Ianto's Shield
Feb. 1st, 2008 01:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
laliginFandom: Torchwood (surprise, surprise, luv...)
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 5575
Summary: Five Ways the Fotsali Shield Saved the Day (And One Way...)
Spoilers: Series 1 and Doctor Who series 3 only! No TW series 2 spoilers!
Prompt: 011. Red.
A/N: The theme of this Five Ways fic is a device of my own creation, the Fotsali shield. Pretentious and arrogant of me though it may be, I do love and adore it and have said to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
shadowbyrd on a number of occasions that it's the answer to so many situations it's delicious. These are five. And one other...
And the list of fics this is related to is getting ridiculous - the mere mention of the Fotsali shield puts a fic into my main fanon universe (and since when have I had one of them?!). As far as I remember, these are the fics that are bound into that set:
Jack's Fear; Jack's Team; Jack's Flowers; Pomegranate Seeds; Tourism In Lockdown; Come Walk The Hub With Me; and Lost. Of these, the only one I'll beg you to read before this is Lost - and don't worry, it's only 800 words long...
And if there's more, I'm stupid and have forgotten them. Or haven't decided if they tie in properly or not, yet. I should make a proper list and just link to that in future, 'cause there's more in this universe coming.
Ianto's Shield (Five Ways the Fotsali Shield Saved the Day)
ONE
It’s somewhere just past the middle of the night when there are noises outside the tent. Ianto sits bolt upright in his sleeping bag, already processing the screams and the high pitched laughter before the others have even got past asking blearily, “What’s going on?”
Ianto unzips his sleeping bag and scrambles to the bags at the bottom of the tent, slapping on a torch and putting it aside, then frantically grabbing at the bags with the alien tech while Owen says, “Oh, shit,” and goes for the guns.
There’s a sharp, metallic swish outside, and thuds and the crunch of crushed snow, then something heavy crashes into the side of the tent and Gwen visibly swallows a scream. Ianto throws tech back at his sleeping bag, grabbing a disc from the bottom of the bag just as a little spherical shadow appears on the side of the tent, and a high pitched voice cries, “Come out to play, Torchwood!”
Tosh snatches at their emergency supplies as Ianto dives back up among them and hits a button on the device. Their tent is slashed open, two spheres with blades dart in through the flapping canvas, both laughing manically, and then everything goes red. It takes the others a moment to realise that they’re now encased in a sphere of their own, then the two floating spheres chirp, “Aren’t you going to play with us? Silly Torchwood.”
One of them darts forward a little, and Owen raises his gun instinctively, but Ianto pulls his arm back down, telling him swiftly, “The bullet will only ricochet, don’t even try.”
The spheres swing round, seeming to stare at the four of them, huddled inside their shield, then both say, “You’re boring. The others ran,” and take their blades to the outside of the red sphere.
Sparks fly, and Ianto, Tosh, Owen and Gwen shield their eyes. After a few moments the spheres fall back, and open fire with lasers.
The shots bounce back and blast one of the spheres right out of the air.
The second goes still for a moment, then buzzes rapidly round the shield, crying, “You’re cheating! That’s not fair!”
“Sore loser,” Owen says, smirking a little.
“Don’t push them,” Ianto murmurs, as another six spheres hack their way into the tent and surround them.
For a few seconds they seem to confer, then they all rise up a little in the air and start shooting again, dodging the ricochets of their own laser fire and giggling madly as the tent catches fire and those bags which were left outside the shield are utterly destroyed.
The remaining members of Torchwood Three huddle in the base of their shield and pray as one that the spheres don’t get through.
It takes a few minutes, but eventually the spheres grow bored and pull back, circling round the red sphere in the ruins of the tent. The devastation of their attack on base camp is evident now – mutilated bodies litter the snow, and scraps of canvas flutter in the wind. Supplies and equipment are swiftly getting buried by snow flurries, if they’re not being shot to pieces for fun by the spheres.
Ianto looks away, shivering even though it’s warm inside the shield.
“You’re going to die out here,” one of the spheres says, singsong and chirpy, and another chips in with, “All alone and abandoned.”
“We’re not alone,” Gwen snaps.
“And we’re not going to die,” Toshiko adds with transparent defiance. “There’s nothing you can do to us.”
The spheres back off further, rising up towards the sky and withdrawing their blades, as Ianto draws his knees up and wraps his arms around his legs, whispering, “We’re dead. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have dragged it out.”
“We’re not dead yet, Ianto,” Gwen tells him firmly, and he stares at her wordlessly for a moment, then buries his face in his knees as the spheres open fire on the slopes above them.
Tosh freezes, whispering, “Oh no.”
And then the snow comes crashing down.
~*~
It’s somewhere just past the middle of the night when there are noises outside the tent. Ianto sits bolt upright in his sleeping bag, startling Owen and Gwen awake as he stares at the tent door and strains his ears to hear beyond the rustles of their tent and the wind outside.
“What’s going on?” Gwen asks, which wakes Tosh.
“I thought I heard something,” Ianto tells them, but the roar that woke him seems infinitely distant now.
“You’re paranoid,” yawns Owen. “The altitude’s getting to you.”
Sleepily, Tosh asks, “What time is it?”
Gwen digs her watch out of one of the pockets on the inside of the tent, lighting up the digital screen and telling her, “We’ve got another couple of hours before we have to get up.”
With groans, Tosh and Owen curl back up, wriggling down into their sleeping bags as Owen mutters, “Thanks, Ianto.”
Gwen puts her watch away and lies down again, saying, “Night,” and then going quiet and gradually falling asleep.
Ianto stays sitting up for a while longer, listening.
The wind sings outside.
After a few minutes he crawls down to the packs and quietly goes through their alien tech until he finds a palm-sized disc, with concentric circles on the surface. He runs his fingers over it for a moment or two, then does up the bag again and returns to his previous position. Holding the disc tight in one hand, he lies back down and closes his eyes.
Sleep is a long time coming.
TWO
“It’s gone to ground,” Ianto reports to Tosh, edging around the open manhole and glancing up at Owen.
“It’s gone underground,” Owen corrects him, putting the safety catch back on his gun and the gun back in his holster. “We’re going after it, Tosh.”
“Is that a good idea?” Tosh asks over the comms, sounding worried. “Gwen’s almost done collecting witness statements, she can give you backup in ten minutes or so.”
“In ten minutes’ time that thing could be anywhere,” Owen snaps, starting down the ladder, and Ianto holsters his gun and tells Tosh, “He’s right. We’re going in. Send Gwen along as soon as you can.”
With a sigh, Tosh says, “Alright. Don’t do anything stupid. More stupid. You know.”
“We’ll be good,” Ianto promises, and follows Owen down into the sewers.
At the bottom of the ladder he steps down into a splash of water, and draws his gun again, pulling a penlight from another slot in the gun holster, as Owen shines his torch back at him and says, “I reckon it went this way. Come on.”
Ianto nods and glances back the other way, edging after Owen and trying to move as quietly as possible, keeping his feet under the surface of the water with each step. They move on cautiously like that, pausing when Owen finds claw marks three inches deep in the wall.
“Crap,” he says quietly, shining the torch ahead of them. “Are guns going to work on this thing?”
“I don’t know,” Ianto tells him. “Jack would know.”
“How many times do we have to remind you he’s not here?” Owen snaps, sharp enough that Ianto realises exactly how worried he’s getting.
He says nothing for a moment, then Tosh chimes in over the comms, asking, “How are you doing?”
“We’re on the trail,” Owen tells her shortly, then turns off his comm to ask Ianto, “We have a backup plan?”
