sam_storyteller (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sam_storyteller) wrote2005-07-17 03:31 pm
sam_storyteller) wrote2005-07-17 03:31 pm
Entry tags:
Condition of Release, 2/5
Title: Condition of Release
Part: 2 of 5
Rating: PG-13; R in the final chapter
Summary: Jack has studied the Cybermen for forty years, and he's damned if he'll let one take any of his people away from him without a fight.
Beta Credit:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
51stcenturyfox, misswinterhill, neifile7, and spiderine are winnars! :D
CHAPTER TWO
The archives were Ianto's domain, and had been Suzie's before him and David's before her, but Jack had been here since before the archives were moved in -- he'd supervised the transfer himself when the Hub was converted from underground station to base. Some years, he'd been the archivist; for a decade after the second war, when he'd been traumatised without really realising it, they'd put him in the archives because he couldn't stand to be out in the open and unprotected. He'd worked past it, slowly, but in the time between his medical discharge in '44 ("battle fatigue"; it was true that he was so tired) and his first return to the field in '53, he'd spent years underground. He'd slept here, eaten here, worked only here. He knew every twist and turn intimately, and he knew where the locked and hidden doors were.
Sometime in that hazy, dimly-lit decade, he'd realised that very few people in Torchwood knew his secret anymore, and if he could lock away the records of just how long he'd been alive, the secret could be kept. So he'd opened the Secure Archive, and every few years any records with his name attached were "sterilised", his name removed, and the originals locked in the Secure Archive. That was where the Cyberman files were, except for the ones concerning Torchwood One. And he was looking for something much older than those.
He unlocked the door with his strap and stepped inside -- oh, he had been tidy once, obsessed with order down here in the dark. If he could just put everything in order, file it all away in its rightful place, then the world wouldn't be dangerous and he could go out in the air again.
He'd worked through that, too.
Here they were, the carefully preserved tapes and film reels and files. He should have put them on DVD years ago; the ghost of the pale, frightened man in the room agreed with him. Well, no time like the present, and he needed the records anyway. He took an empty storage box from under the workbench and began to fill it with records. The Hartigan Excavation site reports, the Waterfield reels, the autopsy file on Vaughn, the Invasion Debriefing, the Van Statten authentication, the Snowcap Base black box recordings. Most of it wouldn't be relevant; only the Waterfield reels touched on this aspect, as far as Jack could recall, but his memory sometimes failed him. He could use Tosh's converter rig to put them on DVD and review them on the fly.
He paused to think for a moment, and then added the Carstairs tapes to the box as well. Not relevant, perhaps; no Cybermen on those tapes. But he recalled something about mind control on them, something about a programming machine, that might make them valuable.
When he was done, he locked up behind himself and carried the box up to the general archive work area, covered in a mixture of Tosh's broken tech, Ianto's half-finished work, and a variety of his own personal repair projects. He loaded the reels and tapes into the converter rig, programmed it to upload to his secure server, burn to DVD, and incinerate, and went upstairs again. He paused briefly on the archive threshold, the ghost of his past peering terrified into the open Hub, then continued up and out, into the atrium.
All seemed quiet; Tosh was clacking away at her keyboard with a box of take-away sitting next to her. She looked up and gave him a smile when she saw him.
"Our liaison called," she said, tipping her head at Jack's office. "Gwen took it. UNIT's dispatching now, they'll report in as each survivor is cleared. Here's our two," she added, swinging the monitor over so that he could see. "One's in Newport, but the other's in Dover -- that's a bit more than a day trip, unless we leave it for tomorrow. Even then..."
"Yeah," Jack said, studying the map. Most of the other survivors were in the north. Two in Scotland, three in Ireland, Ianto and one other in Wales, one in Dover and two in Norfolk, five on the northern border, and thirteen scattered around Yorkshire. He wondered what it was about Yorkshire.
"Owen," Jack called.
"Yeah, fuck," Owen called back.
"Lose a finger?" Jack asked. A hand shot up from medical, with two upraised fingers still very much attached. "What's the problem?"
"Nothing, just found something else she wrecked," Owen called. "What is it?"
"You got a scanner for me?"
"I will have, in about twenty minutes."
"How hard is it to operate?"
Owen's face and arms appeared over the ledge of the medical bay. "Not hard. Why?"
"I'm taking Tosh and Gwen with me to Newport. We'll drop Gwen back here and go on to Dover from there. You and Gwen can watch Ianto in shifts."
"Suits me, I'm not eager to see another Cyberman in a hurry," Owen said, and disappeared again.
"We'll drive to Dover tonight, investigate if we get there before dark, otherwise hit it in the morning," Jack told Tosh. "Up for this?"
"Of course," she said with a smile. "Have I got time to pack an overnight bag?"
"Yeah, do it," Jack said. "I'll pick you up."
He walked over to his office, where Ianto and Gwen were eating Chinese from take-away boxes, Ianto as if he'd never seen food before, Gwen a little more daintily. Ianto had a napkin tucked in his shirt. The same shirt he'd been wearing for two days, the one smeared with grime, the one with blood on the cuffs. Jack sighed.
"Gwen, take a minute," he said, and jerked his head at the atrium. Gwen got up, took her food with her, and squeezed his hand as she walked out. Jack settled in at his desk and regarded Ianto, who set his food aside with a regretful look and pulled the napkin gingerly out of his shirt.
"I think," Jack said, "that most of what you're saying is conditioning. I can see you in there, and we're going to pull you out. For now, don't worry about replying, just listen and try to shake off the instinct, and when we're done I'll make sure you understand. Okay?"
Ianto nodded.
"We have to make sure this didn't happen to anyone else. Tosh and I are going to be gone overnight. I'm leaving you here with Owen and Gwen, and I'm going to authorise Owen to try and find out -- why this is happening, what your patterns are."
Again that moment -- the brief blankness, and the flash of real emotion before Ianto composed his face again.
"He's my second when I'm gone, so you need to do what he says. If he hurts you I want you to tell him, otherwise he'll just keep pushing and -- " Jack paused. Inspiration struck. "And you'll get caught. You don't want that. So do what he says and tell him if he's hurting you. Gwen'll be here to make sure you're okay. When I get back we'll fix it. Until then, you stay in the Hub, and Owen and Gwen will watch you in shifts. You can sleep in the cells, but you don't have to stay there during the day if you don't want to. You can clean or read, but I'm restricting your database access. You can go out if someone goes with you." Jack rested his hands flat on the table. "You understand me? Do you really understand?"
"Yes, Jack," Ianto said, and it was -- obedient, yes, but there was also a hint of emotion in his voice that Jack took for truth.
"Good. Give Gwen your keys, she'll bring you some clothes and anything else you want from your place."
Ianto took his keys out of his pocket and went to find Gwen. Jack watched him go, pensive, then went to tell Owen what to do while he and Tosh were away.
***
By the time they'd wrestled Owen's "portable" scanner into the SUV, Jack had managed a few mouthfuls of food and Tosh had called to say she was ready to go. The UNIT liaison, Corporal someone, had also called to say the first survivor they'd investigated was clean. Ianto had hovered around the SUV while Jack and Gwen closed the boot and got ready to go, looking a little forlorn that he couldn't help. As Gwen pulled the SUV out of its parking space in the secure garage, Jack watched Owen take him by the arm and pull him back into the Hub.
They picked up Tosh and made good time to Newport, while Jack sat in the backseat with his headphones in and reviewed the data he'd pulled out of storage. It was, legitimately, horrible stuff; they had worse individual reports on record, but the Cybermen were like the Daleks -- they just kept coming back, and their ability to time-travel meant you could never be fully sure you were rid of them. They seemed to like to play games, too, for all their talk of straightforward unemotional rationality. Cybermen never staged a frontal assault; they snuck in, used human agents, used human technology, appealed to human fear and greed to get what they wanted. Only then did the slaughter start.
There were more than twenty-seven survivors of Canary Wharf; those were only the ones who had actually been there that day, and didn't include a dozen or so others who had called in sick or weren't in the building when disaster struck. Those plus the survivors, when compared with the total roster of building staff and the known dead, still left a little over 300 "missing." Among them, Rose Tyler, who had been a "visiting guest" that day. The best Jack could hope for was that she had died quickly.
In the end, Newport turned out to be a wash. Their local wasn't even alive anymore; she'd killed herself months ago, and her husband had just kept collecting the pension without telling anyone. He looked terrified when they turned up on his doorstep, but Jack didn't have the energy to be angry. He lied, said something official-sounding about the pension being converted to a legacy payment for her two kids until they were eighteen, and had Gwen and Tosh do a sweep of the husband, his kids, the house, and the garden to make sure there was no trace of a Cyberman anywhere nearby.
They were all silent on the way back to Cardiff, Gwen staring out the window, Tosh typing a report in the back seat, Jack focusing on the road and silently cursing, not for the first time, the Cybermen and Yvonne Hartman and maybe the Doctor too, a little, though he felt traitorous doing it. He was nearly certain the Doctor was still alive; Jack knew Time Lords didn't stay down as easily as humans did.
They left Gwen at Ianto's place, with the assurance she'd get a cab back to the Hub, and turned east towards the river bridge, England, and the chalk-riddled coast where Dover lay. Crossing over into England seemed to break a wall in Tosh; they weren't a mile past the Severn when she spoke.
"Jack," she said hesitantly.
"Yeah?" he asked, keeping his eyes on the road.
"I spoke with Owen earlier..." she hesitated, then continued. "He said you told him...well, he said he thought maybe you lost someone at Canary Wharf."
"Yeah," Jack said, fingers tightening slightly on the wheel.
"You never told us. When it happened. I know you were angry, but nobody knew," she said. "That part, I mean."
"It wasn't relevant," Jack said, then relented. "Maybe it was. I didn't want to talk about it."
"Do you now?"
"No," he said, trying to ease the harshness of it. He wasn't angry at Tosh. It wasn't her fault. "Not -- right now."
"If you did -- "
"I know," he interrupted, and gave her a quick glance. "Thank you, Tosh."
