False Start (Torchwood)
Title: False Start
Author: Jewels (bjewelled
Fandom: Torchwood
Disclaimer: Belongs to the BBC, so I hear.
Summary: Ever remain half a step ahead, and you might just stay alive long enough to live.
False Start (Torchwood)
Toshiko Sato had rather enjoyed her day's work. For once she had spent her Saturday not locked up in the Hub, but at an auction. It had been Ianto who had stumbled across the catalogue, and pointed out that several of the items up for sale looked like they had a rather unearthly origin. It had been a toss up between whether they were going to steal the goods, or order them to be delivered to Torchwood, but when Gwen had discovered that they were some old lady's belongings that she was selling off to help pay for her grandson's university education, she had insisted that they just buy the things from the auction like normal people.
Tosh had a feeling that Jack had given in just so that he wouldn't have to listen to her giving him grief over the whole situation for the next two weeks. It had been close run who exactly would get to go out. The alternative was spending the day under Ianto's auspices, helping to sort out all the paperwork and artefacts and biological material that should have been sorted out months ago. With nothing new having come through the Rift in several weeks, he was taking advantage of the lack of activity to get some of their backlog cleared.
Tosh had been lucky enough to go, on the grounds that she would be best able to identify what was alien and what was just some old woman's bricabrac. Jack had dropped her off in the SUV, lamented the fact that Ianto was a slave driver, and handed her the Torchwood credit card, the one without a limit, with the admonishment that she wasn't to go shopping at the end of the day. She had laughed, waved farewell and wandered in. Once inside, she'd immediately been accosted by an earnest looking young man who'd monopolised her attention for the entire afternoon. It was rather a nice little ego boost, and she'd thoroughly enjoyed her time.
Not that she'd had time to flout Jack's moratorium on shopping. The auction had gone on longer than she'd thought it would, and by the time she managed to get out of the building it was dark, the streets quiet. She thought about calling the Hub and having one of the team pick her up, but then decided against it. She rather liked walking through the roads at night, when it was quiet and cool, and there was no one bothering her or making demands or too much noise. She was fairly certain she wasn't that far from the Hub, so she struck out in the direction she remembered Jack driving from, put her hands in her pockets to ward off the chill, and set off.
Her footsteps echoed in the streets, her breath misting the cool November air, and she breathed deeply, the sharp touch of it in her lungs causing her to cough slightly. She rather liked winter, she thought. Everything seemed crisp, and sharper about the edges.
"Tosh?"
She turned and started in surprise. Walking towards her, his hands shoved into the pockets of his great coat, was Jack Harkness. "I didn't know you were planning to collect me, I didn't even hear the SUV," she said, and glanced at her watch. “How long have you been hanging around out here waiting?”
He smiled at her, thinly. "Find anything interesting?"
"One or two things." She rummaged in her bag, missing the way his eyes glinted hungrily in the orange light of the street lamps as he watched. "The only really interesting thing seems to be this." She pulled out something that was roughly the size of a fishfinger. It was smooth and silver grey, but what had given it away was that Tosh realised that there was no metal on earth that had the same greenish-gold lustre.
“That's interesting,” Jack said, his tone studiously disinterested.
Tosh grinned, knowing he was just humouring her. “I know, it doesn't look like it's anything special. Give me time and a laser scalpel and I'll have its contents laid out on my desk like entrails.” She tried not to giggle at the rather gruesome mental image of dissecting technology like a biology class rat.
Jack didn't seem to be sharing in the joke. She would have expected him to tease her about her silly sense of humour, but instead he stared at her, mouth twitching into a tremulous smile, as if he was barely holding himself together. "Give it to me."
She stared back, feeling unease creep over her, and then settle into a cold lump in the pit of her stomach. "I'll not lose it," she said, slowly, "I'll lock it away when we get back to the Hub."
"I'll take it," he said, deceptively lightly. "Give it here."
She slowly shook her head, not taking her eyes of him. "No, Jack, it's okay. I'll take it. It's protocol. I found it, I'm supposed to log it in."
"Dammit, Tosh!" He exploded, and Toshiko jumped. "Give it to me now!"
She shook her head, firmer this time. "No," she said, definitely. "You're not Jack Harkness. Who are you?"
"You know what?" He gave a short, mirthless laugh, and pulled his hand out of his pocket. He was holding a gun of a sort she was fairly certain wasn't to be found anywhere in Torchwood. It was metallic blue, and slightly larger than a clenched fist. “Fuck it. I asked nicely.” And he shot her.
