened." It was a stepladder, JJ realised as Ianto ascended it, reaching toward the Hub's lowest emergency light. Ianto pulled the grate from over it with ease.
"What are you doing?" JJ asked, painfully certain that he ought to already have known.
"Redirecting some of the emergency power. It'll take an age for the mainframe to start back up again, but..." Ianto pulled at a few things, and the bulb's light died. "One computer is better than nothing. Then we'll restart the search. This time for Sian, no 'a'." JJ couldn't tell, from that point on, whether Ianto was holding tools or if his tools were his hands themselves. JJ was in the middle of imagining Ianto with giant pincer-y pliers for hands when-
FACE. Snow White all over and holes in her eyes right there, RIGHT HERE SCREAMING, so JJ screamed too and didn't stop, five inches away from a lady in a mirror, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, this had to be Bloody Mary and he'd just MET BLOODY MARY and she was SCREAMING and- Oh. She'd already gone.
JJ staggered and discovered that Ianto was on the floor, so he figured, hey, it's all a learning experience, and fell down, too. An image of the FACE still prickled his vision, and he shivered a shiver that lasted a very long time. "Are you okay?" he asked, because Ianto would say 'yes', and JJ could copy that.
"On second thought," said Ianto, in a wincing sort of voice, "my knees have volunteered you to fetch my laptop. Hope you don't mind."
"Sure." JJ continued to catch his breath around his words. "Sure. Where. Is it?"
"Next to you, desk drawer." Ianto pushed himself up into a seated position against the wall, next to the cog's cage. JJ found the laptop case and, fingers digging deeply into the leather, handed it over, then pulled the tipped ladder aside and sat down on the floor, waiting to be invited to look at the screen.
Ianto waved him over. He put his back to the wall and they sat shoulder to shoulder, which was a bit of a relief. As soon as the laptop started up, a message - via some unfamiliar messenger program, probably top secret - blinked onto the screen. 'AndynoDandy: Your Gwen was here. Find her?'
Ianto sighed and responded, letters flurrying effortlessly into the reply box, 'I. Jones: Did I find my Gwen, or someone else's?'
'AndynoDandy: Bucket o laughs u lot. We got an untraceable IP just quit the MPDB partway thru a search. Did u find who ur lookin for?'
MPDB? What was that? Damned new jobs always had so many damned acronyms. By the time JJ gave up on it, Ianto had already replied.
'I. Jones: The search was cut off due to outage. Please complete if possible. Include name: Sian.'
Oh. Missing Persons Database. Of course. Damned new jobs and their damned obvious acronyms.
'AndynoDandy: you sur whoever ur lookin for hasnt been stuck on that stupid island of yrs?'
'I. Jones: Excuse me?' As soon as he hit 'enter,' Ianto looked over at JJ, as if he were doing some kind of internal database analysis of his own, complete with full appraisal, then cracked his knuckles, and waited.
'AndynoDandy: I know all about it, dont play coy with me. poor folks walk into haunted houses, come out spooked, you lock em up, none the wiser.'
JJ looked at Ianto - feeling quite appropriately freaked out - and Ianto just nodded him back to the screen. What, did Ianto want him to consider this seriously? Was that what they did with people who got too scared and didn't measure up? Had this happened before? "Is he telling the truth?"
'I Jones: Are you willing to complete the search?'
'AndynoDandy: fine yeah. dont u lock her away if u dont have to. cruel n unusual if u ask me.'
'I Jones: I will report back if any additional search terms arise. Thank you very much. You have no idea how valuable you are to operations.'
Ianto powered off the laptop and set it aside. "Feel like a trip downstairs?" he asked, easing onto his feet with the help of the door cage.
"Downstairs?" JJ asked, standing in time.
"The catacombs." Ianto pout-frowned. "The dungeon." He gestured beyond JJ's shoulder. "After the cells, two lefts past the morgue, across from the crypt?"
JJ's mouth was dry. Very dry. Surely Ianto was pulling his leg, but about the names of the sublevel sections, or the very idea of venturing in their direction? Come to think of it, it didn't really matter, not anymore. JJ peeled his tongue from the roof of his mouth. "I'd like a glass of water first, please."
Gwen took the gleaming halls of St. Jude's lightly under her boots, gun drawn, but not raised. Erin had reported no contact from Jack, nor any disruptions or local outages in the last hour, although the city continued its random flickering. Siana and the Rift were now linked firmly together by Gwen's assessment. Siana had been taken, and Siana had been returned damaged. She had been flickering around the Hub, possibly the whole city, and so were the outages. Now Jack had disappeared. Such facts were easily related to one another.
Passing a bald old man, no, wait, woman, in a wheelchair, Gwen shivered.
Gwen's first impression of Siana was not that she was dangerous, or angry, which made the haphazard hostage situation difficult to digest. Siana was obviously lost and frightened, though, and lost, frightened people were also rash. Gwen would at least give Siana the benefit of the doubt to start, even if Siana had done something to Jack - something she could then easily do to Gwen, as well.
This led Gwen to a final certainty: if she hoped to have any positive effect on this situation, she would not do so by waving her gun at it. Not this time.
