BTBD Challenge 20 - Sticky situation

[m_findlow]

Title: Sticky situation
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Torchwood team
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 2,723 words
Content notes: Written for Challenge 20 - Sticky at beattheblackdog
Summary: The team find themselves unexpectedly stuck

The five of them had traced the signal to an abandoned church tucked away in the rolling hills that surrounded the city's suburban fringes, before transforming into the mountainous coal country that stretched for miles northward and west.

The creature itself was also not difficult to find, and sat quivering at the top of the nave, bulbous and bright yellow with very long, fine fur that waved about at the tiniest breath of air.

'Aw, it looks so cuddly,' Gwen commented.

'Don't let looks deceive you,' Jack warned, 'we don't know what it is, or what it's capable of.' They held their guns aloft, trained on the creature until they could be sure it wasn't going to suddenly attack. As they approached closer, it seemed to quiver more violently, its fur beginning to stick up, making it look bigger than it was, already about the size of a beach ball, but now a good two feet wider from all sides.

'It's like a cat bristling its fur,' Ianto observed, 'probably more frightened of us.'

'Okay,' Jack said, 'you three hold back here, and Ianto and I will try to get closer.'

As Jack and Ianto slowly crept forward, the furry critter seemed to increase in size again, slowly expanding outwards, making itself bigger. They stopped for a moment and watched on.

'I take back what I said. It's not a cat, it's a puffer fish,' Ianto commented.

Still the creature expanded, until it was a giant ten foot wide yellow ball of fur. It shook and quivered even more violently, still getting larger.

'Er, do you think it's meant to be doing that?' he asked warily, not taking his eyes off it. Jack watched as the ball stretched and shook angrily. He had a bad feeling about this.

'Everybody get back! I think she's gonna blow!'

And blow she did. The explosion was far more powerful than any of them had expected, and threw them all off their feet, crashing into haphazardly arranged furniture, before knocking them out for the count.

There were low groaning and splattering noises when they finally came to, having been bruised and beaten from the explosion. Not only that, but the creature had ejected a sticky yellow goo that covered the walls and dripped from anything that had gotten in its path. Owen, Gwen and Tosh had been lucky, being further from the blast radius, and sheltered partly by the old wooden pews that had broken their fall, but luckily not their bones, and spared them most of the sticky alien mess.

Whilst Gwen had been out cold, some had managed to drop onto her face, and she panicked when she couldn't open her eyelid, now stuck shut with yellow gunk.

'Owen I can't open my eye!' she cried, moving to cup it with her hand.

'Don't touch it!' he barked, 'there's no telling what that stuff could do.' He was rushing over to check on Tosh, who was awkwardly stuck between a pew and a sideboard.

'You okay?'

'I think so.' She went to push herself up and found her hand covered in the sticky substance, her fingers still curled up where she'd been holding her gun, unable to unfurl them.

'I can't move my hand, it's stuck, like my fingers are glued together.' Owen manged to extract her gun from the sticky grip, but her actual fingers were stuck fast.

'Okay, let's just get out of here and then we'll take a look at it,' he said, helping her up and making sure not to touch anything covered in furry yellow sludge.

'Where are Jack and Ianto?' Gwen asked worriedly, joining them at the far side.

They tiptoed forward through the mess, trying not to step in anything sticky, and also mindful of the occasional drip from above. The rafters were covered in the stuff. Owen caught one wayward drip on the top of his head and quickly brushed most of it out with the arm of his jacket.

They found their two teammates collapsed behind a tall backed chair in the left transept. Jack was lying heavily on top of Ianto, having thrown himself in front of him to protect him from the brunt of the explosion. There was an old light fixture just above them that was covered in alien slime, some of which had oozed down on them whilst they were unconscious, pooling on Ianto's left shoulder where Jack's arm was draped protectively over it. They were still out cold, having been much closer when the alien had decided to self destruct.

Gwen and Owen helped to pulled them away from the overhead light and the descending ooze, as they began to regain consciousness.

'Urgh, kamikaze aliens,' Jack groaned. 'Didn't see that coming.'

'Have I told you before how heavy you are?' Ianto wheezed under Jack's weight. Jack just chuckled and moved to roll himself off his lover, only to have his movements arrested.

'Er, I'm stuck.'

'Funny. Now get off,' Ianto moaned.

'No, seriously, I'm stuck,' Jack said, trying to pull his arm away from Ianto's chest, but finding it firmly fixed from the tips of his fingers curled over his shoulder, and all the way down to his elbow, pressed up against Ianto's pectoral.

