Torchwood: Fanfic: Black-mail

[m_findlow]

Title: Black-mail

Fandom: Torchwood

Character: Ianto

Author: m_findlow

Rating: PG

Length: 1,957 words

Content notes: None

Author notes: Written for angelcage ’s prompt any, any, blackmail photographs at fic_promptly

Summary: Ianto has received something in the post that he wishes he hadn’t.

Torchwood didn't get a lot of mail. It was one of the consequences of being a top secret organisation. Still, they had a post office box, however incongruent that might be, and it was part of Ianto’s weekly duties to go and fetch the mail from the post office. After all, they couldn't just have the postie walk it to them – not even on the auspices of it being post for the Welsh Tourist Board.

You just never knew what was going to be happening in the tourist office at the time when it wasn't strictly open for tourist business. It might have been really dull and boring, just Ianto restocking the pamphlet holders or dusting off the Royal Doulton Wales imprinted fine china tea set, which had been for sale for as long as Ianto had worked there, but which had never garnered a single bit of attention from anyone who came through looking for attractions and recommendations. He wasn't even sure anyone had even glanced at the glass cabinet despite the fact that he kept it polished and the inside well dusted. Oh well, you just never knew. Maybe someday someone would take a shining to it and actually buy it. A keepsake of their visit to the Welsh capital. It would be the biggest sale he'd ever made, since Royal Doulton didn’t come cheap. There wasn't a lot of profit in dragon-filled snow globes, postcards and the occasional set of collectable stamps that got sold. The award-winning nature of this particular tourist bureau was the very knowledgeable staff behind the counter, namely one Ianto Jones.

Going about his usual weekly chores, Ianto carried the small pile of post under his arm, down the steps, along the quayside, and finally through the tourist office door, setting the mail on the counter whilst he moved behind it to pop the kettle on for a nice cup of tea. Everyone thought he only drank coffee, since he was the master connoisseur of all such things caffeinated, but what they failed to notice was that he liked a good cup of tea just as much as the rest of them. Up in the tourist office it was a bit much to have a full blown coffee machine and all the relevant bits and bobs necessary to brew the perfect cup. It was much easier to have a cheap electric kettle and a small box of tea bags ready to go when you needed a nice hot brew to keep you going.

Whilst the kettle was burbling away, working its way up to a boil, he dumped a fresh tea bag into a clean cup and set it on the counter, reaching over to a small desk caddy and extracting a letter opener to begin tearing through the tops of each piece of post. The first two were purely junk mail, real estate brochures promising phenomenal results of recent sales and would he like to consider listing his property with the agent? More post was discount coupons for a local co-op which seemed to have opened up recently and was keen for new business.

It was the last package however that caught his eye; a plain yellow A4 manila envelope, fixed with sufficient postage, and his name written at the top in nondescript penmanship. Who was sending Ianto mail, let alone via the Torchwood post office box? He didn't even get mail at his flat.

In fact, there was hardly any mail that reached them these days. They'd long ago stopped Archie from sending things from Torchwood Two down to Cardiff, partly because most of what Archie sent was merely to wind up Owen – not that the rest of them had a problem with that, and not because Archie would send anything inherently dangerous – but simply the fact that Royal Mail postal deliveries didn't seem to take the same level of care as they used to. Things had a habit of getting broken or packages damaged, which was even more problematic when you started packing live things inside the brown paper covered boxes tied up with string. Jack had had words about that with Archie. Ianto knew because he’d eavesdropped. Jack was strangely polite about the whole thing, which Ianto didn't think would have been the case had Owen and Archie's roles been reversed, and it was Owens sending strange alien creatures through the post off to Scotland. Then again, Archie got away with a lot of things that the rest of them wouldn't have.

The kettle clicked over to boil but before Ianto had a chance to grab the kettle and pour the water into the cup, he wanted to know what was inside envelope number three. He slid the letter opener along the seam, carefully making a neat slit at the top and then tipped the envelope on an angle, letting the flat contents inside spill onto the counter top. At first he frowned at the contents. They appeared to be large glossy photographs, black and white, as if they'd been developed in a dark room inside someone's house rather than taken down to the high street to be professionally developed.