She holstered her gun and, in the main lobby of the seventh floor, called out, "Siana?" A few startled shouts sounded from the rooms down one hallway, and none sounded suited to a woman in her early twenties, but Gwen followed them anyway. "Siana?" she repeated, a little louder.
A nurse in pink flowered scrubs glared at Gwen for that one, but Gwen didn't care, because from the end of the hall, at that very moment, a young woman's voice called back, "Hello?"
Gwen broke into a light-footed jog. "Siana? What room are you in?"
"I'm here," called the voice. "Seven-four-two." Gwen swallowed hard, hoping she wasn't being manipulated, aware that even if she was, she had no choice but to turn into room 742 and...
That wasn't so bad. It was definitely Siana, with blonde hair, navy blue eyes and lightly striped pyjamas. She sat at the pale peach-tinted bedside of a frail lady in her mid-seventies, this one with a full head of white hair, who sat propped up with a mountain of pillows at the bed's lifted head. She busily knotted some sort of craft project between her hands.
Gwen looked back to Siana's hands, which lay neatly folded on the blanket. She wore JJ's string bracelet - bingo - but no medical bracelet. "Hi, Siana," Gwen said, warming her smile to fight off the cold whites of the room. "My name's Gwen."
"I know you should know my name," Siana said, "but I don't know why."
"Are you a patient here?"
Siana shook her head. "I'm visiting my Gran," she said, and seemed to flicker. Gwen blinked. She was apparently the only one to notice it.
Siana's Gran looked up at Gwen with tearful eyes, similarly dark. Genetic. "Did you bring my Sioned back to me?"
Gwen gave the old woman a curious, narrow look. "'Sioned,' did you say?"
"My name is Siana," said Siana, flashing frustration. "I told you that, Gran." She turned to Gwen. "Her name's Margaret. Margaret, since I don't think you'll want to call her 'Gran,' too." A laugh flickered from Siana, a single flash of tiny teeth, and it was gone.
"Oh, I don't know," Gwen replied, easing forward to sit on the edge of the bed, a risk which startled no one but herself; neither woman reacted. "I don't mind. Loved my own Gran to bits and wouldn't mind using the name again. Have you been away, Siana?"
Siana's face remained rather blank and lifeless, yet alert at the same time, as though she was absorbing everything in her environment and had no opinion about any of it. "I think so. Gran said I was. I... Gwen, who are you? Are we hostages?"
"I'm with the police," Gwen said, a slip that she decided was better after all, for simplicity's sake. "And I'm afraid you just may be hostages. Do you know anything about the hostage situation?"
"Only what they've told us," said Margaret, staring with a pained, watery mixture of relief and confusion at the blank wall ahead of her. "We should stay in our rooms most of the time, relax and wait." Margaret looked over at Gwen, and those eyes - they were looking into hers, but they were stabbing her right in the chest, or the belly. "I'm used to waiting," she said. "It's no problem. I do this." She lifted her project. "A silly pastime. But it does that, passes the time."
"May I see?" Gwen asked, extending her hand.
"I don't know why you would be interested, but..." Margaret passed it over. It was a rope of wool strings, all tied together and looped at one end, weaving in a pattern for a few inches, and then dangling apart at the other end. A work in progress.
"This is macramé," Gwen said, after looking at it closely. "I used to dabble in it myself, when I was a girl. My own Gran showed me, in fact." This was a stretch of the truth - Gwen knew what macramé was, but had never been interested. She handed the rope back. "You're doing a nice job."
"Oh, thank you," said Margaret dismissively, inspecting it. "But I don't... I don't know, it's... I don't know." She continued knotting.
"And Siana," Gwen said, leaning forward with a smile. "Siana, what do you-"
A fourth party cleared her throat in the doorway.
POP.
Jack could easily have pulled Sian's arm from its socket when the ground went out, way out. Way down, crossed with streets and wound with the Taff, thousands of feet down, so he let go of her arm, and they fell together.
"What-" he tried to call over the screaming wind, but the air was rushing by too fast to draw from, and when he turned his head a gust snapped in and burned his mouth.
Sian shook her head at him, her hair blowing up behind her like a white dragon's tail. She grabbed him around the neck.
POP.
Jack sucked in, sucked in, having choked on all that air, but now it was water and he hadn't even felt the splash, and breathing water, not a good idea. Was it Bay water? Were they still in Cardiff? Sian hung in front of him with upside-down domed bubbles below her nose, smiling, holding her breath, and Jack was drowning with her thumbs stabbing his Adam's apple.
POP.
Water fled Jack's mouth before he knew it had room to do so. He fell three feet and hit his head on the ground, and looked around, coughing and clearing. "BLRRGH." Millennium Centre. Plass. Normal, beautiful, perfect cool air. Jack gathered as much of it as he could, as quickly as he could, when Sian hovered over him.
She went for the throat again.
POP.
A fat wire tore at the pit of Jack's elbow so he curled it and hooked, dangling, dipping between groaning hydro poles. Traffic had stopped for a belly-up bulk down the line, and below his shoes, below Sian's bare curling toes, he was flattened to bloody pieces. "Wh-"
Sian pulled herself up by the back of his neck and kissed his cheek.
POP.
Jack landed on his face and rolled. The park had lush grass and a squeaking playground, but no trees, and the sun was in the East.
