A/N: RL is totally infringing on my online time, so replies to reviews may be sparse. Fear not tho, updates should remain steady. Yay!
Ianto remembered the Queen's Skirts from his teenage years; or rather he remembered a vague blur of sticky carpets, false IDs and praying that he pulled so his mates wouldn't make fun of him the next day.
Fortunately, ownership of the pub had changed hands a few times since then and the room he walked into was vastly improved from the grungy place it had once been. There were booths running along the walls, with high partitions dividing the tables to give the illusion of privacy, and the furniture filling the rest of the room was modern, if not very high quality. It had clearly become far more food-orientated than in the past, but Jack had insisted that anywhere which sold alcohol was a viable location for their quarry. Even if the person they were searching for looked too young to be in such an establishment.
Ianto made a quick circuit of the room, but there were very few people out so late on a Monday night and he was soon back at the bar signalling the man behind it, deciding now was as good a time as any to have a break from his fruitless search.
Jack had assured him the girl they were looking for would be able to help Gwen somehow, but he'd been having trouble tracking her down. In Ianto's opinion that meant she didn't want to be found, but Jack clearly didn't wish to admit defeat yet. Which was fair enough, Ianto supposed, when his only remaining hopes of finding Gwen's cure were this mysteriously elusive girl and the even more elusive Doctor.
Ianto paid the bartender and had just taken his first sip of cool lager when his mobile began to ring. The young man rolled his eyes and began to fish it out of his pocket, cursing Jack mentally for his impatience – he'd already checked on Ianto's progress four times in the two hours they'd been searching – but as his fingers closed around the small phone Ianto realised it couldn't be Jack; he would have contacted him over the comm.
Ianto glanced at the screen of the trilling mobile, recognising the number displayed there instantly. He frowned and took his drink over to one of the empty booths, sliding in along the padded leather bench before pressing the button to accept the call.
"Hello?" he said neutrally, in case he had somehow mistaken the number.
"Ianto," Alex's voice purred down the line.
Ianto shivered slightly, mind flashing back to the previous night, of Alex murmuring in his ear as he pushed into the tunnel formed by Ianto's bound hands.
When he failed to respond, Alex spoke again. "Ianto, are you there?"
"Yes," he replied, noting the slight edge to the other's tone.
"Good, good." There was a pause, then, "What are you doing?"
Ianto's frown deepened. Was he calling for a chat? "I'm working."
"Working?" Alex laughed. "It's half-eleven, don't lie to me."
"I'm not. I'm working late."
"Doing what?"
Ianto blinked. One of Alex's rules was not to share personal details, yet here he was asking for them. "It doesn't matter."
"But you've intrigued me now. What do you do?"
"Did you call for any particular reason, Alex?" Ianto countered.
Another laugh rumbled along the line. "Okay, fine, have your little secret. I just called to see if you were coming over."
"What?" Ianto scowled at his bottle of lager as though the one mouthful he'd taken was to blame for this surreal conversation.
"I think you should come over," Alex amended, his voice dropping into a low and commanding tone.
"I...I can't."
"You should."
"But I don't need-"
Alex cut him off. "How's your day been?"
"What?" Ianto asked again, caught off guard.
"Your day, it's been good, hasn't it? No feelings of anxiety, no sense of being out of control, am I right?"
"I..." Ianto struggled with his answer. Alex was right; despite what they'd had to do that morning, he had felt almost entirely himself for the first time in months. That didn't explain how the other man knew that though. "Well, yes, but..."
"I'm good at reading people, Ianto," the other man told him. "I'm especially good at being able to tell what they need. And you need to relinquish control fully before you can regain it again."
Ianto stared blindly at the dark tabletop, unsure how to deal with this conversation when his mind was tuned into the other half of his dual life.
"You should come over," Alex went on, voice seductively low. "We'll pick up where we left off last night."
There was movement in the corner of Ianto's eye and he looked up to find that someone else was now sitting on the other side of the table. He gaped in bewilderment at the girl who'd appeared so suddenly; wondering how she had managed to sneak up on him. "I have to go," he said into the mobile, hanging up before the other Welshman could protest.
"Hi," Ianto said, swiftly taking in the new arrival. She looked young, as Jack had told him, but her demeanour hinted at something disturbingly old. Her gaze flicked up as he studied her, then returned to the deck of worn cards in her hands, her expression blank.
Ianto felt a shudder pass along his spine at that brief glimpse of her eyes. They were as dark as a cloudless night, but without any stars to lighten them. Looking into that darkness was like falling into a vacuum which sucked not the air but rather the noise from the room.
Yes, Ianto decided, this was definitely the girl Jack was looking for.
He lowered his phone to the table whilst slowly lifting his free hand to his other ear to activate his comm.
"Don't bother," the girl said, her impossible eyes fixed on the tarot cards she was shuffling.
Ianto's hand froze and then inexplicably dropped. "I-"
His mobile began to ring again, vibrating noisily across the table, and he stared at it dumbly for a moment before quickly rejecting the call.
"We've been looking for you," he said, returning his attention to the girl. "Jack's been looking for you."
"I know."
Ianto nodded to himself; so she had been avoiding Jack on purpose after all. "He needs to ask you something, will you see him?"
The girl began to lay out a line of three cards. "I will see him," she replied in an even tone. "And I will speak to him."
"Great." Ianto lifted his hand to his ear.
