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Torchwood fic: Blood on Steel
Me: So I should work on my H/C Exchange fic this weekend.
My brain: Or you could write 12K of Torchwood h/c instead.
Thank you so much to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
frith_in_thorns for Britpicking this for me!
Title: Blood on Steel
Fandom: Torchwood
Word Count: 12.3K
Contents: Some gory violence; set in late season 2; gen with canon levels of Jack/Ianto
Summary: An alien booby trap turns the Hub into a deathtrap. Lucky thing it doesn't react to someone with no vital signs. Now Owen is their only hope. More specifically, he's Ianto's only hope.
Also posted: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24171358
This plot is shamelessly ripped off from, or at least inspired by, the Stargate SG1 episode "Message in a Bottle." It also owes inspiration to a similarly-inspired-by-that-episode fic in SGA fandom, Empty Bottle, which did something slightly different with the concept that's a bit more like what I'm doing with it.
--
Another day, another incomprehensible alien artifact in the Hub, in this case a knobby sphere about the size of a large melon, dribbling mud and slime and trails of what looked like kelp all over Owen's autopsy table.
"What's that doing there?" Owen demanded as Gwen and Ianto deposited it carefully. They were carrying it between them using Gwen's leather jacket like a hammock. From the way they lowered it, it looked heavy. "That table is for dead aliens, not -- whatever that is." And because he couldn't resist: "In case that wasn't clear enough, Ianto, your balls don't belong on the autopsy table."
Ianto gave him a level look, while trying to pat mud off his sleeves with a pocket square; he mainly succeeded in smearing it around. "Next time, Owen, you can go investigate the latest mysterious object that a fisherman dredged out of the harbor."
Gwen tried to swipe her hair out of her eyes and then ruefully looked at her mud-covered hand, realizing she was just making it worse. "Just see if you and Tosh can figure out what this thing is, yeah?"
"What what is? Oooh!" Tosh pattered happily down the stairs. "Is this the whatsit from the harbor? It looks a little bit like a mine, doesn't it?" She didn't even seem remotely bothered by the prospect, although Owen took an instinctive step back before it occurred to him that being vaporized by a harbor mine might not actually be the worst thing that could happen to him right now.
... well, getting both his legs blown off by one certainly would be.
"A mine is what the fisherman thought it was," Gwen said. She looked around helplessly, holding her hands up. Owen shoved a pack of wetwipes at her before she got mud on even more of his lab. "They called the bomb squad, bomb squad called us. But it doesn't appear to be. For one thing, mines don't have alien runes on them."
"And it doesn't match any known type," Ianto chimed in, still trying to clean up his sleeves. "Which," he added, edging away a little further, "doesn't mean it might not explode, I suppose ..."
"Oh, you are an interesting little one, aren't you," Tosh murmured, running a scanner over it. "Completely inert, looks like. And completely shielded. No way to tell what's in here."
"Hi there, kids," Jack said cheerily, leaning on the railing and looking down. "How'd the harbor trip go? Looking good, Ianto."
He sounded like he meant it, but the look on Ianto's face suggested that if it hadn't been Jack saying it, and if Ianto hadn't been Ianto, a two-finger salute would have followed.
"And also," Jack went on, "there's a very large curry order out in the tourist office, apparently ordered by someone here. Which I know because it appears that it was ordered under the name of Torchwood, so I guess it's time for that talk again."
"Wasn't me this time," Owen muttered, picking out an infrared probe to prod the sphere with. "No food for the dead man."
Gwen looked sheepish. "That's mine. Sorry, Jack. I was trying to do a speech-to-text order on the mobile because my hands were covered with mud, but I was having to do the buttons with my elbow and it picked me up talking to Ianto, and -- anyway ..." She tossed a wad of muddy wipes into the trash. "It's lunchtime, and lunch is on me."
"Yes, well, I'm going to go take a month-long shower," Ianto said. "And then scrub the car, and then take five more showers."
"What about you, Jack?" Tosh asked, carefully cleaning away a patch of the sphere's surface with a wetwipe. The knobbly look of it, underneath the mud, turned out to be a set of interlocking runic shapes that made up the exterior, like some kind of giant puzzle. Owen established with some cautious prodding that none of it moved, though; the pieces were locked into place. "Ever see anything like this before?"
"Not that I recall," Jack said, pushing off from the railing. "And your tikka masala is getting cold. If we're going to blow things up, which I'm not saying I wouldn't be in the mood for, let's do it after lunch."
Gwen nudged Owen, smudging him with mud. "Come on, Owen, go to lunch with us."
Owen shook his head. There were times when he appreciated the effort the team went to, trying to include him in group activities that he could no longer fully participate in. And then there were times when he'd rather have all the rest of his fingers broken than sit in a room with a bunch of people eating food he couldn't eat, laughing about social lives he no longer had. It seemed to depend on the mood he was in, and apparently today was a bleak existential-angst day; lovely.
"No, I'll stay here and work on this."
"I can stay and work for a while too," Tosh said. "I'm not that hungry." Even though her stomach had been audibly growling a minute ago.
"Go, go," Owen said impatiently, waving a handful of muddy wipes at her. "This thing won't be cracked open by the time you get back."
"If you do get it open, come get me, yeah?"
"Sure," he said easily, not sure whether he meant it or not.
It was easier, in moods like this, to be alone: listening to them all clatter out, bantering with each other, the hole that his death had left in the group sealing up as if it had never been. It was a feeling he got less often now than in the first couple of weeks, this bleak emptiness, but it was hitting him hard at the moment. He looked forward to a couple of hours to tinker with the sphere in peace -- a nice nonmedical puzzle, no lives at stake, no one at risk except for the man who literally couldn't die.
It was Ianto, oddly, who lagged behind, looking down at him over the railing. "Sure you're all right here?"
Owen grunted and reached for a pair of calipers. When he looked up again, Ianto and the rest of them were gone.
*
But not for long. They were back a few minutes later, bringing the food with them so they could hang around and watch him work while they ate.
"Science is not a spectator sport," Owen complained.
"Ianto and I lugged that bloody thing all around the waterfront today," Gwen said. She was sitting crosslegged on a rolling stool beside the autopsy table, with a takeaway box in her lap. "We want to know what's in it."
She had washed the mud off her hands, at least, and Ianto -- sitting on the bottom of the stairs, with Jack a couple steps above him and cartons spread out around them -- had not only managed to completely change clothes but, from the dampness of his neatly combed hair, had actually taken a shower too. A few smudges of half-dried harbor mud on Jack's shirt suggested that Ianto had had some help.
Tosh was dividing her attention between grabbing food from the cartons on the steps and helping Owen clean and examine the object, which continued to defy all efforts to scan it or pry it open.
"This is unsanitary," Owen tried.
"Like you didn't eat in here constantly before you died," Jack said from the step above Ianto. "I saw you drop an entire bacon sandwich into a Weevil's chest cavity once."
"I was hung over," Owen said shortly. "If anyone drops curry on this and kills us all, I'm blaming you."
"This is so peculiar," Tosh said, putting aside a drill. "Nothing damages it. What's it made out of?"
"Some kind of space metal, I bet." In spite of his general mood, Owen was starting to wake to the enjoyment of sussing out a new puzzle.
"Try the big electron scanner, maybe?" Tosh suggested. "We can find out its elemental composition that way."
"Since you lot have nowhere better to be, someone give us a hand moving it upstairs," Owen said, snapping his fingers.
"No," Ianto said, gesturing with a piece of naan. "Speaking as the person who will almost certainly have to clean up after this thing -- no. It stays here."
"On my autopsy table," Owen said. "Which I have to clean up."
Ianto flashed a quick smile. "Yes, that was the point."
Owen didn't know how to deal with that teasing warmth; again he had the sense of things shifting, the old way they used to be turning to quicksand under his feet. As usual this had the general effect of turning him into a raging bastard.
"Can't even move around in here," he muttered, elbowing Tosh out of the way and giving Gwen's wheeled chair a shove so he could grab a laser scalpel off the tray of instruments next to her. "Don't you people bloody well have work to do?"
"This is my work," Tosh said quietly. "I'll get the portable one from the lockers, then." She pattered up the stairs past Jack and Ianto.
There was a brief silence. Owen hunched his shoulders and didn't look at any of them. He focused on playing the laser's beam around one of the cracks between the interlocking pieces of the sphere.
After a minute, Gwen said, "You're wrong, you know. We're here because you're our friend and we like hanging out with you. At least when you're not being a giant wanker."
"Speak for yourself," Ianto said. "I'm here because the food's here."
Stuffing a last papadum into her mouth, Gwen set her carton aside and wiped her hands on her jeans-clad thighs. "I'm done anyway. Can I help?"
Owen sighed and gave up, on both an emotional and spiritual level. They were here and apparently getting rid of them so he could mope about his own death in peace was just not going to happen. "Give me a hand turning this over, then," he muttered.
The object was very heavy, more than it seemed like it ought to be for its size. The lumpy exterior, knobbed with slight protrusions from the patchwork of pieces that made up its exterior, kept it from rolling off the table but also made it hard to roll around. Between the two of them, Owen and Tosh had been able to move around, but it was hard to do on his own.
Owen couldn't help glancing up at the railing above, where Tosh had disappeared. She wouldn't have run off to cry, would she? Surely not. But who knew. Everyone had been weird since he died, from Ianto's almost eerie gentleness to Tosh going on crying jags for no apparent reason.
"This is a strange little bauble, isn't it?" Gwen murmured, reaching for it.
Owen and Tosh had been handling it all over with no problems. Tosh had been wearing gloves, but he wasn't. They'd detected no harmful chemicals or radiation.
But as her cautious fingertips contacted the surface of the thing, there was a flash of blue light, flaring all over the surface of the object, lighting up the vaguely runic structure of the pieces that made up its exterior.
From over on the stairs, Owen heard Jack suck in his breath sharply and start to yell something, but he was already lunging at Gwen. There was a loud metallic SPANG! noise, more like a movie special effect than anything real, and Owen grabbed for Gwen, screaming, "Down! Get down!"
He wasn't entirely sure what happened next. He and Gwen hit the concrete floor hard, and all around them, things hit the floor too. One of them slammed into the concrete inches from Owen's face, showering him with flying chips and dust. He tried to cover Gwen with his own body; she threw an arm over him as if she was trying to do the same thing. He heard someone scream.
And then it was over, in a second that had seemed to last a thousand years. Owen cautiously raised his head and spat out bits of concrete.
There was some kind of rod embedded in the concrete right in front of his nose, slim and silvery and stretching up and -- he stared above his head -- through the metal autopsy table above them. Other silver rods pierced it around them, imprisoning them in a sparse web of spikes.
From under the table he couldn't see much else, but he heard hoarse, pained breathing, not too far away.
What the hell, he thought wildly; what the hell? He'd been touching it all over. So had Tosh --
But Tosh was wearing gloves. And Ianto and Gwen, when they brought it in, had been taking pains to avoid making contact, as per Torchwood standard operating procedure.
The fishermen might have been wearing gloves, too.
But I --
Wasn't alive. Maybe it had to be a living person. Wouldn't do to set off a trap with the idle brush of wind and seaweed, after all.
All of this went through his mind in a frantic whirl as Gwen raised her head. Concrete dust sifted off her hair. "Wha --" she began.
There was another sharp metallic click from over their heads. Owen's eyes met Gwen's in a single moment of horror, and they both rolled frantically to the side as another spike pierced the table and slammed into the floor where they had been. It ripped through Owen's jacket, pinning him down.
For a moment they lay in a tangled heap. Gwen was panting, and Owen could feel her heart going like a rabbit's. If he'd been able to, his would be too.
Slowly, he brought up a finger to touch his lips. Gwen nodded. He tugged on his jacket, trying to free himself -- carefully at first, then somewhat more frantically: there were people hurt out there (Ianto, Jack, Tosh). The leather wouldn't tear, so he carefully slithered out of it, one arm and then the other, leaving him in a T-shirt. The spike had creased his arm, leaving a slight furrow behind, showing a thin line of exposed muscle with no bleeding. Great, another body part to try to remember to superglue as part of his morning getting-ready-for-work routine. He began slowly and carefully to sit up.
Gwen started to follow suit. Owen touched his finger to his lips again and shook his head. "Stay here," he whispered.
She looked up at the table above them, with the bright overhead lights showing around the holes that had been punched in the metal, a single wide-eyed glance of terror. She pointed to him and mimed something complex and questioning.
Owen just shook his head as he scooted out from under the table. He didn't have time or patience to try to explain his growing theory that it wasn't reacting to him, at least not to the extent that it was to her or the others. This was a weapon aimed at killing things. He was already dead. QED.
Still, he moved slowly and tried to be as quiet as possible. Couldn't do much good for anyone with a bloody great spike through his chest, could he?
He extricated himself from the table, trying not to touch any of the spikes, and stood up slowly. The first thing he saw, other than the fact that the autopsy room was now hemmed in with a damned metal forest of the things, was blood, a great red swath across the white wall. Owen no longer had a heartbeat to react, no longer had a gag reflex, but on some psychosomatic level, he reacted anyway.
There was still no sign of Tosh -- thank God -- but it had got both Jack and Ianto, who, unlike himself and Gwen, had nowhere to go. Jack was very clearly dead, pinned to the wall near the top of the stairs with a spike through the middle of his chest. At least it had been quick and would be temporary.
Ianto, on the other hand ...
It had got him through the shoulder. He was pinned to the wall, feet on the stairs, opposite hand clutched around the spike that was holding him in place like a specimen in a butterfly collection. There was blood everywhere, splattered up the side of his face, turning his shirt dark red and soaking his jacket, sprayed across the wall behind him in a spray pattern that suggested to Owen the very real and terrifying possibility that it had pinned him through a major blood vessel; the shoulder was full of them. The spike might be the only thing currently holding it closed and preventing him from bleeding to death in seconds.
Like me. He didn't remember being shot, not really. Just a muzzle flash and a feeling of heat and pressure. He didn't remember dying, and that was probably a mercy.
But for now, Ianto was alive, and conscious, though deathly pale. He stared at Owen with wide eyes in a chalk-white face, and opened his mouth, starting to speak.
Owen touched his finger to his lips. Ianto drew in a shaking breath and gave a small, jerky nod. His fingers scrabbled on the blood-slick spike, slipping a few inches before coming to rest again.
He was going to be in shock soon, if he wasn't already. And he must be in excruciating pain. From the angle, it could hardly have missed his scapula. Owen was grateful, right now, for the profound self-control that could make Ianto such a giant bloody pain in the ass to deal with sometimes. It was probably keeping him alive now. He didn't make a sound, just small pained gasps, the breath hissing through his teeth.
Owen glided toward him on stealthy feet, picking his way through the forest of spikes. It occurred to him -- strange, idle thought -- that if he'd been like this a few years ago, he could have walked right into that surgical suite with Katie and the doctors. The gas wouldn't have hurt him. He could have saved ...