'This stuff is like alien superglue,' Owen said, trying to help detach Jack.

'Just take my jacket off,' Ianto instructed, figuring that was all Jack was really attached to.

Owen pulled on a pair of gloves and tried to prise apart the pair of them. On closer inspection he could he see that the fibres from their clothes had melted away and it was their skin that was fused together. He took another look at Tosh's hand and saw the same thing.

'Okay, it's not budging. Let's get you back to the hub,' Owen conceded. 'The cleanup here is going to have to wait.'

Somehow they managed to get back to the hub, though it took a considerable amount of coordination to figure out how to get the pair of them in the SUV. They were able to sit side by side, but because of the way Jack's right arm was attached to Ianto's left shoulder, it meant he had to sit side on. Cuddled up beside him was really the only way to describe it, and the only way for them to sit comfortably. Or at all for that matter.

Owen had managed to rinse most of the now flaking yellow substance from Gwen's face and Tosh's hand, leaving behind no traces except for the fact that their skin was still stuck together in places it shouldn't be. Since Tosh's injury was the most easily accessible, Owen began trying various solvents to try and break down whatever chemicals were causing the skin to stick together. Nothing he tried seemed to work, but scans had at least shown that it didn't seem to be doing them any harm apart from the obvious.

He sent them all away from  his lab for a few hours whilst he experimented with some samples he'd brought back.

'Organic fusion,' he said to the group as they were all sat around, drinking coffee and looking miserable. Somehow Ianto had manged to coordinate making coffee with Jack still attached to him, thought it had taken considerably longer, because Jack had his face right up against his own and was finding it hard not to nibble at it whilst Ianto was trying to concentrate on not burning himself with the milk steamer.

'What does that mean?' Gwen asked, looking like a pirate with her eye patch covering her glued eyelid.

The alien excreted a chemical compound that causes organic material to bind together. It explains why Tosh's hand is stuck together, but why her gun didn't get glued to her hand as well. It's also why Jack's arm is stuck to Ianto and not his clothes.

Jack pulled back from Ianto as much as he could. 'Have you been buying synthetic again?'

Ianto rolled his eyes at Jack. 'Wool is too expensive knowing it's going to get destroyed ever other week,' he replied in his defense.

'So now we know what it is. Now how do we all get unstuck?'

'I've sorted that too. I ran some anaerobic catalysts on my samples and discovered that it should eventually break down on its own.'

'How long is eventually?' Gwen asked.

'A few days. A week tops.'

'Couldn't you just use some of those chemicals to get us unstuck now?' queried Jack. 'Much as I love Ianto, I don't think this is what he meant when he said we should spend more time together.'

'Nice thinking, but no,' Owen replied, ignoring Jack's innuendo. 'They're so caustic in even their lowest concentrations that not only would it unstick you, it'd probably melt off all the skin and muscle right down to the bone.'

'Stuck together it is then,' Ianto agreed.  

It hadn't seemed at the outset to be a difficult task. After all, they practically lived in each others pockets as it was. The first day was pretty easy. Owen had diagnosed Ianto with a severe concussion. He had a lump on the back of his head the size of a small plum to prove it, where he'd whacked his head against the hard flagstone floor inside the church when Jack had thrown him to the floor. Owen had insisted he spend the day in bed recovering and Jack was only too happy to accommodate, comfortably cosying up, his hand permanently fixed to Ianto's shoulder as they dozed on and off, Jack checking in with him every so often to confirm whether still knew who he was and what day it is.

Their problems started the next morning when they went to get out of bed and shower. They tripped over one another trying to move from a lying positing to sitting, then standing and crab walking to the bathroom.

'Good thing we like showering together,' Jack grinned, trying to find the positive in their situation.

Their biggest problem was clothes. With Jack's arm attached where it was, it meant he couldn't put on a shirt because he could only get one arm in the sleeve. Ianto had similar problems. He could work both arms into sleeves, nearly accidentally headbutting Jack in the process, still not used to him so being so close, but he couldn't button it up because Jack's arm was in the way.

'This isn't going to work.'

'We could always go topless,' Jack suggested.

'Jack, it's the middle of winter. We'll freeze.'

'I'll keep you warm,' Jack promised, adding another arm on Ianto’s other shoulder to match.

He may have meant well but as soon as they'd spent half an hour in the cold hub, they were both reaching for a blanket to wrap themselves in.

'This isn't going to work,' Jack said, repeating Ianto's earlier statement. 'How are we supposed to get any work done if we're wrapped up like this?'

'Oh, because we were doing so well before that,' Ianto retorted sarcastically.