She nodded. "Worried about Ianto?"
"Worried about a lot of things."
Jack measured that drive by the UNIT reports that Tosh received; they were halfway to London when the first survivor was cleared, two-thirds when the second came in clean, just past it when the report came in that one of the Irish survivors had been wired, and had killed two UNIT soldiers before she, and the Cyberman she'd been sheltering, were killed. Jack banged his fist on the steering wheel angrily, but he drove on.
"Maybe that was the only one," Tosh said hopefully. "After all, the odds have got to be enormous against there being even one, let alone more-than."
"Not that enormous," Jack said. "You can't factor for bullshit luck and Cyberman ingenuity. Well, maybe you could," he allowed, and Tosh gave him a small, pleased smile. "We won't make it to Dover before dark. I'm not going hunting in the dark. We'll find a place to stay, get some dinner, go out first thing tomorrow."
"By then we should know more about how UNIT is getting on," Tosh said thoughtfully. "Might help us be better prepared."
"Good. That's a plan," Jack said, and they were quiet the rest of the way to Dover. When they arrived, Jack left Tosh to check them into a guest house near their target, and took a little time to wander around downtown, with his best charm turned on, asking about anything strange or unusual that might have been happening in the area. He got a few phone numbers (unasked-for, if not unwelcome) but no news he could make use of. He was glad to give up the pretense for a while and meet Tosh for dinner in a restaurant that looked out on the water. The waiter seemed to think they were a couple and smiled when he brought them their food -- though he looked perplexed when Tosh asked for wine and Jack just wanted cold water, no ice. They didn't talk much at first, though she didn't seem uncomfortable with it; they were both tired.
Sometimes it was so hard.
"Her name was Rose Tyler," he said quietly, after he'd eaten enough to take the edge off his hunger. "The woman who died in Canary Wharf."
Tosh looked at him, her face curious, but he could see she wouldn't actually ask what she wanted to.
"We weren't lovers," he added, and saw her nod. "I wanted -- I could have asked, I just never did."
"That doesn't sound like you," Tosh said, then put a hand to her mouth. "I don't mean -- "
Jack waved it off. "Well, I did once, before I really knew her." He smiled. One dance, on the hull of a spaceship high above London, but then she'd just been a pretty girl he wanted to con. After, she and the Doctor had both been too precious to him.
"Did she work for Torchwood, then?" Tosh asked.
No." Jack shook his head. "She wouldn't have, not for them. I don't know why she was there that day at all. I doubt she knew. And she died. End of story."
"I'm sorry, Jack," Tosh said.
"Me too," Jack said. Then he shrugged. "It doesn't matter, it's over, and we have to make sure it doesn't happen again."
That evening there were two more UNIT reports, both clears, and Jack checked in on Owen and Gwen; by nine, Ianto was already asleep in the cells, and Jack watched him over a CCTV feed to his laptop for a few minutes before switching it off. He was half-tempted to leave Tosh at the guest house and go investigate for himself -- after all, he couldn't die, and there was a humming urgency in him to find these things and destroy them. They'd already taken too much, and god knew if he'd be able to get Ianto back.
But he didn't go, because he was angry and not stupid. He and Tosh had better odds of finding and killing it together than he would on his own. And he didn't actually enjoy dying.
***
In the morning there were ten more UNIT reports, still all clear, and he could tell that Tosh took heart from it. Jack wasn't letting his guard down, but he was -- pleased, anyway, that it looked like they were well on their way to confirming the survivors were only that: survivors. When they were done here he'd do something, set up some kind of network or check system or something. Gwen would know what to do.
They didn't eat breakfast, just took coffee from the dining room in the guest house and saddled up. Micah Donovan lived nearby in a pretty little bungalow with a large back garden, just the kind of place someone could find some peace in. And when he answered the door, he looked confident, even cheerful.
"Can I help you?" he asked, drying his hands as if he'd just been doing the breakfast dishes. "Car broke down?"
"Mr. Donovan," Jack said. "Captain Jack Harkness, this is Toshiko Sato. We're from Torchwood."
The transformation was immediate and complete -- in the space of a few seconds Donovan's face turned pale, his hands dropped to his sides, and he sagged against the door as if he couldn't stand up on his own. Tosh put out a hand to help, but Jack grabbed her wrist; if Donovan was faking to get them to drop their guard, then he was a dangerous man.
"Thank God," he whispered. Jack's senses kicked into high gear. Everything became very bright and sharp. "Are you here to take it away?"
Jack saw Tosh backing up out of the corner of his eye.
"Take what away?" he asked. Donovan turned -- and Jack saw a slight glint of metal in his scalp. He reached for his gun.
"It's in the garden shed," the man mumbled, turning back to them. "Please take it away. Please."
"Why don't you show us?" Jack said, trying to keep his voice neutral. Donovan stepped forward -- Jack wasn't even aware he'd pulled his gun until he saw it aimed between the man's eyes. Donovan froze, and Jack stepped to one side.
He led them down the steps -- Jack keeping the gun on him, grateful for the empty early-morning streets, no witnesses -- and through a gate into the back garden. There was a rundown-looking shed at the bottom of the garden, with three huge padlocks on the door. Donovan stopped in front of it, trembling.
Jack sniffed the air -- there was a rotten-sweet smell, like old garbage, and the closer they got to the shed the stronger it was.
"I won't go in there," Donovan said. "You can't make me. You can kill me before I go in there."
Jack took a pair of cuffs off his belt and tossed them to Tosh, who carefully bound Donovan's hands behind his back before searching his pockets. A ring of keys: house-key, car-key...and three small gold keys.
Jack took them from her and opened the locks carefully -- this close, the smell was almost overwhelming. With each snap of the tumblers, Donovan whimpered.
"It's not my fault," he said, as the last lock fell away. He was shaking, trying to hide behind Tosh. "I swear it's not my fault, it made me do it."
Jack pushed him up against the fence with one hand on his chest, then down to the ground. "Stay there."
Donovan nodded. Tosh already had her gun out.
"On three," he told her softly. She stepped to the far side of the door. "One, two -- "
The door went in easily with a single kick, tumbling off its hinges, taking half the frame with it. Their guns were up and aimed inside before they could even properly see. Even when the dust had settled it was too dark -- the single window was papered over with brown paper, and the light from outside barely fell a foot inside the doorway. The stench, unbound now, washed over them like an almost physical thing.
Jack saw a lightbulb swinging wildly on a cord from the ceiling; gun still ready, he stepped inside, holding his breath, and pulled the little chain.
Light flooded the room, strobing a little as the bulb swung with the force of his pull. he heard Tosh behind him ask "What -- ?" and then he heard her gag and stumble backwards, throwing up her coffee and whatever was left of last night's dinner. He put one arm over his mouth and nose, letting his gun fall to his side.
Most of the shed was taken up with a cyberconversion unit and a handful of life-support machines similar to the ones he'd seen in the Cyberwoman's little chamber at Torchwood. None of them were powered up. Cradled in the centre of the unit were -- limbs, yes, metal limbs and metal structures, with gaps here and there where skin should have been. They were slimed over with fluid, yellow-red-brown. Bones showed through in places; maggots wormed their way around what had once been a face, and the place was full of flies. The fresh breeze from the doorway changed the air pressure in the room; he watched as one of the arm units lost the last of its decaying muscle, the metal and rot and bone clattering to the floor with a wet splat, bone rattling against metal. There was a buzzing whine as one of the flies zipped past his ear, out into the open air.
He backed out slowly, wishing he could close the door behind him.
Tosh was wiping her mouth, drawing deep breaths, hands shaking. Donovan was curled in a ball against the fence, rocking back and forth, and there was a very, very dead Cyberman in the garden shed.
"It was evil," Donovan moaned. "I had to do it."
Jack crouched next to him, reached around to the back of his head, and pulled the wire out without ceremony or warning. Unlike with Ianto, there was no significant change. The man was weeping, clearly terrified of what he'd done.
"It's all right," Jack said softly, putting the wire in his pocket. "It's okay. You did the right thing. Shh, it's fine."
"It screamed," Donovan wailed, pressing his face into Jack's shoulder. Jack fumbled with the handcuffs, unlocking them, and Donovan clutched his coat. "It screamed forever in my head -- "
Jack helped him to his feet, held him while he wept into his coat. This was -- better, actually, than Ianto's eerie calm. This was genuine trauma and emotion. Micah Donovan, for whatever reason, had resisted control long enough to kill the monster in his garden shed. And then, presumably, had locked it up tightly so he never had to see it again. Jack didn't blame him.
"It's fine," he said, stroking Donovan's hair, trying to soothe him. "You're safe. You did the right thing. We'll destroy it, okay? We'll make sure we get everything. You're safe."
"Thank you," Donovan mumbled into his chest. "Thank you, oh, thank you..."
Jack looked over his head at Tosh, who seemed to have recovered; she was already on the phone to someone, maybe UNIT for cleanup or maybe the Hub to let them know. He had no idea how he and Tosh alone were going to get a rotting robotic corpse and a cyberconversion unit out of here, but they'd find a way.
"Micah," Jack said gently, when the worst of it seemed to have subsided. "Toshiko's going to take you inside and make you a cuppa, okay? You can tell her about it while I take care of it."
"All of it," Donovan said. "Promise me."
"I promise," Jack said, as Tosh took his arm. "Go with Tosh now."
"Come on, Mr. Donovan," Tosh coaxed. He let go of Jack's coat slowly. Tosh leaned up and whispered in Jack's ear, "Napalm in the boot."
Right. He'd forgotten they kept a box of acid in the boot of the SUV. Tosh and Owen called it Napalm because you had to set it on fire to get it to work, but if he sprayed the shed with it, it'd eat the entire thing down to the floorboards and wouldn't stop until the soil under that was sterile. Thus satisfying both his own thoroughness and Donovan's lingering terror. It wouldn't even smoke; no need to alarm the neighbours.
