Late Night Loss Chapter 24

[galadriel1010]

Gareth gripped Ianto’s hands tightly and smiled worriedly at him and at Jack and John, “This gets more surreal by the second, it really does. Cemetery of Small Gods?”

John nodded and flipped his book open to the right place. The cat was approaching them now, walking along the top of the book cases, and they could all sense, even if they couldn’t see them, the other cats approaching from round about. “Go, we’ll find you there. If we get separated meet at the Watch House.” He held Jack’s hand and started to read:

This cemetery of Small Gods was for the people who didn't know what happened next. They didn't know what they believed in or if there was life after death and, often, they didn't know what hit them. They'd gone through life being amiably uncertain, until the ultimate certainty had claimed them at the last. Among the city's bone orchards, the cemetery was the equivalent of the drawer marked MISC, where people were interred in the glorious expectation of nothing very much.

The first cat met with another where they had stood moments before and looked both ways up and down the corridor, “Big Tony?”

“Just wants them spooked for the moment. Miss Next, it seems, has a certain fondness for them…”

“They are most definitely spooked.”

“Oh yes. And it may only be a matter of time. The book is nigh on unsalvageable I believe.” ‘The cat that got the cream’ was about the only analogy you could draw with their expressions in this instance.

Three men stood silently, paying tribute to a fallen leader on a day of remembrance that few people remembered. Behind them, two men, almost identical in appearance, slipped quietly from the graveyard and looked around. “Night Watch, huh?” Jack commented, scanning the streets for any sign of their partners, “Always been a favourite of mine.”

“You what?” John didn’t actually appear to have heard him

“Night Watch is one of my favourite books. I got a copy the first day it was released and read it three times through non-stop. It… It carries a lot of resonance for me.” He shoved his hands in his pockets, “Do you come here often.” ‘My God,’ he thought, ‘was that really me chatting myself up? Nah… Was it?’

John seemed to think the same, apparently that was the general impression of Jack; so much so that it carried through to his fictional persona; the other man grinned, “Not that often really, we’ve been to Night Watch once before, but we come to the Discworld more often. It’s safe, reasonably safe.”

“Not a word I’d associate with the Discworld isn’t ‘safe’.” He commented

“It’s got Carrot in it, which is enough to deter anyone.” John bit his lip as it became apparent that Gareth and Ianto weren’t there, “Come on, we’d better find him, and then find the others.”

“They’re not here?” John was surprised by the way the older man’s face paled at that, “Do you think they got out?”

He nodded, “Yes, they got out before us, so I guess they may have come in before the plot and had t get out of the way… They’re here somewhere Jack.”

Jack straightened up tensely, “I couldn’t lose him again, not when I only just got him back.”

Sergeant Angua tossed her mane of blonde hair over her shoulder and studied her sword, checking it for marks or notches. There were none, she knew this, but it looked good to check now and again, especially when you were the visible presence outside the door of the Watch House. Two men caught her eye and she made to block their path, “Who goes there?”

One of them sighed heavily, whilst the other looked mildly alarmed and quite annoyed, “Sergeant, you know who I am.” John pointed out, “Do you need to ask every time you see me?”

“I know who you are, but who’s he. He looks like you…”

“He’s an outlander, the person my character’s based on… Sort of.” He groaned, it gave him a headache just thinking about it, “Are they here?”

Her face was carefully blank, too carefully, “Are who here?”

“Where are they?”

She folded, “In there with Carrot, waiting for you and getting very worried. They’ve been here an hour.”

Jack pushed past her first, having not spoken a word because he didn’t think he could, and John followed him, shrugging apologetically at Angua as he did so. She simply smiled at him and nodded, the couple were familiar to the Watch, although their doppel-ganger friends had come as a surprise.

Jack looked around the almost cavernous room and spotted Ianto and Gareth almost immediately, easily identifiable by their unusual clothes, the fact that they were almost identical and the way that Ianto was hurrying towards him, face extremely pale. The immortal closed the last few steps and caught his lover in his arms, holding him close as he saw Gareth and John do the same to their left and a little behind Ianto. “God, Yan. I was so worried.” He whispered, “I thought I’d lost you again.”

The younger man chuckled and pulled back just enough to kiss him, “You’re not getting rid of me that easily Captain. I was worried too.” He brushed his fingers across Jack’s cheek tenderly, “I didn’t know if you’d made it. From here on in, we jump together, OK?”

“Definitely.” He smirked, “Although we may need to learn how to do it first.”

Ianto laughed and rested his head on Jack’s shoulder, “Where’s the fun in that? Come on, what’s the plan now?”

“Oh, you think I have a plan do you?” He tucked Ianto’s hand into his own and led him over to where their friends were also getting reunited, “I think we need to sort their plot out before we go home. And to do that we have to find Thursday…”

“Sounds like a pub moment to me.” Ianto suggested as they reached the other couple and leant against a desk, “How about it, fancy a trip to the pub?”

“We’ve just been to the pub.” Gareth pointed out

“So?” Jack and Ianto didn’t see his point, “Let’s go again. We have planning to do, and I seem to remember that we were rudely interrupted.”

Ianto choked, “Not the usual circumstances for that comment, although it’s true.”