She felt the burning sensation of what some distantly analytical part of her thought must be some plasma-based weapon. Just when she could see a dark wall approaching her, she felt a barely detectable sting in her palm, where she was holding the little alien object from the auction and-
Her footsteps echoed in the streets, her breath misting the cool November air, and she breathed deeply. Then she realised that she shouldn't be breathing, and hadn't she been just standing in this same street dying just a moment ago? She hesitated, glanced down at her bag, rummaging around in it. After some fumbling, she found the little metal fishfinger, and held it in her hand, staring at it, oddly. It felt warm now, whereas it hadn't before. Her hand tingled where she touched it.
“Tosh?”
She whirled, and saw Jack Harkness approaching her, his hands stuck in the pockets of his great coat. “You're not Jack...?” she said, almost uncertain of herself.
He stopped, gave her a wry smile. “Why would you say that?”
It was wrong, it wasn't his smile. And looking at his pockets, she caught a flash of metallic blue. Years of fighting for her life took over, and she reached beneath her coat, pulled out the gun she always carried around with her and shot him. Unfortunately for her, green electrical fire flashed over him where the bullets hit, and they felt to the ground, their momentum dissipated.
Crap, she had enough time to think, and then his expression had turned savage, and he'd crossed the distance between them and snatched the gun out of her hands. “No idea how you knew,” he said, viciously, “But this just saves time.”
He shot her with her own gun, there was a faint stinging in her hand, and the darkness rushed at her-
She held the metal fishfinger in her hand, staring at it. She felt like it was staring back at her. It felt warm, and her hand tingled where it touched her skin.
“Tosh?”
She turned around enough to catch a glimpse of Jack Harkness striding towards her, hands in his great coat, and that was enough to make up her mind. She shoved the fishfinger in her pocket and ran for her life.
He paused, apparently surprised at her suddenly bolting, but his surprise didn't stop him for long. She heard booted footsteps in the street behind her, far faster than any normal Human should have been. She ran, cursing the fact that her boots had such impractical heels that made running so difficult. Desperately trying to lose him, she ducked into the lesser travelled alleyways and ginnels that ran between the shops of the street. She heard him enter behind her, and then the footsteps stopped. That was all the warning she got before he shot her in the back.
The plasma burned through her torso, and the blackness reached out greedy fingers to take her away-
The heels of her boots made her running stride uncertain and she desperately tried to find firmer footing on the rather worn out pavement. She ducked into the side street that ran down behind the hairdressers, and heard the false Jack's footsteps follow her. Her eyes scanned around desperately for another route out, and then she heard his footsteps stop. Before he got a chance to do anything, she dove to her right, crashing through the rickety wooden door that accessed a shabby garden, and heard the plasma weapon burn off against the brickwork she had just been standing in front of.
She ran through the garden, down the side of the house, emerging on the street running parallel to the one she had started on. It was mostly residential down here, with more nooks and crannies to escape into, and more people, she knew, who could be hurt if she went the wrong way. She heard crashing, and swearing behind her as her pursuer followed her, and she stopped thinking, picked a direction, and carried on running.
She reached into her pocket, fingers clumsy from the cold night air, and pulled out her mobile. Running and tried to push the numbers for the Hub as fast as she could remember, making mistakes and having to start over. She ducked, and zigzagged through whatever spaces she could find, and had a vague idea that she was heading in the direction of the town centre. Finally she got the number, pressed the phone to her ear as it started to ring.
It rang for what seemed like far too long, and then there was a click and Ianto's tired sounding “Hello?” was like music to her ears.
“Ianto! You have to help me!”
“Tosh?” Tiredness was suddenly gone from his voice, replaced by tight concern. “What's going on?”
“He's trying to-” She flinched as a plasma burst splattered over the tree next to her, igniting bits of bark, and she changed directions again and kept running. “Oh god, he's trying to kill me!”
“Tosh, stay calm.” A fine thing for him to say. He wasn't being chased by some murderous clone of his boss. “Where are you?”
She stopped, abruptly, having turned into a side street that ended abruptly in a seven foot high brick wall with nasty spikes on the top. A dead end. She looked around, not recognising anything. “I don't know! I have no idea where I am!!”
“What can you see?”
She spun around on the spot, desperately trying to pick out some feature that would be distinct and recognisable. “I... there's a buildin-”
She got no further before she was grabbed from behind, an arm, that might have been made out of solid steel for all the good her pulling at it did, wrapped around her neck, choked off her words. Not-Jack plucked the phone out of her hands easily and crushed it in one hand. “You know,” he said, sounding out of breath and angry, “If I'd realise you'd be such a pain to catch, I wouldn't have bothered spending the afternoon talking to you and would have just killed you on the spot.”
