Torchwood: Fanfic: All nighter

[m_findlow]

Title: All nighter
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack, Ianto, Gwen, Rhys
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 2,514 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for m_findlow's prompt "Any, any, no such thing as a sleep in" at fic_promptly
Summary: Rhys is beginning to learn that sleep is optional when you work for Torchwood

"Torchwood", that’s what the message on the phone read. No preamble, no polite "hello, how are you? Could really use a hand with the end of the world". Just one word. It wasn’t even his phone, but for some reason it had landed in the bed, tucked right underneath his pillow.

'Gwen?'

She mumbled incoherently next to him. 'What?'

'It’s Jack. Or Ianto. One or the other.' Or maybe it was that fancy rift computer thing that sent the messages out. Who knew? All he knew was that their quiet night in was over.

'Huh?'

'Your phone, Gwen?' Rhys said, as if having to remind her what her phone was.

He didn't get a chance to pass it to her, before another message bleeped angrily across the screen.

"Move your butt. You know how cranky Ianto gets when he's left waiting at your front door."

Right, well that settled who the sender was. He didn't think their computer had that much of an attitude.

Gwen was crawling out from under the duvet, letting the cold air outside seep in underneath the covers, making Rhys shudder.

'So much for a night off,' Rhys grumbled, glad at least that he'd get to go back to sleep, even if Gwen couldn't.

'That's Torchwood for you,' Gwen said, hopping around on one leg, pulling a shoe on the other. How she'd gotten dressed that quick was still a mystery to him. She was almost flying out the bedroom door when her phone beeped again, still sitting on the bedside table.

'Hey, you almost forgot this,' Rhys said reaching over for it.

"Bring Rhys, too", it read.

'Bloody Torchwood,' Rhys cried.

Rhys clambered into the car, feeling disheveled in his clothes from yesterday - and yes it was technically yesterday now - reading the display on the clock that glowed on the dashboard.

'Hi Rhys, glad you could join us,' Jack chirped, looking fresh as a daisy, as if Ianto had just brought him home from the cleaners freshly washed and pressed. He didn't look half bad himself, nor did Gwen considering they'd been asleep less than three hours. Why did he feel like he needed toothpicks to keep his eyelids open?

'You need a van or something?' Rhys asked.

'Maybe, or maybe not,' Jack replied non-committally, 'but figured you were already up and we can always use an extra hand.'

'Brilliant,' Rhys muttered, feeling rather less than privileged.

'What have we got, Jack?' Gwen asked, all business, peering over the front seats to try and get a look at the readings on Ianto's PDA.

'Not sure yet,' he admitted, 'but it's big and on the move, so we should be too,' he added, pulling out from the kerb, making his trademark squeal of tyres, no doubt leaving an imprint on the road to show where he'd been.

It was a reasonably short drive across town, short in the sense of miles, and shorter still on account of the breakneck speed of Jack's driving.

'Next street on the left,' came Ianto's instructions, and Jack flew around the corner without so much as braking, sending them all hurtling to the right with the inertia, before rediscovering the brakes, hitting them hard, having spied their arrival.

Jack gripped the wheel, ducking low to peer out the windshield.

'Is that?'

'Yep,' Ianto confirmed.

'Oh boy,' Jack groaned.

'What? What is it?' Rhys said, sounding a little panicked.

They all got out of the car and watched the creature proceeding along the street away from them.

'If I remember correctly,' Ianto began, 'last time it had projectile slime glands?'

'Oh yeah,' Jack confirmed. 'By the time we caught the thing, you could have rowed down the street.'

'And guess who got to clean the cells? And everywhere else for that matter,' Ianto complained.

'Hey, at least you only had to deal with what we traipsed in through the hub. Owen and Suzie were out there for days removing the stuff from the road.'

'Not something I relish repeating.'

'If we don't upset it, we'll be fine,' Jack assured him.

'Excellent,' Ianto replied. 'Because we never upset anything,' he added drolly.

To Rhys' mind, it looked like a giant walrus, without the tusks, eleven or twelve feet tall in height, and just as wide, with a long tapered body and big floppy fins that it was using to push itself along. It didn't exactly move fast, but the gooey substance oozing out from under its body was helping it to travel along more easily. At least it wasn't quite what he'd imagined. When Jack had said it was big, he'd imagined another space whale scenario. This was perfectly pedestrian by comparison.

