"Gwen, Ianto? You okay?"
Gwen ran down the corridor, tapping the comm in her ear. "Jack! There was just some kind of earthquake. Ianto isn't answering me." Her torchlight bounced crazily over the stone floors and walls. "I don't know where he is, we split up a few-" She stopped dead, staring.
"What? Gwen, what is it?"
"The walls," she said, quietly, wide-eyed. "The walls caved in. Ianto went down this way."
"I'm coming. Stay where you are."
- - -
Jack turned to Owen. "Go down to Tosh and figure out what just happened. That wasn't a normal earthquake."
"You're telling me." Owen hurried out of the room. Jack followed, running.
- - -
Ianto gasped awake, coughing stone dust and rolling over in a litter of rock. He took a quick assessment – arms legs neck head nose I'm fine – and opened his eyes.
He could see nothing. It was completely dark.
He felt around himself, fingers stretching, arms straining, trying to find his torch. He didn't want to move. There was a dull pain at the back of his head. A rivulet of something – blood, he thought, but he couldn't see – ran down the side of his face.
In his ear, tinny and desperate: "Ianto? Sweetheart, answer me!"
"Gwen," he choked. It was a strangled noise. He cleared his throat. "Gwen, I'm here." That was a little better.
"Oh, thank God!" The relief in her voice was palpable. He almost felt better, hearing it. Hooray, he wasn't dead.
"What happened?" he asked. He tested his arms, trying to lift his upper body. They were fine. He sat up, reaching blindly up and around him. There was nothing nearby.
"We don't know yet." She paused. "Whatever it was, it made the walls cave in."
He blinked. There was no difference, his eyes opened or closed, and that scared him a little. "I'm trapped in here?"
"We'll get you out. Don't worry."
"Are Jack and Owen all right?"
"They're fine. It didn't really affect them up there. Owen's gone to help Tosh and Jack's coming – oh, here he is."
Jack's voice: "Are you okay, Ianto?"
"Fine," he said. "But I've lost my torch and I can't see anything."
"Can you hear us anywhere but in your bluetooth?"
"No. Yell louder?"
There was no answer. Ianto waited.
Jack came back, "Did you hear that?"
"No."
"How far down this hall did you go?"
"Pretty far, I suppose. Where are you?"
Gwen answered, "About ten meters from where we split up."
Ianto estimated roughly the distance he had walked after splitting up with Gwen. He sighed. "There's about five hundred meters of collapsed castle between us."
He heard Jack curse, then silence, the comms muted while, Ianto supposed, Jack and Gwen figured out what they were going to do. He opened and closed his eyes again. There was literally no difference at all. As if there were no light anywhere, nothing to let his eyes adjust to the darkness. Carefully, he climbed to his feet, swaying a little bit but staying upright, the pain at the base of his skull throbbing dully. He reached out in either direction. His fingers brushed nothing. He shuffled his feet slowly, moving little by little in a direction that he hoped would get him to a wall.
His foot caught on something and he swayed off balance, then toppled to the ground, landing hard on his side. He cursed loudly, rolling over to clutch his arm.
Jack's voice, back in his ear: "You okay?"
"Yes, fine," he answered, annoyed. He opened his eyes.
He could see.
There was light, somewhere. He looked behind himself.
Then he shouted and scrambled backwards, ignoring the sudden, blinding pain in his wrist, because there was someone standing there in the middle of the corridor three meters away from him, someone with her arms outstretched and her mouth open in a silent scream and she was on fire.
And then Ianto could hear the scream, could hear it reverberating through his head, the absolute horror and pain of it, and then he was on fire. He could smell his own hair burning and feel his skin start to bubble and crack and he was shouting and trying to put himself out and somehow drowning in fire and the smoke from his own clothes and gasping for breath –
And then, nothing.
No light. No burning.
Everything was quiet again.
Then Jack, shouting in his ear, "What's going on? Talk to me, Ianto!"
Ianto was still breathing hard. He felt his clothes, his skin, his hair. Nothing burned. He could remember the pain, but couldn't feel it. "I'm fine," he said, knowing he sounded terrified but suddenly not caring.
"What happened?"
"I – I don't know." He held his wrist. That pain was still there. Sprained, probably, from the fall. "There was a woman. She was on fire. Then I was on fire. Then it stopped."
"One of the ghosts?"
"Yes."
"And you could feel what she was feeling?"
"Yes."
Gwen, chiming in: "Like the ghost machine."
