Part Two
White hot pain shot through Ianto's left shoulder and he staggered. He heard Gwen-not-Gwen swear and saw her aim the pistol once more, her hand shaking as if trying not to pull the trigger. It was the first sign he'd had that maybe Gwen was still in there, fighting whatever had taken over her body. Before she could take another potentially fatal shot, he threw himself forward and tackled her once more, hoping she didn't hit her head as they fell.
The gun went off, missing them both before he managed to knock it away. She once again started flailing, and this time he knew he couldn't hold back: he hit her hard, and she went limp. He rolled away, gasping in pain and panic.
He needed Owen, to treat his wound, and Tosh, to start working on how to help Gwen. But the Hub was in lockdown, and Jack was probably still dead, locked up somewhere without his weapon. All Ianto had was himself, Jack's gun, and a bloody shoulder.
Right. He'd been shot. He needed to stop the bleeding first in order to help Gwen. But he couldn't leave her on the floor, unconscious; what if she woke up and attacked him again? He needed to subdue her, and in a way that she couldn't get out of this time. Apparently ties didn't make good restraining devices outside of the bedroom. Or Gwen had more experience with bondage than she let on.
Holding his injured arm close to his body, Ianto sat up and looked around, trying to think straight. Handcuffs. He needed handcuffs. Or Weevil clamps. Should be in his desk, they all had several pairs for field work. He stood and walked unsteadily over to his desk, where he found what he needed: plastic wrist straps. Stumbling back over to Gwen, he propped her up, pulled her arms behind her again, and lashed her to the large pole next to the sofa. He used his tie as a gag this time, because he didn't want to hear that awful voice coming from Gwen's mouth.
Then he walked toward the medical bay, making sure he grabbed Gwen's gun from where he'd tossed it on the sofa and picking up Jack's Webley from the floor. He pulled out his mobile phone, stowing one weapon in in his belt and one in his suit jacket as he called Owen.
"What the hell's going on?" the doctor asked without even saying hello. "Tosh said there's a code two. Are you inside?"
"Yes, I'm here," Ianto replied, too tired to snap. Getting shot hurt, and the pain was tiring; even going down the stairs to the medical bay was taking a forced effort. "I put the Hub on lockdown. I'll explain as soon as I—shit."
"What's wrong?"
Ianto stared at the medical bay in shock. It was a mess, with medical supplies scattered everywhere, and blood all over the floor. What had happened? It had to be Jack's. This must have been where Gwen killed him.
"There's blood all over the medical bay," Ianto told him, feeling strangely detached from the scene. "I think it's Jack's."
"What happened?" Owen snapped. "Dammit, Ianto, what's going on?"
"I've been shot," Ianto said, mustering up the strength to raise his voice. "So before I tell you about how bad my morning's been so far, tell me what to do or you're going to have an even bigger mess to clean up when you get here and I will haunt you through every minute of my autopsy."
"Shit," Owen muttered. "You could have said."
"I just did. I'm in the medical bay. The very bloody medical bay. What do I do besides try not to slip in it?"
"Are you safe?" Owen asked. "Because if there's an alien in the Hub shooting people, you need to get somewhere safe first."
"It's contained for now." Ianto started pulling out gauze and bandages and everything else he could remember seeing Owen use to treat gunshot wounds. "And I'm starting to feel light-headed, so tell me what to do before I can't see straight."
"Where did you get shot?"
"Left shoulder." Ianto waited for the inevitable.
"Damn, and it wasn't even me." Ianto rolled his eyes, even though the doctor couldn't see him. "All right, listen carefully, and I'll talk you through it. You'll be fine, you saw me do this a few months ago."
Ianto followed Owen's directions, patiently answering the doctor's questions as he treated his gunshot wound. Add that to the list of things he'd never done before but had now learned while working for Torchwood. After he had cleaned it and bandaged it and even put his arm in a sling, Owen directed him to the painkillers—the good, strong ones.
"No, I need to be able to think straight," Ianto told him. "What else can I take that will leave me clear-headed but pain-free?"
"Not much is going to take that kind of pain away," Owen warned him. "But you can double up some ibuprofen and cross your fingers. Tosh and I are on our way."
"The Hub is locked down, you know. You can't get in."
"Tosh is going to hack into the system and start the reset from the garage. Now, who shot you?"
"Gwen."
"What!"
"She's not herself," Ianto said. "Speaking of which, some sedative might be good in case she wakes up. I hit her hard, but she's stronger and crazier than usual."
