GTHW 3/10
chapter three
Ianto was good at cleaning things up. Circumstances that had allowed him to develop skills like how to eliminate bloodstains from antiquated fabric had not left him a lot of other choices. So he was well aware of it, but not that such skills were anything special. Yet, within a week of his arrival, Ianto found himself being treated as the authority on equipment maintenance and building upkeep.
He'd braced for the derision such janitorial positions usually invited, but the soldiers, in their own way, expressed genuine gratitude for his help and advice, after months of making do on their mish-mash of knowledge of household practices and half-remembered childhood chores.
Ianto would return to his bunk to find packets of food left under his neatly folded blanket, usually sweets or items not produced by the computerized 'kitchens'. He kept the ones he knew how to eat; the stuff he didn't, he took with him to the infirmary, to give to somebody who looked like they needed it. Sometimes he received trinkets, small charms or handmade pieces. Those he kept, in a metal box he'd taken out of the supply room. Mostly they were wood or metal, but sometimes it was a rough gem, or something he didn't recognize.
- - -
He wasn't sure what prompted him to make the decision. Perhaps it was listening to one tale too many, or a creeping kind of claustrophobia that had been gradually pressing down on him. But he woke up one day (night?) and thought, I have to get outside.
Ianto had not been explicitly forbidden to leave the base, or at least he was quite sure the soldiers hadn't been told he was. He looked at the time, and remembered that Varys' squad was due for a scavenge run within the hour. Heart hammering, he slipped out of the barracks and made his way to the general deployment bay.
Lace was not in the armory when he entered. But his every move would still be monitored, and he hesitated. He could not carry a blaster, or any of the energy weapons, and trying to do so might raise an alarm, so he pulled out a long knife with an accompanying sheath. On further thought, he took a small dagger that could be tucked into a boot. And a shield.
The squad began arriving, and they stared when he explained that he wanted to go with them. Varys looked particularly uncertain. But Ianto had read his papers thoroughly, and knew that, legally, he could do whatever he liked, and was responsible for his own actions. A whispered conversation between Varys, Sera, Rum-Tum and Yeeka produced many shrugs and frowns.
Eventually Wire grumbled, loudly, "We've gotten no orders that he wasn't to leave, so unless one of you has a personal problem with it, let the man come if he wants to."
"I won't leave the skater," added Ianto. "I just... need to get outside."
He received several sympathetic nods. Sera, the squad leader, nodded. Varys sighed, and Toss sent her a pointed look before saying, "You heard the man. I'll be his watcher, if it makes the rest of you feel better." That seemed to settle any remaining uncertainties, and Ianto was ushered into the prep area. Fortunately extra kits were always set out, in case of last-minute changes in shift.
Despite his certainty, Ianto couldn't help glancing at the door to the bay every few minutes. Which was ridiculous; he'd barely seen the Captain since the execution, and it was true that the Captain had never told him he wasn't allowed to leave the base. Granted, it had probably never occurred to him that Ianto would even want to leave, or that a way would be made available to him.
But no intimidating silhouette appeared. Varys handed him a kit, and looked grudgingly impressed when Ianto slipped into the gear easily.
"I'm a fast learner," he said with a small smile. It also helped that he'd cleaned out a good number of the things, so he knew how it came together and how to work the fastenings. A body suit made of a dark, thick fabric. Harnesses, utility belt, weapon straps, boots. Headgear with the face visor, air purifier and transmitters. Heavy boots that had good grip and large soles.
The skater was a long, thin land vehicle with a wide base that made it look like a triangular tube. It was made up of many interlocking segments and traveled on many wheels, which allowed it to move like a snake around obstacles. It could also hover for a short period of time, and had ailings rather than walls along the sides. The seats were lined up the centre, with the soldiers facing out. Enough for a squad of ten to strap down, but handles hanging from the ceiling allowed the skater to carry more.