The other two looked at them, looked at each other, back at Jack and Ianto and burst out laughing. They refused to be drawn on the reason for their sudden mirth and willingness to find a pub, but the overhead mutterings about ‘just like us’ and ‘dirtier mind than you’ gave them an idea of what had caused it. Ankh Morpork was a bustling, thriving metropolis where everyone was fictional and most of them wouldn’t have batted an eye if two weevils in tutus had cart wheeled down the middle of the street singing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, so the two couples were almost completely ignored (actually, they were almost run over by an oblivious cart driver, but that was fairly normal apparently.) They were all laughing and flushed from running when they arrived at the pub and this time John and Jack went to get the drinks. When they returned the two fictional men looked excited, eyes glowing. It was clear than even in the few hours they’d known each other, the fictional representations of themselves had become a lot more like the real thing: Gareth was more visibly affectionate if you knew what you were looking for, John was less of the follower and becoming the leader more, their jokes were getting cruder. “So,” John interrupted Jack’s reverie in a way that even the immortal couldn’t deny was exactly the way he started meetings at Torchwood, “You’ve got a plan?”

“He’s always got a plan.” Ianto assured him

“So?” They demanded, “What is it?”

“Well…” He laughed, “Somehow, we’ve got to give you a readable plot, right? One that isn’t straying too far from the current framework.”

“Yeah, we just don’t have the funding to do anything with the location or any of that.” John agreed, leaning forwards sadly but thoughtfully, “It’s never going to be mega, is it? Two guys who find themselves falling in opposite directions but towards each other whilst filming a sci-fi show.”

“Maybe. Maybe you’re right. But how about, rather than it being a TV show, it’s actually two alien investigators who find themselves falling for each other?”

“With a half-cyber-converted ex-girlfriend and an amnesiac ex-girlfriend thrown into the mix to complicate things.” He shrugged at Jack’s withering glance, “What? It worked for us.”

Jack chuckled, “That it did. That it did indeed. Although I’m sure that we could argue that they were more hindrances and obstacles on our path than actually helpful to us, really.”

“Without Lisa I would never have come back to Cardiff, and without Jazz I would never, ever have admitted to myself how I felt about you. Probably… Maybe.”

“That’s…” He waved a hand, “That’s by the by. What I mean is… What do I mean?”

“I think he means that with the characters you’ve got, you could easily build our story, and we’d approve publication.”

“But, aren’t you supposed to be a secret organisation?” Gareth pointed out, “Not very secret if there’s books about it, is it?”

“You’d be surprised.” Ianto answered with a smirk, “One of our friends, one of his exes actually, is a witch, like from Harry Potter? No one believes that that’s real. Besides, we could drop it a hundred years or so into the future where we’re open.”

“Do you think it would work?” Jack asked over his drink, pulling a face at the foul taste.

“It might do. I mean, we’d have to get approval from the Council of Genres and Jurisfiction and… Thursday. We need to ask Thursday to start with.” John sucked in a breath and pulled his travel book out, “You know, I’d quite like to join Jurisfiction. I think we’d make a good team, good agents.”

“Yeah.” They had eyes only for each other and Jack and Ianto found themselves exchanging glances, both wondering the same thing, ‘Are we like this?’ They thought they probably were, especially since Tosh and Owen and then the Daleks and then Switzerland and the wedding and Rosie and everything…

“How the hell did we get here?” Ianto’s surprised and rhetorical question startled John and Gareth from their reverie.

The younger of the two men chuckled, “Erm… Along Treacle Mine Road and left along Easy Street?”

He shook his head with a smile, “Never mind. Just being… Weird I guess. Come on, we’ve got a story to tell.”

“We should start at Norwood Park.” John suggested, flicking through his book for the right page, “There’s going to be a meeting there very soon.”

“Yeah, we were on our way there when we bumped into you. Lucky chance I guess. What were you two doing up there?”

“Went to visit the Judgement of Solomon.” He didn’t look up, “Making out in the stacks.”

Ianto rolled his eyes, “You know Jack, I think you made a bit of an impression on Mark when he came to visit that time.”

“Why do you assume it’s me?”

“Because he thinks I’m sexually repressed and closed minded because I once told him that I would never have sex in the cupboard with Lisa.”

“And he believed you?”

”I know, anyone would think he didn’t actually know me. Especially considering that no one had been able to find us for the last half an hour.”

“You were having sex in the stationary cupboard?”

“No, of course not, I wouldn’t do that… Too many distractions, you know what I’m like with stationary, we used the server room, it was warmer anyway.” His partner simply stared at him with that look, half astonishment, half respect and entirely lecherous and illegal, “Anyway… Found your place?”

“Erm…” John shook his head and reminded himself that the man sitting opposite him was not his partner and tried to stop thinking just how much fun it would be with both… No! Maybe, maybe later once they’d got this sorted out. He groaned, “Is it always like this in your head?” He asked Jack

The immortal nodded with his mega-watt grin firmly in place, his eyes dancing with amusement, “Oh yes. You get used to it eventually. And I have to say that I agree completely.”

Gareth and Ianto exchanged glances, “Not a chance. Well…”

“Probably not. Somewhere between thin and fat.”

“Chance that is… Although…”

“Stop it.” They stared at each other a little longer and then burst out laughing, “Are you sure the book world’s ready for this?”

”They’d better be.” John ran his finger down the page and took Ianto’s hand across the table, whilst his partner took Jack’s hand and the immortal and his partner closed the horseshoe, “Let’s go.”