The boy, the young man, she realised. The one who had spent the afternoon chatting to her. He must have seen her arrive with Jack. That must have been how he knew to mimic his appearance. He tightened his grip about her neck, and with a crack she heard reverberate through her skull, he broke her neck. Light exploded behind her eyes and the black started to rush in and-
She fumbled the numbers of the Hub's main phone line, her running managing to make it impossible to type it in properly. But she didn't stop moving. She cleared the screen and tried again. It connected, and she held the phone against her ear as she ran, eyes scanning the area around her until she spotted road signs, reciting them to herself mentally so that she knew them.
“Hello?” Ianto's voice sounded tired, irritated.
“Ianto, help me. I'm being chased. He's going to kill me!”
“What-? Tosh?”
“Just help me!” She told him where she was. “He's got some sort of plasma weapon. Burns through flesh.” Hurts like fuck. “I tried to shoot him but he had some sort of energy field up-”
“Tosh, we're coming. Stay where you are.”
She kept running, ignoring that particular edict, and instead of turning right to go into that dead end from before, she darted left as the plasma weapon hit the tree behind her. She found herself on a slightly more crowded street, realising she was definitely headed into town. But the houses along the road were all terraced, and there was nowhere for her to hide. But there were cars lining the street. She glanced behind her to see whether she'd been caught up with yet, before she dropped to the ground, rolling under a rusted Ford Fiesta that had seen better days.
She tried to calm her breathing, desperately scared that he would hear her exhausted panting. Her muscles were trembling and aching with fatigue, and her blood pounded in her ears. The running footsteps slowed as the false Jack arrived on the street. They became slow measured, and she realised he must know she was hiding. There was no way she could have fled out of his sight in the time between her turning into the road and him arriving.
She tried holding her breath, but it made her go light headed. Tosh tried to force herself to breathe slowly, steadily, and slowly she could feeling her heart rate coming back under control. But she nearly bite through her tongue as she jumped when she saw two booted feet come into her side beside the car. They pause, as their owner stopped and looked around, and she clapped a hand over her mouth to try to obscure any noises she might make.
Her phone started ringing.
Toshiko's heart leapt in horror. “Nononono!” She whispered frantically, trying to pull the mobile out of her pocket and silence it. The words “WORK IANTO” mocked her from the screen. Trying to find out where she was, no doubt. She couldn't help but scream as she felt a hand clamp onto her hand, dragging her out from beneath the car, and then she was being hauled upright, her phone clattering to the floor. The impact knocked the battery loose, and the ring tone went silent.
“You have something that belongs to me,” Jack who was not Jack said viciously, and punched her in the throat, crushing her windpipe. She clawed at her throat and stumbled back, choking, and realised that she was starting to recognise the dark that tried to take her before-
Her blood pounded in her ears, her breathing the harsh night air caused her throat to ache. Toshiko reached into her pocket, grabbed her phone, and skidded it across the road as hard as she could. It clattered and bounced, and miraculously the battery didn't come off, and it slid to a stop under another car, several meters away.
Not too far away, booted feet slowed to a walk, and he started to move slowly down the pavement, searching for her. He came to a stop beside the battered Fiesta, and she held her breath. On cue, her phone started ringing, the cheery tone that Tosh had downloaded the week before now seemed dreadfully macabre, and she made a note to replace it with a standard, boring ring if she managed to get out of this situation with her life.
The foot moved as he ran towards where the phone was ringing, and as soon as he was far enough away, she rolled out from under the car, picked herself up and ran again. She caught sight of him standing up, her phone in hand, and then she knocked over a flowerpot and he turned, saw her, and ran after her again.
She had a better head start this time, but she still didn't get very far. He was faster and stronger, and she tried to make one last desperate dive through a hedgerow, but he ploughed into her from behind, knocking her to the ground, and she had the vague impression that she'd just been hit by a car.
It chilled her to the bone as the man who looked like Jack pined her to the ground, straddling her to keep her in place, ignoring her hand as she tried to hit him, or scratch him, or push him off her somehow. He was pulling at her clothes, ripping and tearing them, and terrified notions that this time he would rape her before he killed her again flickered through her mind, enough to make her start to scream before he clapped a hand over her mouth. And then she realised he was searching for something.