Owen told him where to find a needle and syringe, then started asking more questions. Ianto tried to explain about Gwen, then wondered why Owen couldn't hang up and get the hell over there instead of wasting time talking about it. What was he supposed to do when he'd been shot, Gwen had been taken over by an alien, and Jack was—
"Jack!" Ianto exclaimed without even thinking. He hurried upstairs as fast as he could, which was not particularly quick; he felt like any minute he might crash, if not pass out. Remembering his coffee from earlier, he grabbed his mug as well as Gwen's as he went to Tosh's desk.
"What about Jack?" Owen asked. "He should have resurrected by now. Why isn't he there taking care of you? "
"Because I don't need Jack to take care of me," Ianto replied. "I've been shot and I'm handling it. Besides, he's clearly still dead or he'd be here making things much worse by now."
"Okay, do you know for sure that he's there, that he's dead?" Owen asked, as if talking to a young child. "Have you seen him? Or his body?"
"I told you already, there was blood all over the medical bay, and I saw it on the stairs. She must have lured him down somehow and killed him there, but I don't know what happened after that. Checking the CCTV now."
He pulled up the scene from the main part of the Hub. It had started well over an hour ago. Gwen had arrived exceptionally early, and Jack had come out to greet her. She had appeared nervous even then, and Ianto could see the concern and confusion on Jack's face. Gwen went down to the medical bay, and Jack followed, typing something into his wrist strap.
There was the sound of several gunshots—that explained the blood. After about twenty minutes, Ianto saw Gwen come back up and head downstairs. She left several bloody footprints along the way. Given that she hadn't been dragging a body, she must have sent Jack to the morgue through the elevator system. Which meant Jack was probably tucked away inside a drawer somewhere, either about to revive and find himself in a dark box, or already pounding his way out.
"He's probably in the morgue," Ianto told Owen over the phone. "Which seems awfully far at the moment, so he'll have to wait." He leaned on his elbows and closed his eyes, feeling faint.
"Ianto!" Owen shouted over the phone. "Stay with me. You have to get Jack. He can help you."
"I don't need Jack's help," Ianto muttered. "He took my shot, you know. I could have made the shot."
"What shot?" Owen asked. "You mean, with the blowfish? That was three weeks ago, mate."
"Bloody Torchwood," Ianto replied. "Like you said, he swans back in and expects everything to go right back to the way they were."
"Ianto, did you take the oxycodone?" Owen asked.
"I didn't take anything yet," Ianto snapped. "I need to keep my face on straight. I mean, my head. I need to keep my head on straight so Gwen doesn't start sprouting bloody tree limbs out of her arms—"
"Ianto, you're babbling. You might be going into shock. Sit down before you pass out."
Ianto sat down on the floor with a hard thump. "Ouch."
"Put your head between your knees."
He put the phone on the floor and talked down into it.
"Owen?"
"Yeah?"
"Are you here yet?"
"Not yet."
"My shoulder is killing me."
"I'm sure you patched it up fine," the doctor said. "You're probably coming down from an adrenaline high so it's going to feel even worse now. You need something to drink, something to eat. Anything sweet there this morning?"
"I brought pastries," Ianto told him. "Gwen ate the apple."
"She hates apple."
"Exactly. She's possessed." Ianto glanced up at Tosh's desk. "I have coffee. Hang on." He grabbed the two mugs he'd brought over, drank them both, then eyed the table by the sofa. He debated crawling, then decided he didn't want to get his pants dirty. Or more dirty, since he'd already been rolling around on the floor of the Hub, and not in a good way. So he walked over to the sofa, grabbed a muffin, and laid down.
To his surprise, he'd brought the phone with him.
"Ianto?" came Owen's tinny voice. "You still with me?"
"No," Ianto replied. "I'm not with anyone right now. Jack asked, and I said yes, but we haven't actually gone out yet. I'm still too pissed off at him." He stuffed half the muffin in his mouth. He felt tired and weak, but more than that, he felt the stirrings of panic scraping at the edge of his mind. He was locked in the Hub with his dead boss and a coworker-slash-alien who had shot him.
"You and me both," Owen said. "But hey, get out of this and you'll have something to laugh about when you do. Trust me, getting shot by a coworker is a gas."
"Very funny, Owen," Ianto replied. "And I'm sorry, you know."
"I know, you apologized that time we got drunk at the Dockside. Now, did you eat something? You sound like you're chewing."
"Yep," Ianto said, swallowing the muffin and wishing he had more coffee. "Already feeling better."
"Good. Are you sitting or laying down?"
"I'm lying down," Ianto replied, then shook his head ruefully. "And I'm clearly starting to feel better if I'm correcting your grammar. Sorry."
"No problem. Glad to hear it. How's Gwen?"
Ianto glanced at the pole, where she was still sagged forward. "Out like a light. I hope I didn't hurt her. What next?"
