The Unexpected Rise of Director Jones
by Soledad
Summary: Jack is gone, and the rest of the Torchwood Three team must see how they manage without him.
My thanks to weis07 for coming up with the idea of Rhys' nightmares.
Chapter 04 – Nightmares
Rhys Williams was dreaming. For a man who'd finally brought up the courage to ask for the hand of the love of his life – and even got a positive answer – it wasn't really surprising. A man on the threshold of wedded bliss was supposed to have X-rated dreams of his upcoming wedding night, wasn't he?
Only that his dreams were not X-rated – unless there was such thing as X-rated nightmares, that is – neither had they anything to do with the planned wedding. They were nightmares all right; recurring ones.
He'd had them every night since the most recent earthquake, and they always came in the same order.
First, he was walking down endless corridors in some strange underground place. There were cells on both sides, with glass doors, and in the cells large-toothed monsters in jumpsuits, with faces like Halloween masks, howling in an eerie chorus.
Then, suddenly, he found himself in one of those cells, looking at Gwen through the glass. Gwen staring at him, teary-eyed, saying: I'm sorry, Rhys, I truly am. I've cheated on you and drugged you, but it was all for your own good. I had to shut you in, to keep you safe, can't you see it? Say that you forgive me! I need you to forgive me! Please!
And then she was gone, replaced by a creepy little old man in an old-fashioned, dark suit, who walked through the thick security glass as if through water, saying: I'm sorry, my boy, but this must be!
And then there was a sharp pain piercing his guts, and he looked down at himself, watching with morbid fascination as his light blue shirt became soaked with blood.
His blood.
Rhys gasped awake, drenched in cold sweat, and reached out for Gwen blindly. He needed to feel her solid presence to pull himself together again.
But the other half of the bed – Gwen's side – was empty and cold, her nighties thrown onto the floor carelessly. She must have left hours ago.
Sighing, Rhys climbed out of his sweat-soaked bed to check the bedside table, in the hope that Gwen had left a notice about where she'd gone and when she'd been back. He found none. Not that that would have been anything new.
Ever since Captain Harkness had left, Gwen had been at home less than before. Oh, there were always reasonable explanations; after all, they were a man short, and work wasn't getting any less. Still, Rhys could not shake off the feeling that Gwen was lying to him.
Which wouldn't have been anything new, either. So much about the upcoming wedded bliss. Bloody Torchwood!
Knowing that he wouldn't be able to fall asleep again – and wondering how long it would take until chronic insomnia would start to influence his work – Rhys too a long, hot shower, then put on a terrycloth robe, fetched a beer from the fridge and sprawled out on the couch in front of the telly.
It was beyond midnight, but one of the commercial channels would have reruns of Wife Swap. He needed something normal, something down-to-earth and thoroughly silly to distract him.
Gwen was not happy to find Rhys on the living room couch, surrounded by empty beer bottles, asleep with the telly still running. He'd been developing a resistance to the sleeping pills she secretly slipped into his food whenever she needed to leave without him asking questions, and that could become a problem in the long run.
She didn't want to Retcon him again, even if she could. She'd done so in the past year repeatedly, and she feared that he'd end up like Suzie's victims. She didn't want that to happen. She needed him; the solid, normal background he provided – even though her other interests had long turned away from him.
Her short, torrid affair with Owen had been very satisfying – until that bastard would develop an interest for the woman from the 1950s who could have been his mother. Granted, she hadn't been actually that old, due to the time travel aspect, but still… How would Owen dare to drop her for someone like that?
And then there was Jack, of course. Jack, whose mere presence could make her week-kneed. Jack, with his ridiculous principles of not breaking up a stable relationship. Jack, who lowered himself to shagging the teaboy instead of finally stand up to his feelings like a man.
That bastard who'd run off with some mysterious alien – Gwen still didn't quite buy the whole legend about the Doctor, no matter what Tosh would say. What did Tosh know anyway – apart from freakish tech and computers, that is? And Ianto was lying whenever he opened his mouth.
But in the end, it didn't matter whom Jack had run off with – or why. What did matter was the fact that he had run off, abandoning his team, his responsibilities, and the city he was supposed to protect.
Abandoning her.
No-one abandoned Gwen Cooper for some random alien. And if they did, they were gonna pay the price.
