Transcending Torchwood: Chapter 3

[galadriel1010]

5.12.61
Ianto sits in the deep chair on the far side of the desk from Jack and considers him across the expanse. “Are you sure you want to come back to Torchwood and that you're ready for it? This is your opportunity to get out, if you want to take it.”

He folds his arms and glares. “When have I ever suggested that I'd want to leave Torchwood?”

“You used to talk about it,” Ianto says, frowning at the recollections. “You used to talk about going back to Paris or to Rio, writing a book...”

“With you!” he interrupts. “I wanted to do those things with you, to get you out of Torchwood and have more time with you. Why would I want to do them alone, when I'd know that you're back here and...” he trails off, chilled into silence by the expression of hurt on Ianto's face. “Ianto, it's been seven days since...” Since he got to the site of the explosion to find Ianto clinging to life and being loaded into an ambulance. Since he'd pulled off his coat and pressed it into the hands of the ambulance driver, instructing him to make sure it stayed with Ianto. Since the Rift opening he'd been searching for had opened too close to him and drawn him into a world of fire and smoke and pain with a force he couldn't fight. Since he woke up in a world he didn't understand, alone and resigned to having lost Ianto and not knowing if he could go on or if there was a point. “Maybe I should go,” he concedes. “Whilst I won't be missed.”

“You would be missed,” Ianto says. His eyes, when Jack finally meets them, are aching with longing that he can't seem to express. “But if you wanted to go, I'd be here waiting when you were ready to come back.”

“I'm back,” he whispers. “I'm right where I want to be.”

Ianto smiles and relaxes, and he pushes a printed contract and a pen across to him. “This was drawn up by Prince Harry and myself, in preparation for your return. It's essentially the contract you would have had when we restructured Torchwood before you disappeared, if you'd had a contract.”

“Contracts are so constraining,” he scoffs, because Ianto expects it and maybe if at least one of them does as is expected then they'll make it back to normal. He's reading the contract, though, puzzling out the meaning from the legalese. “It's pretty comprehensive,” he acknowledges approvingly, and Ianto passes him the pen. “I only have one question.”

“Go on?”

He tapped the line in question. “It says that I'm answerable to you, the monarch and the Governor-General of Torchwood. Who is it?”

“The current Governor-General is Princess Charlotte of Wales.” He gestures to a portrait on his wall, a young woman in a formal version of something like the UNIT uniform. “She is the daughter of King William. The role passes to the second in line to the throne, or the next adult in line.”

“She's beautiful.” He studies her features and smiles. “He married Kate, then?”

“He did. They wanted to postpone it in light of the disaster in Edinburgh, but Gwen and Harry persuaded them to go through with it, to keep smiling and lift the country's mood.” His face clouds with melancholy. “I was sorry to miss it, more sorry that you weren't there.”

“I'll watch it on DVD.” Jack signs the contract quickly and pushes it back to Ianto. “There, I'm all yours.” He waggles his eyebrows and leans back. “Can I request a tour?”

Ianto, finally, smiles, and countersigns the contract. “No escape now, Captain. Just let me file this and then I can show you around.”

Ianto’s office is at the centre of the hexagonal operations centre, and the corridor that stretches from one side of the building to the other and parts around the office marks the divide between administration and operation. On each side, a block of individual offices bookends a wedge-shaped workroom. One of the workrooms is quiet and studious, with small groups monitoring communications, plotting routes on the wall-mounted screens and tracking suspects and teams. The other room is far more relaxed, and with a smaller team it seems more spacious. They look towards the door when it opens and carry on, ignoring Jack and Ianto. “Gorgeous stranger appears in the doorway and they don't even blink.” Jack glances at Ianto. “Definitely your employees.”

“Of course. No revolving door on the stationery cupboard here.” Ianto closes the door again and raises one eyebrow. “No need when everyone lives on site.”

Jack grins, not because it's funny but because it's the most familiar Ianto has been in a week. Maybe he's just the sort of person that everyone flirts with automatically, but even that seems like an achievement from the dour, tight-eyed man who had first come to meet him in Diana's office. It gives him hope that the man he loves is still in there somewhere.

It's raining outside, so they bow their heads and hurry straight through the accommodation area, past the rec centre in the middle, and into the training centre on the far side of the complex. Ianto combs his hair back into its normal tidy style and beckons Jack straight past the desk. “We're just looking,” he tells the receptionist. “No need to book us in.”

This, too, is a hexagonal building bisected by a corridor with a smaller room in the centre. In this building, however, the smaller room is a unisex changing room. The left hand side of the building is a fully-equipped gym, complete with a resistance pool and a physical combat training area, and the right holds a firing range, driving simulator and planning room. Jack hovers by the armoury and his hand drops to his hip. “I came back naked,” he said quietly. He still feels naked with his ring finger bare. “I need to shoot something.”

