Part 6

Cardiff, September 2004

Ianto stared, his eyes fixed on the dirty and pealing green paint. Tracing the cracks in the surface, the curling edges revealing a paler shade below. Not that he saw any of it.

His eyes might be open, but what he saw was inside his own mind. A chaotic cacophony of thought.

Fear was the predominant feeling that curled its way through the mess in his head. He was lost. Trapped. Forgotten.

It hadn't' bothered him all that much before, how few ties he had to other people. He didn't really speak to his sister. Obligatory calls on Christmas and birthdays but they never had anything much to say to each other. He wondered if she'd tried to call on his birthday this year, and what she'd thought when he hadn't called back.

He wondered about his mates, and realised that he didn't actually have any. Not real ones. There were people on his course who he'd been friendly with, people who'd come to him pleading for lecture notes, or freebies at the coffee shop he'd worked in. He'd never sat alone at lunch or been ignored. He got on with people.

And yet no-one had missed him. Five weeks they'd said. He'd been down here five weeks and no-one had missed him enough to report him missing. He wondered what his flat-mates had done with his belongings. Thrown them out, or maybe they'd just left it for the landlord to clear when their contract had ended.

All he'd wanted was to get a good degree. To get out. To find something more than he'd grown up with. He'd worked so hard for that. Paying his own way. He'd worked and studied and left no time for much else. People tended to give up extending invitations to social outings after the first few refusals. He'd always refused. He'd always been working. All for a better life. But in the end what had it got him?

Locked up by a bunch of lunatics in a damp basement. No-one was going to find him. No-one cared enough to come looking. These crazy people could do anything they liked to him and he'd be powerless to stop them. He could die down here, and no-one would ever know.

Oh god. That was it wasn't it? He was going to die down here. He didn't know who these people were with their strange name stamped into every surface and object, but they certainly didn't seem to care about silly little things like civil liberties or human rights. They were the kind of people the saner sections of the population had learned to fear.

Fanatics. With all their spiel about rifts in time and space, and aliens, and energy patterns. Sci-fi bollocks that normal people would know was just fantasy. What were they, extremist Scientologists? Deluded believers.

For first time in years, Ianto Jones prayed. For salvation. For mercy. For a way out.

~Tw~wT~

It took a few days for the plan to come to him. Routine could be both blessing and curse. Ianto didn't have a clock in his room but somehow he could tell that the same amount of time passed between each of the visits to his room. The lights always came on at the same time each morning. Toshiko arrived not long after with a pastry and a cup of tea, tried to talk to him and then took away his usually uneaten or half eaten dinner.

He didn't ignore her, but he didn't say much either.

Shortly after the doctor would show up and would stand outside the bathroom while he did what needed doing. Then would come the tests. He hated the tests. Hated having to try and stop himself shaking through them. Some tests were the same every day. Some were different. The doctor didn't try and talk to him beyond explaining each step of the tests. Ianto didn't listen; what did he care what strange warped experiments these freaks were performing? It would all turn out the same in the end wouldn't it? Either he'd find his way out, or he'd die. He'd only said one thing to the doctor, and only once. He'd looked up and caught his eye just once.

"First do no harm."

The doctor had narrowed his eyes and given him a considering look, then pushed the needle he'd been holding into Ianto's arm anyway.

He'd be left alone for a good space of time after the tests. There wasn't much to do in his room. In his cell. There were crates and boxes tucked into the corners, but a little exploring showed them to be empty or sealed too tightly for him to get into. The quiet empty time made his head hurt. He didn't want the nutters near him, and yet the isolation was almost unbearable.

The empty time would be broken by Toshiko. She'd come with a sandwich usually. Something out of a packet and a bottle of water. She'd smile her shy hopefully sympathetic smile and after hours on his own he'd return it. She'd talk to him some more, say things that he supposed she meant to be reassuring but were just the strange delusions of her warped mind.

More empty time. He'd get up, wander around the room. He'd read and reread the old newspaper from 1957 he'd found inside one of the boxes. Yellow with age but still readable if a little fragile.

Toshiko would be back before lights out. More food. He'd have hardly moved all day and his stomach would be in knots. He rarely ate the microwave ready meal she presented him with. He always took the water.

After what always felt like the exact same amount of time, the lights would go out with a clunk. Like the whole building powered down. Pitch dark. He'd be under the covers before then. He hadn't been the first night and he'd been so lost.

Eyes open, straining against the dark, he'd lie under the blanket. Sleep would come, it always did, but he dreaded it.

All the time the plan tumbled through his mind. Different possibilities. Different options.

Then one day they came for him, and plans went out of the window.

~Tw~wT~

The atmosphere inside the conference room was stifling. Tosh was sitting at the table, curled low in her chair and radiating unhappiness. Suzie sat opposite her, drumming her nails on the tabletop. Owen was pacing; prowling around the room much like he had done in the quarantine room weeks before.

"This can't go on Jack."