Ianto grips his penlight between his teeth and digs in his inside jacket pocket, pulling out a small disc and handing it to Owen.
“That’s a shield projector,” he says. “Hit the button in the middle and it generates a forcefield strong enough to hold off the blast of an atom bomb.”
Owen’s eyebrows go up, and he looks back down at the disc, then asks, “What about you?”
“You’re going first,” Ianto points out. “And the shield should just about fill the tunnel, so I’ll be alright.”
Owen looks momentarily uncertain, but Ianto just holds his gaze until he shrugs and heads onwards.
Less than thirty seconds further onward, there’s a roar ahead of them that shakes slime from the brickwork. Then there are snarls and growls and sudden shrieks, and Owen breaks into something as close to a run as they can manage in this depth of water.
In the tunnels ahead their beast is being attacked by three Weevils. Owen’s some eight steps ahead of Ianto when the beast rips the last Weevil’s throat out and flings it to one side, then turns and charges at them.
“Shield!” Ianto yells, and Owen’s encased in a red sphere that blocks the sewer passageway.
Ianto backs away as the beast slams four paws into the shield and roars again, and Owen backs up as far as he can within the sphere. The beast stretches up and starts trying to find a way around the shield, snarling at Ianto and clawing and hacking at the walls and ceiling in fury.
The bricks start to crumble, and Owen yells at him, “Get out of here!” just before the roof collapses.
Ianto backs up beyond the collapse, shouting, “Owen! Owen!” and then trying to contact him over the comms, getting no answer.
“What’s happened?” Tosh asks quickly.
“Roof collapsed,” Ianto tells her, holstering his gun again and hurrying forward to try and work through the rubble. “Owen was inside the Fotsali shield, so he should be alright, but I can’t get to him and he doesn’t know how to turn it off.”
“I’m only picking up one lifesign,” Tosh says, and Ianto pauses.
“The shield must be blocking your sensors,” he says after a moment, then grips the penlight between his teeth again and starts pulling the sections of brick away from the pile in front of him. He keeps working even when Tosh says, “Ianto, are you sure the shield does that?”
He ignores her, shoving brick aside and jumping back as more rubble slides down. He takes a moment to remove the little torch from his mouth and swallow hard, then goes back to clearing the way, pulling the debris apart as quickly as he can manage.
“What about the alien?” asks Tosh. “If Owen’s still alive then it might be as well.”
Ianto makes an exasperated noise and pauses again, snatching the torch from his mouth and snapping, “No, it can’t be. It wasn’t inside the shield, so your sensors would pick it up. Now leave me alone, I’m busy and you’re slowing me down.”
He turns off his comm and goes back to digging.
After a few more minutes he gets through to a bulge of red, and shines the light through, shouting, “Owen!” again.
“About bloody time,” Owen calls back, then adds, “Get that light out of my eyes and tell me how to get out of this thing.”
“I can’t yet,” Ianto tells him, with a sigh of relief. “I need to clear the top or you’ll be crushed as soon as you turn the shield off.”
Owen says, “Well, get on with it, then,” but his tone of voice is far from annoyed.
Ianto puts the penlight back between his teeth and sets about climbing the slipping piles of rubble to clear the shield from the top. When he finds one massive paw sticking out of the bricks he pokes it a few times and then shoves it aside and keeps working.
“Am I the only one getting déjà vu here?” Owen asks, and Ianto pauses long enough to say, “No. I’m just glad I’m not in there with you.”
Owen snorts and says, “Thanks,” even though he knows exactly what Ianto means. “So that was a yes on the déjà vu, then?”
“Mmhmm,” Ianto says around the torch. Pausing, he adds, “I don’t know where it’s come from, though. You’re not making a habit of getting buried alive, are you?” as he turns his comm back on.
Owen starts to reply, but Ianto gets distracted as Tosh yells over the comm, “Ianto, if you don’t tell me what’s going on I swear –”
“I’ve found him,” Ianto interrupts. “He’s alive.”
“Thank you,” Tosh snaps, then audibly drags in a breath to calm down, and continues, “Gwen’s already talking to the police and claiming subsidence to explain the cave in. She says she can keep them out of the area for another half an hour at most, but she’ll have to stick with the police to get you that long. Hurry.”
“On it,” Ianto tells her, and starts pushing bricks off the top of the shield again, managing to clear the majority of it and then climbing up as high as he can get to shove the beast off the shield. The body slides down and thuds onto the piles of bricks, utterly shattered, and Ianto follows it down, landing feet first on the furry carcass and moving away from the shield as he tells Owen how to deactivate the projector.
As soon as he’s free Owen throws Ianto the disc, and Ianto puts it back in his pocket.
“So,” Owen says. “Got anything in there we can use to get this thing back to the Hub?”
Ianto shakes his head with a slight smile.
“Sorry,” he says. “Not this suit.”
THREE
The creature lunges, and Jack tackles Gwen to the ground, knocking her out of its path. It snarls at them and bounds past, heading for Owen and Ianto, who take a few shots at it and then hurriedly get out of the way.
Jack gets off Gwen and offers her a hand up, saying, “Any ideas?”
“Well,” Gwen says, taking her hand back and brushing herself down, “last time we had something like this we cornered it down an alley and tranquillised it.”
“Was the last one poisonous?” Jack asks, leading her after the others as Tosh tells him, “They’re just up ahead. Second left from your position.”
“No,” Gwen admits, “but that tactic should still work, shouldn’t it?”
Jack shakes his head, spotting Ianto and Owen up ahead and dashing after them as they duck down another alleyway in pursuit of the creature, calling back to Gwen as she tries to catch up with him.
“It’s already figured out we’re more of afraid of it than it is of us. All it has to do is charge us and we either let it go or we get poisoned. We need a new plan.”
“Like what?” Gwen shoots back, catching up with him and matching his pace.
“I’m hoping Owen brought that portable cell again,” Jack says, but Gwen tells him, “The battery power ran out and we couldn’t recharge it. New plan.”
“Um,” Jack says, just as Ianto yells over the comms, “It got past us, it’s heading back! Jack, look out!”
This time it’s Gwen who dives on Jack, knocking them both over the obligatory pile of cardboard boxes as the poisonous scaly thing races past them again, four legs a blur as it skids to the end of the alley and hares off round the corner.
Gwen pushes herself up, sweeping her hair back out of her eyes and mouth and gazing after the creature.
“You’re kneeling on my leg,” Jack tells her, and she absently moves aside and climbs back out of the pile of boxes so he can stand up, just as Ianto and Owen arrive. Owen takes the opportunity to stop and catch his breath, and to be fair Ianto’s not complaining about the rest.
“Owen,” Jack says, scrambling out of the rubbish, “what alien tech have you got on you?”
“Nothing,” Owen tells him breathlessly. “Against regulations, remember?”
Jack stares at him for a second, then says, “You’re telling me you actually obeyed my orders for once? Could you have picked a worse time if you’d tried?”
“You can’t bloody win,” Owen grumbles, straightening up and checking his gun.
And then Ianto guiltily pulls a palm-sized disc from his inside jacket pocket, and asks Jack, “Is this the sort of thing you meant?”
Jack snatches it from his hand gleefully, saying, “I thought that got stolen. That’s perfect.”
He turns and starts after the alien, then swings back, frowning at Ianto and saying, “Don’t think this means you’re getting away with this. You’d better have a damn good explanation for having this.”
Ianto takes a breath to speak, but Jack waves a hand at him and says, “Leave it till we’ve caught this thing. Come on.”