Stop it.
Not breathing, heart not beating, and yet still holding the breath he didn't need, he eeled through the spikes until he was close enough to reach out and lightly put a hand on Ianto's uninjured shoulder.
"I think heat and motion set it off," he whispered. "Heat, motion, sound. Heartbeats." He might have grimaced, he wasn't sure, because the corners of Ianto's mouth quirked up in something very briefly like a smile. With his hand still resting on Ianto's shoulder, Owen pressed lightly, his thumb on Ianto's collarbone. He could feel Ianto's heartbeat, very fast and light. "Try not to talk if you don't have to. I'm gonna get you out, mate."
Ianto gave a small nod, breathing in short, pained gasps. He breathed out very softly, "Gwen?"
"She's fine," Owen whispered back. "Better than us."
Ianto's eyes flicked up, in Jack's general direction.
"Look at me, not at him," Owen whispered. "Nothing you can do for him right now. He's gonna be fine, eventually."
"He'll ..." Ianto's voice was a breath. "Wake up again ... die again ..."
"He'll get through it. He's got through it before. Nothing you can do."
He spoke absently; he was thinking, and thinking desperately. Ianto was going to need painkillers, and something to keep his vitals from crashing in the short term. Shock was the biggest danger here; that, and collapse. Right now, Ianto was standing up, feet planted firmly on the stairs, back against the wall. If he sagged, or even moved too much, the spike would twist and tear, rip open whatever it was holding closed in there ...
Owen closed his eyes briefly, and, keeping his hand on Ianto's shoulder, he glanced back toward the ball on the table, almost hidden now behind its forest of spikes. It was glowing faintly blue, a complex tracery around the outsides of the runelike pieces.
"Found it!" a cheerful voice called from above, and Owen and Ianto both snapped their heads up in alarm.
There was another of those ominous metal clicking sounds, and they both yelled at the top of their lungs -- in Ianto's case, more of a breathy whisper: "Tosh, duck!"
This time Owen saw it happen. The spike extruded from the metal ball with impossible speed, a silver blur that shot just underneath the top rail of the upper railing and slammed into something with a loud crunch. There was a clatter and a scream.
"Tosh!" Owen called, and then snapped his mouth shut. The outburst didn't seem to have triggered another spike in their direction; it might have Ianto classed as a nonthreat now. But they couldn't take the chance, because Ianto couldn't handle another of those in any part of his body, and pinned like that, he couldn't dodge.
"Owen?" Tosh called down, with a slight hitch in her voice. She sounded scared, but not in pain. "What was --"
"Down, down!" he called back as loudly as he dared; "Stay down!" and then he looked around and saw something worse: Gwen was crawling out from under the table.
Owen waved at her frantically with the hand not still resting on Ianto's shoulder -- he wasn't even sure why he'd kept it there, he just knew, as a doctor, that touch was soothing, and it was the only thing he had to offer right now. "Gwen!" he whispered loudly. "Stay there!"
She stopped, with her legs half under the table, looked up, and saw Ianto and Jack. Her eyes went wide.
Owen touched his lips with his finger again. Gwen nodded. She was still looking around, taking in the entire scene, Ianto and Jack and the spikes. Owen recognized the look; it was probably about what he'd looked like when he had crawled out a couple of minutes ago, stunned bafflement at the transformation of the familiar autopsy room into a jungle of lethal silver rods, the walls painted in their friends' blood.
"Ianto," he whispered, giving Ianto's shoulder a brief squeeze, and Ianto's gaze turned to him, lagging, not quite tracking. That wasn't good. "I'm going to get you something for the pain. Don't move and stay quiet, yeah?"
Ianto gave another small nod and clenched his hand on the spike. He took a breath, and whispered, "What about ... this?"
"Gonna get it out." He just didn't know how. Nothing he and Tosh had done had even left a mark on the thing.
But failure wasn't an option. Not this time. Not with what was at stake.
He gave Ianto's shoulder another brief squeeze, and drew his hand away. Retracing his path was easier; he was less worried, now, about setting off the device again. It didn't really seem to notice him at all. It was possible he could speak and behave normally and not trip it, but he wasn't about to test that, not with the others' lives in the balance. And they, unlike him, had lives to lose.
"Tosh?" he called up softly. "You okay up there?"
"I think so," her soft voice filtered back down. Owen glanced at the device, but that didn't seem to have triggered it.
He was close to Gwen now, who was still sitting on the floor. Owen put a hand on her shoulder and turned to look at the sphere. Up close, he could see the blue light shining around all its complex patterns of geometric cracks, outlining the blocky chunks of material of which it was made. Each spike came from one of those -- and only one per section, which meant it was limited, he thought. It only had so many of those. But there were dozens, maybe hundreds, and he saw sections as yet untripped. If every separate piece of its exterior could produce one of these, then it still had plenty more to deploy.
"Still there, Tosh?"
"I'm here," she called down.
"We need to get Gwen out. Go down to the archives, see if you can find something to disguise her body heat and heartbeat, yeah? Blankets'll do in a pinch, but we must have something better."
"Oi, now, wait a minute," Gwen whispered. Owen shushed her again. Gwen scowled up at him, and whispered so softly it was little more than mouthing the words, "I can help."
She could. And she could also get killed in the process.
"Living people set it off," he whispered. "It doesn't seem to react to me. Stay there."
He patted her shoulder and stepped past the table, weaving in and out of the spikes, to the selection of emergency drugs he kept on hand and available, given this lot's tendency to turn up bleeding. He was picking up what he needed when there was another of those metallic clicks.
Owen spun around just in time to see Gwen, who had been in the process of slowly and quietly standing up, hit the floor hard as another spike deployed and shot through the space she'd occupied a second ago.
He hadn't even heard her make a sound.
Movement, heartbeat. Fuck.
She lay flat, staring at him with wide eyes and trying to gasp quietly.
"Gwen!" Ianto gasped out from his position against the wall.
"Will all you alive people stop talking?" Owen whispered loudly.
The sphere hadn't done anything in reaction to that, suggesting that either his theory that it had Ianto classified as a nonthreat was accurate, or it reacted more strongly the closer you got to it. Or both.
Owen bent to pick up the items he'd dropped, then, in the ensuing silence, eeled over to Gwen and crouched beside her.
"Hurt?" he whispered. She shook her head. "Stay here 'til Tosh comes back. Then you see if you can get up top and help her. Faster we can turn this thing off, faster we can get Ianto out."
"What about you?" she whispered, the words coming out on a breath.
"Oi love," he whispered, looking around at the spikes, at the blood, "this thing knows the score. I'm already dead."
*
Tosh reappeared at the railing as Owen was slithering back over to Ianto with a handful of loaded syringes. Owen didn't see her arrive; what got his attention, and Gwen's, was Tosh making little waving motions with whatever it was she was holding.
Once they'd seen her, she whispered something that sounded like "Cold gun," and mimed throwing in Gwen's general direction. Gwen nodded, and Tosh executed a perfect drop. Gwen stretched out a hand along the floor like a slow-motion sport move and caught it. Owen was very briefly distracted, watching them. It was beautiful teamwork, like something out of a movie.
Then he got back to his own business and fetched up against the wall beside Ianto, who gave Owen a pallid, weary look, his strength visibly flagging. Ianto was trembling from the effort of staying upright and quiet with a great metal spike punched through his scapula, grinding on bone whenever his knees sagged .... as well he might.
"Gwen's all right?" he whispered.
"She's fine." For now. Gwen had cold-gunned herself; he could tell by the glitter of frost in her hair as she very slowly and carefully began crawling through the spikes toward the opposite staircase, which was not quite as thoroughly spike-ified as the one Jack and Ianto were on. They didn't know what the thing they called a cold gun actually was for, but it was certainly good for chilling down the surface temperature of an object. He hoped she hadn't given herself frostbite.
Owen forced himself not to watch her painstaking progress. Instead he showed Ianto the syringe in his hand. "Painkiller." The next one. "Stimulant. Not good for you, not right now. But it'll keep you on your feet for a little while, and keep your blood pressure up. Fainting right now wouldn't do you any favors."
"You know what you're about," Ianto breathed out through clenched teeth. "Do it."
Owen pulled back Ianto's jacket collar and then carefully undid the top buttons of his shirt and pulled it down to expose the skin below his collarbone. The entire time, Ianto had his head tipped to the side, watching Owen with weary trust. Well ... it wouldn't be the first time one of his team had their lives in his hands. It was what he was here for.
He pressed the needles home -- one, then two. Ianto didn't react; the amount of pain he was in, a little jab probably registered as nothing at all. Owen rubbed his thumb against the injection site, and looked over to see how the girls were getting on.
Gwen was on the stairs now, working her way up the steps in slow motion, stepping over and ducking under spikes. It was oddly hypnotic, a slow and graceful ballet. It also seemed to be working. She hadn't triggered anything yet.
With his attention on Gwen and his thumb still idly rubbing circles beneath Ianto's collarbone, Owen almost jumped out of his skin when Ianto's blood-sticky hand circled his wrist. He turned back quickly, to Ianto looking at him intently from eyes that already looked somewhat sunken in blue-shadowed sockets. (Dehydration, Owen's brain catalogued without much conscious input, an old instinct from his medical residency. Need to get an IV set up.)
"You should get out of here too," Ianto whispered. He took a breath and touched his tongue to his dry lips. "They could use your help up there."
"Plenty to do down here too," Owen whispered back. He tried to twist his wrist free, but for a man impaled on a spike, Ianto had a strong grip.
"Dangerous," Ianto whispered. "It's a deathtrap down here."
"Already dead. Not much left to lose."
"You bloody stubborn arsehole," Ianto whispered, which was enough to get Owen's attention all by itself. Ianto hardly ever swore. "Your life's not worth less than ours."
Owen carefully took Ianto's hand and pried it off his wrist with his other one -- the one with the broken pinky finger, the finger he'd broken weeks ago just to make a point, deliberately and without a single qualm aside from the meaty pop it made as the bone came apart. Came apart, and would never heal, leaving him with one and a half surgeon's hands. Forever, or at least for as long as his unlife lasted.
"I don't have a life," he whispered, and jerked his head at the sphere. "And it knows it." He patted Ianto's chest and ducked away. "Stay here."
He left Ianto sputtering and very clearly wanting the last word, but unable to have it as long as he had to raise his voice to do it. Excellent, as long as the idiot didn't work himself into a fit of blood loss.
There had to be something in this whole damn place that was capable of cutting through the spikes. He did actually have a few ideas along those lines; it was the execution that was going to be tricky.
"Tosh!" he whispered, as loudly as he dared.
Her head appeared over the railing a moment later, ponytail swishing. "Gwen's safe," she whispered down.
That wasn't what he was going to ask, although it was a vast relief to know. "Singularity scalpel," he whispered. "Archives."
Tosh nodded. She glanced toward Ianto and Jack with a tormented look, then ducked away and was gone.
Owen pulled out tool drawers, muffling each with his off hand as he drew it out, glancing at each item and moving on to the next. Nothing he and Tosh had used so far had done anything to the outside of that thing, but maybe the spikes were more vulnerable.
He pulled out the heaviest-duty laser he had, and also a handheld angle grinder with a diamond-edged blade. After a glance at the ominously glowing but quiescent sphere at the center of its forest of spikes, he worked his way back over to Ianto.
"Going well, is it?" Ianto whispered in a dry tone. He sounded better, and there was a little more color in his face. Temporary, Owen thought; it was a reprieve, not a solution. They were borrowing from Ianto's future health to get this done, and they had to get it over with before they ran through the loan and started borrowing against health he didn't have.
"This is probably gonna hurt," he muttered, "sorry." And he brought up the angle grinder, turning it toward the spike a couple of feet down from Ianto's shoulder.
Ianto didn't react much to the tool's high-pitched whine, but when Owen pressed the grinding edge into the spike, Ianto jerked all over and clutched wildly at Owen's arm, sinking the bloody fingers of his one good hand into Owen's shoulder.
Owen gritted his teeth and kept going, leaning into it, while Ianto clutched at him with a shaking hand, but didn't tell him to stop.
Then the sphere shocked them.
There was no warning, just a sudden whipcrack of one of the weirdest and most awful things Owen had felt in his unlife, as if the energy that was keeping him alive was suddenly disrupted and turned inside out. It was like a fingernail bending backwards all over his whole body.
Distantly, he heard Ianto screaming in pain.
Owen found himself lying on his back on the stairs with a brand new spike inches above his face. It must have been triggered by whatever noise he was making, whatever he was doing. Had he had a seizure? He didn't seem to have broken anything new, but it was hard to tell because he couldn't really feel much of anything, even less so than usual.
He'd dropped the tools; they lay scattered down the stairs.
"Ianto," he whispered, and slowly tried to pull himself into a sitting position. Nothing was working; all he could manage was some feeble twitching. He had an instant of true, soul-deep horror -- the only thing worse than an endless, unchanging unlife would be getting trapped in the unresponsive shell of a body he couldn't move. But then the hands moved, the torso moved; he sat up, avoiding the spike with difficulty, and managed to fit himself back into the clumsy shell of his body somehow.
"-- Owen? Owen ... Jesus ..."
Ianto's hoarse whisper came from above. Owen held up a hand, then his single pointer finger (Wait a minute) and Ianto's voice cut out sharply. Owen took a couple of sort-of-not-breaths, more like gathering himself, and then very carefully stood up. His limbs still felt weirdly detached, like none of it quite belonged to him. He really, really hoped this feeling wasn't permanent.
Ianto rested his head against the wall. "Let's not do that again," he whispered.
"Not planning on it." Owen glanced down at the new spikes providing a tripping hazard on the stairs, then over at the sphere. So it had the capability to defend itself in ways other than extruding pointy objects of death. Wonderful.
"What'd it do to you?" Ianto whispered. Owen noticed with a slight surge of guilt that Ianto had bitten through his lower lip; there was fresh blood on his chin.
"Disrupted me, I think." Sensation, such as it was, had begun coming back to his hands. He touched Ianto's unhurt shoulder lightly, moved over to check around the spike. It didn't seem to have done any new damage, for whatever that was worth.
Ianto grimaced and raised his head. "You should get out of here," he whispered. "Go up top where Gwen and Tosh are, and figure out a solution from there."
"Are we really having this discussion again?"
"It almost put one of those right through you a minute ago."
"But it didn't, did it?"
"And if it puts one through your head?" Ianto whispered. "What then?"
"Won't think much about it, will I?"
Ianto got that stubborn set to his jaw. "You think it didn't hurt us," he whispered, "to see you there -- see you bleed out -- see you on that autopsy table? You think we felt nothing about that?"
