RESURRECTION
Chapter Four
Having dealt with Owen, Ianto moved onto his next task. He ascended the stairs to Tosh's work station one final time, looking at the security feed displayed on her computer screen. Gwen had finally succumbed to the sedative, it appeared. She was sprawled bonelessly in the chair he had brought in for her earlier, her hand resting on Jack's shoulder, head leaned back, mouth wide open in what he assumed was a continuous snore.
There appeared to be no change in Jack. Not that he had expected there to be, really, but it had been a faint hope in the back of his mind, a hope that he would come back by himself, that Ianto would not have to go and fetch him.
He scanned the latest footage from the mortuary, stopping when he reached the recording of Gwen falling bonelessly into the chair. The recording showed that she had stirred for a minute, then become completely still, apart from the rise and fall of her chest, the occasional twitch of a limb. This lasted for twelve minutes, until the current footage.
He nodded in satisfaction, his fingers dancing lightly across the keyboard as he replaced the live feed from the mortuary with those twelve minutes of footage, setting it to repeat. This would ensure that if Owen decided to check on the Captain, he would see nothing amiss.
Ianto knew Owen, far better than Owen knew him. The doctor would not check in person, he would keep his physical distance and instead check the cameras. He would see nothing amiss, apart from Jack's corpse. And, if anyone decided to review the archived footage later, all they would find was Gwen snoring away, Jack still dead.
He stood and watched the security display, ensuring that there were not obvious movements, the repetition of which would be noticed. As he reviewed the feed, he absently stroked a hand over Tosh's silky black hair, finger-combing it into order. She stirred slightly, muttering something in Japanese. He smiled, glancing down at her. His nihon-go was a bit rusty, but he thought she might have said "go away." He felt nothing from her but calm, and sleepy irritation. She had forgotten, for the moment.
He smoothed her hair one last time, then withdrew his hand.
Satisfied that the replacement was not obvious, he began to make his way down to Archives, forcing himself to walk sedately, despite the impatience he felt, the need to outrun the niggling thought that this would all be in vain, that the plan wouldn't work, that Jack would remain lying there forever, still and cold, never to move again.
More to distract himself than anything else, he made a call whilst he descended through the lower levels of the hub.
"Owen."
"What?" came the expectedly irritated reply.
"Just thought I'd let you know what's happening."
"Yeah, that would make a nice change."
"Tosh is still fast asleep at her desk. It doesn't look like she'll be awake anytime soon. Gwen is still in with Jack, though she seems to have fallen asleep as well. Snoring away at near ear-drum shattering levels, if the width her mouth is open to is any indication."
"Life is good for some."
Ianto ignored the jibe, knowing that, for Owen, snark was a reflex reaction – it was nothing personal.
He looked about as he walked past the cells, checking on their current inhabitants. Nothing seemed to be amiss, though the weevil looked more irritated than usual, its short period of freedom making it even less amenable to imprisonment than it had been previously. Ianto had always sympathised with it, locked down here in the dark, away from its own kind, surrounded by alien creatures.
'You should have kept running,' he thought towards it, and he felt that alien stare stroke, surprisingly gentle, against his mind in response. They had always seemed to understand each-other, himself and Janet. Ianto had hated using her to find the Weevil-nappers.
She actually seemed to understand the concepts behind using her as bait, and, perhaps even more surprisingly, she seemed to have forgiven him for it. If her recent attitude towards Jack was any indication, she blamed him for the entire mess.
"I'm going down to the Archives," he told Owen, continuing his stroll past the cells.
"I thought you said you were going to bed." Owen asked slyly, fishing.
"I am."
"You have a bed in Archives?" he asked, his tone disbelieving.
Ianto did not reply.
Owen snorted. "I always knew you had no life."
"Will you be alright on your own?"
"Yeah, I think I can manage to watch a computer screen, Ianto. Flashing red means an incursion, doesn't it?" he asked, voice acid with sarcasm. His tone faded as he went on, muttering to himself. "God knows what we'll do if something actually happens. The state we're in, a lone weevil would disembowel us all." There was a click, then silence as Owen hung up the phone.
Ianto paused before the door to the Archives, tucking his phone back into his pocket. He entered the code automatically into the discrete keypad to the left of the doorway, then stood back as it swung open.
The hallway was dark, unlit. That was fine - he knew his way around down here like a blind man knew his own home. It was sometimes necessary to move around in the dark, in order to avoid the cameras. This was a rather large flaw in their security, in fact. He had been meaning to speak to the Captain about possibly installing infra-red . . .