He takes off after the creature, and the other three chase after him, with Tosh saying, “Hurry! It’s heading out of the back streets. There’s a gang of kids not far in front of it. Go right, now!”
They round the corner and the creature halts abruptly at the other end of the alley, looking back and snarling.
Jack adjusts the disc a little, then tells the others, “Stay here. If this doesn’t work shoot the hell out of it,” and starts walking forward.
The creature crouches lower, watching his every move, then gives a crackling howl and bounds forward, charging right at him.
Jack keeps walking.
Gwen, gun at the ready, is on the point of shouting at him to do something when the creature leaps. Jack hits a button on the device and hurls it, and a translucent red sphere springs into being around the creature.
It hits the side with a sickening crack, and slides bonelessly down the inside curve of the shield, coming to rest in the bottom of the sphere.
Jack glances back at the others with a smile, and says, “Problem sorted. Now all we have to figure out is how to get it back to the Hub. Oh, and how to turn off the shield, of course.”
“You can’t do that yourself?” Owen asks, gesturing expressively at his wrist, but Jack shrugs, and looks back at the shield projector, half hidden under the creature’s body and well and truly stuck inside the sphere.
“Not as such,” he admits. “Still, I did just save the day. What more do you want?”
FOUR
It’s only when Tosh nearly falls off her chair that they realise something’s wrong. Jack makes a leap from the couch to catch her as she slips sideways, then nearly falls himself as dizziness strikes.
Owen gets up to help them, and grabs his desk as darkness swarms in front of his eyes.
“What is this?” Jack asks, settling Tosh back on her chair as she groans and presses both hands to her forehead.
“I dunno, give me a minute,” Owen says, shaking his head sharply and heading for the autopsy room.
Jack reaches around Tosh to bring up the internal diagnostics of the Hub, and finds only one small aberration in the air quality. He focuses the scans on that single anomaly, then double-takes at the results and yells, “Owen, get back here!” just before a resounding thud echoes from the autopsy room.
He slaps a hand to his comm, shouting, “Gwen! Ianto!” as he pulls Tosh from her chair and hauls her over to the couch, then drags in a deep breath and holds it as he dashes down the autopsy room steps to pick Owen up off the floor.
He’s halfway back up the steps when it all goes black for a moment. When he can see again it’s to find Ianto and Gwen hauling him and Owen out to the main Hub, clearly fighting dizziness themselves.
Owen and Tosh are flat out unconscious, and Ianto sits Jack down on the coffee table and leaves him to Gwen, turning and heading back towards the autopsy room.
“What are you doing?” Jack croaks, fighting to get back up, though Gwen pushes him back down – and then sits down beside him suddenly.
“It’s the plant Owen was investigating,” Ianto says quickly. “It’s eaten through the container and the perfume is poisoning us. I’m going to destroy it.”
“I’ll do it,” Jack tells him, trying to get up again and gasping when he nearly pitches forward.
“I’ve had less exposure,” Ianto snaps, “but that won’t count for much in a minute, so don’t waste my time.”
He darts back down into the autopsy room before Jack can stop him, and Gwen pulls at his arm dizzily, saying, “Ianto gave me this on the way down here. I don’t know what it is.”
Jack takes the device she’s offering him and tries to focus on it, but with little success. He squeezes his eyes shut, then opens them quickly and looks at the device.
“Cleans up the air quality in small, air-tight areas,” he says rapidly. “Won’t work in a room the size of the Hub.”
“Then what use is it?” Gwen asks, grabbing his shoulder to keep herself upright and very nearly knocking them both off the coffee table.
Ianto staggers back up the steps and goes to his hands and knees at the top, coughing weakly and his arms nearly buckling beneath him before he heads over to the others. Abruptly, Gwen topples over backwards, and Jack can’t quite stop them both from going over the back of the coffee table, hitting the floor hard as the table slides away from them. With a kick, Ianto helps it on its way and collapses on the floor next to them, then pulls a familiar disc from his jacket pocket, adjusts the concentric circles and activates the Fotsali shield.
Jack has enough presence of mind to turn on the air filter before they both pass out.
~*~
Of course, when Ianto comes round Jack’s already awake, and has made them all as comfortable as they can be within the limits of the shield. He’s sitting with Tosh’s head in his lap, stroking her hair back from her face and clearly doing his best not to look worried.
“Don’t sit up too quickly,” he tells Ianto, who’s on the outer edge of some kind of multiple-person recovery position (either that or Jack just thought it would be funny to get them all cuddling up close). Ianto bears that in mind but sits up anyway, one hand at his forehead just in case that ache in his head means his skull really is about to split apart.
“I think you’ll all be okay,” Jack says reassuringly. “Course, I’d like Owen to be able to tell me that for sure, but he probably won’t wake up for a while yet.”
“Is Tosh alright?” Ianto asks.
Jack hesitates for a moment, then says, “She will be. She couldn’t have taken much more exposure to the gas, though. Good thinking with the shield.”
He shifts a little, and Ianto notices that he’s holding the projector in the hand not occupied with Toshiko’s hair.
“I thought I told you to put this back in the archives after last time,” Jack says idly, and Ianto holds his gaze for a moment, then points out, “Tosh would be dead if I had. Maybe all of us.”
“I’m not denying that,” Jack says. “But I did give you a direct order. What’s your reasoning?”
“I don’t want to be without it when we need it,” Ianto says quietly. “I don’t know why, but I don’t feel safe without it.”
“You shouldn’t feel safe with it,” Jack tells him.
When Ianto frowns a little, Jack says softly, “Don’t rely on it. There are too many flaws in it. It’s the greatest defence technology ever invented and it’s got more people killed than any war on this planet. I don’t want to add you to the list.”
Ianto nods, looking away, and murmurs, “Okay.”
“Hey,” Jack says softly, and he looks up again.
With a slight smile, Jack says, “Thanks.”
Ianto just nods.
FIVE
“Turn it off,” Jack yells, but Tosh shouts back, “I can’t, there’s no failsafe! We need to get rid of it!”
“Rift activity,” Jack starts, and Tosh snaps at him, “Do you think I haven’t thought of that? There’s nothing in time and how are we meant to get it there?”
Jack strides forward and pulls her away from the column half buried in the floor, trying again to disarm the thing with his wrist device. Of course it doesn’t work, and he looks back at Toshiko with panic in his eyes. She checks her computers and tells him, “Three minutes eight seconds.”
“Shit,” Jack says, looking back at the device, then whirls around and tells her, “Get out of here. Stop the others from coming back and evacuate the area. Get as far as you can before it goes off.”
“That won’t save us,” Tosh points out, and Jack turns away, saying, “You might get far enough that the blast won’t kill you. If you move now.”
“No,” Tosh says. “I’m staying. There has to be some way of stopping it.”
Jack whips round and yells, “Get out! You can’t do anything! Staying here is just stupid, now go!”
Tosh sits down at her computers defiantly.
“Two minutes forty four,” she tells him. “Stop shouting at me and let me work.”
Jack stares at her in pure desperation for a second, while she pulls up the window with her scans of the device – before it drilled itself into the floor by the couch and started counting down, of course – and tries to refine the frequencies it’s working on.
“Two minutes twenty one,” she says, and Jack says, “Please. Tosh,” but she ignores him.
And then Jack gasps suddenly and bolts for the archives. Tosh spins in her chair, halfway through calling, “Jack, what…?” but then quickly turning back to her work, biting her lip as she checks the time again. There has to be something she can do. Has to be. There always is.
