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cyusTitle: Before The Children Green And Golden
Characters: Ianto, Rhiannon, Jack, Agent Johnson, Dekker, Alice, Steven
Length: 9700 words
Rating: R
Spoilers: Children of Earth
Summary: Ianto doesn't die in Thames House, but the chain of events doesn't stop for that. The 456 are still making demands, the government is still complying, and so choices still need to be made.
Notes: For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rosesfade as part of the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
help_haiti auction. Thanks for your patience. Thanks for Britspeak help to smirnoffmule, thanks for beta to amand_r, copperbadge, neifile7, paragraphs. Loosely connected to Time Has Set Its Maggot and Prince Of The Apple Towns. Title taken from a Dylan Thomas poem.
The stones pinged off the window, duller when they hit the wall beside it. Ianto turned off the light in his room, stared out through the window into the night. Gone eleven now. One of the streetlights painted a line into his room, over his desk stuffed with crap, along the shelving he'd put together when he'd been ten, the wallpaper that still had laser aliens and the bed he never made.
Ping, another pebble went, and Ianto waved from behind the window, made the cutting across his throat gesture. Wanker didn't look for it.
"Oi!" Ianto only had to lean forward a little to see his mam lean outward through the kitchen window next to his, shouting at Rutter who was hidden in the bushes. Ianto could see him from where he was standing, face pressed to the window pane. He splayed his fingers to the glass and gestured five to Rutter, but Rutter was too busy finding pebbles.
His mam was going on about them thieves now, stealing their jobs, those English cunts that squatted in their houses. She was raging at the window. Ianto pulled the vodka from underneath his stack of dirty laundry, slipped out of his room, past the kitchen, blue with smoke from his mam's cheap fags, and grabbed his jacket from the hook in the corridor.
"Going out," he shouted, opening the door at the same time.
His mam was yelling from the window for him to stop and get a goddamn job, tottering steps on the linoleum as she made for the kitchen door, but Ianto was slipping out already, throwing the door into the lock and making a run for it down the stairs and the small incline, Rutter joining him as they both slid down the muddy side of a hill to stumble onto the road proper.
"Thought you'd never show."
Ianto laughed and unscrewed the vodka, taking a pull. Rutter was drinking something from a plastic bottle. His uncle was burning liquor up in the valleys and Rutter palmed a few every now and then. "Rhi's gone out, the slut, blowing the McPhee cunt behind the shed or something."
"Cunt," Rutter replied and fell into a trot with Ianto, both of them walking to the side of the road, small branches and gutter mud loud under their feet.
"Stupid cunt," Ianto agreed, drinking it down with more vodka. "McPhee's a ponce anyway. Saw him check me out. Wants to suck my dick." Ianto danced up on the kerb of the street, balancing badly, stumbling off it and a few steps up the hill before he took them down again, nearly falling in the rain-drenched soil.
"Wants to eat shit, he does," Rutter shouted, running to catch up with Ianto. "Your sister's cunt gets soaked in homo juices."
Ianto laughed at that, then waved Rutter on. "Meeting down by the docks?"
Rutter whooped, that passed for yes, and they made their way there. They took the backway past the whirring electricity of the high voltage behind fences. Something in Ianto wanted to touch that just once, to see if you could really die from that.
In the dark, the drizzle starting up, it sounded like alien language whirring in the air and Ianto saluted it in Star Trek manner, muttering, "Captain Picard, sir," when Rutter was shouting about cuntfaces from further ahead and waited for Ianto catch up.
They stepped back onto an industry backway road and Rutter shoved the door to the abandoned warehouse open. Shouts of agitation and protest from the crowd inside quieted when they stepped in, shut the door again.
Someone had thought it brilliant to make a fire; the smoke was billowing around them. Rutter bounded off towards Koo-da and Springs, blokes that had a few years on them but Rutter liked to be in with them and they liked to take the piss. Ianto sauntered over to the rest of the bunch curled in a corner, vodka bottle dangling from his fingers. He bent down, fingers curling around the back of Lanes' neck and thrust his tongue into her mouth, swapping vodka spit between them. Chirp was punching at his thigh so he stumbled over their legs and bodies, half settling in their midst, still lip-locked with Lanes. Someone's fingers tried to take the booze from him and he pulled away from the kiss then and scooted to settle against the wall between Chirp and Davies, old mattress under his arse.
"Your sister's shagging McPhee," Cock shouted from where he stood with Rutter and Springs.
It had been Coch once, going with the Welsh pride. Asking Cock it probably still was, but it had been too easy to turn it into something more fitting. Ianto gave him the V over the heads of the others.
"English cunt is probably fingering her right now. Stealing our jobs, then stealing our pussy."
"Piss off," Ianto shouted, then Lanes pulled him down to lie half on the mattress, half on the floor, behind the others, the vodka bottle pressed between them like a child. He shoved the bottle to the side at the thought. Enough of babies. She said it still hurt sometimes from when she'd got it scraped out.
Lanes fumbled at his face, fingering his hair and cheeks while they were kissing and he pressed his hand under her skirt. She splayed her legs for him when he pushed his fingers in, moaned for him. He groped for her breasts with his other hand, she rutted against him.
"Talked to me mate north," Cock said. Someone banged something to start the meeting officially. Chirp groaned, a small stone pinged off one of the metal walls, people laughed. "We'll be going up North, big thing, big big thing. One of them English cunts is refusing to pay up proper for restoration, says it's improper," Cock affected posh. "Improper, is it, to pay proper fees to the country you're squatting in, the cunt."
"What about Plaid Cymru?" Davies shouted.
Lanes was biting at Ianto's jaw, had her hand curled around his wrist and pushed down on his fingers. He rubbed off on her through his jeans.
"What about them?" Cock gave back.
"Heard them say they don't want no violence no more. Was on the news, wasn't it?" Agreeable grunts all around. "Said it wasn't good for the Welsh, for-"
"Wigley sitting with his fat arse, licking Labour's bollocks," Cock interrupted. Lanes was moaning in Ianto's ear as Cock went on about the coward Plaid Cymru arses and that they owed it to their country.
One of them, probably Rutter, started singing Land of My Fathers in drunken vowels, Gwlad this and that, and the rest of them joined in. Ianto had had to kiss arse in Welsh in school and had forgot it all by now anyway, he lip-mimed badly when he had to. No need to now, when he was spilling into his jeans and against Lanes' thigh, squeezing at her cunt until she pushed his hand away, smoothed her skirt and sat up. She smiled at him, grabbed his vodka bottle and took a healthy swig.
Everyone was applauding, not them for their performance, but Cock and his slogans. They'd be going up north then. Better than Cardiff where the coppers had them cornered two minutes after they'd moved in on the house. Safer. Thing is, last time he'd be here. He hadn't told Lanes, hadn't told Rutter, hadn't told his mam or Rhi. Been back and forth on it, had stood at the station and turned back again, but he'd had no job since leaving school, stacking things in the market but that's no job, is it.
He looked at Rutter and Cock and Lanes grinning at him and rubbing at her stomach as if she was highlighting the baby she'd scraped out for him. He needed out.
***
The drone of the rotorblades, loud engine sounds made London below not-so-picturesque and for tourists, a novelty joyride for a few thousand quid. They were rising up too fast to see anything but blurs of people, and had to contend with the lights of emergency services pooled around Whitehall. Ianto had caught Jack's eye as they were shoved into the helicopter, arse over feet, and lip-read-imagined Jack's quip about the comparatively gentle treatment of soft copper hands. They'd planned to separate them but helicopters were not airbuses. When Ianto angled his foot just so, the toes of his boots pressed against Jack's.
If they were any more James Bond, Ianto would know morse code and they'd mission-impossible their way out of the helicopter to be picked up by a speedboat on the Thames. He should sell that idea to the Beeb.
Not really. If he could, he'd sell the whole storyline of synchronized children controlled by aliens that could be contained in glasshouses without being caught. Anyone had stones to throw? His stomach turned as he remembered the child caught inside with that, in it. The 456, named after the wavelength they used. Only civil servants would come up with a number for that kind of horror. It had been twelve children in 1965, they wanted ten percent now.
Jack was shouting at one of the soldiers, telegraphing dismay for both of them. Somewhere below Gwen was making back to Wales, and when Jack had decreed it would be her, the split second of heart-clenching protest had made Ianto whisper gibberish to her for goodbye, a find them find them when he'd never cared before, a dismal trade them for her and they'd go like good boys, but see, she was pregnant and--
It had been easier to walk into this with Jack than it was sticking it out. When Ianto glanced outward back there, over the horizon was home while London was once again threatening to burn his existence, and like a junkie he kept running back for a few more scars to save a world that had never treated him right.
Ianto kicked his toes against Jack's when one of the machine guns was forced up under Jack's chin, pressing his head back against the helicopter wall because he couldn't shut his gob. Jack settled down, brows still drawn, shrugged in Ianto's direction.
They should have fucked before walking into Thames House. Ianto closed his eyes to the drone. People waffled on about love and shit, but they should have fucked, a good hard buggering, even if it would have been all film moments of despair and anger and he would have thought of it in camera angles and fake sex sounds and near-death experiences.
A good snog now, wet and tongue and the type that had them down on the grating in the Hub (blinding heat and noise, explosion), he could go for that and not think of Mica and David and the fuck-all plan of shit governments in tidy offices, spending their days discussing fates over tables, compiling figures and--
Well, he had been caught throwing lit bottles at police cars and had been caught face-down to the tarmac in a protest against this or the other, spent nights in cells, back in the days. Then he'd fucked off to London and painted it all a bit of a lie, pocketing the money and not giving it a second thought.
The irony, now the Queen paid him, they consulted with Whitehall and he played boy in a pressed suit when he would have spit in their faces ten years before.
Thing is, he still would, but Jack would have his head in the not good way. He didn't think Jack knew, about him at eighteen or him finding the mummified alternatives in London later for the kick of rage, before Torchwood had picked him up and fucked with his mind about the bigger picture and change from within, and Lisa had fucked with his mind about love. They all had secrets, even if one of Jack's had spilled wide open, giving the execution of orders in 1965 a face.
The helicopter tilted, flying a turn and they left the Thames to their right and went out north.
"Let me talk to the PM!" Jack's shout made it over the hum of the motor, and it made the soldiers whisper and shake their heads. Ianto leaned forward glancing at them, wishing he'd had spy training and picked up lip reading alongside morse-coding. No joy. He raised an eyebrow across the helicopter at Jack, got a shrug back in reply and a further attempt from Jack to rouse a reply.
The soldiers remained zipped-lipped towards them, even if they scrounged up conversation and meaningful looks to each other.
"UNIT?" Ianto mouthed to Jack, overenunciating his lip movements. It made Jack crack a smile at least, inside joke about the buffness, but didn't provoke more than a shrug and Jack rolling his shoulders with a look of dismay at his cuffed state.
The helicopter took them further into the countryside, gardens getting bigger and morphing into more green and fewer anything else.
Here was hoping they could make up a plan on the fly once they landed wherever they were going, going into a roll and in without guns blazing for lack of guns. Here was hoping there was a plan. They should have given them blindfolds to keep the mystery. Still, it looked different from the air than it did from a forklift, and somehow flying to their execution was starting to lose its appeal. Jack was too busy communicating rage with his eyes to pick up on Ianto's warning kicks of his toes. There had better be a plan.
No cars on the street below them, crossing the M1, as it should be, and it raked empty instead of jammed with backed-up traffic, playing landing strip for no airplanes. They landed. Jack was out of the helicopter and Ianto was lagging behind, no great rolls or dives under waiting cars, no secret army.
"We're Torchwood!" Jack's voice carried over the sound of the rotorblades.
Ianto was waiting for bullets.
A bus drove off the compound behind them, gates, and Ianto didn't need to look at Jack to know about the flicker of calculation, making a run for it. A machine gun was pressed to Ianto's back. Molotov cocktails began to feel like a handy way to revisit the past.
Jack, in the middle of a circle of soldiers and, "We're Torchwood," like it carried any weight. Chin held high and eyes hard, and a troop marched past them, a group of soldiers in left and right cutting off their path and not sparing this any glance.