“Where is it?” He was hissing, turning out her pockets, tearing at the lining of her jacket. “I know you have it. It's the only way you could keep anticipating me, knowing what I was going to do next.” His hands closed around the little metal fishfinger, and he pulled it out of her pocket triumphantly, his eyes gleaming, his mouth twisted into a nasty feral grin. “Finally,” he said, dropping it into his own pocket, and turned his attention to her. His free hand wrapped around her throat and tightened. “No getting away from me this time,” he told her, and started to choke the life out of her.
The blackness took its time now, as if it knew she couldn't escape again. It started to seep into her bones, into her brain, and her vision was growing dimmer as she started to lose consciousness-
Two sharp bangs, with the sudden release of pressure, brought the world back into sharp and vivid lines. Bullet wounds appeared in the Jack Harkness that had been choking her, but the blood that seeped out was pale yellow, and had the consistency of custard. A third bang and he started to slump forward. She shrieked, all rationality gone, and levered him away before he could collapse on top of her.
She choked and gasped, forcing air back into her lungs, but her mind wouldn't order itself, and all her limbs were trembling. Two men rushed forward, and she realised that Ianto was bending over her, carefully supporting her, helping her to sit up. She flung her arms around him, buried her face in his chest and shook, unable to bring herself to even start crying.
“Tosh?” Ianto sounded worried. “It's alright. He's dead. You're safe.”
She heard a fourth and final gunshot and the muttered words “damned Tx-ii shapeshifting bastards” and she realised they must have brought some disruption rounds, perfect for breaking through forcefields, with them. It was the only way they could have stopped him. Then she felt a hand brushing her hair, and Jack's voice soothing her.
“I'm proud of you, Tosh,” she heard, “You stayed alive. Good girl.”
Not trusting herself to speak, Tosh let them pick her up and take her away.
**
It was such a relief to be back inside the Hub, her hands wrapped around a cup of industrial strength hot sweet tea, that she never wanted to leave. Jack had made her the cup, saying that it had worked wonders in the blitz, and so it would probably work for her too. Ianto hadn't been available with his coffee-making skills, he was out dealing with the alien body that they had made. Gwen and Owen, it turned out, had left for home hours before Tosh had called in a panic. The other two had been just about to leave themselves. She'd been lucky to catch them.
Jack was playing with the little metal fishfinger, twirling it in his fingers. She'd just finished relating the events of the night, and, to her surprise, he had a smile on his face.
“I wasn't sure from the picture in the catalogue, but from what you're saying, I think I know what this is.” Jack smirked, tossing it in the air, catching it again, before holding it up to the light. “It's a Lie-In.”
Toshiko blinked, surprised by such a stupidly normal, and bizarrely out of place name. “A what?”
“A useful little gadget. Not true time travel really. It doesn't move you physically through time. It takes a flash scan of your brain in the moment before death, and transmits it through time to a random point in time anywhere up to about three hundred seconds earlier. It overwrites the previous version of your consciousness, and essentially you gain the next few minutes of memory and experience. So then you can change a decision you made before. It's how you kept evading him. You just kept trying different choices until you got the best one.”
Toshiko shivered. “So it lets you play a game of trial and error with your life?”
Jack nodded, slowly. “Torchwood had a whole stash of them that had been taken from the hold of a Sil'urian smuggling ship that went down over the Isle of Man, if I remember correctly. They were all presumed missing or destroyed in the Fall of Torchwood One.”
Tosh jumped as she heard footsteps, but when she turned it was to see Ianto entering Jack's office, drying his hands off on a Cardiff tourist board tea towel. He smiled gently at her as she fought down the instinctive surge of adrenaline his approach had caused.
“If you're done here,” he said, “I can give you a lift home. Don't think you should be driving just yet.”
Her hands were still shaking. The surface of the tea in her mug was filled with little ripples. She thought if she tried to drive herself home, she'd probably send herself straight off the bridge and into the Taff. “Good idea,” she said, gratefully, and took another huge gulp of tea.
Ianto looked at Jack questioningly, who nodded, waving a hand dismissively. “Go, sleep. You'll feel better in the morning. Sweet tea and a good nights sleep. Good for helping you deal with multiple brushes with death.”
The weird thing was, she couldn't tell if he was joking. She nodded, setting the mug on his desk, and moved to join Ianto by the door, but something occurred to her halfway across the floor and she turned and looked at him, confused.
“I'm curious,” she said, at his questioningly raised eyebrow. “Why's it called a 'Lie-In'?”
Jack grinned, giving the fishfinger a rueful look. “Because it gives you 'just five more minutes'.”
