Rating: T

Word count: ~ 2,600

Warnings: Angst, magic, semi-borrowed, semi-altered dialogue, canon violence.

Summary: Twelve steps to immortality: this is the pinnacle of alchemy, of all alchemists. Ianto has reached final goal, and all he feels is empty.

A/N: Sorry for the delay, but my wife is leaving today for a few weeks, and we took the weekend for ourselves. This turned out much longer than I thought it would, but I adore Tosh, which might have something to do with that.

(On another note, several people have mentioned that Ianto here is much darker than in canon. An explanation/my reasoning is included at the end.)


The Art of Far and Near

Chapter Four

"Do whores have prayers?"

The pistol is aimed and cocked.

Mary smiles at him, bright and sweet even with a bruise spreading across her cheek and leaves in her hair.

His finger tightens on the trigger, and the shot is fired.


(That's the beginning, but it's too far back for this story. Fast forward.)


"This is incredible. This is the most incredible thing I ever heard. They should make an action figure of you."

Mary is beautiful, dark and golden, eyes bright as she leans forward over the table. Tosh has to turn her eyes away.

"You were right, about the pendant. I see it now—it can be used for good."

With a quick, bright grin, Mary settles back, as self-satisfied as a cat when she catches Tosh's eye. "What did they say at work? How did you explain it?" she demands, but Tosh has a feeling she already knows what the answer is going to be. She used to wear the pendant, too, after all.

"I didn't tell them," she admits softly, and is still feels like a betrayal. But the technology in the pendant is so captivating, so different from anything on earth. Tosh is a technomancer; her magic sings in wires, hums with electricity, dances through circuits. Computers are beautiful to her eyes, programs are like flowers, and this pendant is like a supernova trapped in a locket, endlessly enthralling beauty that she can hold in the palm of her hand.

She doesn't want to let it go, doesn't want to share it.

The others wouldn't understand.

"I think that's wise," Mary agrees, pushing her cup to the side. Her smile is free and blinding when she meets Tosh's eyes. "I'm sorry, but I'm gonna have to kiss you now."

"Mary, no," Tosh protests, because she shouldn't want this, she shouldn't let Mary tie her up in knots so easily. She's loved Owen—loved him hopelessly, helplessly—for as long as she's known him, and this—

This isn't something she's supposed to want.

But Mary just laughs. "Listen! You do something unbelievably brave and sexy, I have to kiss you. I don't make the rules."

And Tosh has never been brave or sexy to anyone, let alone some as bright-dark and lovely as Mary. It's just as heady as the pendant, enthralling in a way that makes Tosh feel drunk and euphoric on the perfection of it.

She kisses Mary, Mary kisses her, and that's it, she's gone. Lost.

(Mary's just become everything in her world, and Tosh should be terrified, but she just wants more.)


(In a kinder world, it might have been an ending. But here, it's the middle of the tale.)


Mary's cigarette curls smoke up towards the ceiling, grey spirals that look like fog, or maybe ghosts. "So," she ventures, "what's happening with the thing you found on the building site?"

Tosh shakes her head, glad for the change of subject. She's never been good with emotions, with emotionally charged situations. Right now she wants nothing more than to crawl across the table and curl herself into Mary's skin, and has to wrap her hands around her cup to distract herself. "Don't know, my boss is dealing with that."

One blond eyebrow arches, ridiculously perfect. "I thought you did all the technological stuff," Mary says, but there's no confusion in her voice. It's almost like she's making a point, but Tosh can't think what that point would be.

"I do, but sometimes our jobs overlap a bit," she defends, not entirely certain why she suddenly feels defensive. "I'm doing—there's an admin thing he's asked me to do."

"Don't you have a secretary for that?"

Tosh thinks of Ianto, the self-disgust in this thoughts, the pain of them. He's their secretary, for the most part, even though it makes Tosh a bit twitchy sometimes. She's read up on alchemy a bit, the little there is to read, and born alchemists are really terrifyingly powerful. But Ianto still cleans up after them, still brings them all coffee and takes care of the filing and makes sure the kitchen is stocked with all of their favorite snacks. It makes her wonder, sometimes, if he thinks of it as a punishment for what he did to Lisa.

