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amand_rTitle: Leviathan 1/3
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
amand_r
Prompt: Jaws
Characters: Jack, Gwen, Ianto, random OCs
Rating: R for violence
Wordcount: 24,700
Spoilers: You don't have to have seen Jaws. But you should. You really should. All canon through season two of Torchwood is assumed.
Disclaimer: I do not have any rights over Jaws and/or Torchwood, nor can or do I make any money off any fictive enterprises that I might undertake with them. All I have are a handful of Skittles that are all warm in my pocket. Sue me and taste the linty rainbow, people.
Author's Notes: Read it before you go swimming. In Wales. Where it's cold.
Real Author's Notes: Thanks tomisswinterhill and joanwilder for the beta goodness. And to the mods, for patience. alba17, you're beyond deification. Also, I might've played merry cob with maritime authorisation rules, though for the most part, jurisdictions et al are correctly observed. I'm not Tom Clancy. Also, I wrote this to so much techno, I might have given myself an arrhythmia.
Summary: South Wales had everything. Clear skies. Gentle surf. Warm water. People flocked there every summer. No wait, they didn't. That doesn't really matter. It was the perfect feeding ground anyway.
Careless went the Scottish rogues
Full of farmers' food and rest,
Scenting Gustav's bloody gold
Sweden-bound from Norway's west.
Then at once steel arrows flew,
Woods alive with musketball.
First Sinclair went to his death
Shortly, they had slain them all.
(Tempest, 'Sinclair')
The thing about a shark, it's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes. When it comes at you it doesn't
seem to be livin'... until he bites you, and those black eyes roll over white and then... ah then you hear that
terrible high-pitched screamin'. The ocean turns red, and despite all the poundin' and the hollerin' those
sharks come in and... they rip you to pieces. (Peter Benchley and crew, Jaws)
IT'S TUESDAY AFTERNOON, AND NOT REMOTELY SUNNY. IN FACT, IT'S DOWNRIGHT DARK (OH AND HOT):
The sodium lights on the boat were so bright Ianto thought he'd need shades. Jack seemed to think that because the water had no painted lane lines, he could turn the wheel any way he wanted, and for the past fifteen minutes the boat had been making lazy wavering lines. It was rocking with not just the bad weather, but the accumulated effects of the poor steering, and now it listed back and forth perilously. Ianto steadied his hand on the edge of the boat, flipped another scoopful of fish parts and blood over the side and closed his eyes, resisting the urge to vomit.
"You keep doing that," he muttered, "and I'll make you come down here and shovel some of this shite."
Jack's coat billowed about him as he worked the wheel at the top of the pilothouse with one arm. "Ianto! Starboard side!"
Ianto looked aft.
"No no! Starboard! Look right!"
Ianto glanced toward the water just in time to see it shoot up from the waves, crest and submerge back into the water. He dropped the scoop in the bucket and stumbled backwards, moving his galoshed feet until his back hit the wall of the main cabin.
"Fuck," he mumbled. "We're gonna need a bigger boat."
"Hey Ianto!" Jack called over the wind, his voice almost chipper. "I think we're gonna need a bigger boat, yeah?"
A WEEK BEFORE, A TUESDAY EVENING, IN FACT, SLIGHTLY CHILLY FOR SUMMER:
What he hated most about pulling was the actual pulling part. Drunk birds stumbling up to his flat, or letting him into their flat, or the time before that when he had to chat them up and look like he cared about a) their problems, b) anything they liked or didn't like aside from a drink preference or c) anything remotely personal about them, such as job, friends, etc.
The beach fire and piss-party was supposed to be an easy way in, but the girl –Jennifer? Ginny? Ginevra, no that was a Harry Potter bint—wanted to tell him about her ex-boyfriend while she downed the shite Irn-Bru and rum someone had made in a plastic jug and dragged out into the sand. On one hand that meant that she was on the rebound. On the other hand it meant that he had to work to get any, like a fucking monkey peeling a banana.
Maybe she'd be really grateful.