They were Torchwood and no-one gave a fuck. They were Torchwood with nothing but the name to write on badges and graffiti to smear onto walls.
He'd been eighteen when he'd been up in the North and burned houses of English bastards squatting in houses the Welsh should have owned, stealing their jobs, stealing their money and doing fuck-all for the country. Where was that now, windows to smash, but they were Torchwood and paid by the Crown.
He'd been eighteen and in it for the beat of adrenaline. People listened, people stopped and listened.
The soldiers carried on past Jack, like none of them existed. They stood on the tarmac, Ianto behind Jack, like they didn't exist at all. Waiting after the rush of the handcuffs and the helicopter joyride.
Ianto turned to the soldier beside him. "We're Torchwood."
Jack was yelling for order, to be heard, nearly pulling his shoulders out of their sockets while soldiers trotted past him. Ianto's tie fluttered up in the breeze, hit him in the face.
The soldier stared blankly back at him. Not even worth the bullets now, were they?
***
Ianto made it as far as Newport, the coachfare and the ticket in his hand and he got off at Newport and went back. Could've walked it, triumphant return along Newport Road, waved to the petrol station and the English fuckers on the university fields. Time before he'd made it to Dover. That had been something.
"Where've you been then?"
Ianto didn't look at Rhi as he hung up his jacket and threw the door to his room closed, only to have Rhi rip it open. "Mam's been off her head!"
"Mam's always off her head." Cued by the mere mention of her, she yelled something from her bedroom, something about all the English being rotten arselickers. "Can hear the heartache, can't you, Rhi? Piss off."
Rhi came at him, trying to shake sense into him maybe and he shoved her back, caught her across the face and blinked once, then opened his eyes to her shocked ones.
"Like Dad, then, you little pisser."
Ianto laughed and wanted to lunge for his vodka still hidden in his backpack because it was so absurd, they were so absurd, caught in this while their mother was banging on about the English tossers from her bedroom and the bed she couldn't get out of.
"Been different when Dad was still there," Ianto said eventually, kicked at the desk chair that rolled into the desk, shook the raggedy old computer on it that was worth nothing.
"Tough then," Rhi said, fingers clenched into fists at her side. "Been different for all of us, been different when he still had work, and Mam still had work and you little tosser had something right in your head."
Ianto shrugged, teeth clenching. He'd heard this before.
"Wouldn't be all wrong if you got work. Heard they were hiring down in the docks, or-"
Ianto turned and waved her off. The slap to his cheek came by surprise. He scoffed. "This what it is then? Piss off, Rhi, you and Mam and Dad with your stupid cunty bullshit, can piss right off."
"You're not fifteen anymore! You're not a baby anymore, for Christ's sake. Want to be living here forever, squatting here forever, living off Mam's pension until she can't pay her doctor's bills anymore-"
"You can talk. You and your squatting cunt English pisser. Whole town's about that. How you suck his dick for a bit of cheap money like a good Welsh whore."
Rhi reached for him then, and Ianto ducked around her, ran down the hallway and past his mam's yelling from her bedroom and he was outside again. Rutter'd be there or Lanes, they'd be about at the park maybe. Should've gone and been off to London, would've served them right. Rhi was shouting from the doorstep but he didn't react, just went on.
Forgot his backpack, forgot his booze. He kicked at the kerb. A car came full-tilt down the road and cut him off, one of those American ones that cost more than a flat, all blue lights and sleek and roaring. He grabbed a stone off the ground and threw it after the fuckers, missed by a mile.
He found Chirp and Lanes by the playground, Lanes dangling upside down from a swing, fingers dragging through the sand below. Further away by the houses a woman was pushing a pram, school was still on or there'd be the eleven-year-olds and their pot in the other corner of the grounds, near the park. You saw some of them shooting heroin now, at eleven, turning into cocksucking little junkies before they'd stopped pissing into their pants.
"Where you been then?" Chirp called, waved the bottle around.
Ianto kicked up sand as he walked closer, buried his hands in jeans, shrugged. "Had to go to my aunt's with my mam. My aunt, her husband, me uncle, he died you see. Money business."
Chirp glanced at Lanes, who waved at Ianto from upside down.
"Was down Pembrokeshire-ways. They have a farm. Pigs. And they've sheep. Well, my aunt does now."
"Your mam's brother then?"
Ianto shrugged and took the bottle from Chirp.
"What happened to the money from your dad's then? The savings from his shop down Newport-way? Rhi said-"
"Rhi's a lying englishfucking cuntface." Ianto shrugged again and walked over to Lanes, pushed her off the swing, laughing at her protest when he sat on the weathered wood and pushed off. She settled on his lap. Every swing made the metal beam croak above them. Chirp laid back on one of the rotating platforms, booze resting between his legs.
"Up north again then?" Lanes wound her arms around him. "Like last year?"
Ianto nodded. Last year, when they'd almost got caught. Lanes' hair brushed against his cheek. She opened the zipper on his jacket and stuffed her hands inside, resting her head against his collarbone.
"We'll show them," Ianto said after Chirp completed another rotation, trainers dragging in the wet sand. He brushed at Lanes' hair, blew across it. "We deserve it, don't we? Bit of something."
"More vodka." Lanes laughed.
"More vodka!" Chirp shouted, kicking up sand.
Ianto dreamed of London instead. He always did when he saw it in the news, when they showed Big Ben and whatnot. Might as well be New York City or Los Angeles. They deserved a bit of that, all of them did.
The baby in the pram over on the other side of the grounds by the houses started crying. Its mother bent down for it. His mam would have been yelling. Always had been, even before Dad. Lanes was saying something about moving out to one of the flats in the city and shopping and Chirp was singing a shanty about pretty black girls with tits, the wanker.
"Rutter's pissed off," Lanes said into Ianto's neck, playing with the hair at his nape, curling it around her fingers. "That's what Suze said next door from him. She said she's seen him leave."
Ianto's fingers curled around hers on his thigh. "When?"
Lanes shrugged. "Last week? Little pisser made over for England."
Ianto stared at Chirp rotating slowly, the sun glinting off his booze when he lay just so, then gone again when he was spun around further.
"My ma's not home. Shag?" Lanes groped for Ianto's dick.
Chirp fell into another song about fresh pussy and booze and Ianto let Lanes pull him off the swing and back to the houses, take him inside and they shagged on the stairs, still clothed, thrusting in time to Chirp's sing-song. He left her half-passed out after another smoke and made for home as it was.
Of all of them, he'd always thought he'd be the one who'd make it out.
***
The helicopter took off behind them, dragging leaves to flutter around them before they settled, taking all the noise except for the military busy-ness with it.
"I want answers!" Jack shouted at the nearest soldier.
"Inside, Captain Harkness," someone said. The soldiers parted rank in front of Jack, and Ianto could glimpse through between shoulders. Female voice, same uniform. Soldier with tits. Ianto felt the sexist pig but she didn't look like she'd give a care either way, arms crossed, and it took a tick, the same moment it took Jack, until he recognized her.
Jack froze, then exploded into a snarl, jerking at his cuffs. She remained calm, looking on. She had no gun, kept her hands clasped behind her back. She nodded at Jack, at Ianto. Ianto felt himself going into comic-synched snarl with Jack, like they were playing married and equally wounded.
"Brought us all the way here to kill us?" Spittle flew from Jack's mouth.
The woman showed her empty hands and no smile. "There are bigger things at stake. Inside, Captain." She bit out the syllables, jaw set. Any other time and Jack would have been begging to hire her for Torchwood for a bit of a flavour. Think jellybellies, he'd said to Ianto but wouldn't divulge the flavours. Ianto called him on tutti frutti, Jack had shrugged that off.
Maybe not her, maybe not now. Bombs and concrete weren't like girlfriends in basements. Maybe.
The push to the small of Ianto's back moved him forward, made him fall into step behind Jack, who was still arguing. They were playing their own little soldier game in different ways. The protocol and tightness of this, Ianto suppressed a laugh at how much Torchwood had always had lacked that and how much more it lacked it now that every scrap of structure had been stripped away.
The boots crunched in the sand as they stepped off the landing platform and walked towards the building, then went silent on concrete again when they reached it, leaving the real world outside in favour of dark corridors, smelling of damp. Ianto missed the sun already. The electric lines fizzed overhead, looking provisional and like they'd been abandoned a few decades earlier and were protesting their re-use. There was water on the floor, biding its time to play part in a big-scale electrocution. It figured that this was only marginally better than being locked in a police cell. Ianto kept his eyes on the back of Jack's coat between the swaying back and forth of black-clad soldiers or security service of some kind, the knot of his belt in the small of his back, Jack's fingers and thumbs interlinked, his thumb worrying about his knuckles.
They turned a corner, the whole troop of them, playing at ballet, when the patter of steps came towards them. Ianto craned his head.
"Uncle Jack!"
The troop stopped, and all Ianto saw were a child's hands around Jack's body. Small, white fingers curled into the grey of Jack's coat, holding on.
"Hey, soldier," Jack said with an oof and a laugh, shoulders straining for a hug back for the child. "Listen, stay with your mum, okay?"
Ianto stared at the thumb worrying about the knuckles of Jack's fingers, even when the small hands disengaged and the troop continued and they walked past a blond boy in a red jacket, past a woman. Jack's daughter Alice, Jack's grandson Steven. It had been different in theory.
Ianto stared at Jack's hands in cuffs as they walked along the corridors, turned his head only once to catch another glance at the child, but the soldier behind him thumped him between the shoulder blades and made him turn back. Alice was following them at a distance.
Visions of "nice to meet you, I'm shagging your dad. He's a good lay," toppled about in Ianto's head. Petty, that.
They should have shagged before walking into Thames House, after Jack had run out and come back. It made nothing better but it blurred everything out for a while.
A security barrier for identification, terse voices exchanging information. Jack kept his gob shut, here where Torchwood carried no weight whatsoever.
No-one expected high technology in a cheap abandoned warehouse, and the disarray of cables as they entered, provisional, all of it, was more like their getaway place than anything sophisticated the British secret service should have cooked up. The government that paid all of them.
Ianto took the time to look around, massaging his wrists when they took off the cuffs. In front of them them one of the blokes he recognized from their cameras in Thames House did the same, the looking and the rubbing at wrists. Nice little get-together. Warehouses, dampness and wanting to change the world. Funny how it all stayed the same.
"This should be everything you need. And if it's not, we'll find it," the woman addressed Jack. Ianto took a step forward to stand slightly behind him and to the right. Torchwood, as it was.
"For what?" Jack replied.
"Wavelengths. The 456 are named after a wavelength, and that's got to be the key to fighting back."
Wavelengths to be the rocks for the glasshouse. Hard to imagine it working better than bullets that pinged off the glass.
The bloke was laughing behind the soldier with the tits. "You're wasting your time. There's nothing you can do. I've analysed those transmissions for forty years and never broke them."
Soldier with tits turned, pulled her gun and fired. The bloke collapsed to the floor, holding his knee. Jack turned his head, raised an eyebrow. Ianto shrugged. That's how it rolled here. Better than bullets to the brain though.
"Not planning to kill us any longer then?" Jack asked.
She shook her head, didn't even crack a smile. "Bigger picture. So what do you think, Captain?" She nodded to the right of Ianto and Jack and they played puppets and both turned their heads at once. "She told me you were good. Was she right?"
Jack smiled. The woman - his daughter - Alice - looked back levelly and the smile was a bit tight and she glanced at Ianto, glanced back at Jack with something that had parental sex written all over it. Bit weird, she was older than him, Ianto thought, toeing at the puddle of water he was standing in. He gave Alice a tight nod, a greeting, friendly family hellos. They could have avoided this if he'd kicked it at Thames House.
"Let's get to work," Jack interrupted their non-moment and shrugged out of his coat. Ianto took it from him by instinct, hung it over the nearest chair as Jack moved to the laptops. "Get me access to the Torchwood software."
Someone moved somewhere. It wasn't him, he was fondling the coat and watching Alice.
"Ianto! The grid."