With an anxious look at the softly snoring Rhys – she didn't want to wake him, now that he was finally asleep, and most certainly not at the moment, when she had such a delicate matter to handle – she tiptoed by him to the small room next to their bedroom that served as her study.
She booted up her computer and began to work on her report to that odd lot called UNIT. She still didn't fully understand what kind of organization it was, but if Tosh and Ianto were so afraid of them learning about Jack's disappearance, they would be the right people to contact. They would evaluate the situation and do what needed to be done.
Torchwood Three needed a new leader. And no matter what the others were blathering about, she was the one Jack had chosen to replace his second-in-command. She was the one with the people skills, the one with the connection to the police, the one who knew how a proper investigation should be done.
Under Jack's leadership, work at Torchwood Three had been chaotic at best. If they wanted to manage without him – who, at least, didn't need sleep and couldn't be killed, not for good anyway – they needed to be better organized… a bit like the police, actually.
There had to be a clear structure of responsibilities; a proper chain of command. She knew she would be able to establish that, eventually; the others would have to adapt. It was that simple. And once she'd broken her colleagues in, she could hire more people to work for Torchwood – to work for her.
But first she had to secure the position for herself. Before Ianto could lick the right boots up to whatever authorities had the right to choose a replacement for Jack. That lying little weasel had already started to worm his way into the confidence of the City Hall employees; a good thing that Carrie's hubby had informed Mr Grainger in time.
No support for the teaboy from that angle… and should Jack ever return, the photos Gwen had taken would show him that his opportunistic little bed-warmer had found somebody else soon enough. One way or another, Ianto was going to lose.
With a dark little smile, Gwen finished her report and consulted her phone, trying to find the best address to send it to. Unfortunately for her, none of the names in Jack's phone book appeared even vaguely familiar. Well, none save for that Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart Tosh and Ianto had mentioned; but they also said that the Brigadier was a friend of Jack's – and had retired years ago anyway.
Most names had various abbreviations attached to them; abbreviations she was unfamiliar with. She didn't want to go to the PM's office right away – Jack always said Torchwood was above the government. But not above UNIT, apparently… and what about the Home Office? The Secret Service? Couldn't they do something?
She studied the names some more until she found one marked as both UNIT and MI5. Her eyes widened in surprise. That was exactly what she needed! That must have been one of those people Jack had occasionally yelled at through the phone.
Grinning to herself in satisfaction, Gwen wrote a short message, attached her report and sent the whole thing to a certain Commodore Sullivan. Then she carefully wiped the Sent Messages folder in her mailing program, just in case Tosh or Ianto would try to hack into her computer. Again.
There; it was done. Now she could lean back and wait for the results.
Commodore Harry Sullivan was more than a little surprised when the message of an unknown woman arrived on his computer in the middle of the night.
Firstly because he only used this particular address to keep in touch with Jack Harkness and other ex-companions. Secondly because the woman introduced herself as the second-in-command of Torchwood Cardiff. And thirdly because she raised serious accusations against Jack Harkness, the one on top of her list, the most disturbing among them, being that Jack had abandoned his duties as the Torchwood leader and run off with some alien in a blue police box.
That particular piece of information told Sullivan more than it would tell most people. Those not in the know would have found the description ridiculous. Sullivan, however, knew at once that Jack must have left with the Doctor – which, in itself, was unusual, to say the least.
The Doctor, not moving along the paths of linear time, usually didn't contact his former companions, in order to avoid causing a temporal paradox. The commodore himself hadn't seen the elusive Time Lord since the mid-1970s, although he knew that various incarnations of him had visited Earth in the meantime. Repeatedly.
The last reported appearances were in Cardiff, during the earthquake in 2006, and a different incarnation in London, at the time of the unsuccessful Sycorax invasion. There were rumours that the same incarnation had been present at Canary Wharf, but no-one could actually prove that.
Still, that didn't mean that he couldn't have visited Cardiff recently. The commodore vaguely remembered Jack Harkness saying something about the TARDIS needing to be refuelled and the Rift being the right place to do so, and if the Doctor picked up an ex-companion again, he must have had a reason for that.
God knows Jack had waited long enough for him. One hundred years it had been? Or two hundred? Somewhere in-between, of that Sullivan was quite sure.
