AN: Well, A New Dawn is now longer than the whole of Too Long A Sacrifice, and we're only about 5 days into the story! I think it will end up at least as long as Hidden Behind Our Appearances.
Sorry for the long time since the last chapter. Real life keeps throwing obstacles in my way, whenever I think I'm going to have a bit of free time to write. You're getting it first here on ff, before it goes on my live journal account, because live journal seems to be dead today.
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Chapter 7
The morning after they had seen Jack refuse the Master's offer, Gwen and Tosh arrived for work simultaneously . Both had swollen eyes from crying. Neither Ianto nor Owen had arrived, though Mark and Joanne had been at the Hub since 9am.
Mark almost went up to them, to ask what was wrong. But, on receiving a warning look from Joanne, confined himself to reporting that everything was quiet, and coffee was ready and waiting in the kitchen. Tosh and Gwen nodded their thanks and, fetching some, went to sit together in the boardroom.
Tosh was the first to break the awkward silence. "Gwen," she started tentatively. "I'm really sorry I shouted at you yesterday. I was just so overwhelmed by what Jack did, that I wasn't thinking straight. It could have been any of us with Jack in his cell after the Master died, and we would all have done exactly the same. None of us would have let him off the Valiant."
Gwen looked at her miserably. "Thanks Tosh, but I'll always bear the guilt for that."
At that moment, Ianto entered the room. If anything, he looked worse than the two girls, though, as always, he was impeccably dressed in a suit. Ianto took one look at the girls and stated flatly, "you know then."
Tosh and Gwen nodded sadly. "We saw it on the DVD after you and Owen ran out of the Hub," Tosh explained.
A look of utter grief crossed over Ianto's face, though he immediately suppressed it. He surreptitiously pressed the wound in his arm, wanting to feel the pain. He covered up the gesture by appearing to brush a thread from his suit. "I see Mark made coffee again," he said, trying to behave as if all was normal.
Tosh approached him, cautiously. "It's OK to show how you feel, Ianto. We understand, we know what you must be feeling, because we are feeling it too. Maybe not quite so deeply as you, since you and Jack were so close, but we all betrayed him. And to know that he rejected the chance at escaping torture, to keep us safe, is heartbreaking."
Ianto reacted badly to that. "You can't possibly understand what I feel Tosh," he snapped angrily. "You didn't betray the man who loved you. You didn't taunt him viciously. You didn't tell him that you hoped the Master would hurt him!" He had to stop at that point, practically in tears. "And you didn't tell him you never loved him, as he was being dragged away by UNIT." He did break down then, and slumped into a chair with his head in his hands, tears flowing freely down his face. The girls sat either side of him, and offered what comfort they could.
A few minutes later Owen arrived, and found them like that. His heart sank. He had hoped that his team would have got their emotions under control overnight, so that they could focus on what needed to be done. He backed out of the boardroom quietly without being seen.
b_b_b_b_b
Owen waited for half an hour, to give his three colleagues time to compose themselves, before he returned to the boardroom. He found them sitting despondently around the table.
"So," he began, "now we all know what deal Jack made with the Master. I assume that we are all in agreement that we do anything that is necessary to get Jack exonerated, and make sure that neither UNIT, nor any other government institution, have any right to imprison him." . .
"Damn right," agreed Tosh vehemently.
"We can't even blame Jack for torturing those rebels," put in Gwen, "he must have done it to protect us."
"And there must be some reason why he ended up, apparently willing and enjoying it, in the Master's bed," added Ianto. "Owen, could it have been Stockholm syndrome?"
"Not a typical case, no," replied Owen. "That refers to long term hostages becoming emotionally attached to their captors, in gratitude for the lack of physical abuse. It would be incredibly surprising if that happened to Jack, since the Master abused him horrendously. The Master would have had to offer him something Jack perceived as kindness, for him to develop Stockholm syndrome."