He pulled the heavy metal door closed behind him and walked confidently through the black, each quiet footstep echoing eerily, comfortingly, off the close walls.
Four steps in, a gentle gust of air coming from a vent above lightly ruffled his hair.
Nine steps later, the echo dogging his footsteps seemed to pause slightly before returning, indicating a gap in the wall. He turned left, moving down the smaller corridor at right angles to the main hallway.
The corridor branched twenty paces down, and Ianto took the right path. A minute later, he took another left. His eyes had been seeing nothing for so long, they attempted to fill the void with phantom flashes of colour, ghostly streamers of hues he had no name for. The air became moist, slightly musty, so wet it nearly hurt his nose to breathe it in.
No-one else ever came down this far. In fact, no-one else knew it was here. One of his first acts after Jack took him on was to edit all copies of the maps made of this area.
He reached out a hand and trailed it lightly along the thick moss growing on the damp brick wall. It always surprised Ianto that moss was able to survive down here. These tunnels were very close to the sea, running underneath it in some parts, which is the damp came from. 'The salt must be filtered out of the water as it seeps through the earth,' he thought to himself. Otherwise, the moss would most likely have been killed off by the salt. He was curious enough about it to consider bringing Tosh down here - she had a bit of a green thumb. God, her garden . . . The thought was a passing one, though.
Considering what he kept down here, Ianto was reluctant to call any sort of attention to this section of the Archives, no matter how benign.
It was a good place to conceal something. He had even considered moving Lisa down here at one stage, after Owen had said something particularly disparaging to him, which Jack had overheard. Jack had ordered Owen to help out in Archives for a week as punishment. He still can't believe he managed to keep the curious and ever-prying Owen from finding her.
He had seriously considered moving her after that, and was dissuaded only by the time it would take for him to get to her down here if something went wrong.
. . . ninety-five. . . ninety-six . . . ninety-seven steps.
He stopped and turned to face the wall, trailing his fingers along until he came to a gap about one centimetre wide, running from the ground to the ceiling. He slipped a finger into the gap at the height his shoulder, pressing it against the small scanner concealed there. There was a rapid flash of red that illuminated the tunnel briefly, temporarily dispelling the ghostly colours clouding his vision. The scanner recognised his fingerprint on the first attempt, an almost unheard-of occurrence.
There was a gasp of escaping air from below eye level, and something hard impacted with his leg. He reached down and pulled on the section of wall that had come loose. The concealed half-door swung open, silent on well-oiled hinges.
He squatted down and ducked through the opening, emerging into a concealed room. He reached back and found the handle set into the metal backing of the door and pulled it shut behind him, then closed his eyes and reached up to click on the light switch.
Even through his eyelids the harsh fluorescent lighting burnt his eyes. He covered them with his hands and waited for them to adjust to the sudden brightness. After a minute he dropped his hands, then opened his eyes, surveying the contents of the room.
The concealed storage room was about five metres by five metres, half of it taken up by shelves of different sizes, containing a number of objects, ranging from the every-day to the exotic, objects that were deemed too dangerous to keep where anyone could access them, yet too valuable to throw away.
Most of the items contained in the room had been left there by his predecessor, a man by the name of Dr Harleinger. A well-respected scientist, a brilliant man by all accounts. He had been killed when one of the objects he was experimenting on unexpectedly gained sentience and had objected to being dismantled. Or should that be dissected, given that it was sentient?
'Only God knows why Jack replaced him with me.' Ianto thought to himself.
Ianto had also made a few contributions of his own. Some were objects that Jack had told him to 'get rid of', without specifying a means of disposal (needless to say, he had not informed Jack of their destination - his justification was that if Jack wanted to know, he would have asked), and other items he had found in the storage area that were possibly unsafe, or very rare and valuable.
He strode across the room to the shelf lining the far wall, where there was a long cylindrical object concealed in a piece of fabric, the item he had retrieved from Jack's safe earlier. He tucked it carefully into the waistband of his trousers.
Next to where the cloth-mufled object had sat, there was a large rectangular metal box. He wiped the dust from it carefully before picking it up. It was very heavy - the metal lining was at least a centimetre thick.
The item it contained was something that Ianto had salvaged from storage months ago, after Jack had destroyed its twin. It was a stroke of luck that he had managed to remove it before the Captain became aware of its existence. The substance it was made of was so rare, Ianto had taken the precaution of storing it in the thick metal box, which rendered it undetectable from any of their routine scans.