He read through the attachment again, his face getting increasingly grim in the process. Whoever this Gwen Cooper character was, obviously hated Jack very much – and wanted Jack's position badly. The accusations were severe: neglecting duties, covering up for horrible mistakes of team members – mistakes that put Cardiff at serious risk – for sexual favours, and now leaving the Rift in the care of untrained civilians…
It was pure, dumb luck that she happened to send this to Sullivan's address. The current brass of UNIT would happily discard Jack as unfit and move in to take over the Rift. They certainly wouldn't appoint one of Jack's team as his successor. Without Jack, Torchwood Three would be dissolved in no time and turned into a UNIT outpost.
Had this stupid woman considered that? Apparently not. Perhaps she had no idea; or chose to ignore the risks. All she seemed to care about was to become the next Torchwood Three leader.
The commodore wondered how she might have found his address; perhaps by searching through Jack's things. After all, Jack had left rather abruptly; and he'd always been a bit careless with things he hadn't considered important.
Of course, if he didn't mean to come back, he wouldn't need to be careful, right?
In any case Sullivan needed to learn more about Torchwood agent Gwen Cooper. And he needed to stop her, by any means necessary. Should she find out that she'd sent her little message of pure slander to the wrong address, she might give it a second try.
Or she might have already sent multiple letters, to all addresses she'd found in Jack's phone book. That would be a disaster of epic proportions.
Still, Sullivan needed to move carefully. He no longer was in the position to intervene directly. After his stint with the NATO his function with both UNIT and MI5 was a consulting one. Would he start asking questions – by the Cardiff Police, for example, where Gwen Cooper had apparently worked before joining Torchwood, he'd draw a lot of unwanted attention to Torchwood Three.
For a few minutes he was thinking really hard. Then his eyes lit up in triumph.
"Of course, of course," he muttered. "I should have thought of her right away."
In the quiet of her house in Ealing, London, Sarah Jane Smith was startled when her phone rang in such an ungodly hour.
It wasn't the fact itself that somebody would call her in the middle of the night… well; morning would almost be more accurate. As a freelance journalist she was used to such things. After all, her informants often took a risk by telling her things she wasn't exactly supposed to know, and for some unfathomable reason most people seemed to believe that calling at night would be safer.
As if the listening devices would stop for sleep.
Not that her phone could have been hacked, of course. Mr Smith made sure of that. Still, people tended to call at nighttime.
No, what surprised her was the fact that it was her second phone that rang. The clumsy, outdated model with the ring tone mimicking the noise the TARDIS made when landing. Or starting. The one she only used to keep in touch with other ex-companions, because it didn't have a GPS.
The one that hadn't rung… well, she couldn't even remember for how long.
The screen showed Harry's number, and she smiled involuntarily. Dear old Harry still called from time to time, checking on her. Making sure she was all right, even though their shared adventures lay in the past. In the distant past. More distant than she liked to admit, to be honest.
Still, Harry calling her at such an unusual time was a tad worrying, and she picked up the phone in a great hurry.
"Harry, what's going on? Is the world about to end?"
"Not yet, at least I hope it isn't," the familiar voice of her old friend answered. "But something's definitely fishy. Did you know the Doctor was here again?"
"No," she said in surprise. "I haven't seen him – the new him – since that incident with the Krillitanes at Deffry Vale school. Of course, he never bothers to drop by when he's in town," she added, with a slight bitterness. "It's nothing new."
"He wasn't in London; he was in Cardiff," Harry offered as some kind of consolation.
"That makes sense," she replied. 'He was probably refuelling the TARDIS. He does that from time to time, according to Jack – why is this case any different?"
"Because Jack's apparently gone with him," Harry said.
"Has he now?" Sarah Jane frowned a bit. "Then who's watching the Rift now?"
"That's the problem," Harry's voice was worried – a bad sign. After all he'd seen and experienced, Harry wasn't one to worry easily. "It seems that his team's tried to cover up his disappearance – except the one who's damn eager to get his job. She sent me a message with a detailed list of Jack's supposed shortcomings and her own skills that would apparently qualify her as the new Torchwood Three leader."
"Nothing really qualifies one to lead Torchwood Three," Sarah Jane snorted. "All previous Torchwood Three leaders had come to a bad end. Could Jack stay dead, he'd be in one of those cryogenic tubes already, several times over. What does this woman make so sure she'd be better? What is she? A former MI5 or MI6 agent? An android from outer space? The female reincarnation of James Bond?"
