TW/DW Fic: Back, and Back, and Back a Little More (Future Optional) (1/7)
Title: Back, and Back, and Back a Little More (Future Optional) (1/7)
Author: nancybrown
Prompt: Back to the Future
Characters: Ianto, Jack, Jenny, Madame Vastra, Strax, Parker, Martha, Gwen
Rating: R
Warnings: violence, character death, mention of sexual assault, prostitution, language, and severe bending of time travel plausibility even taking all three canons into account
Spoilers: through TW: "Exit Wounds" and through DW: "The Snowmen"
Words: 32,500 (5,000 this part)
Beta: tymewyse and fide_et_spe both had a hand in making this far more comprehensible than it would have been. All remaining aspects of wtfery are mine alone.
Summary: Accidentally shot into the past by a time-travelling car, Ianto has to fix his own mistakes or he won't have a future to go back to.
AN: Written for reel_torchwood Screening 6. Also fills the Trope Bingo space: au:fusion
Disclaimer: BBC, Universal, RTD, Steven Moffat, and Robert Zemeckis own these characters and situations, and want nothing to do with this ridiculous fluff piece of faux-Victoriana.
***
The phone rang three times before Ianto picked up and groggily said, "What?"
The perky concierge on the other end said, "Good morning. This is your wake-up call. We hope you have enjoyed your stay at...."
He dropped the phone back into the cradle and buried his face in the pillow. He'd asked for the wake-up at five sharp, but now was not relishing the idea of getting up so early. He stretched out an experimental hand. The other side of the bed was cold, therefore Jack hadn't been able to sleep again. The only person less pleasant to be around than moody and didn't-want-to-be-here Jack was moody, tired, and still didn't-want-to-be-here Jack. Fuck.
The light level was weird. Jack must have cracked the curtains before he left. Ianto wished he hadn't. They were staying at a luxurious hotel in a suite with a fantastic view of where One Canada Square would have been standing had the building not been condemned and demolished. But then, for once Ianto hadn't been the one to book their room.
The phone rang again. Ianto ignored it. Four rings roused him from the pillow. "What?"
Jack said, "Did you get the wake-up call?"
"Yes." This was mumbled mostly into the pillow.
"Fantastic. I asked them to call you at precisely seven-fifty-three."
Ianto's brain processed this through a haze. Then he shot straight up. "Fuck."
From where he'd dropped the phone, Jack's voice said, "Good morning."
Ianto managed the world's fastest shower, hoping the day's worth of scruffy stubble made him appear a dangerous scoundrel rather than a sloppy recluse. He pulled on his clothes, saving the last of the tying and fastening for the lift. As luck would have it, he didn't meet anyone from the conference on his ride down, but the luck was small: the rest of the attendees were in the room, waiting for him.
Jack wasn't there. Nor was Gwen.
Ianto plastered on his blandest smile for the unfriendly faces of the UNIT and government officials already seated. "Excuse me." He ducked back out into the corridor, turned on his comm, and hissed, "Gwen, where are you?"
There was a pause. Gwen said, "I thought Jack called you. We're out on a retrieval with Martha. You can handle the conference for us, can't you, pet?" The last part was spoken in her best, 'Please?' tone. None of them wanted to stand in the spotlight as UNIT bitched and moaned at them, so of course Jack had found a way out, and tapped Gwen to go with him. Ianto could look on this as a kindness, that Jack had let him sleep, but he knew better. Ianto had drawn the short straw for being the only living Torchwood agent who could keep calm when the shouting began. No-one wanted a repeat of the last conference.
"Fine. But if it turns into anything, phone me." I'll rescue you if you rescue me.
"Done."
Ianto went back into the conference room, grateful for the poor coffee in the urn. He settled into his assigned chair, too aware of the empty seats beside him. He faked polite interest in the speaker who had already begun showing his slides.
The UNIT commander across from him offered a tight smile. "So nice for Torchwood to finally join us. Are your colleagues attending?"
Ianto considered ignoring him to pay closer attention to the opening remarks, but curious looks from the others around him sent hot embarrassment up his neck. "We got word of a retrieval. Captain Harkness and Agent Cooper are investigating."
The tight smile became a smirk. "Is that what we're calling it now?"
Ianto bristled but didn't reply, shifting his chair to face PowerPoint Hell.
The voice dropped, perhaps in deference to the speaker. "Your little club was founded by drunkards and libertines, and that proud tradition continues. I don't know why they even bothered inviting you."
If his face could catch fire, it would. The accusations hit too close to home. Jack may have maintained his sobriety for two years and two millennia, but after his time underground and the sudden deaths of Toshiko and Owen, he'd fallen off the wagon again. Last night he'd spent too much time in the hotel bar before Ianto had taken one for the team, practically shoving his hand down Jack's trousers with a promise of more if he would just come upstairs.
But Jack was out on a mission with Martha and Gwen, and here Ianto was and here he would stay, accepting insults on their behalf.
He twisted his neck to focus on the slides again. Mandated inter-agency cooperation. Security in an unsafe time. Aliens everywhere, and everything suspect. Fuck. Sometimes Ianto really hated his job.
***
The call came just after the lunch break. Appreciative, Ianto muttered not even half an excuse before he dashed out the door calling for a taxi as Gwen gave him directions in his earpiece. Twenty minutes of London traffic later, Ianto found himself outside a warehouse in a run-down industrial estate. Jack, Gwen, and Martha waited outside as he paid the driver.
"Now will you tell me what's going on?" He craned his neck for a look at Gwen's scanner, but couldn't make sense of it.
Jack said, "One of Martha's contacts got word late last night. There's a cell of Saxon cultists," Ianto groaned, "working on a project he left behind, and they may have got it functional. A time machine."
He didn't miss the lecherous sparkle as Jack said the words. Ianto glanced at Martha, whose involvement made more sense now. "Why would Saxon build a time machine? You said he had the TARDIS imprisoned."
"That's the thing," she said. "The TARDIS was locked. It could only go to right here, and to the distant future."
"Plus," said Jack, "and I think this was more important, the TARDIS is the most complex artificial intelligence ever designed. She can't be used to manipulate history without a lot of tweaking and overrides. That's why the Doctor can go through time without unravelling history. She's got safeguards that travel with her passengers, just like the translation matrix."