"I don't know," Ianto said. In trying to get away from the burning woman, he'd found a wall. He sat against it, cradling his wrist to his chest. "It never worked for me. But it sounds like it. I could feel-" He closed his eyes, wincing. "I could feel everything. The fear, the pain."
"It wasn't real," Gwen said, quietly. "It's all right, it wasn't real."
He didn't answer. He knew that. But it had certainly felt it.
"Ianto, Gwen and I are going to go outside and see if there's any way in on your side of the collapse."
"All right," he said. He started to pull himself up with his good hand braced against the wall. "I'll try and find something from inside."
"Are you sure you should be moving around?" Gwen asked, concerned.
"It's better than sitting in the dark."
"Tosh, Owen," Jack said, sounding like he was moving, "tell us the second you have that quake figured out."
"Got it," came Owen's reply. Then they were quiet.
Ianto moved very slowly through the dark, one hand trailing the wall, the other held to his chest, listening to the stone drip and sigh. Listening to the labyrinth.
- - -
"Whenever we bring the teaboy with us, something horrible happens. He's cursed."
"Will you be quiet?" Tosh was typing rapidly at her haphazard computer setup, staring intently at the screen, trying to make sense of what was there.
Owen jumped off of the table he was sitting on. "What, are you carrying a torch for him now?"
"No, I just want to make sure that he's safe. If you're not going to help then just sit quietly, or go help Jack."
Owen sighed and leaned against Tosh's table. "What exactly are you doing?"
Tosh glanced at him, then back at the screen. "The earthquake wasn't actually an earthquake. It was – a riftquake, I guess. Something in this area is causing strain on the rift, making it unstable."
"What's causing the strain?"
"I don't know. I'm tracing the rift disturbance back to the center of origin – like ripples in a lake, after you throw a rock. If you follow the ripples back, you'll find the exact place that the rock hit the water. If I can find that, then the others will be able to stop whatever is causing the strain."
"Do you think that's what's causing the ghosts?"
Tosh shrugged. "They're probably connected, somehow. We'll have to find it to make sure."
Owen leaned over her shoulder. "How long's it gonna take you to find the center?"
"I don't know," Tosh said grimly. "The circles of rift disturbance have distorted slightly. It's going to take me a while to map them out properly."
Owen nodded. "Meanwhile, old Ianto's stuck down there in the dark."
- - -
Jack and Gwen stopped outside of the castle, looking in either direction. Jack pointed right. "You go around that way. Get to the collapse and find any way in that you can. A crack in the stone, if you have to. Anything that will fit one of us through. I'll go on the other side." He started away, but Gwen grabbed his arm. He looked back.
On the crest of one of the manicured hills that rolled up to the castle entrance, a little boy was standing and staring up at the sky. He was transparent, and buzzed slightly with static, winking in and out of sight.
"He's so sad," Gwen breathed.
Then he was gone. Gwen let go of Jack. He touched his comm. "Tosh, we just saw another ghost."
"It was different," Gwen said slowly, "It looked different. More washed out than the one Ianto and I saw inside."
"It might be that the further you are from whatever is causing them, the less clear the image is," Tosh said.
"So you do think it's like the ghost machine?" Gwen asked. "Something showing things that have happened in the past?"
"It's possible. Maybe instead of placing the viewer inside of the moment, it displays the moment in the area around the viewer. So it's possible for more than one person to see the image."
"Let us know if you find out anything else, Tosh." Jack tapped off and looked at Gwen. "You okay to go on your own?"
"I'm fine," Gwen said, shaking her head. "Fine. They're like old photographs. Nothing to be afraid of. Go on," she said, with a shooing gesture. "Let's hurry." She went off along the side of the castle. Jack looked after her for a moment, then went off in the opposite direction.
- - -
Ianto had been alone in the dark for half an hour, and it was beginning to get to him.
He'd fallen more than a few times, leaving him always anxious of the next step, his heart constantly in his throat against that nightmare feeling of losing his balance, crashing to the ground, having to orient himself again but never being able to, not really. It was too dark, and everything around him was too similar. All stone. All damp and close. Even without light he could feel how close it all was, pressing in on either side of him.
Jack's voice made him jump. "Ianto, how're you doing?"
He caught himself before the surprise made him fall. "Not terribly well, thanks."
"We'll have you out of there soon. Toshiko thinks she can trace the rift disturbance to its center, and we'll find out what's causing it. And the ghosts."
"Can we stop calling them ghosts? It's not helping."
"Sorry," Jack said, and then was silent.
Ianto stood still for a moment, leaning his head against the wall. Then he said, suddenly, "Jack."