"A former police constable, apparently," Harry said dryly.
Sarah Jane was speechless for a long moment. Absolutely speechless. The mere idea of a PC – a former PC – in charge of the Cardiff Rift boggled the mind.
"You're kidding, right?" she then said. "You have to be kidding. Tell me that you are kidding."
"Not at all, I'm afraid," Harry replied.
Sarah Jane still couldn't quite believe it. "Good gracious, is the woman insane? Does she really think that breaking up bar fights qualifies her to lead the most endangered outpost in the UK? And why did she write you, of all people? You never had anything to do with Torchwood and you aren't even with UNIT anymore."
"Perhaps she snatched Jack's phone book and chose the person with the most impressive-sounding titles," Harry joked humourlessly.
"That's bad, really bad," Sarah Jane said. "Worse than bad; it's a nightmare. Who knows whom else did she contact? Not everyone at UNIT likes Jack."
"That, I say, is the understatement of the century," Harry replied glumly. Jack, while generally capable of charming people out of their pants, was good at making enemies, too.
"We should alert the Brig," Sarah Jane said. "He still has some influence. We might need him."
"I'll contact him first thing in the morning," Harry promised. "But there are other things to do, and I'll need your help, old thing."
"Don't call me that," Sarah Jane said automatically; some things never changed, which was actually comforting. "What can I possibly do? It's not so as if anyone at UNIT would listen to me, you know. They never did. Not even while I was travelling with the Doctor."
"Their loss," Harry replied, gallantly as always. "It doesn't matter. I need you to do what you do best: check on people and ferret out their secrets."
"You mean you need me to go to Cardiff and find out whatever I can about this woman," Sarah Jane translated the request.
"Aye," Harry said. "If you could discredit her a bit in the process, it would be even better."
"Hmmm," Sarah Jane weighed the possibilities against each other in her mind. "Well, I happen to have a former student in Cardiff who works for one of the local newspapers. She worked very doggedly on revealing Mayor Blaine's dubious nuclear project a couple of years ago… of course, she didn't know that Blaine was actually a Slitheen. What was her name again? Catie… no, Cathy. Cathy Salt. I can contact her and get her on the case."
"I'd prefer if you could go yourself, old girl."
"And I'd prefer if you could stop with the silly nicknames. They weren't funny thirty years ago and now they're positively insulting," Sarah Jane snapped. "Don't fret, I will go to Cardiff. But I've got things to finish here first, and in the meantime Cathy can dig out the basic facts for me. She's very good at that."
"All right, let's do this your way," Harry sighed. "I'd sleep better if we could monitor her online correspondence, though. Do you think Mr Smith could do it?"
"I can try," Sarah Jane replied, a little uncertainly. "It couldn't be that complicated – unless she sends her messages from the Torchwood Hub. Not even Mr Smith can trick the Torchwood Mainframe."
"The mail sent to me came from her private address. I don't think she'd risk to send anything from the Hub where he others could catch her red-handed," Harry said. "All right, then. Let's keep in touch, shall we?"
"Always," Sarah Jane answered with a smile and hung up.
It felt good, working with Harry on saving the world again. Just like in old times.
The Hub was eerily quiet just before daybreak – but not empty. Never empty. It was a place full of ghosts.
Ghosts of former Torchwood agents, now lying still and cold and dead in the morgue, frozen for eternity.
The ones who had forcibly drafted Jack a century and a half ago.
The ones he had fought with, worked with in those long years, and inevitably lost – to malevolent aliens, to dangerous alien technology or simply to the passing of time that flowed past him like a river flows past an unmovable rock.
The ones he had found dead, killed by his predecessor – to save them, apparently.
The ones he had to kill, in order to prevent something terrible from happening. Like Suzie.
Yes, the Hub was full of ghosts, which was why no-one liked to stay here alone. No-one but Ianto, that is, who had lived with his own ghosts for too long to still be bothered.
There was very little that could still bother him after Canary Wharf. Or after having lost Lisa for the second time.
Jack's departure was one of those things – and not only because it would set back the healing of his wounds by, oh, about a century or so. Apart from leaving him behind without a second thought, Jack had also dropped the responsibility for Torchwood Three onto his lap.