Martha smiled. "I asked him about that when he took me on my first trip. I thought I might step on a butterfly and change history. He told me not to step on butterflies."
"Yeah. He's never been helpful on whys and wherefores. But I've worked on the TARDIS control panel. It's gorgeous." Jack always got that faraway look when he talked about his time with the Doctor, and Ianto always made a point of not being annoyed.
"Why are we here?" he asked again.
Gwen said, "We tracked their work to this warehouse." She waited half a beat in case either of the others volunteered any information, but they were both in 'travelling with the Doctor is the best thing that ever happened to me' euphoria, which would soon nosedive into 'except for that one time, and that one time, and holy fuck that sucked' depression. Gwen smiled weakly. "It's a Torchwood London facility."
Ianto's head swivelled around again. He knew the locations of several TW1 off-site facilities. This one was unfamiliar, but so much of their later work had been top-secret in conjunction with the MoD. Why would a lowly junior researcher have known about it? As the old, well-known hot ball of acid settled in his stomach, he knew this was why Jack had called him in on the retrieval. Ianto was their resident expert on Torchwood London.
Seeing his expression, Jack did manage a momentary shift in his eyes, a soft apology for dredging up bad memories.
"All right. I'm going in then, yes?"
"I'm going with you," said Martha. "I've been tracking these cultists for weeks. Jack and Gwen will cover the exits in case they come out running."
Gwen said, "We called Mickey, but he's looking into something else. He'll be hours."
"What about UNIT?" Surely Martha's presence meant they knew?
Jack said, "We'll inform them after we've neutralised the threat. We can't trust them." So much for inter-agency cooperation, although caution made sense. A number of UNIT troops had been aboard the Valiant with Martha's family and Jack, and some kept their memories of the event. Jack said he'd tracked down most of the survivors and given them Retcon over quiet drinks, but that circled back to how much Jack had been drinking lately. And so it went.
"All right. Dr. Jones?" Ianto held out his arm, which Martha took.
"Mr. Jones."
Gwen sighed. "That was only funny the first three times, you pair."
"Jealous," Ianto diagnosed, and Martha nodded firm agreement. "Let's go."
Inside the warehouse, everything was dark, and it became quickly apparent that the cultists, or whatever they were, weren't home.
"Stay outside," Ianto told Jack and Gwen through the comms. "They might be back soon."
"Stay safe, both of you," Jack countered, but he and Gwen remained where they were whilst Ianto prowled through the vaults of the dead.
Stuck in his own saturnine reverie, he almost didn't hear Martha. "Say again? Sorry."
"I said, I didn't realise you worked for Torchwood London."
He shrugged, shining his torch elsewhere in his discomfort. "It never came up."
"I had a cousin who worked there."
"Adeola Oshodi," Ianto said, a second before she did.
Martha's breath caught.
"When I first got a proper look at you when you walked into the tourist centre, I thought I was seeing a ghost. And then I didn't like to say."
"It's fine. We favour each other. We did." Her face, shadowed in the dark room, fell into a quiet sadness. "Everyone said so, even when we were kids. We used to play together at our granddad's house." They passed a room with weird, spiny creatures preserved in jars filling all the metal shelves along one wall. She shivered. "Granddad was a doctor, and his father, too. The study had jars like this, with pickled brains and worse."
Ianto tried to picture wee little Martha and wee little Adeola peeking like twins into a hazy yellowish-green jar with some poor bastard's syphilitic nose floating inside. He imagined their amused grandfather telling them stories to make the girls squeal in delighted terror. "I guess after that the aliens weren't so frightening."
"No," she agreed, lost in a fond memory. "I wasn't going to ask if you knew her."
Another shrug. "Lisa was friends with her." Lisa was friends with everyone. She had a best mate for all occasions: one best mate for shoe shopping, a different best mate for dress shopping, a best lunch mate, a best-couple-friends-they-could-double-date-with, and so on. Ianto knew he'd been in the pile, kept around as the best mate she'd also loved.
"Who's Lisa?"
This time he did look at Martha more closely. To say that she and Gwen gossiped like old women would be to lose the use of a worn-out but perfect cliché for how she chatted with Jack. Ianto had assumed that, along with the details of his sex life, Lisa would have been mentioned in passing, but Martha's question was entirely innocent.
"She was my girlfriend."
The 'was' still hurt, and the context of how they'd known Martha's cousin said the rest. She took his hand and gave a quick squeeze. Sympathy, and understanding.
As they walked, little details came back. Ianto knew this site. When Yvonne had taken over, she'd cleared out many of her predecessors' old trophies and files, storing them in a series of off-site locations. Didn't fit the new paradigm. Too Old World, she'd held, and not suitable for the Brave New Torchwood she was building. She'd kept the few accoutrements she thought accentuated her own ideals, and stowed the rest away.
Now, with the loss of the main building, and the huge loss of life, these old souvenirs showed the true heart of what remained of Torchwood London.
Martha gave a little gasp. Ianto shone his torch over to what she'd seen. A snarling Sontaran menaced her from behind a transparent partition. As they stared, the alien glowered back, glassy eyes glimmering with a feral light.
"What's a Sontaran doing here?" she breathed, when it became apparent the creature wasn't going anywhere.
"Torchwood London's first case," Ianto explained, his memory refreshed by the little brass plaque at the base of the display. "Learning about how it all got started was part of the new employee orientation. This fellow was part of a notorious alien gang who terrorised part of the city. The founders of Torchwood London neutralised the gang, and that convinced Queen Victoria to charter the location."
Now that he knew where he was, Ianto passed his torchlight over the displays and paintings, resting the beam on a mutton-chopped dour face. "Sir Reginald Poopin. Bastard of a man, by all accounts, but so was everyone in those days. Just think. If the Victorians had had more sex, the whole Empire might have looked different."
Martha laughed. "That's one time we never visited when I was with the Doctor. If the Renaissance is anything to go by, they were having loads of sex and not talking about it."