"Yeah?"
"Keep talking to me."
"Why?"
He paused. "Because I'm terrified and I can't see."
It was Jack's turn to pause. Ianto could almost hear the gears working in his head through the bluetooth.
"What do you want me to talk about?"
"Anything," Ianto said, attempting a step forward.
He fell, and tried to catch himself with his injured hand. He cursed loudly.
"What happened?"
"I fell," Ianto hissed, sitting up. "I think I might have sprained my wrist earlier."
"Which wrist?"
"Left."
"Shame." Ianto heard Jack's grin. "I like that wrist."
"Well, it's not gone anywhere." Ianto pulled himself upright. "You can live without for a few weeks."
He managed a few steps without falling. He heard Jack take a breath, then say rather suddenly, casually, "Your father wasn't a master tailor."
Ianto halted, surprised. "No," he conceded. "He worked at Debenhams." He kept moving. "I take it you've known that since I said it."
"Why did you lie?" Jack didn't sound accusatory; just interested. Good thing, too, because if he'd been up in arms about Ianto lying about something-
"It's a better story." Ianto reached the end of the corridor and turned right with the wall.
"You don't care that it isn't true?"
"No," he said, simply, edging around a pile of stone. "Where my father worked has no affect on me. On who I am. I could have said he was an astronaut, if I liked. But the situation didn't call for it."
"Sure it did. Aliens."
"We were talking about dresses."
"And aliens."
Ianto grinned in the dark. "It's always about the aliens with you. There's no way to reveal that your father was an astronaut flirtatiously."
"How about that your father was an alien?"
Ianto laughed. "We'll have to test that out some time. Role play."
"He wasn't an alien, was he? That's not something else that has no affect on who you are that you'd rather lie about?" This time, Ianto heard a very small, oddly dull edge to the question. He frowned.
"Not an alien, no. Disappointed?"
"Nope. Rather not have to deal with that." He heard Jack hesitate. Then, "You know, you could have told me the truth."
Ianto's brow furrowed. "I could have. But it doesn't matter."
"It does to me."
"Why?"
"Because I want to know you."
Ianto scoffed. "You've known me in a lot of very interesting ways, Jack, but I don't think you want to know me like that."
"Why not?"
Ianto hesitated. "Because I'm – normal." He took a breath. "Because you'll run off again. And it won't have mattered how well you knew me. What my dad did. Where I went to school. Because you'll have gone."
- - -
Outside, Jack frowned down at the circle of his torchlight. "I won't."
"Won't what?" Ianto's voice sounded distant and tinny through the earpiece, and Jack was suddenly annoyed by that. This wasn't a conversation to be had through a quarter mile of darkness and stone.
Or maybe, to them, it was.
"I won't leave again."
Ianto sighed. "Don't make promises that you can't keep, Jack. You have no idea if you'll have to go."
Jack kept moving along the outer wall of the castle, searching for any fault or sag in the stone. "Can I promise that I'll come back?"
"You might not be able to."
"Can I promise that I'll try?"
He heard a short laugh. "Yes. I suppose you can promise that."
Jack's brow creased. "Why don't you trust me?"
Ianto sounded surprised. "I do trust you. With most things. I trust that you'll get me out of here, and I trust that you won't murder me in my sleep or anything unseemly like that. How don't I trust you?"
"To want to know you. To want to come back."
"It's because you're-" He heard Ianto heave a frustrated sigh, trying to find the right words. "You're too important. All of this is so small. I should have made Gwen talk to me – you and I can't have a conversation without it turning into a personal discussion."
"Don't change the subject."
"Jack, why do you care?"
Jack thought for a moment. "I guess I think it's strange that you don't."
"I just – I understand. I understand that, in the long run, all of this will turn out to be nothing for you. I'm trying-" He paused. "I'm trying not to care too much. Because I don't know how any of this is going to end up." He got quieter. "I don't want to give too much of myself. In case it all turns out to be nothing." He laughed. "If I'd been standing next to you just then, I never would have said that. I may still regret it."
Jack said quietly, "Whatever you give, I'll take."
He heard Ianto's surprised catch of breath, and it made him smile.
"When did you become the girl in this relationship, Jack?"
Jack laughed. "Well, there goes our serious discussion, then."
"Thank God. I felt a song coming on." He waited, then added softly, "Thank you, though."
"No problem."
"Found a way in yet?"
"Working on it."
- - -
Tosh tapped her comm. "Jack, Ianto?"
"Here."
"Here."
