Ianto sat on the steps leading down to the autopsy room. He was tied to the railing and rattled his handcuffs in vain.
"Owen, let me go!" he wailed.
"Now, why would I do that?" bellowed Owen angrily from above as he stepped back into the room. He carried Toshiko's limp body in his arms, taking care not to bump her into the railing or the wall.
Downstairs, he gently placed her on the examination table and hooked her up to the machines. His heart sank as he turned them on. He'd checked her pulse before and found nothing. Now, the flatline on the ECG confirmed his worst fear.
"Dammit," he murmured as he drew up an epinephrine syringe. He wasted no time and injected the adrenaline directly into the muscle of her right thigh. Then, Owen began performing CPR. Thirty compressions, two breaths. Repeat.
The minutes passed, but nothing changed. Toshiko Sato's heart had stopped beating.
"I'm sorry," Ianto cried, his voice shaking. "Oh god, Tosh, is she still alive? I never wanted to... at least I don't think so..."
"What did you do to her," Owen snarled, his face darkening. Reluctantly, he ceased the CPR. He knew it was hopeless.
In a fit of rage, he rushed over to the restrained younger man, grabbed Ianto by the collar, and shook him. "What have you done?!"
"I don't know! It was her! She's in my head!" Ianto exclaimed with tears in his eyes, his words tumbling incoherently out of his mouth. Then he frowned. "Or she was. Not sure where she has gone, but she will be back. She always is. Penny did this!"
"Who the fuck is Penny?" Owen yelled. "Maybe I should have just let you shoot yourself! Bloody hell!"
With helpless frustration, he pushed Ianto away and returned to Tosh's side.
"Where's Jack?" whispered Ianto.
"Dunno. I left him upstairs," Owen said absently, looking at his watch.
Tosh had been dead for over fifteen minutes. A crushing wave of helplessness washed over him. There was no way to save her without knowing the type of poison used. Running tests would take too long. The rational part of his brain knew there was nothing he could do, but the sight of her lifeless body was too much.
He turned around and walked up the stairs.
"I'll go see what's keeping him," he muttered and was gone.
Jack still lay by the water tower where he had collapsed. The shards of the mug that had slipped from his grip were scattered around him, and the coffee spill had seeped into the fabric of his blue shirt.
Owen knelt and turned him on his back.
"Feel free to come back any time now, Jack."
Owen had no idea how Jack's immortality/resurrection shtick worked, but in his limited experience, he had noticed that he usually recovered quickly from minor injuries. Did poison count as a minor injury?
He sat down beside the dead body and looked at Jack for a while. Even in death, he looked like he was just getting his beauty sleep, Owen observed with annoyance - the eternal poster boy.
The medic looked at his watch again. Over 30 minutes had passed.
"What's taking you so long, Jack? I don't want to go back down there alone. Tosh is...," he closed his eyes and took a shaky breath. "...and Ianto is really your business, not mine."
An oppressive silence had fallen over the hub.
How the hell had their lives gone tits up so quickly?
Only the rift monitor beeped occasionally, and water dripped somewhere in the distance.
Owen Harper hated silence.
He'd never admit it, but despite his grumpy exterior, he enjoyed having the rest of the team around him, the hub buzzing with activity. A good substitute was blasting loud music while working or playing his vast collection of first-person shooters on his console while waiting for lab results.
He also hated being alone.
Being alone gave his emotions too much room. It gave him too much time to think about his feelings. As tears welled up and his throat tightened, he felt his despair finally sink in. Owen howled angrily and slammed his fist against the rift manipulator that towered next to him.
The impact sent a sharp pain through his arm. Owen hissed and rubbed his bruised hand. At the very least, the pain restored the focus he desperately needed.
He sighed and rubbed his face in exhaustion.
Finally, he gave up sitting around and stood up again. He picked up the empty mug from Tosh's table and took it to the lab. Not that it mattered right now, but learning about the nature of the poison would keep him occupied until Jack came back to deal with this mess.
"Nothing. There is bloody nothing!" Owen cursed under his breath as he continued to stare into the microscope. He'd run several tests in the last hour, all of which had come back negative. Whatever the cause of death had been, there were no traces left in the mug. Only the remains of the herb leaves that were used to flavour the coffee.
