Catching Up With The Sun Chapter 3
Word count: About 2,700 in this chapter
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Ianto came back for him. He blew off the soot from Jack’s face, wiped away the blood and the grime that clotted the edges of his casing. He sat down at an untouched desk and held Jack to his chest, just over his heart.
Then he stole an entire cyber-conversion unit for Lisa.
Jack was terrified of the being inside that metal trap, the one Ianto lovingly kissed and smiled at and murmured sweet words to. He had never encountered the Cybermen before, but he knew enough about bio-implantation and mind control technologies to tell that Lisa was entirely gone. He knew there was no chance that she could be healed as Ianto wanted. Jack wished with every ounce of his being that he could turn back into a human at that moment, if only to save Ianto from the monster- he refused, even in his own thoughts, to call the alien that had killed Lisa by her name.
Ianto approached the director of Torchwood Three, a coldly professional half-Indian woman, and he was hired after a mere cursory glance over his file. Jack fumed about the lax hiring standards: although he was sure the director would eventually perform a background check, Jack would never have allowed anyone into the Hub before they were fully vetted. He wished he knew her name for when he was turned back into a human.
Ianto settled into Torchwood Three quietly. He served the other agents coffee, ordered their meals, organized their paperwork and took over the Archives. He moved the Cyberman into the basement and took on the responsibility of the Tourist Office so that he could covertly accept the medical deliveries he ordered under Torchwood’s licenses. Taking care of the Cyberman in addition to keeping up with several full-time jobs so as to not arouse suspicion meant that Ianto didn’t get as much sleep as he needed. The stress of the deception was also beginning to affect his eating habits and his emotional health. He was also constantly emotionally torn from remaining hopeful for Lisa and watching her seem to slide away. Ianto kept up a normal façade to the team, but Jack knew the truth.
Jack could do nothing but fret as Ianto slipped into depression. For as long as he’d been linked to the young man, feelings of loneliness and despair had been present, but they had receded after Jack had been reunited with him and even more so after Ianto had met Lisa. That was the reason he had finally accepted the woman in Ianto’s life: she did something for him something that Jack, with his love for Ianto so much larger than his current form, could never do. Ianto carried his trusty pocket watch everywhere at Torchwood Three, taking up the habit of curling Jack's fob around his fingers, and that proximity was their only comfort.
Three months into Ianto’s stay in Cardiff their director was shot by a police officer as she stood over the body of a young woman she had just murdered. The Cardiff team discovered that their leader was also responsible for the deaths of over a dozen people in the Cardiff area, all brutal murders.
Ianto had kept himself apart from the team and so the demise of his leader didn’t really affect him emotionally. But when he was putting away her autopsied body he had a flashback to the Battle of Canary Wharf and raced down to the Cyberman’s room, only to find his half-converted girlfriend deeply asleep and resistant to any attempts to awaken her. As he felt the strength of Ianto’s despair and loneliness and terror racing through his own small body, Jack yearned for the ability to cry along with Ianto in that dark room.
One of the other team members took over as director. The man was originally from UNIT and it was reflected in his leadership style, but his views on alien rights were much more liberal than those of the quasi-military organization. Jack was very grateful for this. The previous director hadn’t been xenophobic, but she had been very unlikely to take the extra risks necessary in the field to secure alien life when execution was safer and simpler.
Not long after her death, the team discovered an artifact that allowed whoever was holding it to view the echoes of the past, and in some cases the future. Their new leader declared it to be dangerous to the safety of the team and ordered it locked away. However, in the upheaval since the death of their previous leader the team had fallen behind on their paperwork, and no one had written up the incident report. Without any knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the retrieval, Ianto figured the artifact was benign and picked it up without taking any protective measures.
When Ianto froze in the middle of the Hub, Jack was filled with terror, but it wasn’t referred to him from Ianto. Suddenly, he couldn’t feel any emotions from the young man, in direct contrast to the last nineteen years. Only when the device released a gasping Ianto did fear and shock from the other man flood into Jack.
As soon as he’d caught his breath, Ianto reached into his pocket and gripped Jack so hard that his fob loop dug into Ianto’s hand. Ianto headed downstairs at a near-run, but instead of going to the Cyberman, as Jack had expected, he went to the archives. The artifact was dropped carelessly on a table, which scared Jack almost more than anything that had happened so far: Ianto was always fastidious about caring for artifacts.