Owen had absolutely no answer for that, but he was saved by the bell just then, more or less, by Tosh reappearing at the railing with the singularity scalpel in hand. She started to wave it at him. Owen shook his head and made a palm-down gesture: Keep it down. Tosh nodded, but slowly and carefully mimed throwing it to him.
Owen shook his head. He patted Ianto's shoulder and slithered up the stairs, stepping over scattered takeaway cartons; going past Jack, who he tried not to look at. He knew exactly how much blood was in the human body, and how much it could lose without dying, and Jack had definitely lost all of that.
He'll be fine. Eventually. Waking up in a room full of dead teammates isn't going to do any favors for his mental health, though.
Tosh came into view at the top of the stairs, holding out the singularity scalpel. Owen shook his head. "You're going to use it," he whispered. "Not me."
Her eyes went wide. "Owen --"
"Shhh." He crouched just below her on the stairs, glanced down at the sphere to make sure it remained in its quiescent state before reaching up -- she was crouched too, leaning down -- and touched her hand carefully to turn it so he could see the scalpel and its screen, showed her the controls with little touches. "You've seen me use it. Fuck, Rhys has done it, and on a live subject too. You can do this."
"Of course I can," she said, pulling it back and firming her jaw. "I am brilliant, aren't I?"
"Yeah," Owen said. "Yeah, you are."
She pinked up a bit. "What about you; where are you going to be?"
"Down here prepping for surgery. The instant we pull that thing out of Ianto, the clock starts." He was determined not to even consider the option that it might be a clock with five seconds on the countdown. "Where's Gwen?"
Tosh made a beckoning motion, and Gwen popped into view above Tosh. They had both taken off their shoes, Owen noticed, to move more quietly. Good idea. He reached down to take off his, too.
"Gwen," he whispered, "I need something to do surgery on. Or in. I'm going to need to set up a sterile operating theater fast, and I can't do it on the table for reasons that, well ..." He gestured vaguely in the direction of the sphere. "Sheets maybe? Anything will work if it can be sterilized."
Gwen's eyes went distant for a moment. "Remember that traveler we met from, what was it, the 36th century? The apocalypse one? With the portable pop-up clean rooms?"
"We still have those? Yes. Perfect. Get one. Either of you fancy being a surgical nurse?"
Their mutual horrified looks suggested that neither of them did.
"Yeah, well, I'm going to need one. Work it out amongst yourselves. Tosh, get ready with the scalpel and lock onto whatever is inside that thing, but don't do anything 'til I give the word. I need to set up first. When I tell you to go, obliterate it."
Tosh nodded.
Owen slipped back down the stairs. He didn't look at Ianto beyond a quick glance to make sure Ianto didn't seem to be in danger of passing out where he stood. He didn't look good at all -- very pale, sweat beading along his hairline, gripping the spike with his good hand as if he needed the grip to hold himself upright. He started to whisper a question as Owen went by, but Owen shook his head.
He was deep in planning headspace. This was going to be one of those medical situations where he had to rehearse every step so he could spring into action as soon as the flag dropped. Frustratingly there were also some giant question marks, like: would the sphere retract all its spikes if it was damaged, or send out more? Would the singularity scalpel even work on it? Did it have more of those shocks in store, and could Ianto take another one --?
Think, think. He had done this kind of thing before, done it while exhausted, done it under gunfire. He tried not to think about the fact that he'd never done it with a dead man's half-numb hands, one of them broken.
Well, if you can't do it, Harper, they need to fire you and get a new doctor who can handle the job, and that's all there is to it, isn't it?
He laid out the instruments he was going to need, laid the handheld UV sterilizer beside them -- handy little alien gadget, that one. Got a bag of saline, an IV kit.
Gwen arrived at the top of the stairs. She leaned over the railing with a hand closed in a fist, and opened it to reveal an object that looked like a large white plastic button, or a small stack of glued-together poker chips. From experience he knew that when tapped, it would open out into a filmy plastic bubble big enough to accommodate several people, designed as portable wasteland shelter in a post-apocalyptic environment.
"Yeah, that's the one. Keep it, one of you'll set it up down here when we're ready. Who's my nurse?" he whispered.
Gwen and Tosh looked at each other. Tosh had both hands occupied with the singularity scalpel. She started to open her mouth, closed it, and gave a little shrug. Gwen pointed at herself.
"When it's safe," he whispered, "be ready to move. I'll need you down here. Both of you, actually, but not 'til it's safe, yeah? Good to go, Tosh?"
She gave him a thumbs-up with one of the hands holding the scalpel's controls.
Owen gathered up a handful of gauze packets and worked his way back through the forest of spikes to Ianto, who gave him a wan sort-of smile.
"Hanging in there?" Owen whispered, with a glance at the spike.
Ianto looked down at the spike pinning him and then at Owen and said, very quietly and wearily, "I hate you."
"They say laughter is the best medicine," Owen whispered back, tearing open gauze packets with his teeth.
"That's a comforting thing to hear, coming from my doctor."
"Right, so what happens now is Tosh zaps that thing with the scalpel as soon as we're in place. Sorry, this is going to hurt." With a pad of gauze in his palm, Owen worked his arm between Ianto's upper back and the wall, sliding it forward through the sticky-warm mess of Ianto's blood until his fingertips brushed the spike. Ianto tried to pull himself forward to help, and gasped in pain. "No no, don't move, don't move. It's good. I got it."
The rest of the gauze was gripped in his other hand, which he planted on Ianto's blood-soaked chest, next to the embedded spike. He was positioned not only to stop the bleeding as soon as he had the chance, but also to hold him up, because he fully expected Ianto was going to collapse when the spike came out. He could feel Ianto's heartbeat through the hand on his chest, much too fast, but reassuring in its constancy.
"Anything I should do?" Ianto whispered. The words rasped out between his teeth. The painkillers weren't doing more than taking the edge off it, and whether they got the spike to retract or had to get it out with the singularity scalpel, it was going to be agonizing. Owen suspected Ianto knew that, too.
"Just stay as still as you can. It'll hurt less."
"Is that like 'just a little pinch, Ianto, this won't hurt at all'?"
"When have I ever said that?"
"You're right," Ianto whispered. "Actually reassuring patients is beyond the scope of your charming bedside manner."
"Some people find me very charming." He was stalling, damn it, and he knew it. Ianto didn't have the time to waste. But once the spike pulled out, he might have no time at all, and Owen found it suddenly hard, much harder than he would have thought, to take that final step. "So no," he whispered, "you're right, this is going to hurt like hell no matter what you do. If you don't move, it'll do less damage coming out, that's all. Less for me to fix."
"You will," Ianto whispered, and his head tilted, fell sideways against Owen's, some of his weight sagging onto him. "Fix it, that is. You're a brilliant doctor, Owen."
"I know," Owen whispered back, and he felt rather than heard Ianto's breath hitch in a silent half-laugh.
He looked up at Tosh, waiting expectantly at the railing, still as a stone, and gave her a nod.
Watching the singularity scalpel being used from the outside was, as it turned out, not that interesting to watch. There was a long still moment with Tosh concentrating utterly, her only movement the tiny twitches of her hands as she zeroed it in on the sphere.
There might have been a pop, like the muffled sound of electrical circuits frying. There was definitely a sudden hot-metal smell, really more of a taste. (He could still taste and smell -- not as well, maybe, but at least it wasn't gone entirely.)
And with the same suddenness as they'd extruded, the spikes pulled back into the sphere, retreating swiftly and smoothly, sealing up as if they'd never been.
There was an unpleasant wet thump as Jack's body hit the floor, but Owen was mainly concerned with taking the sudden weight of a full armload of limp, bleeding Ianto.
He slapped the gauze over the entry and exit wounds. It wasn't spurting, but it was definitely gushing; the gauze and his hands were instantly saturated. Ianto was still at least somewhat conscious, trying to stay on his feet and providing as much help as he could -- which wasn't much -- as they stumbled down the couple of stairs to the floor of the autopsy room. Without the spikes everywhere, there seemed to be much more room in here, all of a sudden. Owen brought them both down to the floor in a kind of controlled fall.
"Gwen!" he shouted. "Tosh!"
After all the whispering, his voice sounded much too loud, but Gwen was there almost instantly; she must have been on her way down the stairs already. Owen's hands and sleeves and shirt were saturated with Ianto's blood. Far too much blood. This wasn't going to work, the damage was too great, maybe he could have dealt with this once but he couldn't do it in his present condition --
"Oh God," Gwen murmured, looking down at Owen and Ianto and the spreading pool of blood on the floor. "What do you need me to do?"
"Shelter," he got out, and she deployed it, the button expanding into a tentlike domed structure about six feet across. "Tosh, get the -- that thing, out of here --"
"On it!" Tosh cried, pattering down the stairs.
"Tools are over there," he told Gwen. "IV and fluids. That tray. Bring it here."
He dragged Ianto inside the pop-up, not bothering with niceties or anything other than speed. Ianto was fading in and out, eyelids fluttering. They left a trail of blood on the floor.
"This?" Gwen asked, clambering in after him with the loaded tray, packed with tools and scanners and a bag of saline, everything he thought he'd need for emergency field surgery.
"That. Gloves and mask on you, and then keep pressure on this for me."
She obeyed, and took over pressing down on the gauze, for all the good it was doing, while Owen wiped his hands, started to reach for a mask and then remembered he didn't need one. He sealed the bubble shut with a quick swipe of his fingers, sealing them in.
"Hang in there," Gwen murmured to Ianto, "hang on, we're going to help you," a steady soothing mantra as Owen worked as fast as he could, clipping the pulse and oxy monitors on -- a mix of modern and future tech, feeding into one of Tosh's scanners -- and getting the IV in him, with saline and the anesthetic drugs. He hated this part most of all; anesthesia was a fine art, and Ianto needed a full operating suite with a dedicated anesthesiologist, a team, working to save his life. Instead he got emergency field surgery on a concrete floor.
Ianto's bloody lips moved, but no sound came out. He clutched weakly at Owen's arm, his blood-slick fingers leaving streaks behind.
"Gonna put you out now, mate," Owen said. He squeezed Ianto's arm, and reached for the scissors. "You'll wake up with Jack all healed up and hovering over your bedside being disgustingly sentimental about it. You know he's gonna bring flowers."
"He better bring flowers," Gwen said, bearing down on the blood-sodden bandages. "We'll kill him again on your behalf if he doesn't."
Ianto smiled briefly, and then his eyes rolled back in his head and he was out. Owen glanced at his stats: so good so far. BP extremely low, pulse much too fast as his body tried to compensate. But not crashing. Not yet.
"Here we go," Owen muttered. "Move your hands, but be ready to move back in on my say-so."
He cut away Ianto's shirt, and Gwen pulled back the soaked gauze. Owen glanced up once; through the translucent bubble around them, he glimpsed Tosh bending over Jack.
And then he pulled on sterile gloves, and the world narrowed down to this, and only this.
*
Death wasn't exactly a bed of roses by anyone's definition, but Owen would grant it this: it made the aftermath of surgery a little more bearable in its way, even if what he really wanted to do was get a bottle of Scotch and tune out the world for a while.
But there were no aching shoulders, no muscles quivering from fatigue and strain, no sweat plastering down his hair and dripping off his nose. The only sign that he'd just spent three hours on his knees clamping blood vessels and picking out chips of bone out of Ianto's mess of a shoulder was the blood swirling down the drain as he scrubbed and scrubbed his hands at the sink in the upstairs shower room.
He'd opted to go up here to clean up rather than try to clean off at the sink in the autopsy room because he needed a shower too -- he was covered in Ianto's blood from head to foot -- and also, for a little while, he just needed to ... exist.
Ianto was still completely out and probably would be for a while. He was recovering down in the autopsy room. Owen felt he should be moved as little as possible, especially when moving him involved carrying him up a flight of stairs, so Tosh and Gwen had brought down cushions and a roll-out mattress, and they'd got him settled, with his shoulder swathed in bandages and blankets tucked around him to keep him warm.
Jack was up by now, though wobbly, and Owen had left him supervising an IV blood-draw setup for Tosh, their only Ianto-compatible blood donor. Gwen, having cleaned up herself, was working on scrubbing the remaining blood off the stairs and walls, cleaning up the spilled leftovers from lunch and so forth. Aware that he was only likely to make things worse, looking like an escapee from an abattoir as he did, Owen had slipped off upstairs to clean up.
A quick shower got most of the blood off -- all his showers were quick ones now; between his inability to get an erection or feel much of the water's heat, there was no pleasure in it, and looking at his body, being reminded of its pallid deadness, was the last thing he wanted. Now, in a clean T-shirt and loose pair of tracksuit bottoms, he scrubbed and re-scrubbed his hands, and dug half-dried blood out from under the nails. His palm was going to need restitching, or more accurately re-gluing; it had occurred to him some time back that there was no point in not just going straight for the easiest option. He'd also had to take off the splint, saturated with blood as it was, and he manipulated the broken finger under the water. It was an odd feeling, no pain at all, just a kind of popping as it wobbled around.
Things he regretted: that.
He was calmer now because he had to be. He'd always been volatile. Angry. Now he was in a situation where a moment's outburst of temper could result in having to wrap up a broken finger every day for the rest of what might loosely be termed his life.
Or maybe it's the lack of adrenaline. Maybe what you think are emotions are just a residual vestige of it, a sort of psychosomatic echo; maybe what you think is love, or fear, or desperation is just a memory of it, and slowly it'll fade, like the taste of coffee and the aftershocks of orgasm, as you forget what all of it felt like, what any of it felt like ...
There was a knock at the door.
"Occupied!" Owen snapped. "Wait your turn."
"Owen? It's Jack."
"Not actually a counterargument," Owen called. Jack opened the door. "Oh, well, just come right in then, make yourself at home, what's the point of even having doors around here. I could have been naked, you know."
"Yes, that would have been terrible." Jack closed the door behind him.
Owen reached for a towel. "Shouldn't you be doing the anxious-boyfriend hovering thing?"
"Gwen and Tosh are my surrogate hoverers," Jack said. His voice was light, but there was a shadow underneath, something not very deeply buried, like a tether tugging him back toward the autopsy room.
"How's Tosh doing?" Owen asked, turning away to scrub at his damp hair. "I gave her instructions. I hope she's following them."
"When I left to come up here, she was lying down and drinking juice, yes. Owen ... Owen. Owen, look at me."
Owen scowled, and looked, seeing Jack as he was now -- clean, changed, not crumpled and soaked in blood.
"Where'd you put that sodding thing, anyway?" he asked. By the time he and Gwen emerged from their impromptu operating theatre, the sphere had long since been dealt with.
"Locked in the vaults," Jack said. "According to Toshiko, it's harmless now. Whatever was inside -- an electronic controller, an organism -- is gone."
"And we're keeping it."
"Better to have it here, locked up, than out in the world."
Owen didn't answer. He would have appreciated the satisfaction of blowing it up, but it seemed to be impervious to that kind of thing.