She was probably right. "My point stands." He gestured with his torch. A second painting displayed Poopin, his unnamed attaché, and the body of what was presumably the same Sontaran. Both men stood proudly over the corpse, Victorian hunters who'd brought down their quarry. They'd brought the body home and stuffed it like a fish. "Torchwood used to practise vivisection. This fellow got off lucky, if you can believe it." He didn't add that his trawls through the records said the practise had continued into the 1980s. He'd never worked up the courage to ask Jack if they'd practised on him.
Beside him, Martha shuddered. "You said he was in a gang. What did they do with the other Sontarans?"
"There weren't any others. One was a lizard queen alien. At least one member was human. There were even rumours that the Doctor was involved with the gang, which would explain why Torchwood cared."
Martha ignored the painting and walked over to the display case again. Clearly, she was thinking through the implications: had Torchwood caught the Doctor, it would be his body on display here, or else his head on the wall in Yvonne's office where the lizard queen had glowered her dead taxidermy eyes at employees during performance reviews. 'If it's alien, it's ours' left no room for mercy.
"Lisa heard a lot of stories about Torchwood London's beginnings," Ianto said, indicating with his torch that they should keep walking. "She said the official story was that the gang were threatening the streets, but we both thought Torchwood just didn't like competition." There'd been quite a few similar organisations working at the time, including Torchwood and the Warehouse. Apparently his own great-grandfather had occupied a minor position in the latter, a factoid he'd discovered during another records search.
"I'm not surprised. You're hardly on best terms with UNIT now."
"True, but we're not going to kidnap General McFly's lover and hold her hostage to lure UNIT to our base before we slaughter the lot."
"I've met General McFly's wife," Martha said. "She could kick your arse."
"She's not some fainting flower of a Victorian lady, though. I doubt the lizard queen's girlfriend even put up a fight."
Back before their lives went to shit, Lisa ate up romantic stories like chocolates, from trashy romances to the tabloids. Give her a film where two people shared a destined, desperate, decadent, or doomed love, and Lisa gulped it down with an erotic novel chaser. Rumours of a fated romance between two women of different species, thrown together by chance in a London slum during a knife fight? Lisa had sighed hugely, pillow pressed to her pretty breast, and she'd wept for the tragedy of Poopin's plan. Ianto had listened with half an ear, indulging her interests even as he painted her toenails for her, and he'd absorbed everything through his hands and his lips, as he kissed her calves, asking, "How long d'you think her tongue was?"
Not wanting to think about Lisa, surrounded here by reminders of what he'd lost, he changed the subject. "When is Tom due back in the country?"
"Next week."
"And the wedding is a week after that?" He didn't need to ask, as Martha's mum had called Jack three times to make sure he still planned on attending, Rift permitting. Ianto made sure Jack's good suit was pressed, and his own best suit as well although he probably wouldn't be able to attend, not and leave Gwen to deal with Torchwood business on her own. There was no question of all three attending, with Rhys in tow.
The black mood descending over his thoughts told him changing the subject hadn't helped. Everything came back to dead friends.
They turned a corner. Both torches shone on a new workroom with signs of recent use. In the centre of the room waited the second most beautiful machine he'd ever seen. Ianto had always loved cars, but this model, nothing he knew, was automotive sex: clean steel lines, black details sharp on the silvery exterior. It purred, even as it sat still, like a puma waiting to pounce. He was instantly in love.
Martha took a quick walk around the car, paying less attention to the body work, and more on the engine. She popped open the bonnet with a deft hand. Ianto shone his torch over the car as a luminary glow, but her tight beam indicated a coral pattern he'd know anywhere.
"Jack, we've found the time machine."
Jack met up with them minutes later, just as Ianto, against Martha's advice, had slipped into the driving seat and let the leather mould to his backside. He wouldn't touch anything. Well, not much.
Jack whistled as he saw the car. "Oh, mama."
Martha giggled. "Should we leave you alone?"
Ianto immediately volunteered to chaperone, but Martha said, "Not the way you've been drooling on the interior." Jack meanwhile joined Martha in her inspection of the engine compartment. His trousers seemed a bit constrictive, the kinky bastard. Ianto glanced behind himself. No back seat. Pity.
Martha tapped her borrowed earpiece. "Gwen, you are missing this. Jack is trying to make out with the car."
In all their ears, Gwen said, "Snap a photo for me. Someone has to pay attention out here whilst you lot play Top Gear."
Careful around technology that could easily rip a hole in space-time and destroy this part of the galaxy, Jack only hit the thing with a spanner twice. Then he asked Ianto and Martha to perform a quick inventory of the site while he inspected the vehicle and workshop area for more time machine paraphernalia they'd have to dispose of with care, starting with the plutonium.
"I'll handle the inventory," Ianto told Martha. "Keep him out of trouble, yeah? God knows what he'll do around a functional time machine."
"As long as his trousers stay on, we're fine."
"I can hear you," said Jack.
Amongst the stacks of broken artefacts, decrepit oil paintings, and random detritus one found in old storehouses, Ianto found a box with photostatic copies of old Torchwood London pamphlets and fliers. "Zachary Is a Zombie," "Official Policies on Sharing Information With Area 51," and "A brief history of alien invasions in London, 1875-1900" peered up from disintegrating paper in faded blue copier ink. Mass-produced, handed out to Torchwood employees, and promptly forgotten, this stuff was rubbish, consigned to the company dustbin because the company furnace hadn't got round to burning it all.
This whole site would have to be locked down, gone through, cleaned up, and/or incinerated. Something unhappy crawled in his throat considering the enormity of the task, and his dawning horror that the bulk of the work would fall onto his shoulders. They had shut down the main site, but how many little secret hidey holes had Torchwood stuffed full of crap and forgotten? Torchwood Glasgow technically had a director, though given Archie's precarious health and robust approach to running head-first into danger, that wouldn't last. Ianto would have a century's worth of files and worse to address if he lived to see the day.
As the others pored over the car, Ianto began organising boxes, searching in vain for a hand trolley. He stacked a crate of old fliers in the boot of the car, reckoning he could start a small fire in a barrel outside, make a dent in the rubbish that way.
Jack shooed him away after the third box. "Don't load it. We're not keeping this stuff."
"Then why the inventory?"
"We need to know what we have to destroy or lock down."
"So you are keeping some of it," Martha said with a frown.
"I'll start on the near rooms," Ianto said, knowing he'd have to do the task no matter what.