Author: Jewels (bjewelled
Fandom: Torchwood
Disclaimer: Belongs to the BBC, so I hear.
Summary: Ever remain half a step ahead, and you might just stay alive long enough to live.
False Start (Torchwood)
Toshiko Sato had rather enjoyed her day's work. For once she had spent her Saturday not locked up in the Hub, but at an auction. It had been Ianto who had stumbled across the catalogue, and pointed out that several of the items up for sale looked like they had a rather unearthly origin. It had been a toss up between whether they were going to steal the goods, or order them to be delivered to Torchwood, but when Gwen had discovered that they were some old lady's belongings that she was selling off to help pay for her grandson's university education, she had insisted that they just buy the things from the auction like normal people.
Tosh had a feeling that Jack had given in just so that he wouldn't have to listen to her giving him grief over the whole situation for the next two weeks. It had been close run who exactly would get to go out. The alternative was spending the day under Ianto's auspices, helping to sort out all the paperwork and artefacts and biological material that should have been sorted out months ago. With nothing new having come through the Rift in several weeks, he was taking advantage of the lack of activity to get some of their backlog cleared.
Tosh had been lucky enough to go, on the grounds that she would be best able to identify what was alien and what was just some old woman's bricabrac. Jack had dropped her off in the SUV, lamented the fact that Ianto was a slave driver, and handed her the Torchwood credit card, the one without a limit, with the admonishment that she wasn't to go shopping at the end of the day. She had laughed, waved farewell and wandered in. Once inside, she'd immediately been accosted by an earnest looking young man who'd monopolised her attention for the entire afternoon. It was rather a nice little ego boost, and she'd thoroughly enjoyed her time.
Not that she'd had time to flout Jack's moratorium on shopping. The auction had gone on longer than she'd thought it would, and by the time she managed to get out of the building it was dark, the streets quiet. She thought about calling the Hub and having one of the team pick her up, but then decided against it. She rather liked walking through the roads at night, when it was quiet and cool, and there was no one bothering her or making demands or too much noise. She was fairly certain she wasn't that far from the Hub, so she struck out in the direction she remembered Jack driving from, put her hands in her pockets to ward off the chill, and set off.
Her footsteps echoed in the streets, her breath misting the cool November air, and she breathed deeply, the sharp touch of it in her lungs causing her to cough slightly. She rather liked winter, she thought. Everything seemed crisp, and sharper about the edges.
"Tosh?"
She turned and started in surprise. Walking towards her, his hands shoved into the pockets of his great coat, was Jack Harkness. "I didn't know you were planning to collect me, I didn't even hear the SUV," she said, and glanced at her watch. “How long have you been hanging around out here waiting?”
He smiled at her, thinly. "Find anything interesting?"
"One or two things." She rummaged in her bag, missing the way his eyes glinted hungrily in the orange light of the street lamps as he watched. "The only really interesting thing seems to be this." She pulled out something that was roughly the size of a fishfinger. It was smooth and silver grey, but what had given it away was that Tosh realised that there was no metal on earth that had the same greenish-gold lustre.
“That's interesting,” Jack said, his tone studiously disinterested.
Tosh grinned, knowing he was just humouring her. “I know, it doesn't look like it's anything special. Give me time and a laser scalpel and I'll have its contents laid out on my desk like entrails.” She tried not to giggle at the rather gruesome mental image of dissecting technology like a biology class rat.
Jack didn't seem to be sharing in the joke. She would have expected him to tease her about her silly sense of humour, but instead he stared at her, mouth twitching into a tremulous smile, as if he was barely holding himself together. "Give it to me."
She stared back, feeling unease creep over her, and then settle into a cold lump in the pit of her stomach. "I'll not lose it," she said, slowly, "I'll lock it away when we get back to the Hub."
"I'll take it," he said, deceptively lightly. "Give it here."
She slowly shook her head, not taking her eyes of him. "No, Jack, it's okay. I'll take it. It's protocol. I found it, I'm supposed to log it in."
"Dammit, Tosh!" He exploded, and Toshiko jumped. "Give it to me now!"
She shook her head, firmer this time. "No," she said, definitely. "You're not Jack Harkness. Who are you?"
"You know what?" He gave a short, mirthless laugh, and pulled his hand out of his pocket. He was holding a gun of a sort she was fairly certain wasn't to be found anywhere in Torchwood. It was metallic blue, and slightly larger than a clenched fist. “Fuck it. I asked nicely.” And he shot her.
