AN: Hello, sorry its been a while. Had a trip to the uk to go to MD2, got back here, had back surgery and here I am months later... T Da!
Anyway lovelies, this assumes Tosh, Owen and Ianto never got written out of TW and it is 2015... Because I can.
For you lovely Americans Zed = Z = Zee.
THE WOBBLING DEAD
Ianto wasn't entirely sure he could bring himself to believe in zombies. Jack came back from the dead on an almost daily basis and he never lurched about, groaning. Well he did, but only before his first coffee of the day anyway. Owen too had come back, just once and he didn't lurch about either, in fact he was steadier on his feet now more than ever because he couldn't drink. The groaning was another matter entirely.
Zombie movies seemed ten a penny and pretty much all looked the same. Groaning and lurching dead people with a side of flesh eating along the way. To Ianto, that made no sense. Why eat when you are dead? Owen couldn't eat so why would a zombie be able to? And what was with all of the groaning? Anyone would think they were Welsh. However, all these misgivings didn't deter him from becoming a huge fan of The Walking Dead. That was until he met a real zombie for himself, up close and way too personal. After that, the TV show, shockingly like the real thing, was avoided. The Zed word was no longer mentioned in his presence.
Ianto had been witness to many horrifying things in his short life, but zombies definitely were the worst. It wasn't that they scared him. They repulsed him. Everything about them, their wobbling, their gasping and moaning and the smell; not to mention the fact that bits of the more putrid ones would drop off. They would still keep coming, leaving their innards trailing along with them. Their existence shattered his already tenuous belief in an afterlife. They also really did eat flesh. Most of all though, what really upset him was that one of the aforementioned zombies had been his father.
A whole cemetery full of corpses had risen from their 'sleep' and gone walkabout in Newport. Truly worrying was the fact that Torchwood had no idea why it had happened or how. The consolation was that it hadn't happened in Splott. UNIT had been called in to help contain them and days were spent rounding up manky corpses and grasping skeletons found wondering South Wales.
Toshiko and Owen, Martha Jones and one Dr Lewis Evans had spent days trying to decide on a means of taking them down. Everyone else was on the chase. It was exhausting. The newspapers and Television reports were full of horror stories, whole families had been murdered in their beds and chewed on. Jack had attempted a media black out and failed. His temper reaching new depths of foulness as they battled the stomach curdling menace. Gwen, hid Rhys in the safety of the hub and gathered up Ianto's sister and her family and then her parents and against Jack's orders they too were secured away from the threat. Ianto, after coming face to face with his dead dad and then raising the initial alarm had eventually been shoved into a UNIT tent and told to help coordinate. He was immensely thankful.
Days later the roamers were finally all rounded up and incinerated in industrial sized microwave ovens at an industrial estate just outside of Swansea. UNIT packed up their troops and tents and went home. Witnesses were retconned. Things went back to normal. It was never determined, the reason for the unprecedented event. The rift had been quiet the entire time.
Team Torchwood took it in turns to get a few days off to recover and come to terms. Ianto knew that he never would. In life his father had been a drunken abuser and in death he hadn't turned out much better. Ianto still loved him, he was his dad, but now what few good memories he did have were tainted. Ianto found himself wondering if his father had been aware that he was a zombie, stumbling around Newport, with his rotting flesh almost gone and his son pointing a gun at him. There had been mud and a dangling worm in one of his eye sockets.
Jack had asked how Ianto had known it was his dad and Ianto told him the tale of placing flowers on his mother's grave and bearing witness to his father's remains digging their way out. Ianto could only reflect on how grateful he was that his mother had been cremated and he knew for a fact that he would be too.
