A/N
Vance has his own secretary/PA. Cynthia would never have shown him that fax, she would have conveniently misplaced it, probably right into Gibbs' or McGee's hands. ;-) (I'm pretty sure we haven't seen much of Cynthia in the current season, although I usually catch NCIS in reruns, the timing is just better for my schedule…. So I don't know if Vance has done anything to redeem himself, but it's pretty obvious what *I* think of the man… )
And by request, a Welsh Werewolf in New Jersey….
Chapter Fifteen:
Day Two, Part Four
"The world is not dangerous because of those who do harm
but because of those who look at it without doing anything"
Albert Einstein
Standing next to her brother, Nerys watched in sickened horror as the rescue worker pulled an arm out from the rubble. It was…it was just an arm. It had been ripped off at the shoulder, just… her gut churned violently. It was a man's arm… Caucasian…
"That's him," Ianto confirmed her suspicion. Her fear.
She closed her eyes, forcing back her own tears, determined to be strong for him. "I'm so sorry, Yan," she laid her hand on his back, expecting him to turn into her, to cry. He loved Jack so much…she'd never seen anybody who loved someone so much.
But he didn't cry. He didn't move. He didn't respond to her touch or her voice. He just stood there, watching, hardly seeming to be able to breathe while they moved the arm over to a waiting body bag.
"Ianto, sweetheart…" she tried to get him to turn, to face her. He shouldn't be watching this. But he refused to be goaded into looking away.
"Leave him," Mickey finally advised in a soft tone; he took her by the hand and tugged her over to him.
Nerys allowed herself to be drawn into the warmth of his arms. Maybe he was right, maybe Ianto needed to see this, maybe it was the only way he'd be able to convince himself that Jack was really gone. Maybe he wasn't the only one who needed convincing, she realized, because she was still watching, too.
A few moments later, they found something else…she wasn't e sure what it was, just a hunk of flesh. They placed it in the body bag next Jack's arm……it was…her gorge rose. It was a head, part of a shoulder, maybe. It was Jack's…a cold gust of wind brought the scent of charred flesh up to the rooftop…
Mickey knelt down next to her, rubbing her back while she threw up a few feet away from the ledge of the building where Ianto still stood, unmoving. Unable to move, perhaps.
"I'm sorry," she muttered in between dry heaves after there was nothing left to come up.
"Don't worry about it," he told her. "It's nothing to be ashamed of, ok?"
"Yeah, yeah ok. Thanks." She looked up at her brother; he'd come away from the ledge and was watching her.
"Will you please go home, now?" he asked in a plaintive tone.
"No." She slumped back against Mickey, wiping the last of the vomit away from her chin with the back of her hand.
"Nerys—"
"I'm not leaving you!"
"Nerys, he's right, you shouldn't be here," Mickey tried to tell her. He shut up quickly when the both glared at him.
"What next?" she asked, her glower shifting back to her brother.
Ianto rubbed his hands over his face. Arguing with Nerys would only waste time they didn't have. He had no idea how long it would take Jack's body to regenerate or how quickly he would come back once it started to…what that was going to be like… he closed his eyes a moment, trying not to think about it. "I got the license plate number of the truck they put him in," he said, keeping his tone brisk. Flat. Anything to keep mask of professionalism in place. If it cracked and fell, he might crack with it. He wasn't prepared to do that in front of his sister. He turned to Mickey. "We need to track it, find out where they've taken him."
"How do you do that?" Nerys wanted to know.
"Laptop," Mickey answered the question, giving the case a pat.
"What? How?"
"With the right program you can do just about anything," Ianto told her, his tone still light.
"And you've got that kind of program?"
Her boyfriend grinned, "'Course I do." He turned to the Welshman. "We need to find someplace we can work. My jeep's parked about a mile from here."
Ianto gave him a look.
"I'm not an idiot, I disabled the GPS," he said in an incredulous tone. He offered Nerys his hand at the same time; she accepted.
"Sorry," the other man apologized. He should have known better.