She felt the burning sensation of what some distantly analytical part of her thought must be some plasma-based weapon. Just when she could see a dark wall approaching her, she felt a barely detectable sting in her palm, where she was holding the little alien object from the auction and-
Her footsteps echoed in the streets, her breath misting the cool November air, and she breathed deeply. Then she realised that she shouldn't be breathing, and hadn't she been just standing in this same street dying just a moment ago? She hesitated, glanced down at her bag, rummaging around in it. After some fumbling, she found the little metal fishfinger, and held it in her hand, staring at it, oddly. It felt warm now, whereas it hadn't before. Her hand tingled where she touched it.
“Tosh?”
She whirled, and saw Jack Harkness approaching her, his hands stuck in the pockets of his great coat. “You're not Jack...?” she said, almost uncertain of herself.
He stopped, gave her a wry smile. “Why would you say that?”
It was wrong, it wasn't his smile. And looking at his pockets, she caught a flash of metallic blue. Years of fighting for her life took over, and she reached beneath her coat, pulled out the gun she always carried around with her and shot him. Unfortunately for her, green electrical fire flashed over him where the bullets hit, and they felt to the ground, their momentum dissipated.
Crap, she had enough time to think, and then his expression had turned savage, and he'd crossed the distance between them and snatched the gun out of her hands. “No idea how you knew,” he said, viciously, “But this just saves time.”
He shot her with her own gun, there was a faint stinging in her hand, and the darkness rushed at her-
She held the metal fishfinger in her hand, staring at it. She felt like it was staring back at her. It felt warm, and her hand tingled where it touched her skin.
“Tosh?”
She turned around enough to catch a glimpse of Jack Harkness striding towards her, hands in his great coat, and that was enough to make up her mind. She shoved the fishfinger in her pocket and ran for her life.
He paused, apparently surprised at her suddenly bolting, but his surprise didn't stop him for long. She heard booted footsteps in the street behind her, far faster than any normal Human should have been. She ran, cursing the fact that her boots had such impractical heels that made running so difficult. Desperately trying to lose him, she ducked into the lesser travelled alleyways and ginnels that ran between the shops of the street. She heard him enter behind her, and then the footsteps stopped. That was all the warning she got before he shot her in the back.
The plasma burned through her torso, and the blackness reached out greedy fingers to take her away-
The heels of her boots made her running stride uncertain and she desperately tried to find firmer footing on the rather worn out pavement. She ducked into the side street that ran down behind the hairdressers, and heard the false Jack's footsteps follow her. Her eyes scanned around desperately for another route out, and then she heard his footsteps stop. Before he got a chance to do anything, she dove to her right, crashing through the rickety wooden door that accessed a shabby garden, and heard the plasma weapon burn off against the brickwork she had just been standing in front of.
She ran through the garden, down the side of the house, emerging on the street running parallel to the one she had started on. It was mostly residential down here, with more nooks and crannies to escape into, and more people, she knew, who could be hurt if she went the wrong way. She heard crashing, and swearing behind her as her pursuer followed her, and she stopped thinking, picked a direction, and carried on running.
She reached into her pocket, fingers clumsy from the cold night air, and pulled out her mobile. Running and tried to push the numbers for the Hub as fast as she could remember, making mistakes and having to start over. She ducked, and zigzagged through whatever spaces she could find, and had a vague idea that she was heading in the direction of the town centre. Finally she got the number, pressed the phone to her ear as it started to ring.
It rang for what seemed like far too long, and then there was a click and Ianto's tired sounding “Hello?” was like music to her ears.
“Ianto! You have to help me!”
“Tosh?” Tiredness was suddenly gone from his voice, replaced by tight concern. “What's going on?”
“He's trying to-” She flinched as a plasma burst splattered over the tree next to her, igniting bits of bark, and she changed directions again and kept running. “Oh god, he's trying to kill me!”
“Tosh, stay calm.” A fine thing for him to say. He wasn't being chased by some murderous clone of his boss. “Where are you?”
She stopped, abruptly, having turned into a side street that ended abruptly in a seven foot high brick wall with nasty spikes on the top. A dead end. She looked around, not recognising anything. “I don't know! I have no idea where I am!!”
“What can you see?”
She spun around on the spot, desperately trying to pick out some feature that would be distinct and recognisable. “I... there's a buildin-”
She got no further before she was grabbed from behind, an arm, that might have been made out of solid steel for all the good her pulling at it did, wrapped around her neck, choked off her words. Not-Jack plucked the phone out of her hands easily and crushed it in one hand. “You know,” he said, sounding out of breath and angry, “If I'd realise you'd be such a pain to catch, I wouldn't have bothered spending the afternoon talking to you and would have just killed you on the spot.”