"You said Jack's in the morgue, yeah?
"Most likely."
"Can you get down there?"
"I think so," Ianto replied. He took a deep breath and sat up; nothing spun around. He stood, and felt steady enough to take a few steps. "All right, I'm going to check on Jack. I'll call you back." He hung up the phone and started toward the morgue, making sure to avoid the bloody footprints. He tried not to think of it being Jack's blood, of Gwen shooting him and sending him to the morgue and dragging his blood through the Hub.
When he got to the morgue, he stopped and listened for shouting or thumping; nothing. He started checking the empty drawers until he found Jack—and swore vociferously before calling Owen.
"Find him?"
"Owen, he's frozen." Ianto stared down at Jack in the cryofreeze unit, the one they'd used for Beth the day before. How in the world had Gwen known what to do? She'd been there, but she had no medical training, no tech training, nothing. Some days she could barely print her shopping list.
Owen swore as well. "Dead or alive?"
"What?"
"Did she freeze him dead or alive? Check the side of the unit."
He did, but as best as he could tell, Jack had gone into the unit dead. There was still blood all over his torso, and Ianto thought he could see half closed wounds on his chest. Besides, how else could Gwen have got him into the unit, if not dead? Ianto was amazed she had managed to move Jack at all.
"Can I unfreeze him?" Ianto asked.
There was a long silence on the other side of the phone. "Owen?"
"Yes, but if she did something wrong, it could be bad for him."
"We're all having a bad day. He says he'll always come back. He died yesterday and came back."
"I know," Owen grumbled. "But I'm a doctor and that's still damn strange to me. How far along is it?"
Ianto squinted at the numbers again. "Looks like almost eighty percent. How long before you can get in?"
"Tosh said it'll take her a while to hack into the lockdown protocol—"
"She wrote it, why can't she hack it?"
"Because she's using a wireless laptop from her car," Owen replied. "And when she does get in, she said a complete reset takes an hour."
"Damn."
"Yep. We really need to work on our lockdown procedures, they keep biting us in the arse. Look, go ahead and start the defrosting procedure. It'll take at least two hours, even if he's only eighty percent. Coming out of cryofreeze takes longer than going under because we don't want to damage any tissue by warming them up too fast." He talked Ianto through the right sequence of buttons, and soon the unit started to click and whir.
"All right," Ianto said, stepping back. "Now I can do Tommy in a few weeks. So at least an hour for you and Tosh to get in, and two for Jack to get out. I need to sit down."
"As long as Gwen is secure, go right ahead," Owen head. "We'll be there as soon as we can."
"Thank, Owen. I'll check back in thirty minutes or so."
"Take it easy," Owen replied. "And be careful."
Ianto watched Jack for several minutes, when it suddenly hit him: this was as close to death for Jack as he could get. He hadn't resurrected, and he'd been frozen while he was dead. Because he was frozen, he was unable to come back, trapped between life and death. Ianto laid his hand on the unit and bowed his head, refusing to let his emotions get the better of him.
He'd been shot. By Gwen. And Jack had not only been shot, but killed and frozen. By Gwen. He told himself it wasn't her, it was the being inside her—however that had happened. They had been sure they'd defeated the sleepers of Cell 114, but something had gone wrong. One of them had survived—in Gwen.
What did that make her? Gwen had been so certain that Beth Halloran was human, all because she believed she was human. Was Gwen now an alien, because she believed herself an alien? Was a human in an alien body truly human? Was an alien in a human body truly alien?
No, this was different. This was Gwen. This was his coworker and friend. She was a human being who had been taken over by an alien consciousness. And they owed it to her to try and save her, to free her. She was a captive, a hostage—not the enemy. Gwen hadn't shot him, the alien inside her had shot him. Gwen had tried to stop it, had forced it to deliberately hit his shoulder and not his heart. He had to save her.
Like you didn't save Lisa.
Ianto stepped back with a gasp, shaking his head as a sudden rush of memories threatened to overwhelm him. The tower, the battle, the bodies; running, fighting, looking frantically for Lisa. Finding her strapped to a conversion unit, getting her out, keeping her safe and searching desperately for a cure. He had done everything he could, but he had still failed Lisa. He could not fail Gwen. She would not be taken over by this being, not like Beth Halloran would have been taken over by her programming one day. Not like Lisa.
Ianto wished Jack was there—alive and awake— to help. He would know what to do far better than Ianto. He had heard of the sleepers, knew how they worked. Maybe he even knew what had happened to Gwen, how the alien had jumped bodies. Ianto may have told Owen he was handling it, but he wasn't. He'd been shot. His coworker was possessed. And Jack was dead and frozen.