Thirty minutes later, smelling faintly of a chemistry lab, Jack walked into the kitchen and found a wan-looking Donovan eating a scone while Tosh looked on and sipped tea.
"Feeling better?" he asked, and the man nodded.
"I'm sorry, I really am -- most of the time I'm all right," he said. "Oh, look, I've got snot on your lovely coat -- "
"It's had worse," Jack said, sitting down. Tosh pushed a cup of lukewarm tea at him.
"Mr. Donovan gave me a full report," Tosh said. "I'll write it up later."
Jack nodded. "The Cyberman's gone. Scorched earth, there's nothing left. Had to take out the shed too, though. Sorry about that."
"Thank you," Donovan said, looking down at his cup. "I can't thank you enough."
"We'd like to help, any way we can..." Jack tried to figure out what he could even offer this poor bastard. "I have...medication that could make you forget this. All of it. Everything back before Torchwood."
Donovan shook his head. "I am all right, really," he said. "It's been months since it...stopped screaming. I see a therapist, you know. I mean I don't tell him about it, it's all -- I use metaphors, but it helps." He glanced up at Jack again. "If it's all the same, I'd really rather Torchwood just left me in peace."
"Do you have anyone nearby who can check up on you?" Jack asked. "Family...?"
"I'm not suicidal. I swear. I'll probably sleep like a baby tonight," Donovan said. He caught Jack's sceptical look. "I -- my girlfriend could stay over for a few days. She'd like that. She keeps wanting to move in, but not with that -- " he shuddered. "Not with the thing in the garden."
"If I were you," Tosh said gently, touching his arm, "I'd have her come over and help you plant some flowers there. You could build a planter frame and fill it up."
"Yes, yes, thank you," Donovan said. "That's a very good idea. I'll -- I'll tell her it burnt down. That's true, isn't it?"
"True enough," Jack agreed. "Here's my card," he added, offering him a card from his pocket. "If you change your mind, call me."
"That's kind of you," Donovan told him, tucking the card in his shirt pocket. "I really don't think I will."
Jack jerked his head at the door. "We'll be on our way."
"Thank you again," Donovan said, shaking his hand. "You don't know what this means to me."
"I'm finding out," Jack said grimly, and left Donovan to his pretty house and his nice garden and the patch of sterile soil where a dead Cyberman used to be.
They stayed in Dover only long enough to check out; Jack got breakfast on the road, but Tosh said she didn't feel much like eating. She watched him, though, as he sped down the M20, steering with one hand and eating a disgusting breakfast sandwich with the other.
"That was probably the most horrible thing I've ever seen," she said finally.
"It's in my top ten," he allowed, casting a sidelong look at her.
"Sorry I freaked out."
"It happens," he said. "After the last two days, anyone would."
"You didn't."
"I'm the boss. I'm not allowed to," he said. She smiled a little. "You know what I want more than anything right now?"
"What?" she asked.
"A drink. I want a huge glass of scotch."
"You never drink," Tosh said, obviously shocked.
"I'm on the job," Jack told her. "When this is over, next time the Rift is quiet, I'm going to take some time off and have my nice big drink and a three-hour nervous breakdown. I might puke."
Tosh laughed a little. "Is that how you do it? This job?"
"You know me by now."
"When you take your sick days, that's what you do?" Tosh asked.
"Sometimes. Sometimes I go out and get laid. Puking optional." He grinned at her. "We did a good job this morning, Tosh. Hold onto that."
"Do you think he'll be all right?"
"He seemed like he was working it out. 'All right' is relative. Something bad happened, but he got through it. We all do. That was good, the thing about planting stuff. I bet if you come back next year he'll be growing zucchini or something in it."
"He said he didn't know who it was. Not like Ianto -- he didn't know who the Cyberman was. So maybe...if it hadn't been Ianto's girlfriend..." Tosh looked out the window. "Maybe he would have killed her if he didn't love her."
"Ianto's bad luck," Jack said, crumpling the sandwich wrapper in one hand and tossing it into the paper bag it had come in. "We'll fix it, Tosh."
"Do you think so?"
Jack opened his mouth to say what he was thinking -- one way or another -- but he found he didn't want Tosh to know that if they couldn't help Ianto, executing him might still be on the table.
"We'll do our best," he said instead.
***
There is no video for this recording; it was on a reel-to-reel tape machine. Even on a DVD audio transcription, parts of it show the wear of age. They crackle and fuzz, or a word is dropped, or there's a spark of noise as someone accidentally gets too near the microphone. Jack remembers understanding more, back when his ear was better trained to decipher the static.
"Where did we leave off yesterday, Lieutenant?" Jack's voice says. He pronounces it the British way, lef-tenant, and he sounds cheerful, or at least not dangerous. Lieutenant Carstairs has been most cooperative in answering the questions of Captain Jack Harkness. "Can you recount it for me?"
"Yes, sir," Lieutenant Carstairs replies. One could wish for a video-recording; Carstairs had been a handsome man who carried himself well. "During most of the year 1917 soldiers were transported without our knowledge to another location -- "
"Another planet?"
"I think so, sir, yes. We were transported without our knowledge to another -- planet, if you like, where we were conditioned to believe we were still in the war. We continued regular wartime activity under the command of General Smythe. That's S-M-Y-T-H-E."
"Noted."
"I began to feel uncertain about the General's behaviour when he attempted to court-martial three travelers found in the trenches."
"This is..." a rustle of paper, though Jack has memorised the names, "An unnamed Doctor, traveling under the alias John Smith; a young woman, Zoe Heriot; a young man suspected to be a deserter from a Scots regiment, James McCrimmond, no rank given."
"That's right, sir."
"Go on."
"Well, eventually Lady Jennifer and I -- Lady Jennifer Buckingham, she was in the Women's Reserve -- decided we'd rather throw in our lot with the Doctor, due to this and that, I've told you all that, sir. We came to see we weren't on Earth, and it turned out General Smythe wasn't even human. They'd been using these machines to make us obey them, only the machines didn't work on everyone."
"That's what I'd like to talk about today," Jack's voice says. "The machines, and how you broke free from their control."
"I don't mind talking about that, sir. Only...you do believe me, sir, don't you? I'm not mad, you know."
"Lieutenant," Jack says, "I'm probably one of the only people on Earth who does."
***
When they returned to the Hub, they found Owen standing in front of Tosh's workstation, tapping out commands on a tablet that were being mirrored on the largest of her screens, modeling something that looked like an upside-down tree. A sort of mutant upside-down tree.
"Where's Ianto?" Jack asked, and Owen rolled his eyes.
"Morgue, with Gwen," he said, gesturing with the stylus towards what had once been the roundhouse for the trains that serviced the Hub, and was now cold-storage for the honoured dead. Jack left Tosh to find out what Owen was doing and walked down the stairs, across the fountain pool, footsteps ringing loud on the metal. The Hub seemed quieter, lately, than it used to. Maybe it was just him.
Ianto and Gwen were sitting side-by-side, backs against the wall, or rather backs against the doors to the freezer boxes where the dead were kept. Ianto's head was about a foot and a half below the door to Lisa's drawer.
"You're back!" Gwen said, scrambling to her feet. Ianto looked up at him, all hooded eyes and smooth young face. He was out of uniform, such as it had been; he had on a ratty pair of jeans and a pristine pair of trainers, and a too-big rugby shirt that looked like it probably actually belonged to Gwen's boyfriend. When Gwen reached down, he took her hand and let her help him to his feet, then shoved both hands in his pockets.
"Find anything?" Gwen asked. Jack cut his eyes to Ianto, warningly. "Right. Team briefing, I expect."
"Yeah. We took care of it, nothing urgent," Jack said. "Fill you in later."
"But not me," Ianto said softly -- the first time he'd spoken when he wasn't either being asked a question or threatened, Jack thought. He looked at the younger man, curious, and Ianto ducked his head.
"Not yet. How's it going here?" Jack asked neutrally.
"Rift's quiet," Gwen said. "Owen and Ianto are making headway. Aren't you, sweetheart?" she asked Ianto, who nodded. "You should talk to Owen, though."
"It's my next stop," Jack assured her. "Uh...so, cold storage...?"
"I asked," Ianto said, in the same quiet, numb tone as before. "Owen didn't need me. I wanted to sit with her."
Jack looked at Gwen, who shrugged. "I didn't see the harm."
"OI!" Owen yelled, voice echoing down the walls to them. "READY FOR YOU, JACK!"
"Sweeter words," Jack said, without even thinking. Gwen bit down on a giggle. Even Ianto smiled distantly. "COMING UP!" he yelled back at Owen. He noticed Gwen took Ianto's elbow, making sure he walked with them, as they emerged into the atrium.
"I have," Owen announced, descending the half-flight from Tosh's desk to join them, "a theory." He swung a flash-drive around his finger on a lanyard, looking pleased with himself. "Conference room?"
Jack gestured for him to lead the way. Gwen left Ianto standing there and followed him up; Tosh was already setting the room up for the presentation Owen had apparently prepared. Jack turned to Ianto.
"You wanna hear this?" he asked. It was like watching a slow computer take commands; the blankness drifted across Ianto's face but was gone again in a second or two.
"May as well," he said. Jack pressed a hand between his shoulders, gently, pushing him towards the spiral staircase.
Owen's mutant upside-down tree turned out to be a map of Ianto's brain, or anyway of his thought processes. Tosh was, as with everything mathematic and technological, professionally interested; Gwen studied it with an air of only partial understanding. Ianto looked hard at the little structure, brow furrowing, eyes narrowing, as if he could force himself to comprehend.
"So the human mind," Owen opened officiously, "is a fucking mess."
Jack raised his eyebrows.
"I mean, you know, instincts and impulses and learned behaviour, emotional influences, rational influences, it's all kind of bunched up," Owen continued. His hands scrunched an imaginary brain together out of the air. "This is why psychotherapy is a lucrative profession."
"Owen, are we approaching a point?" Jack asked.