More time had passed than he'd realised with he heard Jack shouting for him. The summer sky wasn't growing dark, but they'd worked into the evening. Gwen had come inside, apparently deciding the cultists weren't coming back today.
Ianto asked, "Are we breaking for dinner?"
"Not yet. Unless you've found something interesting in the warehouse, we're taking the car to a more secure location and coming back tomorrow with a UNIT crew." Jack twisted his mouth as he said the words, as though he was chewing something with an unpleasant number of legs.
"Right, I'll take it outside."
Jack held up a hand. "I'll drive. The last thing we need is for someone else to drive it into the Ice Age."
"Which you could do yourself," said Gwen.
"Yeah, but I'd come back. Eventually." Jack's attempt at a joke fell hard. "It'll be fine."
Sure enough, as Jack turned the key, the starter caught and spectacularly failed to shoot him anywhere but half a centimetre forward. Ianto operated the controls for the sally port door, opening wide for him to drive out.
Ianto followed to the car park outside. He had a curious vision of the four of them piling into the car and driving off together. Jack parked the car smoothly and got out. His face was shining. "She handles like a dream. Be nice, and I'll let you drive her next."
"Actually, as the designated chauffeur and getaway driver for Torchwood Cardiff, it's my job to thoroughly inspect the vehicles we use for proper road worthiness, etcetera." He managed a straight face as he held out his hands for the keys.
Jack didn't, but he did hand them over. "Try her out."
As the keys touched his hand, Ianto saw movement behind Jack. UNIT? Mickey?
No, cars were parked at the edges of the car park. The Saxon cult members had returned from their errand, and seeing the warehouse open, they must have realised they'd been found out. They were advancing on the two of them.
Even as this crystallised in his mind, gunshots roared out, forcing him away from Jack. More shots were fired toward the warehouse. Jack stood frozen, caught between protecting Ianto, and running back to protect their two friends.
Another bullet settled the issue. Ianto leapt behind the car, digging for his own gun. He saw Jack make a mad dash for the warehouse, shouting at Gwen to shut the inner door.
A bright light flashed, and loud noise. Ianto covered his face, his ears ringing. That had been an explosive, small, perhaps a grenade. Jesus.
His gun finally free, he poked around the side of the car and squeezed off three shots to give Jack enough cover fire to reach the warehouse.
If they had grenades, they'd lob one at Ianto next.
But whatever they had, they threw it not over the car, but directly where Jack had dived under the closing warehouse door, the device landing in what would have been a perfect pass against his backside. The world held its breath.
With a loud roar and a bright flash and a giant WHOOMP, the bomb detonated.
For a moment, Ianto went completely numb.
Jack had been on top of the bomb. He'd have been obliterated in the blast. Being Jack, that didn't mean he wouldn't recover. On the other hand, it didn't mean he would. Schrödinger’s explosives. Both Gwen and Martha had been with Jack. There was a remote chance that either was still alive, in critical condition and dying under a tonne of smoking rubble, and a remoter one that Martha had managed to fall back behind the inner doorway. They were both almost certainly dead.
A sob choked halfway up his throat before emerging as a scream. The Saxon fucks turned to see him. Ianto had their sudden, undivided attention. He had a gun. They had more guns and probably more grenades.
Shit.
Instinctively, he dove back into the car and slammed the door as the first bullets sprayed the bodywork. Swearing, terrified, he squeezed the ignition, dropping the gears into a hard reverse. He was going to fuck up the transmission, and it didn't matter. He backed away from the building, easily hitting fifty in reverse. He would run into something. And with the ruin of the warehouse receding in front of him and the cultists swarming into the gap, that didn't matter, either.
Backup was coming. He could flee, take the car and go, come back with reinforcements. He knew he wouldn't. As he backed away, the Saxon people marched after him in two lines, guns still firing. Without even considering what he was dong, he hit the brakes.
This was a bad idea. But he wasn't leaving the site, not with a one in a million chance that Gwen and Martha were still alive, not with the near-certainty that Jack's body, in pieces, would gasp back to life broken and screaming and alone. All he had to do was get rid of these bastards between him and them.
Ianto dropped the car into first, and aimed for third, right between the two lines of cultists. Behind them was the building. He'd never be able to stop. He'd plough into them, plough into the wreckage, wind up just as dead as his friends.
He gunned it.
The cultists realised what he planned as he screeched towards them. Determination turned to fear. The brighter ones dashed to the sides. Ianto saw the frozen face of the closest one, caught in a rictus of fear, right as the car reached him.
And reached 88 KPH at exactly the same moment.
Ianto tensed for impact.
White light followed by the thunder of crashing wood was utterly different from the damp, wet meaty thud he'd been expecting. He shouted as beams splintered around him, scratching in fiendish squeals against the metal frame. His foot jammed on the brakes, jerking him and the car to a stop. Whatever he'd crashed into teetered a moment longer, then crashed completely atop him like the world's last tree house surrendering to the termites.
The car hissed around him. Bits of wood settled with small cracks. Everything was dark.
"What the fuck?" he repeated to himself again and again.
No cultists. No warehouse. He appeared to have drawn the attention of three horses whose stable was no longer present, which (horses?) meant he'd soon be drawing the attention of whoever kept the horses.
Ianto attempted to start the car, was relieved to note that it still started, and drove over the wrecked stable. Barn. Whatever. The horses followed him.
"Sorry," he said to the confused horses as he drove slowly away.
He barely got down the street before his situation settled into his head. He'd been in an industrial estate in London. Now he was somewhere rural. Ianto hated rural. Even before the crazy hillbilly cannibals had tried to turn him into starters for a Torchwood feast, he'd wanted as little as possible to do with the rural parts of the country as he could arrange.
A red light on the dash kept drawing his eye, and he kept ignoring it. If he didn't look at the petrol gauge, he could pretend he wasn't in deep trouble. He kept the car's speed low, peering around him for bearings. The buildings were squat, none of them more than two or three storeys, all wood or brick. Gas lamps, few and far between, lit the murk.
The car sputtered. He let his eyes linger on the gauge, which was conveniently located right beside what appeared to be a digital calendar. Please don't let it be a digital calendar, he thought. Please.
