Chapter Six

Still Jim's World, still December 2005.

From the cloister's yard half a dozen angels were looking suspiciously at the twenty or so of their monks standing still at the edge of the roof like some sort of creepy sentinels.

"A+."

"Nope. O+."

"Really? Where I belong it was AB."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"Sykorax!" the others replied in unison.

"Sorry, never heard of them."

Jay sighed. There was always one exception. Not always the same one, of course. He was himself an exception. He was the only one who had married Annabel and had two kids with her. Even though most of them had crossed her path and had loved her, they all had lost her and considered him lucky. He never told them different.

"What do we do?"

"Nothing, it's the Doctor's call."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah. It has been confirmed; the Doc, Harriet Jones and some UNIT representative are on board."

"What about Rose?"

"Maybe, but for the time being we don't have any confirmation. She wasn't on the footage."

"Oh. Okay."

"In Jack's world, this happens just after the game station for the Doc and Rose. The Doc was still regenerating…"

Without any warning the sentinel monks began to collapse like puppets with their strings cut. Most of them just collapsed on themselves and had come around dangerously near the edge. Some were just lucky enough to have one of the other Brothers who had followed them on the roof to prevent them from falling over. Some others were not that lucky.

Jill and Jeff managed to break Brother Simon's fall and Brother Mathew later thanked the fish pool for being in the right place.

"What's going on? What happened?" Jay asked.

"The ship exploded. People are falling all around the world." Brother Scott answered. He was coming from the concierge where he was watching the news.

"It's Torchwood." John added, coming back from the control room. "They brought the ship down with the Prime Minister and the Doctor on board."

"What about the Tardis and Rose?"

"As for the Tardis, she was there; she's on the footage, but no sign of Rose or Jackie. Mickey on the other hand…"

"Shit."

The angels were devastated. He wasn't their Doctor, she wasn't their Rose, but it was all the same. The Doctor was dead. Dead for real. He was not coming back.

"It makes sense, though." Jay pointed out. "Now we know why the Master chose this dimension."

"What about Jim?"

"Thanks to the kid, he is free now. With the Doctor and Rose being dead, he has no reason to stay any longer."

"He still needs to get his wristband back, to leave this era."

Unlike Jack or his other counterparts, Jim's vortex manipulator had only run out of batteries, but replacements wouldn't be available for, oh, around two millennia. He had managed to sneak by his past self with the Doctor and Rose the second time he lived through 1941 to get spare batteries (and his square gun, never know when that would come in handy) from his Chula ship.

Jim had secured the precious spare battery and even the square-gun, his wristband however was in Torchwood locked in the archive's vault.

….

As those tragic events occurred, at Doctor Elizabeth Brown's house the party was too focused on other concerns to grasp what was going on in the outside world. With the help of a good meal and an adequate dose of antibiotics Ifan was feeling a little better.

But the two runaways could not stay long in the shelter offered by the old lady without endangering her. Doctor Brown had miraculously escaped Alex's vengeful extermination of all the people who would care about Jim. But they had nowhere to go. At least Jim didn't, because Ifan had one foot in the grave, or to be more precise, a scapula, and there was only one place he was headed.

"I could have taken that shit down once and for all." Ifan said, disgusted with himself.

"What stopped you?" the old woman asked.

"My father needs a transplant, and it was becoming urgent." Ifan explained, not very comfortable with the reason that had led to Jim's escape.

"I'm sorry." was Jim's only answer.

"I don't understand what you two are talking about, but I'm quite sure I don't need to."

Of course Jim's old lover had no reason to guess Alex was selling Jim's organs like spare parts all over the place. But for some reason Alex was not willing to provide Winston with the heart he desperately needed.

"However killing Alex wouldn't solve the problem, Torchwood would just come for us." Jim commented.

"I didn't mean Alex, I meant Torchwood, the whole Torchwood." Ifan replied, a bit shocked by Jim believing he could have killed someone, even if the someone was Alex. "Starting at the roots; Torchwood's Mother House included."

"You're kidding?"

"It's all about money in this world. Torchwood is built over a very complex financial package from which it can self-finance. I had found the weak point, a few more days and I could have brought it all down."

"Interesting."Jim said thoughtfully. "Out of interest, what would you need to do it?"

"A secure input connection with the main system. Meaning I can only do it from inside, here in Cardiff's Hub or at Glasgow's."

"It could be arranged." Jim replied.

"You're not planning on going back?"Liz asked.

"They will hunt us to the end."

"Which won't be long for me... But I would have liked to have died bringing down Torchwood."

"You're not going to die." Jim said firmly.

As Jim and Ifan had guessed, Alex had rid them of his own gunmen. The Hub was now only defended by 28 terrorized employees who didn't even know who the man with Ifan was. Most of them knew about the meat, but none of them had ever seen it or knew it was in fact a him.

To be able to do what he wanted, Ifan needed Torchwood One to have no reason to suspect something was wrong in Cardiff. To make sure no-one was going to warn them Jim locked the whole team in the vault cells.