'Oh, I'd forgotten how much that stuff reeks!' Jack cried, holding his sleeve over his face as he got close enough to the trail of slime being left in its wake.

'You've seen one of these before?' Gwen asked, her own nose pinched at the foul odour.

'Before your time,' he replied. 'Trust me, you didn't miss much. Looks like we might need that van, after all,' he added, grinning at Rhys who looked horrified. If they stunk up one of his vans, he wouldn't be happy about it. He'd be charging them extra, and by that he meant extra over and above what he usually charged them, which was usually at least double, sometimes triple. At least they didn't complain about the bill, and they were good payers. Ianto always cut the cheque within fourteen days.

'What exactly is that thing?' Rhys asked.

'Think of an oversized runny nose and you're pretty much on the mark,' Jack replied.

Rhys couldn't believe that he was standing here, in the middle of a street in Cardiff, watching a giant blobby walrus creature sluicing its way down the street. And not one curtain twitcher, not one! Admittedly it was late and everyone was probably asleep, and the thing wasn't really making any noise, just idling its way along, minding it's own business, but still...

'What I want to know is how this stuff never makes the news,' he said to no one in particular.

'We're good at what we do,' Jack replied.

'Yeah, but, what with YouTube and all that, surely some stuff must get out?'

Jack gave a sideward glance at Ianto who grinned like the cat that got the cream.

'Like I said, we're good at what we do.'

Jack had his hands on his hips, surveying the scene.

'So what do you think, Ianto?'

'On a scale of one to ten, how annoyed will it be if we try to use nets?'

'You wanna be cleaning up slime for the next three days?'

'Okay, so nets are out.'

'There must be some humane way to capture it,' Gwen said, feeling a bit sorry for it. It wasn't like it was hurting anyone.

'I'd love to be able to talk it into coming back with us, but I left my pocket guide to blob at home.'

'What about tranquilizers? Like the ones we use for the weevils,' she suggested.

Jack considered it for a moment. 'The question is, do we have enough?'

Huddled around the back of the SUV, they turned out their medical kits, backup kits and glove compartments.

'Okay, what've we got?' Jack asked.

'Twenty weevil syringes, three lots of general anesthetic from the med kit, and one emergency sedative pen,' Ianto reported.

'Okay, so I used six of these things to take down Myf back in the day, and that things is what, probably three or four times her size?'

'So we have to use it all?' Gwen said.

'Looks that way. Uh,' Jack paused, 'just one problem,' he said, rifling through the contents of the back of the SUV.

'What's that?' Gwen said.

He lifted up the biggest, nastiest looking needle she'd ever seen. 'This thing is only going to fit eight doses.'

Rhys considered the enormous syringe. 'You couldn't just poke it a few times with the smaller ones?'

'They wouldn't penetrate the skin,' Jack replied.

'Yeah, but isn't that thing going to be well annoyed after the first needle stick?'

'I don't doubt it,' Jack agreed, 'but this is all the equipment we have.'

The plan was to stage a coordinated assault, with each of them taking turns to inject a dose of sedative into the creature from different angles, distracting it long enough for the first person to get away, and for the next to sneak up from somewhere else for the next dose. They only had the one needle, so it was going to be a bit of a relay race to transfer the syringe from one team member to the next. They emptied the first dose into the syringe, and emptied the next two into small cannisters, where it could be easily piped up into the empty syringe when they received it.

'Rhys, you're gonna have to be the decoy,' Jack stated. 'Gwen's going to go in for the first dose, and when she does, that thing is going to want a piece of her. Your job is to get its attention, so that I can get the needle to Ianto, and then Gwen is going to frog leap and get it from him to me for the last dose.'

'Hey, how come I have to be the decoy?'

'You wanna try sticking that thing?'

When he looked at it again, he gladly accepted decoy duties.

The plan had sounded good, but none of them, not even Jack, had anticipated just how much their presence and their assault had annoyed the giant walrus-like creature. As soon as Gwen had jabbed it, its head swung around to fling gobs of sticky goo in her direction. She ducked the first two, but the third caught her in the side, its velocity sending her tumbling to the ground in the pool of mess, Jack already with the needle in hand, running over to Ianto's position.

'Oi, over here you big bully!' Rhys shouted, hoping the slime wasn't harmful as Gwen pulled herself up out of it. It swung back towards him and hawed loudly at him, heaving its body towards him, aiming giant gobs of slimy spit at him.