"Our minds don't look like this," Owen said, gesturing at the upside-down tree. "'Cept, Ianto's does. It's been restructured. I mean, this is, you know, simplified, but. Not that much. So you have input -- seeing something, hearing something, you're asked a question," Owen drew his finger down from a box labeled INPUT to one labeled DECISION. "It hits a decision node, right, and the input goes one of three places. Either it's something the rational, conscious mind can deal with no problem, so it goes this way...and that's Ianto," Owen said, finger running off the screen and swooping around to point at him. Ianto flinched. "See? Ianto's brain. That's an automatic and logical reaction, that flinch."
"Thank you," Ianto murmured drily.
"That's why when someone walks past him he still asks if they want a coffee," Owen said. "Then you have option two -- if the input requires original thought, something other than an automatic response, it goes here..." he moved back to the box labeled DECISION and straight down, to a second branch. "It's checked to make sure the response won't endanger the Cyberman. Ianto, isn't there a storage room in corridor twelve?"
"I don't think it's structurally sound in that area," Ianto said, after an infinitesimal hesitation. Jack wouldn't have noticed it if he hadn't been watching. He saw Gwen and Tosh felt the same. Ianto bowed his head, cheeks flushing. They all knew what had been in corridor twelve.
"Not Ianto," Owen said. He sounded -- not gentle, precisely, but the usual edge was missing from his voice. Jack thought about how he had found Owen, what Owen had undergone to bring him here to Torchwood, and decided this might not be any easier on Owen than on Ianto. Owen turned back to the tree and kept going. "Say he's faced with something he has no prepared response for and can't improvise around, it's kicked back to the decision node and goes to the transmitter," he said, tracing the third branch with his finger. "From there he receives instructions directly from her. That's why he's blanking. Ianto, how'd you get her out of Torchwood?"
All heads turned to Ianto. His eyes were blank, staring ahead, face slack. After a second he closed his eyes and when he opened them they had some life again.
"The microtransmitter Tosh decoded," Owen gave her a nod of the head, "was helping Ianto communicate directly with her."
Her -- not Lisa, not The Cyberwoman or even The Cyberman. Just her. Like they were afraid to speak the name.
"When he couldn't answer, it transmitted a query, and the answer was transmitted back," Owen continued.
"When he blanks out it's because he's expecting a reply command," Tosh said. "Like a computer querying a server that isn't there."
"And he gets back a 404," Owen agreed.
"So...we've been talking to...her?" Gwen asked cautiously. "Sometimes? Her...through Ianto?"
It was a chilling idea, and it made Jack's skin crawl. Tosh looked intrigued; Owen looked disgusted.
"The rest of the branches?" Jack asked, pointing to the sub-branches that led off from the three main ones.
"Mostly medical documentation for his file -- nerve responses, impulse control, not really relevant but I can go into it if you've got four hours and a medical degree," Owen said.
"Easy," Jack warned him, and turned to Ianto. "Ianto."
Ianto looked up.
"Does this seem right to you?"
Ianto opened his mouth, paused -- a real hesitation, hopefully -- and then closed it, frowning. Jack realised his mistake.
"Is Owen's theory accurate?" he corrected. Of course it wasn't right. Nothing about this was right.
"Incomplete," Ianto said, turning to look at Owen, nodding. "But accurate, yes."
"Incomplete?" Owen asked, offended. "What's missing?"
Ianto's eyes shifted to the mutant tree. "It wasn't always a response," he said quietly. "Sometimes she just did things. I did things, because she made me."
Owen's eyebrows lifted. Tosh leaned forward.
"Like what?" Owen asked.
"Don't answer that," Jack said sharply. Ianto's head whipped up to look at him, startled, but there was also a hint of gratitude in his face. Whatever it had been, there was no need to make Ianto confess to it in front of the others. And Jack suspected some of what she'd made him do would be hard for anyone to admit.
Owen gave Jack a sceptical grimace, but he tapped the side of the screen to clear it. "So, briefing over. Plan of attack?"
"Attack?" Gwen asked, sounding alarmed. "We're not taking the Falklands, Owen. It's Ianto."
Owen shrugged. "Still need a plan. You're not well, mate," he said to Ianto.
"Yes, I know that," Ianto replied.
"What do you recommend?" Jack asked Owen, who ticked a list off on his fingers.
"Intensive cognitive deprogramming. Biofeedback's a possibility. Retraining. If those don't take, Retcon."
"Is he dangerous?" Jack asked.
"I don't think so. Unless you were a psychopath before she got hold of you," Owen said to Ianto. Ianto bluescreened for a minute, then shook his head and smiled a little.
"He doesn't belong in a cell, Jack," Gwen said. "He belongs in hospital."
"I know that," Jack said, irritated. "Owen, is that something you can do here?"
Owen shook his head. "Not my game. Not if you want it done properly. Besides, I haven't the time to nanny the secretary all day and still save the world from aliens."
Jack nodded. "Okay. Everyone clear out. Ianto and I need to have a chat."
Tosh gathered her laptop and cords and followed Owen out; Gwen lingered, rubbing Ianto's shoulder affectionately, and then followed with a warning look at Jack that he felt was entirely undeserved. Yes, he had threatened to execute Ianto two days ago, but honestly, at the time Ianto had just finished pointing a gun at all of them.
Gwen had come closest of any of them to dying -- death, conversion, it amounted to the same thing in his mind -- so perhaps she had a right to feel bound to Ianto, to protect him. Or perhaps she was trying a little too hard because, on some level, she was angry at him. Whether it was Ianto's fault or not...it was hard not to be angry. He understood that, but he suspected Gwen wouldn't.
When the door had closed behind her, Jack turned back to Ianto. He was watching Jack, face carefully neutral -- waiting for his sentence, perhaps.
"I don't know about you, but I love it when people talk about me like I'm not in the room," Jack said.
"I'm used to it," Ianto replied, then glanced away. "Not being noticed, I mean."
"But you wanted to be," Jack said. Ianto flinched. "She made you hide. I bet you were desperate for someone to see."
Ianto was silent for a while before he responded. Jack wondering if that decision node of his was kicking in.
"I don't blame any of you," Ianto finally said. "When I want to disappear I'm very good at it."
"Ianto, look at me please," Jack said. Ianto turned back and met his eyes. As if it were a command, rather than a request. Jack sighed.
"I can retcon you, if you want," he said. "I can make this whole thing go away. All the time here, the end of Canary Wharf, all of it."
Ianto gave him a dry look. "Not without risking brain damage."
"Okay, maybe not everything. If we only take a couple of months, you should be all right."
"But?" Ianto said.
"But...there is a greater risk when the subject has undergone a significant personality change or is suffering from a mental illness," Jack admitted. "I'm not going to force you. It's up to you."
Ianto shook his head. There was a slight pause first; Jack knew what that meant, now, and he leaned forward.
"Retcon," he said. Ianto flinched. "Okay. That's all I need to know. Well, I can't throw you in the cells, I can't check you into a hospital, and Owen can't handle you."
He realised, belatedly, that he sounded annoyed; as if Ianto was one more problem to deal with.
"I can find you someone to help," he said. "That's not a problem. But if you need more than what Owen can do -- "
Ianto's lips quirked briefly. "There's always Providence Park."
Without really knowing, he had put his finger squarely on it; yes, Providence Park of a sort, but not the one Ianto was thinking of. The Providence Park of the alien set, the asylum for Rift survivors. Built-in security, just in case, and full-time therapeutic staff.
Ianto would need to go to Flat Holm.
***
"I didn't really do anything," Carstairs says on the tape, and there's a crackle in the background, then a noise -- metal on metal. A chair, perhaps, being inched in closer. "The Doctor...he began it."
"Tell me about it," Jack says softly.
"Yes, sir." Carstairs was handsome, but not Jack's type -- one of those soldiers Jack had tried it on in the early days and always been shoved back by. A shame. So...obedient, except when he wasn't. "There were things we couldn't see. Literally. We were, huh, I guess you could say hypnotised. There was this machine, they used it to communicate -- the General, I mean, and his kind. I couldn't see it, Lady Jenny couldn't either. The Doctor told us to look, really look, and then we saw it...and that was the start. I started to see things for what they really were."
Jack remembers thinking that it was like that, back then; some of the soldiers came into the trenches bursting with patriotism and pride and ready to kill the fucking Huns, and then they started to see things. Things as they really were.
But this is not that. Just a pretty metaphor.
"It seemed like the more we saw of the world, the more we saw it. I'm sorry, Captain, I'm not explaining it well."
"You're doing fine, Lieutenant."
"The more we traveled, the easier it became to choose the other side. The resistance fighters, you understand. There were machines that could break the hypnotism, I saw them, but we didn't need them. We just needed to see further, to see more. New experiences. Sometimes we didn't know what was true, but that was so much better than knowing wrong. It was a terrible kind of freedom.
"So it was gradual."
"As we went, yes. At one point they put me back under, they used a machine to re-hypnotise me. It's worse not to know, sir, worse to see the untruths and believe them than it is not to know what the untruths are."
Carstairs was a bit of a poet. Jack can appreciate that more, now, than he could.
"I think once the mind cracks open a little, sir, everything else must follow. Seeing all we saw just made it easier."
"I'll need a more detailed briefing than that from you, Carstairs, in a little while."
"Of course. I can write a mission report. Only...can I ask you something?"
"Yes."
"This isn't an ordinary military debriefing, is it, Captain Harkness?"
There is a pause. "No."
Carstairs clears his throat. "And are you really a Captain, sir? Only -- only I can't abide being lied to anymore. I can't. It's why they sent me home, you see; I couldn't even trust my superiors, because sometimes they really did lie."
Men lie in war. Men lie to start wars. Jack knows this, and yet still he knows twenty years from that moment he went back to war again. If only to protect a few poor boys from the lies that were, and are, so much worse than Torchwood's.
"I am a Captain, Lieutenant Carstairs. I fought too. In here, if I can't be truthful, I won't answer at all. I promise you."
A soft breath. "That's a great relief, Captain Harkness."
"I know, soldier. Get some rest. Tomorrow someone will bring you pen and paper to write your report with."