“Later.” Ianto waits by the door for Jack to come and join him again. He leads him to the lift and presses the call button. “I think we should wait here a while. You can see everything else from up here.”

Jack clasps his hands behind his back in the lift and watches Ianto's expression in the mirror. It's one of the frequent, achingly familiar moments in which he can almost forget everything that's gone wrong, but the empty feeling inside him won't let him. The lift arrives in seconds anyway, and Ianto strides ahead of him into an elegant but simple canteen. A few people are sitting at tables around the room and stand to attention when they enter. Someone whispers Jack's name and he knows that the news will now spread like wildfire. It had only been stopped to that point by the subtlty of Diana's team, and the fact that she kept him to herself.

Ianto does that now, and leads Jack to a sofa facing the plate windows before he goes to the counter to order them drinks. The menu is clearly aimed at keeping the field agents in top shape, with a few luxuries to make life more interesting, and a card on the table next to the sofa explains that he can ask his doctor to send a specialised menu to the kitchen and pre-book meals from it if he needs to. Ianto, fortunately, brings hot chocolate, sandwiches and cake on a plain wooden tray and sets it down on the table. “You look like you needed hot chocolate. And cake always goes down well.”

He beams, despite the fact that Ianto insists on giving him the sandwiches first. They're smoked cheese and tomato on white – his favourites. Right now, he can't believe that he ever doubted that Ianto would he here waiting for him when he came back; Ianto has always looked after him, and he wouldn't let anything get in his way – not even death.

“I'm really impressed,” he says at last, rather than giving voice to thoughts that he can't confess to this Ianto. “It's what we always dreamed of.”

“Yeah.” Ianto looks out through the rain, across the campus. He smiles and looks at Jack's reflection. “The work would have driven you mad, though.”

3.8.29
Steven dumped another box on the kitchen table and wiped his forehead. “Whose stupid idea was it to move in in the middle of a heatwave?”

“Your uncle, I think,” David told him, following him in with a pair of suitcases. “He seems to be in charge of everything else.”

“Wait, my uncle?” Steven gaped at him. “How is he my uncle when he does anything wrong? He's not even related to me!”

“You adopted me, you get to deal with the responsibility. David didn't have a choice about it.” Ianto came out of the kitchen and collected the suitcases from David with quiet thanks.

“Wouldn't be here, if I did,” he grumbled, but he nudged Ianto with his elbow and smiled. “There's just a couple of boxes left to bring in. Steven and I will get them.”

“Thanks, boys.” He paused at the bottom of the stairs and looked the pair of them over. “You two go and get those, then we'll go over to the canteen and get some lunch, okay?”

“The magic words!” David grabbed Steven and tugged him out of the front door to get the last things from the van, and Ianto took the suitcases up to the bedrooms, laughing. The house had three bedrooms, one at the front and one at the back with a connecting bathroom between them, and the master bedroom on the right over the kitchen and the dining room. There was also a study over the downstairs toilet, and another leading off the master bedroom over the garage. It was a beautiful house, and made the move away from Cardiff easier.

He set the suitcases down on the right beds, back bedroom for David and the master bedroom for him, and left them there. By the time he got downstairs the boys had put the last boxes by the wall and were waiting for him to bundle him out of the door. It was a beautiful warm day, and the campus was only just finished and being slowly occupied by the teams. Young rose bushes flowered in dry flowerbeds, and flowers tumbled from window boxes and hanging baskets. They passed the night-shift operations team clustered outside the rec centre and called out greetings as they went in. There was another canteen in the training centre to provide a more health-conscious menu, but the restaurant in the rec centre was more relaxed and comfortable, giving table service all day.

Members of his team, scattered around the room, greeted them as they entered, and a waitress hurried to seat them with a bright smile, and gushed about the quality of the kitchen and the space they now had. The whole campus had a back-to-school atmosphere, and Ianto was looking forwards to throwing himself into work here.

11.10.27
Ianto entered the conference room at the London office with his head researcher, Tessa Giles, and they took the chairs closest to the screen. “Thank you all for coming.” He looked around the table and his gaze settled on Prince Harry. “I assume you've all seen the news reports.”

Brigadier Harris grunted and shook his head. “Terrible business. Have you identified him yet?”

“No.” He sighed and straightened his papers. “We don't even know if the victim is one of the thirty known to have been lost to the Rift, or someone we didn't know about. Our Medical Examiner hopes to have checked the DNA profiles of the missing that we have on record by the end of the week – hopefully that will provide us with an identity.”