Ianto gave a verbal acknowledgment, somewhere between grunt and word, and typed in the command structure at a free laptop, memorized access codes for power and communication.
"Log on to the servers and..." Jack was smiling now, then Torchwood flickered across the screen and the mainframe connected. It ate up Ianto's access codes like candy, watermelon jellybellies, remote direction. Somewhere, buried under the rubble, something still existed.
"Welcome back," Ianto muttered.
The soldier with the tits was shouting out things. People hurried to obey.
"It still won't work," the bloke shouted from behind them. "There's nothing on there. It's useless."
Ianto glanced up at Jack, meeting his eyes for a moment. "We've got technology way beyond you," Jack said and turned back to the screen. Ianto was calling up background information and redirected energy, they'd need more of everything to do anything in this fine governmental facility.
"We hacked into Torchwood years ago, you idiot. There's nothing."
Ianto wanted to flip the bloke the v, just for old times' sake, English ponce, but refrained and focused on two screens at once, trying to keep up with Jack's pirating of old Torchwood resources on the other computer, deep-frying networks.
"Dad, come and look at this."
It made Ianto's finger stumble, trying to remember they were saving the world here, saving children after a bunch of shit debriefings they did better at Torchwood, thanks very much. Soldiers hurried along the wall of the building, out through the door. One line of electricity sparked above them, making them all duck momentarily.
Jack left his laptop and walked over to Alice. "Tone it down a bit, Ianto."
Ianto nodded and scaled the electricity back, focusing on getting their system stable.
"It's some sort of pirate station," Alice said to Jack. Ianto turned to look over his shoulder, then took his hands off the keyboard, walked over, trying to comprehend what was going on. "They're trying to get the story out to the public. But they're taking the kids."
Shitty camera phone pictures showed screaming children, soldiers, buses off in the country, mothers crying for help. A child's face pressed to a dirty bus window, fingers splayed then pulled into fists and pounding against it. Maybe eight, nine years old, crying, calling "Mummy."
Ianto retched.
***
The light was still on in the kitchen, or again, but none of them were ever up that early. Ianto took the fifty quid from his jacket pocket and stuffed them into his shoe in case Rhi had one of her flip-outs again about bringing home money and Mam dying in soiled sheets. He creaked the door open and slipped inside, hung his jacket on the hook and meant to slip past the lit kitchen unseen.
"Showing your face again?" Rhiannon said.
Ianto stopped in his tracks and glimpsed into the light, smoke plumes. Trying to judge her mood. Abort, abort. He shrugged and leaned against the doorframe.
"She's asleep."
Ianto glanced towards the bedroom door. He hadn't been in there in days. It reeked. He shrugged again, walked into the kitchen and to the fridge, glanced over the sour milk and rank butter to discoloured slabs of meat, coleslaw leftovers, some stew from last week. He shut the door again.
"I'm leaving," Ianto said to the pink bellydancing magnet on the kitchen door. "I'm gone from here." He glanced sideways at Rhi.
Rhi laughed, pulled on her cigarette and shook her head. "Head still in the clouds?" She sipped from a mug, probably old coffee. Rhi didn't drink, or hadn't since she'd been Ianto's age, she'd said.
Ianto looked at his shoes, muddy and the mess he'd dragged into the kitchen. He took a rag from the sink and cleaned up his tracks on the linoleum.
"Your friends give you these ideas?"
Ianto shrugged, wanted to reach down for the crinkling money in his shoe and shove it on the table. Money he made, well, here and there and the last tenner for a blowjob in the park, it'd pay for a while.
"Didn't use to be like this." Rhi gestured with her cigarette, ember falling. She had bags under her eyes, didn't look much like his big sister anymore. "Us. Used to be a family."
"Before Dad you mean?" When she nodded, Ianto dumped the rag in the sink. "Left us this, didn't he? Much good that did."
"He's always tried-"
"He's always tried fuck-all, Rhi." Ianto gestured at their kitchen table, the yellowing cabinet boards. "Lost his job and that was it, wasn't it? Suddenly he was drinking and- and-"
"Who was the one who went round to school and told everyone he was a bloody spy working for the government like in James Bond then?"
Ianto shut his mouth. "It was what you told me, Rhi," he said eventually, fingers playing with the rag in the sink, then grabbing for the pack of fags on the table, pushing one out, lighting it. "When he was a cunt, and when he came home drunk or didn't come home at all. Listen Ianto, it's all a secret, yeah?"
Rhiannon looked away.
Ianto willed her to meet his eyes. "It's like a game, Ianto, except it's true, that's what you said."
"You knew it was just messing about." Rhi stared at the table.
"Yeah, later I did. Later when I thought he was the best dad in the world and that I just couldn't tell anyone, that everything, all his stupid fucking behavior, all the-, it was all just this cover."
"It was the only thing that shut you up when you were bawling."
"Right." Ianto stubbed his cigarette at the ashtray. "He was the best dad in the world, not just some useless cunt who let down everyone." He threw the cigarette butt into the tray. "Wish he still was, you know. Wish that all your lies, that that was all true."
Rhi chuckled a little and Ianto figured it was at him for playing Daddy's boy when he hated the man's guts. A car came up the street outside the kitchen, blinding for a moment before it passed. Someone was shouting outside.
"Mam's dying," Rhi said.
"Been for years." Ianto clenched his fingers into fists, wished he hadn't thrown away the cigarette now.
Rhi sucked on her cigarette, other hand playing with the pack of fags. "Really dying now. Phil next door has been by yesterday. Said she'd need a hospital. Can't afford it, I said. And he went on about the NHS, but really, she wouldn't go."
"That twat's been saying that for years, every time he's here he goes on about people dying and the world ending and something in the water, Rhi. She's not dying, she's drinking and smoking and sleeping half the day."
"That's not-"
"She's been doing that for years." Ianto kicked at a chair. It scraped over the floor and Rhi whispered a shhh. "I'm going," Ianto said. "She can keep on dying for another ten years, I'm not staying here."
"Be like Dad then."
"Yeah, be like Dad then," Ianto said.
"This is who you are, Ianto. This place, this godforsaken place and the twats you piss about with and one of the girls you'll get preggers. You're not leaving, no-one's ever leaving this."
"You'll see." Ianto drew another fag from the pack in Rhi's hand. "I'm not going to stay here."
"What is it then? MI5? The Secret Service? Are you going to be James Bond, Ianto?"
Ianto flipped her off as he walked out of the kitchen.
***
It was beating tick tock. Snap of the fingers, beat of the heart, the thin little arm on analogue clocks shifting in time to the blinding red of emergency lighting.
Someone yelled a command. No-one knew to use comms here, it was all bluster. Someone brushed past Ianto, forced him to step back and back again until he stood in a corner, vast space between him and Jack. Jack was calling the shots. Not that anyone listened except the soldier with the tits and a couple of pseudo-scientists with cables in their hands who were secret service, MI5 or something else altogether by day. The bloke was still moaning in the corner and holding his knee.
The screens were still on pirate stations. Ianto had bummed a mobile off of someone but Rhi wasn't answering the phone and Gwen wasn't answering either.
"Don't worry, they're only taking the bad ones," the bloke was crooning from his perch in the corner and smirked at Ianto, still in his suit and his government agency demeanour.
Ianto dialed again. No-one picked up. Ianto's fingers paused on the keys. They zoomed in on large maps and at the corner was Wales and it cut off at Newport, reporting numbers, reporting movement, reporting shaky pictures of crying children.
"We have to stop this, Jack," Ianto said, stepping close.
The emergency lights flickered off, instantly flickered on again. A siren somewhere. Jack was yelling for someone to turn off the noise.
Jack had an eye on the little analogue clock hand on his wrist, whirr of the seconds brushing past, and he didn't need to look at Ianto. Blind trust, Ianto figured, that's what they'd call that. Playing tinman soldier in Toy Story. Hadn't he been the evil one? He forgot. Ianto stepped around the soldiers back to his laptop.
Lights. And for a moment Jack was frozen in them, red playing over his face while the pictures of busloads of children flickered over the small screens of their work stations. Jack went over the information another time, endless reloop on the screen. "If we cycle the wavelength back at them..."
"I know what you're trying to do. A constructive wave," the bloke said from the corner.
Ianto tried the mobile again with one hand, shifting through the allocation of energy on the other. They'd have to hack into MI5, or, really, use the pathway Tosh had got them, round the backway, knock knock, who's there.
"Do you think people aren't working on that all over the world?" the bloke continued. "But it's never gonna work. The effect would be like shouting at the 456, that's all. Just shouting."
"Why did Clem die?" Jack looked from the bloke at Ianto, who had a shrug and dropped the mobile in his pocket, dial on repeat. They hadn't been there, had only heard Gwen's shaky report of blood everywhere and Clem holding his head, the only one who'd got away in 1965, and screaming about being connected to the thing in the glasshouse. Ianto opened a second window. Someone had set up a countdown, and it was counting down, twenty minutes now.
"It was the 456 that killed him," the soldier with the tits said.
"But how did they do it? Why did they do it?"
"We've got the recording here," the woman said, and Ianto brought it up on the screen when one of the soldiers sent it over, splayed it over Jack's laptop and his own. Wavelengths wavered, the sound tinny from the speakers, and the picture of Clem. Hard to look away from that.
"His mind must have synced to the 456 back when he was a child," Jack said. "But they didn't need to kill him. He wasn't any threat. Unless maybe that connection hurt them."
"This is the 456 at the moment of his death. We've lifted the sound from the Thames House link," the woman said. The sound came louder over the speakers and direct.
Jack leaned closer, touched the screen as if it was touchable. Ianto bit back a laugh and enhanced the bit of visualized wavelength recording Jack had been looking at, then Jack took over himself, pulling out part of the form. The bloke hobbled over. Ianto glanced up, met Alice's eyes further away, hands in the pockets of her coat, like she didn't know how she'd ended up here. Welcome to life, love, Ianto thought and looked back down at his screen. His call on the mobile still went out to nothing.
What if Gwen had never reached them?
"That sound, Mr Dekker, what's that sound?" Dekker? Jack knew him? Ianto looked between them, thinking 1965 and then swallowing that dead.
"I don't know, it's new," Dekker replied.
"Exactly. It's new. We don't have to analyse the wavelength, just copy it. Turn it into a constructive wave." Jack looked at the screen.
"So Clem," Ianto began, "and them... and then they..."
"Sound. Wavelengths. That wavelength to be precise. They gave us that wavelength."
The countdown ticked down, playing across the silence now.
"And we turn it back on them," Ianto continued, fingers on the mobile phone. They'd turn it on them now and save the world, a job well done, and he'd go back and give Mica and David a tenner and send them on their way to live. Good day's work, no-one died.
Dekker nodded, smiling. The woman cocked her head.
"We have the wave, but we've got no way of transmitting," Jack said. He thumped at the keys on the laptop, enhancing sequences wildly. "I don't know how we could possibly-"
"Of course you have," Dekker said.
Ianto looked up from the screen, looked at Dekker, smirking, at Jack, the soldier with the tits averting her eyes.
"Shut up," Jack replied to the screen.
"Same way as them." Dekker looked up at Alice. The countdown ticked in a wall projection over her head and it clicked for Ianto.
"We'll find something else," Ianto said, cutting off Jack at his intake of breath, cutting off Dekker.
"What does he mean?" the soldier with the tits asked.
Ianto looked back at her steadily. "Don't listen to him."
She looked from him to Dekker, back at the computer screen as if it offered any answers, back at Dekker and his smug gleeful face. "Dekker, tell me."
"The 456 used children. To establish the resonance."
"Meaning what?"
Dekker shrugged, half a laugh gurgling in his throat, that Ianto wanted to punch at. "We need a child."
"What do you mean?" Alice, from halfway across the room, but it was tickling in her face, sinking in.
Jack's head snapped up from the screen, the frantic search for solutions. "Get her out of here."
Alice was shaking her head. "No, Dad. No, tell them no."
Dekker was chuckling openly now. "Centre of the resonance. Hoo! That child's gonna fry."
"We'll find another way. There is another way." Ianto typed away at the keyboard, trying to think of something, anything else.