"Thank you, sir."
Chapter Three
Part: 2 of 5
Rating: PG-13; R in the final chapter
Summary: Jack has studied the Cybermen for forty years, and he's damned if he'll let one take any of his people away from him without a fight.
Beta Credit:
51stcenturyfox, misswinterhill, neifile7, and spiderine are winnars! :DCHAPTER TWO
The archives were Ianto's domain, and had been Suzie's before him and David's before her, but Jack had been here since before the archives were moved in -- he'd supervised the transfer himself when the Hub was converted from underground station to base. Some years, he'd been the archivist; for a decade after the second war, when he'd been traumatised without really realising it, they'd put him in the archives because he couldn't stand to be out in the open and unprotected. He'd worked past it, slowly, but in the time between his medical discharge in '44 ("battle fatigue"; it was true that he was so tired) and his first return to the field in '53, he'd spent years underground. He'd slept here, eaten here, worked only here. He knew every twist and turn intimately, and he knew where the locked and hidden doors were.
Sometime in that hazy, dimly-lit decade, he'd realised that very few people in Torchwood knew his secret anymore, and if he could lock away the records of just how long he'd been alive, the secret could be kept. So he'd opened the Secure Archive, and every few years any records with his name attached were "sterilised", his name removed, and the originals locked in the Secure Archive. That was where the Cyberman files were, except for the ones concerning Torchwood One. And he was looking for something much older than those.
He unlocked the door with his strap and stepped inside -- oh, he had been tidy once, obsessed with order down here in the dark. If he could just put everything in order, file it all away in its rightful place, then the world wouldn't be dangerous and he could go out in the air again.
He'd worked through that, too.
Here they were, the carefully preserved tapes and film reels and files. He should have put them on DVD years ago; the ghost of the pale, frightened man in the room agreed with him. Well, no time like the present, and he needed the records anyway. He took an empty storage box from under the workbench and began to fill it with records. The Hartigan Excavation site reports, the Waterfield reels, the autopsy file on Vaughn, the Invasion Debriefing, the Van Statten authentication, the Snowcap Base black box recordings. Most of it wouldn't be relevant; only the Waterfield reels touched on this aspect, as far as Jack could recall, but his memory sometimes failed him. He could use Tosh's converter rig to put them on DVD and review them on the fly.
He paused to think for a moment, and then added the Carstairs tapes to the box as well. Not relevant, perhaps; no Cybermen on those tapes. But he recalled something about mind control on them, something about a programming machine, that might make them valuable.
When he was done, he locked up behind himself and carried the box up to the general archive work area, covered in a mixture of Tosh's broken tech, Ianto's half-finished work, and a variety of his own personal repair projects. He loaded the reels and tapes into the converter rig, programmed it to upload to his secure server, burn to DVD, and incinerate, and went upstairs again. He paused briefly on the archive threshold, the ghost of his past peering terrified into the open Hub, then continued up and out, into the atrium.
All seemed quiet; Tosh was clacking away at her keyboard with a box of take-away sitting next to her. She looked up and gave him a smile when she saw him.
"Our liaison called," she said, tipping her head at Jack's office. "Gwen took it. UNIT's dispatching now, they'll report in as each survivor is cleared. Here's our two," she added, swinging the monitor over so that he could see. "One's in Newport, but the other's in Dover -- that's a bit more than a day trip, unless we leave it for tomorrow. Even then..."
"Yeah," Jack said, studying the map. Most of the other survivors were in the north. Two in Scotland, three in Ireland, Ianto and one other in Wales, one in Dover and two in Norfolk, five on the northern border, and thirteen scattered around Yorkshire. He wondered what it was about Yorkshire.
"Owen," Jack called.
"Yeah, fuck," Owen called back.
"Lose a finger?" Jack asked. A hand shot up from medical, with two upraised fingers still very much attached. "What's the problem?"
"Nothing, just found something else she wrecked," Owen called. "What is it?"
"You got a scanner for me?"
"I will have, in about twenty minutes."
"How hard is it to operate?"
Owen's face and arms appeared over the ledge of the medical bay. "Not hard. Why?"
"I'm taking Tosh and Gwen with me to Newport. We'll drop Gwen back here and go on to Dover from there. You and Gwen can watch Ianto in shifts."
"Suits me, I'm not eager to see another Cyberman in a hurry," Owen said, and disappeared again.
"We'll drive to Dover tonight, investigate if we get there before dark, otherwise hit it in the morning," Jack told Tosh. "Up for this?"
"Of course," she said with a smile. "Have I got time to pack an overnight bag?"
"Yeah, do it," Jack said. "I'll pick you up."
He walked over to his office, where Ianto and Gwen were eating Chinese from take-away boxes, Ianto as if he'd never seen food before, Gwen a little more daintily. Ianto had a napkin tucked in his shirt. The same shirt he'd been wearing for two days, the one smeared with grime, the one with blood on the cuffs. Jack sighed.
"Gwen, take a minute," he said, and jerked his head at the atrium. Gwen got up, took her food with her, and squeezed his hand as she walked out. Jack settled in at his desk and regarded Ianto, who set his food aside with a regretful look and pulled the napkin gingerly out of his shirt.
"I think," Jack said, "that most of what you're saying is conditioning. I can see you in there, and we're going to pull you out. For now, don't worry about replying, just listen and try to shake off the instinct, and when we're done I'll make sure you understand. Okay?"
Ianto nodded.
"We have to make sure this didn't happen to anyone else. Tosh and I are going to be gone overnight. I'm leaving you here with Owen and Gwen, and I'm going to authorise Owen to try and find out -- why this is happening, what your patterns are."
Again that moment -- the brief blankness, and the flash of real emotion before Ianto composed his face again.
"He's my second when I'm gone, so you need to do what he says. If he hurts you I want you to tell him, otherwise he'll just keep pushing and -- " Jack paused. Inspiration struck. "And you'll get caught. You don't want that. So do what he says and tell him if he's hurting you. Gwen'll be here to make sure you're okay. When I get back we'll fix it. Until then, you stay in the Hub, and Owen and Gwen will watch you in shifts. You can sleep in the cells, but you don't have to stay there during the day if you don't want to. You can clean or read, but I'm restricting your database access. You can go out if someone goes with you." Jack rested his hands flat on the table. "You understand me? Do you really understand?"
"Yes, Jack," Ianto said, and it was -- obedient, yes, but there was also a hint of emotion in his voice that Jack took for truth.
"Good. Give Gwen your keys, she'll bring you some clothes and anything else you want from your place."
Ianto took his keys out of his pocket and went to find Gwen. Jack watched him go, pensive, then went to tell Owen what to do while he and Tosh were away.
***
By the time they'd wrestled Owen's "portable" scanner into the SUV, Jack had managed a few mouthfuls of food and Tosh had called to say she was ready to go. The UNIT liaison, Corporal someone, had also called to say the first survivor they'd investigated was clean. Ianto had hovered around the SUV while Jack and Gwen closed the boot and got ready to go, looking a little forlorn that he couldn't help. As Gwen pulled the SUV out of its parking space in the secure garage, Jack watched Owen take him by the arm and pull him back into the Hub.
They picked up Tosh and made good time to Newport, while Jack sat in the backseat with his headphones in and reviewed the data he'd pulled out of storage. It was, legitimately, horrible stuff; they had worse individual reports on record, but the Cybermen were like the Daleks -- they just kept coming back, and their ability to time-travel meant you could never be fully sure you were rid of them. They seemed to like to play games, too, for all their talk of straightforward unemotional rationality. Cybermen never staged a frontal assault; they snuck in, used human agents, used human technology, appealed to human fear and greed to get what they wanted. Only then did the slaughter start.
There were more than twenty-seven survivors of Canary Wharf; those were only the ones who had actually been there that day, and didn't include a dozen or so others who had called in sick or weren't in the building when disaster struck. Those plus the survivors, when compared with the total roster of building staff and the known dead, still left a little over 300 "missing." Among them, Rose Tyler, who had been a "visiting guest" that day. The best Jack could hope for was that she had died quickly.
In the end, Newport turned out to be a wash. Their local wasn't even alive anymore; she'd killed herself months ago, and her husband had just kept collecting the pension without telling anyone. He looked terrified when they turned up on his doorstep, but Jack didn't have the energy to be angry. He lied, said something official-sounding about the pension being converted to a legacy payment for her two kids until they were eighteen, and had Gwen and Tosh do a sweep of the husband, his kids, the house, and the garden to make sure there was no trace of a Cyberman anywhere nearby.
They were all silent on the way back to Cardiff, Gwen staring out the window, Tosh typing a report in the back seat, Jack focusing on the road and silently cursing, not for the first time, the Cybermen and Yvonne Hartman and maybe the Doctor too, a little, though he felt traitorous doing it. He was nearly certain the Doctor was still alive; Jack knew Time Lords didn't stay down as easily as humans did.
They left Gwen at Ianto's place, with the assurance she'd get a cab back to the Hub, and turned east towards the river bridge, England, and the chalk-riddled coast where Dover lay. Crossing over into England seemed to break a wall in Tosh; they weren't a mile past the Severn when she spoke.
"Jack," she said hesitantly.
"Yeah?" he asked, keeping his eyes on the road.
"I spoke with Owen earlier..." she hesitated, then continued. "He said you told him...well, he said he thought maybe you lost someone at Canary Wharf."
"Yeah," Jack said, fingers tightening slightly on the wheel.
"You never told us. When it happened. I know you were angry, but nobody knew," she said. "That part, I mean."
"It wasn't relevant," Jack said, then relented. "Maybe it was. I didn't want to talk about it."
"Do you now?"
"No," he said, trying to ease the harshness of it. He wasn't angry at Tosh. It wasn't her fault. "Not -- right now."
"If you did -- "
"I know," he interrupted, and gave her a quick glance. "Thank you, Tosh."
She nodded. "Worried about Ianto?"
"Worried about a lot of things."