“How were they found?” Harry asked. “Was it close to any of the disappearances?”

“No. The initial victims were taken from open places, spread across the whole active area indiscriminately,” Tessa answered for him. She pressed a button on the keyboard and showed a map of the city on the screen behind them. Over this she layered a plot map of the Rift victims who were taken on the first night. “They followed the lines of the Rift. Since then...” She pressed another key and the subsequent victims appeared on the map one at a time. “As you can see, the disappearances have become more targeted. We believe that the Rift anchors to certain locations, and the longer the history of activity on the site, the more likely it is to be an anchor point.” Once more she layered readings over the map, but this time it was all Rift activity in the city, increasing in stages and becoming more concentrated. “We don't have the historical data from Cardiff to verify this, but records do suggest that a similar thing has happened there.

“The victim returned on Saturday was found here,” she told them, indicating an area of open land in the city centre. “It's a former mill site, and an amber level activity zone.”

Brigadier Harris peered over his glasses at her. “Are we likely to see more of the victims returned?”

She glanced at Ianto and nodded. “We assume so.”

Harry, too, looked at Ianto. “There's no chance it's him?”

He sighed and shook his head. “Even considering the severity of the injuries sustained, Jack would have recovered by now.” There was an awkward silence whilst everyone avoided looking at him, and he flipped the page over to look at the notes he'd scribbled down over the last few days. “The current facility in Edinburgh isn't sufficient to provide the medical care the Rift victims require, nor is it set up to carry out the research into the Rift that is now necessary and possible.” He looked over at Harry primarily. “I'd like to establish a full base with training, research and medical facilities, and with accommodation for the agents stationed there. The Highland and Island hubs and the Torchwood House centre can become outposts, with provision of cover centralised in Edinburgh.”

“Okay.” Harry nodded and leaned back in his chair. “Get the proposals to me, then we can talk about budgeting.” He waited for Ianto to acquiesce. “And I want you in charge up there.”

Ianto's eyebrow rose curiously. “What about London?”

“Move the centre of operations to Edinburgh with you. That will reaffirm the unification, get you out from under parliament's watchful eye and, if we choose the site well, keep the nerve centre of Torchwood away from a population concentration.” He looked at each of them in turn. “This is our opportunity to have a fully functional, centralising base, purpose built to take Torchwood through the twenty first century.” He stood, and they stood as well. “Make it good.”

3.1.12
The conference call connected and Ianto forced himself to relax. Di Green smiled at him from Edinburgh, setting a mug of coffee next to a hard hat on her desk. “Director Green,” he greeted her warmly. “Nice of you to join me at last.”

“Sorry, Ianto. We had another power outage.” She shrugged and looked up at the clock. “It only went down for about half an hour today.”

“We really need to get you into the new building,” Ianto told her. “How's it coming on?”

“Well, the electricians are finished, and London's technicians went in today to start installing the monitoring equipment. They think that'll be done by the end of the week, and then they'll start moving the server in and then the access stations. Computer wise, we might be able to move in by the end of the month.” She paused to take another sip of her coffee and scowl at the screen. “The kitchen is nearly fitted as well – appliances are in, but the counters and cupboards are still going in. We've got a shipment of furniture coming next week, and we should be at a stage by then that that just needs to go in, and that will finish the dormitories. The bathrooms are being plumbed in this week ready to tile next week, once the decorators have finished the medical suite.”

“We're on schedule to move in next month, then?” he checked.

“Absolutely,” she agreed. “We've been able to get everything in really smoothly. It's a perfect site for it.”

“Maybe. I am a bit worried that it'll become a hot spot of Rift activity.” He tapped his pen on the desk. “Abandoned mills always seem to.”

“At least we'll be conveniently located to respond.” She shook her head. “Relax, Ianto. It'll be a huge improvement on the portacabin, and we'll deal with any problems as and when they arise.”

“Just like we always do.” He found a piece of paper and scribbled a note. “I'll come up for the opening, if you don't mind me treading on your toes?”

“You're still my director,” she pointed out. “Are we going for a grand opening, or a low-key affair?”

“Grand, I think. Show them that we're doing something to protect them. Let's hope we get that far without any deaths.” Ianto glanced at the calendar. “We're doing well so far.”

“An improvement on last year, at least.” She drained the last of her coffee and picked up her hard hat. “Right, I need to get back to work and check up on a sighting in one of the suburbs. Is there anything else you need from me?”

“No, that's everything. I'll make arrangements for the opening, leave you to get on with the everyday running,” he offered. “Take care.”

“Always do.” She smiled and leaned across to end the call.

Chapter 4