Ianto sat down at the archive master computer and opened a search. When Jack heard his own name and title resonating through Ianto’s mind as it was entered into the search, he realized that Ianto must have seen an event in the Hub that concerned him and was struck by a terrible fear. What would Ianto think once he read Jack’s records and saw all the things he had done?
It took a long time for Ianto to read everything, even as much as Jack had edited his own records. When he reached the final report, which detailed the disappearance of Jack and his teammates, Ianto was silent and his emotions were too conflicted for Jack to understand them.
In the end, Ianto whispered something to the empty archives. Jack nearly burst with his desire to know what Ianto had said, but the emotions he sensed continued to be ambiguous.
When Ianto went to bed a few hours later, he slept the whole night with Jack held tightly over his heart.
Dozens of potential consultants had been vetted for the Cyberman; only one had qualifications that measured up to Ianto’s standards. The night the man arrived Ianto encouraged the team to go out for drinks, assuring them that he would close down the Hub when he left. As soon as they were clear, he let in the specialist.
Although he played genial and accommodating to the team, and then calm and collected to the doctor, Jack could sense his true feelings: Ianto was so tired from four and a half months of caring for his girlfriend. The Cyberman used Lisa’s voice and memories most of the time, but occasionally it slipped into a robotic voice and this convinced Ianto that she was deteriorating. He was heartsick and dreaded the specialist telling him that there was no way they could save her.
Since Ianto had no emotional connection to the man, Jack couldn’t glean his name, but his actions confirmed Ianto’s high estimation of his skills. In less than an hour the specialist had gotten the Cyberman off the ventilators. Ianto couldn’t have been more grateful and hopeful, but Jack knew that this was the worst thing he could have done.
As soon as it was not reliant on the machines to keep it alive, the Cyberman was free. It discarded the remnant emotional constraints of the host body. While Ianto rushed down the stairs to protect his lover, Jack was crying inside. He knew that even if by some stroke of luck Ianto survived a part of him would die that night.
After hiding the Japanese doctor’s body, Ianto returned to the Cyberman’s room to discover one of his colleagues deleted and another locked into the conversion unit. Ianto’s pain tore Jack apart as the Welshman pleaded for Lisa to free her captive. The Cyberman’s answer made Ianto freeze, not moving even as it approached him, even as it reached out to touch his shoulder, even as electricity stabbed through his body.
Jack gasped back to life, disoriented beyond any resurrection he’d ever felt. In an instant, he deduced what had happened: when the Cyberman had deleted Ianto, the shock was more than enough to kill him in his tiny form, and whatever powered his immortality had brought him back in his own human body.
He forced himself to look around the room, but once he’d ascertained that the Cyberman had left he could look at nothing but Ianto. Even the corpse of Ianto’s colleague- torn apart from a failed conversion and spreading blood over most surfaces in the room- could not distract him. The Welshman’s skin was paler than Jack had ever seen it, his soft pink lips parted, unmoving, his beautiful eyes closed forever. Jack wanted so horribly to touch him, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
“Ianto,” he murmured. His tongue mangled the name- he hadn’t spoken in nearly three decades, plus it was Welsh, so he’d likely get it wrong anyway- but it was still the most beautiful word he’d ever heard. He closed his eyes and swallowed heavily.
During the last few months Jack had put his mostly idle mind to the question of killing a fully functioning Cyberman. He had come up with a plan, but he had no way of knowing whether it would work. First things first, though, he had to see if he could make it to the director’s office.
Forcing his unused muscles to bring him to his feet, Jack limped slowly toward the door. Even though he’d just come back to life, it seemed that the powers of his immortality couldn’t erase more than thirty years of disuse. His body ached, was rubbed raw by the very air, by his clothes, which were the same he’d worn on the day he’d been transformed into a pocket watch.
He didn’t look back as he left the room.
By the time he got to the main Hub, Jack found that the Cyberman had killed the director. The last living team member was firing indiscriminately at the monster, dodging electric shocks and retreating toward the open armory. Jack admired her fortitude and hoped that she could distract the Cyberman long enough for him to put his plan into action.