The boy, the young man, she realised. The one who had spent the afternoon chatting to her. He must have seen her arrive with Jack. That must have been how he knew to mimic his appearance. He tightened his grip about her neck, and with a crack she heard reverberate through her skull, he broke her neck. Light exploded behind her eyes and the black started to rush in and-
She fumbled the numbers of the Hub's main phone line, her running managing to make it impossible to type it in properly. But she didn't stop moving. She cleared the screen and tried again. It connected, and she held the phone against her ear as she ran, eyes scanning the area around her until she spotted road signs, reciting them to herself mentally so that she knew them.
“Hello?” Ianto's voice sounded tired, irritated.
“Ianto, help me. I'm being chased. He's going to kill me!”
“What-? Tosh?”
“Just help me!” She told him where she was. “He's got some sort of plasma weapon. Burns through flesh.” Hurts like fuck. “I tried to shoot him but he had some sort of energy field up-”
“Tosh, we're coming. Stay where you are.”
She kept running, ignoring that particular edict, and instead of turning right to go into that dead end from before, she darted left as the plasma weapon hit the tree behind her. She found herself on a slightly more crowded street, realising she was definitely headed into town. But the houses along the road were all terraced, and there was nowhere for her to hide. But there were cars lining the street. She glanced behind her to see whether she'd been caught up with yet, before she dropped to the ground, rolling under a rusted Ford Fiesta that had seen better days.
She tried to calm her breathing, desperately scared that he would hear her exhausted panting. Her muscles were trembling and aching with fatigue, and her blood pounded in her ears. The running footsteps slowed as the false Jack arrived on the street. They became slow measured, and she realised he must know she was hiding. There was no way she could have fled out of his sight in the time between her turning into the road and him arriving.
She tried holding her breath, but it made her go light headed. Tosh tried to force herself to breathe slowly, steadily, and slowly she could feeling her heart rate coming back under control. But she nearly bite through her tongue as she jumped when she saw two booted feet come into her side beside the car. They pause, as their owner stopped and looked around, and she clapped a hand over her mouth to try to obscure any noises she might make.
Her phone started ringing.
Toshiko's heart leapt in horror. “Nononono!” She whispered frantically, trying to pull the mobile out of her pocket and silence it. The words “WORK IANTO” mocked her from the screen. Trying to find out where she was, no doubt. She couldn't help but scream as she felt a hand clamp onto her hand, dragging her out from beneath the car, and then she was being hauled upright, her phone clattering to the floor. The impact knocked the battery loose, and the ring tone went silent.
“You have something that belongs to me,” Jack who was not Jack said viciously, and punched her in the throat, crushing her windpipe. She clawed at her throat and stumbled back, choking, and realised that she was starting to recognise the dark that tried to take her before-
Her blood pounded in her ears, her breathing the harsh night air caused her throat to ache. Toshiko reached into her pocket, grabbed her phone, and skidded it across the road as hard as she could. It clattered and bounced, and miraculously the battery didn't come off, and it slid to a stop under another car, several meters away.
Not too far away, booted feet slowed to a walk, and he started to move slowly down the pavement, searching for her. He came to a stop beside the battered Fiesta, and she held her breath. On cue, her phone started ringing, the cheery tone that Tosh had downloaded the week before now seemed dreadfully macabre, and she made a note to replace it with a standard, boring ring if she managed to get out of this situation with her life.
The foot moved as he ran towards where the phone was ringing, and as soon as he was far enough away, she rolled out from under the car, picked herself up and ran again. She caught sight of him standing up, her phone in hand, and then she knocked over a flowerpot and he turned, saw her, and ran after her again.
She had a better head start this time, but she still didn't get very far. He was faster and stronger, and she tried to make one last desperate dive through a hedgerow, but he ploughed into her from behind, knocking her to the ground, and she had the vague impression that she'd just been hit by a car.
It chilled her to the bone as the man who looked like Jack pined her to the ground, straddling her to keep her in place, ignoring her hand as she tried to hit him, or scratch him, or push him off her somehow. He was pulling at her clothes, ripping and tearing them, and terrified notions that this time he would rape her before he killed her again flickered through her mind, enough to make her start to scream before he clapped a hand over her mouth. And then she realised he was searching for something.
