Part One
Ianto let himself into the Hub, a box of pastries for the team tucked under his arm. The previous day had been hard—stopping a nuclear apocalypse was not on their usual list of ways to save the world—and the whole team had been upset after being forced to kill Beth Halloran. Gwen, especially, had been unhappy, and Ianto knew she'd still be struggling, questioning how they had handled the case and what they could have done differently to save Beth.
The tourist office was empty, as usual, and he made his way downstairs, expecting it to be dark and quiet given how early it was even for him. To his surprise, the lights were on; perhaps Jack was up and about already, though he usually stayed in his room or his office until the others arrived. Ianto set the box down by the sofa and went over to Jack's office, but he was not at his desk, nor was he down in his bunker. Curious, Ianto stepped back into the Hub to find Gwen coming up from the stairs to the lower levels. She froze when she saw him, like a deer caught in headlights.
For some reason, Ianto immediately felt off. Gwen rarely came in before him, and there was an airabout the way she looked and moved that seemed apprehensive, even suspect. His first thought, shamefully, was that she was there to see Jack, that they were hiding something together; she did look somewhat rumpled and nervous. Then he told himself to stop thinking that way, because Gwen was engaged to be married. She might not respect that commitment, given her previous relationship with Owen, but Jack would, even if he did flirt too much. And besides, Jack had asked Ianto out on a date and was still patiently waiting for Ianto to actually take him up on it three weeks later.
Still, something was wrong. Where was Jack? Ianto smiled so that he did not give away his concerns. "Good morning," he said. "You're in early today."
She looked leery, as if he were accusing her of murder instead of simply coming in to work early. Which he wasn't—not yet. Her eyes darted back toward the stairs as she rubbed at her left arm. He chanced a quick glance and noticed something dark on the floor. Processing it without blinking, his instincts were now on high alert: it looked like blood. Jack was gone, Gwen was uneasy, and there was blood on the floor. Ianto sensed that he was in danger, and knew he had to tread carefully.
Gwen didn't respond, so Ianto moved toward his station as if he were getting ready for the day. He saw more blood on the floor—footprints leading across the Hub to the stairs. He needed to lock down the Hub. Something was wrong, it almost certainly had to do with Gwen, and he couldn't let her out. Which meant the others couldn't get in to help, but he couldn't risk her leaving, not in the state she was in. Which Ianto wasn't sure of, but somehow, he knew it wasn't really Gwen standing there, even though she still hadn't said a word. Her body language, even the look in her eyes, was all wrong.
Pretending to check his email and get his work area ready, Ianto disabled the alarms and silently put the Hub into soft lockdown mode, which meant they kept power, but the doors sealed with no exit or entry until the reset sequence was triggered. If she sensed he had done anything, she gave no sign. She was still standing by the steps, watching him warily. He turned back toward her with a smile. "Would you like a pastry? They're on the table. I'll start some coffee if you care to join me."
She nodded and walked slowly toward the sofa. She was still wearing her coat and rubbing her arm again, almost subconsciously. Ianto went to make them coffee, taking the opportunity to see if anything else was out of place in the Hub. He only noticed the blood, faint footprints that started at the medical bay. Gwen appeared uninjured aside from her arm, so unless someone else had come in, it must be Jack's blood. He hoped it was Jack's blood, because at least Jack would come back. It briefly occurred to him that it could be from Gwen's fiancé, but given Jack's conspicuous absence, Ianto strongly suspected that Gwen had killed Jack and somehow dragged him downstairs. He was probably in one of the cells.
The question was – why?
While it was not impossible to think that Gwen had suffered a major psychotic break overnight, it seemed unlikely. In their line of work, abrupt personality changes that involved killing a coworker usually involved alien intervention. And given what they'd been through the day before with Beth and the alien sleeper cell, Ianto wasn't taking any chances. He needed to be careful.
He brought two mugs of coffee over to the table by the sofa and sat down, motioning to Gwen to join him. She still hadn't spoken, which confirmed that something was not right. Gwen Cooper didn't stay silent, she said what she wanted to say, when she wanted to say it. Especially when she was upset, and Ianto knew she had been upset yesterday. He watched her sit down, trying to decide how best to approach the situation now that he was on his own.