"We're running out of time," the soldier with the tits said, staring at Jack like he was calling the shots.
"Not him. You're not getting him," Jack pressed out.
"One child or millions."
"Not him."
Amidst it all Ianto tried the mobile again, with not enough minutes on the clock. They could be on one of the buses. Right now they could be on one of those buses and he'd never know. Them and all the other kids like him and he'd stand by and press the button and watch it happen.
No-one picked up.
***
Vauxhall was treating them to sunshine that afternoon. It came in through the curtains that could use a wash, but then, so could the rest of this place and this part of London wasn't much different to Cardiff at its best. Ianto bent down to the telly knobs and changed the football to the tail end of the news because he'd caught a flicker of this in the corner shop earlier.
"Leave it!" Tim bounced the ball off Ianto. "I was watching the football, wanker!"
The telly stood in the middle of the living room, next to the stack of dishes. Tim lounged about the ratty sofa and started throwing the ball at the bare walls, half watching the telly when Ianto stood in front of it.
He was the only one laughing at the news report. Bit like you were seeing your life in the films.
Lanes' screaming face and Cock triumphant. They'd painted themselves all red, gibbering Welsh at the news cameras. They showed Lanes' face all big and she was making dragon sounds and her hand looked a bit burned. A house was still smoking behind them. He'd sent her money the first week, second week he'd just bought a burger for it. It would have been him there with them. Chirp was cursing in the background until they packed them into police cars and the report cut off.
"Welsh pissers," Tim said, throwing the ball about.
Ianto nodded, felt a bit of a stab somewhere and got up, changing the channel back as he did. Tim whooped for the footie on.
"They got work in. Docklands," Zebra shouted from the kitchen. "My mate's been told, it's all hush hush, but they had people walk around down past the shops, spreading the word."
Something to add to the job he was doing right now, he could use the money. "Put my name down, yeah?" he shouted over Tim yelling at the ref on the telly as he walked towards the kitchen, grabbed a cup. He'd have to be out in a few.
"Ian, someone called over from Cardiff. Said she was your sister?" Ben stuffed his face with dry toast. "Thought you said you're from Bristol, mate?"
"Am." Ianto shrugged and looked at the note of Rhi's call. "She moved."
"I said you'd-"
"Docklands then?" Ianto cut him off.
Zebra shrugged and sorted through their cabinets for noodles. "Canary Wharf. Thought you knew. They talked to Dyl and he told me. Just sat around the pub, eyeing people, he said."
Ianto waved him off and shoved the box of noodles across the counter at him.
"They're only cruising, not saying much, no formal application. It's all come over here, meet us there, all pretend posh-like."
"Posh?" Ianto grabbed a slice of bread from the open plastic bag, chewed down. "Proper posh? Suits?"
Ben looked Ianto up and down, low jeans, belt, manky shirt. "You wouldn't know a suit if it bit you in the arse."
Ianto shrugged. "Father's a master tailor."
Zebra whistled. "Get him to make you a suit then, posh boy."
Ianto laughed it off and gave him the v, then, with another sip of coffee and more toast, he was out the door and down the stairs, rapping his knuckles against the wall as he went. It didn't reek of foreign food stuff in the staircase, that was a plus. He caught the bus at the corner and got off further in the city.
Lisa was waiting by the coffeeshop, take-away coffee in hand, hers only. "Thought you'd never show," she said as she sipped the coffee through a straw.
"I'm busy," Ianto replied as he brushed past her and into the shop for his own coffee.
"Proper first date. I figured you'd be on time?" Eyebrow arched she looked him over when he came back out the shop, cradling his own papercup.
Ianto stuffed his shirt into his trousers with his free hand, grinned. "But I am."
Lisa looked nothing like Lanes, was nothing like her. She'd never paint her face red for a stupid little cause that passed the time. He didn't miss Cardiff and the estate and Cock and his slogans, but by rights he'd have been up there with them, burning down everything the English, the wealthy, the others had taken.
Lanes, on a swing, and drinking cheap booze until life made sense again and the nans from across the playground yelled at them to piss off. He hadn't thought of that in months. She probably had a kid now.
***
His mobile had run dead. No-one home. No-one to reach.
The lowest ten percent, he knew what that was.
It called for a big monologue, this, for saving the world and the good of people with the one child they had stashed in the corner, fuck all the ties and connections, fuck them being Torchwood and doing the right thing, making the hard choices and sending a kid to the fairies, making her mother lose everything in a heartbeat.
"Jack."
"Not him." Jack turned, the chair he leaned onto creaked with his movement, inviting Ianto to sit and watch the end of the world as they knew it, hello there REM, play out in shitty mobile cam quality as if they had the time.
"Not him, not me, not the Doctor, not anyone you know, is that it?" Ianto stared at Jack's fingers, then at the soldier with the tits across the room and back at Jack's face. "Where's your list of exceptions, Jack? Keeping it under a pillow?"
Jack's jaw wobbled, slow motion wobble. Alice was crying in the corner - Ianto wasn't even sure why she was there still, why no-one had led her out, who had any control over this nutjob of a place with muscle men carrying machine guns like water pistols.
"What did I do to get on there? Offer my arse for a shag?"
"Nice try." Jack laughed, leaned forward to press a few buttons on a cheap, unbranded laptop, like this subversive underground place wasn't allowed to show off their macs and iPhones without getting a slap on the wrist. "You're not doing this. You're not running this. Not him. Not this. I'm calling it. There is no discussion. And we're not using him."
"I will if I have to."
That stopped Jack in his tracks, mid-faux-movement.
They should have shagged hours ago. Now he felt impotent eighteen. Back when they'd resorted to fire and brute force to get their way when no-one else gave a fuck about them down by the docks and in the estates, back when he'd resorted to shagging and getting drunk on booze and high on drugs because there was nothing else.
"We're running out of time," the soldier with the tits said into his ear. "It's that one or all of them, all of us."
It was that one, only one, or kids like him and Lanes and the baby she'd got scraped out because this world fucked you over. He could have been on his way back to Wales, given the kids twenty quid for a celebration. He should try to get a connection to Gwen, have her talk some sense, but she'd be Flat Holm'ing and Pharm'ing and for once Jack would see nothing wrong with it.
"He'll fry," Dekker taunted and that wasn't helping.
"Not him. You won't." Jack turned and looked from Dekker to Ianto, and then only at Ianto.
Ianto's fingers twitched, he held out his hand and the soldier with the tits stood beside him and it took her a second. A second of Jack tracking his movement, her movement, Dekker going still in the corner and only Alice screaming while the tick tock of the countdown became audible and forced itself into every motion, between all syllables.
"Not him, Ianto. Not him."
Beat. Eight years old, a child. Beat.
She slid the gun into his hand, metal warmed, and it felt right at home there. Same one he'd used against the glasshouse, not that it had done any good there. His fingers curled around the handle, index finger around the trigger.
Jack lunged at him, and Ianto didn't even have to aim to hit his target.
Jack slumped to the ground. Alice screamed, high-pitched. Everyone looked at him, waiting.
"Him or all of them, all of us," the soldier with the tits said into the bubble of silence.
Dekker was rubbing his hands in glee, fucking pervert.
"No, you can't take him, you can't," Alice was screaming, charging at Ianto. Soldiers grabbed her by the shoulders and held her back, her body straining against them.
Ianto looked at the soldier with the tits and nodded once.
It was only two minutes, maybe, couldn't have been longer because time was ticking down. They were rigging the place, bustling and Ianto powered up the system as far as it would go, constructing waves by hand, Dekker beside him at the other screen.
Gagging, somewhere, at the back of his throat, when he looked at the blood down Jack's shirt. The door opened, closed and someone carried Steven inside, set him down in the middle of the room as the wires fired up into stand-by around him.
"What's happening? Where's Uncle Jack?"
"He's," Ianto swallowed, fingers flying over the keyboard and he should be telling the child something, but there was nothing useful. Give him a bottle of booze and maybe he wouldn't feel a thing. "Keep her out," he told the soldier with the tits, and the doors locked. A bit more hightech this place when they let on. And Alice's face was only pressed to the small window in the door where Ianto could avoid looking at it, and not see Rhi in it.
Their system was close to crashing on the last of the constructon, maxed out, the clock still ticking.
"Don't wake up," Ianto muttered to himself as he typed the last commands.
Steven was looking around for his mother, searching, for Jack. Ianto's fingers faltered. "Him or all of us," the soldier with the tits said to him, and Ianto gave a sharp nod. Bit of a lie to pretend it was for the good of the world when really, it was this kid or one he knew, and this one was closer.
He brought the construction together, hit enter and looked up. Steven, trembling. Transmission, a few key presses, and the wave on the screen transmitted through Steven. Fingers still on the keys, Ianto looked at him, and he owed him that much and his mother and Jack.
Behind him Jack gasped alive, immediately on his feet before two soldiers grabbed him, held him.
"Not him," he said when the wave went through Steven, and Ianto swallowed it all and didn't look away. Jack was screaming over the high pitch of the wave noise. "Not him."
Selfish little prick Ianto was, he thought that likely Jack would never use the same words about him again, as if there was nothing else to think.
Then it was only the wave holding Steven up and then it wasn't. The sound cut off.
***
"You never visit." Rhi took Mica from her seat, balanced her on her hip.
David was three and tugging at his suit trousers with chocolate fingers. Ianto tugged him off but he kept coming back at him like it was his mission in life to make sure Ianto fit back in. His suit chafed. His mobile was chirping in his pocket, likely Lisa calling to check on him, but if he took it out he'd have to answer, and if he answered he'd have to lie.
"I'm busy," Ianto said, smiling at Mica, but the child didn't much react. "Work, things like that."
"How is London, then? Good yeah?"
"Yeah, good." He should send more money probably. Past Rhi, outside the kitchen window, a couple came up the street, she pushing a pram and the two of them arguing, shouting at each other. For a moment she looked like Lanes, but he'd never asked about her. Figured she still lived around here, maybe.
"Go take David out now that you're here, will you, Ianto? Give me a minute of quiet?"
Ianto nodded and grasped the chocolate fingers in his own hand, let David lead him out through the door and past the houses to the playground. David let go at the first glimpse of swings and other children. Ianto buried his hands in his pockets as he followed behind at slower pace. People turned to look at him and he nodded, briefly, then kept his head down and toed the edge of grass and sand behind the swings, half-watching David.
"You're not from around here, are you?"
Ianto looked up. The girl who had asked was fourteen maybe, bottle of vodka between her legs. She and her friends were sitting in the bushes behind him, eyeing him, probably wondering if they could get at his wallet.
His mobile was vibrating in his pocket again.
"Uncle Ianto!" David called from the top of the slide at the same time. Ianto waved.
***
"Because there's a whole world out there," Ianto said, needing Jack to understand this. There was his world out there that didn't live forever and that belonged to him just a little. He was standing beside them, too awkward to kneel down with them when he'd caused this, but he didn't want to walk away just yet.
Jack gave no indication of even hearing him, arms around Alice who was rocking Steven on the floor, face buried in her hair. For him it had been since Lisa with the grief, and while this was familiar enough, it wasn't his. The mobile was still in his pocket. Still re-dialing and waiting to get through, but they were safe now.
And caught between an underground hide-away that didn't exist anymore and the world itself with all the godforsaken Rutters and Lanes and all the other dead cunts of his youth, caught between his past and Jack's despair, cradling Alice cradling Steven in his arms, Ianto shook his head. "I'm sorry," he said.
Jack didn't even look up, and Ianto couldn't blame him.
The door on the way out was a little like the one in the abandoned warehouse, back in Cardiff, the one where they'd smoked pot and made plans to straighten out the world. It fell into the lock, and Ianto stood in the sun, glancing up at the sky, and waited. He bummed a cigarette off one of the soldiers, stood and smoked and waited. The bustle of clean-up began around him, vans and buses and the roar of helicopters. Debriefings would happen later after everyone had checked to see if their bodies still came attached with arms and legs and head.
The jostle of people, shouts in the air and the sun on his face.
Strangely, the saved world didn't feel any different.