Jack measured that drive by the UNIT reports that Tosh received; they were halfway to London when the first survivor was cleared, two-thirds when the second came in clean, just past it when the report came in that one of the Irish survivors had been wired, and had killed two UNIT soldiers before she, and the Cyberman she'd been sheltering, were killed. Jack banged his fist on the steering wheel angrily, but he drove on.
"Maybe that was the only one," Tosh said hopefully. "After all, the odds have got to be enormous against there being even one, let alone more-than."
"Not that enormous," Jack said. "You can't factor for bullshit luck and Cyberman ingenuity. Well, maybe you could," he allowed, and Tosh gave him a small, pleased smile. "We won't make it to Dover before dark. I'm not going hunting in the dark. We'll find a place to stay, get some dinner, go out first thing tomorrow."
"By then we should know more about how UNIT is getting on," Tosh said thoughtfully. "Might help us be better prepared."
"Good. That's a plan," Jack said, and they were quiet the rest of the way to Dover. When they arrived, Jack left Tosh to check them into a guest house near their target, and took a little time to wander around downtown, with his best charm turned on, asking about anything strange or unusual that might have been happening in the area. He got a few phone numbers (unasked-for, if not unwelcome) but no news he could make use of. He was glad to give up the pretense for a while and meet Tosh for dinner in a restaurant that looked out on the water. The waiter seemed to think they were a couple and smiled when he brought them their food -- though he looked perplexed when Tosh asked for wine and Jack just wanted cold water, no ice. They didn't talk much at first, though she didn't seem uncomfortable with it; they were both tired.
Sometimes it was so hard.
"Her name was Rose Tyler," he said quietly, after he'd eaten enough to take the edge off his hunger. "The woman who died in Canary Wharf."
Tosh looked at him, her face curious, but he could see she wouldn't actually ask what she wanted to.
"We weren't lovers," he added, and saw her nod. "I wanted -- I could have asked, I just never did."
"That doesn't sound like you," Tosh said, then put a hand to her mouth. "I don't mean -- "
Jack waved it off. "Well, I did once, before I really knew her." He smiled. One dance, on the hull of a spaceship high above London, but then she'd just been a pretty girl he wanted to con. After, she and the Doctor had both been too precious to him.
"Did she work for Torchwood, then?" Tosh asked.
No." Jack shook his head. "She wouldn't have, not for them. I don't know why she was there that day at all. I doubt she knew. And she died. End of story."
"I'm sorry, Jack," Tosh said.
"Me too," Jack said. Then he shrugged. "It doesn't matter, it's over, and we have to make sure it doesn't happen again."
That evening there were two more UNIT reports, both clears, and Jack checked in on Owen and Gwen; by nine, Ianto was already asleep in the cells, and Jack watched him over a CCTV feed to his laptop for a few minutes before switching it off. He was half-tempted to leave Tosh at the guest house and go investigate for himself -- after all, he couldn't die, and there was a humming urgency in him to find these things and destroy them. They'd already taken too much, and god knew if he'd be able to get Ianto back.
But he didn't go, because he was angry and not stupid. He and Tosh had better odds of finding and killing it together than he would on his own. And he didn't actually enjoy dying.
***
In the morning there were ten more UNIT reports, still all clear, and he could tell that Tosh took heart from it. Jack wasn't letting his guard down, but he was -- pleased, anyway, that it looked like they were well on their way to confirming the survivors were only that: survivors. When they were done here he'd do something, set up some kind of network or check system or something. Gwen would know what to do.
They didn't eat breakfast, just took coffee from the dining room in the guest house and saddled up. Micah Donovan lived nearby in a pretty little bungalow with a large back garden, just the kind of place someone could find some peace in. And when he answered the door, he looked confident, even cheerful.
"Can I help you?" he asked, drying his hands as if he'd just been doing the breakfast dishes. "Car broke down?"
"Mr. Donovan," Jack said. "Captain Jack Harkness, this is Toshiko Sato. We're from Torchwood."
The transformation was immediate and complete -- in the space of a few seconds Donovan's face turned pale, his hands dropped to his sides, and he sagged against the door as if he couldn't stand up on his own. Tosh put out a hand to help, but Jack grabbed her wrist; if Donovan was faking to get them to drop their guard, then he was a dangerous man.
"Thank God," he whispered. Jack's senses kicked into high gear. Everything became very bright and sharp. "Are you here to take it away?"
Jack saw Tosh backing up out of the corner of his eye.
"Take what away?" he asked. Donovan turned -- and Jack saw a slight glint of metal in his scalp. He reached for his gun.
"It's in the garden shed," the man mumbled, turning back to them. "Please take it away. Please."
"Why don't you show us?" Jack said, trying to keep his voice neutral. Donovan stepped forward -- Jack wasn't even aware he'd pulled his gun until he saw it aimed between the man's eyes. Donovan froze, and Jack stepped to one side.
He led them down the steps -- Jack keeping the gun on him, grateful for the empty early-morning streets, no witnesses -- and through a gate into the back garden. There was a rundown-looking shed at the bottom of the garden, with three huge padlocks on the door. Donovan stopped in front of it, trembling.
Jack sniffed the air -- there was a rotten-sweet smell, like old garbage, and the closer they got to the shed the stronger it was.
"I won't go in there," Donovan said. "You can't make me. You can kill me before I go in there."
Jack took a pair of cuffs off his belt and tossed them to Tosh, who carefully bound Donovan's hands behind his back before searching his pockets. A ring of keys: house-key, car-key...and three small gold keys.
Jack took them from her and opened the locks carefully -- this close, the smell was almost overwhelming. With each snap of the tumblers, Donovan whimpered.
"It's not my fault," he said, as the last lock fell away. He was shaking, trying to hide behind Tosh. "I swear it's not my fault, it made me do it."
Jack pushed him up against the fence with one hand on his chest, then down to the ground. "Stay there."
Donovan nodded. Tosh already had her gun out.
"On three," he told her softly. She stepped to the far side of the door. "One, two -- "
The door went in easily with a single kick, tumbling off its hinges, taking half the frame with it. Their guns were up and aimed inside before they could even properly see. Even when the dust had settled it was too dark -- the single window was papered over with brown paper, and the light from outside barely fell a foot inside the doorway. The stench, unbound now, washed over them like an almost physical thing.
Jack saw a lightbulb swinging wildly on a cord from the ceiling; gun still ready, he stepped inside, holding his breath, and pulled the little chain.
Light flooded the room, strobing a little as the bulb swung with the force of his pull. he heard Tosh behind him ask "What -- ?" and then he heard her gag and stumble backwards, throwing up her coffee and whatever was left of last night's dinner. He put one arm over his mouth and nose, letting his gun fall to his side.
Most of the shed was taken up with a cyberconversion unit and a handful of life-support machines similar to the ones he'd seen in the Cyberwoman's little chamber at Torchwood. None of them were powered up. Cradled in the centre of the unit were -- limbs, yes, metal limbs and metal structures, with gaps here and there where skin should have been. They were slimed over with fluid, yellow-red-brown. Bones showed through in places; maggots wormed their way around what had once been a face, and the place was full of flies. The fresh breeze from the doorway changed the air pressure in the room; he watched as one of the arm units lost the last of its decaying muscle, the metal and rot and bone clattering to the floor with a wet splat, bone rattling against metal. There was a buzzing whine as one of the flies zipped past his ear, out into the open air.
He backed out slowly, wishing he could close the door behind him.
Tosh was wiping her mouth, drawing deep breaths, hands shaking. Donovan was curled in a ball against the fence, rocking back and forth, and there was a very, very dead Cyberman in the garden shed.
"It was evil," Donovan moaned. "I had to do it."
Jack crouched next to him, reached around to the back of his head, and pulled the wire out without ceremony or warning. Unlike with Ianto, there was no significant change. The man was weeping, clearly terrified of what he'd done.
"It's all right," Jack said softly, putting the wire in his pocket. "It's okay. You did the right thing. Shh, it's fine."
"It screamed," Donovan wailed, pressing his face into Jack's shoulder. Jack fumbled with the handcuffs, unlocking them, and Donovan clutched his coat. "It screamed forever in my head -- "
Jack helped him to his feet, held him while he wept into his coat. This was -- better, actually, than Ianto's eerie calm. This was genuine trauma and emotion. Micah Donovan, for whatever reason, had resisted control long enough to kill the monster in his garden shed. And then, presumably, had locked it up tightly so he never had to see it again. Jack didn't blame him.
"It's fine," he said, stroking Donovan's hair, trying to soothe him. "You're safe. You did the right thing. We'll destroy it, okay? We'll make sure we get everything. You're safe."
"Thank you," Donovan mumbled into his chest. "Thank you, oh, thank you..."
Jack looked over his head at Tosh, who seemed to have recovered; she was already on the phone to someone, maybe UNIT for cleanup or maybe the Hub to let them know. He had no idea how he and Tosh alone were going to get a rotting robotic corpse and a cyberconversion unit out of here, but they'd find a way.
"Micah," Jack said gently, when the worst of it seemed to have subsided. "Toshiko's going to take you inside and make you a cuppa, okay? You can tell her about it while I take care of it."
"All of it," Donovan said. "Promise me."
"I promise," Jack said, as Tosh took his arm. "Go with Tosh now."
"Come on, Mr. Donovan," Tosh coaxed. He let go of Jack's coat slowly. Tosh leaned up and whispered in Jack's ear, "Napalm in the boot."
Right. He'd forgotten they kept a box of acid in the boot of the SUV. Tosh and Owen called it Napalm because you had to set it on fire to get it to work, but if he sprayed the shed with it, it'd eat the entire thing down to the floorboards and wouldn't stop until the soil under that was sterile. Thus satisfying both his own thoroughness and Donovan's lingering terror. It wouldn't even smoke; no need to alarm the neighbours.
Thirty minutes later, smelling faintly of a chemistry lab, Jack walked into the kitchen and found a wan-looking Donovan eating a scone while Tosh looked on and sipped tea.
"Feeling better?" he asked, and the man nodded.