One minute fifty nine.
She’s halfway to a solution when her computer freezes.
“No!” she shrieks, frantically typing in the recovery codes and then screaming aloud when they don’t work.
“Not now!” she howls at her computer, trying to reset it. “You can freeze any other time you want, just not now!”
It’s then she notices that the clock in the corner is still ticking. One minute one. One minute. Fifty nine. Fifty eight.
“Bastard,” she tells her computer flatly. “You utter bastard.”
Thirty two and Jack comes running back, clutching a disc in one hand. He unbuckles his wrist strap and throws it onto the couch on his way up to the column, asking hurriedly, “How much is buried in the floor?”
“Another three feet,” Tosh tells him. “What are you doing?”
Jack looks up from adjusting the concentric circles on the disc, and says, “This might not work. Get out.”
“Too late,” Tosh tells him quietly. “Sixteen seconds.”
Jack yells, “Move!” at her, and she gets up from her chair and backs away to the stairs, counting down mentally.
Ten, and Jack slams the disc down on the floor beside the column, dropping to his knees. Nine, and a translucent red hemisphere appears over him and the column. She works it out. If it’s a sphere, the other half encases the buried section of the bomb.
Six, and Jack glances over at her, saying, “Cover your eyes.”
Three, and Tosh turns away, closing her eyes, covering her ears, and crouching down by the railings. Two. One.
The explosion nearly deafens her, and even with her back turned the light is verging on painful. It fades after a few moments, and she takes her hands from her ears, shaking her head and trying to get past the ringing buzz that’s all she can hear now.
She turns.
The sphere is more or less empty – though the chunk it’s taken out of the floor is clear to see, and there’s a layer of black ash in the bottom. The shield projector is intact on top of the ash.
After a few moments, Tosh turns away again, covering her mouth with her hand and trying to work out what to think. Grief seems appropriate, but for the moment shock and relief are taking precedence, though there’s more than a dash of guilt in there too. If she’d only thought of something… If her computers hadn’t crashed…
“Ow.”
She looks back again, as Jack sits up inside the shield, stark naked and rubbing the back of his neck.
“I hate getting blown up,” Jack tells her, craning his neck to get the crick out of it, and then picks up the shield device and deactivates it, standing up and brushing ash off himself. Tosh looks away again, blushing slightly.
“I didn’t think you’d come back from that one,” she says quietly.
Jack makes a dismissive sound and throws the shield device onto the couch, saying, “Explosions are easy enough. Being dismembered and kept in different places – now that’s tricky. But it’ll take more than a bomb to stop me. I’m gonna take a shower. Get Ianto to put the Fotsali shield back where it belongs, okay? And mind the hole.”
“I bet it’s not often you say that,” Tosh mutters, but when she glances back again Jack’s already on his way down to his quarters to clean up and get dressed again.
With a sigh, she stands up and dusts herself down, then goes to investigate the crater in the floor.
It’s at that point the cog door rolls open and the others return, Ianto calling, “Tosh? They were out of salad so I got you a cheese sandwich instead. Is that alright?” while Gwen peels away and heads for her desk and Owen says sarcastically, “This is the highlight of his day, Tosh. We had great fun out there. What have you been up to?”
“Not much,” Tosh says with a shrug, as they get to the top of the stairs and stop dead in their tracks at the sight of the gaping hole in the Hub floor.
“Although,” she adds, smiling brightly at them, “we did figure out what that column was for…”
And One Way It Made Everything Worse
“How much power did it have left before today?” Tosh asks, glaring at her scanner in frustration.
“That’s not how it works,” Jack snaps, pacing in front of the shield. “If it’s on it wears down in three days, if it’s not on it charges itself back up. It’s not going to shut down before he suffocates.”
“If he’s still alive,” Owen chips in helpfully, and Jack spins to glare at him.
“He’s alive,” he growls through gritted teeth.
Owen shrugs and continues to observe Ianto through the translucent red shield, saying, “Maybe. But with this thing in the way I can’t even be sure if he’s breathing.”
“But why hasn’t he woken up?” Gwen asks from the other side of the shield, one arm pulled in tight against her stomach, the other hand pressed against the red sphere as she stares anxiously at Ianto.
“Because whatever got into his head lied to him,” Jack snaps. “For all we know it’s stripped his mind bare on the way out.”
Tosh opens her mouth for a moment, frowning, then pauses and stops herself.
“What?” Jack asks sharply.
“Are we assuming that the energy spike on the sensors was… the… thing?” Tosh says slowly, and Jack nods. “Then shouldn’t the same energy signal have showed up when the thing left his body?”
Everyone turns to look at her.
“There’s nothing,” she says, looking up at them all. “No energy left the shield.”
“No,” Jack says in frustration, “it wouldn’t have. The shield doesn’t let any harmful energy in or out. It barely even deals with light and sound.”
“So where’s the thing gone?” asks Tosh.
Jack stares.
“You mean it’s still in there.”
Gwen swiftly pulls her hand back from the shield, biting her nails instead. After a moment, she says, “Are you sure it can’t have got out? What if it jumped through time or something?”
“The shield prevents it,” Jack says shortly. “Whatever’s in there can’t get out until it’s deactivated.”
“So when Ianto set off that machine the thing will have got trapped within the confines of the shield,” Owen says, looking back at Ianto’s unconscious body and the machine, which is still throwing out the occasional spark.
“So now we have two problems,” Jack says, clasping his arms around himself and visibly fighting down fury. “We have to turn the shield off and keep that thing contained at the same time.”
Ianto’s eyes open.
“Ianto!” Gwen gasps, and the other three snap round immediately.
Ianto sits up and turns his head to look at them, each in turn. And then he smiles, and his eyes are empty.
Cautiously, Jack moves forward, a little disturbed at the way Ianto tips his head back to hold his gaze.
“Ianto,” he says softly, and Ianto’s smile grows wider.
“Gone,” he says, with a flash of teeth, and Jack can hear Tosh catch her breath and cover her mouth behind him.
“What do you mean gone?” he snaps.
Ianto throws back his head and laughs, then grins at them all and rolls to his knees, sitting back on his heels and saying, “He thought the machine was to transport me. So did you, didn’t you?”
“What was it for?” Jack asks in a low voice.
Ianto plants both hands on the inside of the shield, and smiles brightly.
“Just a little something to clear his head.”
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 5575
Summary: Five Ways the Fotsali Shield Saved the Day (And One Way...)
Spoilers: Series 1 and Doctor Who series 3 only! No TW series 2 spoilers!
Prompt: 011. Red.
A/N: The theme of this Five Ways fic is a device of my own creation, the Fotsali shield. Pretentious and arrogant of me though it may be, I do love and adore it and have said to
shadowbyrd on a number of occasions that it's the answer to so many situations it's delicious. These are five. And one other...And the list of fics this is related to is getting ridiculous - the mere mention of the Fotsali shield puts a fic into my main fanon universe (and since when have I had one of them?!). As far as I remember, these are the fics that are bound into that set:
Jack's Fear; Jack's Team; Jack's Flowers; Pomegranate Seeds; Tourism In Lockdown; Come Walk The Hub With Me; and Lost. Of these, the only one I'll beg you to read before this is Lost - and don't worry, it's only 800 words long...
And if there's more, I'm stupid and have forgotten them. Or haven't decided if they tie in properly or not, yet. I should make a proper list and just link to that in future, 'cause there's more in this universe coming.
