Torchwood: Fanfic: Keeping it together

[m_findlow]

Title: Keeping it together
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Owen, Ianto
Author: m_findlow
Rating: M (language)
Length: 1,040 words
Content notes: Spoilers for Episodes 1.12 and 1.13
Author notes: Written for badly_knitted's prompt "Any, any, with their backs against the wall" at fic_promptly
Summary: Things are bad, but Owen knows they have to hold it together if they're going to get through it.

'Incoming!' Owen yelled out as a warning to Ianto. He stepped aside just moments before Owen bustled through the door, shoving a dazed weevil in front of him. It staggered clumsily, drugged and with a dark hood over its head. Even though Owen was shorter than it by a good foot at least, it was hardly a match for him in its current state. It had no option but to comply with the pushing and shoving as Owen directed it blindly down into the depths of the hub.

Without being asked, Ianto pressed the button on the wall and the cell door beeped open, the perspex door swinging in.

Owen shoved the creature inside and tugged off the hood in the same action. In the two seconds of confusion caused by the sudden assault of light, Owen deftly stepped backwards and out of the cell, before Ianto palmed the button and sealed the cell door shut once more. Even without the hood, the weevil took a few minutes to come to its senses, still reeling from the face full of weevil spray sedative, and taking in its surrounds. It paused before the door, squatting slightly and hunched over, growling like they almost always did when voicing their displeasure.

As it began to growl, a symphony of other weevils joined its chorus of keening sounds, reverberating around the stone walls. It was a thoroughly haunting sound that sent a cold shiver down Owen's spine. He could tell from the way Ianto tensed that it affected him the same way.

'Great,' Ianto muttered. 'Just when I'd finally gotten them all to shut up for five minutes. They were giving me a headache.'

Owen listened to the sound. It seemed to come from all around them, above and below and pressing in from each side. He looked down the corridor, seeing each cell door tightly shut, but movements just beyond the clear perspex doors, indicating they contained weevils. 'Are we?' he asked, afraid to articulate the rest of the question.

Ianto set his hands on his hips, surveying the situation. 'Yep. That was the last one.'

'Shit,' Owen cursed. 'All of them full up?' He wondered if asking the same question another way might give him a different answer. It couldn't possibly be that bad, could it?

'Apart from the ones below sub-basment nine,' Ianto replied.

'We've never used those,' Owen said. They'd never had to. Eights cells to a vault and nine floors of vaults. He did the math. Seventy two weevils contained within their cells. They'd never had more than a half dozen locked up in all the time he'd been here. Now Ianto was telling him they'd reached operational capacity.

'I know,' Ianto said. 'I've already asked Jack about opening up the lower levels. There's weevils running amok around the city and I don't even have anywhere prepared for putting them. I never thought things could get this bad.'

'You worry about getting those cells activated. Tosh and I will head out and round up as many weevils as we can.'

Weevils didn't normally play up like this. They liked to keep to themselves, nesting in clusters in the city's sewers. Even when things were bad, a storm that flooded the underground network of pipes, unexpected heatwaves that turned the sewers into a sauna, hell, even that time they'd had the earthquake, the weevils had never hit the city streets in these numbers. It was like every weevil in Cardiff had evacuated, leaving the safety of the underground for sanctuary above ground.

Ianto nodded silently, looking overwhelmed by the prospect of even more weevils. 'Do you still think we should have done it?' he asked. 'All of this is happening because of us. Because of what we did.'

Owen's face hardened. 'I'm not having this conversation, Ianto. You think we should've left them stuck in 1941? Could you have lived with that, knowing we could do something to bring them back and instead let them rot and die there?'

'But the rift...'

'Yeah, we fucked it up,' Owen admitted. 'We only had half the equations to make it work properly. But Tosh is back now and we've got the plans for the rift machine. She'll figure out a way to fix it and stop all these anomalies from slipping through.'

'Jack said we shouldn't mess with it.'

Owen huffed. 'Yeah, well I didn't see Jack trying to stop Tosh from feeding us those equations in the first place. If he hadn't wanted us to try it, he wouldn't have let her leave them somewhere we could find them.'

There was a silent pause before Ianto spoke again. 'Jack says he doesn't know how to fix this.'

Owen clenched his jaw, refraining from saying anything he might regret. He didn't regret what he'd done, opening the rift to save them, even if it had cost him a bullet in the shoulder for his troubles. Ianto didn't really want to stop him. He wanted Jack and Tosh back just as much as the rest of them. He was just too chickenshit to do what had to be done. Now they were all second guessing what they'd done.

Jack was panicking and Jack never panicked. Owen didn't like to admit that it worried him having Jack this worked up about the situation. It was bad, there was no denying it, but they all just needed to calm the fuck down and figure out how to stop it. If they could open up the rift to bring two people back from the past, then surely there was a way to shut it down and send everybody else back. He watched as Ianto swallowed visibly. He was starting to lose it as well. They couldn't afford to lose it now. If he had to be the voice of reason to get them through this, then he would.

'You just focus on getting those cells ready,' Owen ordered. 'We're going to be coming in hot. If we have to lock up every weevil in this bloody city then so be it. And if you see Jack, you tell him to keep his shit together and start working on a way to stop this from getting worse.'

Comments

[bk_forever]

Owen still shouldn't have done it. He didn't know it but he played right into Bilis Manger's hands, manipulated without even realising.

[m-findlow.livejournal.com]

They all got played by Bilis, and even though I know he scratched out part of Tosh's equations, if Jack really didn't want them to use the rift machine he shouldn't have let Tosh leave them any equations to find.

[bk_forever]

Jack hadn't bargained on Bilis finding and scratching out part of the equation I guess. If they'd got the whole thing they probably could have opened the Rift safely.