Beside the empty fuel gauge, the display read: "3 March 1885"
***
Chapter Two
Author: nancybrown
Prompt: Back to the Future
Characters: Ianto, Jack, Jenny, Madame Vastra, Strax, Parker, Martha, Gwen
Rating: R
Warnings: violence, character death, mention of sexual assault, prostitution, language, and severe bending of time travel plausibility even taking all three canons into account
Spoilers: through TW: "Exit Wounds" and through DW: "The Snowmen"
Words: 32,500 (5,000 this part)
Beta: tymewyse and fide_et_spe both had a hand in making this far more comprehensible than it would have been. All remaining aspects of wtfery are mine alone.
Summary: Accidentally shot into the past by a time-travelling car, Ianto has to fix his own mistakes or he won't have a future to go back to.
AN: Written for reel_torchwood Screening 6. Also fills the Trope Bingo space: au:fusion
Disclaimer: BBC, Universal, RTD, Steven Moffat, and Robert Zemeckis own these characters and situations, and want nothing to do with this ridiculous fluff piece of faux-Victoriana.
***
The phone rang three times before Ianto picked up and groggily said, "What?"
The perky concierge on the other end said, "Good morning. This is your wake-up call. We hope you have enjoyed your stay at...."
He dropped the phone back into the cradle and buried his face in the pillow. He'd asked for the wake-up at five sharp, but now was not relishing the idea of getting up so early. He stretched out an experimental hand. The other side of the bed was cold, therefore Jack hadn't been able to sleep again. The only person less pleasant to be around than moody and didn't-want-to-be-here Jack was moody, tired, and still didn't-want-to-be-here Jack. Fuck.
The light level was weird. Jack must have cracked the curtains before he left. Ianto wished he hadn't. They were staying at a luxurious hotel in a suite with a fantastic view of where One Canada Square would have been standing had the building not been condemned and demolished. But then, for once Ianto hadn't been the one to book their room.
The phone rang again. Ianto ignored it. Four rings roused him from the pillow. "What?"
Jack said, "Did you get the wake-up call?"
"Yes." This was mumbled mostly into the pillow.
"Fantastic. I asked them to call you at precisely seven-fifty-three."
Ianto's brain processed this through a haze. Then he shot straight up. "Fuck."
From where he'd dropped the phone, Jack's voice said, "Good morning."
Ianto managed the world's fastest shower, hoping the day's worth of scruffy stubble made him appear a dangerous scoundrel rather than a sloppy recluse. He pulled on his clothes, saving the last of the tying and fastening for the lift. As luck would have it, he didn't meet anyone from the conference on his ride down, but the luck was small: the rest of the attendees were in the room, waiting for him.
Jack wasn't there. Nor was Gwen.
Ianto plastered on his blandest smile for the unfriendly faces of the UNIT and government officials already seated. "Excuse me." He ducked back out into the corridor, turned on his comm, and hissed, "Gwen, where are you?"
There was a pause. Gwen said, "I thought Jack called you. We're out on a retrieval with Martha. You can handle the conference for us, can't you, pet?" The last part was spoken in her best, 'Please?' tone. None of them wanted to stand in the spotlight as UNIT bitched and moaned at them, so of course Jack had found a way out, and tapped Gwen to go with him. Ianto could look on this as a kindness, that Jack had let him sleep, but he knew better. Ianto had drawn the short straw for being the only living Torchwood agent who could keep calm when the shouting began. No-one wanted a repeat of the last conference.
"Fine. But if it turns into anything, phone me." I'll rescue you if you rescue me.
"Done."
Ianto went back into the conference room, grateful for the poor coffee in the urn. He settled into his assigned chair, too aware of the empty seats beside him. He faked polite interest in the speaker who had already begun showing his slides.
The UNIT commander across from him offered a tight smile. "So nice for Torchwood to finally join us. Are your colleagues attending?"
Ianto considered ignoring him to pay closer attention to the opening remarks, but curious looks from the others around him sent hot embarrassment up his neck. "We got word of a retrieval. Captain Harkness and Agent Cooper are investigating."
The tight smile became a smirk. "Is that what we're calling it now?"
Ianto bristled but didn't reply, shifting his chair to face PowerPoint Hell.
The voice dropped, perhaps in deference to the speaker. "Your little club was founded by drunkards and libertines, and that proud tradition continues. I don't know why they even bothered inviting you."
If his face could catch fire, it would. The accusations hit too close to home. Jack may have maintained his sobriety for two years and two millennia, but after his time underground and the sudden deaths of Toshiko and Owen, he'd fallen off the wagon again. Last night he'd spent too much time in the hotel bar before Ianto had taken one for the team, practically shoving his hand down Jack's trousers with a promise of more if he would just come upstairs.
But Jack was out on a mission with Martha and Gwen, and here Ianto was and here he would stay, accepting insults on their behalf.
He twisted his neck to focus on the slides again. Mandated inter-agency cooperation. Security in an unsafe time. Aliens everywhere, and everything suspect. Fuck. Sometimes Ianto really hated his job.
***
The call came just after the lunch break. Appreciative, Ianto muttered not even half an excuse before he dashed out the door calling for a taxi as Gwen gave him directions in his earpiece. Twenty minutes of London traffic later, Ianto found himself outside a warehouse in a run-down industrial estate. Jack, Gwen, and Martha waited outside as he paid the driver.
"Now will you tell me what's going on?" He craned his neck for a look at Gwen's scanner, but couldn't make sense of it.
Jack said, "One of Martha's contacts got word late last night. There's a cell of Saxon cultists," Ianto groaned, "working on a project he left behind, and they may have got it functional. A time machine."
He didn't miss the lecherous sparkle as Jack said the words. Ianto glanced at Martha, whose involvement made more sense now. "Why would Saxon build a time machine? You said he had the TARDIS imprisoned."
"That's the thing," she said. "The TARDIS was locked. It could only go to right here, and to the distant future."
"Plus," said Jack, "and I think this was more important, the TARDIS is the most complex artificial intelligence ever designed. She can't be used to manipulate history without a lot of tweaking and overrides. That's why the Doctor can go through time without unravelling history. She's got safeguards that travel with her passengers, just like the translation matrix."