So far, Ianto had only seen the planetary storm through a screen or on a video feed, where it already looked violent and chaotic. Physically going out and entering it, even when secured to a vehicle and surrounded by people, was a different experience entirely.
There was no time to get used to it. The moment the bay was cleared and the doors opened, it was as if Ianto's body was engulfed by sound. Thunder in the distance was barely heard over the roar of high winds, of sand pummeling the outer walls of the base. The skater sped out into the storm the moment the doors were opened wide enough.
Ianto had been prepared for the punishing winds, but it was the sound that hit him like a wall. The skater had some kind of shield that kept out the larger debris, at least. The rough, rocky country sent them bumping and bouncing every few seconds. It was near impossible to see anything further than a few feet from the vehicle, and any strip of skin that got exposed felt as if it was being scrubbed by sandpaper.
It was glorious.
True to his word, Ianto didn't leave the skater when it stopped and the others dismounted. Toss remained with him, answering his protests with an enigmatic, "No man is to be left alone outside."
The squad trickled back in after two hours, carrying bags and boxes of their scavenging. It was an old site, apparently; they'd returned in case there was something the first two squads had missed. Nobody reported anything interesting, but Wire came in carrying strips of metallic casing, which he claimed could be used on the skaters.
The journey back felt shorter, as these things tended to, and Ianto quietly listened to the chatter that sprang up. Mostly descriptions of the site, or plans for later in the evening. It felt as if they'd forgotten him, but he didn't mind; he could see that this was a closely-bonded squad, at ease with each other and in their responsibilities, from Yeeka the skater pilot to Aberdeen the navigator.
The happy air dissolved, however, when the skater pulled into the deployment bay; the Captain was waiting by the collection tables, next to the soldiers on crew shift who would take in their equipment and scavenge finds.
"Knight," he said as they got near. His gaze was like steel and looked ready to skewer somebody, so Ianto pushed to the front. He felt the squad, to a man, pausing behind him, but the Captain didn't even acknowledge them. After a moment, Sera ordered them to begin the post-mission procedures, and the sound of equipment being collected and suits removed filled the deployment bay.
Ianto waited, though he itched to take off his own suit. Jack would have been shouting by now, threatening Ianto with bodily harm. But the Captain was silent. A few times he looked close to speaking, but he continued to glare stonily. Eventually he nodded at the squad over Ianto's shoulder, and departed, anger radiating from every line of his body.
"It's like you're not scared of him at all," remarked Wire. After the post-mission scrub-down, the squad had wordlessly headed for Commons B, taking Ianto along with them.
"Should I be?" Ianto responded with feigned casualness, sipping from the mug of tea they'd brought him. Aberdeen's work - he could never resist adding in that second drop of sweetener.
He was staring more at his shoes than at any of them, but he sensed the turning of heads. Varys cleared her throat. "You were there when he executed Weiler."
Ianto blinked, tried to place the name. His memory, ever helpful, pulled up the images: blood and viscera trickling down a wall, fragments of bone found ten feet away when he swept the place a week later. He began to guess their trouble.
"It's not that I think he can't hurt me," said Ianto slowly, rubbing a finger over the simple handle of the metal cup. "He can. It's just... he does what he has to. What he thinks he has to, anyway. And... maybe I can understand that."
"You don't hate him," said Rum-Tum, in a surprised tone.
That pulled Ianto's head up, and he glanced at the other man in surprise. "No." He frowned. "Why? Do you?"
"Maybe not exactly hate," interjected Varys. But Ianto didn't miss the way Rum and Toss twitched and averted their eyes. "But, well, we don't like him, do we? He's not one of us."
Something about the way she said it, made Ianto think that she meant more than just a difference in rank, or coming from different places. And he wanted to question her, wanted to know more about another mystery of this alien world, but he was tired, and more than a little sick of being kept in the dark.
He shrugged. "He's the Captain."
"As easy as that, huh?" Varys grinned at him, a little uncertainly.
"Down here, seems like it has to be," said Ianto. He could sense all their eyes on him, but said nothing more.
