Torchwood: Fanfic: That sinking feeling

[m_findlow]

Title: That sinking feeling
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack, Ianto, Owen
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 2,144 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for juliet316's prompt "Torchwood, any, the ground seemed to liquify beneath their feet" at fic_promptly
Summary: Sometimes things break when they fall through the rift

'Are you sure you should be touching that?' Ianto asked, watching as Jack carried the item with him into the archives where Ianto had been working. It had been residing on Tosh's desk since this morning when they'd picked it up, having found it in the refrigerator of a local cafe when they'd finally traced the rift energies back to their source.

'I thought Tosh was going to run some more tests on it before we decided what it was.'

'Please,' Jack scoffed. 'I've seen plenty of molecular destabilisers in my time. It'll be fine. I think there's a whole box of them somewhere around here,' he said, looking around the massive room, not even knowing where to begin.

'I don't understand the point of half the things that get invented in the future,' Ianto said. 'What is the point of a molecular destabiliser?'

'Oh, all sorts of things,' Jack said. 'It's great for getting stuff out of the way. You could demolish a whole house with just the press of a button, disintegrating it into a pile of atoms. No need for bulldozers and dump trucks to haul away the rubble. That's so twentieth century. Positively primitive.'

Ianto tried not to take offense. It wasn't his fault what century he had been born in. That was the technology that he was used to.

'Let me show you how it works,' Jack said, pulling him over towards his desk. 'What's say I destabilise your apple,' he said, picking it up before repositioning it on the very middle of the desk, and clearing away Ianto's neat piles of documents.

'If I end up with apple sauce on my desk, I'm not going to be happy.'

Jack tweaked a few nearly invisible buttons on the side of the narrow device, before holding it out and pointing it in the apple's direction.

'Here goes,' Jack announced, pressing the button to activate the device.

It sputtered and zapped with a fizzling noise that didn't sound at all encouraging. The apple on Ianto's desk remained whole and untouched.

'Huh,' Jack said, 'that should have worked.'

They were both busy examining it, when Ianto looked up and realised that Jack seemed to be taller than usual. He looked him up and down, only to realised that Jack hadn't gotten taller, Ianto had gotten shorter. His feet were slowly sinking down into the concrete, as were Jack's.

'Uh, Jack,' he said, tugging at his sleeve and pointing downwards.

Jack looked down and saw what Ianto had seen, the ground seemingly having turned to liquid beneath their feet.

'Any chance that thing was broken and that you destabilised the floor by accident?'

'That would explain a few things,' Jack admitted.

They tried pulling their feet out of the sludge like mess that the floor had become, but it was gooey and viscous. The more they struggled against it, the more they seemed to sink down into it, like quicksand.

Ianto hated that he was so practical sometimes, especially at a time like this. Practicalities aside though, he'd seen plenty of movies with this sort of thing, and he had to admit, it was actually a lot more terrifying in real life.

'Just relax, Ianto,' Jack said.

Relax? He wanted to yell at Jack. He was the whole reason they were in this mess in the first place. Instead he said 'Can you reverse it?'

'I don't even know how it did it in the first place. The beam must have shot out in a different direction.'

'Lucky you didn't hit us then,' Ianto said, feeling the floor sucking him in up to his knees.

'Stop moving,' Jack said.

'I have!' he replied, trying not to panic, but feeling himself sinking further in, watching as Jack was descending into the floor as well.

'Call Owen,' Jack said. 'He should be upstairs,' he added, knowing that the girls were both out, having the afternoon off. Owen had been elbow deep in alien autopsy last he'd seen.

'My phone's on the desk,' Ianto said, staring at the desk ten yards away. 'Where's yours?'

'Left it upstairs,' Jack replied.

'Great,' Ianto said, feeling a sucking sensation beginning to wrap around his hips.

The both began yelling out at the top of their lungs, hoping that somehow Owen might hear them if he came down this way on his way to dispose of any alien remains in their large incinerator.

After ten minutes of solid yelling, no rescue was forthcoming, and the pair of them were both sunk into the floor up to their chests, the floor having grown more liquid like the longer they were stuck there, sucking them down faster. All they'd managed was to keep their arms above their heads so that they could at least still reach out if they had to, not completely immobilised by liquid floor.

When the liquid concrete started creeping up over his shoulders, Ianto started to accept that this was going to be it. An unspectacular death initiated by faulty alien tech. He'd always known Torchwood would get him one day, but he hadn't realised just how unprepared he was for the moment.

'Jack, if I don't make it,'

'Don't say that. We'll make it out of here.'

'You might,' Ianto said, knowing that Jack's immortality was going to have to take a decent beating before it gave in. 'I need you to know that I have a sister.'

'Ianto, stop.'

'No, there's a file on your compurer called "Legacy". The password to open it is "executor". Inside are all my bank details, title for the flat, broker's contact details for my share portfolio, car registration documents, and my will. Rhi gets half, and the other half is to go on trust for my niece and nephew.'

Jack couldn't believe what he was hearing. He hadn't even known Ianto had any living family. Now he was asking Jack to distribute his assets to them.

'You are not going to die, Ianto Jones. Not today.'

'I hate to break it to you,' he replied, the floor having crept up underneath his chin, 'but it's not looking real good.'

Jack continued yelling out as he watching his team mate's head being slowly sucked under, his own not far from being submerged.

Eventually his cries paid off and Owen came running into the room, shocked at what he saw.