Jack looked up from where he sat at the head of the table, running a knuckle over his pursed lips as he met Owen's eyes. At least he'd stopped pacing. His team were cracking. He'd chosen good people when he'd picked his team. Damaged but good people. They had suffered. They had hard edges, and enough cynicism to outdo any working man's club, but they didn't have the level of clinical coldness that could allow them to watch the suffering of another being for days on end without it drilling into their souls.

"Then give me something I can work with." Jack exclaimed quietly, moving his hand to scratch lightly at his forehead. "Tell me you've found a way to neutralise or remove The Pattern, or can even tell me what it is. Tell me you can guarantee he isn't a threat to this planet and I'll pump him full of retcon and drop him off at the hospital myself."

Around the table, his team looked at each other and then away. Owen made a scoffing sound and returned to pacing.

"Owen." Jack sighed. "Sit down."

Owen shook his head, and kept on pacing. Raising his hands, clenching his fists, like he was about to say something then stopping short. Eventually he stopped, slammed his hands on the table and looking down its length he eyeballed his superior. "Do you know what he said to me Jack? First do no harm. When you recruited me into this hell hole you told me our job was to help people, and now I have a frightened kid quoting the fundamental principal of medical ethics at me! I swore an oath Jack. Above and beyond all other oaths, as a doctor it is my duty to respect that principal! Yet I'm... this isn't. This isn't what I signed up for."

"For all you know that isn't a frightened kid, but a very clever alien spy." Jack countered easily, calmly, although inside he felt his team's unease. Of course he did.

"Yes yes, I know all that shit. He could be anything. Until we know we can't take chances blah, blah, blah. Look Jack... I'm not saying we shouldn't be careful... just..."

"He's breaking." Tosh's quiet words sliced through the room. "We're breaking him."

"I hate to say it," Suzie sighed. "But they're right. This, what we're doing isn't right."

Jack threw his gaze over to his second and raised an eyebrow. "You've changed your tune. I thought he was a drain on our already stretched resources. I thought you were all for carting him off to UNIT." Out of the corner of Jack's eye, he caught Tosh's wince.

"And I still think that's a viable option. But you don't. So if you're insisting we keep him here we need to do something with him other than keep him locked in that room." Suzie tossed back, and then let out a long breath. "I'm not heartless. And seeing him locked up down there makes me feel like..."

"A monster." Owen spat. "At least that's how I feel. A heartless fucking monster."

"He asks... every day." Tosh practically whispered. "Begs really. Please let me go." She trailed off with a shake of her head. "I took him a cake yesterday. Because, you know, he missed his twenty first birthday. He just looked at it like it was about to jump up and attack him."

At the far end of the table, Owen closed his eyes and shook his head, a look of disbelief on his face. "Only you Tosh."

"I just... I wanted to do something nice for him." Tosh looked down at the table top.

Jack looked around the room at the unhappy faces. At all the kindness and compassion escaping from behind those carefully built facades. It was too much.

Standing, Jack paced away from the table and looked out of the floor to ceiling glass of the conference room wall. Out over the hub. "This. What we're doing. It's our job. Sometimes we have to do things we don't like. Things that feel wrong. But we have to do them. Because in the end the choices we make here could affect the entire world. If you can't deal with that, if you can't deal with those choices then you don't belong here." He waited a moment, and when no argument came, he drew a deep breath through his nose. "Don't you people have work to do?"

The sound of chairs scraping. Of feet on carpet then metal. The swish of the door. Blessed silence.

"You are such a bastard Jack Harkness."

Suzie. Turning sharply, Jack narrowed his eyes at his second who remained in her seat. He watched her in without a word, hands in his pockets, as she pushed away from the table and stood. "I can't even remember the number of times you've told me about Torchwood One. About this place before you took over. How cold. How indifferent it was. And then you stand there and tell us that watching another human being suffer is all part of our job? You bastard. You're just as bad as they are."

Running his hands through his hair, Jack gripped the back of his neck and tilted his head back. When he spoke his voice was barely above a whisper, and laced with a plea. "Tell me what I'm supposed to do Suzie. Tell me how I do this the right way, because everything I try comes out wrong."

Their eyes met, and Suzie pursed her lips, her face softening. "Before you arrived for the meeting Tosh suggested that perhaps we could let him out of his room. We're planning to retcon him anyway once we've worked all this out. Why not let him have a bit more freedom? Maybe even let him outside. With supervision. We need to monitor him, but we don't need to throw away the key."

"And if we're wrong? If he's dangerous?" Jack threw back. "Protecting all those people out there. That's got to be our first priority."

"So we're very careful. And we deal with things as they happen. We can't lock someone away forever just because they might be dangerous. You'd have to lock most of the human race away if that was the case." Suzie laid a comforting hand on his arm with a small smile. "Including all of us."

Jack gave Suzie a small nod, and looked back through the glass. After a long moment he made his decision. "Tell Tosh when she goes down to give him his lunch to bring him up here would you?... and Suzie?"

"Yes Jack?" Suzie replied from beside the door.

"Thanks."

~Tw~~wT~

When it happened, it happened too fast. Too soon. Jack's feet pounded down the concrete tunnels, Owen's sharp cry still ringing in his ears.