They began making their way back, still mindful of the soldiers and police. Ianto was urging them to a brisk pace.
"Why are you in such a hurry to follow after them?" Nerys asked him at length; she was definitely glad she'd worn the hiking boots. "There's nothing left…" An arm. A hunk of charred, bloodied flesh that used to be… Her gut churned and heaved, but she managed not to wind up on all fours again. "Ianto, answer me. Why?"
He stopped a moment, but hardly hesitated before telling her the truth. "Because he needs me. Because I promised him I will always be there when he comes back." His voice was thick with all of the emotions he couldn't keep bottled up any longer, no matter how hard he tried.
"Comes back from what? Ianto, you saw, there's nothing left, just…just pieces! He's dead, and I am so sorry, but he's gone. He's dead," she repeated when he showed no signs of having heard her the first time.
"Nerys…" Mickey tried. The other cut him off.
"Yeah. He is. But with him it's only a temporary condition."
She looked from her brother to her boyfriend and back again. "What do you mean, 'a temporary condition'? Nobody comes back from the dead."
Neither answered. She was left to follow behind them, aware of the tension that was mounting between the two men. It continued until they finally got to Mickey's jeep and he asked for his laptop.
She handed it over. "Would one of you please say something? I know you get into some pretty weird shit, but—"
"Jack can't die, Nerys," Mickey finally told her. He'd been waiting for Ianto to explain, but he wasn't even looking at her… at either of them.
"What do you mean, he can't die?" she asked. "Everybody dies!"
"Not Jack," he said, his gaze fixed on the laptop as Mickey set it up.
"Ifan—"
He turned to her, his face clouded over and dark. "As of his last birthday, Jack was two thousand and eighty seven years old—give or take a decade." His tone was cold. Harsh. "He spent one thousand nine hundred and twenty four of those years buried under Cardiff. Alive. He was buried alive by the same psychopath who tried to blow the city up last year. No matter what anybody does to him, Jack will never, ever die. I don't know how or why, at least not in anyway that I can explain, I just know it's true. I have seen him get killed and come back so many times—and every time he does it, I die a little bit inside too, because I am so afraid that this is it, this is the time he won't come back to me, even though he promised he would." He wiped the moisture from his cheeks. "Right now that promise is all I have to hang onto. So we are going to track that vehicle and we are going to get him back. Whatever it takes, we're going to get him back." He turned to Mickey. "How much longer?"
"This could take a while. We'd probably better find somewhere to hole up while the program runs."
Ianto just nodded and slid into the backseat while Nerys got in up front with Mickey. "Is he human?" she asked her brother.
"Yes. He's human. Would it matter if he wasn't?"
…………………………………………………………….
"Who did you say you worked for?" Amber Wilson eyed the men standing on her front porch with suspicion. There were four of them; they had arrived in one of two big black SUV's that were sitting in her driveway. There were four more men sitting in the second vehicle. They were asking about Bobby and Wendy.
"I didn't," the man replied to her question; he had a British accent. He hadn't given his name either. "If you would allow us to come inside for a moment, I can assure you this is a matter of utmost—"
"I'm sorry," she cut him off, "but in case they didn't mention it at customs, you're in the United States now. We have rules here. So unless you have a warrant…?" she gave him a speculative look.
He remained mute, grim looking.
"Have a nice night," Amber stepped back inside and locked the door behind her. She threw the deadbolt. She had the feeling it wouldn't help.
"Who was that?" James asked, coming down the stairs. He'd been upstairs talking to Bobby while he and Wendy packed. Their friend Martha was in the dining room looking over the packet of test results from the children they'd seen at the hospital. Lisa Cuddy was with her; she'd broken more rules than she cared to count in turning the test results over to Martha, but the other had insisted they would help them find an answer once they got back to the UK.
"Amber?" James prompted her when she didn't answer him right away.
She turned and stole a glance outside through the curtained window next to the door. The men had gone back to their vehicle, but it didn't look like they were going anywhere. "Call the police," she told her husband.
"What?"
"Just do it," she insisted, as she strode towards the dining room.
