"Like Deckard Dreamed."
The hub is full to the brim with destructive silence.
There had been emotional bloodletting earlier, before Gwen subsided into dumb mutiny and Toshiko tranquilized. She whimpered in her sleep, tension cutting through the heavy medication and mental panic. There were ample amounts of sound and fury, but no answers.
Owen and Ianto went missing (AWOL presumably, the girls wouldn't cover for a kidnapping.) and no one would tell him why.
He rampaged. He swore. Myfwany was driven from her nest and flew the diameter of the hub in distressed circles. Every glass window from Jack's office to the observation deck was annihilated. Jack called UNIT, called the MI-5. No visuals from CCTV, no recent purchases from all credit cards, no sightings. No one knew where they were.
No one except for doe-eyed Gwen and darling little Toshiko.
(The camera was not held by a professional. Complete lack of steady hands. Walls were reduced to smudges, the paintings that hung on them as tangible as smoke.
The voice made an attempt to be completely detached from all human emotion. There was an undercurrent of something through it. It wasn't easily identifiable. "Zero five hundred, Monday the twenty-first."
Another voice cuts in, dry and sardonic. "From here on in I shoot without a script-"
"Doctor Owen Harper recording-"
"-see if anything comes from it-"
"-the interrogation-"
Dry Wit hasn't stopped talking, but he gets a little quieter at the word interrogation. "-instead of my old shit."
"-of Ianto Jones.")
Jack could feel the panic bearing down on him, his heart felt heavy and too big for his chest. The beat irregular. "This is treason, Gwen." He followed the circular column of green energy making its way around the Hub. Pale arms emerged, grabbed a notepad and a pen, then disappeared again.
Gwen had found the "Jedi Button" (Owen chose the name, not Ianto.) and enjoyed using it as an impromptu Berlin Wall. Jack couldn't give it the same enthusiasm. He's had to respawn his hands three times already.
"If what's caused them to leave is a result of something that happened at Torchwood, we can handle it. We have," Jack clenched his fists in his hair in frustration. In the face of his anxiety words seems elusive. "We have plans, with diagrams and little maps-" The green light spins, Gwen has either just turned away from him or is finally facing him (most likely with an adolescent hand on her hip).
"I deserve the right to know." His throat refuses to pass any more sound. Are they gone? Is He gone? For good? They just left, like everything was normal. Same goodbye tossed over a leather-clad shoulder. Same twist of the lip that was almost a smile, came extraordinarily close to it, but still fell short.
Jack suddenly understood how Ianto was able to keep the Cyber-Lisa a secret for so long. He's the King of Divergent Static. He kept you busy will well-fitting suits and stopwatches, holding your attention away from what was really important. Somehow keeping Jack from noticing what would drive two members of his team away and grip the others in stoic silence.
("What's your name?"
"Ianto Jones."
"Date of Birth?"
[They relied on the inconsequential to hide the shakes in their voices.]
The camera is still in the same hands. The frame catches half of Ianto's face; there are deep shadowed crevasses under his eyes. Tension lines strung across his forehead.
"What-" Owen throws the camera on the table. The recording jumps and skips accordingly. There's a retching noise. Ianto's face is perfectly enclosed in the frame. He looks worried and half-rises, probably to find Owen a bucket. "This is fucking ridiculous! You're fucking insane, Jones."
Ianto is much paler than his Welsh blood allows. He finally sits after leaving the frame. There's a bucket on the table. He slowly sets his hands on the table, ignoring the way it causes the sleeves of his dress shirt to ride up.
"We should be at the Hub, looking through the archives, running more tests."
Ianto doesn't wait for Owen to stop. He interrupts him halfway through another round of: "You're a fucking idiot." "We ran all the tests, we have the data." His face hardly moves. "That's why we're here." He leans forward. The light is behind him, it lends an artificial halo as his shadow slowly crawls across the table. "I need you to do it for me."
The time stamp in the lower right hand corner slowly ticks by the passage of time. Ten minutes are lost. No one moves.
Owen isn't in frame. There's a cacophony of sound as he finally pulls out a chair and sits.)
Gwen appears between one blink and the next. The Jedi Button clenched tightly in a fist. "You deserve the right to know?" Jack recognized the position as her "fierce" one. Back held so straight as to seem ridiculous. "You think-"
"I know you all never forgave me for leaving. I understand. I abandoned you." He gave her a smoldering look, the proper too-many teeth grin mixed with the proper amount of penitence. It was a cheap trick, designed to seduce, but worth it. "This is my chance to make it up to all of you, let me help!"