Characters: Ianto, Rhiannon, Jack, Agent Johnson, Dekker, Alice, Steven
Length: 9700 words
Rating: R
Spoilers: Children of Earth
Summary: Ianto doesn't die in Thames House, but the chain of events doesn't stop for that. The 456 are still making demands, the government is still complying, and so choices still need to be made.
Notes: For
rosesfade as part of the help_haiti auction. Thanks for your patience. Thanks for Britspeak help to smirnoffmule, thanks for beta to amand_r, copperbadge, neifile7, paragraphs. Loosely connected to Time Has Set Its Maggot and Prince Of The Apple Towns. Title taken from a Dylan Thomas poem. The stones pinged off the window, duller when they hit the wall beside it. Ianto turned off the light in his room, stared out through the window into the night. Gone eleven now. One of the streetlights painted a line into his room, over his desk stuffed with crap, along the shelving he'd put together when he'd been ten, the wallpaper that still had laser aliens and the bed he never made.
Ping, another pebble went, and Ianto waved from behind the window, made the cutting across his throat gesture. Wanker didn't look for it.
"Oi!" Ianto only had to lean forward a little to see his mam lean outward through the kitchen window next to his, shouting at Rutter who was hidden in the bushes. Ianto could see him from where he was standing, face pressed to the window pane. He splayed his fingers to the glass and gestured five to Rutter, but Rutter was too busy finding pebbles.
His mam was going on about them thieves now, stealing their jobs, those English cunts that squatted in their houses. She was raging at the window. Ianto pulled the vodka from underneath his stack of dirty laundry, slipped out of his room, past the kitchen, blue with smoke from his mam's cheap fags, and grabbed his jacket from the hook in the corridor.
"Going out," he shouted, opening the door at the same time.
His mam was yelling from the window for him to stop and get a goddamn job, tottering steps on the linoleum as she made for the kitchen door, but Ianto was slipping out already, throwing the door into the lock and making a run for it down the stairs and the small incline, Rutter joining him as they both slid down the muddy side of a hill to stumble onto the road proper.
"Thought you'd never show."
Ianto laughed and unscrewed the vodka, taking a pull. Rutter was drinking something from a plastic bottle. His uncle was burning liquor up in the valleys and Rutter palmed a few every now and then. "Rhi's gone out, the slut, blowing the McPhee cunt behind the shed or something."
"Cunt," Rutter replied and fell into a trot with Ianto, both of them walking to the side of the road, small branches and gutter mud loud under their feet.
"Stupid cunt," Ianto agreed, drinking it down with more vodka. "McPhee's a ponce anyway. Saw him check me out. Wants to suck my dick." Ianto danced up on the kerb of the street, balancing badly, stumbling off it and a few steps up the hill before he took them down again, nearly falling in the rain-drenched soil.
"Wants to eat shit, he does," Rutter shouted, running to catch up with Ianto. "Your sister's cunt gets soaked in homo juices."
Ianto laughed at that, then waved Rutter on. "Meeting down by the docks?"
Rutter whooped, that passed for yes, and they made their way there. They took the backway past the whirring electricity of the high voltage behind fences. Something in Ianto wanted to touch that just once, to see if you could really die from that.
In the dark, the drizzle starting up, it sounded like alien language whirring in the air and Ianto saluted it in Star Trek manner, muttering, "Captain Picard, sir," when Rutter was shouting about cuntfaces from further ahead and waited for Ianto catch up.
They stepped back onto an industry backway road and Rutter shoved the door to the abandoned warehouse open. Shouts of agitation and protest from the crowd inside quieted when they stepped in, shut the door again.
Someone had thought it brilliant to make a fire; the smoke was billowing around them. Rutter bounded off towards Koo-da and Springs, blokes that had a few years on them but Rutter liked to be in with them and they liked to take the piss. Ianto sauntered over to the rest of the bunch curled in a corner, vodka bottle dangling from his fingers. He bent down, fingers curling around the back of Lanes' neck and thrust his tongue into her mouth, swapping vodka spit between them. Chirp was punching at his thigh so he stumbled over their legs and bodies, half settling in their midst, still lip-locked with Lanes. Someone's fingers tried to take the booze from him and he pulled away from the kiss then and scooted to settle against the wall between Chirp and Davies, old mattress under his arse.
"Your sister's shagging McPhee," Cock shouted from where he stood with Rutter and Springs.
It had been Coch once, going with the Welsh pride. Asking Cock it probably still was, but it had been too easy to turn it into something more fitting. Ianto gave him the V over the heads of the others.
"English cunt is probably fingering her right now. Stealing our jobs, then stealing our pussy."
"Piss off," Ianto shouted, then Lanes pulled him down to lie half on the mattress, half on the floor, behind the others, the vodka bottle pressed between them like a child. He shoved the bottle to the side at the thought. Enough of babies. She said it still hurt sometimes from when she'd got it scraped out.
Lanes fumbled at his face, fingering his hair and cheeks while they were kissing and he pressed his hand under her skirt. She splayed her legs for him when he pushed his fingers in, moaned for him. He groped for her breasts with his other hand, she rutted against him.
"Talked to me mate north," Cock said. Someone banged something to start the meeting officially. Chirp groaned, a small stone pinged off one of the metal walls, people laughed. "We'll be going up North, big thing, big big thing. One of them English cunts is refusing to pay up proper for restoration, says it's improper," Cock affected posh. "Improper, is it, to pay proper fees to the country you're squatting in, the cunt."
"What about Plaid Cymru?" Davies shouted.
Lanes was biting at Ianto's jaw, had her hand curled around his wrist and pushed down on his fingers. He rubbed off on her through his jeans.
"What about them?" Cock gave back.
"Heard them say they don't want no violence no more. Was on the news, wasn't it?" Agreeable grunts all around. "Said it wasn't good for the Welsh, for-"
"Wigley sitting with his fat arse, licking Labour's bollocks," Cock interrupted. Lanes was moaning in Ianto's ear as Cock went on about the coward Plaid Cymru arses and that they owed it to their country.
One of them, probably Rutter, started singing Land of My Fathers in drunken vowels, Gwlad this and that, and the rest of them joined in. Ianto had had to kiss arse in Welsh in school and had forgot it all by now anyway, he lip-mimed badly when he had to. No need to now, when he was spilling into his jeans and against Lanes' thigh, squeezing at her cunt until she pushed his hand away, smoothed her skirt and sat up. She smiled at him, grabbed his vodka bottle and took a healthy swig.
Everyone was applauding, not them for their performance, but Cock and his slogans. They'd be going up north then. Better than Cardiff where the coppers had them cornered two minutes after they'd moved in on the house. Safer. Thing is, last time he'd be here. He hadn't told Lanes, hadn't told Rutter, hadn't told his mam or Rhi. Been back and forth on it, had stood at the station and turned back again, but he'd had no job since leaving school, stacking things in the market but that's no job, is it.
He looked at Rutter and Cock and Lanes grinning at him and rubbing at her stomach as if she was highlighting the baby she'd scraped out for him. He needed out.
The drone of the rotorblades, loud engine sounds made London below not-so-picturesque and for tourists, a novelty joyride for a few thousand quid. They were rising up too fast to see anything but blurs of people, and had to contend with the lights of emergency services pooled around Whitehall. Ianto had caught Jack's eye as they were shoved into the helicopter, arse over feet, and lip-read-imagined Jack's quip about the comparatively gentle treatment of soft copper hands. They'd planned to separate them but helicopters were not airbuses. When Ianto angled his foot just so, the toes of his boots pressed against Jack's.
If they were any more James Bond, Ianto would know morse code and they'd mission-impossible their way out of the helicopter to be picked up by a speedboat on the Thames. He should sell that idea to the Beeb.
Not really. If he could, he'd sell the whole storyline of synchronized children controlled by aliens that could be contained in glasshouses without being caught. Anyone had stones to throw? His stomach turned as he remembered the child caught inside with that, in it. The 456, named after the wavelength they used. Only civil servants would come up with a number for that kind of horror. It had been twelve children in 1965, they wanted ten percent now.
Jack was shouting at one of the soldiers, telegraphing dismay for both of them. Somewhere below Gwen was making back to Wales, and when Jack had decreed it would be her, the split second of heart-clenching protest had made Ianto whisper gibberish to her for goodbye, a find them find them when he'd never cared before, a dismal trade them for her and they'd go like good boys, but see, she was pregnant and--
It had been easier to walk into this with Jack than it was sticking it out. When Ianto glanced outward back there, over the horizon was home while London was once again threatening to burn his existence, and like a junkie he kept running back for a few more scars to save a world that had never treated him right.
Ianto kicked his toes against Jack's when one of the machine guns was forced up under Jack's chin, pressing his head back against the helicopter wall because he couldn't shut his gob. Jack settled down, brows still drawn, shrugged in Ianto's direction.
They should have fucked before walking into Thames House. Ianto closed his eyes to the drone. People waffled on about love and shit, but they should have fucked, a good hard buggering, even if it would have been all film moments of despair and anger and he would have thought of it in camera angles and fake sex sounds and near-death experiences.
A good snog now, wet and tongue and the type that had them down on the grating in the Hub (blinding heat and noise, explosion), he could go for that and not think of Mica and David and the fuck-all plan of shit governments in tidy offices, spending their days discussing fates over tables, compiling figures and--
Well, he had been caught throwing lit bottles at police cars and had been caught face-down to the tarmac in a protest against this or the other, spent nights in cells, back in the days. Then he'd fucked off to London and painted it all a bit of a lie, pocketing the money and not giving it a second thought.
The irony, now the Queen paid him, they consulted with Whitehall and he played boy in a pressed suit when he would have spit in their faces ten years before.
Thing is, he still would, but Jack would have his head in the not good way. He didn't think Jack knew, about him at eighteen or him finding the mummified alternatives in London later for the kick of rage, before Torchwood had picked him up and fucked with his mind about the bigger picture and change from within, and Lisa had fucked with his mind about love. They all had secrets, even if one of Jack's had spilled wide open, giving the execution of orders in 1965 a face.
The helicopter tilted, flying a turn and they left the Thames to their right and went out north.
"Let me talk to the PM!" Jack's shout made it over the hum of the motor, and it made the soldiers whisper and shake their heads. Ianto leaned forward glancing at them, wishing he'd had spy training and picked up lip reading alongside morse-coding. No joy. He raised an eyebrow across the helicopter at Jack, got a shrug back in reply and a further attempt from Jack to rouse a reply.
The soldiers remained zipped-lipped towards them, even if they scrounged up conversation and meaningful looks to each other.
"UNIT?" Ianto mouthed to Jack, overenunciating his lip movements. It made Jack crack a smile at least, inside joke about the buffness, but didn't provoke more than a shrug and Jack rolling his shoulders with a look of dismay at his cuffed state.
The helicopter took them further into the countryside, gardens getting bigger and morphing into more green and fewer anything else.
Here was hoping they could make up a plan on the fly once they landed wherever they were going, going into a roll and in without guns blazing for lack of guns. Here was hoping there was a plan. They should have given them blindfolds to keep the mystery. Still, it looked different from the air than it did from a forklift, and somehow flying to their execution was starting to lose its appeal. Jack was too busy communicating rage with his eyes to pick up on Ianto's warning kicks of his toes. There had better be a plan.
No cars on the street below them, crossing the M1, as it should be, and it raked empty instead of jammed with backed-up traffic, playing landing strip for no airplanes. They landed. Jack was out of the helicopter and Ianto was lagging behind, no great rolls or dives under waiting cars, no secret army.
"We're Torchwood!" Jack's voice carried over the sound of the rotorblades.
Ianto was waiting for bullets.
A bus drove off the compound behind them, gates, and Ianto didn't need to look at Jack to know about the flicker of calculation, making a run for it. A machine gun was pressed to Ianto's back. Molotov cocktails began to feel like a handy way to revisit the past.
Jack, in the middle of a circle of soldiers and, "We're Torchwood," like it carried any weight. Chin held high and eyes hard, and a troop marched past them, a group of soldiers in left and right cutting off their path and not sparing this any glance.