The first photo was quite dark and he couldn't make out much, just the outlines of a few strange objects, but as began to shuffle through the photos a disturbing image began to appear. He began to make out the outline of the SUV and, beside it on the ground, what was very clearly an alien, that was also very clearly not alive. It was lying there in a pool of blood which showed up dark black in the glossy monotone photograph. He didn't recognise the alien from any of his cases out with the team, or any of the files that had passed his desk from the rest of them. He was pretty sure something that looked as wildly alien and this did, would definitely have gotten mentioned over the proverbial water cooler.

He shuffled to the next photo and nearly dropped it. It was almost identical to the earlier photo; the dead alien on the ground not far from the SUV, its blue lights flashing along the edge of the windscreen marking it out clearly as not your normal all-terrain vehicle. This photo included him and another man.

A photo of him and another man, kissing.

A photo of him and another man, kissing, that he didn't know.

A photo of him and another man, kissing that he didn't know, nor could he remember.

It wasn't the odd little peck on the cheek either. It was a full-blooded “well, that was a bit exciting, let's have a good old face-mashing snog to celebrate” kind of kiss. The kind reserved Jack after a good weevil hunt, except the man in the photo very clearly wasn't Jack. There wasn't enough to define exactly who the man was but enough to know that it wasn't anybody Ianto recognised.

How was this possible? When had these photos been taken, and why did he not remember ever being in a situation where any of these things had collided? Had he retconned himself? No, that just wasn't possible. If he’d taken retcon, it would have shown up in his bloodwork from his last checkup with Owen. And that was only two weeks ago, but the retcon traces would have lasted at least a month. If he had taken retcon, Owen would have known about it. Moreover, there would have been a discrepancy in their supplies of retcon – for which Ianto was responsible – and he had every single pill of every possible strength fully accounted for. There were no missing pills.

So what had happened? He shuffled and found three more photos all showing pretty much the same thing but just from slightly different angles, showing slightly different moments of him snogging the face off the man with the dead alien at their feet beside the vehicle.

He recognised the spot where the photos had been taken. It was up on Castle Street, right near the dodgy kebab shop with the three star hygiene rating that was highly questionable. Even Owen wouldn't eat there and that was saying something. Apart from the location the rest was a complete mystery. What the hell had happened?

The boiled kettle became completely forgotten as he flipped through the photos once more, creating almost a flip book of moments where he'd been caught clearly doing something he shouldn't have, in a situation where he had zero recollection. It was only when the top photo slipped off the pile and onto the floor next to the desk that he noticed the message scribbled on the back in thick black marker ink. There was a phone number written at the top and then underneath the words “these photos will go to every newspaper, every television station, and be published on every online blog across the UK unless you do exactly what we tell you.”

Ianto looked at the photos again, realising that he had two problems: one being the very obvious dead alien in the middle of Castle Street, the other being the illicit affair with the mystery man, neither of which were good news if they happened to get out into the wider world. Torchwood might be able to do something to suppress the fact that alien photos had been published, passing them off as a hoax, but there was going to be nothing to be done once everybody saw the kiss. No one was going to believe that Ianto was innocent in all of this, denying he knew anything about it, and unable to prove otherwise.

He shuffled through the photos one more time, biting his lip hard as if chewing through it would give him an answer that he hadn't already thought of. There would have to be a logical explanation for it all. He should just pick up the phone and tell Jack exactly what had arrived in the envelope. Jack would understand. Jack would believe him when he said that he didn't know what had happened and that the kiss meant nothing, even if the photos seem to completely contradict that notion. He certainly looked like he was enjoying it.

Then again, there was the message on the back of the photograph. What if that was only half of what they were threatening him with? What if it went beyond that? After all, it was very hard to write a long threatening message on the back of a single photograph. There could be this and much worse still to come if he didn't comply with the instructions. More photos, or something even more incriminating.

What did they want? Money? Alien technology? Something else? He wouldn't find out unless he actually called the number that had been written down. That in itself seemed deadly though. He quickly punched the number into the computer, doing a reverse phone look up and it came back blank. Great. Of course it did. This was stupid, he told himself. Just bloody ring Jack and tell him. They could fix this. They could find out who it was and stop them. Or this might just be the precursor to something more deadly and dangerous, or even more evidence that Ianto had gone rogue without realising it. Perhaps he’d been taken over by some sort of strange alien entity that was able to completely blank out his conscious mind, taking over his body and doing its own bidding.

What to do… What to do… Ianto bit his lip even harder, pulling his phone out of his pocket and looking at it, looking back at the photographs and then unlocking the phone.

Ianto punched in a number and hit dial.