He'd taken blood samples from Tosh and Jack, and the results were the same. There were no traces of poison in either. Nothing seemed to be wrong, and yet Toshiko's heart had stopped.
For a while, Owen had managed to focus on the task at hand and not dwell on the harsh reality of her lying dead in his autopsy room, but it was becoming increasingly difficult.
He turned his gaze back to Ianto, who was still sitting on the stairs, staring at the floor with tears in his eyes. He had begged Owen repeatedly to let him go but now had fallen silent.
"Ianto, you have to give me something. Anything," Owen insisted, but the younger man just shook his head.
"Let me go," Ianto said with a strange tone.
"Why isn't Jack resurrecting?"
Ianto's lips curved into a smug smile.
Owen scowled at him.
"Jack is still dead, and there's no sign of him waking up. What have you done? This is no ordinary death. If I believed in this crap, I'd think it was witchcraft."
"Maybe it is," Ianto said with a scornful grin, then burst out laughing.
Owen stared at him in disbelief, unsure how to react to this change in behaviour.
"And as long as you don't know the right words, you'll never wake them up!" Ianto chuckled.
"What's wrong with you all of a sudden?" Unnerved, Owen shot back. "Not long ago, you were sobbing and crying. You wanted to end your own life, and now this seems to be fun for you?"
Ianto suddenly grew serious.
"Oh, don't worry, he's absolutely heartbroken. Just let him go, and maybe there'll be a way to save your friends," Ianto said. Or whoever was speaking through him.
Owen's brow furrowed. "Who are you?"
"I speak on behalf of Ianto, and I ask you to let him go."
"How kind of you," Owen remarked sarcastically. "But there is no chance of me letting him leave."
The whole situation was bizarre, and Owen felt out of his depth. Gwen needed to get back to the hub right away. He picked up his phone and dialled her number.
No one answered, and the call eventually went to voicemail.
"Just great," Owen muttered. "Gwen? If you get this - come back to the hub; there's an emergency here. And I'm not kidding!"
Frustrated, he ended the call and threw his phone on the lab bench.
Owen returned his gaze to the gleeful Ianto, who had begun to taunt him.
"Let him go, and I'll help you! Let him go, and I'll help you!"
"Oh, shut up, I need to think!" he shouted. The constant blabbing was driving him crazy.
There was something Ianto had said that begged for his attention.
"Let him go, and I'll help you! Let him go, and I'll help you!"
Owen scowled at the Welshman's mocking chant until it hit him.
... you'll never wake them up!
There was no point in waiting for Jack's resurrection if he wasn't dead.
The blackness of death was all-encompassing. At times, it was almost relaxing to float in an endless ocean of nothingness. No worries, no fear, no pain, no happiness, no love; an eternal journey through an infinite void. Until it wasn't, and the calm sea turned rough. Life returned to him like a tidal wave, and he felt like drowning. In a panic, he gasped for air and tried to grab hold of something that would keep him from being swept away.
When Jack Harkness opened his eyes, he was greeted by familiar surroundings.
"Did someone kill me?" he asked, his voice cracking as he looked around disorientated. He was lying on a table in the autopsy room.
"I did. I shot you," Owen said matter-of-factly, stepping into his line of sight with a stern expression. "Never thought I would do that again so soon."
Jack looked at him in confusion.
"What for? What happened?"
"Well, our dear tea boy over there," Owen snarled, pointing to a gagged and restrained Ianto. "Had the glorious idea to kill us all!"
Ianto struggled against the handcuffs, mumbling something unintelligible into the cloth stuffed into his mouth.
Jack struggled to sit up, more confused than before, and stared in disbelief at his restrained archivist and lover.
"What the hell are you talking about, Owen?" he snapped at the medic.
Then he noticed the second table next to him, as well as Toshiko's lifeless body upon it.
"Tosh!" he exclaimed, half jumping, half falling off his table as he rushed over to her. He went pale as he checked her wrist for a pulse and saw the flatline on the ECG. "What happened?"
"Don't really know yet," Owen muttered. "One minute Ianto's handing out fresh coffee, and the next I see Tosh collapsed over her workstation and you tumbling down the stairs by the water tower. And then there's this little traitor who is watching the whole thing and talking to himself like a madman. A second later, he rushes into your office and tries to shoot himself. That's why I decided to cuff him to the railing; I can't let him try again and succeed this time."
