Disclaimer: Torchwood is not mine.
A/N: Guess who started watching Baccano!...
Unbeta'd and just this for now (yeah, I know.) Enjoy!
There is a vial in the Torchwood One Archive, covered in layers of dust and marked only with an identification number decades old. When Yvonne Hartman finds out what it is supposed to be, she smiles and puts her best scientists on recreating its contents.
It takes a few tries and dozens of lab rats, but hardly a year later do they manage to duplicate the elixir. And after three consecutive successful trials on animals, Hartman gives her approval for testing on humans.
They draw lots from the employee register. Ianto Jones becomes Test Subject No. 1.
(In the end, he's only one. He doesn't know if that was a blessing or a curse.)
They ask (command) him to take the elixir, a full glass of it, without a word of what it is. Ianto doesn't think of its smell (rather sweet) or its taste (a little like wine). Instead, he gulps it down and hopes it doesn't end up killing him. (Later, Ianto would find that thought ironic.)
Five minutes later, one of the scientists slashes his palm. Ianto flinches, hand stinging and flowing with blood when suddenly—
As if on reverse, the blood retreats back into the wound and the clean slice across his palm closes perfectly. Unblemished, like there had been no wound in the first place.
Then the Ghost Shifts starts, and everything goes to shit.
.
.
His first death is by Cyberman. His second by Dalek, not even twelve minutes later. The moment he finds Lisa, bound by metal and who is metal (but still human, still worth saving), might as well be his third.
(It is.)
Smuggling Lisa into Cardiff is fueled by guilt, adrenaline, desperation, love, and guilt. He knows why he's one of the twenty-seven survivors (out of over eight hundred, oh god), and tries, tries not to think about it. Doesn't let himself think of what it meant, what it will mean in the long run, for now. It makes him sick to his stomach, seeing his skin heal perfectly after every little cut he gets from reassembling Lisa's unit, while Lisa can't even breathe on her own.
None of the scientists in that specialized team had survived what the country is now calling the Battle at Canary Warf. The lab had been nothing but a wreck. There is no cure for that damn thing he drank, and he's now stuck like this.
When he's done, collapsed on the floor beside his unconscious girlfriend (in her goddamn metal cage), he stares at the ceiling in a daze. Tomorrow, Ianto will start working on getting into Torchwood Three. If he has to hound Captain Harkness about it, then so be it. But for now, he lets everything crash down around him and doesn't sleep a wink.
.
.
.
("It worked," the scientist had told him after watching his wound rewind, eyes gleaming, "Congratulations, Mr. Jones. You're now immortal.")