They were Torchwood and no-one gave a fuck. They were Torchwood with nothing but the name to write on badges and graffiti to smear onto walls.
He'd been eighteen when he'd been up in the North and burned houses of English bastards squatting in houses the Welsh should have owned, stealing their jobs, stealing their money and doing fuck-all for the country. Where was that now, windows to smash, but they were Torchwood and paid by the Crown.
He'd been eighteen and in it for the beat of adrenaline. People listened, people stopped and listened.
The soldiers carried on past Jack, like none of them existed. They stood on the tarmac, Ianto behind Jack, like they didn't exist at all. Waiting after the rush of the handcuffs and the helicopter joyride.
Ianto turned to the soldier beside him. "We're Torchwood."
Jack was yelling for order, to be heard, nearly pulling his shoulders out of their sockets while soldiers trotted past him. Ianto's tie fluttered up in the breeze, hit him in the face.
The soldier stared blankly back at him. Not even worth the bullets now, were they?
Ianto made it as far as Newport, the coachfare and the ticket in his hand and he got off at Newport and went back. Could've walked it, triumphant return along Newport Road, waved to the petrol station and the English fuckers on the university fields. Time before he'd made it to Dover. That had been something.
"Where've you been then?"
Ianto didn't look at Rhi as he hung up his jacket and threw the door to his room closed, only to have Rhi rip it open. "Mam's been off her head!"
"Mam's always off her head." Cued by the mere mention of her, she yelled something from her bedroom, something about all the English being rotten arselickers. "Can hear the heartache, can't you, Rhi? Piss off."
Rhi came at him, trying to shake sense into him maybe and he shoved her back, caught her across the face and blinked once, then opened his eyes to her shocked ones.
"Like Dad, then, you little pisser."
Ianto laughed and wanted to lunge for his vodka still hidden in his backpack because it was so absurd, they were so absurd, caught in this while their mother was banging on about the English tossers from her bedroom and the bed she couldn't get out of.
"Been different when Dad was still there," Ianto said eventually, kicked at the desk chair that rolled into the desk, shook the raggedy old computer on it that was worth nothing.
"Tough then," Rhi said, fingers clenched into fists at her side. "Been different for all of us, been different when he still had work, and Mam still had work and you little tosser had something right in your head."
Ianto shrugged, teeth clenching. He'd heard this before.
"Wouldn't be all wrong if you got work. Heard they were hiring down in the docks, or-"
Ianto turned and waved her off. The slap to his cheek came by surprise. He scoffed. "This what it is then? Piss off, Rhi, you and Mam and Dad with your stupid cunty bullshit, can piss right off."
"You're not fifteen anymore! You're not a baby anymore, for Christ's sake. Want to be living here forever, squatting here forever, living off Mam's pension until she can't pay her doctor's bills anymore-"
"You can talk. You and your squatting cunt English pisser. Whole town's about that. How you suck his dick for a bit of cheap money like a good Welsh whore."
Rhi reached for him then, and Ianto ducked around her, ran down the hallway and past his mam's yelling from her bedroom and he was outside again. Rutter'd be there or Lanes, they'd be about at the park maybe. Should've gone and been off to London, would've served them right. Rhi was shouting from the doorstep but he didn't react, just went on.
Forgot his backpack, forgot his booze. He kicked at the kerb. A car came full-tilt down the road and cut him off, one of those American ones that cost more than a flat, all blue lights and sleek and roaring. He grabbed a stone off the ground and threw it after the fuckers, missed by a mile.
He found Chirp and Lanes by the playground, Lanes dangling upside down from a swing, fingers dragging through the sand below. Further away by the houses a woman was pushing a pram, school was still on or there'd be the eleven-year-olds and their pot in the other corner of the grounds, near the park. You saw some of them shooting heroin now, at eleven, turning into cocksucking little junkies before they'd stopped pissing into their pants.
"Where you been then?" Chirp called, waved the bottle around.
Ianto kicked up sand as he walked closer, buried his hands in jeans, shrugged. "Had to go to my aunt's with my mam. My aunt, her husband, me uncle, he died you see. Money business."
Chirp glanced at Lanes, who waved at Ianto from upside down.
"Was down Pembrokeshire-ways. They have a farm. Pigs. And they've sheep. Well, my aunt does now."
"Your mam's brother then?"
Ianto shrugged and took the bottle from Chirp.
"What happened to the money from your dad's then? The savings from his shop down Newport-way? Rhi said-"
"Rhi's a lying englishfucking cuntface." Ianto shrugged again and walked over to Lanes, pushed her off the swing, laughing at her protest when he sat on the weathered wood and pushed off. She settled on his lap. Every swing made the metal beam croak above them. Chirp laid back on one of the rotating platforms, booze resting between his legs.
"Up north again then?" Lanes wound her arms around him. "Like last year?"
Ianto nodded. Last year, when they'd almost got caught. Lanes' hair brushed against his cheek. She opened the zipper on his jacket and stuffed her hands inside, resting her head against his collarbone.
"We'll show them," Ianto said after Chirp completed another rotation, trainers dragging in the wet sand. He brushed at Lanes' hair, blew across it. "We deserve it, don't we? Bit of something."
"More vodka." Lanes laughed.
"More vodka!" Chirp shouted, kicking up sand.
Ianto dreamed of London instead. He always did when he saw it in the news, when they showed Big Ben and whatnot. Might as well be New York City or Los Angeles. They deserved a bit of that, all of them did.
The baby in the pram over on the other side of the grounds by the houses started crying. Its mother bent down for it. His mam would have been yelling. Always had been, even before Dad. Lanes was saying something about moving out to one of the flats in the city and shopping and Chirp was singing a shanty about pretty black girls with tits, the wanker.
"Rutter's pissed off," Lanes said into Ianto's neck, playing with the hair at his nape, curling it around her fingers. "That's what Suze said next door from him. She said she's seen him leave."
Ianto's fingers curled around hers on his thigh. "When?"
Lanes shrugged. "Last week? Little pisser made over for England."
Ianto stared at Chirp rotating slowly, the sun glinting off his booze when he lay just so, then gone again when he was spun around further.
"My ma's not home. Shag?" Lanes groped for Ianto's dick.
Chirp fell into another song about fresh pussy and booze and Ianto let Lanes pull him off the swing and back to the houses, take him inside and they shagged on the stairs, still clothed, thrusting in time to Chirp's sing-song. He left her half-passed out after another smoke and made for home as it was.
Of all of them, he'd always thought he'd be the one who'd make it out.
The helicopter took off behind them, dragging leaves to flutter around them before they settled, taking all the noise except for the military busy-ness with it.
"I want answers!" Jack shouted at the nearest soldier.
"Inside, Captain Harkness," someone said. The soldiers parted rank in front of Jack, and Ianto could glimpse through between shoulders. Female voice, same uniform. Soldier with tits. Ianto felt the sexist pig but she didn't look like she'd give a care either way, arms crossed, and it took a tick, the same moment it took Jack, until he recognized her.
Jack froze, then exploded into a snarl, jerking at his cuffs. She remained calm, looking on. She had no gun, kept her hands clasped behind her back. She nodded at Jack, at Ianto. Ianto felt himself going into comic-synched snarl with Jack, like they were playing married and equally wounded.
"Brought us all the way here to kill us?" Spittle flew from Jack's mouth.
The woman showed her empty hands and no smile. "There are bigger things at stake. Inside, Captain." She bit out the syllables, jaw set. Any other time and Jack would have been begging to hire her for Torchwood for a bit of a flavour. Think jellybellies, he'd said to Ianto but wouldn't divulge the flavours. Ianto called him on tutti frutti, Jack had shrugged that off.
Maybe not her, maybe not now. Bombs and concrete weren't like girlfriends in basements. Maybe.
The push to the small of Ianto's back moved him forward, made him fall into step behind Jack, who was still arguing. They were playing their own little soldier game in different ways. The protocol and tightness of this, Ianto suppressed a laugh at how much Torchwood had always had lacked that and how much more it lacked it now that every scrap of structure had been stripped away.
The boots crunched in the sand as they stepped off the landing platform and walked towards the building, then went silent on concrete again when they reached it, leaving the real world outside in favour of dark corridors, smelling of damp. Ianto missed the sun already. The electric lines fizzed overhead, looking provisional and like they'd been abandoned a few decades earlier and were protesting their re-use. There was water on the floor, biding its time to play part in a big-scale electrocution. It figured that this was only marginally better than being locked in a police cell. Ianto kept his eyes on the back of Jack's coat between the swaying back and forth of black-clad soldiers or security service of some kind, the knot of his belt in the small of his back, Jack's fingers and thumbs interlinked, his thumb worrying about his knuckles.
They turned a corner, the whole troop of them, playing at ballet, when the patter of steps came towards them. Ianto craned his head.
"Uncle Jack!"
The troop stopped, and all Ianto saw were a child's hands around Jack's body. Small, white fingers curled into the grey of Jack's coat, holding on.
"Hey, soldier," Jack said with an oof and a laugh, shoulders straining for a hug back for the child. "Listen, stay with your mum, okay?"
Ianto stared at the thumb worrying about the knuckles of Jack's fingers, even when the small hands disengaged and the troop continued and they walked past a blond boy in a red jacket, past a woman. Jack's daughter Alice, Jack's grandson Steven. It had been different in theory.
Ianto stared at Jack's hands in cuffs as they walked along the corridors, turned his head only once to catch another glance at the child, but the soldier behind him thumped him between the shoulder blades and made him turn back. Alice was following them at a distance.
Visions of "nice to meet you, I'm shagging your dad. He's a good lay," toppled about in Ianto's head. Petty, that.
They should have shagged before walking into Thames House, after Jack had run out and come back. It made nothing better but it blurred everything out for a while.
A security barrier for identification, terse voices exchanging information. Jack kept his gob shut, here where Torchwood carried no weight whatsoever.
No-one expected high technology in a cheap abandoned warehouse, and the disarray of cables as they entered, provisional, all of it, was more like their getaway place than anything sophisticated the British secret service should have cooked up. The government that paid all of them.
Ianto took the time to look around, massaging his wrists when they took off the cuffs. In front of them them one of the blokes he recognized from their cameras in Thames House did the same, the looking and the rubbing at wrists. Nice little get-together. Warehouses, dampness and wanting to change the world. Funny how it all stayed the same.
"This should be everything you need. And if it's not, we'll find it," the woman addressed Jack. Ianto took a step forward to stand slightly behind him and to the right. Torchwood, as it was.
"For what?" Jack replied.
"Wavelengths. The 456 are named after a wavelength, and that's got to be the key to fighting back."
Wavelengths to be the rocks for the glasshouse. Hard to imagine it working better than bullets that pinged off the glass.
The bloke was laughing behind the soldier with the tits. "You're wasting your time. There's nothing you can do. I've analysed those transmissions for forty years and never broke them."
Soldier with tits turned, pulled her gun and fired. The bloke collapsed to the floor, holding his knee. Jack turned his head, raised an eyebrow. Ianto shrugged. That's how it rolled here. Better than bullets to the brain though.
"Not planning to kill us any longer then?" Jack asked.
She shook her head, didn't even crack a smile. "Bigger picture. So what do you think, Captain?" She nodded to the right of Ianto and Jack and they played puppets and both turned their heads at once. "She told me you were good. Was she right?"
Jack smiled. The woman - his daughter - Alice - looked back levelly and the smile was a bit tight and she glanced at Ianto, glanced back at Jack with something that had parental sex written all over it. Bit weird, she was older than him, Ianto thought, toeing at the puddle of water he was standing in. He gave Alice a tight nod, a greeting, friendly family hellos. They could have avoided this if he'd kicked it at Thames House.
"Let's get to work," Jack interrupted their non-moment and shrugged out of his coat. Ianto took it from him by instinct, hung it over the nearest chair as Jack moved to the laptops. "Get me access to the Torchwood software."
Someone moved somewhere. It wasn't him, he was fondling the coat and watching Alice.
"Ianto! The grid."
Ianto gave a verbal acknowledgment, somewhere between grunt and word, and typed in the command structure at a free laptop, memorized access codes for power and communication.