Martha smiled. "I asked him about that when he took me on my first trip. I thought I might step on a butterfly and change history. He told me not to step on butterflies."
"Yeah. He's never been helpful on whys and wherefores. But I've worked on the TARDIS control panel. It's gorgeous." Jack always got that faraway look when he talked about his time with the Doctor, and Ianto always made a point of not being annoyed.
"Why are we here?" he asked again.
Gwen said, "We tracked their work to this warehouse." She waited half a beat in case either of the others volunteered any information, but they were both in 'travelling with the Doctor is the best thing that ever happened to me' euphoria, which would soon nosedive into 'except for that one time, and that one time, and holy fuck that sucked' depression. Gwen smiled weakly. "It's a Torchwood London facility."
Ianto's head swivelled around again. He knew the locations of several TW1 off-site facilities. This one was unfamiliar, but so much of their later work had been top-secret in conjunction with the MoD. Why would a lowly junior researcher have known about it? As the old, well-known hot ball of acid settled in his stomach, he knew this was why Jack had called him in on the retrieval. Ianto was their resident expert on Torchwood London.
Seeing his expression, Jack did manage a momentary shift in his eyes, a soft apology for dredging up bad memories.
"All right. I'm going in then, yes?"
"I'm going with you," said Martha. "I've been tracking these cultists for weeks. Jack and Gwen will cover the exits in case they come out running."
Gwen said, "We called Mickey, but he's looking into something else. He'll be hours."
"What about UNIT?" Surely Martha's presence meant they knew?
Jack said, "We'll inform them after we've neutralised the threat. We can't trust them." So much for inter-agency cooperation, although caution made sense. A number of UNIT troops had been aboard the Valiant with Martha's family and Jack, and some kept their memories of the event. Jack said he'd tracked down most of the survivors and given them Retcon over quiet drinks, but that circled back to how much Jack had been drinking lately. And so it went.
"All right. Dr. Jones?" Ianto held out his arm, which Martha took.
"Mr. Jones."
Gwen sighed. "That was only funny the first three times, you pair."
"Jealous," Ianto diagnosed, and Martha nodded firm agreement. "Let's go."
Inside the warehouse, everything was dark, and it became quickly apparent that the cultists, or whatever they were, weren't home.
"Stay outside," Ianto told Jack and Gwen through the comms. "They might be back soon."
"Stay safe, both of you," Jack countered, but he and Gwen remained where they were whilst Ianto prowled through the vaults of the dead.
Stuck in his own saturnine reverie, he almost didn't hear Martha. "Say again? Sorry."
"I said, I didn't realise you worked for Torchwood London."
He shrugged, shining his torch elsewhere in his discomfort. "It never came up."
"I had a cousin who worked there."
"Adeola Oshodi," Ianto said, a second before she did.
Martha's breath caught.
"When I first got a proper look at you when you walked into the tourist centre, I thought I was seeing a ghost. And then I didn't like to say."
"It's fine. We favour each other. We did." Her face, shadowed in the dark room, fell into a quiet sadness. "Everyone said so, even when we were kids. We used to play together at our granddad's house." They passed a room with weird, spiny creatures preserved in jars filling all the metal shelves along one wall. She shivered. "Granddad was a doctor, and his father, too. The study had jars like this, with pickled brains and worse."
Ianto tried to picture wee little Martha and wee little Adeola peeking like twins into a hazy yellowish-green jar with some poor bastard's syphilitic nose floating inside. He imagined their amused grandfather telling them stories to make the girls squeal in delighted terror. "I guess after that the aliens weren't so frightening."
"No," she agreed, lost in a fond memory. "I wasn't going to ask if you knew her."
Another shrug. "Lisa was friends with her." Lisa was friends with everyone. She had a best mate for all occasions: one best mate for shoe shopping, a different best mate for dress shopping, a best lunch mate, a best-couple-friends-they-could-double-date-with, and so on. Ianto knew he'd been in the pile, kept around as the best mate she'd also loved.
"Who's Lisa?"
This time he did look at Martha more closely. To say that she and Gwen gossiped like old women would be to lose the use of a worn-out but perfect cliché for how she chatted with Jack. Ianto had assumed that, along with the details of his sex life, Lisa would have been mentioned in passing, but Martha's question was entirely innocent.
"She was my girlfriend."
The 'was' still hurt, and the context of how they'd known Martha's cousin said the rest. She took his hand and gave a quick squeeze. Sympathy, and understanding.
As they walked, little details came back. Ianto knew this site. When Yvonne had taken over, she'd cleared out many of her predecessors' old trophies and files, storing them in a series of off-site locations. Didn't fit the new paradigm. Too Old World, she'd held, and not suitable for the Brave New Torchwood she was building. She'd kept the few accoutrements she thought accentuated her own ideals, and stowed the rest away.
Now, with the loss of the main building, and the huge loss of life, these old souvenirs showed the true heart of what remained of Torchwood London.
Martha gave a little gasp. Ianto shone his torch over to what she'd seen. A snarling Sontaran menaced her from behind a transparent partition. As they stared, the alien glowered back, glassy eyes glimmering with a feral light.
"What's a Sontaran doing here?" she breathed, when it became apparent the creature wasn't going anywhere.
"Torchwood London's first case," Ianto explained, his memory refreshed by the little brass plaque at the base of the display. "Learning about how it all got started was part of the new employee orientation. This fellow was part of a notorious alien gang who terrorised part of the city. The founders of Torchwood London neutralised the gang, and that convinced Queen Victoria to charter the location."
Now that he knew where he was, Ianto passed his torchlight over the displays and paintings, resting the beam on a mutton-chopped dour face. "Sir Reginald Poopin. Bastard of a man, by all accounts, but so was everyone in those days. Just think. If the Victorians had had more sex, the whole Empire might have looked different."
Martha laughed. "That's one time we never visited when I was with the Doctor. If the Renaissance is anything to go by, they were having loads of sex and not talking about it."
She was probably right. "My point stands." He gestured with his torch. A second painting displayed Poopin, his unnamed attaché, and the body of what was presumably the same Sontaran. Both men stood proudly over the corpse, Victorian hunters who'd brought down their quarry. They'd brought the body home and stuffed it like a fish. "Torchwood used to practise vivisection. This fellow got off lucky, if you can believe it." He didn't add that his trawls through the records said the practise had continued into the 1980s. He'd never worked up the courage to ask Jack if they'd practised on him.
