m_findlow

Title: Lost in the darkness
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Ianto Jones
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,347 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for Challenge 5 - Pitch at beattheblackdog
Summary: Ianto gets lost in the deepest depths of the archives

It was blacker that anything he'd ever experienced. It wasn't the blackness, it was the complete absence of light.

Of all the times for the power to go out.

Instinctually he tapped his comms. 'Jack? Tosh?'

Nothing, of course. If all the power was out, that meant their comms as well. Damn it.

There was no backup generator this far down, no emergency lighting, no lamps, no torches. He hadn't thought it would ever be necessary. Now he was beginning to rethink his contingencies. In the grand scheme of things, he wasn't down here all that often, so it really was rather extravagant and excessive, but now he was stuck down here in the dark.

He pulled his phone out of his pocket and opened it, letting the tiny light glow outwards. It was pathetic. This wasn't just dark, this was some kind of pitch blackness that ate light itself. The phone barely lit a foot in front of him, even with the camera flash, absorbed by the thick, impenetrable inkiness.

He tried to recall the path he'd taken to get where he was right now and found his memory unusually lacking. To be fair, the area was largely unused, and he'd had a job of finding the spot he'd come down here for in the first place. It wasn't organised in the same way as some of the newer archives with long rows of shelves. Things down here were much more haphazard, with large pallets and crates all over the place in odd piles.

He started gingerly forward, trying to light the way and failing miserably. All he was trying to manage was to prevent himself from running directly into anything dangerous. Half the stuff down here was still uncataglogued, so there was no telling what might happen if you bumped into the wrong thing.

He remembered his grandad telling them stories when they were kids about his days down in the pits, working as a coal miner, and how they often went completely without lights. A school trip to an old working coal mine had confirmed for him that he didn't like being underground one bit. They'd all been told to turn off the lights on their safety helmets, just to show them how dark it was. He'd bever experienced a darkness like it. It was like being totally blind, and worse, totally alone. Whatever coal mining blood was in his family, it had skipped him completely. The thing that surprised him most though had been the heat. He'd imagined mines as cold and damp, but the depth below the surface brought them that much closer to the molten magma core of the earth, the heat from the lava transmitting upwards through the earth. Even so, the temperature had done little to quell his fears of being trapped down there. Cave ins were common back in the day, but the modern precautions taken in this roped off section of the mine allowing tourists didn't ease his twelve year old mind.

He tried to remember now what his grandad had told him about finding your way in the dark. What was it he'd said? Follow the ground with your foot. That's right. They used to trace their way back by feeling for the mining cart tracks on the mine floor. Never find your way along the walls, he'd warned. A miner could run his hand along the rock wall, convinced he was on track, until suddenly there was no floor beneath him. The wall continued right into the shaft where the floor ended. For a miner who made that error, the consequences seemed too ghastly to contemplate.

He knew there weren't any gaping holes in the floor down here, but still, he heeded old advice, pointing his phone downwards and edging carefully forwards with each step. He should be able to find his way out. Plus, the power might not come back on for hours, especially if they were in some sort of lock down. He couldn't just stay here, rooted to the spot, waiting for God knows how long.

The vault was incredibly vast and maze like, made worse by the lack of light. He tried to see the objects around him with his phone, struggling to remember if he'd passed them on his way down here. It was only now that he realised hadn't been paying that much attention. Nothing looked familiar. Had he taken a wrong turn somewhere? It was so hard to tell. Stupid blackout.

Half an hour of slow, unproductive wanderings had lead him nowhere. Then his phone battery died. Shit. He was plunged back into total darkness again. He wasn't afraid of the dark, but the memory of being down that mine shaft came back, as did the fear of getting lost down there and never being found. The blackness surrounding him became totally disorienting. He wasn't even sure which direction he'd been heading in anymore. Now would have been a really good time for the power to come back online, but it didn't. For the first time he considered that it might be possible to get lost down here. There were whole large sections of unexplored tunnels and vaults, half of them uncharted from the documents they'd found that mapped out various improvements and additions over the years, some which went ahead as planned, and others that were modified, or scrapped altogether. Even Jack had no idea about half of what was down here. For all they knew there could be a dragon living in the deepest depths of the hub.

He decided to continue his efforts to find his way out, wishing that he had a track he could have followed out of here. Instead he moved slowly, arms outstretched in front of him, prepared to brace against anything in his path. He clumsily stumbled into several objects, changing direction with each collision, but finding only more objects lying in wait. Twenty minutes more of crashing about in the dark and he'd reached the end of this tether, having resorted to crawling on hands and knees to prevent whacking his head into anymore low hanging objects. He wanted to sob in frustration, the darkness, the solitude and the silence having eroded his rational thoughts. He couldn't take anymore. He sat on the floor and hugged his knees to his chest. It was hopeless. He'd just have to wait for the power to return. Then he started to hear noises that weren't really there, his imagination wildly going off at tangents, until he heard one firm voice in the darkness.

'Don't ever give up, boy. If you give up down there, you're as good as dead.'

It was his grandad again. He wouldn't die down here, he was pretty sure of at least that much, but it forced him back up on his feet. He stumbled around for a while more until he thought his mind was playing tricks on him. Was he imagining it or was that a tiny speck of light off in the distance? He ploughed towards it, knocked over by wayward shelving, but kept going. As he got nearer he realised he wasn't imagining it. It was the doorway leading out of the vault and out into the corridor. There must still be some emergency lighting out there.

As he staggered out of the vault and into the barely lit corridor, he felt blinded, and had never been so happy to see light. He took a moment to adjust his eyes, before wandering down the maze of dimly lit tunnels and back up to the main hub many floors above.

The team were huddled in Jack's office, playing cards by the looks of things, under the harsh red backup lights while they waited out the power cut. In the relative darkness they couldn't see the dust covering his hands and knees, nor the slightly disheveled look of him.

'What took you so long? Did you get lost?' Jack asked.

'Something like that,' he replied.

Perhaps there was some coal miner's blood in him after all.