"I found the source of the rift disturbance. It's about 300 meters from Ianto." She traced the route on the screen with her finger. "Take the next left, then another left, then a right. It should be in a large room off of that hall."
"Shall I go and have a look, sir?"
"Be careful."
- - -
Ianto grinned. "Yes, sir." Then he tapped off.
He slowly made his way to the end of the corridor, then braved the open space away from the wall in order to go left.
Then he looked up and saw her.
She was radiating light, like a television on in a dark room.
"Lisa?" he whispered, his stomach dropping out at the very word.
She came toward him. She looked the way that she had the morning of the battle of Canary Wharf. Same clothes. The same smile she had worn, walking up to give him a quick kiss at his desk. The last one, before –
"Ianto," she said, standing right in front of him. "Have a good day." She bent as if to kiss him on the cheek, but disappeared before she reached him.
And Ianto was once again in the dark.
He pressed his earpiece. In a strangled voice he said, "Jack."
Jack came back, "What's wrong?"
"It's in my head. Whatever it is, it's using my memories."
"What'd you see?" Jack sounded suddenly on-alert.
"Lisa. The morning she died. She was so happy."
Jack paused. "I'm sorry."
Ianto shook his head, closed his eyes, tried to pull himself together. "It's fine. It's fine. Just memories."
Then when he opened his eyes, the room was thrown to red and filled with plastic sheets hung floor to ceiling, alarms screaming everywhere. He shouted and fell back against a wall. Then he saw himself. Dragging Lisa – half-converted, so heavy – and he heard himself screaming for someone to help, anyone. Jack was yelling in his ear but he couldn't hear him over the noise of the alarms and the screaming from the conversion units and he'd been so afraid and helpless then, trying so hard to save someone who was already gone-
Then it all disappeared. He breathed in and out, trying to control himself, trying not to get caught up in it, in the horrible, visceral memories.
"Ianto?"
"I'm fine," he told Jack, moving once again along the corridor. "It showed me Canary Wharf. When I find this thing, I'm going to kick it until it stops working."
"I'll help," Jack said gruffly, and Ianto laughed.
"Jack, Ianto!" Gwen's voice. "I found a way in. It's just a crack, but it's enough to get inside."
"Good," Jack said. "Once you're in, ask Tosh for directions to the – well, whatever it is. Ianto's heading there now."
"Will do." Then she was quiet.
Ianto kept going, following Tosh's directions. It was painfully slow going, made worse by the fact that every time Ianto blinked he was afraid he'd open his eyes again and be surrounded by some other horrible thing from his past. The fact that the only time he could see anything was when he didn't want to.
The dark has an interesting affect on the human mind. Left there too long, deprived of the sense of sight and given reason to fear, one becomes hyper-conscious of one's breathing. Of the placement of one's feet. Of the feeling of a wall under one's hand. There comes a hysterical certainty, at the back of one's mind, that one is truly blind.
In the kind of darkness where one cannot see their hand in front of their face, the kind of darkness that Ianto had been submerged in for the better part of an hour – one could easily go mad.
Ianto stumbled into a cannibal's kitchen.
The others being forced to their knees, Gwen shrieking and Tosh asking what they've done with him – "Where's Ianto?" – and then being dragged up, burlap sack pulled away, his bruised face slapped so that he jerked awake.
"Time to be bled."
And God, that fear.
The absolute panic of that moment, and Ianto could see it in his own eyes, in an image displayed before him in color and surround sound and that visceral, emotional element that put him there again, in that kitchen with the certainty that he was going to die. Soon. No one to save him, that knife so close to his neck – "Definitely makes the meat taste better" – and his own gagged cries.
He didn't know he was screaming until Gwen's arms were around him.
He breathed, hyperventilating, and clutched at her coat, his eyes huge over her shoulder while she whispered comforting things that he couldn't hear over the sound of his heart beating.
Her torch was shining on the floor nearby. He could see. Just stone.
He relaxed.
"It's all right," Gwen was saying, her hand through his hair. "You're safe, it was just a memory."
He loosened his grip on her and sat back. He was shaking, but it was passing. He couldn't speak.
Gwen tapped her comm. "He's all right, Jack."
Ianto felt his own ear. His earpiece had fallen out at some point between falling down and sitting up. He reached over and grabbed Gwen's torch, tracing it along the ground until he found the small electronic. He picked it up and reattached it.
"I'm fine," he said. "Sorry."
Jack was quiet for a long moment.
"Just – get out of there as fast as you can."
"You don't have to ask us twice." Gwen stood up, then offered a hand to Ianto. He took it.
"Thanks," he said, with weight.