Gwen grasped at the straw that offered. "Maybe the Master didn't continue abusing him, perhaps he just wanted to see whether Jack would accept the deal, but didn't follow through with his threat."
Owen considered, "in that case, then yes, the cessation of the torture could lead to that."
Gwen smiled with hope, "then maybe that is what happened."
Tosh, who had been listening, while growing more and more angry, burst into the conversation at this point. "Are you insane, you can't possibly believe that. Do you really think the Master would make all those DVD recordings, if he wasn't torturing Jack!"
"Not really no," agreed Owen. "But it will be easy enough to check," he pointed out.
Tosh ignored him, and continued her tirade. "And you have all changed your tune about Jack torturing and killing the rebels, and being the Master's lover. Gwen, Ianto, just two days ago you were implying that, despite being tortured, Jack deserved to be locked up because he was a willing accomplice in the end." She gestured wildly. "How does it change anything if he did what he did to save us, or to save himself? How come you're only now willing to give him the benefit of the doubt?"
Gwen blanched and looked ashamed. Tosh was correct. The knowledge that Jack had appeared to work for the Master, and had killed for him, to keep them safe, had totally changed her attitude.
And the same was effectively true for Ianto, though he had started to change his attitude a few hours earlier, when he saw Jack allow the Master to rape him because of a threat to him and Gwen. Gone was the suspicion, replaced by a certainty that there must have been some reasonable explanation for Jack's actions, an assumption that he had had no choice. Even Owen had reacted that way, although he hadn't been quite so obvious about it.
Tosh looked at them with sadness. "You'd better hope that Jack never finds out what it took to make you trust him."
"How did we lose our trust in him so quickly, and so completely?" asked Gwen.
"I suppose that, deep down, we knew that everything he accused us of was true," admitted Owen. "We all betrayed him before Abaddon. Hell, I murdered him. So we all knew that he had no reason to be loyal to us. And he's a great actor. From what we know of the way the Doctor treated him, he couldn't expect Jack to be loyal to him either."
"I didn't want to believe he was working for the Master," argued Ianto.
"Me neither," agreed Tosh.
"But he kept up the act so well, for so long, I eventually gave up hope that it was a trick," continued Ianto.
"Do you think?" Gwen suggested tentatively, "that we were being influenced by the Archangel network? We know it influenced people to believe and trust the Master, and he told us Jack was working for him. Couldn't it have enhanced our willingness to believe it? Even a small effect might have been enough for us to believe Jack's act. And by the time Archangel was deactivated we were all firmly convinced and never questioned it."
"Maybe," Owen agreed. "Who voted for Saxon in the election?"
They all raised their hands. "Well, who knows," Owen shrugged. "Think that, if it makes you feel better. But it's not relevant now. We just have to find Jack and help him."
"What if he doesn't want our help?" asked Ianto, with sorrow. "He may want nothing to do with us, and who could blame him."
"We at least need to find him and offer," Owen continued. "And we need to get him exonerated, so he can stop living in fear."
"He needs us," Tosh put in. "You should have see him when he came to Cardiff. I asked him if he needed anything. He said no, and that he was fine. But it clearly wasn't true. He looked awful."
"Well, we'd better get moving then," declared Ianto. "Everybody get back to work. And Jack is everyone's top priority," he insisted, somewhat usurping Owen's authority.
b_b_b_b_b
As Gwen and Tosh hurried off to continue their efforts to help Jack, Owen went to check in with Joanne and Mark, and deal with any Torchwood matters that needed his attention. They had been lucky over the several days since Owen had met the soldier in the bar, and the rift had been quiet. But it couldn't last, and Owen was well aware that they could not neglect their Torchwood responsibilities indefinitely.