"You okay?" Jack asked.
His voice was gentle. Owen couldn't deal with that kind of gentleness, not right now. He looked down at his hands instead, and slowly, carefully -- with exquisite control, not the abrupt violence he wanted to lash out with -- he began rewrapping his broken finger.
"Course I am," he said. "Dead, but fine. Can't hurt the dead guy."
"What's this, then, a love bite?" Jack asked.
He reached out and brushed his fingers across Owen's bare arm, just above the crease where the spike had sliced through his arm. Owen had honestly forgotten about it.
"Right." There was a tube of superglue tucked into the pocket of his other jeans ... currently stuffed into the bin; it wasn't like he was ever going to wear them again. He reached in and found it. His hands came out streaked with blood. Ianto's blood. God, it never ended. He curled his hand around the glue tube and wanted to just keep squeezing, squeezing, 'til his broken finger popped out of place and through the skin, 'til the other fingers broke too ...
It wouldn't feel like anything, of course, just like it hadn't felt like anything when he broke his finger in front of Tosh.
Jack moved abruptly, reached out to touch the back of his hand. "May I?"
Owen opened his hand. Jack took the glue tube, and Owen rested both hands, both blood-stained hands, lightly on the edge of the sink while Jack ran a bead of glue down his forearm.
"Like that?"
"Just like gluing a broken cup," Owen said. He rinsed his hands again. The new wrapping on his finger was wet now, but it would dry; none of the usual rules applied anymore. He could break, but at least he didn't rot.
"You're a lot more than that," Jack said.
"Sorry ... a walking, talking broken cup." He held out his hand for the superglue.
He recognized this feeling abruptly. It wasn't just the usual death-related depression, it was a kind of post-surgical letdown, the emotional drop of being on and then suddenly winding up with nowhere for all those emotions, all that energy to go. In times gone by, he'd drink it away or fuck it away. But he didn't have those options now, and he didn't even have any reason for feeling this way. It was chemical, hormonal, like all emotions. He didn't have those anymore -- chemicals, hormones. He shouldn't get brain-drop anymore. It was a fake emotion, like the fake life animating his dead limbs.
Jack still had hold of the glue and showed no sign of giving it back. Owen snapped his fingers. "Glue?"
Rather than giving it back, Jack took Owen's hand. He just held it for a minute, cupped gently in his own, and then carefully dried Owen's palm with the edge of the towel, and ran the bead of superglue down the scalpel cut. Then he began to unwrap the wet wrapping around the broken finger, and reached for a dry one from the open medical kit beside the sink.
Owen just let him. It was easier than putting up a fight about it. Right now his emotions were as dead-numb as his skin; some part of his brain hadn't got the memo that neither body nor brain needed to feel fatigue anymore. He dully watched as Jack's strong fingers smoothed down the bandage, loop by gentle loop, firming it up and taping it down. Jack's fingers, whole and alive, not blue with blood loss, lying limply by his thigh ...
"Where does the extra blood come from?" Owen asked abruptly.
"What?"
"The blood. Yours. You spilled most of the standard five liters all over the inside of the autopsy room. I know because we had to scrub it off the steps. You didn't exactly suck it up back inside, but you're definitely not suffering from massive blood loss now ..."
Jack laughed softly, and then he wrapped an arm around Owen and pulled him in for a tight hug. He wrapped a hand around the back of Owen's neck, and just held him for a minute, and then kissed his temple.
"Thank you," he said quietly, against the side of Owen's face. "Owen, I'm glad you're still here. We're glad you're still here."
*
It was late at night, or early in the morning, when Ianto finally woke up. He'd gone from anesthetized sleep to actual sleep, so Owen had decided to just let him rest on the floor in the autopsy room, nestled down in the pile of blankets and pillows and heat packs they'd made for him. It was always chilly down here, for obvious reasons of necessity; you didn't want alien corpses going off in the heat.
Owen remembered when he used to complain about it, climbing up to the main control level to grab a cup of coffee and make bad jokes about Torchwood not paying the heating bills. Now he didn't feel the cold anymore, not as such, but he was aware that other people did, especially people recovering from emergency surgery after nearly bleeding out on the autopsy bay floor, so he drifted by every once in a while to make sure Ianto was warm enough.
The girls had gone home hours ago. Jack was around, as always, wandering in and out of the autopsy room, sometimes sitting beside Ianto, sometimes up in his office. Owen had explained his own continued presence, both to Jack and to himself, on the general principle that he didn't need to sleep anyway so he might as well be around to take care of his patient. Jack hadn't asked any questions.
What Owen was doing, mostly, was paperwork, idle busywork interspersed with long periods of staring into space. Most of the lights in the Hub were off; there was just the light above the table he was using in lieu of a desk so he could stay down in the autopsy pit and still work. From up above, Jack's office lights glowed dimly, along with the glow of the computer equipment that ran all night.
It wasn't sleep, not quite. But it was a contemplative, recharging kind of thing, almost like sleep.
He had begun to realize, when he was in a mental space to consider it rationally, that part of why he felt so weird sometimes was because the human brain wasn't meant to go full tilt all the time. He'd stopped worrying that he was going to go insane from lack of sleep; however his brain worked now, it didn't seem to need it. But it did need to idle occasionally, chugging along at a low speed. Part of dealing with this whole bizarre undead situation was learning to pace himself when he didn't have fatigue or sleep as guides anymore -- but he did still have some of the same needs, including the need for mental down time.
So he just let it happen. There was something very soothing about this, working when he felt like it and zoning out when he didn't, and having company while he was doing it, of a sort.
Speaking of ... he slid off his chair and went over to Ianto's pallet on the floor. The latest bag of IV fluids had run out. Owen knelt and gently extracted Ianto's injured arm from the blankets, so that he could feel the radial pulse and press the tips of Ianto's fingers to see how quickly the color returned. Circulation through the injured shoulder was one of his concerns, but it seemed to be fine, and he was just tucking Ianto's hand back under the blankets when he realized Ianto was watching him with dazed, half-open eyes.
"Morning," Owen said. "Congratulations, you will be able to play the violin again; and since you couldn't play it before, that's right, it's a sodding miracle." Ianto blinked at him sleepily. Owen patted his arm. "You in there, mate? Hold on, I'm gonna check a couple things, yeah?"
Shining a penlight in Ianto's eyes to check his pupil response made him pull away with a garbled protest. Owen grinned down at him. "So you are in there. Any pain?"
After a moment, Ianto shook his head slowly. "Everyone," he murmured, and touched his dry lips with his tongue. "Okay?"
"Yeah yeah, they're fine, you're the only one who was slow enough to get himself impaled. Well, you and Jack. Who is back, by the way."
"Jack ..." Ianto murmured. He seemed to be pulling words out of the haze, one by one. "He's ... here?"
"Yes, he's here. He's just upstairs. Want me to get 'im?"
Ianto nodded, the dazed vacancy in his gaze clearing somewhat.
Owen patted the unbandaged side of Ianto's chest through the blankets, and trotted up the stairs -- the freshly scrubbed and sanitized stairs, courtesy of Tosh and Gwen, now with fresh cracks in the cinderblock walls where the spikes had punched through. The lights in Jack's office were still on. Owen sometimes wondered if Jack had any more need for sleep than Owen himself did. He'd certainly never caught Jack asleep.
We're a club, he thought wryly. A very exclusive club. The died-and-came-back-wrong club.
"Oi, Jack!" he called. "Your boyfriend's awake!"
Jack bounced out of the office -- there was no other word for it -- and Owen made himself scarce to give them some privacy; he wandered down to the vaults. He'd been spending more time down there lately than he ever had before. Something about the darkness and dankness suited his moods a lot of the time, and when he didn't feel like going home, he could get maintenance done at night, check and make sure the auto-feeders worked and the sewers weren't backing up and so forth. It wasn't glamorous work, but it needed doing, and he was no longer worried about wandering around down here by himself at night. Being King of the Weevils was good for something after all.
Tonight, though, he found a place to sit for a while and just sat. His hands, he noticed absently, were shaking. That was interesting. He hadn't thought he could still do that.
People on this team really needed to stop almost dying, if it could rattle a dead man's nerves this badly.
After a long while, he wandered back up to the Hub, filed a few things, and went over to the railing above the autopsy pit to look down at Ianto and Jack. At the shadowy edges of the pool of light cast by the lamp in the corner, they were like something from a painting -- Pietà with IV stand and monitors. Except Jack wasn't holding Ianto, as such, just lying on the edge of the pallet, propped on his elbow with Ianto's good hand in his, and occasionally leaning in to brush his lips across Ianto's forehead.
It was quiet and calm and impossibly intimate. They weren't like this often; mostly, in public, Jack treated Ianto like anyone else at Torchwood Three, with his particular blend of tough love and flirtation. It was either that, or stumbling onto them in flagrante delicto in various locations around the Hub; Owen had started knocking before going into the file rooms these days after one too many eye-searing experiences.
But this, the tenderness, was a side they rarely let out. It was too intimate to spy on, even for him, and Owen started to draw back, but the movement seemed to catch Jack's attention. He looked up, made some kind of gesture at Owen that seemed to suggest he wanted Owen to come down, and when Owen didn't, he leaned down to murmur something into the fringe of sweat-scruffy hair above Ianto's ear. With another light kiss and a squeeze to Ianto's hand, he got up and came up the stairs.
"You don't have to go," Owen said.
"I'll be back." Jack jerked his head down the stairs. "He wants to talk to you anyway."
Well, that could mean just about anything from a need for a bedpan to an emotional conversation he was definitely not up for having. Owen went reluctantly down the stairs, and found Ianto more propped up than Owen had left him, with pillows piled under his head and shoulders to tilt him up a bit -- Jack's doing, no doubt. Adjustable hospital bed, Torchwood style.
"You know, we need to get an actual, proper sickbay in here one of these days," Owen said. He sat crosslegged on the floor beside Ianto. "Waking up on the autopsy table is a real shock to the system, as I know from personal experience. Of course, I was legitimately dead at the time."
Ianto frowned at him. He was still tracking slowly, but seemed a little more with it than before. "Jack said you were hurt."
"Jack," Owen said, "is an absolute liar, as we all know."
"Can I see it?" Ianto asked, and then he smiled, very slightly. "You've seen mine."
"You are spending way too much time around Jack Harkness," Owen complained, and he pushed up the sleeve of his sweatshirt to show Ianto the glued-together cut. "See? Good as new."
Ianto's good hand was still on top of the blankets, as Jack had left it; now he reached up, slow and shaky, and curled his fingers carefully around Owen's arm just below the cut. Squeezed lightly, and let go, his hand falling back to the blankets.
"If you've got the energy for that," Owen said, scrabbling for normalcy, or for a little bit of emotional distance at least, god, "you can show me how well you can move the fingers on your other hand. Check for nerve damage and whatnot."
Ianto obediently curled each finger, rotated and flexed his hand, grimacing slightly with effort. That small amount of activity seemed to exhaust him.
"Any pain? I've been giving you painkillers with the IV fluids, but I didn't have a good baseline when you weren't awake to ask."
"No, it doesn't hurt, not really. What sort of recovery am I looking at?" he asked, watching Owen with a kind of sleepy trust that Owen didn't really know what to do with.
"It went through your shoulder blade. I picked out what I could of the bone fragments, but I was mainly focused on clamping blood vessels and making sure you didn't bleed out." As he almost had. There were times when Owen thought it was just as well that he didn't sleep anymore; there was less scope for nightmare fodder. "Anyway, you're going to need at least one more surgery for that later. Probably not by me; you ought to see an actual specialist about it. Just to give you something to look forward to."
"Thanks for that," Ianto murmured.
"I can refer you to somebody." Ironically working at Torchwood had expanded his professional contacts beyond what he'd had when he was working at an actual hospital, due to the never-ending need to refer victims to a sprawling array of different kinds of specialists.
Usually not his teammates, though.
Ianto nodded sleepily, and Owen pushed his hand back under the blankets. "Get some sleep. Let me know if you need anything, more drugs or whatnot. I'll be around, or if I'm not, Jack can get me."
Another sleepy nod, and he seemed to drift off. Owen didn't get up right away. He leaned back against the wall. It was comfortable just sitting like this, listening to the monitors beeping softly above Ianto's head. Another opportunity to just zone out and exist, letting his mind float free.
"Did anyone ever clean the mud out of the SUV?" Ianto asked suddenly, his eyes fluttering open.
Owen dragged himself back from wherever he'd gone off to, mentally. "... really? That's what you're lying there thinking about?"
"Someone's got to," Ianto said, and god help them all, he made actual motions as if to get up. Owen pushed him back down, not really making much effort to be gentle because fucking seriously?
"If you stand up in your condition, you will most likely pass out and crack your skull open and pop some stitches into the bargain, and then Jack will murder me and I'll have to walk around the Hub with a broken neck and no one wants that. Why do you need to clean the SUV now?"
"Because if no one's done it, the stains will set," Ianto muttered obstinately, staring up at the ceiling with a belligerent look. "And it will take twelve times as long. .... Ask me how I know this."
"You almost died today, you utter wanker," Owen said, and then he laughed -- just leaned back on his hands, and laughed at the complete absurdity of it all. If he still had the ability to laugh until he cried -- if he still had tears at all -- he would have laughed himself to tears. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand by pure instinct, almost surprised to find them dry; he felt so, well. Alive. "Okay, fine, you know what? I don't sleep anyway. I'll do it."
"You'll ... wash the SUV," Ianto said, narrowing his eyes as if he suspected a trap.
"I clean things sometimes," Owen said defensively.
"Really?" Ianto said in a tone that suggested he'd seen no evidence of it so far.
"You're supposed to be asleep. Doctor's orders."
Ianto gave a soft snort, but closed his eyes. After watching for a minute to make sure he was actually staying put, Owen got up, reached for his jacket, and headed for the stairs.
"Going home?" Jack asked. He was at the top of the stairs; Owen wondered how long he'd been there.
"Going to wash the SUV."
It wasn't that often that he got to see Jack caught truly flat-footed. "Er ... what?"
"You heard me," Owen said cheerily over his shoulder. He was ... happy -- weirdly, bafflingly happy. They'd all nearly died yet again, but they'd made it out alive -- well, alive-ish in his case, or dead-ish, and maybe whatever was happening to him now was yet another symptom of his poor technically-deceased brain trying to deal with the situation, but whatever this feeling was, it was nice, and not very many nice things had happened to him lately.
He spun on his heel as he headed for the tunnel to the parking garage, calling back, "Oh, and if he makes any noises about getting out of bed for anything other than completely necessary reasons, Jack, sit on him."
"If you insist," Jack's cheerful voice drifted after him. "I'll make sure he knows it was your idea."
"I regret saying that already, by the way," Owen called back, and Jack's happy laughter followed him out.