"Log on to the servers and..." Jack was smiling now, then Torchwood flickered across the screen and the mainframe connected. It ate up Ianto's access codes like candy, watermelon jellybellies, remote direction. Somewhere, buried under the rubble, something still existed.
"Welcome back," Ianto muttered.
The soldier with the tits was shouting out things. People hurried to obey.
"It still won't work," the bloke shouted from behind them. "There's nothing on there. It's useless."
Ianto glanced up at Jack, meeting his eyes for a moment. "We've got technology way beyond you," Jack said and turned back to the screen. Ianto was calling up background information and redirected energy, they'd need more of everything to do anything in this fine governmental facility.
"We hacked into Torchwood years ago, you idiot. There's nothing."
Ianto wanted to flip the bloke the v, just for old times' sake, English ponce, but refrained and focused on two screens at once, trying to keep up with Jack's pirating of old Torchwood resources on the other computer, deep-frying networks.
"Dad, come and look at this."
It made Ianto's finger stumble, trying to remember they were saving the world here, saving children after a bunch of shit debriefings they did better at Torchwood, thanks very much. Soldiers hurried along the wall of the building, out through the door. One line of electricity sparked above them, making them all duck momentarily.
Jack left his laptop and walked over to Alice. "Tone it down a bit, Ianto."
Ianto nodded and scaled the electricity back, focusing on getting their system stable.
"It's some sort of pirate station," Alice said to Jack. Ianto turned to look over his shoulder, then took his hands off the keyboard, walked over, trying to comprehend what was going on. "They're trying to get the story out to the public. But they're taking the kids."
Shitty camera phone pictures showed screaming children, soldiers, buses off in the country, mothers crying for help. A child's face pressed to a dirty bus window, fingers splayed then pulled into fists and pounding against it. Maybe eight, nine years old, crying, calling "Mummy."
Ianto retched.
The light was still on in the kitchen, or again, but none of them were ever up that early. Ianto took the fifty quid from his jacket pocket and stuffed them into his shoe in case Rhi had one of her flip-outs again about bringing home money and Mam dying in soiled sheets. He creaked the door open and slipped inside, hung his jacket on the hook and meant to slip past the lit kitchen unseen.
"Showing your face again?" Rhiannon said.
Ianto stopped in his tracks and glimpsed into the light, smoke plumes. Trying to judge her mood. Abort, abort. He shrugged and leaned against the doorframe.
"She's asleep."
Ianto glanced towards the bedroom door. He hadn't been in there in days. It reeked. He shrugged again, walked into the kitchen and to the fridge, glanced over the sour milk and rank butter to discoloured slabs of meat, coleslaw leftovers, some stew from last week. He shut the door again.
"I'm leaving," Ianto said to the pink bellydancing magnet on the kitchen door. "I'm gone from here." He glanced sideways at Rhi.
Rhi laughed, pulled on her cigarette and shook her head. "Head still in the clouds?" She sipped from a mug, probably old coffee. Rhi didn't drink, or hadn't since she'd been Ianto's age, she'd said.
Ianto looked at his shoes, muddy and the mess he'd dragged into the kitchen. He took a rag from the sink and cleaned up his tracks on the linoleum.
"Your friends give you these ideas?"
Ianto shrugged, wanted to reach down for the crinkling money in his shoe and shove it on the table. Money he made, well, here and there and the last tenner for a blowjob in the park, it'd pay for a while.
"Didn't use to be like this." Rhi gestured with her cigarette, ember falling. She had bags under her eyes, didn't look much like his big sister anymore. "Us. Used to be a family."
"Before Dad you mean?" When she nodded, Ianto dumped the rag in the sink. "Left us this, didn't he? Much good that did."
"He's always tried-"
"He's always tried fuck-all, Rhi." Ianto gestured at their kitchen table, the yellowing cabinet boards. "Lost his job and that was it, wasn't it? Suddenly he was drinking and- and-"
"Who was the one who went round to school and told everyone he was a bloody spy working for the government like in James Bond then?"
Ianto shut his mouth. "It was what you told me, Rhi," he said eventually, fingers playing with the rag in the sink, then grabbing for the pack of fags on the table, pushing one out, lighting it. "When he was a cunt, and when he came home drunk or didn't come home at all. Listen Ianto, it's all a secret, yeah?"
Rhiannon looked away.
Ianto willed her to meet his eyes. "It's like a game, Ianto, except it's true, that's what you said."
"You knew it was just messing about." Rhi stared at the table.
"Yeah, later I did. Later when I thought he was the best dad in the world and that I just couldn't tell anyone, that everything, all his stupid fucking behavior, all the-, it was all just this cover."
"It was the only thing that shut you up when you were bawling."
"Right." Ianto stubbed his cigarette at the ashtray. "He was the best dad in the world, not just some useless cunt who let down everyone." He threw the cigarette butt into the tray. "Wish he still was, you know. Wish that all your lies, that that was all true."
Rhi chuckled a little and Ianto figured it was at him for playing Daddy's boy when he hated the man's guts. A car came up the street outside the kitchen, blinding for a moment before it passed. Someone was shouting outside.
"Mam's dying," Rhi said.
"Been for years." Ianto clenched his fingers into fists, wished he hadn't thrown away the cigarette now.
Rhi sucked on her cigarette, other hand playing with the pack of fags. "Really dying now. Phil next door has been by yesterday. Said she'd need a hospital. Can't afford it, I said. And he went on about the NHS, but really, she wouldn't go."
"That twat's been saying that for years, every time he's here he goes on about people dying and the world ending and something in the water, Rhi. She's not dying, she's drinking and smoking and sleeping half the day."
"That's not-"
"She's been doing that for years." Ianto kicked at a chair. It scraped over the floor and Rhi whispered a shhh. "I'm going," Ianto said. "She can keep on dying for another ten years, I'm not staying here."
"Be like Dad then."
"Yeah, be like Dad then," Ianto said.
"This is who you are, Ianto. This place, this godforsaken place and the twats you piss about with and one of the girls you'll get preggers. You're not leaving, no-one's ever leaving this."
"You'll see." Ianto drew another fag from the pack in Rhi's hand. "I'm not going to stay here."
"What is it then? MI5? The Secret Service? Are you going to be James Bond, Ianto?"
Ianto flipped her off as he walked out of the kitchen.
It was beating tick tock. Snap of the fingers, beat of the heart, the thin little arm on analogue clocks shifting in time to the blinding red of emergency lighting.
Someone yelled a command. No-one knew to use comms here, it was all bluster. Someone brushed past Ianto, forced him to step back and back again until he stood in a corner, vast space between him and Jack. Jack was calling the shots. Not that anyone listened except the soldier with the tits and a couple of pseudo-scientists with cables in their hands who were secret service, MI5 or something else altogether by day. The bloke was still moaning in the corner and holding his knee.
The screens were still on pirate stations. Ianto had bummed a mobile off of someone but Rhi wasn't answering the phone and Gwen wasn't answering either.
"Don't worry, they're only taking the bad ones," the bloke was crooning from his perch in the corner and smirked at Ianto, still in his suit and his government agency demeanour.
Ianto dialed again. No-one picked up. Ianto's fingers paused on the keys. They zoomed in on large maps and at the corner was Wales and it cut off at Newport, reporting numbers, reporting movement, reporting shaky pictures of crying children.
"We have to stop this, Jack," Ianto said, stepping close.
The emergency lights flickered off, instantly flickered on again. A siren somewhere. Jack was yelling for someone to turn off the noise.
Jack had an eye on the little analogue clock hand on his wrist, whirr of the seconds brushing past, and he didn't need to look at Ianto. Blind trust, Ianto figured, that's what they'd call that. Playing tinman soldier in Toy Story. Hadn't he been the evil one? He forgot. Ianto stepped around the soldiers back to his laptop.
Lights. And for a moment Jack was frozen in them, red playing over his face while the pictures of busloads of children flickered over the small screens of their work stations. Jack went over the information another time, endless reloop on the screen. "If we cycle the wavelength back at them..."
"I know what you're trying to do. A constructive wave," the bloke said from the corner.
Ianto tried the mobile again with one hand, shifting through the allocation of energy on the other. They'd have to hack into MI5, or, really, use the pathway Tosh had got them, round the backway, knock knock, who's there.
"Do you think people aren't working on that all over the world?" the bloke continued. "But it's never gonna work. The effect would be like shouting at the 456, that's all. Just shouting."
"Why did Clem die?" Jack looked from the bloke at Ianto, who had a shrug and dropped the mobile in his pocket, dial on repeat. They hadn't been there, had only heard Gwen's shaky report of blood everywhere and Clem holding his head, the only one who'd got away in 1965, and screaming about being connected to the thing in the glasshouse. Ianto opened a second window. Someone had set up a countdown, and it was counting down, twenty minutes now.
"It was the 456 that killed him," the soldier with the tits said.
"But how did they do it? Why did they do it?"
"We've got the recording here," the woman said, and Ianto brought it up on the screen when one of the soldiers sent it over, splayed it over Jack's laptop and his own. Wavelengths wavered, the sound tinny from the speakers, and the picture of Clem. Hard to look away from that.
"His mind must have synced to the 456 back when he was a child," Jack said. "But they didn't need to kill him. He wasn't any threat. Unless maybe that connection hurt them."
"This is the 456 at the moment of his death. We've lifted the sound from the Thames House link," the woman said. The sound came louder over the speakers and direct.
Jack leaned closer, touched the screen as if it was touchable. Ianto bit back a laugh and enhanced the bit of visualized wavelength recording Jack had been looking at, then Jack took over himself, pulling out part of the form. The bloke hobbled over. Ianto glanced up, met Alice's eyes further away, hands in the pockets of her coat, like she didn't know how she'd ended up here. Welcome to life, love, Ianto thought and looked back down at his screen. His call on the mobile still went out to nothing.
What if Gwen had never reached them?
"That sound, Mr Dekker, what's that sound?" Dekker? Jack knew him? Ianto looked between them, thinking 1965 and then swallowing that dead.
"I don't know, it's new," Dekker replied.
"Exactly. It's new. We don't have to analyse the wavelength, just copy it. Turn it into a constructive wave." Jack looked at the screen.
"So Clem," Ianto began, "and them... and then they..."
"Sound. Wavelengths. That wavelength to be precise. They gave us that wavelength."
The countdown ticked down, playing across the silence now.
"And we turn it back on them," Ianto continued, fingers on the mobile phone. They'd turn it on them now and save the world, a job well done, and he'd go back and give Mica and David a tenner and send them on their way to live. Good day's work, no-one died.
Dekker nodded, smiling. The woman cocked her head.
"We have the wave, but we've got no way of transmitting," Jack said. He thumped at the keys on the laptop, enhancing sequences wildly. "I don't know how we could possibly-"
"Of course you have," Dekker said.
Ianto looked up from the screen, looked at Dekker, smirking, at Jack, the soldier with the tits averting her eyes.
"Shut up," Jack replied to the screen.
"Same way as them." Dekker looked up at Alice. The countdown ticked in a wall projection over her head and it clicked for Ianto.
"We'll find something else," Ianto said, cutting off Jack at his intake of breath, cutting off Dekker.
"What does he mean?" the soldier with the tits asked.
Ianto looked back at her steadily. "Don't listen to him."
She looked from him to Dekker, back at the computer screen as if it offered any answers, back at Dekker and his smug gleeful face. "Dekker, tell me."
"The 456 used children. To establish the resonance."
"Meaning what?"
Dekker shrugged, half a laugh gurgling in his throat, that Ianto wanted to punch at. "We need a child."
"What do you mean?" Alice, from halfway across the room, but it was tickling in her face, sinking in.
Jack's head snapped up from the screen, the frantic search for solutions. "Get her out of here."
Alice was shaking her head. "No, Dad. No, tell them no."
Dekker was chuckling openly now. "Centre of the resonance. Hoo! That child's gonna fry."
"We'll find another way. There is another way." Ianto typed away at the keyboard, trying to think of something, anything else.
