Kaneko (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} kaneko) wrote in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} tw_flashfic,@ 2007-01-17 00:17:00 |
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| Entry tags: | lost in the hub |
Lost and Found by Kaneko
Title: Lost and Found
Author: kaneko
Pairing: Jack/Ianto
Spoilers: Cyberwoman, Small Worlds, Countrycide, End of Days.
Notes: 3,700 words in response to the Lost in the Hub Challenge. With huge, huge thanks to giddygeek and i_naiad and to julad, who is brilliant and always right.
Straddled over the rift, the Hub was a place where things were lost and found. Strange objects washed in like driftwood. Things went missing. There was never any sign of where they'd gone.
It was disconcerting, but a lot of things about Torchwood were. Ianto got used to it like he got used to feeding weevils and cleaning up alien slime. He put everything in its place when he left each night, and if a few train timetables or coffee cups were missing in the morning, if an odd sock appeared, he tried not to pay it too much heed.
Tosh told him she'd found the whole thing alarming at first. "I thought I was going crazy," she said. "I'd put a folder down, and whoosh! It'd be gone. And I still don't like it. I mean, this stuff is confidential. It doesn't stop being confidential if it washes up on Bizarro Weevil World." She tapped her pen (not one of the alien ones, Ianto hoped) against her mouth. "Perhaps we could devise a code," she said thoughtfully. "Something Bizarro weevils wouldn't be able to crack."
"Well, seeing as our weevils haven't yet cracked English, I don't know if I'd be too concerned," Ianto pointed out.
"I suppose," Tosh said. She didn't sound terribly convinced. "I might work on one anyway."
"Of course."
"In my spare time, of course."
"Of course."
She tapped her pen some more, stared at their latest acquisition - a bag of Twiglets. Jack swore they were alien Twiglets. ("You can tell by the shape," he'd said. "Much too spiky.") Tosh frowned. "Not that it would hurt to start now," she added.
"Why don't I start the coffee?" Ianto said briskly.
Gwen, in contrast, barely seemed to notice when things disappeared. It had taken Ianto nearly a year to get used to it, but after four months, Gwen was already completely at ease. "Oh, I had four sisters growing up," she said, waving her hand unconcernedly. "If things of yours didn't go missing, you knew you had nothing left they wanted."
Owen, though, never seemed to get used to it at all. "What's happened to my scalpels?" he'd say. "All right, which of you fuckers took my sandwich? I just put it down. It was right there." And "Ianto, did you take all my pens? Someone find my pens."
That time it hadn't been the Rift. Ianto found the pens chewed to deformity and covered with dinosaur spit. He placed them neatly on Owen's desk, spit and all, sorted by colour. "Always a pleasure to serve," he wrote on a Post-it.
---
The first time Lisa kissed him, they were in the middle of the Torchwood dining hall. Ianto was holding a tray with the remains of his lunch.
"Excuse me," Lisa had said. "I think you have something on your-" she pointed at his mouth.
Ianto lifted his free hand, but before he could wipe his mouth, she'd leaned in and kissed him. Then she swiped her thumb over his bottom lip. "All gone," she said brightly.
Ianto had blinked after her as she left. He could hear the idiots from accounting whistling at him, but he didn't care at all.
The second time Lisa kissed him, she was leaning against the back of his car in the company lot. It was Ianto's first proper car - the first not to stall, hacking and dying, every time it met a traffic light. Ianto adored it. Usually, when people touched it, he could only think of fingerprints. This time, he thought: maybe she'll kiss me again.
He'd raised his eyebrows, though, hoping to look cool. "Hello. Lisa, isn't it?"
Lisa laughed. "Looked me up on the HR database, did you?"
Ianto's cool deserted him. He'd looked her up three or four times actually. "Um," he said.
"I'm starting a rumour that we're a couple," Lisa continued. "In the hope that you'll notice me. Is it working?"
Ianto swallowed. "Yes?"