As Ifan was working on hacking into Torchwood One's main system, Jim began to debrief Alex's employees one by one, in order to get them to work for the New Torchwood he intended to build in order to watch over the Rift. As for Alex, just seeing Jim back to his full strength had sent him into some delirious state he was never coming back from. The retcon Jim gave him had probably not helped.

Five days after they had taken over the Hub, Torchwood London's employees received a text message informing them that the Mother House was closing. The clever ones didn't think twice about it and jumped on the opportunity to disappear into thin air. For those who were more involved in Torchwood hierarchy there wasn't any warning, their files appeared directly on judges' desks.

Torchwood London was not really useful and their policies were very dangerous and nasty, but Cardiff House was needed because of the Rift, and, as Jim was willing to take the job, Ifan make sure the money went that way.

It had been easy for Jim to persuade most of Alex's employees to work with him. The fact that he didn't take revenge on the medic who had harmed him was already a proof the new boss would be nothing like his predecessor. Myelin and Claris had been the first two to volunteer and were quickly followed by most of the others.

On the third day, Jim had to force Ifan to take a break, by putting a sedative in his tea. He knew Ifan would never have accepted to even talk about it, but Jim was determined to save the kid even if it was against his will. That night Jim transplanted skin he had taken off his thighs himself onto Ifan's wounds where his own skin refused to grow back anymore. At the same time he did a transfusion of some of his blood and had Ifan out of the danger zone by the end of the night.

But when the young man came around he wasn't happy at all.

"Why did you do that?"

"Why are you doing what you are doing? Taking Torchwood down?"

"Because I can do it. Because it's probably the only good thing that I can get out of all this shit I call a life."

"You've got your answer, then." Jim answered peacefully. "How old are you Ifan?"

"Nineteen."

"A bit young to die. Especially as you've never had the chance to live a real life."

"I don't know if can. I don't even know if I want to."

That kid had been damaged beyond what was humanly believable. His nights were plagued by nightmares. He could not let anyone touch him anymore, and he was hiding his scars and his gauntness under oversized sweaters like he was ashamed of them.

Rebuilding the person he ought to be was going to be a long and hard journey.

"I will be here, by your side, whatever happens." Jim promised.

…..

Our world, Ianto and Ifan are still chatting.

"So what about Rose? How did she get there?" Ianto asked.

"At the time we didn't know what had really happened with the Sykorax ship; as for Torchwood they had only opened fire to test their new toy on a potential treat." Ifan explained. "We discovered that the Doctor and the Tardis were on board only a month later; at the time we assumed Rose and her mum were there too and had died."

"But you were wrong." Ianto concluded.

"Yep. You know Rose was the reason Jim had come on Earth. At the time he didn't tell me. He stayed, keeping a straight face, helping me out day after day to fight my fears, teaching me how to protect myself and how to fight back. How to get stronger in body and mind. Together we learned to touch and be touched again, very slowly, very carefully…"

Ifan's gaze drifted away towards memories, but soon came back to focus on his double.

"Jim is so sweet, so kind. I would never have believed someone could be so nice." Ifan said, but he stopped at Ianto's frown. "Isn't Jack nice?"

"Jack can be a very nice bastard." Ianto laughed. "But I wouldn't want him any other way."

"When I left I hurt him. He had just confessed he loved me. Instead of telling him what he hoped, I told him I needed to go, and needed him to let me go."

"Did he?"

"Yes, he did." Ifan reply sadly. "He told me he would always be there if I needed him whatever it was for. For the first time of my life I was on my own. I had my place, a job I had chosen, people who didn't have a clue of what I had been through."

"Working in the police, I bet someone would have asked about your scars though."

"Oh. They asked." Ifan replied. "I told them that the case had been closed a long-time; I wanted to look ahead not back."

Ianto gave him one of those half smiles he would always wear when he knew he got something right.

"I dated a lot of girls, and only girls, until one day something Torchwoody gets in one of our crime scenes. I told our senior officer that we ought to call Jim. Jim and Torchwood were staying very discreet because Alex had completely discredited Torchwood. I told him there was a new boss, a very decent one."

"How was the reunion?"

"Difficult. Very difficult. First I realised how much I missed him and I asked him out, but I hadn't realised how insecure Jim was, how vulnerable I had left him." Ifan confessed. "It took some time to help him like he had helped me. He is very good at hiding; withdrawing in-side himself when he is hurt."

"What has Rose got to do with that?" Ianto asked, wanting to take his counterpart on what he expected to be a lighter part.

"Everything. One day I was called up because a girl had been found in the street, delirious; talking about aliens and a blue box and had given the men a hard time. They wanted me to check her because the analyses had come back clean. Rose Tyler was alive and kicking, but full of flistisk venom."

Ifan had looked at Ianto to make sure he knew what he was talking about. Flistisk venom wasn't really dangerous, but the victim would be high for a couple of hours or so.

"When she came around I told her I had a friend who used to speak of a travelling blue box." Ifan paused, a smile on his face. "You ought to have seen Jim when I took her home."

There were tears in Ifan's eyes, but they were happy tears. Ianto could feel the love for his two companions radiating trough his counterpart.

...

To Chapter Seven