Ianto's Shield (Five Ways the Fotsali Shield Saved the Day)
ONE
It’s somewhere just past the middle of the night when there are noises outside the tent. Ianto sits bolt upright in his sleeping bag, already processing the screams and the high pitched laughter before the others have even got past asking blearily, “What’s going on?”
Ianto unzips his sleeping bag and scrambles to the bags at the bottom of the tent, slapping on a torch and putting it aside, then frantically grabbing at the bags with the alien tech while Owen says, “Oh, shit,” and goes for the guns.
There’s a sharp, metallic swish outside, and thuds and the crunch of crushed snow, then something heavy crashes into the side of the tent and Gwen visibly swallows a scream. Ianto throws tech back at his sleeping bag, grabbing a disc from the bottom of the bag just as a little spherical shadow appears on the side of the tent, and a high pitched voice cries, “Come out to play, Torchwood!”
Tosh snatches at their emergency supplies as Ianto dives back up among them and hits a button on the device. Their tent is slashed open, two spheres with blades dart in through the flapping canvas, both laughing manically, and then everything goes red. It takes the others a moment to realise that they’re now encased in a sphere of their own, then the two floating spheres chirp, “Aren’t you going to play with us? Silly Torchwood.”
One of them darts forward a little, and Owen raises his gun instinctively, but Ianto pulls his arm back down, telling him swiftly, “The bullet will only ricochet, don’t even try.”
The spheres swing round, seeming to stare at the four of them, huddled inside their shield, then both say, “You’re boring. The others ran,” and take their blades to the outside of the red sphere.
Sparks fly, and Ianto, Tosh, Owen and Gwen shield their eyes. After a few moments the spheres fall back, and open fire with lasers.
The shots bounce back and blast one of the spheres right out of the air.
The second goes still for a moment, then buzzes rapidly round the shield, crying, “You’re cheating! That’s not fair!”
“Sore loser,” Owen says, smirking a little.
“Don’t push them,” Ianto murmurs, as another six spheres hack their way into the tent and surround them.
For a few seconds they seem to confer, then they all rise up a little in the air and start shooting again, dodging the ricochets of their own laser fire and giggling madly as the tent catches fire and those bags which were left outside the shield are utterly destroyed.
The remaining members of Torchwood Three huddle in the base of their shield and pray as one that the spheres don’t get through.
It takes a few minutes, but eventually the spheres grow bored and pull back, circling round the red sphere in the ruins of the tent. The devastation of their attack on base camp is evident now – mutilated bodies litter the snow, and scraps of canvas flutter in the wind. Supplies and equipment are swiftly getting buried by snow flurries, if they’re not being shot to pieces for fun by the spheres.
Ianto looks away, shivering even though it’s warm inside the shield.
“You’re going to die out here,” one of the spheres says, singsong and chirpy, and another chips in with, “All alone and abandoned.”
“We’re not alone,” Gwen snaps.
“And we’re not going to die,” Toshiko adds with transparent defiance. “There’s nothing you can do to us.”
The spheres back off further, rising up towards the sky and withdrawing their blades, as Ianto draws his knees up and wraps his arms around his legs, whispering, “We’re dead. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have dragged it out.”
“We’re not dead yet, Ianto,” Gwen tells him firmly, and he stares at her wordlessly for a moment, then buries his face in his knees as the spheres open fire on the slopes above them.
Tosh freezes, whispering, “Oh no.”
And then the snow comes crashing down.
It’s somewhere just past the middle of the night when there are noises outside the tent. Ianto sits bolt upright in his sleeping bag, startling Owen and Gwen awake as he stares at the tent door and strains his ears to hear beyond the rustles of their tent and the wind outside.
“What’s going on?” Gwen asks, which wakes Tosh.
“I thought I heard something,” Ianto tells them, but the roar that woke him seems infinitely distant now.
“You’re paranoid,” yawns Owen. “The altitude’s getting to you.”
Sleepily, Tosh asks, “What time is it?”
Gwen digs her watch out of one of the pockets on the inside of the tent, lighting up the digital screen and telling her, “We’ve got another couple of hours before we have to get up.”
With groans, Tosh and Owen curl back up, wriggling down into their sleeping bags as Owen mutters, “Thanks, Ianto.”
Gwen puts her watch away and lies down again, saying, “Night,” and then going quiet and gradually falling asleep.
Ianto stays sitting up for a while longer, listening.
The wind sings outside.
After a few minutes he crawls down to the packs and quietly goes through their alien tech until he finds a palm-sized disc, with concentric circles on the surface. He runs his fingers over it for a moment or two, then does up the bag again and returns to his previous position. Holding the disc tight in one hand, he lies back down and closes his eyes.
Sleep is a long time coming.
TWO
“It’s gone to ground,” Ianto reports to Tosh, edging around the open manhole and glancing up at Owen.
“It’s gone underground,” Owen corrects him, putting the safety catch back on his gun and the gun back in his holster. “We’re going after it, Tosh.”
“Is that a good idea?” Tosh asks over the comms, sounding worried. “Gwen’s almost done collecting witness statements, she can give you backup in ten minutes or so.”
“In ten minutes’ time that thing could be anywhere,” Owen snaps, starting down the ladder, and Ianto holsters his gun and tells Tosh, “He’s right. We’re going in. Send Gwen along as soon as you can.”
With a sigh, Tosh says, “Alright. Don’t do anything stupid. More stupid. You know.”
“We’ll be good,” Ianto promises, and follows Owen down into the sewers.
At the bottom of the ladder he steps down into a splash of water, and draws his gun again, pulling a penlight from another slot in the gun holster, as Owen shines his torch back at him and says, “I reckon it went this way. Come on.”
Ianto nods and glances back the other way, edging after Owen and trying to move as quietly as possible, keeping his feet under the surface of the water with each step. They move on cautiously like that, pausing when Owen finds claw marks three inches deep in the wall.
“Crap,” he says quietly, shining the torch ahead of them. “Are guns going to work on this thing?”
“I don’t know,” Ianto tells him. “Jack would know.”
“How many times do we have to remind you he’s not here?” Owen snaps, sharp enough that Ianto realises exactly how worried he’s getting.
He says nothing for a moment, then Tosh chimes in over the comms, asking, “How are you doing?”
“We’re on the trail,” Owen tells her shortly, then turns off his comm to ask Ianto, “We have a backup plan?”
Ianto grips his penlight between his teeth and digs in his inside jacket pocket, pulling out a small disc and handing it to Owen.
“That’s a shield projector,” he says. “Hit the button in the middle and it generates a forcefield strong enough to hold off the blast of an atom bomb.”
Owen’s eyebrows go up, and he looks back down at the disc, then asks, “What about you?”
“You’re going first,” Ianto points out. “And the shield should just about fill the tunnel, so I’ll be alright.”
Owen looks momentarily uncertain, but Ianto just holds his gaze until he shrugs and heads onwards.
Less than thirty seconds further onward, there’s a roar ahead of them that shakes slime from the brickwork. Then there are snarls and growls and sudden shrieks, and Owen breaks into something as close to a run as they can manage in this depth of water.
In the tunnels ahead their beast is being attacked by three Weevils. Owen’s some eight steps ahead of Ianto when the beast rips the last Weevil’s throat out and flings it to one side, then turns and charges at them.
“Shield!” Ianto yells, and Owen’s encased in a red sphere that blocks the sewer passageway.
Ianto backs away as the beast slams four paws into the shield and roars again, and Owen backs up as far as he can within the sphere. The beast stretches up and starts trying to find a way around the shield, snarling at Ianto and clawing and hacking at the walls and ceiling in fury.