"Good," she said. And she kissed him again.
---
At Jack's request, Ianto kept a kind of storm journal. Jack was convinced that the Rift had tides. "If we can figure out the pattern, we could develop a forecasting system. Do it right, and we'd be there before the weevils, Ianto. We'll be ahead of the game."
Ianto kept the journal meticulously, recording every missing pen and cup. On the day that Jack disappeared, he wrote:
Found: 2 pens (clear ink; Tosh not yet able to decipher symbols on spines), 2 weevils (Penylan; Splott). Lost: 1 weevil from cell (CCTV obscured by static, consistent with rift activity); 17 pens - red (10), blue (2), black (5); 2 Mars Bars (Owen?). Updated 8.14pm: Jack Harkness.
None of them wanted to believe he was gone. Not when they'd just gotten him back. They searched frantically, called hospitals and police stations. Tosh played the CCTV of his disappearance over and over. They watched Jack walk off-camera and walk off-camera and walk off-camera. "There's nothing else?" Gwen kept saying. "That's all we have? How can there be nothing else?"
There wouldn't have been, though. Not if he'd fallen through the Rift.
Around 5am, conventional searches having found nothing, Ianto began going over his journal entries, looking for patterns. He found:
- Pens were more likely to disappear on the same day as weevils.
- The Rift enjoyed Curley Wurleys and Toffee Crisps, but Snickers bars were pretty safe.
- Green highlighters never went missing, but red pens had a half-life of about 24 hours.
- The Rift was as disgusted by Gwen's dirty coffee mugs as Ianto was, but often helped itself to clean ones.
- Unlike humanity, weevils were attracted to Splott.
"Why Splott, do you think?" he asked Tosh a few hours later. She was combing through weather reports and extraterrestrial scans, looking for something - anything - unusual; anything that might lead them to Jack.
"Hmm." Tosh squinted at something swirly looking on her screen. "Splott is almost directly over the centre of the Rift. It's bound to have more than its share of strangeness."
"Splott, splat in the middle," Ianto said absently. He was pretty dizzy from exhaustion by then.
Tosh looked up at him, seeming faintly startled. She smiled tentatively, as though she wasn't sure it was appropriate to smile with Jack gone. When Ianto started to smile back, though, her expression gave way to worry. "Do you think we'll find him, Ianto?"
"I don't know," Ianto said. He had a sudden sense memory of Jack's hand pressed against his shoulder, and for a moment he couldn't breathe. His chest constricted with grief. Jack, he thought.
Then he made himself breathe in and breathe out. He put away the feeling as though he were tidying a room. Jack was lost, he reminded himself. Not dead. He forced a smile for Tosh. "Wherever, he is, I'm sure he knows we're looking for him," he said - and if he was talking to himself as much as Tosh, that was okay; that was fine. "We're not giving up hope. Not again."
---
After Lisa, Ianto knew he'd lost everything. He'd expected to be fired or retconned or quietly disposed of, his body filed neatly next to Suzie's.
Instead, Jack had offered him a promotion. "Here late again?" he'd said one night, after Estelle had died. He'd touched Ianto's shoulder. His hand had been warm through Ianto's shirt. "How would you like to come out with us next time we're in the field?"
They still weren't really speaking to each other - not unless it was work related. "Coffee?" Ianto was allowed to say. "Thanks," Jack was allowed to say back. It was maybe the most Jack had said to him since threatening to kill him.
---
Owen and Gwen searched the streets, Tosh combed through the maze of Torchwood's databases; Ianto put renewed effort into looking for patterns. He found:
- Bananas rarely lasted the night in the Hub.
- Every ten or twelve days, something was likely to go missing from Level 4, in the northwest quadrant.
- The Rift liked Owen's things, especially his medical supplies.
- Something was more likely to disappear on odd days if you had touched it, but more likely to disappear on even days if you hadn't touched it.
- He had too many variables, and not enough information.