"We're running out of time," the soldier with the tits said, staring at Jack like he was calling the shots.
"Not him. You're not getting him," Jack pressed out.
"One child or millions."
"Not him."
Amidst it all Ianto tried the mobile again, with not enough minutes on the clock. They could be on one of the buses. Right now they could be on one of those buses and he'd never know. Them and all the other kids like him and he'd stand by and press the button and watch it happen.
No-one picked up.
Vauxhall was treating them to sunshine that afternoon. It came in through the curtains that could use a wash, but then, so could the rest of this place and this part of London wasn't much different to Cardiff at its best. Ianto bent down to the telly knobs and changed the football to the tail end of the news because he'd caught a flicker of this in the corner shop earlier.
"Leave it!" Tim bounced the ball off Ianto. "I was watching the football, wanker!"
The telly stood in the middle of the living room, next to the stack of dishes. Tim lounged about the ratty sofa and started throwing the ball at the bare walls, half watching the telly when Ianto stood in front of it.
He was the only one laughing at the news report. Bit like you were seeing your life in the films.
Lanes' screaming face and Cock triumphant. They'd painted themselves all red, gibbering Welsh at the news cameras. They showed Lanes' face all big and she was making dragon sounds and her hand looked a bit burned. A house was still smoking behind them. He'd sent her money the first week, second week he'd just bought a burger for it. It would have been him there with them. Chirp was cursing in the background until they packed them into police cars and the report cut off.
"Welsh pissers," Tim said, throwing the ball about.
Ianto nodded, felt a bit of a stab somewhere and got up, changing the channel back as he did. Tim whooped for the footie on.
"They got work in. Docklands," Zebra shouted from the kitchen. "My mate's been told, it's all hush hush, but they had people walk around down past the shops, spreading the word."
Something to add to the job he was doing right now, he could use the money. "Put my name down, yeah?" he shouted over Tim yelling at the ref on the telly as he walked towards the kitchen, grabbed a cup. He'd have to be out in a few.
"Ian, someone called over from Cardiff. Said she was your sister?" Ben stuffed his face with dry toast. "Thought you said you're from Bristol, mate?"
"Am." Ianto shrugged and looked at the note of Rhi's call. "She moved."
"I said you'd-"
"Docklands then?" Ianto cut him off.
Zebra shrugged and sorted through their cabinets for noodles. "Canary Wharf. Thought you knew. They talked to Dyl and he told me. Just sat around the pub, eyeing people, he said."
Ianto waved him off and shoved the box of noodles across the counter at him.
"They're only cruising, not saying much, no formal application. It's all come over here, meet us there, all pretend posh-like."
"Posh?" Ianto grabbed a slice of bread from the open plastic bag, chewed down. "Proper posh? Suits?"
Ben looked Ianto up and down, low jeans, belt, manky shirt. "You wouldn't know a suit if it bit you in the arse."
Ianto shrugged. "Father's a master tailor."
Zebra whistled. "Get him to make you a suit then, posh boy."
Ianto laughed it off and gave him the v, then, with another sip of coffee and more toast, he was out the door and down the stairs, rapping his knuckles against the wall as he went. It didn't reek of foreign food stuff in the staircase, that was a plus. He caught the bus at the corner and got off further in the city.
Lisa was waiting by the coffeeshop, take-away coffee in hand, hers only. "Thought you'd never show," she said as she sipped the coffee through a straw.
"I'm busy," Ianto replied as he brushed past her and into the shop for his own coffee.
"Proper first date. I figured you'd be on time?" Eyebrow arched she looked him over when he came back out the shop, cradling his own papercup.
Ianto stuffed his shirt into his trousers with his free hand, grinned. "But I am."
Lisa looked nothing like Lanes, was nothing like her. She'd never paint her face red for a stupid little cause that passed the time. He didn't miss Cardiff and the estate and Cock and his slogans, but by rights he'd have been up there with them, burning down everything the English, the wealthy, the others had taken.
Lanes, on a swing, and drinking cheap booze until life made sense again and the nans from across the playground yelled at them to piss off. He hadn't thought of that in months. She probably had a kid now.
His mobile had run dead. No-one home. No-one to reach.
The lowest ten percent, he knew what that was.
It called for a big monologue, this, for saving the world and the good of people with the one child they had stashed in the corner, fuck all the ties and connections, fuck them being Torchwood and doing the right thing, making the hard choices and sending a kid to the fairies, making her mother lose everything in a heartbeat.
"Jack."
"Not him." Jack turned, the chair he leaned onto creaked with his movement, inviting Ianto to sit and watch the end of the world as they knew it, hello there REM, play out in shitty mobile cam quality as if they had the time.
"Not him, not me, not the Doctor, not anyone you know, is that it?" Ianto stared at Jack's fingers, then at the soldier with the tits across the room and back at Jack's face. "Where's your list of exceptions, Jack? Keeping it under a pillow?"
Jack's jaw wobbled, slow motion wobble. Alice was crying in the corner - Ianto wasn't even sure why she was there still, why no-one had led her out, who had any control over this nutjob of a place with muscle men carrying machine guns like water pistols.
"What did I do to get on there? Offer my arse for a shag?"
"Nice try." Jack laughed, leaned forward to press a few buttons on a cheap, unbranded laptop, like this subversive underground place wasn't allowed to show off their macs and iPhones without getting a slap on the wrist. "You're not doing this. You're not running this. Not him. Not this. I'm calling it. There is no discussion. And we're not using him."
"I will if I have to."
That stopped Jack in his tracks, mid-faux-movement.
They should have shagged hours ago. Now he felt impotent eighteen. Back when they'd resorted to fire and brute force to get their way when no-one else gave a fuck about them down by the docks and in the estates, back when he'd resorted to shagging and getting drunk on booze and high on drugs because there was nothing else.
"We're running out of time," the soldier with the tits said into his ear. "It's that one or all of them, all of us."
It was that one, only one, or kids like him and Lanes and the baby she'd got scraped out because this world fucked you over. He could have been on his way back to Wales, given the kids twenty quid for a celebration. He should try to get a connection to Gwen, have her talk some sense, but she'd be Flat Holm'ing and Pharm'ing and for once Jack would see nothing wrong with it.
"He'll fry," Dekker taunted and that wasn't helping.
"Not him. You won't." Jack turned and looked from Dekker to Ianto, and then only at Ianto.
Ianto's fingers twitched, he held out his hand and the soldier with the tits stood beside him and it took her a second. A second of Jack tracking his movement, her movement, Dekker going still in the corner and only Alice screaming while the tick tock of the countdown became audible and forced itself into every motion, between all syllables.
"Not him, Ianto. Not him."
Beat. Eight years old, a child. Beat.
She slid the gun into his hand, metal warmed, and it felt right at home there. Same one he'd used against the glasshouse, not that it had done any good there. His fingers curled around the handle, index finger around the trigger.
Jack lunged at him, and Ianto didn't even have to aim to hit his target.
Jack slumped to the ground. Alice screamed, high-pitched. Everyone looked at him, waiting.
"Him or all of them, all of us," the soldier with the tits said into the bubble of silence.
Dekker was rubbing his hands in glee, fucking pervert.
"No, you can't take him, you can't," Alice was screaming, charging at Ianto. Soldiers grabbed her by the shoulders and held her back, her body straining against them.
Ianto looked at the soldier with the tits and nodded once.
It was only two minutes, maybe, couldn't have been longer because time was ticking down. They were rigging the place, bustling and Ianto powered up the system as far as it would go, constructing waves by hand, Dekker beside him at the other screen.
Gagging, somewhere, at the back of his throat, when he looked at the blood down Jack's shirt. The door opened, closed and someone carried Steven inside, set him down in the middle of the room as the wires fired up into stand-by around him.
"What's happening? Where's Uncle Jack?"
"He's," Ianto swallowed, fingers flying over the keyboard and he should be telling the child something, but there was nothing useful. Give him a bottle of booze and maybe he wouldn't feel a thing. "Keep her out," he told the soldier with the tits, and the doors locked. A bit more hightech this place when they let on. And Alice's face was only pressed to the small window in the door where Ianto could avoid looking at it, and not see Rhi in it.
Their system was close to crashing on the last of the constructon, maxed out, the clock still ticking.
"Don't wake up," Ianto muttered to himself as he typed the last commands.
Steven was looking around for his mother, searching, for Jack. Ianto's fingers faltered. "Him or all of us," the soldier with the tits said to him, and Ianto gave a sharp nod. Bit of a lie to pretend it was for the good of the world when really, it was this kid or one he knew, and this one was closer.
He brought the construction together, hit enter and looked up. Steven, trembling. Transmission, a few key presses, and the wave on the screen transmitted through Steven. Fingers still on the keys, Ianto looked at him, and he owed him that much and his mother and Jack.
Behind him Jack gasped alive, immediately on his feet before two soldiers grabbed him, held him.
"Not him," he said when the wave went through Steven, and Ianto swallowed it all and didn't look away. Jack was screaming over the high pitch of the wave noise. "Not him."
Selfish little prick Ianto was, he thought that likely Jack would never use the same words about him again, as if there was nothing else to think.
Then it was only the wave holding Steven up and then it wasn't. The sound cut off.
"You never visit." Rhi took Mica from her seat, balanced her on her hip.
David was three and tugging at his suit trousers with chocolate fingers. Ianto tugged him off but he kept coming back at him like it was his mission in life to make sure Ianto fit back in. His suit chafed. His mobile was chirping in his pocket, likely Lisa calling to check on him, but if he took it out he'd have to answer, and if he answered he'd have to lie.
"I'm busy," Ianto said, smiling at Mica, but the child didn't much react. "Work, things like that."
"How is London, then? Good yeah?"
"Yeah, good." He should send more money probably. Past Rhi, outside the kitchen window, a couple came up the street, she pushing a pram and the two of them arguing, shouting at each other. For a moment she looked like Lanes, but he'd never asked about her. Figured she still lived around here, maybe.
"Go take David out now that you're here, will you, Ianto? Give me a minute of quiet?"
Ianto nodded and grasped the chocolate fingers in his own hand, let David lead him out through the door and past the houses to the playground. David let go at the first glimpse of swings and other children. Ianto buried his hands in his pockets as he followed behind at slower pace. People turned to look at him and he nodded, briefly, then kept his head down and toed the edge of grass and sand behind the swings, half-watching David.
"You're not from around here, are you?"
Ianto looked up. The girl who had asked was fourteen maybe, bottle of vodka between her legs. She and her friends were sitting in the bushes behind him, eyeing him, probably wondering if they could get at his wallet.
His mobile was vibrating in his pocket again.
"Uncle Ianto!" David called from the top of the slide at the same time. Ianto waved.
"Because there's a whole world out there," Ianto said, needing Jack to understand this. There was his world out there that didn't live forever and that belonged to him just a little. He was standing beside them, too awkward to kneel down with them when he'd caused this, but he didn't want to walk away just yet.
Jack gave no indication of even hearing him, arms around Alice who was rocking Steven on the floor, face buried in her hair. For him it had been since Lisa with the grief, and while this was familiar enough, it wasn't his. The mobile was still in his pocket. Still re-dialing and waiting to get through, but they were safe now.
And caught between an underground hide-away that didn't exist anymore and the world itself with all the godforsaken Rutters and Lanes and all the other dead cunts of his youth, caught between his past and Jack's despair, cradling Alice cradling Steven in his arms, Ianto shook his head. "I'm sorry," he said.
Jack didn't even look up, and Ianto couldn't blame him.
The door on the way out was a little like the one in the abandoned warehouse, back in Cardiff, the one where they'd smoked pot and made plans to straighten out the world. It fell into the lock, and Ianto stood in the sun, glancing up at the sky, and waited. He bummed a cigarette off one of the soldiers, stood and smoked and waited. The bustle of clean-up began around him, vans and buses and the roar of helicopters. Debriefings would happen later after everyone had checked to see if their bodies still came attached with arms and legs and head.
The jostle of people, shouts in the air and the sun on his face.
Strangely, the saved world didn't feel any different.
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Date: 2010-04-12 03:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-17 12:51 am (UTC)