"How are you?" he asked, taking a cherry pastry from the box and sitting back, trying to appear normal even though he felt so tense she must have noticed. "After yesterday?"
She didn't answer, so he kept talking, trying to pull her out. Something was terribly wrong; the silence was unnerving.
"It was a hard day. I was on the phone most of the night, liaising with the new city coordinator. I know you were busy with the police. Jack gave the military a piece of his mind about that nuclear bunker while Owen collected the bodies of the sleeper cell. Tosh changed all the passwords and security protocols for the Hub."
For some reason, that got her to talk. "She did?" Gwen's voice betrayed both anger and surprise, which she quickly tried to cover. "But I was able to get in this morning."
"You must have used the new code," Ianto pointed out. Which she should have remembered receiving from Tosh before she left.
"Right," Gwen said, unconvincingly. "That's right. So everything is different now?"
"I'm sure she'll fill you in later," Ianto replied lightly. Not a chance, though. Tosh wasn't getting in, and Gwen wasn't getting out.
As if she knew they were talking about her, Ianto felt his mobile vibrate and found a text from Tosh. After Suzie had locked them in, leaving them with no way to contact the outside world until Ianto had reconfigured his mobile to use the water tower, Tosh had made sure their phones worked during a lockdown.
Hub on LD. Are you there?
Gwen tried to glance at his phone with a curious look, but Ianto gave her a smile as he tilted it away. "It's Tosh, wanting to make sure I got in all right. She'll be here in a while." He texted her back, trying not to give anything away.
Code Two. G comp. J missing.
He deleted the messages as soon as he sent it, then slipped the phone into his pocket and sipped some coffee, trying to ignore the suspicious look Gwen was giving him. Instead, he leaned back again and offered a look of sympathy.
"Are you okay?" he asked. He motioned toward her arm. "Were you hurt yesterday?"
She stopped rubbing her arm and put her hands in her lap. "Just sore. Probably the explosion at the hospital."
Ianto didn't remember it bothering her the day before, and suspected it had something to do with her strange behavior instead. He went another direction. "I'm sorry about how it all ended. I know losing Beth was hard."
Gwen reached forward and took an apple muffin, not her usual blueberry. She bit into it and shrugged in a very uncharacteristic way, like she wasn't affected by Beth's death, when yesterday she'd been so angry and upset.
"Maybe we saved her," Gwen said.
"From who?" Ianto asked.
"From herself," Gwen replied. "She wasn't human, but she believed she was. She couldn't be both."
Ianto nodded and took another bite of his pastry to hide his surprise. "You seemed to think she was human yesterday."
"Before the programming started taking over," Gwen replied. "You weren't there, you didn't see her kill her husband. She could control the implants. She was fighting it, but it was still there."
"She helped us," Ianto pointed out.
"She had no choice," Gwen said, her voice harsher than usual.
"It seems to me that she chose to help us," Ianto said. "Even at the end, she chose to be human."
"But she wouldn't have stayed that way," Gwen said, and now she sounded sad. "In the end, she had no choice but to be what she was."
"Like you don't?" Ianto asked softly, bracing himself for any sudden moves. The short conversation had only confirmed his belief: something had happened to Gwen. She would have never given up on Beth Halloran like the woman sitting next to him. The woman who now twitched, but turned toward him with a fake smile.
"What do you mean?" she asked, setting down her mug. Ianto did the same.
"You believed in her," he said. "Right until the end. What changed?"
"Nothing changed," she said, and Ianto didn't believe a word. "I realized the truth, that's all."
"And what's that?"
She glanced around, then leaned in as if telling him a secret. "We don't have a chance against this, Ianto. This cell, this race. They look like us, talk like us, live like us. And then one day they turn on us. But we don't know who they are, we don't know when it'll happen. There's nothing we can do."
"We know they're out there," Ianto said. "So, we can prepare and be ready when it happens."