He painfully bent his fingers to his Vortex Manipulator, which looked none the worse for the years that he’d spent as a pocket watch. When he managed to stop shaking long enough to press the buttons, he unlocked the door to the secure archives. Ignoring the careful organization of the locker, Jack dragged out a large box- one that he had placed there himself nearly forty years previously- and set it on the desk, wincing at the thunk as the container hit the wood. He nearly cursed aloud when he saw the lock on the containment box, but he remembered his trusty Webley that was still strapped to his waist. Praying that the gun was still functioning after its years as a time piece, Jack aimed it at the lock, turned his head away and fired. The report echoed through the silence of the main Hub. As Jack scrabbled with the lock and shoved aside Costello’s glove to get to the knife, his heart pounded with terror that the sound might have attracted the attention of the Cyberman.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so alive.
Jack turned to chase the Cyberman and collapsed against the director’s desk. He gasped for air, flanks trembling with the effort he’d exerted in climbing the many stairs from the Cyberman’s room in the archives. His legs felt like they were on fire, but he squeezed his eyes shut and dug deep for the energy to stand. He set his eyes on the doorway. In three wobbling steps he grabbed hold of it and sagged against it, feeling completely drained.
The Hub was empty except for the deleted body of the director. The woman who had been fighting the Cyberman was gone. Jack felt a horrible foreboding and began to make his way, shaking and lurching, back to the basement room.
Screams and flashes of bright blue light as he approached made the captain hurry his lead-filled feet. The Cyberman was standing tall, its finger on the button that powered the conversion unit. The Torchwood agent- the woman from upstairs, Jack realized- was screaming so loudly that he wished he could cover his ears, but he didn’t blame her. He would scream if he were trapped in a cyber-conversion unit, too.
Jack moved forward, hoping against all hope that the Cyberman couldn’t hear his shuffling footsteps over the screaming. Killing himself and coming back again might do something for his muscle weakness and nerve sensitivity, but the woman didn’t have time for that. When he was close enough, Jack lifted his arm, squeezed the knife hard to control the shaking in his hand, and plunged it into the creature’s back where Lisa’s heart should have been.
The knife instantly glowed with the same electric light as the conversion unit, crackling energy that snapped up Jack’s arm and across the Cyberman’s body, and he was thrown backwards. The last thing he heard before he died was the agonized shriek of the Cyberman over the deep thunderclap of the knife coming to life, and the last thing he saw was the blinding white light that engulfed the monster.
When he gasped back to life, he was on his back several feet away from the body of the Cyberman, presumably where he had been thrown from the explosion. Electricity still crawled along its stolen form, but it didn’t move. After an eternity, only the knife, still crackling with blue power, showed any signs of life.
The woman’s gasps of fear finally broke through the ringing in his ears. “Get me out of here!” she begged.
He lifted his aching arm and punched in commands on his Vortex Manipulator that unlocked the conversion unit. The woman extricated herself carefully, avoiding a dozen horrifying tools for cutting and drilling. She approached Jack, steps shaking with the aftermath of adrenaline and fear.
“Who are you?” she rasped, falling to her knees at his side. Her eyes were wide and dark, frightened, but there was a strength in them that kept her voice steady and suspicious.
Jack hoped she would believe him because he didn’t have the power to fend off an attack at that moment.
“Captain Jack Harkness,” he replied in a weak voice. “And who are you?” Although he recognized her as one of Ianto’s colleagues, her name had never come through to him.
“Gwen Cooper,” she answered. She was clutching her knees and glancing back at the Cyberman every few seconds, but her earlier stubbornness facing the creature seemed to apply to Jack as well. “How did you get in here?”
Utter exhaustion weighed down Jack’s mind. “Doesn’t matter,” he whispered.
He turned his head. The knife had thrown him within reach of Ianto and he inched his arm along the bloody concrete until he could clutch Ianto’s wrist with his fingers.
If he had waited twenty years and didn’t get to touch the man he loved once, there would have been no reason for any of it.
Jack faintly heard Gwen’s exclamation as he slipped away, but his last thought was of the glorious warmth of Ianto’s skin.
Chapter 4