POP.
The sun was further east.
POP.
"What-" Starting sentences was easy, but finishing them not so much, not when dropped into the middle of highway rush hour traffic, directly in the path of a blaring, speeding, bright yellow lorry.
Jack would have felt it, hard and quick, but he was quicker - it would have been one of the easier ways to go, but he was running purely on instinct by now, and this potential future wouldn't get a chance to actualise. With his clutching hand barely caring whether it broke Sian's arm, he dragged her to the roadside and rolled with her into a surprise ditch. Her body was frail and tiny between his just-conscientious elbows and knees, and when they finally came to a splashing halt, Sian was laughing. She took a moment to comb grass from her tangles, and smacked Jack in the side of the neck.
POP.
JJ had monkey-hands.
He hadn't started out with monkey-hands, mum's phrase. He had started out terrified, creeping into the lower level just behind Ianto and to the left, his torch slipping around in his hand's cold sweat, right at the edge of insane terror, actually. A shudder that refused to ever quite break had hung in the muscles across the back of his neck, waiting for Bloody Mary.
No, Sian. Or Siana. Whomever. Just a girl, a frightened lady. JJ had jumped at the skitter of something, perhaps a mouse or a giant spider, and Ianto had said, "They're nearly as frightened of you as you are of them," and that was what had reminded him: only a girl.
Then it had got even worse, when JJ realised 'morgue' was not a joke name for something fluffier, and 'catacombs' were exactly what these weaving tunnels reminded him of. Especially since they had no overhead lighting anymore. "Don't you have some way to turn these lights back on?" JJ had asked, and Ianto had shrugged and kept moving.
It had got worse when his torch finally fell from his hand, clattering around and flashing memories of Bloody Mary, no, Sian, before his eyes. JJ had nearly screamed, but now he had monkey-hands.
"I'm not sure where Gwen hid the records," Ianto had explained to him at a crossroads. "The location is catalogued in the database, which we can't access right now. We'll have to find it the hard way. You go that way. And if you find anything you like - any tech, any interesting items - they're yours. Stuff your pockets."
"You're not serious."
Ianto had nodded casually, his eyes fixed genuinely on JJ's. "Sure I am. If we've left it lying around uncatalogued and unlocked, we don't deserve to keep it down here. You can have it."
JJ's palms dried rather quickly with all the paper he flipped through, paper in strange languages, paper full of numbers, in search of documents of missing persons, in preparation for treasure. Treasure slipped from sweaty hands. But not clever, dry, hyperactive monkey-hands. He forgot all about Bloody Mary, focused pinprick-sharp on the words, SEARCH DEPT.
He could find SEARCH DEPT. in all these cabinets. These miles and miles of cabinets, which he barely had to think about, because all he had was his torch, and one cabinet at a time. On and on he moved, faster and faster, looking between cabinets in case something had fallen, and through all unlabeled cabinets in case a label had fallen off.
When he found a lightweight tube, he pocketed it. Something round and slick, with just a bit of give under his fingers, he pocketed it. A coiled oblong bit of wire, pocketed, a sharp flat shard, pocketed, something soft, shapeless, fuzzy, pocketed. When he ran into a broom it became his grappling hook, around and behind and between all the cabinets, a monkey-hand extension, better at grabbing and reaching than his own hands, even when dry.
He could inspect it all later. For now, he would just keep moving.
Gwen jumped and turned around. A pretty, black woman stood in the doorway, her hair either cropped short or tied back, Gwen couldn't tell quite yet. White coat, stethoscope, trademark doctor. Except perhaps for the cargo trousers. Those didn't seem like standard issue. The woman motioned Gwen into the hall. With a "Be right back," Gwen followed, and the woman backed up, raising her arm, lightly jerking her thumb back, this way.
The woman brought Gwen to a whiteboard, cleaned off a generous portion with the cloth eraser, and wrote, 'Captors?'
Gwen smiled a little and, just as she was about to search for a marker of her own, was handed one - red, rather than purple. She shrugged helplessly to indicate that she wasn't sure where they or rather she was. 'Gwen Cooper, Torchwood. Here 2 help.'
The doctor wrote in purple, 'Yr friend came to help too?' Then she made an '"L'" with her finger and thumb, and Gwen thought this doctor was calling Jack a loser until the thumb clicked up like the hammer on a gun. The doctor's eyes rolled, and Gwen hid a laugh behind her hand.
'Where is he?'
'Last seen: floor 5. Don't think he remembered me. Busy. Searching.'
'You know him?'
'Moonlighted, once.' Then the woman slid out her hand for a shake, and said aloud, startling Gwen more than she was happy to admit, "Dr. Megan Muli." Her smile was brilliant, not in an overwhelming way, more in a way that made the recipient want to climb right up for more.
Gwen liked her immediately. "Nice to meet you." They shook hands. Gwen forfeited a glance to the doorway of room 742. No motion. She wiped off the whiteboard and wrote, 'Does the girl seem strange to you in any way?'
The doctor nodded, then wrote 'Can't put my finger on the way tho.'
'Sit with me while we talk? Nice to have a second-' Gwen stopped writing, because Dr. Muli was already nodding.
Just as Gwen was taking her first step back with the doctor in tow, room 742 screamed.