'Owen! Be careful!' he said, before Owen got too close to the liquid pool that surrounded them.

'Shit,' he said, trying to quickly assess the situation. Jack was up to his jowls, but Ianto was nearly up to his eyes, his nose still just above the surface, but not for long.

Owen dashed off quickly, in search of rope and something that he could drag out over the pool to get closer to them. Fortunately, there was some thick nylon rope in a store room off to the side, of the kind that they regularly used to tie down crates. He threw one end to Jack who caught it in his hands.

'Save Ianto first,' he said, fumbling to draw a knot around one of his wrists.

'I am,' Owen said, 'but I can't risk you getting sucked all the way under. Who knows if you can survive being trapped in concrete.' He grabbed the other end of the rope and tied it to the leg of the desk.

He disappeared again for a few minutes, returning with a tall ladder, which he slid across the rippling surface until the other side met with good old fashioned hard concrete, creating a bridge.

Jack watched as he carefully crawled along its length to get closer to them.

'Please hurry,' said Jack, watching in horror as he realised that all that remained of Ianto was a small amount of forearm, rising up out of the pool.

Owen managed to reach the half way point and grabbed hold of Ianto's arm. He expected the hand to wrap tightly around his own, but it hung there limply, barely reacting to his touch. He was running out of oxygen, Owen realised. He quickly pulled as hard as he could but found the resistance almost impossible to combat. He tugged harder but still couldn't get any purchase, digging his heels in against the ladder's rungs for more leverage.

'It's not budging!' he said, starting to panic.

Jack himself was almost submerged at this point, but somehow gasped out the words "go slow", before his own nose and mouth were sucked under.

Owen sucked in a breath and gripped Ianto's arm firmly, this time, pulling slowly and applying only a slight amount of pressure against the suction that was holding him down. As first nothing happened, but sure enough, he eventually felt a slight give in the concrete. He pulled gently, feeling more of Ianto's arm sliding back out of the ooze, until he could see the top of his head rising as he pulled on his arm. Owen backed up the ladder, moving away from the centre of the pool and gradually hauling Ianto free. Once he'd managed to free enough of his body to haul him onto the ladder, he crawled back across to terra firma and tugged the ladder back across until it was lying on real floor again.

Ianto was covered in a thick grey goo, unconscious. Owen cleared the muck from his face and gave a couple of quick rescue breaths before Ianto was sputtering and coughing, rolling him onto his side to help him breathe easier.

'It's okay, mate,' Owen reassured him. After a few moments of coughing, Ianto came to realise where he was and remembered what had happened. He looked across at the pool of liquid concrete and saw the alarming view of Jack's lone hand poking up out of the mire, a yellow cord tied tightly around his wrist, the only thing keeping it where it was.

The pair of them quickly made their way over to the desk, taking the rope in hand and pulling at it, needing their combined weight now to pull Jack out of the pool. They were careful not to pull too tightly or too quickly, in case the rope should slip off his wrist. If that happened, they might lose him altogether. Ianto's own hands were slippery on the rope, so Owen took the bulk of the pulling. It was much harder than the first time, as if the concrete had decided to start hardening up again, locking Jack in place.

Once they managed to get more of his arm clear, they pulled the ladder back into place, edging towards the middle, one on each side, so as not to put too much strain on the ladder, unsure how much of their weight it could take. They managed to get a hold under one shoulder and once they had a grip on it, they were able to slowly tug him free.

Jack was dead when they dragged him across the floor and out of harm's way. He'd been under for at least fifteen minutes by the time they'd freed him. It was an agonising wait until he finally gasped in a huge lungful of air, his body restoring itself to its normal state.

'Jack,' Owen called out. 'Are you okay?'

'Yeah. How's Ianto?'

'I'm fine,' Ianto confirmed, grabbing his hand and squeezing it tight, feeling the gritty muck that covered both of them from head to toe.

'Guess we won't be needing that file,' Jack said.

Owen looked at him, confused about what he was referring to.

'Guess not,' Ianto replied, giving him a wan smile.

Owen shook his head, giving up on trying to interpret the secret messages.

'Alright you two,' he said, trying to take professional lead of the situation. 'Shower, and then I want to check you over,' he said, pointing at Ianto, whilst Jack grinned at being let off the hook. Immortality had its perks.

They left, headed for the showers, and leaving Owen to cordon off the area until they could figure out how to re-stabilise it.

'Why did you wait until now to tell me you had a sister?' Jack asked, the question having been on his mind since he'd come back, curious. He hadn't thought that they still kept secrets from each other. Well, not Ianto anyway. There were things that Jack could never tell him.

'I wanted to make sure she was looked after. And the kids.'

'And you were going to wait until you were dead to do that?'

Ianto replied with awkward silence. 'We're not that close.'

Jack stopped and turned to him, gripping his shoulders.

'Take it from me, Ianto Jones, don't wait until it's too late. You only ever have one family, and once there gone, you can't ever get them back.'

Ianto wasn't sure what Jack meant by the comment, but perhaps he was right.

Comments

[bk_forever]

Sheesh, you really had me scared with this one! I thought Ianto was a goner! What a horrid fate that would have been *shudders* So glad Owen rescued them both!

[m-findlow.livejournal.com]

*gasps in horror*

I would never kill off Ianto unless I could bring him back!

[bk_forever]

I know that really, it was just such a scary situation and the tension stretched my nerves to the limit O.O