"I'm sorry, I really am -- most of the time I'm all right," he said. "Oh, look, I've got snot on your lovely coat -- "
"It's had worse," Jack said, sitting down. Tosh pushed a cup of lukewarm tea at him.
"Mr. Donovan gave me a full report," Tosh said. "I'll write it up later."
Jack nodded. "The Cyberman's gone. Scorched earth, there's nothing left. Had to take out the shed too, though. Sorry about that."
"Thank you," Donovan said, looking down at his cup. "I can't thank you enough."
"We'd like to help, any way we can..." Jack tried to figure out what he could even offer this poor bastard. "I have...medication that could make you forget this. All of it. Everything back before Torchwood."
Donovan shook his head. "I am all right, really," he said. "It's been months since it...stopped screaming. I see a therapist, you know. I mean I don't tell him about it, it's all -- I use metaphors, but it helps." He glanced up at Jack again. "If it's all the same, I'd really rather Torchwood just left me in peace."
"Do you have anyone nearby who can check up on you?" Jack asked. "Family...?"
"I'm not suicidal. I swear. I'll probably sleep like a baby tonight," Donovan said. He caught Jack's sceptical look. "I -- my girlfriend could stay over for a few days. She'd like that. She keeps wanting to move in, but not with that -- " he shuddered. "Not with the thing in the garden."
"If I were you," Tosh said gently, touching his arm, "I'd have her come over and help you plant some flowers there. You could build a planter frame and fill it up."
"Yes, yes, thank you," Donovan said. "That's a very good idea. I'll -- I'll tell her it burnt down. That's true, isn't it?"
"True enough," Jack agreed. "Here's my card," he added, offering him a card from his pocket. "If you change your mind, call me."
"That's kind of you," Donovan told him, tucking the card in his shirt pocket. "I really don't think I will."
Jack jerked his head at the door. "We'll be on our way."
"Thank you again," Donovan said, shaking his hand. "You don't know what this means to me."
"I'm finding out," Jack said grimly, and left Donovan to his pretty house and his nice garden and the patch of sterile soil where a dead Cyberman used to be.
They stayed in Dover only long enough to check out; Jack got breakfast on the road, but Tosh said she didn't feel much like eating. She watched him, though, as he sped down the M20, steering with one hand and eating a disgusting breakfast sandwich with the other.
"That was probably the most horrible thing I've ever seen," she said finally.
"It's in my top ten," he allowed, casting a sidelong look at her.
"Sorry I freaked out."
"It happens," he said. "After the last two days, anyone would."
"You didn't."
"I'm the boss. I'm not allowed to," he said. She smiled a little. "You know what I want more than anything right now?"
"What?" she asked.
"A drink. I want a huge glass of scotch."
"You never drink," Tosh said, obviously shocked.
"I'm on the job," Jack told her. "When this is over, next time the Rift is quiet, I'm going to take some time off and have my nice big drink and a three-hour nervous breakdown. I might puke."
Tosh laughed a little. "Is that how you do it? This job?"
"You know me by now."
"When you take your sick days, that's what you do?" Tosh asked.
"Sometimes. Sometimes I go out and get laid. Puking optional." He grinned at her. "We did a good job this morning, Tosh. Hold onto that."
"Do you think he'll be all right?"
"He seemed like he was working it out. 'All right' is relative. Something bad happened, but he got through it. We all do. That was good, the thing about planting stuff. I bet if you come back next year he'll be growing zucchini or something in it."
"He said he didn't know who it was. Not like Ianto -- he didn't know who the Cyberman was. So maybe...if it hadn't been Ianto's girlfriend..." Tosh looked out the window. "Maybe he would have killed her if he didn't love her."
"Ianto's bad luck," Jack said, crumpling the sandwich wrapper in one hand and tossing it into the paper bag it had come in. "We'll fix it, Tosh."
"Do you think so?"
Jack opened his mouth to say what he was thinking -- one way or another -- but he found he didn't want Tosh to know that if they couldn't help Ianto, executing him might still be on the table.
"We'll do our best," he said instead.
***
There is no video for this recording; it was on a reel-to-reel tape machine. Even on a DVD audio transcription, parts of it show the wear of age. They crackle and fuzz, or a word is dropped, or there's a spark of noise as someone accidentally gets too near the microphone. Jack remembers understanding more, back when his ear was better trained to decipher the static.
"Where did we leave off yesterday, Lieutenant?" Jack's voice says. He pronounces it the British way, lef-tenant, and he sounds cheerful, or at least not dangerous. Lieutenant Carstairs has been most cooperative in answering the questions of Captain Jack Harkness. "Can you recount it for me?"
"Yes, sir," Lieutenant Carstairs replies. One could wish for a video-recording; Carstairs had been a handsome man who carried himself well. "During most of the year 1917 soldiers were transported without our knowledge to another location -- "
"Another planet?"
"I think so, sir, yes. We were transported without our knowledge to another -- planet, if you like, where we were conditioned to believe we were still in the war. We continued regular wartime activity under the command of General Smythe. That's S-M-Y-T-H-E."
"Noted."
"I began to feel uncertain about the General's behaviour when he attempted to court-martial three travelers found in the trenches."
"This is..." a rustle of paper, though Jack has memorised the names, "An unnamed Doctor, traveling under the alias John Smith; a young woman, Zoe Heriot; a young man suspected to be a deserter from a Scots regiment, James McCrimmond, no rank given."
"That's right, sir."
"Go on."
"Well, eventually Lady Jennifer and I -- Lady Jennifer Buckingham, she was in the Women's Reserve -- decided we'd rather throw in our lot with the Doctor, due to this and that, I've told you all that, sir. We came to see we weren't on Earth, and it turned out General Smythe wasn't even human. They'd been using these machines to make us obey them, only the machines didn't work on everyone."
"That's what I'd like to talk about today," Jack's voice says. "The machines, and how you broke free from their control."
"I don't mind talking about that, sir. Only...you do believe me, sir, don't you? I'm not mad, you know."
"Lieutenant," Jack says, "I'm probably one of the only people on Earth who does."
***
When they returned to the Hub, they found Owen standing in front of Tosh's workstation, tapping out commands on a tablet that were being mirrored on the largest of her screens, modeling something that looked like an upside-down tree. A sort of mutant upside-down tree.
"Where's Ianto?" Jack asked, and Owen rolled his eyes.
"Morgue, with Gwen," he said, gesturing with the stylus towards what had once been the roundhouse for the trains that serviced the Hub, and was now cold-storage for the honoured dead. Jack left Tosh to find out what Owen was doing and walked down the stairs, across the fountain pool, footsteps ringing loud on the metal. The Hub seemed quieter, lately, than it used to. Maybe it was just him.
Ianto and Gwen were sitting side-by-side, backs against the wall, or rather backs against the doors to the freezer boxes where the dead were kept. Ianto's head was about a foot and a half below the door to Lisa's drawer.
"You're back!" Gwen said, scrambling to her feet. Ianto looked up at him, all hooded eyes and smooth young face. He was out of uniform, such as it had been; he had on a ratty pair of jeans and a pristine pair of trainers, and a too-big rugby shirt that looked like it probably actually belonged to Gwen's boyfriend. When Gwen reached down, he took her hand and let her help him to his feet, then shoved both hands in his pockets.
"Find anything?" Gwen asked. Jack cut his eyes to Ianto, warningly. "Right. Team briefing, I expect."
"Yeah. We took care of it, nothing urgent," Jack said. "Fill you in later."
"But not me," Ianto said softly -- the first time he'd spoken when he wasn't either being asked a question or threatened, Jack thought. He looked at the younger man, curious, and Ianto ducked his head.
"Not yet. How's it going here?" Jack asked neutrally.
"Rift's quiet," Gwen said. "Owen and Ianto are making headway. Aren't you, sweetheart?" she asked Ianto, who nodded. "You should talk to Owen, though."
"It's my next stop," Jack assured her. "Uh...so, cold storage...?"
"I asked," Ianto said, in the same quiet, numb tone as before. "Owen didn't need me. I wanted to sit with her."
Jack looked at Gwen, who shrugged. "I didn't see the harm."
"OI!" Owen yelled, voice echoing down the walls to them. "READY FOR YOU, JACK!"
"Sweeter words," Jack said, without even thinking. Gwen bit down on a giggle. Even Ianto smiled distantly. "COMING UP!" he yelled back at Owen. He noticed Gwen took Ianto's elbow, making sure he walked with them, as they emerged into the atrium.
"I have," Owen announced, descending the half-flight from Tosh's desk to join them, "a theory." He swung a flash-drive around his finger on a lanyard, looking pleased with himself. "Conference room?"
Jack gestured for him to lead the way. Gwen left Ianto standing there and followed him up; Tosh was already setting the room up for the presentation Owen had apparently prepared. Jack turned to Ianto.
"You wanna hear this?" he asked. It was like watching a slow computer take commands; the blankness drifted across Ianto's face but was gone again in a second or two.
"May as well," he said. Jack pressed a hand between his shoulders, gently, pushing him towards the spiral staircase.
Owen's mutant upside-down tree turned out to be a map of Ianto's brain, or anyway of his thought processes. Tosh was, as with everything mathematic and technological, professionally interested; Gwen studied it with an air of only partial understanding. Ianto looked hard at the little structure, brow furrowing, eyes narrowing, as if he could force himself to comprehend.
"So the human mind," Owen opened officiously, "is a fucking mess."
Jack raised his eyebrows.
"I mean, you know, instincts and impulses and learned behaviour, emotional influences, rational influences, it's all kind of bunched up," Owen continued. His hands scrunched an imaginary brain together out of the air. "This is why psychotherapy is a lucrative profession."
"Owen, are we approaching a point?" Jack asked.