Ianto stood up, surveying the DVDs, which were scattered all over the table. He knew in his heart that Tosh was right. It was what he had realised when he saw Jack's deal with the Master. The Master would not have shown any mercy, and these DVDs would show horrors for Jack that he could barely even conceive of. Holding back his grief by pure willpower, he started to gather them up and put them back in order. As he sorted them he came across one that was labelled differently to the others. Instead of a date it had Home Movie # 3 written on the box.
Intrigued, Ianto put it in the machine and pressed play. He recognised it immediately, as the film the Master had shown them on the Valiant. He was about to switch it off, having no wish to see that again, when Jack and the Master began to speak. There had been no sound when the team saw the film before.
In the film, Jack got off the bed with a big grin, and walked towards the Master saying "Ianto, I've missed you."
Ianto was totally confused. Why would Jack call the Master Ianto? As they spoke, and things got heated, it became clear that Jack believed that he was with him (Ianto) not the Master. And suddenly all the familiar touches and gestures made sense. The affection was meant for him all along, not for the psychotic madman that Jack was actually with.
Ianto slumped in his seat, with a combination of happiness and incredible guilt. How the Master had manipulated Jack into that situation, Ianto did not know, but finally understanding healed a part of Ianto's heart he had long thought dead. This film was the reason that he had truly hated Jack. Throughout the time on the Valiant, Ianto's feelings of betrayal had warred with the remnants of love that he felt for Jack, deep down. Seeing Jack offer the same intimacies to the Master, as he had once given Ianto, was too much. That film had been the final nail in the coffin of his love, and it had finally turned to hate.
They had all been so wrong. Jack had never been the Master's willing lover, nor his willing accomplice. It was not Stockholm syndrome. And the Master had known exactly what he was doing, when he showed the Torchwood team that film. It had poisoned their minds against Jack, leaving them all unwilling to hear any explanation from him.
But no longer, Ianto vowed to himself, pressing his injured arm hard. He would do anything it took to make things right.
b_b_b_b_b
After her previous failure to find any leads on Jack, Tosh finally had a stroke of luck. She had been digging into Jack's past financial affairs, going back years. She had found evidence that he had set up several bank accounts in different names, depositing large amounts in each of them. Checking the history of each account, she discovered that they had been left untouched for years, until just after Jack's arrest by UNIT. The accounts had then been frozen by the government, along with all Jack's other accounts. UNIT had obviously found the hidden ones. There had been no attempt to access the accounts until two years after they had been frozen. But, the day after Jack escaped from UNIT, an attempt had been made to access each of them. It had to have been Jack who did that.
Excitement building, Tosh started a program to track the computer at which the attempts had been made. There had clearly been an attempt to make this impossible, but Tosh was confident that the program she had designed could back track through the incredibly complicated path.
While waiting for the results, and searching for any other lead she could find, Tosh allowed the
implications of Jack's failed attempt to access his accounts to sink in. He had just escaped from UNIT, and presumably had nothing, and no money. He would have been traumatised, and desperate to hide, and he must have been devastated to discover he could not access his money. She couldn't imagine how he had coped.
Two hours later, the computer beeped and Tosh dropped what she was doing and hurried over to read the results. She couldn't believe what she saw. The computer claimed that access to Jack's accounts had been attempted from the Hub! It couldn't be true. How on Earth had Jack managed to use a route that would fool her program into giving that result. Practically crying with disappointment, Tosh headed to Owen's office to report her failure.
* * * * .
b_b_b_b_b
Gwen, meanwhile, was having a bit more success. She had accepted that Jack was legally guilty, and was looking at what could be done for him, despite that. And she had arrived at one conclusion.
He needed to be pardoned by the Monarch, under the royal prerogative of mercy. A pardon was the forgiveness of a crime and the cancellation of the penalty. They were given, not to people who had been wrongfully convicted, but to those who were morally innocent of the offence. Usually the Monarch would only grant pardons on the advice of a government minister, the Defence Secretary for military cases like Jack's, but Gwen knew that Jack would have no chance if they went through that route. They would have to approach the Queen directly.