"Code 5! Code5 in the quarantine room! Fuck he's lost it! Jack!"

Code 5. Operative in distress. There was only one operative who was supposed to be in the quarantine room. Tosh.

Damn it all. Damn it all to hell and back. Just when he'd convinced himself he was over-reacting and let his guard down this happened. He knew it. He damn well knew it. And now Tosh was in danger because of it.

He was running faster than he'd run in a long time. He could hear the echoed footsteps of Owen and Suzie chasing behind him. His booted feet skidded on the damp concrete as he passed the last doorway and was met with a scene out of a nightmare. Bracing himself Jack raised his gun.

Ianto Jones was so much taller than Toshiko. The hand in her hair sat below his chin. His other hand held something pressed into Tosh's neck; long and jagged looking, pointy, but not clearly discernible in the dim lighting of the hallway. Tosh's face was creased with pain where her head was being yanked back. Her hands flailed before her, each time they touched Ianto's arm or hand the weapon jerked making her pull them away.

"I won't let you do this to me!" Ianto shouted, his face was streaked with tears, red and desperate. "Just let me go!"

Steady even breaths through his nose. Jack took aim.

"Jack don't!" Tosh yelled, her words clipped off with yelp as Ianto pulled harder on her hair. "He's just scared Jack! Don't shoot him!"

"I'll kill her! I will." Ianto cried out, his voice deep and gruff with anguish.

"Tosh now isn't really the time for the humanitarian approach." Owen shouted back, sliding in beside Jack, gun raised.

Jack didn't reply. He was watching Ianto's face.

"Ianto. You're not well. We're trying to help you. Remember. Remember what we told you about the energy pattern. We only want to help. We're not trying to hurt you." Tosh tried to reason, and Jack felt a bubble of pride under the fear and anger that reddened his vision.

"Stop it!" Ianto shouted. "Stop lying to me! You're all crazy! I won't let you hurt me anymore! I won't let you kill me!"

Jack fired.

The bullet ricocheted off the tunnel wall behind Ianto's head. It was the opening they all needed. Tosh yanked herself free and Owen had hold of her just as fast, pulling her out of harm's way. Jack pounced forward, throwing Ianto the floor and pinning his arms behind his back. In the chaos something clanked woodenly to the floor.

"No! No!" Ianto shrieked as he fought to free himself. "Get off me! Get off me!"

Jack couldn't hear. Couldn't see. No one hurt his team. No one threatened his people.

"Jack stop it!" Tosh called out to him desperately. "He doesn't understand!"

Ianto cried out in pain as Jack forced his arms up behind his back and pulled him up from the floor in the same motion, forcing the Welshman to stumble ahead of him.

It was too much. The hours spent worrying. The way this whole saga had torn at his team. All this time they'd been trying to help him and then he does this.

"You don't understand huh?" He snarled in Ianto's ear. "Well let me make it plain as day."

Ianto was crying openly, fighting him still as Jack marched him down tunnel after tunnel. Jack ignored the calls of his team behind him, ignored the whimpers and mewls of the man who had threatened one of his.

"You think we're crazy?" Jack finally hissed, once they'd turned off a tunnel into a dark room. Pushing Ianto's face against a glass wall, he held him in place with one hand as he reached out with the other to flip a switch on the wall. Light bloomed in the small cell, drenching the squatting figure within. Brown leathery skin, sharp teeth, slitted alien eyes. "Look at it!"

Ianto whimpered again.

"Look. At. It!" Jack shook him again.

Suddenly Ianto began to fight with even more vigour, screaming out with increasing volume. "No. No. No. NO! NO!"

The blast took Jack off his feet from brilliant light into pitch darkness, a shower of sparks raining from the light fitting making the rest of the team duck. The creature in the cage whined and scampered to the back. The buzz of discharging current rang in the air. The crackle of electrics shorting out.

Stillness rained for an eternal moment, as everyone in the room tried to process what had happened. Blinking, Jack pulled himself into a sitting position, barely registering the red emergency lights coming on. Why would he notice when the room had already been half lit by a soft blueish-white glow coming from the corner?

There, backed against the wall, sat Ianto. His hands, fingers curled, held in front him as he stared at them in horror, his entire being radiating soft light. "What... what's happening..."

"Well shit." Owen exclaimed. "That's new."

Jack heard, rather than saw the vague scuffle of his team attempting to hold Toshiko back but soon enough she had dropped to her knees in front of Ianto. Even as they watched, the glow was fading.

"It's real... everything... it's not possible..." Ianto looked at Tosh, his eyes imploring. "What's happening to me?"

"That's what we've been trying to find out." Tosh replied kindly, reaching out and taking his hands in hers.

For a second Ianto could only stare at their hands, and then he looked up at Tosh with an expression of pure horror. "Oh god. I hurt you. Oh god. What's...I'm... sorry. I'm so sorry...I'm sorry. I'm sorry... "

"Shhh... It's ok. I understand. It's alright." Tosh whispered, pulling him into her arms, rocking him as he cried.

Jack didn't notice he'd been backing away until his boot heels met the wall behind him.

Tbc...