"What should I say?" he asked. She didn't answer.
"Martha," said Amber, "you might want to see this," she motioned her towards a window that faced the front of the house.
"What is it, what's going on?" Cuddy wanted to know.
Martha was already up and moving. She cursed under her breath when she saw the SUV's, the men gearing up. "Get Bobby and Wendy, we need to get out of here."
"The line's gone dead," Wilson joined them, holding the cordless phone in his hand. "I started to dial and then it just…died," he wore a perplexed expression.
"Try you cell phone," Amber suggested.
"Don't bother," said Martha. "They'll have jammed the signal by now." She was already gathering the paperwork back up, shoving it into her backpack.
"Who are those people?" Wilson asked; Amber was already half way up the stairs to get Bobby and Wendy.
"I don't know," Martha answered him honestly. "Probably some kind of special ops, maybe SAS—I really don't know. Look," she tried to explain, because he was clearly out of his depth, "somebody was able to get close enough to the man Bobby and Wendy work for to blow up his base. Believe me, that's a hard to do. It has to mean someone wants Torchwood out of the way, someone who has access to classified information." Someone who could get her shut out of the loop as well, probably because it was no secret that she and Jack were friends.
"But I thought Torchwood was some kind of government—" Cuddy stopped midsentence when Martha pulled a large black revolver out of her bag. She gave the younger woman an askance, horrified, look.
"Is that standard issue for UNIT medical personnel?" Amber inquired of her, rejoining them, Bobby and Wendy on her heels.
Martha flashed over a wry grin. "Where I work, you never know what you're going to run into." She handed a second weapon towards Bobby and Wendy.
"You," said Wendy.
"Are you sure?"
"I don't need it."
He nodded without arguing, but only because there wasn't time to argue, and took the gun from Martha's outstretched hand. "Extra clips?" he asked.
"Just one apiece."
"The British government doesn't have any authority here—" Cuddy had finally recovered from her shock enough to speak.
"I doubt those guys care," Bobby told her. Three against eight. Two guns. Three civilians. If it weren't for the three civilians, he would have felt a whole lot better about the odds. He pocketed the clip Martha handed him.
"Are you crazy?" Wilson looked from one to the other and back again, having pieced together what he was pretty sure they were planning. "This has to be some kind of mistake, just turn yourselves in—" it was suicide to even think…
"Not gonna happen," the Australian told him. He looked calm. All three of them did.
"Get these guys out the back," Wendy said to Bobby and Martha; she pulled off her sweater. "I'll cover you."
"Wendy…" he began.
"I can take a bullet, Bobby. You can't. Neither can they," she cast a significant look at Cuddy, Wilson and Amber. Beneath her skin, muscles had already begun to shift, change. She moved towards the living room.
"They'll probably split up to cover the back," Martha advised. She shouldered he backpack and pulled Cuddy up from her chair.
Bobby nodded… two against four…definitely better than two against eight. He looked in Martha's direction; she gave over a curt nod, probably thinking the same thing. Then again, she'd travelled with the Doctor. Given some of Jack's stories, the odds must look really good from where she was standing… wood splintered as the front door was forced in.
Cuddy looked into the living room…something impossible out of every child's worst night mare greeted the four heavily armed, armoured men who stormed in the door… one of them was already dead.
"Stay between us and keep your heads down!" Martha ordered over the gunfire that followed the scream from the other room. "I've got the lead," she added to Bobby, sounding to the others more like a well trained solider than a doctor. She led the way into the kitchen, just as the back door shattered open.
Someone had once told her that she didn't look like a killer. That woman had been wrong. One thing working with UNIT had taught her was that sometimes it was necessary to do the things she wouldn't normally do in order to survive. She always tried to balance that against everything she'd learnt from the Doctor, but at the moment, the best she could do was hope he would have forgiven her if he'd been. Without a word of warning, she opened fire on the intruders, dropping the first one in the door with a well placed bullet… behind them, the screaming stopped.