- - -
The Captain intercepted him on the way to the barracks. "Knight. My office, now."
Ianto had been expecting it, and he followed the man silently to command central. From the way everybody in their path immediately sought not to be, Ianto could only imagine the expressions on both their faces.
The Captain barely waited for the door to close and lock before beginning. "What did you think you were doing?" He rounded on Ianto, not bothering to put the desk between them. "You are untrained. There are dangers out there that you can't even imagine. By leaving the base, you endangered not only yourself, but everybody with you - an entire squad! I thought you, at least, could be depended on to keep your head and do the right thing."
Brilliant blue eyes, and the familiarity was like a punch in the gut. It was easy to remember the difference, when the Captain was cold and controlled and Ianto's memory of Jack was mostly of fire, a volatile force of nature.
It occurred to him, then, in flash that left him breathless; maybe he hadn't wanted to get out, after all, but to be let in.
"I ordered you to not endanger my men," continued the Captain. "You don't know what could have happened out there-"
"Yes, Captain, I don't know," Ianto responded, the words bursting out. "You're right, I don't know anything. I don't know why I'm here, I don't know who you are, I don't even know what this war is about. I can't ask anybody because they think I must already know, and the one person who knows how I came to be here has barely said a word to me in three weeks, until today. So why don't you fucking enlighten me, Captain."
The older man stared at him, possibly in shock at being yelled at. Quite likely nobody had ever dared. And it occurred to Ianto to be scared, because the Captain was armed, and he remembered that man, Weiler's execution, but. It would hardly be the first time the man in front of him held a gun to his head and meant it.
But instead of anger, the Captain visibly subsided, backing off to stand behind the desk. "You're right. You wouldn't know. And the soldiers wouldn't tell a civilian, I didn't think of that. Many of them like you."
"Hard to believe, I know," said Ianto, shaky and replacing volume with sarcasm.
"What?" The man frowned, blinked several times in rapid succession. "No. You are. I mean, that is -" The Captain cleared his throat. "Soldiers don't have much, besides each other. If they like you, they'll try to protect you, especially if you don't have to face the same dangers they do."
He was still hiding something. One of the first things Ianto did at Torchwood Three was learn how to hide a secret from Jack. There was something to be said in that, here, now, he was learning how to tell when the Captain was hiding something from him.
"I... suppose I can understand that." Ianto approached the desk, until the edge of it was pressing into his upper thigh. "But don't I have the right to know? I'm not a child. I'm not really a civilian, even, back in my own time. I'm not asking for military secrets. Just things everybody else knows."
He was ready to argue that it would make him safer, having that information, allow him to avoid making risky decisions. But then Jack nodded sharply. A few clicks and beeps, and the screen materialized in the air above the desk.
The first image was a sprawling collection of blue dots, the core cluster shaped vaguely like a fish; Ianto remembered seeing something like it, on board the mothership. "The Great and Bountiful Human Empire," said Jack, nodding at the screen. "Those are all the major planetary systems, established colonies, and military outposts. We are at one edge of it." He pointed at what would have been the fish's tail. Another click, and the blue was rimmed with red dots. "Those are the Kriida. The Empire has been at war with them for decades. It's said that they were our closest allies, once. Nobody remembers how we started shooting at each other, which usually means it's our fault."
A speedy series of zooms, until the screen was taken up by just one planet. "Officially, we are on planet R-133-FT. There was a colony here, once, but it failed, they found the weather too unstable. Half our scavenge runs find things they left behind. This, and the neighboring three solar systems, are currently under military lockdown."
The Captain turned off the screen and leaned back on his chair. Fingers folded, a ridge on his brow - Ianto carefully stayed still, waiting out whatever the Captain was contemplating telling him.
"Do you know the average life span of a soldier stationed on this base?" was what the older man began with.
"A little under five months. 140 days," answered Ianto. "Sera told me, when she got drunk at my naming-night."