"It's actually quite complicated," she manages to say, dragging her thoughts away from him, away from the memory of running through the dark woods, so sure that someone was going to come after her.

(But no one did.)

"So, what's he found out?" Mary asks, leaning forward like she wants another kiss. There's a wicked gleam in her eyes that says she can see Tosh's gaze automatically flicker down to her lips, and likes it.

Dragging her attention back to the conversation is far harder than Tosh thinks it should be. "I don't know. He's not said anything."

"That's kind of strange."

"It isn't, it's fine." Defending Jack is automatic by now, the words rote. They've been said to Owen, to Gwen, to UNIT specialists and the police and government officials.

(Even when they hurt. Even when she disagrees with them.)

"No, sure. I mean, if he's keeping stuff from you, there's bound to be a
reason."

(Mary's smile is pleased, like she's won something, but Tosh can't think what.)


(Eight ball, corner pocket. She's won.)


(Fast forward.)


There is silver light, like a sun. Mary shines under the kitchen's lights, alien and beautiful.

"This is why you can't tell them," she says, and her voice is river-song and ocean waves, sweet breezes and laughing brooks. There are wings behind her, as pure and gleaming as light reflecting off rippling water, only half-seen, and Tosh can't breathe for the beauty of her. She reaches out, entranced even as she's terrified, and Mary mimics her.

Their hands meet, touch, and Tosh gasps.

"You're cold. Who are you?" she asks. Angel is on the tip of her tongue, but that's not right.

"Still the person you kissed. The person you caressed," Mary says, and her smile is still wicked. That's why 'angel' will never suit her. She's temptation to her core, and revels in it.

Her form shifts, resettles into the woman Tosh shared her bed with, and she looks at Tosh with confidence that just barely covers a flicker of uncertainty. "Say something," she murmurs, and even though it's not begging, Tosh can hear the plea in it.

She takes a breath, ignoring how it shudders. "So…I'm shagging a woman and a creature from the Everafter." It sounds insane to say it out loud, because Tosh has always known herself. This isn't anything like what she would normally do, but she can't bring herself to care.

Mary's mouth quirks up in a bare half-smile, tentative but quickly strengthening. "Which is worse?" she asks, and there's laughter buried in her voice.

Tosh looks at her, sees the warmth in her blue eyes, and knows that even though she should end this here, she won't. She can't. So she smiles back and says, "Well, I know which one my parents would say."


(Turn the clock back, just a little.)


"So I've just come from a really interesting conversation with a Detective
Inspector Henderson."

"Right."

"Interesting because, firstly, the man had the biggest hands I've ever seen, and secondly, because of the story he told me about you saving a woman and her kid from being murdered by her ex-husband."

"Yeah, no, I was going to tell you about that."

"So why didn't you?"

"I don't know, it wasn't a work thing, just a…thing thing. Stuff happens all the time that's not pertinent to here."

"You do this all the time? So you secretly fight crime, is that it, Tosh?"

"I didn't want it to look like I was showing off."

"The guy they arrested, Henderson, said you heard him muttering to himself as he was walking along, and that's what tipped you off."

"Mm. I couldn't really work out what he was saying at first, and then it was like, 'Jesus!'"

"That's weird because when I'm about to murder someone, I'm really careful not to talk to myself about it while I'm in the street."

"No, sure. I mean, that's lesson one."

"Hmm."

(There are no thoughts from him at all, no sound. It's like he's already dead.)


(The ending's clear from this point on. Skip ahead.)


"Now this ... This is incredible. You know what it is?"

"It's a transporter, it can open a door in the Rift. Mary was a political prisoner—she was exiled here on Earth. Look, Jack—"

"You've got half of it right. Mary—it is Mary, isn't it? You want to tell her the really interesting bit?"

(There's only silence.)

"No? Chatty, isn't she? I don't know how you got a word in edgeways, Tosh.
It makes a two-man door. Or a two-siren door. That's what your people are, aren't they? A two-siren door. Big enough for one prisoner and one guard. You want to tell us what happened to the guard, Mary?"

"I killed him."


Tosh clasps the pendant around her neck.

The way she looks at you with those eyes - she's like an animal.

That's Gwen. Of course she wouldn't understand.