"It's fine." Gwen smiled and took her torch from him. "Come on. The sooner we find this thing, the sooner we can get out of here. I'm tired of bloody castles."
She started off down the hall, and Ianto followed her, staying close. Grateful for the light.
- - -
They found it where Tosh said it would be. It looked remarkably like a videogame console. The same sort of sleek design, LED-like lights visible from the inner workings. Gwen picked it up – it wasn't heavy.
"This little thing has been causing all of this trouble?" she asked, incredulous.
"It's always the small things," Ianto said.
"When it isn't the big things." Gwen turned back toward the entrance to the room and started off. "Come on. We can get out the way I came in. It's not far from here."
Ianto followed her to a small crack in the wall. He held the device while she went through, then handed it over and began to squeeze through the tiny opening. He took an offered hand and was pulled upright – and right into a hug from Jack.
Jack released him and smiled. "You made it."
"I did, yeah." Ianto felt more tired, he thought, than he ever had in his life. And that was certainly saying something.
They made their way down to the tourist office. Tosh whisked the device away from them the second they crossed the threshold and set to work figuring out how to turn it off.
"You can do that on the ride back," Jack said, and set Tosh, Owen and Gwen to work packing up the equipment. Ianto he told to stay seated in the office until they were done. He was too exhausted to protest.
- - -
Tosh, Owen and Gwen fell asleep almost the second the SUV pulled onto the road. Tosh had figured out how to turn the device off on the walk to the car. Ianto sometimes thought that Tosh was becoming too good at working alien technology.
Jack was driving, so Ianto sat in the passenger's seat, watching trees and fields rushing past the headlights. He leaned his head against the window, his breath condensing on the glass.
Jack spoke beside him, "I think I know what it is."
"What what is?"
"The device."
"What is it, then?"
"A stone tape."
"And a stone tape is?"
"A name that I just made up," Jack said, with a sidelong grin at Ianto. "But it fits. There's this theory in paranormal investigating called the 'stone tape theory'. It's based off of a television play from the seventies – never seen it, but I've heard that it's good. The theory is that certain powerful events can imprint themselves into the places they occurred. So this machine, using technology similar to our ghost machine, records the imprints – the emotional energy – and converts them into playable images. Complete with the emotions and physical feelings experienced during the events. It's an archival tool. Probably used by archaeologists."
"Alien archaeologists," Ianto muttered, his eyes closed. "And I suppose it can pick up the emotional energy attached to a person. What was it doing to the rift, then?"
Jack thought for a moment. "It was probably trying to convert the rift energy into a playable image. It may not have ever come into contact with that type of energy before. Trying to convert it might have put the strain on the rift, which caused the riftquake. It might also be why our stone tape was on the fritz."
"On the fritz?"
"No one was operating it, but it was still showing images at random intervals. Broken 'play' button."
Ianto propped his head up with his hand. "We never get anything through the rift with a warranty."
Jack glanced at him. "I don't think it came through the rift."
"Where'd it come from, then?"
Jack smiled. "Alien archaeologists. They probably left it in the castle to record the history of the place. Might have gotten scared off by the rift activity and left it behind."
Ianto stared out the window. He was quiet for a long time.
Then, without looking at Jack, he asked, "Why is it always like that?"
Jack glanced at him. "Like what?"
Ianto sighed. "The device is always harmless. A bit of alien scrapbooking. A stone tape. It's what it records that's the bad part. The stuff that it picks up from us. Dead men. Cannibals. We're the ones who make it horrible."
Jack put his hand on top of Ianto's. Ianto looked at him, surprised.
"I don't know," Jack said, sadly. "But you're right. It is us." He looked at the back seat, where Tosh had the device on her lap. "I wonder if they'll come back for it."
Ianto glanced back, too. "They won't want it now. Not unless they're masochists."
Jack looked at him and grinned a little bit. Ianto returned it. He twined his fingers through Jack's.
They rode in silence, with the all of the stone and the darkness fading behind them.
Author's Note: I'm sorry that this is going up so late! I've literally been writing for twelve hours. It has never taken me this long to write 4,500 words. I pray that it never will again. I'm also sorry if there are some typographical errors; I did go through and edit to the best of my ability, but at this point I'm so tired that I can hardly read anymore. This is my level of dedication to you lovely people.
On another note, I wrote a lot of this to "The Ballad of Ianto Jones", and man, if you ever want to burst into tears in the middle of rush-hour traffic, put that on your iPod and shuffle. Not a fun song. But awfully pretty.
Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed it.
