Fate
Author note: A Torchwood adventure set between season 2 and 3 staring Jack, Ianto and Gwen. Thank you to redisourcolor and her/his challenges on Live Journal for inspiration for this story.
Disclaimer: I don't own Torchwood, obviously. Thank you Russell T and BBC for the loan.
Chapter One - Patterns
A white plastic shopping bag had caught at the top of the escalator. Catching the constant draft of the air conditioning, it would fill with air and tumble down a few steps, before deflating and allowing the revolving stairs to push it back up to the top. It reminded Ianto of the sea. The white plastic surging on the crests of ever-cycling waves. Unheeded a shopper's red boot emerging from the level below kicked the bag from its cycle. The bag swirled forward to join the rest of the anonymous litter.
Ianto blinked. He'd let himself be distracted from why his was stuck on a hard, and decidedly sticky, plastic chair in the food court of one of Cardiff's least illustrious shopping centres. But clocking in at just over thirty hours without sleep, Ianto was finding it hard to stay focused. Not on bags and boots, on faces.
Ianto took a sip from a styrofoam cup, grimaced slightly, rubbed his eyes with forefinger and thumb and briefly pinched the root of his nose, before scanning the inhabitants of the centre again. The blank-faced crowd of clichés. Tired mothers wearing tracksuits pushing prams full of unwashed and wriggling children. Teenage girls competing for who can wear the shortest shorts, like their mothers and grandmothers hadn't done it all before them. Old men shuffling along behind old women, white singlets visible beneath thin white shirts. Familiar faces. Faces Ianto had seen since childhood.
It wasn't this shopping centre he had come to as a boy, as a teenager. But it was one just like it. He had filled those prams, he had sat in a food hall looking at those short shorts, trying to imagine what went on beneath. It was one of these type of shops where he had been caught shoving a pair of cargo pants and a cross colours t-shirt under his windcheater.
There was still a twist of shame when he thought about it. Eyes that had seen much worse still remembered the look on his father's face. That time it hadn't been the customary anger or disappointment in those blue eyes. They were resigned, defeated. Ianto had turned out as expected, despite all his father's best efforts for it to be otherwise. Ianto had won the battle, but lost the war.
He closed his eyes and opened them again, wiping the image, and rescanned the crowd. Looking at familiar faces for something, someone, alien.
He'd argued with Jack before he left the hub, "It won't do any good if I don't know what I'm looking for. It could be anyone and they probably aren't even there. Me hanging around the food hall like some creepy pedo isn't going to help get her back." Ianto was so used to following orders without question, that his voice sounded petulant, at least to his own ears. Not the measured argument he had intended. But there wasn't anyone left to challenge Jack anymore. It was just him. And this screamed waste of time.
Jack had just grinned at him, annoyingly, "If you look closely, you'll be able to see a pattern. Find the thing that doesn't fit and you've found our man, or woman, or girl, or baby, or..."
"I get the picture, but I don't think this is the best use of our time. Gwen..."
"If she's still alive, which I think she is, she'll be okay for a couple of days. There's a timeframe to this. They've been around a long time, it's ordered. Trust me Ianto, I'm not losing her too."
The words were calm but Ianto noted the way Jack's breath blew over the word 'too'. Not quite a hitch, not even a quaver - but there. And Ianto didn't want to push, didn't want to see his tower of strength crumble. If this was the way Jack wanted it played, this was the way it was going to get played. No guns blazing, just watching and waiting. For patterns.
And there were lots of patterns, patterns of the millions of lives that skirted the edge of poverty. Lives that didn't think the words were council estate, but thought the word was home. A pattern he had broken, even if everything else broke with it. But there was another pattern grinding against this one. A red boot kicking a shopping bag. There was something about the boot - or the bag.
The bag. Ianto had thought the place looked dirty when he came in, bins overflowing; cola cans crushed on the ground leaking out their remaining brown liquid onto the tiled floor. He had thought it was just the shift in perceptions from teenager to adult, or the shift to being someone who now did his shopping in London's high streets, eyes that had forgotten what real life looked like. But this was worse than normal. There should be a guy. That guy that walked around picking up the discards of other people's lives, cleaning up the spills, invisible and unnoticed. Ianto normally noticed guys like that. They reminded him of himself.
But not just the bag, the boot. He'd seen it, somewhere else. Now Ianto remembered, surprised he'd forgotten. It was last night, just before Gwen had gone missing, following the familiar beeps and clicks to the weevil, they'd circled the council flats in different directions trying to cut the creature off. Only when he'd reached the other side, all he saw was the weevil shuffling down a manhole to the sewers, but no Gwen.
Jack had asked him if he'd seen anyone else and he thought he hadn't. But now, he remembered the red boots. Like the perception filter on the invisible lift. Once you knew it was there, it was impossible to miss. As he'd raced towards the weevil, he'd seen a girl, sitting on the edge of a concrete ramp, kicking her legs and smoking a cigarette. Kicking her red boots. It could be a simple slip of memory in the panic that followed Gwen's disappearance, and a coincidence that she was here today. But Ianto had been in the business long enough to know there was no such thing.
"Jack," Ianto spoke into his earpiece, "I've found them."
A/N:Please review and I'll post more chapters.