'Oh hell,' he said, running away, letting it chase after him, trying to weave and avoid the projectiles.

'Stop running, Rhys!' Jack yelled, watching as Ianto tried to get closer, having to slip and slide through the thick trail of goop being left in its wake. He finally got there and shoved the needle in, receiving another haw of annoyance from the creature. Its tail flicked powerfully and knocked over both he and Gwen together, the needle dropping into the deep pool of slime, sinking beneath the surface.

Jack watched on helplessly as the pair of them scrambled around searching for it in the dark and in the sludge. The creature was starting to get groggy but still awake enough to know that it was being attacked, and that the two things behind it were responsible. All it had to do was to lift its tail up and it could swat them both, crushing them completely.

'Jack, do something!' Rhys yelled, seeing what was about to happen.

Jack quickly threw the cannister at Rhys and leapt forward, grabbing the side of its large flipper and clambering up on top of it, gripping the stray hairs on its body to pull himself up.

'Pick on someone your own size,' he said, as it rocked and rolled underneath him, like some wild rodeo ride.

Rhys ran over to help the others, but tripped in the slime, landing face first into it. He landed on something else as well, feeling a long metal rod underneath him - the syringe. He gripped it and heaved it up, just as Gwen and Ianto were finally back on their feet, offering him a hand each to help him up.

'I've got it,' he cried.

Ianto yanked it from his hand, quickly trying to rub off the slippery slime with his jacket. A few moments later he'd filled it with the cannister Rhys had tucked in his pocket from earlier.

'Jack! Heads up!' he yelled, lofting it high in the air, where Jack miraculously managed to catch it, one-handed, whilst still hanging on to his bucking bull with the other. He wasted no time plunging it in, riding out the swaying of the creature as it finally came to rest in its own pool of goo.

Jack slowly climbed down, landing knee deep in a pool of murky sludge, before traipsing his way back over to the rest of the team, all of whom were covered head to toe in the stuff, and smelling like a garbage tip.

'Perhaps an academic point for later,' Ianto began, 'but I'm thinking that maybe nets wasn't such a bad idea after all. Another suit gone to God,' he muttered, looking disdainfully down at what was left of his attire, covered in mess.

'At least it's out for the count. I was beginning to worry that the last batch wasn't going to be enough.'

Jack was about to make a suggestion that Gwen and Rhys head back to pick up a van to load their newest captive, whilst he and Ianto baby sat their sleeping giant, when his wrist strap started bleeping madly.

'Rift alert,' Gwen announced.

'Oh, don't tell me another one is coming through,' Rhys cried.

Then, in a flash of light, the creature was gone.

'Uh, what just happened?' Ianto asked, looking around confused.

Jack frowned, checking the readings.

'Huh, never done that before,' he said.

'Done what?'

'Inverse rift charge.'

'Isn't that the same as a negative spike?'

'Not exactly,' he replied. 'A negative spike might take you anywhere. As inverse charge puts you right back where you left off. Didn't think the rift was stable enough for that, not without a rift machine to curb its wayward tendencies.'

Jack's strap beeped again, and the rest of them cringed and waited for the rift to suck them up as well. Instead, nothing happened.

'It's a message,' Jack said, studying it, and translating it in his head as he read it out aloud.

"Our sincerest apologies for any inconvenience caused by our malfunctioning fauna transportation unit. Regards, the Optalican Intergalactic Zoological Preservation Society. P.S. Thank you for sedating it. These things are a bloody nightmare!"

Three faces stared back at him, perplexed.

'Did we just capture an inmate from an alien petting zoo?' Ianto asked.

'Looks that way.'

'Well,' he huffed. 'They could have at least taken the slime with them.'

'I guess beggars can't be choosers. At last we don't have to figure out how to send it back now.'

'I don't think I've ever felt so disgusting in all my life,' Rhys moaned.

'There's a hot shower back at the hub with your name on it,' Jack offered.

Rhys grimaced. 'Think I'll pass.'

Jack laughed, grinning. 'Ianto?'

'I'm all in. In fact, I'm even willing to share it,' he said grinning back. 'There's probably going to be a few hard to reach spots I'll need a hand with.'

'And they say grime doesn't pay.'

Comments

[bk_forever]

Heehee! I love that the zoo retrieved their specimen, but there's still an awful lot of slime to clean up. Ianto really needs a slime-dissolving spray that just melts the stuff into harmless elements that can be washed down the drain.