POP.
Jack knew that smell, and now he was full of it. He coughed and parried with the urge to vomit, his hand splashing into something very surely disgusting as he pushed himself up against the sewer wall. It was pitch dark. So dark. And someone was laughing.
"You're so funny!" said Sian between convulsive giggles. "You make these..." She gasped, chirping, "These faces! Ohmygod!" Her hand wetly slapped the wall beside his head, over and over again. Jack waited for her to settle, mainly because if he tried to talk, words weren't what would come out. "How was it?"
Jack puffed air in his cheeks. Tasted like dirt and manure, but it was air, just air. His eyes were adjusting to the light coming through the grates above, and the sewer stopped closing in on him, started backing away from his face, which was nice. He tried to keep his breathing normal, undetectable, in order to keep control of the situation. Yep. He had total control of this situation. Just had to work on keeping it. "It was... something," he managed to answer. "How did you do it?"
"Didn't really mean to. Can't help it. It's like being shot."
Good, a joke. "Yeah? How many times have you been shot?"
Sian laughed some more. It was an airy, good-natured laugh, feminine and powerful, genuine. It didn't sound insane. She was crouching in the muck, Jack found, between his spread knees, her hover suggesting she had just released his throat. "Plenty," she recovered to explain, "if you'll grant that I'm the gun. And the bullet. I can pull my own trigger and then I go, and I make everything shut off if I want, but my aim's getting worse all the time. I can hardly choose where I land anymore. You smell good."
"Huh? Dunno how you can smell anything other than-" Jack coughed "-down here."
"I said you smell good." Sian leaned forward and took a big, loud whiff. "I can smell it. It's something."
"Eau de fifty-first century," Jack bragged, for easily the eleven-millionth time, and it still felt good. "You like it?" What the hell else was he supposed to say?
"Smelled it all over the place. All over the when. It's been following me for ever. What is it?"
Hey, why not. Nothing wrong with keeping up the give-and-take. "Pheromones. I'm good at them. Making them, picking up on them. Natural talent." Sian nodded thoughtfully, watching Jack with rapt attention. He flexed his hands, wiped them down his thighs. Wait a minute. "Where's-" Oh God. "When are we, and where the hell is my gun?"
Sian grinned, her face porcelain, her irises so dark they could have been holes straight through her head, and brandished it. "This?"
"Yeah, that." Jack snarled a breath and reached for it, but Sian tugged it up and away. "When are we, then? What day is it, what time? What did you do? Come on, I talked to you, now you talk to me. Give me something."
Sian pointed the gun in Jack's face. "We went back." She cocked the hammer back, in time. "I know that much." The Webley was way too big for her; she was in her twenties, surely, but she had a child's hands. "You can do something," she said. "I knew you were special. Like me. I wanted to see it happen. Would have been fantastic, but then you had to go and get us all wet."
"Uh..." Jack winced sympathetically, for her and for himself at once. "I'm special, sure. Not so sure I'm like you." He threw up both hands to wrestle the gun away, and he knew it would happen, and that was okay.
POP.
Ianto was leafing through the SEARCH DEPT. cabinet, alone, finally alone, when his earpiece crackled back to life. "Gwen! Ianto! I've got her! I've-"
"Who, Jack? Who have you got?"
From the sound of it, no one. That 'I've got her' sounded very something's-got-me. Ianto straightened, opting to listen, and heard a girl laughing in the background. He was glad he had taken JJ's earpiece away for safe keeping. Beginning to work for Torchwood was necessarily going to be the stuff of nightmares, which were, often, more about what you found in yourself than what you found out there. JJ would have to get used to that just like the rest of them had - hence, the little exercise in the catacombs - but actually listening to Jack scream or die or whatever he was about to do was going too far in Ianto's opinion. Let JJ be saved this as long as possible.
Gwen chased the scream. Taking Siana into her arms was automatic. Siana was rocking, hands over her ears, and crying - crying into Gwen's Johnny Rotten T-shirt, sobbing against her neck, and the only thing to do in a situation like this was to repeat 'sweetheart' and rock until something more coherent happened. Gwen glanced up at Margaret. Dr. Muli was holding her hand and her gaze, and whispering some comforting sort of chant.
"Sweetheart. Sweetheart. It's okay," Gwen tried. "What happened to you?"
At the question, Siana tensed, prickling in fear or anger, and pounded a small fist to Gwen's shoulder. "You happened to me! You in some dungeon place, some sick stone metal place! How am I supposed to know? How am I supposed to know? Where did you make me go? You knew who I was, you didn't know who I was, a man was screaming, screaming man, screaming..."
Before Gwen could answer - and she knew there was only one answer, the Hub, things were coming together - her earpiece crackled to life. "Gwen! Ianto! I've got her! I've-"
Gwen smacked her own ear. "Who, Jack? Who have you got?"
"She's here! She... okay... damn it, hold on, hold... aaaggh!"
It was a sign of struggle if Gwen had ever heard one. "Who the hell is that?"
"The... girl! Turned out we were wrong about the... name! It's Sian!"
"My name," said Siana, cheek to Gwen's shoulder, ear near Gwen's ear with her face out of sight, "is Siana." Gwen tipped her head up and away. This was a private conversation.