The next few moments were a blur. James glanced over his shoulder past Bobby and saw…something… his mind refused to wrap itself around it though because things like that didn't exist… then there was shoving, pushing… shouting… screaming. Red splatter. He watched Chase reload…shoot… the man he was shooting at fell to the ground, dead, and Bobby Chase pushed him out, over the body… bodies… The look in Chase's face was…calm. He wasn't fazed by any of it, the guns, the shooting, the bodies…the… this is what he had left Princeton Plainsboro to become?
Then they were outside in the open air. Martha was clutching her arm, her expression pained. Amber was trying to look at the wound.
"I've had worse," the Englishwoman insisted.
Amber gave her a look; Martha relented and allowed herself to be examined.
"Bobby?" she called. There didn't seem to be any sign of pursuit.
A shape appeared in the backdoor… just a silhouette at first… slight of build…long dark hair… her hair was slick. Wet. Dripping. Her skin glistened slick and red in the afternoon sun.
Flashes of what he'd seen moments ago skittered through James Wilson's mind as she approached… fur… teeth… claws… her approach was slow. Deliberate. Like a predator stalking its prey…
He didn't see the look of fear in her eyes. He had no way of knowing what she was thinking, that she was petrified of the looks they were giving her, of the fear she smelled coming off of them. There was too much of it, too much blood, too much gun powder, for her to be able to isolate one scent from another, to know for sure whether or not Bobby going to turn from her, that he would at hate her. Fear her. He'd seen her kill before, but never a human. It didn't matter that he'd killed a couple of them too, he hadn't done it with his bare hands. He wasn't the monster…
Bobby was on his feet, then, walking towards her. She stopped.
He didn't. He kept walking until he was close enough to wipe the back of his hand across her cheek, cradle her head in his hands. "I love you," he told her what he knew she needed to hear. "Now please tell me you're all right."
A ghost of a smile flickered across her lips. "I'm ok."
He moved a hand down to her shoulders, her chest… the wounds were little more than angry red welts where bullets had pierced her skin.
"I'll be fine, Bobby. I heal fast." Bullets didn't stop her unless they were made of silver. "I only took a couple of hits and they all went straight through." Nothing vital had been hit or she wouldn't be calmly explaining to him that she was all right.
He nodded, accepting that she would be ok.
She looked past him, then. James Wilson and Lisa Cuddy were staring at her. Fear. Distain. Disbelief. Horror. All the things she feared the most.
She could see it in their eyes, they expected her to turn back into a monster and start ripping them apart like she'd done to those men, men who would have killed them without a second thought if she hadn't stopped them.
"Don't look at them," Bobby told her. "Wen… just me. Just look at me." He could see the tears glistening in her brown eyes. "Just me," he whispered.
She nodded, focused on his face, on the acceptance she found in his blue eyes. He loved her. He knew what she was and he loved her anyway. He had never called her a monster or been repulsed by her or afraid of her, not even the first time he'd seen her other skin.
Amber had finished her examination of Martha's arm and agreed that the injury was only superficial. The wound needed to be cleaned and dressed, but otherwise, she was all right. She turned her attention towards the rest of the group. She'd seen as much as James and Cuddy, but it had been easier to concentrate on something else than to look at what was standing in front her. Now that she didn't have a patient to worry about, however...
"Amber, they would have killed us," Martha said to her, desperate to make her understand. "Look at the way they came in. They weren't planning on leaving witnesses. James—Lisa—"
Amber pulled herself up to her feet and made her way to where Bobby and Wendy were standing. She regarded them both a long moment, her expression impossible to read.
James got to his feet too. His expression was easily readable. He was afraid…in denial. Trying to figure out what had really just happened.
"Are you sure you're all right?" Amber finally asked.
Wendy nodded.
The other returned it. "Thanks." She turned to Bobby. "I'm billing Torchwood for whatever damage those goons did to my house, Chase."
James gaped at his wife.
"After everything we've lived through the last few years…" she seemed to be having as hard a time with him not being able to believe what he'd just seen as he was having with her accepting it. She turned back to Wendy, "I'm just glad you're on our side."