---
The first time Jack kissed him, Ianto had had a dying girlfriend in the basement. He'd smiled blandly, looking - he hoped - cool and unattainable, and then slipped away back to the cells. He'd cleaned three weevil cages before his heartbeat returned to normal.
The second time Jack kissed him, it was just a brush of his lips against Ianto's forehead. Lisa was dead. Ianto was not. "That house was full of bodies, Jack. They were going to cut my throat," he said. His hands were shaking. Jack's arm was solidly comforting around his shoulder. "They were going to bleed me out."
"Yeah," Jack said. His arm tightened.
They were quiet for a while, and then Jack nudged Ianto with his shoulder. "Hey, apart from that, how'd you like the field?"
Ianto laughed shakily, and when Jack's lips brushed his forehead, he leaned into his touch.
---
He found:
- The Rift almost never took people; Jack was the first to have been lost in the Hub.
- Cardiff attracted a lot of alien slime.
Ianto began seeding the Hub with things the Rift liked: bananas, red pens, tongue depressors, limes. Under each item, there was a square of paper with the time of placement written in black marker.
The first two days, nothing happened except that some coffee cups went missing from the kitchen, and Owen almost broke his foot skidding on a small stack of pens.
"Oh what the fucking fuck!" he said.
"Er. Sorry, that was me," Ianto confessed.
"Oh, sorry, it was me," Owen repeated, in what might have been an attempt at a Welsh accent.
"It's part of an experiment. To find Jack."
Owen opened his mouth like he was about to say something cutting, but then closed it again. "Fine."
"Sorry," Ianto said again, warily. It wasn't like Owen to be accepting.
Owen gave Ianto a strange look. "It's okay. Just- just give a bloke some warning next time, yeah?"
Then, later that day, Ianto got excited because the red pens on Level 5 had disappeared.
"Level 5, A7," he shouted, running into the computer area.
"Sorry?" Tosh said. She looked up from her weather patterns.
"The pens!" Ianto said. "They're gone! The ones in the-"
"Wait." Gwen looked up at him. "The red pens?"
"Yes!"
"On Level 5?"
Ianto deflated. "Yes."
"Yeah, sorry, I moved those. I didn't know it was part of the thing."
On the third day, though, Ianto finished his rounds of feeding and cleaning the weevils, and there in the corridor of Level 2 was a small hill of pink and blue alien fruit.
He called Owen in - Owen dealt with most of the biologicals when they first arrived. "Smells like apples," Owen said, kneeling down to bag and tag them. "Here-" he passed Ianto a map of Level 2. "Tosh said to bring it down."
Ianto fished a red pen from his shirt pocket, and made a mark on grid A1. "Alien apples," he wrote.
On Level 7, six of the bananas were missing. Ianto put a blue mark on B1 of that map. Then a red mark on B2 of Level 1 (alien socks), and a blue mark on D3 of the roof (Toffee Crisps).
The next day, he updated the maps, and then again the next day after that. There didn't seem to be a pattern.
"Let me see that," Tosh said. "Wait." She reprinted the maps on transparencies. Then she and Gwen helped Ianto redo the labels. Once the transparencies were placed over each other, they looked at it again.
Then they looked at it again.
"Hmm," Tosh said.
Ianto made them all coffee.
Then they looked at it again.
"Maybe-" Tosh turned it upside down.
They looked at it.
"No," Tosh said. She turned it the right way up.
"It could be a sort of zigzag," Gwen said. She sounded hopeful. "The red bits anyway."
"Is it just me," Ianto said, "Or does nothing ever appear or disappear in Jack's room."
---
The last time Ianto kissed Lisa, their hands and faces were covered with blood. He kissed her, pleading and praying. She didn't kiss him back.
---
Ianto waited until the others had gone home before he went to check Jack's room. He felt a bit disrespectful going in. Inside, it was quiet and still and neat. Ianto placed a bag of bananas on the floor. He closed his eyes. The room smelled like Jack's cologne. The bed was unmade. Ianto never cleaned in here.