"Our minds don't look like this," Owen said, gesturing at the upside-down tree. "'Cept, Ianto's does. It's been restructured. I mean, this is, you know, simplified, but. Not that much. So you have input -- seeing something, hearing something, you're asked a question," Owen drew his finger down from a box labeled INPUT to one labeled DECISION. "It hits a decision node, right, and the input goes one of three places. Either it's something the rational, conscious mind can deal with no problem, so it goes this way...and that's Ianto," Owen said, finger running off the screen and swooping around to point at him. Ianto flinched. "See? Ianto's brain. That's an automatic and logical reaction, that flinch."
"Thank you," Ianto murmured drily.
"That's why when someone walks past him he still asks if they want a coffee," Owen said. "Then you have option two -- if the input requires original thought, something other than an automatic response, it goes here..." he moved back to the box labeled DECISION and straight down, to a second branch. "It's checked to make sure the response won't endanger the Cyberman. Ianto, isn't there a storage room in corridor twelve?"
"I don't think it's structurally sound in that area," Ianto said, after an infinitesimal hesitation. Jack wouldn't have noticed it if he hadn't been watching. He saw Gwen and Tosh felt the same. Ianto bowed his head, cheeks flushing. They all knew what had been in corridor twelve.
"Not Ianto," Owen said. He sounded -- not gentle, precisely, but the usual edge was missing from his voice. Jack thought about how he had found Owen, what Owen had undergone to bring him here to Torchwood, and decided this might not be any easier on Owen than on Ianto. Owen turned back to the tree and kept going. "Say he's faced with something he has no prepared response for and can't improvise around, it's kicked back to the decision node and goes to the transmitter," he said, tracing the third branch with his finger. "From there he receives instructions directly from her. That's why he's blanking. Ianto, how'd you get her out of Torchwood?"
All heads turned to Ianto. His eyes were blank, staring ahead, face slack. After a second he closed his eyes and when he opened them they had some life again.
"The microtransmitter Tosh decoded," Owen gave her a nod of the head, "was helping Ianto communicate directly with her."
Her -- not Lisa, not The Cyberwoman or even The Cyberman. Just her. Like they were afraid to speak the name.
"When he couldn't answer, it transmitted a query, and the answer was transmitted back," Owen continued.
"When he blanks out it's because he's expecting a reply command," Tosh said. "Like a computer querying a server that isn't there."
"And he gets back a 404," Owen agreed.
"So...we've been talking to...her?" Gwen asked cautiously. "Sometimes? Her...through Ianto?"
It was a chilling idea, and it made Jack's skin crawl. Tosh looked intrigued; Owen looked disgusted.
"The rest of the branches?" Jack asked, pointing to the sub-branches that led off from the three main ones.
"Mostly medical documentation for his file -- nerve responses, impulse control, not really relevant but I can go into it if you've got four hours and a medical degree," Owen said.
"Easy," Jack warned him, and turned to Ianto. "Ianto."
Ianto looked up.
"Does this seem right to you?"
Ianto opened his mouth, paused -- a real hesitation, hopefully -- and then closed it, frowning. Jack realised his mistake.
"Is Owen's theory accurate?" he corrected. Of course it wasn't right. Nothing about this was right.
"Incomplete," Ianto said, turning to look at Owen, nodding. "But accurate, yes."
"Incomplete?" Owen asked, offended. "What's missing?"
Ianto's eyes shifted to the mutant tree. "It wasn't always a response," he said quietly. "Sometimes she just did things. I did things, because she made me."
Owen's eyebrows lifted. Tosh leaned forward.
"Like what?" Owen asked.
"Don't answer that," Jack said sharply. Ianto's head whipped up to look at him, startled, but there was also a hint of gratitude in his face. Whatever it had been, there was no need to make Ianto confess to it in front of the others. And Jack suspected some of what she'd made him do would be hard for anyone to admit.
Owen gave Jack a sceptical grimace, but he tapped the side of the screen to clear it. "So, briefing over. Plan of attack?"
"Attack?" Gwen asked, sounding alarmed. "We're not taking the Falklands, Owen. It's Ianto."
Owen shrugged. "Still need a plan. You're not well, mate," he said to Ianto.
"Yes, I know that," Ianto replied.
"What do you recommend?" Jack asked Owen, who ticked a list off on his fingers.
"Intensive cognitive deprogramming. Biofeedback's a possibility. Retraining. If those don't take, Retcon."
"Is he dangerous?" Jack asked.
"I don't think so. Unless you were a psychopath before she got hold of you," Owen said to Ianto. Ianto bluescreened for a minute, then shook his head and smiled a little.
"He doesn't belong in a cell, Jack," Gwen said. "He belongs in hospital."
"I know that," Jack said, irritated. "Owen, is that something you can do here?"
Owen shook his head. "Not my game. Not if you want it done properly. Besides, I haven't the time to nanny the secretary all day and still save the world from aliens."
Jack nodded. "Okay. Everyone clear out. Ianto and I need to have a chat."
Tosh gathered her laptop and cords and followed Owen out; Gwen lingered, rubbing Ianto's shoulder affectionately, and then followed with a warning look at Jack that he felt was entirely undeserved. Yes, he had threatened to execute Ianto two days ago, but honestly, at the time Ianto had just finished pointing a gun at all of them.
Gwen had come closest of any of them to dying -- death, conversion, it amounted to the same thing in his mind -- so perhaps she had a right to feel bound to Ianto, to protect him. Or perhaps she was trying a little too hard because, on some level, she was angry at him. Whether it was Ianto's fault or not...it was hard not to be angry. He understood that, but he suspected Gwen wouldn't.
When the door had closed behind her, Jack turned back to Ianto. He was watching Jack, face carefully neutral -- waiting for his sentence, perhaps.
"I don't know about you, but I love it when people talk about me like I'm not in the room," Jack said.
"I'm used to it," Ianto replied, then glanced away. "Not being noticed, I mean."
"But you wanted to be," Jack said. Ianto flinched. "She made you hide. I bet you were desperate for someone to see."
Ianto was silent for a while before he responded. Jack wondering if that decision node of his was kicking in.
"I don't blame any of you," Ianto finally said. "When I want to disappear I'm very good at it."
"Ianto, look at me please," Jack said. Ianto turned back and met his eyes. As if it were a command, rather than a request. Jack sighed.
"I can retcon you, if you want," he said. "I can make this whole thing go away. All the time here, the end of Canary Wharf, all of it."
Ianto gave him a dry look. "Not without risking brain damage."
"Okay, maybe not everything. If we only take a couple of months, you should be all right."
"But?" Ianto said.
"But...there is a greater risk when the subject has undergone a significant personality change or is suffering from a mental illness," Jack admitted. "I'm not going to force you. It's up to you."
Ianto shook his head. There was a slight pause first; Jack knew what that meant, now, and he leaned forward.
"Retcon," he said. Ianto flinched. "Okay. That's all I need to know. Well, I can't throw you in the cells, I can't check you into a hospital, and Owen can't handle you."
He realised, belatedly, that he sounded annoyed; as if Ianto was one more problem to deal with.
"I can find you someone to help," he said. "That's not a problem. But if you need more than what Owen can do -- "
Ianto's lips quirked briefly. "There's always Providence Park."
Without really knowing, he had put his finger squarely on it; yes, Providence Park of a sort, but not the one Ianto was thinking of. The Providence Park of the alien set, the asylum for Rift survivors. Built-in security, just in case, and full-time therapeutic staff.
Ianto would need to go to Flat Holm.
***
"I didn't really do anything," Carstairs says on the tape, and there's a crackle in the background, then a noise -- metal on metal. A chair, perhaps, being inched in closer. "The Doctor...he began it."
"Tell me about it," Jack says softly.
"Yes, sir." Carstairs was handsome, but not Jack's type -- one of those soldiers Jack had tried it on in the early days and always been shoved back by. A shame. So...obedient, except when he wasn't. "There were things we couldn't see. Literally. We were, huh, I guess you could say hypnotised. There was this machine, they used it to communicate -- the General, I mean, and his kind. I couldn't see it, Lady Jenny couldn't either. The Doctor told us to look, really look, and then we saw it...and that was the start. I started to see things for what they really were."
Jack remembers thinking that it was like that, back then; some of the soldiers came into the trenches bursting with patriotism and pride and ready to kill the fucking Huns, and then they started to see things. Things as they really were.
But this is not that. Just a pretty metaphor.
"It seemed like the more we saw of the world, the more we saw it. I'm sorry, Captain, I'm not explaining it well."
"You're doing fine, Lieutenant."
"The more we traveled, the easier it became to choose the other side. The resistance fighters, you understand. There were machines that could break the hypnotism, I saw them, but we didn't need them. We just needed to see further, to see more. New experiences. Sometimes we didn't know what was true, but that was so much better than knowing wrong. It was a terrible kind of freedom.
"So it was gradual."
"As we went, yes. At one point they put me back under, they used a machine to re-hypnotise me. It's worse not to know, sir, worse to see the untruths and believe them than it is not to know what the untruths are."
Carstairs was a bit of a poet. Jack can appreciate that more, now, than he could.
"I think once the mind cracks open a little, sir, everything else must follow. Seeing all we saw just made it easier."
"I'll need a more detailed briefing than that from you, Carstairs, in a little while."
"Of course. I can write a mission report. Only...can I ask you something?"
"Yes."
"This isn't an ordinary military debriefing, is it, Captain Harkness?"
There is a pause. "No."
Carstairs clears his throat. "And are you really a Captain, sir? Only -- only I can't abide being lied to anymore. I can't. It's why they sent me home, you see; I couldn't even trust my superiors, because sometimes they really did lie."
Men lie in war. Men lie to start wars. Jack knows this, and yet still he knows twenty years from that moment he went back to war again. If only to protect a few poor boys from the lies that were, and are, so much worse than Torchwood's.
"I am a Captain, Lieutenant Carstairs. I fought too. In here, if I can't be truthful, I won't answer at all. I promise you."
A soft breath. "That's a great relief, Captain Harkness."
"I know, soldier. Get some rest. Tomorrow someone will bring you pen and paper to write your report with."
"Thank you, sir."
Chapter Three
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Flat Holm is also somewhere very conveniently away from the mainland, meaning I don't have to write hours of therapy :D