The bricks start to crumble, and Owen yells at him, “Get out of here!” just before the roof collapses.
Ianto backs up beyond the collapse, shouting, “Owen! Owen!” and then trying to contact him over the comms, getting no answer.
“What’s happened?” Tosh asks quickly.
“Roof collapsed,” Ianto tells her, holstering his gun again and hurrying forward to try and work through the rubble. “Owen was inside the Fotsali shield, so he should be alright, but I can’t get to him and he doesn’t know how to turn it off.”
“I’m only picking up one lifesign,” Tosh says, and Ianto pauses.
“The shield must be blocking your sensors,” he says after a moment, then grips the penlight between his teeth again and starts pulling the sections of brick away from the pile in front of him. He keeps working even when Tosh says, “Ianto, are you sure the shield does that?”
He ignores her, shoving brick aside and jumping back as more rubble slides down. He takes a moment to remove the little torch from his mouth and swallow hard, then goes back to clearing the way, pulling the debris apart as quickly as he can manage.
“What about the alien?” asks Tosh. “If Owen’s still alive then it might be as well.”
Ianto makes an exasperated noise and pauses again, snatching the torch from his mouth and snapping, “No, it can’t be. It wasn’t inside the shield, so your sensors would pick it up. Now leave me alone, I’m busy and you’re slowing me down.”
He turns off his comm and goes back to digging.
After a few more minutes he gets through to a bulge of red, and shines the light through, shouting, “Owen!” again.
“About bloody time,” Owen calls back, then adds, “Get that light out of my eyes and tell me how to get out of this thing.”
“I can’t yet,” Ianto tells him, with a sigh of relief. “I need to clear the top or you’ll be crushed as soon as you turn the shield off.”
Owen says, “Well, get on with it, then,” but his tone of voice is far from annoyed.
Ianto puts the penlight back between his teeth and sets about climbing the slipping piles of rubble to clear the shield from the top. When he finds one massive paw sticking out of the bricks he pokes it a few times and then shoves it aside and keeps working.
“Am I the only one getting déjà vu here?” Owen asks, and Ianto pauses long enough to say, “No. I’m just glad I’m not in there with you.”
Owen snorts and says, “Thanks,” even though he knows exactly what Ianto means. “So that was a yes on the déjà vu, then?”
“Mmhmm,” Ianto says around the torch. Pausing, he adds, “I don’t know where it’s come from, though. You’re not making a habit of getting buried alive, are you?” as he turns his comm back on.
Owen starts to reply, but Ianto gets distracted as Tosh yells over the comm, “Ianto, if you don’t tell me what’s going on I swear –”
“I’ve found him,” Ianto interrupts. “He’s alive.”
“Thank you,” Tosh snaps, then audibly drags in a breath to calm down, and continues, “Gwen’s already talking to the police and claiming subsidence to explain the cave in. She says she can keep them out of the area for another half an hour at most, but she’ll have to stick with the police to get you that long. Hurry.”
“On it,” Ianto tells her, and starts pushing bricks off the top of the shield again, managing to clear the majority of it and then climbing up as high as he can get to shove the beast off the shield. The body slides down and thuds onto the piles of bricks, utterly shattered, and Ianto follows it down, landing feet first on the furry carcass and moving away from the shield as he tells Owen how to deactivate the projector.
As soon as he’s free Owen throws Ianto the disc, and Ianto puts it back in his pocket.
“So,” Owen says. “Got anything in there we can use to get this thing back to the Hub?”
Ianto shakes his head with a slight smile.
“Sorry,” he says. “Not this suit.”
THREE
The creature lunges, and Jack tackles Gwen to the ground, knocking her out of its path. It snarls at them and bounds past, heading for Owen and Ianto, who take a few shots at it and then hurriedly get out of the way.
Jack gets off Gwen and offers her a hand up, saying, “Any ideas?”
“Well,” Gwen says, taking her hand back and brushing herself down, “last time we had something like this we cornered it down an alley and tranquillised it.”
“Was the last one poisonous?” Jack asks, leading her after the others as Tosh tells him, “They’re just up ahead. Second left from your position.”
“No,” Gwen admits, “but that tactic should still work, shouldn’t it?”
Jack shakes his head, spotting Ianto and Owen up ahead and dashing after them as they duck down another alleyway in pursuit of the creature, calling back to Gwen as she tries to catch up with him.
“It’s already figured out we’re more of afraid of it than it is of us. All it has to do is charge us and we either let it go or we get poisoned. We need a new plan.”
“Like what?” Gwen shoots back, catching up with him and matching his pace.
“I’m hoping Owen brought that portable cell again,” Jack says, but Gwen tells him, “The battery power ran out and we couldn’t recharge it. New plan.”
“Um,” Jack says, just as Ianto yells over the comms, “It got past us, it’s heading back! Jack, look out!”
This time it’s Gwen who dives on Jack, knocking them both over the obligatory pile of cardboard boxes as the poisonous scaly thing races past them again, four legs a blur as it skids to the end of the alley and hares off round the corner.
Gwen pushes herself up, sweeping her hair back out of her eyes and mouth and gazing after the creature.
“You’re kneeling on my leg,” Jack tells her, and she absently moves aside and climbs back out of the pile of boxes so he can stand up, just as Ianto and Owen arrive. Owen takes the opportunity to stop and catch his breath, and to be fair Ianto’s not complaining about the rest.
“Owen,” Jack says, scrambling out of the rubbish, “what alien tech have you got on you?”
“Nothing,” Owen tells him breathlessly. “Against regulations, remember?”
Jack stares at him for a second, then says, “You’re telling me you actually obeyed my orders for once? Could you have picked a worse time if you’d tried?”
“You can’t bloody win,” Owen grumbles, straightening up and checking his gun.
And then Ianto guiltily pulls a palm-sized disc from his inside jacket pocket, and asks Jack, “Is this the sort of thing you meant?”
Jack snatches it from his hand gleefully, saying, “I thought that got stolen. That’s perfect.”
He turns and starts after the alien, then swings back, frowning at Ianto and saying, “Don’t think this means you’re getting away with this. You’d better have a damn good explanation for having this.”
Ianto takes a breath to speak, but Jack waves a hand at him and says, “Leave it till we’ve caught this thing. Come on.”
He takes off after the creature, and the other three chase after him, with Tosh saying, “Hurry! It’s heading out of the back streets. There’s a gang of kids not far in front of it. Go right, now!”
They round the corner and the creature halts abruptly at the other end of the alley, looking back and snarling.
Jack adjusts the disc a little, then tells the others, “Stay here. If this doesn’t work shoot the hell out of it,” and starts walking forward.
The creature crouches lower, watching his every move, then gives a crackling howl and bounds forward, charging right at him.
Jack keeps walking.
Gwen, gun at the ready, is on the point of shouting at him to do something when the creature leaps. Jack hits a button on the device and hurls it, and a translucent red sphere springs into being around the creature.
It hits the side with a sickening crack, and slides bonelessly down the inside curve of the shield, coming to rest in the bottom of the sphere.
Jack glances back at the others with a smile, and says, “Problem sorted. Now all we have to figure out is how to get it back to the Hub. Oh, and how to turn off the shield, of course.”
“You can’t do that yourself?” Owen asks, gesturing expressively at his wrist, but Jack shrugs, and looks back at the shield projector, half hidden under the creature’s body and well and truly stuck inside the sphere.
“Not as such,” he admits. “Still, I did just save the day. What more do you want?”
FOUR
It’s only when Tosh nearly falls off her chair that they realise something’s wrong. Jack makes a leap from the couch to catch her as she slips sideways, then nearly falls himself as dizziness strikes.