Ianto dragged Jack down to the archives in search of a solution. He had to keep one arm firmly wrapped around Jack's waist to stop him from moving in the opposite direction to him. It was like some bizarre dance they were doing, where neither of them particularly knew the steps.

Ianto rifled through a box whilst Jack faced the other way, hindering his efforts as little as possible until Ianto found what he was looking for. He extracted two very large jumpers from the box. Whoever their previous owner was must have been a giant, Jack thought, once he saw them. Ianto set to work, cutting a hole in one of  them, near the top, and cut the sleeve off another, attaching it to the hole. Then he unpicked the stitching around the neck and widened it.

'Hold still,' he instructed as he tried to pull it over both their heads, and helping Jack's free arm through the new spare sleeve. Jack had been skeptical, but Ianto's three armed jumper creation was actually quite good, and more importantly, it was nice and warm.

'Good thing your dad was a master tailor,' he joked.

'Honestly, I think he'd be horrified,' Ianto joked back.

For the rest of the day, the team tried to get by as best they could. Gwen was forever stumbling into things and losing her balance, the patch over her eye having robbed her of her depth perception. Tosh was equally unproductive, unable to type with both hands slowing down her efforts. Jack and Ianto were relegated to the sofa, where they could at least sit and try to catch up on reading reports or research papers. Anything requiring more dexterity than that was deemed too hard, with the exception of making coffee, which was classed as essential. They'd tried feeding Myfanwy earlier that morning, but after Jack had tripped over the unseen water bucket, and taken Ianto tumbling down with him, almost to the very edge of her nest, and the fifty foot drop below, they'd decided not to risk it anymore, and prayed that the rift would behave itself, just for a few days.

Owen grumbled around, being the only one spared from their sticky situation, meaning he had to be the one to return to the scene and do all the cleaning up. He made sure to wear thick protective gear to minimize the chance of gluing himself together, but was still suitably grouchy by the time he got back.

'What shall we call it?' Tosh asked, trying to update their alien species database with as much information as they'd manged to collect, including a very detailed sketch of what it had looked like pre-explosion, which Jack had done when he'd gotten bored.

'A bloody nuisance?' Owen suggested. 'Not only is that stuff sticky as hell, it bloody stinks too after two days decomposition.'

'How about a red giant?' Ianto suggested.

'Uh, I think you'll find it was yellow,' Jack said, wondering if Ianto had hit his head harder than Owen thought.

'I know, but it swelled up and then exploded, just like a red giant,' he explained.

'Well at least it didn't implode and suck us all into a black hole,' Gwen said, relieved. 'What about Big Bird?'

'Only it wasn't a bird,' Owen argued.

'Okay, so what's big and yellow, and blows up unexpectedly?' Ianto asked. Surely they could come up with something.

'Owen dressed as a banana?' Jack offered.

The team fell into fits of laughter whilst Owen turned an impressive shade of vermillion.

'Yeah, go on, laugh it up. Hope you're stuck that way forever,' he snarked.

 

A few nights later, Jack and Ianto were fast asleep in bed. They'd been sleeping fitfully for days, because every time one of them wanted to change position, they ended up half dragging the other with them, whether they wanted it or not, and usually into a position that was not nearly as comfortable for the person being dragged as it was for the one doing the dragging, resulting in them regularly waking each other up. This time it was Jack who decided he wanted badly to roll over onto his right side. As he went to throw himself over his right arm, attached to Ianto, suddenly tore away, causing Ianto not only to wake but to let out a scream of pain as well.

'Bloody hell!'

'Hey! We're detached!' Jack exclaimed. 'Must've finally worn off.'

'Not before taking three layers of my skin with it,' he muttered, rubbing the patch on his chest which was now bright red and sore. 'Now I know what it must feel like getting your chest waxed. Something I'm adding to my list of things never to do,' he said, still wincing.

'Would you like me to kiss it better?'

'I'm worried your lips might get stuck there permanently.'

'There are worse places they could get stuck,' Jack grinned.

'And there are better places,' Ianto added, returning Jack's grin. 'Now that we're unstuck you might be able to reach them.'

Jack rolled over and snuggled back up against Ianto. 'I'll tell the others you're not feeling well and that we're still stuck together, so well have to spend the entire day together in bed.'

'Good plan.'

Comments

[bk_forever]

Never a bunch of Kneebles around when you need them... Bet they could've solved the sticky problem ;)

Poor Jack and Ianto, life as Siamese twins is both tricky and uncomfortable. Loved Ianto's innovative three-armed giant sweater though.

I think both of them would have preferred to come unstuck in a less painful manner.