My brain: Or you could write 12K of Torchwood h/c instead.
Thank you so much to
frith_in_thorns for Britpicking this for me!Title: Blood on Steel
Fandom: Torchwood
Word Count: 12.3K
Contents: Some gory violence; set in late season 2; gen with canon levels of Jack/Ianto
Summary: An alien booby trap turns the Hub into a deathtrap. Lucky thing it doesn't react to someone with no vital signs. Now Owen is their only hope. More specifically, he's Ianto's only hope.
Also posted: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24171358
This plot is shamelessly ripped off from, or at least inspired by, the Stargate SG1 episode "Message in a Bottle." It also owes inspiration to a similarly-inspired-by-that-episode fic in SGA fandom, Empty Bottle, which did something slightly different with the concept that's a bit more like what I'm doing with it.
--
Another day, another incomprehensible alien artifact in the Hub, in this case a knobby sphere about the size of a large melon, dribbling mud and slime and trails of what looked like kelp all over Owen's autopsy table.
"What's that doing there?" Owen demanded as Gwen and Ianto deposited it carefully. They were carrying it between them using Gwen's leather jacket like a hammock. From the way they lowered it, it looked heavy. "That table is for dead aliens, not -- whatever that is." And because he couldn't resist: "In case that wasn't clear enough, Ianto, your balls don't belong on the autopsy table."
Ianto gave him a level look, while trying to pat mud off his sleeves with a pocket square; he mainly succeeded in smearing it around. "Next time, Owen, you can go investigate the latest mysterious object that a fisherman dredged out of the harbor."
Gwen tried to swipe her hair out of her eyes and then ruefully looked at her mud-covered hand, realizing she was just making it worse. "Just see if you and Tosh can figure out what this thing is, yeah?"
"What what is? Oooh!" Tosh pattered happily down the stairs. "Is this the whatsit from the harbor? It looks a little bit like a mine, doesn't it?" She didn't even seem remotely bothered by the prospect, although Owen took an instinctive step back before it occurred to him that being vaporized by a harbor mine might not actually be the worst thing that could happen to him right now.
... well, getting both his legs blown off by one certainly would be.
"A mine is what the fisherman thought it was," Gwen said. She looked around helplessly, holding her hands up. Owen shoved a pack of wetwipes at her before she got mud on even more of his lab. "They called the bomb squad, bomb squad called us. But it doesn't appear to be. For one thing, mines don't have alien runes on them."
"And it doesn't match any known type," Ianto chimed in, still trying to clean up his sleeves. "Which," he added, edging away a little further, "doesn't mean it might not explode, I suppose ..."
"Oh, you are an interesting little one, aren't you," Tosh murmured, running a scanner over it. "Completely inert, looks like. And completely shielded. No way to tell what's in here."
"Hi there, kids," Jack said cheerily, leaning on the railing and looking down. "How'd the harbor trip go? Looking good, Ianto."
He sounded like he meant it, but the look on Ianto's face suggested that if it hadn't been Jack saying it, and if Ianto hadn't been Ianto, a two-finger salute would have followed.
"And also," Jack went on, "there's a very large curry order out in the tourist office, apparently ordered by someone here. Which I know because it appears that it was ordered under the name of Torchwood, so I guess it's time for that talk again."
"Wasn't me this time," Owen muttered, picking out an infrared probe to prod the sphere with. "No food for the dead man."
Gwen looked sheepish. "That's mine. Sorry, Jack. I was trying to do a speech-to-text order on the mobile because my hands were covered with mud, but I was having to do the buttons with my elbow and it picked me up talking to Ianto, and -- anyway ..." She tossed a wad of muddy wipes into the trash. "It's lunchtime, and lunch is on me."
"Yes, well, I'm going to go take a month-long shower," Ianto said. "And then scrub the car, and then take five more showers."
"What about you, Jack?" Tosh asked, carefully cleaning away a patch of the sphere's surface with a wetwipe. The knobbly look of it, underneath the mud, turned out to be a set of interlocking runic shapes that made up the exterior, like some kind of giant puzzle. Owen established with some cautious prodding that none of it moved, though; the pieces were locked into place. "Ever see anything like this before?"
"Not that I recall," Jack said, pushing off from the railing. "And your tikka masala is getting cold. If we're going to blow things up, which I'm not saying I wouldn't be in the mood for, let's do it after lunch."
Gwen nudged Owen, smudging him with mud. "Come on, Owen, go to lunch with us."
Owen shook his head. There were times when he appreciated the effort the team went to, trying to include him in group activities that he could no longer fully participate in. And then there were times when he'd rather have all the rest of his fingers broken than sit in a room with a bunch of people eating food he couldn't eat, laughing about social lives he no longer had. It seemed to depend on the mood he was in, and apparently today was a bleak existential-angst day; lovely.
"No, I'll stay here and work on this."
"I can stay and work for a while too," Tosh said. "I'm not that hungry." Even though her stomach had been audibly growling a minute ago.
"Go, go," Owen said impatiently, waving a handful of muddy wipes at her. "This thing won't be cracked open by the time you get back."
"If you do get it open, come get me, yeah?"
"Sure," he said easily, not sure whether he meant it or not.
It was easier, in moods like this, to be alone: listening to them all clatter out, bantering with each other, the hole that his death had left in the group sealing up as if it had never been. It was a feeling he got less often now than in the first couple of weeks, this bleak emptiness, but it was hitting him hard at the moment. He looked forward to a couple of hours to tinker with the sphere in peace -- a nice nonmedical puzzle, no lives at stake, no one at risk except for the man who literally couldn't die.
It was Ianto, oddly, who lagged behind, looking down at him over the railing. "Sure you're all right here?"
Owen grunted and reached for a pair of calipers. When he looked up again, Ianto and the rest of them were gone.
*
But not for long. They were back a few minutes later, bringing the food with them so they could hang around and watch him work while they ate.
"Science is not a spectator sport," Owen complained.
"Ianto and I lugged that bloody thing all around the waterfront today," Gwen said. She was sitting crosslegged on a rolling stool beside the autopsy table, with a takeaway box in her lap. "We want to know what's in it."
She had washed the mud off her hands, at least, and Ianto -- sitting on the bottom of the stairs, with Jack a couple steps above him and cartons spread out around them -- had not only managed to completely change clothes but, from the dampness of his neatly combed hair, had actually taken a shower too. A few smudges of half-dried harbor mud on Jack's shirt suggested that Ianto had had some help.
Tosh was dividing her attention between grabbing food from the cartons on the steps and helping Owen clean and examine the object, which continued to defy all efforts to scan it or pry it open.
"This is unsanitary," Owen tried.
"Like you didn't eat in here constantly before you died," Jack said from the step above Ianto. "I saw you drop an entire bacon sandwich into a Weevil's chest cavity once."
"I was hung over," Owen said shortly. "If anyone drops curry on this and kills us all, I'm blaming you."
"This is so peculiar," Tosh said, putting aside a drill. "Nothing damages it. What's it made out of?"
"Some kind of space metal, I bet." In spite of his general mood, Owen was starting to wake to the enjoyment of sussing out a new puzzle.
"Try the big electron scanner, maybe?" Tosh suggested. "We can find out its elemental composition that way."
"Since you lot have nowhere better to be, someone give us a hand moving it upstairs," Owen said, snapping his fingers.
"No," Ianto said, gesturing with a piece of naan. "Speaking as the person who will almost certainly have to clean up after this thing -- no. It stays here."
"On my autopsy table," Owen said. "Which I have to clean up."
Ianto flashed a quick smile. "Yes, that was the point."
Owen didn't know how to deal with that teasing warmth; again he had the sense of things shifting, the old way they used to be turning to quicksand under his feet. As usual this had the general effect of turning him into a raging bastard.
"Can't even move around in here," he muttered, elbowing Tosh out of the way and giving Gwen's wheeled chair a shove so he could grab a laser scalpel off the tray of instruments next to her. "Don't you people bloody well have work to do?"
"This is my work," Tosh said quietly. "I'll get the portable one from the lockers, then." She pattered up the stairs past Jack and Ianto.
There was a brief silence. Owen hunched his shoulders and didn't look at any of them. He focused on playing the laser's beam around one of the cracks between the interlocking pieces of the sphere.
After a minute, Gwen said, "You're wrong, you know. We're here because you're our friend and we like hanging out with you. At least when you're not being a giant wanker."
"Speak for yourself," Ianto said. "I'm here because the food's here."
Stuffing a last papadum into her mouth, Gwen set her carton aside and wiped her hands on her jeans-clad thighs. "I'm done anyway. Can I help?"
Owen sighed and gave up, on both an emotional and spiritual level. They were here and apparently getting rid of them so he could mope about his own death in peace was just not going to happen. "Give me a hand turning this over, then," he muttered.
The object was very heavy, more than it seemed like it ought to be for its size. The lumpy exterior, knobbed with slight protrusions from the patchwork of pieces that made up its exterior, kept it from rolling off the table but also made it hard to roll around. Between the two of them, Owen and Tosh had been able to move around, but it was hard to do on his own.
Owen couldn't help glancing up at the railing above, where Tosh had disappeared. She wouldn't have run off to cry, would she? Surely not. But who knew. Everyone had been weird since he died, from Ianto's almost eerie gentleness to Tosh going on crying jags for no apparent reason.
"This is a strange little bauble, isn't it?" Gwen murmured, reaching for it.
Owen and Tosh had been handling it all over with no problems. Tosh had been wearing gloves, but he wasn't. They'd detected no harmful chemicals or radiation.
But as her cautious fingertips contacted the surface of the thing, there was a flash of blue light, flaring all over the surface of the object, lighting up the vaguely runic structure of the pieces that made up its exterior.
From over on the stairs, Owen heard Jack suck in his breath sharply and start to yell something, but he was already lunging at Gwen. There was a loud metallic SPANG! noise, more like a movie special effect than anything real, and Owen grabbed for Gwen, screaming, "Down! Get down!"
He wasn't entirely sure what happened next. He and Gwen hit the concrete floor hard, and all around them, things hit the floor too. One of them slammed into the concrete inches from Owen's face, showering him with flying chips and dust. He tried to cover Gwen with his own body; she threw an arm over him as if she was trying to do the same thing. He heard someone scream.
And then it was over, in a second that had seemed to last a thousand years. Owen cautiously raised his head and spat out bits of concrete.
There was some kind of rod embedded in the concrete right in front of his nose, slim and silvery and stretching up and -- he stared above his head -- through the metal autopsy table above them. Other silver rods pierced it around them, imprisoning them in a sparse web of spikes.
From under the table he couldn't see much else, but he heard hoarse, pained breathing, not too far away.
What the hell, he thought wildly; what the hell? He'd been touching it all over. So had Tosh --
But Tosh was wearing gloves. And Ianto and Gwen, when they brought it in, had been taking pains to avoid making contact, as per Torchwood standard operating procedure.
The fishermen might have been wearing gloves, too.
But I --
Wasn't alive. Maybe it had to be a living person. Wouldn't do to set off a trap with the idle brush of wind and seaweed, after all.
All of this went through his mind in a frantic whirl as Gwen raised her head. Concrete dust sifted off her hair. "Wha --" she began.
There was another sharp metallic click from over their heads. Owen's eyes met Gwen's in a single moment of horror, and they both rolled frantically to the side as another spike pierced the table and slammed into the floor where they had been. It ripped through Owen's jacket, pinning him down.
For a moment they lay in a tangled heap. Gwen was panting, and Owen could feel her heart going like a rabbit's. If he'd been able to, his would be too.
Slowly, he brought up a finger to touch his lips. Gwen nodded. He tugged on his jacket, trying to free himself -- carefully at first, then somewhat more frantically: there were people hurt out there (Ianto, Jack, Tosh). The leather wouldn't tear, so he carefully slithered out of it, one arm and then the other, leaving him in a T-shirt. The spike had creased his arm, leaving a slight furrow behind, showing a thin line of exposed muscle with no bleeding. Great, another body part to try to remember to superglue as part of his morning getting-ready-for-work routine. He began slowly and carefully to sit up.
Gwen started to follow suit. Owen touched his finger to his lips again and shook his head. "Stay here," he whispered.
She looked up at the table above them, with the bright overhead lights showing around the holes that had been punched in the metal, a single wide-eyed glance of terror. She pointed to him and mimed something complex and questioning.
Owen just shook his head as he scooted out from under the table. He didn't have time or patience to try to explain his growing theory that it wasn't reacting to him, at least not to the extent that it was to her or the others. This was a weapon aimed at killing things. He was already dead. QED.
Still, he moved slowly and tried to be as quiet as possible. Couldn't do much good for anyone with a bloody great spike through his chest, could he?
He extricated himself from the table, trying not to touch any of the spikes, and stood up slowly. The first thing he saw, other than the fact that the autopsy room was now hemmed in with a damned metal forest of the things, was blood, a great red swath across the white wall. Owen no longer had a heartbeat to react, no longer had a gag reflex, but on some psychosomatic level, he reacted anyway.
There was still no sign of Tosh -- thank God -- but it had got both Jack and Ianto, who, unlike himself and Gwen, had nowhere to go. Jack was very clearly dead, pinned to the wall near the top of the stairs with a spike through the middle of his chest. At least it had been quick and would be temporary.
Ianto, on the other hand ...
It had got him through the shoulder. He was pinned to the wall, feet on the stairs, opposite hand clutched around the spike that was holding him in place like a specimen in a butterfly collection. There was blood everywhere, splattered up the side of his face, turning his shirt dark red and soaking his jacket, sprayed across the wall behind him in a spray pattern that suggested to Owen the very real and terrifying possibility that it had pinned him through a major blood vessel; the shoulder was full of them. The spike might be the only thing currently holding it closed and preventing him from bleeding to death in seconds.
Like me. He didn't remember being shot, not really. Just a muzzle flash and a feeling of heat and pressure. He didn't remember dying, and that was probably a mercy.
But for now, Ianto was alive, and conscious, though deathly pale. He stared at Owen with wide eyes in a chalk-white face, and opened his mouth, starting to speak.
Owen touched his finger to his lips. Ianto drew in a shaking breath and gave a small, jerky nod. His fingers scrabbled on the blood-slick spike, slipping a few inches before coming to rest again.
He was going to be in shock soon, if he wasn't already. And he must be in excruciating pain. From the angle, it could hardly have missed his scapula. Owen was grateful, right now, for the profound self-control that could make Ianto such a giant bloody pain in the ass to deal with sometimes. It was probably keeping him alive now. He didn't make a sound, just small pained gasps, the breath hissing through his teeth.
Owen glided toward him on stealthy feet, picking his way through the forest of spikes. It occurred to him -- strange, idle thought -- that if he'd been like this a few years ago, he could have walked right into that surgical suite with Katie and the doctors. The gas wouldn't have hurt him. He could have saved ...