And, thinking of scans. . .
He replaced the box for the moment and withdrew from his pocket the scanner he had concealed there earlier. It was set to locate a small beacon, about the size of a five cent piece. He looked intently at the small illuminated screen, and saw that the beacon was still within the laboratory. So, unless Owen had removed the black shirt he had put on earlier, the beacon should still be concealed in the collar. 'That could mean that Owen is either still in the operating theatre, or he is wandering about the Hub shirtless, possibly looking for me,' he mused. Ianto hoped it was the former.
He replaced the scanner in his pocket and retrieved the box and moved towards the exit. As both his hands were busy, he rubbed his head against the switch until the lights switched off, then pushed at the door, hard, with his foot. The door gave way and he ducked out, careful to move so that the wrapped knife didn't dig into his ribs.
Kicking the door closed again, he took a deep breath of the misty, dust-free air, before beginning his arduous journey back to the more well-known areas of the warren of catacombs beneath Roahl Dahl Plass.
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He stood, in total darkness, at the exit to the Archives, the box heavy in his hands, ribs sore from being poked, as the minutes silently ticked by on his internal clock.
He was alone, and it was dark, so there was no need to check his watch, no need to keep up the necessary deception he had practiced since he was a child, a deception that had become a nervous habit.
Like all children of the Community, he had been presented with a watch, just before his first day of primary school. And like all of the Rift-born, for Ianto the watch was unnecessary. It was a prop, a pretty ornament, of no actual use. The Rift-born always knew 'when' they were.
He ran a caressing finger absently across the face time-piece wrapped around his wrist.
The children were given watches so there was always a logical explanation for why they always knew what time it was. To explain to a teacher why a particular student would always jump up from his desk and politely insist that he be allowed to have morning tea at precisely 11.30am, despite the clock at the back of the room saying it was only 11.25.
It seemed to be an unwritten law that all clocks in any government institution be either five minutes early or five minutes late.
He supposed the watches would likely seem an unnecessary caution to an outsider. Because the worst someone would think of a child who always knew what the time was, without or in spite of technological aid, was that the child was precocious, or maybe slightly odd.
This was why the watches were necessary. It's human nature, after all – that when someone has seen even a slight oddness in another, that person will look for more. The Rift-born had larger secrets to hide than possession of an internal clock.
Ianto sighed to himself, feeling the seconds crawl by. He wished now that he had programmed more frequent intervals into the camera schedule he had set up earlier. Except that if he repeated the same pattern too many times, he increased the likelihood that the changes would be noticed later.
Standing there, waiting impatiently, he could feel his thoughts catching up to him, feel the emotions he had pushed down and buried under purpose, stirring and twitching in the dark.
He inhaled sharply as an image sprung to mind, Jack's hand cold and still, nearly indistinguishable from the bleached-white sheets on which it was lying. It had looked so wrong, wrong in a way that had no logic. He was dead, after all. What reason would a corpse's hand have for not being still?
But it felt so wrong, to see Jack's hand lie there, immobile. Jack who could not help but use them to touch and fiddle with things, who would throw them up in exasperation, wave them around the place to illustrate a point, run them through his hair as they lay close together late at night . . .
Ianto took a deep breath, and focused closely on the seconds ticking by.
Tick . . . breath . . . tick . . . breath . . . tick . . . breath . . . tick . . . time.
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Ianto threw the door open and walked hurriedly past the cells, keeping close to the right wall for the first few metres then quickly moving to the left side. He moved, fast and careful, through the invisible maze to the main area of the hub.
Pausing momentarily, he leaned his box up against the wall, freeing one hand to withdraw the scanner from his pocket. Owen had now moved to his desk near Tosh's. He sighed with relief. He had not liked the thought of manufacturing a minor emergency to keep him occupied.
He arrived in the mortuary and closed the door behind him, with twenty seconds left to spare. Leaning against the door for a moment to catch his breath, he took the time to survey the room. Gwen had not moved – she was still sleeping the sleep of the drugged, sprawled in the chair by Jack's body. Ianto winced slightly at volume of the echoing snores coming from that petite body. There was still nothing from Jack.
He walked forward, placed his burden on the ground, then pulled out the drawer neighbouring Jack's. It was, thankfully, empty. Ianto then lifted the box and placed it on the empty steel drawer, withdrew the wrapped object from his waistband and carefully placed it next to the box.
He turned to Jack, and stood, looking down at him. He placed his hands on his hips, and sighed.
It was time to get to work.