Beside him, Martha shuddered. "You said he was in a gang. What did they do with the other Sontarans?"
"There weren't any others. One was a lizard queen alien. At least one member was human. There were even rumours that the Doctor was involved with the gang, which would explain why Torchwood cared."
Martha ignored the painting and walked over to the display case again. Clearly, she was thinking through the implications: had Torchwood caught the Doctor, it would be his body on display here, or else his head on the wall in Yvonne's office where the lizard queen had glowered her dead taxidermy eyes at employees during performance reviews. 'If it's alien, it's ours' left no room for mercy.
"Lisa heard a lot of stories about Torchwood London's beginnings," Ianto said, indicating with his torch that they should keep walking. "She said the official story was that the gang were threatening the streets, but we both thought Torchwood just didn't like competition." There'd been quite a few similar organisations working at the time, including Torchwood and the Warehouse. Apparently his own great-grandfather had occupied a minor position in the latter, a factoid he'd discovered during another records search.
"I'm not surprised. You're hardly on best terms with UNIT now."
"True, but we're not going to kidnap General McFly's lover and hold her hostage to lure UNIT to our base before we slaughter the lot."
"I've met General McFly's wife," Martha said. "She could kick your arse."
"She's not some fainting flower of a Victorian lady, though. I doubt the lizard queen's girlfriend even put up a fight."
Back before their lives went to shit, Lisa ate up romantic stories like chocolates, from trashy romances to the tabloids. Give her a film where two people shared a destined, desperate, decadent, or doomed love, and Lisa gulped it down with an erotic novel chaser. Rumours of a fated romance between two women of different species, thrown together by chance in a London slum during a knife fight? Lisa had sighed hugely, pillow pressed to her pretty breast, and she'd wept for the tragedy of Poopin's plan. Ianto had listened with half an ear, indulging her interests even as he painted her toenails for her, and he'd absorbed everything through his hands and his lips, as he kissed her calves, asking, "How long d'you think her tongue was?"
Not wanting to think about Lisa, surrounded here by reminders of what he'd lost, he changed the subject. "When is Tom due back in the country?"
"Next week."
"And the wedding is a week after that?" He didn't need to ask, as Martha's mum had called Jack three times to make sure he still planned on attending, Rift permitting. Ianto made sure Jack's good suit was pressed, and his own best suit as well although he probably wouldn't be able to attend, not and leave Gwen to deal with Torchwood business on her own. There was no question of all three attending, with Rhys in tow.
The black mood descending over his thoughts told him changing the subject hadn't helped. Everything came back to dead friends.
They turned a corner. Both torches shone on a new workroom with signs of recent use. In the centre of the room waited the second most beautiful machine he'd ever seen. Ianto had always loved cars, but this model, nothing he knew, was automotive sex: clean steel lines, black details sharp on the silvery exterior. It purred, even as it sat still, like a puma waiting to pounce. He was instantly in love.
Martha took a quick walk around the car, paying less attention to the body work, and more on the engine. She popped open the bonnet with a deft hand. Ianto shone his torch over the car as a luminary glow, but her tight beam indicated a coral pattern he'd know anywhere.
"Jack, we've found the time machine."
Jack met up with them minutes later, just as Ianto, against Martha's advice, had slipped into the driving seat and let the leather mould to his backside. He wouldn't touch anything. Well, not much.
Jack whistled as he saw the car. "Oh, mama."
Martha giggled. "Should we leave you alone?"
Ianto immediately volunteered to chaperone, but Martha said, "Not the way you've been drooling on the interior." Jack meanwhile joined Martha in her inspection of the engine compartment. His trousers seemed a bit constrictive, the kinky bastard. Ianto glanced behind himself. No back seat. Pity.
Martha tapped her borrowed earpiece. "Gwen, you are missing this. Jack is trying to make out with the car."
In all their ears, Gwen said, "Snap a photo for me. Someone has to pay attention out here whilst you lot play Top Gear."
Careful around technology that could easily rip a hole in space-time and destroy this part of the galaxy, Jack only hit the thing with a spanner twice. Then he asked Ianto and Martha to perform a quick inventory of the site while he inspected the vehicle and workshop area for more time machine paraphernalia they'd have to dispose of with care, starting with the plutonium.
"I'll handle the inventory," Ianto told Martha. "Keep him out of trouble, yeah? God knows what he'll do around a functional time machine."
"As long as his trousers stay on, we're fine."
"I can hear you," said Jack.
Amongst the stacks of broken artefacts, decrepit oil paintings, and random detritus one found in old storehouses, Ianto found a box with photostatic copies of old Torchwood London pamphlets and fliers. "Zachary Is a Zombie," "Official Policies on Sharing Information With Area 51," and "A brief history of alien invasions in London, 1875-1900" peered up from disintegrating paper in faded blue copier ink. Mass-produced, handed out to Torchwood employees, and promptly forgotten, this stuff was rubbish, consigned to the company dustbin because the company furnace hadn't got round to burning it all.
This whole site would have to be locked down, gone through, cleaned up, and/or incinerated. Something unhappy crawled in his throat considering the enormity of the task, and his dawning horror that the bulk of the work would fall onto his shoulders. They had shut down the main site, but how many little secret hidey holes had Torchwood stuffed full of crap and forgotten? Torchwood Glasgow technically had a director, though given Archie's precarious health and robust approach to running head-first into danger, that wouldn't last. Ianto would have a century's worth of files and worse to address if he lived to see the day.
As the others pored over the car, Ianto began organising boxes, searching in vain for a hand trolley. He stacked a crate of old fliers in the boot of the car, reckoning he could start a small fire in a barrel outside, make a dent in the rubbish that way.
Jack shooed him away after the third box. "Don't load it. We're not keeping this stuff."
"Then why the inventory?"
"We need to know what we have to destroy or lock down."
"So you are keeping some of it," Martha said with a frown.
"I'll start on the near rooms," Ianto said, knowing he'd have to do the task no matter what.