Stop it.
Not breathing, heart not beating, and yet still holding the breath he didn't need, he eeled through the spikes until he was close enough to reach out and lightly put a hand on Ianto's uninjured shoulder.
"I think heat and motion set it off," he whispered. "Heat, motion, sound. Heartbeats." He might have grimaced, he wasn't sure, because the corners of Ianto's mouth quirked up in something very briefly like a smile. With his hand still resting on Ianto's shoulder, Owen pressed lightly, his thumb on Ianto's collarbone. He could feel Ianto's heartbeat, very fast and light. "Try not to talk if you don't have to. I'm gonna get you out, mate."
Ianto gave a small nod, breathing in short, pained gasps. He breathed out very softly, "Gwen?"
"She's fine," Owen whispered back. "Better than us."
Ianto's eyes flicked up, in Jack's general direction.
"Look at me, not at him," Owen whispered. "Nothing you can do for him right now. He's gonna be fine, eventually."
"He'll ..." Ianto's voice was a breath. "Wake up again ... die again ..."
"He'll get through it. He's got through it before. Nothing you can do."
He spoke absently; he was thinking, and thinking desperately. Ianto was going to need painkillers, and something to keep his vitals from crashing in the short term. Shock was the biggest danger here; that, and collapse. Right now, Ianto was standing up, feet planted firmly on the stairs, back against the wall. If he sagged, or even moved too much, the spike would twist and tear, rip open whatever it was holding closed in there ...
Owen closed his eyes briefly, and, keeping his hand on Ianto's shoulder, he glanced back toward the ball on the table, almost hidden now behind its forest of spikes. It was glowing faintly blue, a complex tracery around the outsides of the runelike pieces.
"Found it!" a cheerful voice called from above, and Owen and Ianto both snapped their heads up in alarm.
There was another of those ominous metal clicking sounds, and they both yelled at the top of their lungs -- in Ianto's case, more of a breathy whisper: "Tosh, duck!"
This time Owen saw it happen. The spike extruded from the metal ball with impossible speed, a silver blur that shot just underneath the top rail of the upper railing and slammed into something with a loud crunch. There was a clatter and a scream.
"Tosh!" Owen called, and then snapped his mouth shut. The outburst didn't seem to have triggered another spike in their direction; it might have Ianto classed as a nonthreat now. But they couldn't take the chance, because Ianto couldn't handle another of those in any part of his body, and pinned like that, he couldn't dodge.
"Owen?" Tosh called down, with a slight hitch in her voice. She sounded scared, but not in pain. "What was --"
"Down, down!" he called back as loudly as he dared; "Stay down!" and then he looked around and saw something worse: Gwen was crawling out from under the table.
Owen waved at her frantically with the hand not still resting on Ianto's shoulder -- he wasn't even sure why he'd kept it there, he just knew, as a doctor, that touch was soothing, and it was the only thing he had to offer right now. "Gwen!" he whispered loudly. "Stay there!"
She stopped, with her legs half under the table, looked up, and saw Ianto and Jack. Her eyes went wide.
Owen touched his lips with his finger again. Gwen nodded. She was still looking around, taking in the entire scene, Ianto and Jack and the spikes. Owen recognized the look; it was probably about what he'd looked like when he had crawled out a couple of minutes ago, stunned bafflement at the transformation of the familiar autopsy room into a jungle of lethal silver rods, the walls painted in their friends' blood.
"Ianto," he whispered, giving Ianto's shoulder a brief squeeze, and Ianto's gaze turned to him, lagging, not quite tracking. That wasn't good. "I'm going to get you something for the pain. Don't move and stay quiet, yeah?"
Ianto gave another small nod and clenched his hand on the spike. He took a breath, and whispered, "What about ... this?"
"Gonna get it out." He just didn't know how. Nothing he and Tosh had done had even left a mark on the thing.
But failure wasn't an option. Not this time. Not with what was at stake.
He gave Ianto's shoulder another brief squeeze, and drew his hand away. Retracing his path was easier; he was less worried, now, about setting off the device again. It didn't really seem to notice him at all. It was possible he could speak and behave normally and not trip it, but he wasn't about to test that, not with the others' lives in the balance. And they, unlike him, had lives to lose.
"Tosh?" he called up softly. "You okay up there?"
"I think so," her soft voice filtered back down. Owen glanced at the device, but that didn't seem to have triggered it.
He was close to Gwen now, who was still sitting on the floor. Owen put a hand on her shoulder and turned to look at the sphere. Up close, he could see the blue light shining around all its complex patterns of geometric cracks, outlining the blocky chunks of material of which it was made. Each spike came from one of those -- and only one per section, which meant it was limited, he thought. It only had so many of those. But there were dozens, maybe hundreds, and he saw sections as yet untripped. If every separate piece of its exterior could produce one of these, then it still had plenty more to deploy.
"Still there, Tosh?"
"I'm here," she called down.
"We need to get Gwen out. Go down to the archives, see if you can find something to disguise her body heat and heartbeat, yeah? Blankets'll do in a pinch, but we must have something better."
"Oi, now, wait a minute," Gwen whispered. Owen shushed her again. Gwen scowled up at him, and whispered so softly it was little more than mouthing the words, "I can help."
She could. And she could also get killed in the process.
"Living people set it off," he whispered. "It doesn't seem to react to me. Stay there."
He patted her shoulder and stepped past the table, weaving in and out of the spikes, to the selection of emergency drugs he kept on hand and available, given this lot's tendency to turn up bleeding. He was picking up what he needed when there was another of those metallic clicks.
Owen spun around just in time to see Gwen, who had been in the process of slowly and quietly standing up, hit the floor hard as another spike deployed and shot through the space she'd occupied a second ago.
He hadn't even heard her make a sound.
Movement, heartbeat. Fuck.
She lay flat, staring at him with wide eyes and trying to gasp quietly.
"Gwen!" Ianto gasped out from his position against the wall.
"Will all you alive people stop talking?" Owen whispered loudly.
The sphere hadn't done anything in reaction to that, suggesting that either his theory that it had Ianto classified as a nonthreat was accurate, or it reacted more strongly the closer you got to it. Or both.
Owen bent to pick up the items he'd dropped, then, in the ensuing silence, eeled over to Gwen and crouched beside her.
"Hurt?" he whispered. She shook her head. "Stay here 'til Tosh comes back. Then you see if you can get up top and help her. Faster we can turn this thing off, faster we can get Ianto out."
"What about you?" she whispered, the words coming out on a breath.
"Oi love," he whispered, looking around at the spikes, at the blood, "this thing knows the score. I'm already dead."
*
Tosh reappeared at the railing as Owen was slithering back over to Ianto with a handful of loaded syringes. Owen didn't see her arrive; what got his attention, and Gwen's, was Tosh making little waving motions with whatever it was she was holding.
Once they'd seen her, she whispered something that sounded like "Cold gun," and mimed throwing in Gwen's general direction. Gwen nodded, and Tosh executed a perfect drop. Gwen stretched out a hand along the floor like a slow-motion sport move and caught it. Owen was very briefly distracted, watching them. It was beautiful teamwork, like something out of a movie.
Then he got back to his own business and fetched up against the wall beside Ianto, who gave Owen a pallid, weary look, his strength visibly flagging. Ianto was trembling from the effort of staying upright and quiet with a great metal spike punched through his scapula, grinding on bone whenever his knees sagged .... as well he might.
"Gwen's all right?" he whispered.
"She's fine." For now. Gwen had cold-gunned herself; he could tell by the glitter of frost in her hair as she very slowly and carefully began crawling through the spikes toward the opposite staircase, which was not quite as thoroughly spike-ified as the one Jack and Ianto were on. They didn't know what the thing they called a cold gun actually was for, but it was certainly good for chilling down the surface temperature of an object. He hoped she hadn't given herself frostbite.
Owen forced himself not to watch her painstaking progress. Instead he showed Ianto the syringe in his hand. "Painkiller." The next one. "Stimulant. Not good for you, not right now. But it'll keep you on your feet for a little while, and keep your blood pressure up. Fainting right now wouldn't do you any favors."
"You know what you're about," Ianto breathed out through clenched teeth. "Do it."
Owen pulled back Ianto's jacket collar and then carefully undid the top buttons of his shirt and pulled it down to expose the skin below his collarbone. The entire time, Ianto had his head tipped to the side, watching Owen with weary trust. Well ... it wouldn't be the first time one of his team had their lives in his hands. It was what he was here for.
He pressed the needles home -- one, then two. Ianto didn't react; the amount of pain he was in, a little jab probably registered as nothing at all. Owen rubbed his thumb against the injection site, and looked over to see how the girls were getting on.
Gwen was on the stairs now, working her way up the steps in slow motion, stepping over and ducking under spikes. It was oddly hypnotic, a slow and graceful ballet. It also seemed to be working. She hadn't triggered anything yet.
With his attention on Gwen and his thumb still idly rubbing circles beneath Ianto's collarbone, Owen almost jumped out of his skin when Ianto's blood-sticky hand circled his wrist. He turned back quickly, to Ianto looking at him intently from eyes that already looked somewhat sunken in blue-shadowed sockets. (Dehydration, Owen's brain catalogued without much conscious input, an old instinct from his medical residency. Need to get an IV set up.)
"You should get out of here too," Ianto whispered. He took a breath and touched his tongue to his dry lips. "They could use your help up there."
"Plenty to do down here too," Owen whispered back. He tried to twist his wrist free, but for a man impaled on a spike, Ianto had a strong grip.
"Dangerous," Ianto whispered. "It's a deathtrap down here."
"Already dead. Not much left to lose."
"You bloody stubborn arsehole," Ianto whispered, which was enough to get Owen's attention all by itself. Ianto hardly ever swore. "Your life's not worth less than ours."
Owen carefully took Ianto's hand and pried it off his wrist with his other one -- the one with the broken pinky finger, the finger he'd broken weeks ago just to make a point, deliberately and without a single qualm aside from the meaty pop it made as the bone came apart. Came apart, and would never heal, leaving him with one and a half surgeon's hands. Forever, or at least for as long as his unlife lasted.
"I don't have a life," he whispered, and jerked his head at the sphere. "And it knows it." He patted Ianto's chest and ducked away. "Stay here."
He left Ianto sputtering and very clearly wanting the last word, but unable to have it as long as he had to raise his voice to do it. Excellent, as long as the idiot didn't work himself into a fit of blood loss.
There had to be something in this whole damn place that was capable of cutting through the spikes. He did actually have a few ideas along those lines; it was the execution that was going to be tricky.
"Tosh!" he whispered, as loudly as he dared.
Her head appeared over the railing a moment later, ponytail swishing. "Gwen's safe," she whispered down.
That wasn't what he was going to ask, although it was a vast relief to know. "Singularity scalpel," he whispered. "Archives."
Tosh nodded. She glanced toward Ianto and Jack with a tormented look, then ducked away and was gone.
Owen pulled out tool drawers, muffling each with his off hand as he drew it out, glancing at each item and moving on to the next. Nothing he and Tosh had used so far had done anything to the outside of that thing, but maybe the spikes were more vulnerable.
He pulled out the heaviest-duty laser he had, and also a handheld angle grinder with a diamond-edged blade. After a glance at the ominously glowing but quiescent sphere at the center of its forest of spikes, he worked his way back over to Ianto.
"Going well, is it?" Ianto whispered in a dry tone. He sounded better, and there was a little more color in his face. Temporary, Owen thought; it was a reprieve, not a solution. They were borrowing from Ianto's future health to get this done, and they had to get it over with before they ran through the loan and started borrowing against health he didn't have.
"This is probably gonna hurt," he muttered, "sorry." And he brought up the angle grinder, turning it toward the spike a couple of feet down from Ianto's shoulder.
Ianto didn't react much to the tool's high-pitched whine, but when Owen pressed the grinding edge into the spike, Ianto jerked all over and clutched wildly at Owen's arm, sinking the bloody fingers of his one good hand into Owen's shoulder.
Owen gritted his teeth and kept going, leaning into it, while Ianto clutched at him with a shaking hand, but didn't tell him to stop.
Then the sphere shocked them.
There was no warning, just a sudden whipcrack of one of the weirdest and most awful things Owen had felt in his unlife, as if the energy that was keeping him alive was suddenly disrupted and turned inside out. It was like a fingernail bending backwards all over his whole body.
Distantly, he heard Ianto screaming in pain.
Owen found himself lying on his back on the stairs with a brand new spike inches above his face. It must have been triggered by whatever noise he was making, whatever he was doing. Had he had a seizure? He didn't seem to have broken anything new, but it was hard to tell because he couldn't really feel much of anything, even less so than usual.
He'd dropped the tools; they lay scattered down the stairs.
"Ianto," he whispered, and slowly tried to pull himself into a sitting position. Nothing was working; all he could manage was some feeble twitching. He had an instant of true, soul-deep horror -- the only thing worse than an endless, unchanging unlife would be getting trapped in the unresponsive shell of a body he couldn't move. But then the hands moved, the torso moved; he sat up, avoiding the spike with difficulty, and managed to fit himself back into the clumsy shell of his body somehow.
"-- Owen? Owen ... Jesus ..."
Ianto's hoarse whisper came from above. Owen held up a hand, then his single pointer finger (Wait a minute) and Ianto's voice cut out sharply. Owen took a couple of sort-of-not-breaths, more like gathering himself, and then very carefully stood up. His limbs still felt weirdly detached, like none of it quite belonged to him. He really, really hoped this feeling wasn't permanent.
Ianto rested his head against the wall. "Let's not do that again," he whispered.
"Not planning on it." Owen glanced down at the new spikes providing a tripping hazard on the stairs, then over at the sphere. So it had the capability to defend itself in ways other than extruding pointy objects of death. Wonderful.
"What'd it do to you?" Ianto whispered. Owen noticed with a slight surge of guilt that Ianto had bitten through his lower lip; there was fresh blood on his chin.
"Disrupted me, I think." Sensation, such as it was, had begun coming back to his hands. He touched Ianto's unhurt shoulder lightly, moved over to check around the spike. It didn't seem to have done any new damage, for whatever that was worth.
Ianto grimaced and raised his head. "You should get out of here," he whispered. "Go up top where Gwen and Tosh are, and figure out a solution from there."
"Are we really having this discussion again?"
"It almost put one of those right through you a minute ago."
"But it didn't, did it?"
"And if it puts one through your head?" Ianto whispered. "What then?"
"Won't think much about it, will I?"
Ianto got that stubborn set to his jaw. "You think it didn't hurt us," he whispered, "to see you there -- see you bleed out -- see you on that autopsy table? You think we felt nothing about that?"
Owen had absolutely no answer for that, but he was saved by the bell just then, more or less, by Tosh reappearing at the railing with the singularity scalpel in hand. She started to wave it at him. Owen shook his head and made a palm-down gesture: Keep it down. Tosh nodded, but slowly and carefully mimed throwing it to him.