“Where is it?” He was hissing, turning out her pockets, tearing at the lining of her jacket. “I know you have it. It's the only way you could keep anticipating me, knowing what I was going to do next.” His hands closed around the little metal fishfinger, and he pulled it out of her pocket triumphantly, his eyes gleaming, his mouth twisted into a nasty feral grin. “Finally,” he said, dropping it into his own pocket, and turned his attention to her. His free hand wrapped around her throat and tightened. “No getting away from me this time,” he told her, and started to choke the life out of her.
The blackness took its time now, as if it knew she couldn't escape again. It started to seep into her bones, into her brain, and her vision was growing dimmer as she started to lose consciousness-
Two sharp bangs, with the sudden release of pressure, brought the world back into sharp and vivid lines. Bullet wounds appeared in the Jack Harkness that had been choking her, but the blood that seeped out was pale yellow, and had the consistency of custard. A third bang and he started to slump forward. She shrieked, all rationality gone, and levered him away before he could collapse on top of her.
She choked and gasped, forcing air back into her lungs, but her mind wouldn't order itself, and all her limbs were trembling. Two men rushed forward, and she realised that Ianto was bending over her, carefully supporting her, helping her to sit up. She flung her arms around him, buried her face in his chest and shook, unable to bring herself to even start crying.
“Tosh?” Ianto sounded worried. “It's alright. He's dead. You're safe.”
She heard a fourth and final gunshot and the muttered words “damned Tx-ii shapeshifting bastards” and she realised they must have brought some disruption rounds, perfect for breaking through forcefields, with them. It was the only way they could have stopped him. Then she felt a hand brushing her hair, and Jack's voice soothing her.
“I'm proud of you, Tosh,” she heard, “You stayed alive. Good girl.”
Not trusting herself to speak, Tosh let them pick her up and take her away.
**
It was such a relief to be back inside the Hub, her hands wrapped around a cup of industrial strength hot sweet tea, that she never wanted to leave. Jack had made her the cup, saying that it had worked wonders in the blitz, and so it would probably work for her too. Ianto hadn't been available with his coffee-making skills, he was out dealing with the alien body that they had made. Gwen and Owen, it turned out, had left for home hours before Tosh had called in a panic. The other two had been just about to leave themselves. She'd been lucky to catch them.
Jack was playing with the little metal fishfinger, twirling it in his fingers. She'd just finished relating the events of the night, and, to her surprise, he had a smile on his face.
“I wasn't sure from the picture in the catalogue, but from what you're saying, I think I know what this is.” Jack smirked, tossing it in the air, catching it again, before holding it up to the light. “It's a Lie-In.”
Toshiko blinked, surprised by such a stupidly normal, and bizarrely out of place name. “A what?”
“A useful little gadget. Not true time travel really. It doesn't move you physically through time. It takes a flash scan of your brain in the moment before death, and transmits it through time to a random point in time anywhere up to about three hundred seconds earlier. It overwrites the previous version of your consciousness, and essentially you gain the next few minutes of memory and experience. So then you can change a decision you made before. It's how you kept evading him. You just kept trying different choices until you got the best one.”
Toshiko shivered. “So it lets you play a game of trial and error with your life?”
Jack nodded, slowly. “Torchwood had a whole stash of them that had been taken from the hold of a Sil'urian smuggling ship that went down over the Isle of Man, if I remember correctly. They were all presumed missing or destroyed in the Fall of Torchwood One.”
Tosh jumped as she heard footsteps, but when she turned it was to see Ianto entering Jack's office, drying his hands off on a Cardiff tourist board tea towel. He smiled gently at her as she fought down the instinctive surge of adrenaline his approach had caused.
“If you're done here,” he said, “I can give you a lift home. Don't think you should be driving just yet.”
Her hands were still shaking. The surface of the tea in her mug was filled with little ripples. She thought if she tried to drive herself home, she'd probably send herself straight off the bridge and into the Taff. “Good idea,” she said, gratefully, and took another huge gulp of tea.
Ianto looked at Jack questioningly, who nodded, waving a hand dismissively. “Go, sleep. You'll feel better in the morning. Sweet tea and a good nights sleep. Good for helping you deal with multiple brushes with death.”
The weird thing was, she couldn't tell if he was joking. She nodded, setting the mug on his desk, and moved to join Ianto by the door, but something occurred to her halfway across the floor and she turned and looked at him, confused.
“I'm curious,” she said, at his questioningly raised eyebrow. “Why's it called a 'Lie-In'?”
Jack grinned, giving the fishfinger a rueful look. “Because it gives you 'just five more minutes'.”