"Give me... the- NO, you- gi- GWEN if you're anywhere near St. Jude's right now, I could- OW! - really use... a hand!"
Gwen put a hand over her eyes to prevent them falling out of her head. "Jack. I have her. Right here. With me. I don't know who you're fighting with, but... Do you really need me there?" She was ready to sprint, but waiting for the final go-ahead. She hoped it wouldn't come.
The line was quiet for a moment. Then, "...No. No, it's okay. She's... just... Would you stop looking at me like that? And the pointing, that's not so much fun, either."
"If I may interrupt?"
A relieved laugh fluttered out of Gwen. She stroked Siana's hair. Sanity. That would be nice right around now. "Hi, Ianto. How are you?"
"Fine, thanks. Locations?"
"Both at St. Jude's," Gwen said. "Not on the same floor, I don't think. I'm on the seventh."
"Roof," Jack said. Then, not to them, annoyed and laughing with success, "Yeah-hah, I hear I'm good on roofs. I didn't tell you I'm good on r- Watch it!"
"So we have two," Ianto said. "A Siana and a Sian."
"I saw her face back when I was searching missing persons, right..." Oh, it was tense. Gwen could feel the line between them growing taut, but to hell with it. "Right before I found out about Flat Holm. Hers was one of the disappearances that corresponded with a negative Rift spike."
"Gathered as much. She showed up here again and frightened JJ out of his pants, cut out the power. Andy tipped me off to what you found, well, sort of. I'm looking through your old Missing Persons archive now. And JJ's been taken care of."
From any other man, that would have been alarming. "We've found her." Gwen was overwhelmed with relief which, at the crest of the wave, felt decidedly manufactured. "She's all right. All things considered."
"Not from where I'm standing, she's not," Jack replied. "No - you - don't you touch me. Don't even think about it."
Nearly out of the scope of Gwen's focus, Siana mumbled, "I'm not leaving again. I'm staying here. I'm not leaving my Gran. Don't you make me leave again." Dr. Muli and Gwen shared a look. 'Do you know what's going on?' - 'Haven't the faintest.'
Then Ianto's voice, thoughtful in her ear. "Timelines. Jack, can they fold over on themselves like this? Could it be why we have two?"
"Maybe. This one - this one took me for a - no, GET - a ride. And she's taking credit for the outages. Might be using the power to - I'll say what I wanna say, you just stay b-"
"How the hell are we going to contain this?" Gwen wondered, more to herself than the others. "What do we do?"
The earpiece whistled, cracked, and died. Gwen bit her tongue for Siana's sake, and stroked her hair, all the way down her back.
POP!
"I've just found her file. I could say file, but it's a single sheet of paper."
The earpiece whistled, cracked, and died.
Shit.
Ianto slammed the drawer closed and enjoyed the echo. He aimed his torch at Sian/Siana's face, and read the name below it. Sioned Artisinat. That could be one of them, or both of them. Two or one? What did you call it, when a single person only seemed split in two, because she was in two places at once? Sioned Artisinat.
He knew that name.
Sioned Doe.
Ianto knew that name.
He sprinted from the third archive, and then down the hall, dress shoes clacking all along the way, and would probably disturb JJ, but just then he turned into archive 203, and slid between cabinets all the way to the back of the tiny closet to find its tiny filing box, sitting in the furthest corner.
Before Gwen, Siana's chair sank gracefully until it disappeared, leaving Gwen on her knees as she followed Siana down. Disoriented, Gwen let her rear slip from the backs of her ankles to bump onto the floor.
Siana looked up at her, then around the room, and said, "This is what it's like."
Gwen followed. This was not the same room. The bed was gone; Margaret and Dr. Muli were gone. There was just Gwen, Siana, a light-yellow linoleum floor, and a lot of legs. The legs belonged to carts. The carts looked like they had cushions on top.
Two of them were crying.
Gwen couldn't really feel the floor beneath her seat. She was clutching Siana's shoulder, hard - Stop, Gwen, you'll break her - and trying to find the words to ask how, and why. Why here, and now. Why now?
"Shh," Siana pre-empted. "I came here because it's quiet, and reminds me what it feels like."
"Why-" Gwen stopped herself in case she got loud, and chose something quieter, easier. "Are we still in St. Jude's? Is it still the same time? Did you mean to do this?"
Siana nodded, twice, and shrugged. "I have a rope," she whispered. "Or it has me." Gwen watched her lips move, and nothing else, until Siana gestured down to her own stomach, fingertips patting a lazy circle. "It's tied to my spine, and it comes out my bellybutton." She stuck out a finger. "It pulls me around. It's weird, but it doesn't hurt. I'm attached to something alive. There's a big hand at the other end, and it pulls me."
Okay. Gwen gathered a few breaths. It was mostly coincidence, mostly bad timing. "You mean that's what it feels like when you go from place to place?"
Siana stood, pulling Gwen with her. Gwen took care of the physical part, following the gesture voluntarily. "Are they cute?" Siana wondered, as though Gwen could determine an objective answer to the question.