Owen shook his head. He patted Ianto's shoulder and slithered up the stairs, stepping over scattered takeaway cartons; going past Jack, who he tried not to look at. He knew exactly how much blood was in the human body, and how much it could lose without dying, and Jack had definitely lost all of that.
He'll be fine. Eventually. Waking up in a room full of dead teammates isn't going to do any favors for his mental health, though.
Tosh came into view at the top of the stairs, holding out the singularity scalpel. Owen shook his head. "You're going to use it," he whispered. "Not me."
Her eyes went wide. "Owen --"
"Shhh." He crouched just below her on the stairs, glanced down at the sphere to make sure it remained in its quiescent state before reaching up -- she was crouched too, leaning down -- and touched her hand carefully to turn it so he could see the scalpel and its screen, showed her the controls with little touches. "You've seen me use it. Fuck, Rhys has done it, and on a live subject too. You can do this."
"Of course I can," she said, pulling it back and firming her jaw. "I am brilliant, aren't I?"
"Yeah," Owen said. "Yeah, you are."
She pinked up a bit. "What about you; where are you going to be?"
"Down here prepping for surgery. The instant we pull that thing out of Ianto, the clock starts." He was determined not to even consider the option that it might be a clock with five seconds on the countdown. "Where's Gwen?"
Tosh made a beckoning motion, and Gwen popped into view above Tosh. They had both taken off their shoes, Owen noticed, to move more quietly. Good idea. He reached down to take off his, too.
"Gwen," he whispered, "I need something to do surgery on. Or in. I'm going to need to set up a sterile operating theater fast, and I can't do it on the table for reasons that, well ..." He gestured vaguely in the direction of the sphere. "Sheets maybe? Anything will work if it can be sterilized."
Gwen's eyes went distant for a moment. "Remember that traveler we met from, what was it, the 36th century? The apocalypse one? With the portable pop-up clean rooms?"
"We still have those? Yes. Perfect. Get one. Either of you fancy being a surgical nurse?"
Their mutual horrified looks suggested that neither of them did.
"Yeah, well, I'm going to need one. Work it out amongst yourselves. Tosh, get ready with the scalpel and lock onto whatever is inside that thing, but don't do anything 'til I give the word. I need to set up first. When I tell you to go, obliterate it."
Tosh nodded.
Owen slipped back down the stairs. He didn't look at Ianto beyond a quick glance to make sure Ianto didn't seem to be in danger of passing out where he stood. He didn't look good at all -- very pale, sweat beading along his hairline, gripping the spike with his good hand as if he needed the grip to hold himself upright. He started to whisper a question as Owen went by, but Owen shook his head.
He was deep in planning headspace. This was going to be one of those medical situations where he had to rehearse every step so he could spring into action as soon as the flag dropped. Frustratingly there were also some giant question marks, like: would the sphere retract all its spikes if it was damaged, or send out more? Would the singularity scalpel even work on it? Did it have more of those shocks in store, and could Ianto take another one --?
Think, think. He had done this kind of thing before, done it while exhausted, done it under gunfire. He tried not to think about the fact that he'd never done it with a dead man's half-numb hands, one of them broken.
Well, if you can't do it, Harper, they need to fire you and get a new doctor who can handle the job, and that's all there is to it, isn't it?
He laid out the instruments he was going to need, laid the handheld UV sterilizer beside them -- handy little alien gadget, that one. Got a bag of saline, an IV kit.
Gwen arrived at the top of the stairs. She leaned over the railing with a hand closed in a fist, and opened it to reveal an object that looked like a large white plastic button, or a small stack of glued-together poker chips. From experience he knew that when tapped, it would open out into a filmy plastic bubble big enough to accommodate several people, designed as portable wasteland shelter in a post-apocalyptic environment.
"Yeah, that's the one. Keep it, one of you'll set it up down here when we're ready. Who's my nurse?" he whispered.
Gwen and Tosh looked at each other. Tosh had both hands occupied with the singularity scalpel. She started to open her mouth, closed it, and gave a little shrug. Gwen pointed at herself.
"When it's safe," he whispered, "be ready to move. I'll need you down here. Both of you, actually, but not 'til it's safe, yeah? Good to go, Tosh?"
She gave him a thumbs-up with one of the hands holding the scalpel's controls.
Owen gathered up a handful of gauze packets and worked his way back through the forest of spikes to Ianto, who gave him a wan sort-of smile.
"Hanging in there?" Owen whispered, with a glance at the spike.
Ianto looked down at the spike pinning him and then at Owen and said, very quietly and wearily, "I hate you."
"They say laughter is the best medicine," Owen whispered back, tearing open gauze packets with his teeth.
"That's a comforting thing to hear, coming from my doctor."
"Right, so what happens now is Tosh zaps that thing with the scalpel as soon as we're in place. Sorry, this is going to hurt." With a pad of gauze in his palm, Owen worked his arm between Ianto's upper back and the wall, sliding it forward through the sticky-warm mess of Ianto's blood until his fingertips brushed the spike. Ianto tried to pull himself forward to help, and gasped in pain. "No no, don't move, don't move. It's good. I got it."
The rest of the gauze was gripped in his other hand, which he planted on Ianto's blood-soaked chest, next to the embedded spike. He was positioned not only to stop the bleeding as soon as he had the chance, but also to hold him up, because he fully expected Ianto was going to collapse when the spike came out. He could feel Ianto's heartbeat through the hand on his chest, much too fast, but reassuring in its constancy.
"Anything I should do?" Ianto whispered. The words rasped out between his teeth. The painkillers weren't doing more than taking the edge off it, and whether they got the spike to retract or had to get it out with the singularity scalpel, it was going to be agonizing. Owen suspected Ianto knew that, too.
"Just stay as still as you can. It'll hurt less."
"Is that like 'just a little pinch, Ianto, this won't hurt at all'?"
"When have I ever said that?"
"You're right," Ianto whispered. "Actually reassuring patients is beyond the scope of your charming bedside manner."
"Some people find me very charming." He was stalling, damn it, and he knew it. Ianto didn't have the time to waste. But once the spike pulled out, he might have no time at all, and Owen found it suddenly hard, much harder than he would have thought, to take that final step. "So no," he whispered, "you're right, this is going to hurt like hell no matter what you do. If you don't move, it'll do less damage coming out, that's all. Less for me to fix."
"You will," Ianto whispered, and his head tilted, fell sideways against Owen's, some of his weight sagging onto him. "Fix it, that is. You're a brilliant doctor, Owen."
"I know," Owen whispered back, and he felt rather than heard Ianto's breath hitch in a silent half-laugh.
He looked up at Tosh, waiting expectantly at the railing, still as a stone, and gave her a nod.
Watching the singularity scalpel being used from the outside was, as it turned out, not that interesting to watch. There was a long still moment with Tosh concentrating utterly, her only movement the tiny twitches of her hands as she zeroed it in on the sphere.
There might have been a pop, like the muffled sound of electrical circuits frying. There was definitely a sudden hot-metal smell, really more of a taste. (He could still taste and smell -- not as well, maybe, but at least it wasn't gone entirely.)
And with the same suddenness as they'd extruded, the spikes pulled back into the sphere, retreating swiftly and smoothly, sealing up as if they'd never been.
There was an unpleasant wet thump as Jack's body hit the floor, but Owen was mainly concerned with taking the sudden weight of a full armload of limp, bleeding Ianto.
He slapped the gauze over the entry and exit wounds. It wasn't spurting, but it was definitely gushing; the gauze and his hands were instantly saturated. Ianto was still at least somewhat conscious, trying to stay on his feet and providing as much help as he could -- which wasn't much -- as they stumbled down the couple of stairs to the floor of the autopsy room. Without the spikes everywhere, there seemed to be much more room in here, all of a sudden. Owen brought them both down to the floor in a kind of controlled fall.
"Gwen!" he shouted. "Tosh!"
After all the whispering, his voice sounded much too loud, but Gwen was there almost instantly; she must have been on her way down the stairs already. Owen's hands and sleeves and shirt were saturated with Ianto's blood. Far too much blood. This wasn't going to work, the damage was too great, maybe he could have dealt with this once but he couldn't do it in his present condition --
"Oh God," Gwen murmured, looking down at Owen and Ianto and the spreading pool of blood on the floor. "What do you need me to do?"
"Shelter," he got out, and she deployed it, the button expanding into a tentlike domed structure about six feet across. "Tosh, get the -- that thing, out of here --"
"On it!" Tosh cried, pattering down the stairs.
"Tools are over there," he told Gwen. "IV and fluids. That tray. Bring it here."
He dragged Ianto inside the pop-up, not bothering with niceties or anything other than speed. Ianto was fading in and out, eyelids fluttering. They left a trail of blood on the floor.
"This?" Gwen asked, clambering in after him with the loaded tray, packed with tools and scanners and a bag of saline, everything he thought he'd need for emergency field surgery.
"That. Gloves and mask on you, and then keep pressure on this for me."
She obeyed, and took over pressing down on the gauze, for all the good it was doing, while Owen wiped his hands, started to reach for a mask and then remembered he didn't need one. He sealed the bubble shut with a quick swipe of his fingers, sealing them in.
"Hang in there," Gwen murmured to Ianto, "hang on, we're going to help you," a steady soothing mantra as Owen worked as fast as he could, clipping the pulse and oxy monitors on -- a mix of modern and future tech, feeding into one of Tosh's scanners -- and getting the IV in him, with saline and the anesthetic drugs. He hated this part most of all; anesthesia was a fine art, and Ianto needed a full operating suite with a dedicated anesthesiologist, a team, working to save his life. Instead he got emergency field surgery on a concrete floor.
Ianto's bloody lips moved, but no sound came out. He clutched weakly at Owen's arm, his blood-slick fingers leaving streaks behind.
"Gonna put you out now, mate," Owen said. He squeezed Ianto's arm, and reached for the scissors. "You'll wake up with Jack all healed up and hovering over your bedside being disgustingly sentimental about it. You know he's gonna bring flowers."
"He better bring flowers," Gwen said, bearing down on the blood-sodden bandages. "We'll kill him again on your behalf if he doesn't."
Ianto smiled briefly, and then his eyes rolled back in his head and he was out. Owen glanced at his stats: so good so far. BP extremely low, pulse much too fast as his body tried to compensate. But not crashing. Not yet.
"Here we go," Owen muttered. "Move your hands, but be ready to move back in on my say-so."
He cut away Ianto's shirt, and Gwen pulled back the soaked gauze. Owen glanced up once; through the translucent bubble around them, he glimpsed Tosh bending over Jack.
And then he pulled on sterile gloves, and the world narrowed down to this, and only this.
*
Death wasn't exactly a bed of roses by anyone's definition, but Owen would grant it this: it made the aftermath of surgery a little more bearable in its way, even if what he really wanted to do was get a bottle of Scotch and tune out the world for a while.
But there were no aching shoulders, no muscles quivering from fatigue and strain, no sweat plastering down his hair and dripping off his nose. The only sign that he'd just spent three hours on his knees clamping blood vessels and picking out chips of bone out of Ianto's mess of a shoulder was the blood swirling down the drain as he scrubbed and scrubbed his hands at the sink in the upstairs shower room.
He'd opted to go up here to clean up rather than try to clean off at the sink in the autopsy room because he needed a shower too -- he was covered in Ianto's blood from head to foot -- and also, for a little while, he just needed to ... exist.
Ianto was still completely out and probably would be for a while. He was recovering down in the autopsy room. Owen felt he should be moved as little as possible, especially when moving him involved carrying him up a flight of stairs, so Tosh and Gwen had brought down cushions and a roll-out mattress, and they'd got him settled, with his shoulder swathed in bandages and blankets tucked around him to keep him warm.
Jack was up by now, though wobbly, and Owen had left him supervising an IV blood-draw setup for Tosh, their only Ianto-compatible blood donor. Gwen, having cleaned up herself, was working on scrubbing the remaining blood off the stairs and walls, cleaning up the spilled leftovers from lunch and so forth. Aware that he was only likely to make things worse, looking like an escapee from an abattoir as he did, Owen had slipped off upstairs to clean up.
A quick shower got most of the blood off -- all his showers were quick ones now; between his inability to get an erection or feel much of the water's heat, there was no pleasure in it, and looking at his body, being reminded of its pallid deadness, was the last thing he wanted. Now, in a clean T-shirt and loose pair of tracksuit bottoms, he scrubbed and re-scrubbed his hands, and dug half-dried blood out from under the nails. His palm was going to need restitching, or more accurately re-gluing; it had occurred to him some time back that there was no point in not just going straight for the easiest option. He'd also had to take off the splint, saturated with blood as it was, and he manipulated the broken finger under the water. It was an odd feeling, no pain at all, just a kind of popping as it wobbled around.
Things he regretted: that.
He was calmer now because he had to be. He'd always been volatile. Angry. Now he was in a situation where a moment's outburst of temper could result in having to wrap up a broken finger every day for the rest of what might loosely be termed his life.
Or maybe it's the lack of adrenaline. Maybe what you think are emotions are just a residual vestige of it, a sort of psychosomatic echo; maybe what you think is love, or fear, or desperation is just a memory of it, and slowly it'll fade, like the taste of coffee and the aftershocks of orgasm, as you forget what all of it felt like, what any of it felt like ...
There was a knock at the door.
"Occupied!" Owen snapped. "Wait your turn."
"Owen? It's Jack."
"Not actually a counterargument," Owen called. Jack opened the door. "Oh, well, just come right in then, make yourself at home, what's the point of even having doors around here. I could have been naked, you know."
"Yes, that would have been terrible." Jack closed the door behind him.
Owen reached for a towel. "Shouldn't you be doing the anxious-boyfriend hovering thing?"
"Gwen and Tosh are my surrogate hoverers," Jack said. His voice was light, but there was a shadow underneath, something not very deeply buried, like a tether tugging him back toward the autopsy room.
"How's Tosh doing?" Owen asked, turning away to scrub at his damp hair. "I gave her instructions. I hope she's following them."
"When I left to come up here, she was lying down and drinking juice, yes. Owen ... Owen. Owen, look at me."
Owen scowled, and looked, seeing Jack as he was now -- clean, changed, not crumpled and soaked in blood.
"Where'd you put that sodding thing, anyway?" he asked. By the time he and Gwen emerged from their impromptu operating theatre, the sphere had long since been dealt with.
"Locked in the vaults," Jack said. "According to Toshiko, it's harmless now. Whatever was inside -- an electronic controller, an organism -- is gone."
"And we're keeping it."
"Better to have it here, locked up, than out in the world."
Owen didn't answer. He would have appreciated the satisfaction of blowing it up, but it seemed to be impervious to that kind of thing.
"You okay?" Jack asked.