Glancing down at Jack once more, Ianto resolved to finally move things forward with him once the situation was over. Jack had asked him on a date, and Ianto had said yes, but every time Jack had tried to follow through, Ianto had put him off. Something held him back—he wasn't sure what—but now, looking at Jack, he told himself not to put it off any longer. What if Jack didn't come back from one of his deaths? What if he left again? Ianto was scared of what it might mean to date Jack—his boss, a man, and someone he'd already had casual sex with—but he realized at that moment that he was more scared of not trying. Of not even taking the chance to see what it could be, all because he was afraid of what it could be. The irony was not lost on him.
"You'd better wake up, Jack. You promised dinner and a movie, and I think I'm ready to take you up on it," he murmured. "I'm sorry it's taken me so long. How about Saturday?"
He didn't lean down and kiss the container, though the thought did occur to him. Refusing to put himself squarely in a Mills and Boon novel, he turned to go upstairs. He should sit down, like he'd told Owen, but he needed to figure out how to save Gwen first.
Carefully making his way back upstairs to the main part of the Hub, Ianto found Gwen in a bad state. She was shaking, her head jerking, her breath coming in ragged gasps. The tie had come loose and fallen around her neck. He couldn't help but wonder if the alien was faking illness as a way to be released and approached her cautiously.
"Ianto," she gasped, and she opened bloodshot eyes to gaze up at him in desperation. "Help me, please!"
He dropped to his knees. Gwen was fighting.
"I don't know what to do," he told her. "Owen's on his way, you have to keep fighting."
She shook her head. Her lip had stopped bleeding, but she was sweating, her hair a tangled mess around her pale face. "I…I can't," she said. It sounded like she was working hard to get every word out. She shook her head, as if trying to clear it. "It's too strong."
"No, you're stronger," he told her. He reached up to touch her face. "Look at me. You can do this. This is your body, not theirs. And you want to keep it."
"I'm," she struggled again, a groan escaping her lips. "I'm sorry. I didn't…didn't mean to shoot you."
"I know," Ianto told her. "You stopped it, didn't you? From killing me."
"I tried," she gasped, then cried out. Her voice changed pitch, subtle, but eerie.
"You can't fight us, Ianto Jones. We're already here, walking among you. And even if you kill us, we will continue our mission."
"Gwen, fight it!" he shouted, dropping his hand, disgusted by the change in her demeanor. He couldn't imagine the pain she was going through.
"Ianto!" she gasped. Her head twisted at unnatural angles, like something from a horror movie. "It's in my head. It knows everything."
"Then we'll just have to get it out," Ianto replied as calmly as he could. He wished he could take her hand, pull her into an embrace. All he could do was lay his good hand on her knee and offer his reassurance. "I promise."
"I…it shot jack. So many times, oh god, Ianto—I killed Jack!"
"No, you didn't, the alien did it. You—"
"I tried to stop it, but I couldn't. Ianto, it made me do it, put him in cryofreeze—"
"You didn't do anything, Gwen. It wasn't you." Ianto couldn't imagine how awful she must feel, or how they would get through this when it was over, but they would. They always did. "And Jack will be fine, you know he will."
She dropped her head, and when she looked up, she was grinning madly; Gwen was gone again.
"But she did shoot him! She knows so much—so much that will help us. She helped us get rid of him, of the strange creature who won't die."
"Gwen doesn't know anything about cryofreeze," Ianto snapped.
"No, but I do," Gwen-not-Gwen replied. "I went through it. I needed her hands, though. Her weapon. Her authorization. We got him out of the way and then you walked in." She growled as she pulled at her binding. "You ruined everything!"
"I stopped you," Ianto replied, moving away from her violent thrashing. "We will always stop you. You won't get this planet."
Gwen-not-Gwen started to laugh, but it turned into a choke, and then a gasp, until her eyes rolled up in her head and she collapsed, falling forward. Ianto waited a moment, then checked her pulse: weak, but still alive.
"Ianto?" The whispered voice was Gwen. "You can't let it keep my body," she said. "You have to kill it, or it will use what I know. It could destroy Torchwood."
"It won't," he assured her. "We'll stop it. Tosh and Owen are both on the way. We'll figure it out."
She groaned, twisting horribly. "It hurts, Ianto—make it stop—it hurts!" She screamed and passed out again. The alien did not speak.
Ianto took a deep breath to settle his rattled nerves. He tried not to remember Lisa, begging him to stop the pain, crying as the programming invaded her mind and slowly took over her body. He would not fail Gwen.
But could he kill her to save her?
Author's Note:
I've got nothing, other than the usual disclaimer of not being a doctor, secret agent, or alien. Hope you enjoyed it, though! Thanks for reading!