His eyes felt heavy when he opened them again. He'd hardly slept since Jack had disappeared, he realised. He sat, a little guiltily, on Jack's bed. Then he kicked his shoes off and lay down. He closed his eyes.
Jack, he thought.
The Rift liked bananas, he thought. And Toffee Crisps and red pens. It liked medical equipment.
He played back the CCTV of Jack's disappearance in his mind. There was one angle; Jack was visible from behind. His head came up. He turned - not enough to see his face. He walked towards something off-camera. He didn't come back. There had been no static.
When Ianto opened his eyes again, the bare lightbulb seemed searingly bright. It felt as though time had passed. He looked at his watch. It was early morning. The bananas were still on the floor in their bag. His suit was going to be wrinkled.
He rolled over and pressed his face into Jack's pillow. It smelled like Jack. Ianto lay there, breathing in and out. Jack. Was he in the weevil world? Was he in a cell somewhere? Was he being tortured? Ianto squeezed his eyes shut. After a while, he got up, and closed the door quietly behind him.
The next night, he lay awake in his own bed, staring at the ceiling.
---
The third time Jack kissed him, Ianto kissed him back. Jack was alive. He had been dead, but now he was alive. Ianto's heart stuttered. His breath rasped. "I'm alive," the kiss said. "You're alive. This is the beginning of something new."
---
In the morning, he checked the overnight weather reports, fed the weevils and the dinosaur, started up the coffee. When he checked Jack's room, the bananas were still there, and starting to smell banana-y. Ianto sighed. He went to replace them with red pens, which the Rift didn't like quite so well, but which tended not to go brown and whiffy.
Ianto forced himself not to rush the coffee. When it was ready, he cleaned the milk frother, tapped the grinds into the bin. He gave Tosh and Owen a mug each. Gwen wasn't in yet. He went to Jack's room. The pens were still lying on the floor where he'd left them. When he came back, the bananas in the kitchen were gone - Tosh had snagged one for breakfast, and the Rift had stolen the rest.
Between morning tea and lunch, pens disappeared across five levels, but the ones in Jack's room didn't budge.
They were still there the next morning. They were still there the morning after. Ianto slept at home. He got five hours of sleep over three nights.
The next night, he slept in Jack's bed, and again the night after that. By the third night, he hardly felt guilty at all. He slept like a log. The pens were still there the next morning.
"That theory is holding," he said to the others when they arrived.
Owen was delighted. "Right," he said. He rubbed his hands together. "Ianto, help me bring my storage stuff into Jack's room. I don't mind telling you, I am bloody sick of the Rift eating all my scalpels."
They shifted a lot of things into Jack's room that morning. "Just this hard drive," Tosh said, even though the Rift had never shown any interest in electronics. "And maybe these artefacts. Actually, Owen, could you grab that box over there, too? And put that wrench thing in there."
Gwen brought in her purse. "Had my credit cards stolen once," she whispered to Ianto. "I'll tell you, it was not fun."
When they were done, Jack's room was piled high with boxes and bags and back-up drives. Owen tucked his expensive stethoscope lovingly into a drawer next to a little box of diagnostic penlights. Ianto put his favourite mugs on the dresser, covered in a teacloth to keep away the dust.
"Good work, people," Owen said. He surveyed the mess they'd made. "I think this calls for pizza, don't you?"
After the others left, Ianto paused for a second to stare at it all. If Jack could shield his room, he wondered, why hadn't he been able to shield himself?
---
He slept in Jack's room again that night. The towering boxes felt mildly oppressive. He slept restlessly. He dreamed about being trapped in a cold cellar, surrounded by shoes. He dreamed about Lisa.
He woke up, and the usual thick grief after dreaming about Lisa wasn't there. He stared at Jack's ceiling. She's never coming back, he thought.