"And why the gag?" Jack wanted to know. He resisted the urge to rush over to Ianto and free him from his predicament. He couldn't believe what Owen had just said.
"Because he, or whatever it is that's possessed him, refuses to shut up," Owen complained.
Jack's bewildered eyes returned to Tosh, and then he looked at Owen. "And you, are you alright?"
"Me? Sure, I am," Owen laughed dryly. "Ianto's coffee has been terrible the last couple of days. Used my little plant over there for disposal. I did the same today and that's what hopefully saved all our lives."
Jack looked at the small green growth and noticed the brown edges around the leaves.
Then Owen's words sank in.
"Wait... Toshiko isn't dead? The ECG shows no signs of life."
"I know, but I don't think she is. Both of you appeared to be dead, but you didn't resurrect. Not until I shot you."
Jack stared at him, trying to understand the implications.
"That led me to believe that you haven't been dead, regardless of what the equipment said. So, Tosh might not be either. I ran several tests but found nothing. If it's not death, it must be some kind of deep coma," Owen's voice faltered for a moment. "I just don't know what to do about it. I am glad that shooting you worked. Too bad I can't try the same with her."
Jack gently caressed her cheek. Her features looked so peaceful.
What was going on? Jack struggled to understand what had happened as he tried to work out why Ianto would do such a thing. Owen had to be wrong; whoever had done this couldn't be him.
He watched his struggling lover for a while. No sign of remorse or distress, just a caged animal with an insatiable desire to escape his predicament.
Jack crossed the room until he stood directly before the young man. He stared down at him and finally removed the gag. Ianto coughed but said nothing. He just looked up, a defiant look on his face.
"What have you done? Tell me," Jack demanded coldly. He was terrified at the prospect of Ianto poisoning the team, but he couldn't show any weakness right now. He had to find out what was going on.
A malicious grin replaced the defiant expression.
"Ianto is far superior to all of you. He considers you all friends, but I have no idea why. I need you to get out of his way so he can embrace his destiny!"
"Who are you," asked Jack, taken aback.
"My name is Penelope, and I'm his best friend," Ianto explained sweetly.
"Yeah?" Owen exclaimed as he joined Jack's side. "I kind of doubt that. Ianto doesn't have best friends. Not even invisible ones!"
"You all think you know him, but none of you know him as well as I do!" she crooned.
"Tell me what you've done to Tosh," Jack snarled.
"It's a shame my plan didn't work out," Penny said through Ianto. "Since Jack Harkness can't die because he's immortal, my plan was to put you all in a coma instead of just killing everyone. Given enough time, the coma would have led to your deaths anyway. Of course, it wouldn't have been permanent for Jack, but he would have stayed like this long enough for me to achieve my goal."
"Lucky me, not drinking the coffee then, huh?" Owen spat angrily, leaning closer to the man on the ground. "Tell me how to wake her, or I will make ya!"
"Don't touch him!" Jack hissed, pulling him back.
Owen scowled at him. "We've got to find a way to wake Tosh!"
Ianto's grin widened to the point of being grotesque.
"You won't. As a modern doctor, you lack the knowledge of witchcraft."
"Oh, don't get on with the witchcraft again!" the doctor exclaimed, throwing his hands up in despair.
Jack looked at him questioningly.
"Witchcraft is a load of crap! Cut the bullshit and tell us what you did to her!" Owen worked himself up into a rage, his concern for Tosh preceding his professionalism as a doctor.
"Owen, calm down. Witchcraft would explain a lot of what has happened recently," Jack said sharply. His medic losing his nerve was the last thing he needed right now.
Jack stared at Ianto. The puzzle pieces weren't in place yet, but as he reflected on what had happened tonight, he realised they'd seen this before. He thought of the murders and suicides Gwen had been investigating. The more he considered the similarities, the clearer it became that this was part of something bigger.
Suddenly, the workstations upstairs and Owen's laptop on the table sounded an alarm. Not the infamous beeps of the rift monitor but the sensors that monitored the entrances to the hub.
"What now," Owen grumbled but opened the CCTV software anyway. "Uhm, Jack?"
"Yeah?" Noticing the alarmed tone in Owen's voice, Jack looked over at the medic.
"Rhys Williams is standing on the invisible lift, jumping up and down. Either he's lost his mind or he's trying to get our attention..."