Then Mary's knife is at her throat, and Tosh wonders if she ever understood at all.

It's ridiculous - we're unarmed, we're just shouting at her.

Owen, who Tosh has almost completely forgotten the last few days.

Not again. Please, God, not again.

Ianto. Tosh sees the look on his face, the expression in his eyes, and feels her heart all but stop. He's holding a gun, but one-handed.

The other hand is at his side, and far more dangerous for it.


(Skip.)


"That's what they think of you. That's who you've been working with for all
these years."

The voice in her ears is poison, all the more for the truth in it.

Siren, Tosh thinks desperately, trying to remind herself, trying to shake off the spell, but she can already tell it's not going to work.

She doesn't want to.

"It's not true, Tosh, don't listen." Owen sounds desperate, angry, but he's the one who's never seen her has more than an extension of the technology she controls, like a living circuit board, if he even thinks about her that much.

Mary's lips are still so soft against her cheek, the words an intimate whisper on her skin, just as they were last night. "But not me. Whatever I've done, it doesn't change the way I feel about you. We have a connection, Toshiko, something real."


(Back to the beginning.)


"Is it from the Everafter?"

"And how. I'm picking up traces of technomancy, fey magic, and even basic alchemy."

"Any idea what it is?"

"Not a clue. Could be a weapon. Or a really big stapler."


(Fast forward.)


Light flares, blinding, like a captured sun, and the Rift between the human world and the Everafter splits like a zipper being pulled. It wraps around Mary, grabs her and drags her back into the world of her birth.

Then the light is gone, and the doorway with it.

Mary, too.

"What did she—? Has she gone home?" Tosh demands, and she can still feel heartbroken, even with everything Mary did to her, because she's never loved in a healthy way, and she's not about to start.

Jack looks at her, eyes serious even if his expression is still half-joking. "It was made with basic alchemy," he says, looking past her. Tosh turns her head, sees Ianto watching them, grim and sad. "I had Ianto take a look at it. We reset the coordinates."

"Where to?" It comes out accusing, but Tosh can't find it in herself to regret that. She'd thought Ianto of all people would understand doing stupid things for love.

(But he killed Lisa when she changed, a little voice reminds Tosh. He turned his own girlfriend into ash when he realized that she was a murderer, that she wasn't what she used to be. What did you really expect?)

"To the middle of the Everafter's largest desert," Jack says, jokingly. "But it's okay. Plenty warm in the daytime, after all."

Sirens are water creatures. They need it as much as they need air.

It's a cruel death.

"You killed her," Tosh whispers.

"Yes." Jack's voice is harsh, final.

Tosh turns her head away, and weeps.


(Run if forward, all the way to the very end.)


"It's a curse," Tosh says, and the pendant cracks into pieces beneath the heel of her boot.

(Jack's hand is warm on her skin as he cups her chin, uses his thumb to wipe a tear away. He keeps it there for one more moment, meeting her eyes, and then lets go, turns, and walks away.

There's a familiar shadow waiting at the corner of the Plass, a dark shape dressed in a neat bespoke suit. Tosh watches as Ianto joins Jack in front of the invisible lift, and then vanishes with him.)

The Plass is dark, but the lights around it are bright. Tosh lifts her chin squares her shoulders, and sits up a little straighter.


(Another end, but the hardest part is starting over.)


An explanation/my reasoning regarding this Ianto:

In Cyberwoman, Ianto never really stopped believing Lisa could be saved until she'd killed Annie, the innocent pizza girl, and changed her appearance. The same happened here, only her change in appearance wasn't into another innocent that Ianto knew; it was into a necromantic monster, something twisted and broken. Ianto might not have had a gun, but he realized that it wasn't Lisa anymore, and used the weapon available to him: his alchemy. He was horrified and terrified and overreacted, using all twelve alchemical symbols, the same way he overreacted when facing death (for all that it wouldn't really kill him, though he's doubtless still unaccustomed to immortality) with the cannibals.

When he uses the stun gun in canon, it's always in situations where he's generally in control (i.e. Meat. Note that he didn't use one when facing the blowfish in KKBB, another situation where he didn't have any control).

And…yeah, that's my thinking here. Does that make any sense at all?