His voice was gentle. Owen couldn't deal with that kind of gentleness, not right now. He looked down at his hands instead, and slowly, carefully -- with exquisite control, not the abrupt violence he wanted to lash out with -- he began rewrapping his broken finger.
"Course I am," he said. "Dead, but fine. Can't hurt the dead guy."
"What's this, then, a love bite?" Jack asked.
He reached out and brushed his fingers across Owen's bare arm, just above the crease where the spike had sliced through his arm. Owen had honestly forgotten about it.
"Right." There was a tube of superglue tucked into the pocket of his other jeans ... currently stuffed into the bin; it wasn't like he was ever going to wear them again. He reached in and found it. His hands came out streaked with blood. Ianto's blood. God, it never ended. He curled his hand around the glue tube and wanted to just keep squeezing, squeezing, 'til his broken finger popped out of place and through the skin, 'til the other fingers broke too ...
It wouldn't feel like anything, of course, just like it hadn't felt like anything when he broke his finger in front of Tosh.
Jack moved abruptly, reached out to touch the back of his hand. "May I?"
Owen opened his hand. Jack took the glue tube, and Owen rested both hands, both blood-stained hands, lightly on the edge of the sink while Jack ran a bead of glue down his forearm.
"Like that?"
"Just like gluing a broken cup," Owen said. He rinsed his hands again. The new wrapping on his finger was wet now, but it would dry; none of the usual rules applied anymore. He could break, but at least he didn't rot.
"You're a lot more than that," Jack said.
"Sorry ... a walking, talking broken cup." He held out his hand for the superglue.
He recognized this feeling abruptly. It wasn't just the usual death-related depression, it was a kind of post-surgical letdown, the emotional drop of being on and then suddenly winding up with nowhere for all those emotions, all that energy to go. In times gone by, he'd drink it away or fuck it away. But he didn't have those options now, and he didn't even have any reason for feeling this way. It was chemical, hormonal, like all emotions. He didn't have those anymore -- chemicals, hormones. He shouldn't get brain-drop anymore. It was a fake emotion, like the fake life animating his dead limbs.
Jack still had hold of the glue and showed no sign of giving it back. Owen snapped his fingers. "Glue?"
Rather than giving it back, Jack took Owen's hand. He just held it for a minute, cupped gently in his own, and then carefully dried Owen's palm with the edge of the towel, and ran the bead of superglue down the scalpel cut. Then he began to unwrap the wet wrapping around the broken finger, and reached for a dry one from the open medical kit beside the sink.
Owen just let him. It was easier than putting up a fight about it. Right now his emotions were as dead-numb as his skin; some part of his brain hadn't got the memo that neither body nor brain needed to feel fatigue anymore. He dully watched as Jack's strong fingers smoothed down the bandage, loop by gentle loop, firming it up and taping it down. Jack's fingers, whole and alive, not blue with blood loss, lying limply by his thigh ...
"Where does the extra blood come from?" Owen asked abruptly.
"What?"
"The blood. Yours. You spilled most of the standard five liters all over the inside of the autopsy room. I know because we had to scrub it off the steps. You didn't exactly suck it up back inside, but you're definitely not suffering from massive blood loss now ..."
Jack laughed softly, and then he wrapped an arm around Owen and pulled him in for a tight hug. He wrapped a hand around the back of Owen's neck, and just held him for a minute, and then kissed his temple.
"Thank you," he said quietly, against the side of Owen's face. "Owen, I'm glad you're still here. We're glad you're still here."
*
It was late at night, or early in the morning, when Ianto finally woke up. He'd gone from anesthetized sleep to actual sleep, so Owen had decided to just let him rest on the floor in the autopsy room, nestled down in the pile of blankets and pillows and heat packs they'd made for him. It was always chilly down here, for obvious reasons of necessity; you didn't want alien corpses going off in the heat.
Owen remembered when he used to complain about it, climbing up to the main control level to grab a cup of coffee and make bad jokes about Torchwood not paying the heating bills. Now he didn't feel the cold anymore, not as such, but he was aware that other people did, especially people recovering from emergency surgery after nearly bleeding out on the autopsy bay floor, so he drifted by every once in a while to make sure Ianto was warm enough.
The girls had gone home hours ago. Jack was around, as always, wandering in and out of the autopsy room, sometimes sitting beside Ianto, sometimes up in his office. Owen had explained his own continued presence, both to Jack and to himself, on the general principle that he didn't need to sleep anyway so he might as well be around to take care of his patient. Jack hadn't asked any questions.
What Owen was doing, mostly, was paperwork, idle busywork interspersed with long periods of staring into space. Most of the lights in the Hub were off; there was just the light above the table he was using in lieu of a desk so he could stay down in the autopsy pit and still work. From up above, Jack's office lights glowed dimly, along with the glow of the computer equipment that ran all night.
It wasn't sleep, not quite. But it was a contemplative, recharging kind of thing, almost like sleep.
He had begun to realize, when he was in a mental space to consider it rationally, that part of why he felt so weird sometimes was because the human brain wasn't meant to go full tilt all the time. He'd stopped worrying that he was going to go insane from lack of sleep; however his brain worked now, it didn't seem to need it. But it did need to idle occasionally, chugging along at a low speed. Part of dealing with this whole bizarre undead situation was learning to pace himself when he didn't have fatigue or sleep as guides anymore -- but he did still have some of the same needs, including the need for mental down time.
So he just let it happen. There was something very soothing about this, working when he felt like it and zoning out when he didn't, and having company while he was doing it, of a sort.
Speaking of ... he slid off his chair and went over to Ianto's pallet on the floor. The latest bag of IV fluids had run out. Owen knelt and gently extracted Ianto's injured arm from the blankets, so that he could feel the radial pulse and press the tips of Ianto's fingers to see how quickly the color returned. Circulation through the injured shoulder was one of his concerns, but it seemed to be fine, and he was just tucking Ianto's hand back under the blankets when he realized Ianto was watching him with dazed, half-open eyes.
"Morning," Owen said. "Congratulations, you will be able to play the violin again; and since you couldn't play it before, that's right, it's a sodding miracle." Ianto blinked at him sleepily. Owen patted his arm. "You in there, mate? Hold on, I'm gonna check a couple things, yeah?"
Shining a penlight in Ianto's eyes to check his pupil response made him pull away with a garbled protest. Owen grinned down at him. "So you are in there. Any pain?"
After a moment, Ianto shook his head slowly. "Everyone," he murmured, and touched his dry lips with his tongue. "Okay?"
"Yeah yeah, they're fine, you're the only one who was slow enough to get himself impaled. Well, you and Jack. Who is back, by the way."
"Jack ..." Ianto murmured. He seemed to be pulling words out of the haze, one by one. "He's ... here?"
"Yes, he's here. He's just upstairs. Want me to get 'im?"
Ianto nodded, the dazed vacancy in his gaze clearing somewhat.
Owen patted the unbandaged side of Ianto's chest through the blankets, and trotted up the stairs -- the freshly scrubbed and sanitized stairs, courtesy of Tosh and Gwen, now with fresh cracks in the cinderblock walls where the spikes had punched through. The lights in Jack's office were still on. Owen sometimes wondered if Jack had any more need for sleep than Owen himself did. He'd certainly never caught Jack asleep.
We're a club, he thought wryly. A very exclusive club. The died-and-came-back-wrong club.
"Oi, Jack!" he called. "Your boyfriend's awake!"
Jack bounced out of the office -- there was no other word for it -- and Owen made himself scarce to give them some privacy; he wandered down to the vaults. He'd been spending more time down there lately than he ever had before. Something about the darkness and dankness suited his moods a lot of the time, and when he didn't feel like going home, he could get maintenance done at night, check and make sure the auto-feeders worked and the sewers weren't backing up and so forth. It wasn't glamorous work, but it needed doing, and he was no longer worried about wandering around down here by himself at night. Being King of the Weevils was good for something after all.
Tonight, though, he found a place to sit for a while and just sat. His hands, he noticed absently, were shaking. That was interesting. He hadn't thought he could still do that.
People on this team really needed to stop almost dying, if it could rattle a dead man's nerves this badly.
After a long while, he wandered back up to the Hub, filed a few things, and went over to the railing above the autopsy pit to look down at Ianto and Jack. At the shadowy edges of the pool of light cast by the lamp in the corner, they were like something from a painting -- Pietà with IV stand and monitors. Except Jack wasn't holding Ianto, as such, just lying on the edge of the pallet, propped on his elbow with Ianto's good hand in his, and occasionally leaning in to brush his lips across Ianto's forehead.
It was quiet and calm and impossibly intimate. They weren't like this often; mostly, in public, Jack treated Ianto like anyone else at Torchwood Three, with his particular blend of tough love and flirtation. It was either that, or stumbling onto them in flagrante delicto in various locations around the Hub; Owen had started knocking before going into the file rooms these days after one too many eye-searing experiences.
But this, the tenderness, was a side they rarely let out. It was too intimate to spy on, even for him, and Owen started to draw back, but the movement seemed to catch Jack's attention. He looked up, made some kind of gesture at Owen that seemed to suggest he wanted Owen to come down, and when Owen didn't, he leaned down to murmur something into the fringe of sweat-scruffy hair above Ianto's ear. With another light kiss and a squeeze to Ianto's hand, he got up and came up the stairs.
"You don't have to go," Owen said.
"I'll be back." Jack jerked his head down the stairs. "He wants to talk to you anyway."
Well, that could mean just about anything from a need for a bedpan to an emotional conversation he was definitely not up for having. Owen went reluctantly down the stairs, and found Ianto more propped up than Owen had left him, with pillows piled under his head and shoulders to tilt him up a bit -- Jack's doing, no doubt. Adjustable hospital bed, Torchwood style.
"You know, we need to get an actual, proper sickbay in here one of these days," Owen said. He sat crosslegged on the floor beside Ianto. "Waking up on the autopsy table is a real shock to the system, as I know from personal experience. Of course, I was legitimately dead at the time."
Ianto frowned at him. He was still tracking slowly, but seemed a little more with it than before. "Jack said you were hurt."
"Jack," Owen said, "is an absolute liar, as we all know."
"Can I see it?" Ianto asked, and then he smiled, very slightly. "You've seen mine."
"You are spending way too much time around Jack Harkness," Owen complained, and he pushed up the sleeve of his sweatshirt to show Ianto the glued-together cut. "See? Good as new."
Ianto's good hand was still on top of the blankets, as Jack had left it; now he reached up, slow and shaky, and curled his fingers carefully around Owen's arm just below the cut. Squeezed lightly, and let go, his hand falling back to the blankets.
"If you've got the energy for that," Owen said, scrabbling for normalcy, or for a little bit of emotional distance at least, god, "you can show me how well you can move the fingers on your other hand. Check for nerve damage and whatnot."
Ianto obediently curled each finger, rotated and flexed his hand, grimacing slightly with effort. That small amount of activity seemed to exhaust him.
"Any pain? I've been giving you painkillers with the IV fluids, but I didn't have a good baseline when you weren't awake to ask."
"No, it doesn't hurt, not really. What sort of recovery am I looking at?" he asked, watching Owen with a kind of sleepy trust that Owen didn't really know what to do with.
"It went through your shoulder blade. I picked out what I could of the bone fragments, but I was mainly focused on clamping blood vessels and making sure you didn't bleed out." As he almost had. There were times when Owen thought it was just as well that he didn't sleep anymore; there was less scope for nightmare fodder. "Anyway, you're going to need at least one more surgery for that later. Probably not by me; you ought to see an actual specialist about it. Just to give you something to look forward to."
"Thanks for that," Ianto murmured.
"I can refer you to somebody." Ironically working at Torchwood had expanded his professional contacts beyond what he'd had when he was working at an actual hospital, due to the never-ending need to refer victims to a sprawling array of different kinds of specialists.
Usually not his teammates, though.
Ianto nodded sleepily, and Owen pushed his hand back under the blankets. "Get some sleep. Let me know if you need anything, more drugs or whatnot. I'll be around, or if I'm not, Jack can get me."
Another sleepy nod, and he seemed to drift off. Owen didn't get up right away. He leaned back against the wall. It was comfortable just sitting like this, listening to the monitors beeping softly above Ianto's head. Another opportunity to just zone out and exist, letting his mind float free.
"Did anyone ever clean the mud out of the SUV?" Ianto asked suddenly, his eyes fluttering open.
Owen dragged himself back from wherever he'd gone off to, mentally. "... really? That's what you're lying there thinking about?"
"Someone's got to," Ianto said, and god help them all, he made actual motions as if to get up. Owen pushed him back down, not really making much effort to be gentle because fucking seriously?
"If you stand up in your condition, you will most likely pass out and crack your skull open and pop some stitches into the bargain, and then Jack will murder me and I'll have to walk around the Hub with a broken neck and no one wants that. Why do you need to clean the SUV now?"
"Because if no one's done it, the stains will set," Ianto muttered obstinately, staring up at the ceiling with a belligerent look. "And it will take twelve times as long. .... Ask me how I know this."
"You almost died today, you utter wanker," Owen said, and then he laughed -- just leaned back on his hands, and laughed at the complete absurdity of it all. If he still had the ability to laugh until he cried -- if he still had tears at all -- he would have laughed himself to tears. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand by pure instinct, almost surprised to find them dry; he felt so, well. Alive. "Okay, fine, you know what? I don't sleep anyway. I'll do it."
"You'll ... wash the SUV," Ianto said, narrowing his eyes as if he suspected a trap.
"I clean things sometimes," Owen said defensively.
"Really?" Ianto said in a tone that suggested he'd seen no evidence of it so far.
"You're supposed to be asleep. Doctor's orders."
Ianto gave a soft snort, but closed his eyes. After watching for a minute to make sure he was actually staying put, Owen got up, reached for his jacket, and headed for the stairs.
"Going home?" Jack asked. He was at the top of the stairs; Owen wondered how long he'd been there.
"Going to wash the SUV."
It wasn't that often that he got to see Jack caught truly flat-footed. "Er ... what?"
"You heard me," Owen said cheerily over his shoulder. He was ... happy -- weirdly, bafflingly happy. They'd all nearly died yet again, but they'd made it out alive -- well, alive-ish in his case, or dead-ish, and maybe whatever was happening to him now was yet another symptom of his poor technically-deceased brain trying to deal with the situation, but whatever this feeling was, it was nice, and not very many nice things had happened to him lately.
He spun on his heel as he headed for the tunnel to the parking garage, calling back, "Oh, and if he makes any noises about getting out of bed for anything other than completely necessary reasons, Jack, sit on him."
"If you insist," Jack's cheerful voice drifted after him. "I'll make sure he knows it was your idea."
"I regret saying that already, by the way," Owen called back, and Jack's happy laughter followed him out.
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I have not seen the episode nor read the fic it inspired, but I enjoyed this very much.
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