More time had passed than he'd realised with he heard Jack shouting for him. The summer sky wasn't growing dark, but they'd worked into the evening. Gwen had come inside, apparently deciding the cultists weren't coming back today.
Ianto asked, "Are we breaking for dinner?"
"Not yet. Unless you've found something interesting in the warehouse, we're taking the car to a more secure location and coming back tomorrow with a UNIT crew." Jack twisted his mouth as he said the words, as though he was chewing something with an unpleasant number of legs.
"Right, I'll take it outside."
Jack held up a hand. "I'll drive. The last thing we need is for someone else to drive it into the Ice Age."
"Which you could do yourself," said Gwen.
"Yeah, but I'd come back. Eventually." Jack's attempt at a joke fell hard. "It'll be fine."
Sure enough, as Jack turned the key, the starter caught and spectacularly failed to shoot him anywhere but half a centimetre forward. Ianto operated the controls for the sally port door, opening wide for him to drive out.
Ianto followed to the car park outside. He had a curious vision of the four of them piling into the car and driving off together. Jack parked the car smoothly and got out. His face was shining. "She handles like a dream. Be nice, and I'll let you drive her next."
"Actually, as the designated chauffeur and getaway driver for Torchwood Cardiff, it's my job to thoroughly inspect the vehicles we use for proper road worthiness, etcetera." He managed a straight face as he held out his hands for the keys.
Jack didn't, but he did hand them over. "Try her out."
As the keys touched his hand, Ianto saw movement behind Jack. UNIT? Mickey?
No, cars were parked at the edges of the car park. The Saxon cult members had returned from their errand, and seeing the warehouse open, they must have realised they'd been found out. They were advancing on the two of them.
Even as this crystallised in his mind, gunshots roared out, forcing him away from Jack. More shots were fired toward the warehouse. Jack stood frozen, caught between protecting Ianto, and running back to protect their two friends.
Another bullet settled the issue. Ianto leapt behind the car, digging for his own gun. He saw Jack make a mad dash for the warehouse, shouting at Gwen to shut the inner door.
A bright light flashed, and loud noise. Ianto covered his face, his ears ringing. That had been an explosive, small, perhaps a grenade. Jesus.
His gun finally free, he poked around the side of the car and squeezed off three shots to give Jack enough cover fire to reach the warehouse.
If they had grenades, they'd lob one at Ianto next.
But whatever they had, they threw it not over the car, but directly where Jack had dived under the closing warehouse door, the device landing in what would have been a perfect pass against his backside. The world held its breath.
With a loud roar and a bright flash and a giant WHOOMP, the bomb detonated.
For a moment, Ianto went completely numb.
Jack had been on top of the bomb. He'd have been obliterated in the blast. Being Jack, that didn't mean he wouldn't recover. On the other hand, it didn't mean he would. Schrödinger’s explosives. Both Gwen and Martha had been with Jack. There was a remote chance that either was still alive, in critical condition and dying under a tonne of smoking rubble, and a remoter one that Martha had managed to fall back behind the inner doorway. They were both almost certainly dead.
A sob choked halfway up his throat before emerging as a scream. The Saxon fucks turned to see him. Ianto had their sudden, undivided attention. He had a gun. They had more guns and probably more grenades.
Shit.
Instinctively, he dove back into the car and slammed the door as the first bullets sprayed the bodywork. Swearing, terrified, he squeezed the ignition, dropping the gears into a hard reverse. He was going to fuck up the transmission, and it didn't matter. He backed away from the building, easily hitting fifty in reverse. He would run into something. And with the ruin of the warehouse receding in front of him and the cultists swarming into the gap, that didn't matter, either.
Backup was coming. He could flee, take the car and go, come back with reinforcements. He knew he wouldn't. As he backed away, the Saxon people marched after him in two lines, guns still firing. Without even considering what he was dong, he hit the brakes.
This was a bad idea. But he wasn't leaving the site, not with a one in a million chance that Gwen and Martha were still alive, not with the near-certainty that Jack's body, in pieces, would gasp back to life broken and screaming and alone. All he had to do was get rid of these bastards between him and them.
Ianto dropped the car into first, and aimed for third, right between the two lines of cultists. Behind them was the building. He'd never be able to stop. He'd plough into them, plough into the wreckage, wind up just as dead as his friends.
He gunned it.
The cultists realised what he planned as he screeched towards them. Determination turned to fear. The brighter ones dashed to the sides. Ianto saw the frozen face of the closest one, caught in a rictus of fear, right as the car reached him.
And reached 88 KPH at exactly the same moment.
Ianto tensed for impact.
White light followed by the thunder of crashing wood was utterly different from the damp, wet meaty thud he'd been expecting. He shouted as beams splintered around him, scratching in fiendish squeals against the metal frame. His foot jammed on the brakes, jerking him and the car to a stop. Whatever he'd crashed into teetered a moment longer, then crashed completely atop him like the world's last tree house surrendering to the termites.
The car hissed around him. Bits of wood settled with small cracks. Everything was dark.
"What the fuck?" he repeated to himself again and again.
No cultists. No warehouse. He appeared to have drawn the attention of three horses whose stable was no longer present, which (horses?) meant he'd soon be drawing the attention of whoever kept the horses.
Ianto attempted to start the car, was relieved to note that it still started, and drove over the wrecked stable. Barn. Whatever. The horses followed him.
"Sorry," he said to the confused horses as he drove slowly away.
He barely got down the street before his situation settled into his head. He'd been in an industrial estate in London. Now he was somewhere rural. Ianto hated rural. Even before the crazy hillbilly cannibals had tried to turn him into starters for a Torchwood feast, he'd wanted as little as possible to do with the rural parts of the country as he could arrange.
A red light on the dash kept drawing his eye, and he kept ignoring it. If he didn't look at the petrol gauge, he could pretend he wasn't in deep trouble. He kept the car's speed low, peering around him for bearings. The buildings were squat, none of them more than two or three storeys, all wood or brick. Gas lamps, few and far between, lit the murk.
The car sputtered. He let his eyes linger on the gauge, which was conveniently located right beside what appeared to be a digital calendar. Please don't let it be a digital calendar, he thought. Please.
Beside the empty fuel gauge, the display read: "3 March 1885"
***
Chapter Two