The Captain lifted his eyebrows. "Do you know why?"
"At first, I thought it was just plain dangerous," admitted Ianto. "But after a while... that's not what it feels like, when I'm with them."
The Captain nodded. "You've been good for them. Polite, but not a push-over. You take pride in a job well done, even when you know it's not something anybody else wants to do. You care about them, you help them when you don't have to. You support me in front of them, even when you don't approve. Normally I lose it when people shout at me, but just now - you were right, and you must have been thinking all that for a while, but you didn't say anything until we were in a soundproof room with locked doors."
Once upon a time, the last would have been said with a pointed look and a leer, if not outright groping, but the Captain was bizarrely... sincere.
"Thank you," he managed.
Fortunately, the Captain did not seem to realize how bizarre Ianto found the whole thing. The seriousness in his expression sobered Ianto up again.
"I said all that, because you must understand that these soldiers, my soldiers, are not used to people being kind to them. You- you're nice, and for a time I was suspicious... But you just didn't know. You couldn't have known, I guess." Jack sighed, tensing again as if bracing himself for a fight. "These soldiers... they're criminals."
Ianto blinked, nodded. He hadn't thought of it in those terms, but his lack of surprise suggested long suspicion, from the first unspoiled impressions: glimpses of an ever-present wariness and hardened resignation. "Right."
"After the colony failed, a decision was made to build a base here. But the high casualty rate - it was obvious this was a death trap. There was no equipment that required experts, the place just needed soldiers who can point and shoot and, if they were lucky, run away really fast. The military began assigning the... less favored soldiers here. Cannon fodder. Court martials. Uncontrollable radicals. But at least they were all soldiers, you know? They signed up for it.
"And then it became public policy to include military training in schools, at the height of the war, in case the government needed more soldiers. Not even weapons training, usually just hand-to-hand and a little bit of doctored history, but it was considered military. This meant that, technically, anybody raised in the Empire can be designated a soldier. And so, for those who break the law but not seriously enough to warrant a state execution - if they were rich, or had the right connections, they were put in jailhouses. If they weren't, and the jails were full, well. They were slapped with mandatory military service, and they get assigned here. Disobedience is treason, and that is enough for the death penalty."
The room, once so large and cold to Ianto, now felt smaller, closed and oppressive. The silence seemed heavier when Jack ceased to speak, and Ianto could not think of what to say.
"And nobody knows about it," continued the Captain, so quietly and gently that the memory of Jack was nearly indistinguishable. "Most of the empire think that the war is over, or limited to a couple of skirmishes a year. Not even the newsmen come out this far; nothing interesting happens on this side of space. The man call the base the Last Lantern, after the old folktales of Mariner's Wake." His eyes met Ianto's; human blue with a tired hue. "You are in a place that doesn't exist, breathing the air of men waiting to die."
It sounded as if the Captain was quoting something. Ianto thought of Varys, of Wire, of Rum-Tum and Dree, even that new kid River; he felt a flash of helpless anger, at the faceless powers that could judge one life to be more valuable than another's.
There was nothing he could say, really, but the Captain was clearly expecting something from him. "If you're worried that it bothers me, or if I would treat them different, it doesn't. I won't."
"You don't care?" asked the Captain dubiously.
"It doesn't matter. Here, in this place." Ianto looked down at his hands. "And what you said - where I'm from, my situation is not so different." Not different at all. Lisa condemned him, even when nobody else wanted to acknowledge it. "Living on borrowed time, and all that."
"You?" snorted Jack, incredulous.
Ianto raised an eyebrow. "Even if you won't believe what I'm capable of... do you really think that all the people in this base deserve to be here?"
"No." The Captain's gaze held Ianto's. "But you don't. That, I'm sure of."
Ianto felt a little like banging his head against the table. Because here he was, one millennium in the future and facing the man that used to be Jack. Who couldn't remember him at all, but still refused to let Ianto take the blame for what he'd done.
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