A few pink velvet sausage limbs escaped their bedding, and four or six newborn-navy marbles rolled on a plane of swollen lids and pregnant cheeks, puckered lips, a checkerboard of pink and blue. Gwen averted her gaze from all the babies, from their boxes. She was looking into twenty mothers' insides, where she didn't belong, an uninvited invader. Closing her eyes, she tried to smile. "They're wonderful. Why don't you tell me more about the rope? What can you do with the rope?"
"The big hand pulls me whenever it wants, but I can swing it," Siana said. She had a perplexing way of speaking, whispering not with her throat, but with her vocal cords. "I can swing myself. I'm getting better at landing where I like, when it pulls me. I want to stay here, with the babies and Gran. So I do. Mostly."
"And the Hub?"
"What's that?"
Oh, right. Gwen took Siana's hand - it was cool and dry - and led her to the rear wall, so Gwen would have somewhere to lean, so there would only be babies on one side. "When you found me, and I didn't know who you were," Gwen said. "You didn't want to go there, did you?"
"No." Siana put her shoulder to the wall, poking a painted stork in the ear, her marble eyes rolling softly, twitching from baby to baby. "Or maybe I did, and didn't know I did. That happens too. It might've been you." She looked... not at peace, not upset either, just... still. Gwen wanted to touch her face and then thought better of it. She seemed not to need it, not because she didn't want it, but because she already had it. "A fizzle comes with me when I get pulled, when I swing. I spread it out, so it's big and thin and wide. So it's a blanket instead of a bullet."
The flickers. God, the flickering bulbs, all over the city.
"I hurt some people," Siana admitted, and while her eyes were blank, her lip trembled. "Accidents with the streetlights. George's pacemaker. I try not to, but sometimes it's still a bullet. More often, now."
"That's okay," Gwen said, in case Siana felt guilty. She was difficult to read. "That's not your fault. Was George someone close to you?"
Siana shook her eyes, side to side. "No. His bracelet said 'George.'"
Gwen's eyes burned. "Something bad happened to you. We're - I'm - I'm going to try to help you. Help you get better." Somehow.
"How?"
Damn it. "I'm not sure, yet. But I've got a great head on my shoulders. And I know some brilliant people."
"What's 'better'?"
Gwen spun her wedding band around her finger, moved it up and down from her knuckle, fidgeted. For someone like this? "Whatever will make you happy, Siana. We'll get as close as we can to what makes you happy."
Siana appeared not to be listening. "No," she said, as though a baby had told her something offensive. She flickered, flickered again. "No," she repeated, an order, not a denial. Gwen raised her hands to hover them at either side of Siana's face, her mouth hanging open as she waited for any possible intelligible question to come to it. Siana kept flickering, so quickly that it didn't seem to happen, reminding Gwen what it was like to stare into whirring, rotating fan blades. "No, no, no, NO... I said no, no!"
Gwen took Siana's shoulder, squeezing lightly, to steel her, comfort her, through this strange battle she was fighting. Siana stopped flickering - the whole room flickered instead. The painted stork began to fade.
POP.
The sun fell down. Jack was still on the roof, but much closer to the edge and the tangerine arteries of the city's streets glowed with blood-cell brake lights down there, and he was still on the roof. Sian's hand slid away from the back of his neck. He grabbed her wrist and refused to let go when she gurgled with annoyance and tugged.
He holstered his gun. No point shooting her until they got back. "Future, this time?" he asked.
She swore, hissed, stomped her feet. "Damn it, damn it, fuck, shit. This is getting boring."
Up here with all this space, in such a familiar type of place, Jack didn't feel compelled to say much anymore. A few choice areas smarted from being generally thrown around the world like a pinball, but at least Sian had given him a chance. She could have left him in the bay, had she wanted to.
Jack would have thanked her for that, but he didn't want to give her the wrong idea. Sian already had a clear enough grasp on her situation, the power it gave her, at least. Jack had only seen power like this in a few very singular, very special places. In the wrong hands, power like this was horrifying. And Jack had thought his hands were dangerous.
Traffic lights changed. The city ebbed and flowed, alight and all right. Sian leaned away, extending Jack's arm and hanging there, drawing a long line between her shoulder and his. He calmly shifted his weight to counterbalance her, tightening his grip on her wrist. "How far ahead did you take me?"
"Far up as I could get. Tonight? Don't know." Sian gurgled again, coughed, hawked, horked, and spat over the edge. "Bag of popcorn in a microwave. It's bollocks and stupid and I want to go."
POP.
Half the lights before the horizon dropped away and the streets' winding patterns shifted. A quick look around revealed they were still on the same roof, but the other side, facing the Bay.
POP POP POP POP POP. The city spun and the moon spotted all over the sky. POP POP POP POP and Jack struggled to interrupt: "Would you-" POP "-quit-" POP "-it-" POP "-already?" POP.
"Oooh," Sian said, looking out over the city with twinkling lights reflecting in her dead eyes, with the sparkling edge of Cardiff framing her head, a line of stars drawn into one ear and out the other. "I know why I came here. I've been here. I keep coming back." Jack gave her a questioning look, his mouth pushed out in a 'wha?' and she laughed at him. "Faces," she bubbled.
Jack tilted his temple to the streets. "Either tell me what's so special about this now, or take me back to mine. I'm a busy man."
Sian swung on Jack's arm where she stood, one of those tipping inflatable clowns with sand in the feet. Forward, back, forward, back, forward, back. It didn't move Jack much. "Okay," she said on a back-swing.