Owen gets up to help them, and grabs his desk as darkness swarms in front of his eyes.
“What is this?” Jack asks, settling Tosh back on her chair as she groans and presses both hands to her forehead.
“I dunno, give me a minute,” Owen says, shaking his head sharply and heading for the autopsy room.
Jack reaches around Tosh to bring up the internal diagnostics of the Hub, and finds only one small aberration in the air quality. He focuses the scans on that single anomaly, then double-takes at the results and yells, “Owen, get back here!” just before a resounding thud echoes from the autopsy room.
He slaps a hand to his comm, shouting, “Gwen! Ianto!” as he pulls Tosh from her chair and hauls her over to the couch, then drags in a deep breath and holds it as he dashes down the autopsy room steps to pick Owen up off the floor.
He’s halfway back up the steps when it all goes black for a moment. When he can see again it’s to find Ianto and Gwen hauling him and Owen out to the main Hub, clearly fighting dizziness themselves.
Owen and Tosh are flat out unconscious, and Ianto sits Jack down on the coffee table and leaves him to Gwen, turning and heading back towards the autopsy room.
“What are you doing?” Jack croaks, fighting to get back up, though Gwen pushes him back down – and then sits down beside him suddenly.
“It’s the plant Owen was investigating,” Ianto says quickly. “It’s eaten through the container and the perfume is poisoning us. I’m going to destroy it.”
“I’ll do it,” Jack tells him, trying to get up again and gasping when he nearly pitches forward.
“I’ve had less exposure,” Ianto snaps, “but that won’t count for much in a minute, so don’t waste my time.”
He darts back down into the autopsy room before Jack can stop him, and Gwen pulls at his arm dizzily, saying, “Ianto gave me this on the way down here. I don’t know what it is.”
Jack takes the device she’s offering him and tries to focus on it, but with little success. He squeezes his eyes shut, then opens them quickly and looks at the device.
“Cleans up the air quality in small, air-tight areas,” he says rapidly. “Won’t work in a room the size of the Hub.”
“Then what use is it?” Gwen asks, grabbing his shoulder to keep herself upright and very nearly knocking them both off the coffee table.
Ianto staggers back up the steps and goes to his hands and knees at the top, coughing weakly and his arms nearly buckling beneath him before he heads over to the others. Abruptly, Gwen topples over backwards, and Jack can’t quite stop them both from going over the back of the coffee table, hitting the floor hard as the table slides away from them. With a kick, Ianto helps it on its way and collapses on the floor next to them, then pulls a familiar disc from his jacket pocket, adjusts the concentric circles and activates the Fotsali shield.
Jack has enough presence of mind to turn on the air filter before they both pass out.
Of course, when Ianto comes round Jack’s already awake, and has made them all as comfortable as they can be within the limits of the shield. He’s sitting with Tosh’s head in his lap, stroking her hair back from her face and clearly doing his best not to look worried.
“Don’t sit up too quickly,” he tells Ianto, who’s on the outer edge of some kind of multiple-person recovery position (either that or Jack just thought it would be funny to get them all cuddling up close). Ianto bears that in mind but sits up anyway, one hand at his forehead just in case that ache in his head means his skull really is about to split apart.
“I think you’ll all be okay,” Jack says reassuringly. “Course, I’d like Owen to be able to tell me that for sure, but he probably won’t wake up for a while yet.”
“Is Tosh alright?” Ianto asks.
Jack hesitates for a moment, then says, “She will be. She couldn’t have taken much more exposure to the gas, though. Good thinking with the shield.”
He shifts a little, and Ianto notices that he’s holding the projector in the hand not occupied with Toshiko’s hair.
“I thought I told you to put this back in the archives after last time,” Jack says idly, and Ianto holds his gaze for a moment, then points out, “Tosh would be dead if I had. Maybe all of us.”
“I’m not denying that,” Jack says. “But I did give you a direct order. What’s your reasoning?”
“I don’t want to be without it when we need it,” Ianto says quietly. “I don’t know why, but I don’t feel safe without it.”
“You shouldn’t feel safe with it,” Jack tells him.
When Ianto frowns a little, Jack says softly, “Don’t rely on it. There are too many flaws in it. It’s the greatest defence technology ever invented and it’s got more people killed than any war on this planet. I don’t want to add you to the list.”
Ianto nods, looking away, and murmurs, “Okay.”
“Hey,” Jack says softly, and he looks up again.
With a slight smile, Jack says, “Thanks.”
Ianto just nods.
FIVE
“Turn it off,” Jack yells, but Tosh shouts back, “I can’t, there’s no failsafe! We need to get rid of it!”
“Rift activity,” Jack starts, and Tosh snaps at him, “Do you think I haven’t thought of that? There’s nothing in time and how are we meant to get it there?”
Jack strides forward and pulls her away from the column half buried in the floor, trying again to disarm the thing with his wrist device. Of course it doesn’t work, and he looks back at Toshiko with panic in his eyes. She checks her computers and tells him, “Three minutes eight seconds.”
“Shit,” Jack says, looking back at the device, then whirls around and tells her, “Get out of here. Stop the others from coming back and evacuate the area. Get as far as you can before it goes off.”
“That won’t save us,” Tosh points out, and Jack turns away, saying, “You might get far enough that the blast won’t kill you. If you move now.”
“No,” Tosh says. “I’m staying. There has to be some way of stopping it.”
Jack whips round and yells, “Get out! You can’t do anything! Staying here is just stupid, now go!”
Tosh sits down at her computers defiantly.
“Two minutes forty four,” she tells him. “Stop shouting at me and let me work.”
Jack stares at her in pure desperation for a second, while she pulls up the window with her scans of the device – before it drilled itself into the floor by the couch and started counting down, of course – and tries to refine the frequencies it’s working on.
“Two minutes twenty one,” she says, and Jack says, “Please. Tosh,” but she ignores him.
And then Jack gasps suddenly and bolts for the archives. Tosh spins in her chair, halfway through calling, “Jack, what…?” but then quickly turning back to her work, biting her lip as she checks the time again. There has to be something she can do. Has to be. There always is.
One minute fifty nine.
She’s halfway to a solution when her computer freezes.
“No!” she shrieks, frantically typing in the recovery codes and then screaming aloud when they don’t work.
“Not now!” she howls at her computer, trying to reset it. “You can freeze any other time you want, just not now!”
It’s then she notices that the clock in the corner is still ticking. One minute one. One minute. Fifty nine. Fifty eight.
“Bastard,” she tells her computer flatly. “You utter bastard.”
Thirty two and Jack comes running back, clutching a disc in one hand. He unbuckles his wrist strap and throws it onto the couch on his way up to the column, asking hurriedly, “How much is buried in the floor?”
“Another three feet,” Tosh tells him. “What are you doing?”
Jack looks up from adjusting the concentric circles on the disc, and says, “This might not work. Get out.”
“Too late,” Tosh tells him quietly. “Sixteen seconds.”
Jack yells, “Move!” at her, and she gets up from her chair and backs away to the stairs, counting down mentally.
Ten, and Jack slams the disc down on the floor beside the column, dropping to his knees. Nine, and a translucent red hemisphere appears over him and the column. She works it out. If it’s a sphere, the other half encases the buried section of the bomb.
Six, and Jack glances over at her, saying, “Cover your eyes.”
Three, and Tosh turns away, closing her eyes, covering her ears, and crouching down by the railings. Two. One.