The Rift couldn't be left unwatched. Cardiff couldn't be left unprotected. Gwen was unfit for the job she so obviously desired. Tosh didn't want it and Owen… Owen was in no shape to do any job at the moment, not even his regular one.
That left Ianto. Ianto who'd been longer part of Torchwood than any of them. Who'd been trained by Torchwood One thoroughly and who had, thanks to his photographic memory, all Torchwood secrets – or at least their location in the Archives – in his head.
He was the last Torchwood Archivist still alive.
Had UNIT known who – or rather what – he was, he'd probably be dead by now, too. They'd have taken him to some secret lab, trying to extract the info from his brain. And then he wouldn't have had any other choice than to activate that tiny piece of alien tech embedded deeply in his cranium and trigger self-destruction.
He had sworn a solemn oath to keep Torchwood's secrets from falling into the wrong hands – and he knew all too well the dangers, so he would fulfil that oath voluntarily.
That meant he had to hold things firmly in his own hand – if only to keep those secrets safe from Gwen's constant nosing around. That she was ruthless in her pursuing her own agenda the security cameras hidden in Jack's office had already shown. So Ianto used the night to take preventive measures.
The first step had been to clean out Jack's office. Ianto emptied the desk completely, save for the piles of paperwork waiting for someone – for him, as usual – to deal with them. He removed the rusty old thin box from the bottom drawer – the box containing old photos from Jack's past, which he never got to see but knew they existed – and took it down to Jack's room, where he buried it in the hindmost corner of the wardrobe. Then he sealed the room and put a security lock on the trap door.
He would come down to air and clean the room from time to time, but no-one else would enter it. Least of all Gwen-bloody-Cooper.
He then methodically removed every piece of alien tech lying around haphazardly in Jack's office – the man could be really messy at times – returned them to the Archives and changed all the security passwords, just in case Jack had carelessly told Gwen any of them. He also changed the access code to the safe in Jack's office, where the truly dangerous objects were kept.
"I'll tell Tosh about it later," he muttered to himself.
"You'll tell me about what?" a soft voice asked from behind his back, and he whirled around, startled that she'd managed to get in without him noticing.
Until he remembered that he'd turned off the alarm himself, so that he'd be able to move in and out in peace.
"The new security codes," he replied, giving Tosh a tired smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. "What are you doing here, Tosh? You should be at home, resting."
She smiled back at him, equally tiredly and more than just a little sadly.
"So should you. And yet here we are, both of us. Couldn't sleep, eh?"
"Too many nightmares, ever since Canary Wharf," Ianto sighed. "The recent weeks weren't helping, either. You?"
"The same," Tosh admitted. "Every time I close my eyes I see Bilis Manger – or Jack, lying in the morgue. What are you doing, Ianto?"
"Securing the Hub," he explained. "Making sure that only you and me can access any confidential information."
"Is that fair to the others?" she asked quietly. "Owen…"
"Owen wouldn't care; not in his current shape," Ianto interrupted. "And Gwen has already searched Jack's office; taking photographs of his phone book, with all the secret numbers; that of the UNIT liaison, of MI5, MI6, the Prime Minister's office, the Home Office… in her hands, they could be dangerous. You know what she's like, doing the first thing that occurs to her, without thinking of the possible consequences."
Tosh paled imagining those consequences.
"What can we do to counteract?" she asked.
"First of all, I want those numbers deleted from her phone; replaced with completely harmless ones would be even better. Could Mainframe hack into the phone, what do you think?"
Tosh bit her lower lip, thinking.
"I'm not sure," she confessed. "But I can give it a try."
"Please do," Ianto was visibly relieved. "And when you're already at it, try to set up a few firewalls that would limit her access to the database as much as possible. I don't want her poke around in my Digital Archives."
"Do you really think it's necessary?" Tosh was mildly shocked by his request.
Ianto nodded. "Oh, yes. Those databases should have been password-protected from the beginning, but Jack had a bit of a lash attitude towards security. If he hadn't, the whole disaster with Suzie and the resurrection glove could have been prevented. That is something I wouldn't like to face again."
Tosh couldn't argue with that, and so she sat down to her desk to do as Ianto had asked.
~TBC~