"Don't bother," she said again, nudging one corner of a card to bring it in line with the others. "The Fool," she read. "You're looking for something."
Ianto leaned forward slightly. "Jack thinks you can help us. Our friend is ill and-"
The girl looked up, silencing him with those dark eyes. "This reading isn't for her," she told him brusquely.
Ianto scowled at the cards she was still fingering; tarot reading was not something he believed in, but when he opened his mouth to tell her that he was stopped by his mobile ringing once more. Huffing with frustration, Ianto switched it off completely; he couldn't deal with Alex on top of everything else right then.
"The Hanged Man and the Tower," the girl was saying thoughtfully. "You're looking in the wrong place, for the wrong thing."
Ianto froze and then immediately rebuked himself for even considering that she could know anything about him. The words were vague enough to be interpreted any number of ways; like any other form of cold-reading, it was a trick to let people make their own connections.
"That's great," he said, "but Jack needs to know-"
"You shouldn't ask on his behalf when he can do it himself," the girl said and once Ianto had gotten over the fact he'd been interrupted again, he actually registered what she'd said.
"Okay." He shrugged and reached for his comm. for the third time in as many minutes. "I'll get him to come here then."
"I keep telling you, you don't need to bother with that. He can already hear us. Isn't that right, Captain?"
Ianto frowned at her and then tensed in sudden realisation as he heard movement behind him. He looked up as the man who was supposed to be halfway across the city conducting his own search for this girl came into sight. Jack didn't meet his eyes, staring instead at the girl, his expression cold and unimpressed. "So you'll finally talk to me?"
She ignored him and set down another trio of cards above the first set.
"What are you doing here?" Ianto asked Jack, not at all sure what to make of his presence.
The older man gave a blithe smile, still not looking at him. "She might have been avoiding me, but I was sure she'd come out for you."
"Me? Why?"
"She seems to be drawn to people who need direction."
Ianto's mouth worked, trying to decide between the dozen questions he wanted to ask, until he finally settled on a rather inelegant, "What?"
Jack simply shook his head, refusing to answer.
"Your heart will be pierced by Time," the girl announced. She stroked her fingers over one of the other cards. The Wheel of Fortune, Ianto read upside down. "Then you'll be able to see clearly again."
"Pierced by time?" Ianto repeated dubiously. "Right, let me guess, that's supposed to mean time will pass and we'll learn something?" He rolled his eyes, his patience always stretched by so-called psychic intuition. "Very prophetic, thank you."
The girl clearly didn't appreciate his sarcasm and she glared at him with her bottomless eyes. "Do not be facetious. Time will stop passing but the Wheel will still turn, giving you the answer you seek."
Ianto looked up at Jack, his eyebrows raised. "You really think she can help Gwen?"
Jack shrugged. "Maybe she can't personally help, but she can tell us what we need to do." He moved closer to the table. "How do we save her?" he asked.
"That is the wrong question, Captain," the girl replied. She selected a further three cards. "Ah, the Magician emerges." She eyed Ianto wryly. "That means skill and resource, if you were wondering, not Houdini."
Ianto blinked, caught off guard by her dry and unexpected humour. "Well, he is dead," he admitted, unable to keep himself from responding to that mocking tone. "It would have been impressive if he had 'emerged', though."
"What is the right question?" Jack asked, his patience waning at their bickering.
She giggled, sounding for the first time like the child she appeared to be. "It would be rather remiss of me to give you both the question and the answer, wouldn't it?"
"Okay, fine, can we save her?" the Captain tried.
"No."
The blood drained from Jack's face but Ianto quickly spoke up, seeing where he'd fallen into her verbal trap. "Can someone else?"
The girl's lips twitched into a smile. "Yes."
Jack's expression cleared immediately and he leaned on the table, looming over her. "Who?"
"Do you see names written upon my cards?" the girl asked, shaking her head in disappointment. "The Magician emerges and the Sun prevails."
"What does the Sun represent then?" Ianto asked, surprising himself by encouraging her little show.
"In this instance? Success."
Ianto glanced up at Jack. Did he really think this girl held the answer to Gwen's cure? Beyond dropping hints that she believed Gwen would recover, she really wasn't telling them anything helpful.
The Captain met his gaze at last, and although Ianto was expecting to see that Jack shared his misgivings, he was surprised to find optimism in the other's eyes. He didn't understand how such vague and helpless comments from this strange little girl could give Jack hope.
"You may go now," the girl said in sudden dismissal and Ianto turned back at her commanding tone.
"You didn't exactly answer our questions," he pointed out, not feeling nearly as convinced as Jack seemed.
"I only answer what can be answered," she responded, a twinkle in her eyes.
Ianto couldn't argue with that logic, but he wasn't about to let her have the last word either. He eyed the cards spread out between them. "Then answer me this: shouldn't you have started a new reading to tell us about Gwen, if the first was about me?"
The girl stared at him, gaze intense and unblinking, as she uncovered the next card in the deck. "Intertwined fates can be read together." She glanced from Ianto to Jack and then to the card in her hand. She smiled and placed it flat on the table, turning it so Ianto could see clearly.
"The Emperor?" he asked, one eyebrow lifting dubiously. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"It is a gift for you, Ianto," she said, her smile almost shy. "Take it."
"What does it mean?" he repeated, wondering idly how she knew his name.
The girl said nothing, merely focused on gathering up the rest of her cards, the demure smile still lingering on her rosebud lips.