The explosion nearly deafens her, and even with her back turned the light is verging on painful. It fades after a few moments, and she takes her hands from her ears, shaking her head and trying to get past the ringing buzz that’s all she can hear now.
She turns.
The sphere is more or less empty – though the chunk it’s taken out of the floor is clear to see, and there’s a layer of black ash in the bottom. The shield projector is intact on top of the ash.
After a few moments, Tosh turns away again, covering her mouth with her hand and trying to work out what to think. Grief seems appropriate, but for the moment shock and relief are taking precedence, though there’s more than a dash of guilt in there too. If she’d only thought of something… If her computers hadn’t crashed…
“Ow.”
She looks back again, as Jack sits up inside the shield, stark naked and rubbing the back of his neck.
“I hate getting blown up,” Jack tells her, craning his neck to get the crick out of it, and then picks up the shield device and deactivates it, standing up and brushing ash off himself. Tosh looks away again, blushing slightly.
“I didn’t think you’d come back from that one,” she says quietly.
Jack makes a dismissive sound and throws the shield device onto the couch, saying, “Explosions are easy enough. Being dismembered and kept in different places – now that’s tricky. But it’ll take more than a bomb to stop me. I’m gonna take a shower. Get Ianto to put the Fotsali shield back where it belongs, okay? And mind the hole.”
“I bet it’s not often you say that,” Tosh mutters, but when she glances back again Jack’s already on his way down to his quarters to clean up and get dressed again.
With a sigh, she stands up and dusts herself down, then goes to investigate the crater in the floor.
It’s at that point the cog door rolls open and the others return, Ianto calling, “Tosh? They were out of salad so I got you a cheese sandwich instead. Is that alright?” while Gwen peels away and heads for her desk and Owen says sarcastically, “This is the highlight of his day, Tosh. We had great fun out there. What have you been up to?”
“Not much,” Tosh says with a shrug, as they get to the top of the stairs and stop dead in their tracks at the sight of the gaping hole in the Hub floor.
“Although,” she adds, smiling brightly at them, “we did figure out what that column was for…”
And One Way It Made Everything Worse
“How much power did it have left before today?” Tosh asks, glaring at her scanner in frustration.
“That’s not how it works,” Jack snaps, pacing in front of the shield. “If it’s on it wears down in three days, if it’s not on it charges itself back up. It’s not going to shut down before he suffocates.”
“If he’s still alive,” Owen chips in helpfully, and Jack spins to glare at him.
“He’s alive,” he growls through gritted teeth.
Owen shrugs and continues to observe Ianto through the translucent red shield, saying, “Maybe. But with this thing in the way I can’t even be sure if he’s breathing.”
“But why hasn’t he woken up?” Gwen asks from the other side of the shield, one arm pulled in tight against her stomach, the other hand pressed against the red sphere as she stares anxiously at Ianto.
“Because whatever got into his head lied to him,” Jack snaps. “For all we know it’s stripped his mind bare on the way out.”
Tosh opens her mouth for a moment, frowning, then pauses and stops herself.
“What?” Jack asks sharply.
“Are we assuming that the energy spike on the sensors was… the… thing?” Tosh says slowly, and Jack nods. “Then shouldn’t the same energy signal have showed up when the thing left his body?”
Everyone turns to look at her.
“There’s nothing,” she says, looking up at them all. “No energy left the shield.”
“No,” Jack says in frustration, “it wouldn’t have. The shield doesn’t let any harmful energy in or out. It barely even deals with light and sound.”
“So where’s the thing gone?” asks Tosh.
Jack stares.
“You mean it’s still in there.”
Gwen swiftly pulls her hand back from the shield, biting her nails instead. After a moment, she says, “Are you sure it can’t have got out? What if it jumped through time or something?”
“The shield prevents it,” Jack says shortly. “Whatever’s in there can’t get out until it’s deactivated.”
“So when Ianto set off that machine the thing will have got trapped within the confines of the shield,” Owen says, looking back at Ianto’s unconscious body and the machine, which is still throwing out the occasional spark.
“So now we have two problems,” Jack says, clasping his arms around himself and visibly fighting down fury. “We have to turn the shield off and keep that thing contained at the same time.”
Ianto’s eyes open.
“Ianto!” Gwen gasps, and the other three snap round immediately.
Ianto sits up and turns his head to look at them, each in turn. And then he smiles, and his eyes are empty.
Cautiously, Jack moves forward, a little disturbed at the way Ianto tips his head back to hold his gaze.
“Ianto,” he says softly, and Ianto’s smile grows wider.
“Gone,” he says, with a flash of teeth, and Jack can hear Tosh catch her breath and cover her mouth behind him.
“What do you mean gone?” he snaps.
Ianto throws back his head and laughs, then grins at them all and rolls to his knees, sitting back on his heels and saying, “He thought the machine was to transport me. So did you, didn’t you?”
“What was it for?” Jack asks in a low voice.
Ianto plants both hands on the inside of the shield, and smiles brightly.
“Just a little something to clear his head.”
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-01 03:40 am (UTC)And by the way, the last one was creepy. It was wonderful, but creepy. Well done. Thanks for sharing!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-01 01:40 pm (UTC)And yay for creepy. Always fun. ^_^ Thanks for reading!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-01 05:02 am (UTC)i just loved the one with tosh and jack - you blowed him up! good to know he can survive that
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-01 01:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-01 03:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-01 06:03 pm (UTC)Thank you. :)
FANTASTIC!
Date: 2008-02-01 05:00 pm (UTC)I especially like number 4 :D
A great read
R u gonna do anymore lik this?
Re: FANTASTIC!
Date: 2008-02-01 06:07 pm (UTC)Any more like this? If you mean Five Ways fic, I've done one once before - Jack's Top Tips For Torchwood Trainees (http://laligin.livejournal.com/23897.html). Much more cracked out than this one and less interconnection, but they were all comedy skits and seem to have amused a lot of people. :) If you mean more with the Fotsali shield, then aside from all the links at the top, there's a whole lot of fic waiting to be written for it. ^_^ Much more to come!
Thanke most kindly!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-01 05:02 pm (UTC)The flash of teeth and the bright smile made me think of the Master.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-01 06:08 pm (UTC)Really glad you liked it, thank you very much!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-02 01:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-02 01:41 am (UTC):) I'm glad you liked them so much! Thank you very much indeed.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-02 03:11 am (UTC)You're going to FIX IANTO, right? RIGHT?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-02 12:29 pm (UTC)And I'm probably going to have to fix him at some point, if only so he can carry on in my fic universe... He can sit tight for the time being, though, 'cause Jack can't think of a way to resolve it yet. ^_^
Hee. Thank you very much for coming to read. I'm delighted you liked it!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-02 01:00 pm (UTC)But oh, Ianto. Love to see how Jack [you] plan to get Ianto [yourself] out of this one.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-02 06:41 pm (UTC)Aheh, yeah. I may be borrowing heavily from the conversation on the train to get that little problem sorted out...
Thanke for reading them through and encouraging etc. Always appreciated. ^_^
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-04 11:24 pm (UTC)But this one was brilliant! I loved the entire series, they were so easy to read and get lost in.
...D: Which is why it's so mean to end it there. Are you ever going to continue this series?
Once again, fantastic stuff.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-05 07:40 pm (UTC)So thank you very much indeedy for reading and enjoying so much of my stuff. ^_^ It's always lovely to know that they're still worthwhile. I'm very glad you liked them!
Now, if you'll excuse me, Charles and Dai want to go out on a mission... ;)
Hee. Thanke again! ^_^