POP.
Sioned Doe, aged twenty-one. One hundred ten pounds, five feet four inches tall, blonde hair, blue eyes. Family: a single grandmother, Margaret, last name unidentified, mentioned by Sioned twice. Personal analysis: uncommunicative, largely silent, and prone to occasional bouts of crying. Staunchly private. Screams like a hellion if anyone tries to enter her room.
It was Jack's work-handwriting - not his boxy all-caps post-it note scrawl, but the fine-spun dated cursive reserved for official documents. All the Flat Holm records were handwritten, completely divorced from the mainframe's data logs. Just like the rest of Jack's secrets, simultaneously timeless and dated, their security trusted not to firewalls, but to solid ones.
Not the time, Ianto. It never was.
Ianto prodded at his ear in habitual hope. 'Hey Jack, we've already had her two years,' rehearsed itself into 'We've had her two years and we've no record of her release,' changed into 'Shall I place a few more nursing want ads?' because, honestly, that no one had contacted Torchwood, in any form, in the many hours since she had escaped, was not tolerable.
Ianto wouldn't mention that he was rooting for Sioned, Flat Holm's first escapee. That part, Ianto could keep as his own secret, which would remain irrelevant as long as he did his job and kept his focus on trying to catch her. He sort-of hoped she would give good chase before they rounded her up again, and if Jack's irritation before the comms cut out was any indication, she certainly was.
She was giving Jack a hard time. By the sound of it, a really hard time. Maybe the Flat Holm staff remained competent and something truly bad had happened. These patients (patients, not prisoners, patients, not prisoners) had fallen through the Rift. The Rift was powerful and unpredictable, and reached every nook and cranny of the universe and its billion dimensions, as Jack had put it once. Who knew what dormant residual energies infested the island's occupants?
With a final look-over, Ianto memorised the sparse contents of Sioned's card and slid it back into its alphabetical home. He took to the hallway, looked up at the hallway ceiling, lit only by that dim, greenish, alien emergency glow, and narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. Clearly everything would have to be locked into the alien tech and not Jack's wrist strap, which was attached to Jack, and therefore unreliable.
Ten minutes later, Ianto had one back-up generator jury-rigged. He depressed an old wall switch, its spring groaning under his fingers, and the high hanging lights of the sub-substation flack-clack-whumping to life in a long line to the end of the filing cave. To Ianto's private delight, JJ didn't scream at the sensory input. Possibly he was too tired to scream.
"Find anything?" Ianto asked, casual and curious.
Fifty feet down the nearest lane, JJ straightened his back. "For me, yeah. For you, not really. Still all numbers. Not sure what I..." He looked at the broom handle in his hand as though it had gotten there on its own.
Ianto headed for him, stepping carefully over the many new lumps of sweeping JJ had built in his haste. "Let's see, then," he said, in a tone that gave JJ no other option.
JJ dug into his pockets, then lumped both hands together into a cup for all of their contents: a pen, a rubber ball (the super-bouncy kind, left over from one of Jack's favourite games, which at long last had been named: throw-this-thing-and-see-how-many-other-things-it-hits-before-Ianto-puts-it-back-on-my-desk-kinda-like-fetch-y'know? At which point Ianto had been the one to whip it all the way to the back wall, at which point the pastime was officially retired), a paperclip, a piece of glass, a few dust-bunnies, a syringe without a needle (Owen?), and a piece of string.
"Hm," JJ said, flushing brightly. "Lesson, I presume?"
"For future reference: when all else fails, this," Ianto said, sweeping a casual hand from JJ's collection to his broom to his piles, and then the whole of the cavern, "can be the only respite. And, sometimes, it's even useful."
The temporal flexing (fluxing? Such phrases still tasted strange in Gwen's mind; she was never sure she used them properly) slowly moved Siana's chair aside, scraping it along the floor as the pair of them flowed between existences. The return to the familiar - the return to a place Gwen had initially been returned to on her own - brought a tumult of emotion down on her, as all at once she realised she had been dreaming, then realised she hadn't been dreaming after all.
"That was quite a trick," Dr. Muli said, gaping and smirking at the same time, as though Gwen's disappearance/reappearance had proven something she already believed in. "Are you both okay?"
The overhead light finally overcame its browning and flickering. Gwen moved her eyes from Dr. Muli to Siana, who fell back and sat down. "Sorry," Siana said. "It was pulling again. Had to swing." She yawned.
Dr. Muli's eyebrows rose, crinkling her forehead. Margaret, quite fortunately, was either napping, or drugged. "She's stressed," Dr. Muli said, following Gwen's gaze to Margaret, "not to mention confused. Might even be suffering mild shock, considering what we just saw. Where did you go?"
"Maternity," Gwen said, her throat lumping up around the last syllable. "Siana likes it there."
"You sound at a loss," Dr. Muli said, still sounding calm, but Gwen could see her fingers fiddling nervously with her necklace, a rough cut chunk of amber that hung in the hollow of her throat.
Gwen nodded, slowly, at the doctor. She really was at a loss. She tapped her comm and asked fruitlessly for Jack, then just stood there, and waited. Ten more minutes, and she would make this a job for UNIT. Torchwood couldn't do everything on their own all the time.