He slid out of Jack's bed, even though it was freezing. Lisa was gone, but there was still hope for Jack. And Jack was going to need his stuff.
Ianto took the lift three floors up to Jack's office and started packing things into boxes. And then suddenly, he felt frantic. The Rift could take anything at any second. There was no time for neatness. He piled everything he could see into the boxes - files, shot glasses, the Torchwood safety manual. Over the next few hours, he hauled twelve heavy boxes to Jack's room, and when he ran out of boxes, carried Jack's stuff in armfuls. There was no room on the floor, so he dumped it on the bed. Then he crawled between the 'out' tray and an old-fashioned typewriter, and exhaustion dragged him back to sleep.
He dreamed that Jack was kissing him, warm lips brushing the corner of his mouth, making him gasp. Ianto started to wake. He tried not to, but his eyes blinked open of their own accord. The dream didn't fade. Jack's lips were moving over his. Ianto opened his mouth sleepily, wanting Jack's tongue. He woke up some more. Jack was still there. Jack pulled back gently. "Hi, Ianto," he said. He held up a battered purple walkman - Owen claimed that The Smiths would never sound right on an iPod. "Why's all this stuff in my room? And what are you doing in my bed?"
Ianto blinked at him. There was no static on the CCTV, when Jack had disappeared, he thought absently. Jack shielded the room, but not himself.
The thought slid away, though, because they were kissing again. This time the kiss was noisier and more insistent. Ianto lost himself in it. Oh God, he thought. Jack's here. Jack's home. He moaned into Jack's mouth, and then heard himself make a protesting noise as Jack pulled away.
There was no static on the CCTV. The Rift never took people from the Hub. It liked bananas and red pens and medical supplies. Ianto reached up to touch Jack's mouth. "You weren't taken by the Rift."
Jack shook his head. His lips brushed Ianto's fingers.
"Where did you go?" Ianto said. His voice was a little hoarse.
Jack dipped his head for a second. He pressed a kiss to Ianto's palm. When he looked up, his face was haunted. "I'm sorry. I thought- I thought I'd found something I'd lost."
Ianto thought about Lisa and loss and alien slime, about alien socks appearing out of thin air. "We were studying the Rift while you were gone," he said. "Because you were gone." He felt Jack breathe in sharply, and slid his hand up to rub his thumb gently over Jack's cheek. Jack was staring at him. "It takes pens and bananas," he continued, "and you never get back what you lose. But-" he smiled. "Sometimes it gives you alien apples."
Jack leaned his forehead against Ianto's. They lay like that for a long time. Eventually, Jack raised his head and smiled - a small smile, but a real one - and kissed him very gently.
And Ianto pulled him closer and kissed him back, welcoming him home.
---
Later, a lot later - after Jack had apologised and explained and Tosh and Gwen and Owen had hugged him and berated him and hit his arm and hugged him some more, Ianto showed him the map of what had been lost and found.
Jack looked at the pattern of dots. "Oh," he said. He laughed out loud, and grabbed Ianto's hands. "This is great!" He led them to a clear spot where Tosh's back-up drives had been before they'd moved them. "Watch my feet."
He wrapped a hand around Ianto's waist, making Ianto shiver. He was close enough to kiss. Jack grinned at him, and nudged him backwards. "Apples," he said. "Sock." He nudged Ianto backwards again. "Bananas, toffee, side, side-" he twirled Ianto out and twirled him back. "It's the foxtrot!"
Gwen laughed. She held out her hand to Tosh. "May I?"
"Rabbit, slime-" Jack tugged Ianto close again, and Ianto shook his head and grinned at him helplessly. He didn't know the foxtrot, but he'd studied the map for hours; he knew the steps.
"Why haven't we done this before?" Jack said. He twirled Ianto again, while the girls laughed and tripped and copied his steps, and Owen pretended to cover his eyes. Then he pulled Ianto closer and wrapped his arms around him, and they kept on dancing, even after the others had stopped.
The End