"Jack." It's the easiest way for her to say "Ohdeargod, shutupandstopcrying". They hold eye contact far longer than necessary, both refusing to back down. She looks like Jack did when he fought Abaddon, in the very mouth of hell. "We're doing this as a favor to you."
Jack can't breathe. He wants to crawl under his desk and hide, wonder what the hell he did wrong. He'll hold his breath until he dies, and when he finally claws his way back out of the darkness, he'll repeat it all over again until Ianto comes back. And Owen.
"We didn't want to force you to go through… procedure-whatever the hell it was that Ianto called it."
The noise of inarticulate rage was not very becoming.
The noise Gwen made back wasn't either. Her mother had been fond of folk sayings, like all the other people of her generation. Between Scylla and Charybdis. Between the Devil and the deep blue sea. Between a rock and a hard place. "I can't tell you." Never stand between a Welshman and his sense of honor.
Jack left; turned on his heel and exited the Hub completely, out into the fresh downpour.
Gwen held strong, putting down the Jedi Button and keeping one eye on the CCTV.
He stalked directly across the Plass, projecting enough menace that he was given ten feet of space on all sides. He gave no sign of turning around.
Finally, Gwen started to cry.
(Owen refuses to touch the camera. The angle was low, and Ianto's face just off center enough to be annoying, but good enough for Torchwood records.
"What are you?" Owen couldn't handle it anymore, he couldn't stand their creeping about the subject, hiding behind D. and family histories. He wanted this puppet show over, wanted Ianto's warped sense of duty fulfilled, so they could run to Jack and wait for him to make it all better.
Ianto didn't look prepared for the question. In all probability he never would be. "…human."
"What do you remember from the Canary Warf Battle?"
Ianto pauses between words. Spacing them out farther than necessary. "Bits and pieces… I was panicking. The only part that's really… concrete for me was getting Lisa." He rubs a fist against his right cheekbone. The gesture is very childish, innocent; Owen's having a hard time breathing. "All the rest I dreamed about."
"Nightmares?" It's not really a question. Owen puts his hand on the table, the pale skin in stark relief against the dark wood. The knuckles stand out brutally, unseen by the camera; Owen's nails are creating a myriad of bleeding crescents. The camera attempted to keep the new object in view, alternating the focus between Ianto's face and Owen's hand, switching back and forth before finally sticking to the hand.
Ianto didn't answer immediately. He remains slightly out of focus, looking downward.
Owen holds the silence. It blossomed under his tender care. "You're scared." He said, finally. There was little comfort in his flat tone. "Don't think you're the only one Tea-Boy," It was sad that Ianto could almost see it as an endearment given the circumstances. " 'Cause I'm fucking terrified."
Owen stands and walks past Ianto, through the door that is entirely out of focus. Halfway there the focus jumps back to Ianto's face. Glassware is being moved around, something breaks. Ianto doesn't move.
Mayhem is being wrought in the kitchen and Ianto doesn't wade in with a hand broom in one hand, bottle of antiseptic in the other. The world must be ending.
"The dreams didn't start until a few months ago." Owen was in the kitchen, the alcohol found, screaming about pansy booze and little tin soldiers. More glass broke. "I thought they were just a result of seeing Lisa again… residual guilt. But the dreams weren't just about Lisa… there were machines, low-tech Cybermen, all crowded around a low table, looking down. The lights were strange… blue and harsh. Everything looked like it could kill you. I went over to the table and looked down, only to be suddenly looking up. I was lying on that table. I was what they were looking at." There is silence in the kitchen; Owen's hovering unseen, listening. "I can't remember what they were saying to me, but I remember how much I hurt. My chest, my back. It all felt off. I tried to get up but there were straps holding me down, I couldn't panic, it almost felt like I was outside my body but still there, only to watch. Still weak."
Ianto starts to unbutton his shirt, slowly. "One day- Two, I'm not so good at dates right now; I was attacked by a rogue Weevil while investigating a tunnel near the bay." The shirt is unbuttoned completely, hanging off of his shoulders like one long rag. The skin beneath is perfectly unblemished. "I was dead for five minutes. Owen was filling out my paperwork in the morgue. I just sat up." He pushes the shirt off of his left shoulder and turns. There's no skin left on his ribs. Metal glints in the low light, with malice, like a new variant of cancer. There's more metal to bone.
"They called me Cyberman 3.0.")