POP.
Jack was getting tired of the ground dropping out.
One minute, the roof was firm and scratchy under his treads; the next, he was over the edge of it, clinging to the raised wall, hanging precariously over the city - still nighttime - and scrabbling with both arms, nearly falling because the wall was too thick and he had to get hold of Sian again, else she could leave this somewhere, some-when, without him.
"You want to know what's so special about this now?" Sian asked, slipping one tendril-thin leg, then the other, over the edge to sit beside Jack's hanging-place.
Jack shimmied, boot toes catching in mortar, fingertips curling around the wall's cement lip, until he could press his cheek to Sian's knee. Safe. She didn't push him off. Affectionately, she combed her fingers through his hair, trailing tingly needle pricks as her hand caught in gel and sewer-gunk, separating strands. "Yeah," Jack answered her. "How 'bout I sit up there with you, and you tell me all about it."
"M-mm," Sian denied. She curled her fist and yanked, turning Jack's head out to the cityscape. "Check it ouuut."
Jack, numb to the pain of the hair-pull, but lacking the leverage to escape Sian's puppeteering, didn't have much choice. Near the horizon, a chunk of light turned off. A few seconds later, another, to the North. Closer, another, a whole block. "When are we?" Jack asked. "Tell me when. All I want right now, just when."
"I already said. It's tonight. Your tonight. The tonight from when I got you." Sian twisted her arm, wrenching at Jack's hair again, creating a crick in his neck. She was stronger than she looked. "I've been in space," she said, dreamily. "Did you know you can survive in space, in your pyjamas? Takes a while for the blood to boil. Or freeze. Or whatever."
"Yeah, I knew that. Ten minute time limit, give or take. For a human," Jack offered conversationally, as another six, seven, eight chunks of the city fell out. Sirens whipped up; a nearby block crunched and screamed with alarms, and Jack glimpsed the flash of a familiar blonde in jim-jams at a crossroads, where another set of streetlights all turned green at once. Tires squealed, metal crunched, and then the lights over the carnage went out.
"I've eaten stars," Sian continued. "Almost as many as you'll see, some day. Sucked 'em up." She giggled - at what, it was hard to tell, maybe her own linguistic choices. "Nom nom nom. City was a snack. I was really fucking hungry."
"You're absorbing the energy?" Oh, this wasn't good.
"Past tense," Sian corrected. She horked and spat again, and Jack followed the blob with his eyes until it grew invisible. In a few seconds, it would probably splatter all over that awning there, and even that could do damage to a timeline, and he was watching the city fall apart.
It was getting quieter.
Even the sirens were dying.
Jack hadn't asked Gwen if she was okay when he had the chance. Gwen, who had another one of these Sians, versions of Sian, past Sian or future Sian or something else. Would Gwen know to hold on, when the other one took her? Would they meet up again? Would he ever even see her again?
"I've eaten stars!" Sian bragged with the disgruntlement of the tortured artist she seemed to think she was. "Stars! This place is peanut crumbs! This is popcorn! But I come back because I like it." Her voice dropped into a calm kindness undercurrented with mania. She definitely sounded insane now. "I like it because it's quiet. This is what it feels like."
Space. Sian could take a person all the way to outer space, if not now, at some time in her past, and Jack hadn't even asked if Gwen was okay. And what about everything else that would go with her? All that possibility - lost, as if it had never been. "Take me back," he ordered, choking on the words, surprising himself. His throat was closing up. He was feeling things, more things than usual, things he could usually keep under control, simmering somewhere in his knees, not this high up, not in his eyes. "Back. Now."
Three glowing clusters remained, haloed in their own headlight twilights, stalled in pileups and traffic jams. It had all happened so fast. What, ten minutes? "Pew," Siana said shrilly as the spots disappeared, "pew, pew."
The city was perfectly motionless in the moonlight. It didn't even scream, not one citizen. In a few places, crowds of gawkers changed their minds, stopping to take naps in the road, gone before their heads hit the pavement, judging by the ways their limbs flopped.
After all, people ran on electricity, too.
"It'll never come back," Sian said, releasing Jack's hair. There was nothing to listen to but Sian's voice and the breeze. "I have a big mouth. Big mouth, big feet, big footprints. I'm awesome." She made a gratuitously graphic slurping sound. "What do you think?"
"I don't believe you."
Sian laughed. "I don't know how to lie, Longstring Funnyface," she said, talking down to him like a child mimicking a mother, carelessly cruel. Soon, if not already, the only child left.
Jack hadn't bawled like this since he was pregnant.
If this was Cardiff's very near future, and it was also Sian's past, it was, by any analysis Jack could manage, irreversible. Sian's knee, despite having escaped contamination in the sewer, was wet under his cheek, but he was trying not to think about that, or about how sore his arms were, so tense they had their own mind, so tense they threatened to give up and let him fall. The surface below was black. The ledge seemed to sway under his weight, inducing seasickness. "Take me back."
Jack's voice must have given him away - Sian smacked him hard on the top of the head and ordered, "Stop that. It's gross. Stop it, it's making you ugly." She hit him again, and again, and again, and-
POP.
Gordian Knot: Part Three