The side of Gwen's mouth curled up. "No, you can't. Because you never know who it might be, when it will come."
Ianto immediately picked up on the change in language and tone. Gwen seemed to realize her slip and jumped up with wide eyes. Ianto caught her by the wrist and gripped tight as she tried to walk away.
"Who are you and what have you do to Gwen?"
She hissed at him like a madwoman, and lashed out with her other arm, catching him by surprise on the side of his head. It loosened his grip on her enough for her to pull her arm free and move away, but Ianto reacted quickly and threw himself over the table after her.
He tackled her around the legs and they both went down in a tangle of limbs. She hit and kicked and even scratched, but he held tight. She was ferociously strong; Ianto had never wrestled with Gwen before, but he was certain her strength was not normal. He didn't want to hurt her, but he had to subdue her before she hurt herself—or him.
He smacked her across the face, more to startle her than to injure, and when she looked at him in shock, he flipped her over and pinned her arms behind her back. He needed something to tie them together. Sitting on her back, making sure his weight still allowed her to breathe, he quickly took off his tie and wrapped it around her wrists. She had her weapon tucked into her trousers, and he tossed it onto the sofa. Pulling her up, he was dismayed to see that her lip was bleeding from being pressed into the floor; he felt a number of scratches and bruises on his own face as well.
He pushed her onto a chair next to the sofa. "Who are you and what have you done to Gwen?"
She spat at him. He stepped back in shock, a part of him heartbroken, a part of him terrified. He hadn't wanted to be right, that something or someone had compromised Gwen, but he couldn't ignore the hissing creature in front of him. It wasn't Gwen. The woman in front of him was wild-eyed and practically foaming at the mouth as she struggled against her bonds. Ianto paced several times, trying to settle his racing heart, then leaned over her.
"Tell me what happened to Gwen. Did you kill her?"
Gwen-not-Gwen laughed at him, nothing like her normal open laugh. High and cruel, it made his skin crawl, and he resisted the temptation to hit the creature once more. "Tell me!"
"I am her," she said. "I'm here, inside her body. It's mine now."
"Like hell it is," Ianto snapped. "What are you?"
Her lips peeled back in such an ugly sneer that Ianto stepped back again. She started speaking in a language that wasn't her own, but sounded terrifyingly familiar.
It was the voice of Beth Halloran, coming from Gwen's throat. Name, rank, serial number.
Ianto turned his back and stepped away, sick to his stomach. How was it even possible? Beth was dead, her body and its horrifying implants incinerated last night with the others. Why was Gwen talking like her? What had happened—and how could Ianto fix it? He glanced around the Hub, swearing as the implication of the lockdown hit him: he was alone. The only thing he could do was get Gwen into one of the cells and wait for the others.
He turned toward Gwen only to find her standing immediately behind him, her hands still behind her back. She grinned and head-butted him, hitting him hard on the chin and sending him reeling backward. He tried to catch his balance, blinking heavily as he barely managed to stay steady and upright. Gwen-not-Gwen took the opportunity to horrify him even more.
With a vicious grin, she pulled first her right arm and then her left over her head, still tied together and stretching unnaturally. It shouldn't have been possible, Ianto should have heard the crack as her shoulders dislocated, but he didn't. Her face was contorted in pain, yet her hands were now in front of her now—and she reached into her jacket pocket for a second gun. Jack's gun. Where had she got Jack's gun? Had he really not noticed it when they were fighting, when he tied her up?
"She didn't think you'd be here this early," she said. "But it doesn't matter. You can't stop us, Ianto Jones. Not this time."
And she pulled the trigger.
Author's Note:
Ah, the way our minds work sometimes! I asked Summerstar what was a story she hadn't seen before that might be good to see? She suggested a post-Sleeper or post-From Out of the Rain tale. And this is why my brain came up with! But I have another post-Sleeper idea so maybe I'll write that one too, since it would be a much lighter story than this. However, I had fun with this one and must, as always, thank Avaantares for her help with the medical and weapons stuff. It's four parts and mostly done, so relatively quick updates. Thank you for reading!