But now, he was almost in there, and she had wanted to go off somewhere private. She had been swaying, and he had had too much of that fucking rum, too, and so she ran down the beach, pulling off her top, and he could feel himself plodding along behind her to keep up, like his cock was a goddamn divining rod, pointing: this way—pussy.
Ginn..nnunvana whatever ran further away, her bra gone and pants peeling when she stopped for a split second so that he could catch up. Just these little knickers. Not a thong, but meh, he'd live.
"Come on, then!"
The water was fucking cold, and what did she think this was? The fucking Cote d'Azur? He stood on the rocks with his feet almost in and looked for her, but it was too dark to see anyway. There was no way he was going in that fucking swamp, no matter how summer it was supposed to be.
"I'm starkers! It's nice."
He liked water sex. It made lifting the birds easier. But his fingers didn't want to work, and he plunked down on the rocky beach and tried again to pull one trainer off to no avail. The laces were all scrotty and tangled and he couldn't pull hard enough to get them off and—he fell over onto the rocks and stared at the sky. There were billions of stars. He was pissed.
He could hear Ginninniny splashing in the water and raised a hand to get up, but his body felt heavy. He was just going to lie here for a while and sleep. Well, close his eyes. Charge his prick for action. She'd come out of the water all wet and shivering, and he'd fuck the heat right back into her. He'd never fucked cold pussy before. Huh.
There was a noise from out in the water, sounded like gulls or screaming. Were there gulls this late at night? Did seagulls ever sleep? Come to think of it, where did seagulls sleep?
He was still sort of thinking about that and what it would be like to screw Ginny's icy cunt when the thing came out of the water and just…took him away.
WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, DAMP; GOOD WEATHER FOR A CUPPA. ALAS:
"Ianto! Just the man I wanted to see!" Jack called as Ianto ran across the car park. "And the lovely Mrs. Williams! Come on down!" Gwen peered out at him from under a drenched newspaper as she approached from the opposite direction. Only Jack looked remotely dry, shoulders square and gait loose as he strolled along the front of the building under a giant black umbrella that read "Torchwood" down the paneling in red letters.
"It's not Mrs. Williams," she told Jack for the millionth time as they entered the side door to the police station, the one closer to the morgue.
Jack collapsed the umbrella, handed it to Ianto and watched with some amusement as he hung the hook handle over his arm. "I know, I just hope that we can get you in a catsuit and Ianto in a bowler hat and the two of you can fight crime."
"We're perfectly capable of doing that without the catsuit and bowler," Ianto sniped, and Gwen hit Jack in the chest with her newspaper, leaving a wet black ink smear down the front of his blue button-down. Jack's lips twitched, but he didn't say anything. "Though if Gwen really wants the catsuit," Ianto capitulated as they strolled the hallways, looking for the entrance to the port mortem rooms. "Far be it from me to protest her fashion decisions." With that he earned his own bad dog smack, albeit a black smudge on a black coat was rather futile.
Jack took the newspaper and tossed it in the bin as they passed. "Right. Cult TV jokes later," he admonished, as if hadn't started it. "For now, let's go see what happens when a killer shark prowls the coastal waters."
Gwen cocked her head as he held the door for her. "A shark."
Ianto nodded and walked through the door past Jack, just a little too close. There was the shadow of something on his arse. Oh hello there, Jack. It was going to be one of those days, where they sort of almost perhaps touched until it drove them crazy and they ended up shagging in the archives.
Ianto liked those days.
Jack raised an eyebrow, and it had nothing to do with aquatic life. "No," he said distractedly to Gwen, "not really. I just wanted to say that." He shoved his hands in his pockets now that they were standing in the small arena that held the open litters waiting for drawers. The morgue must not have been full because they were all empty. Or maybe zombies. Ianto reached to his arm and wrapped his fingers around the cane of the umbrella.
"Oh, hello," came a voice before a head popped into view from one of the litters. The head was attached to shoulders, which were attached to a scrawny chest and the tall form of Vladimir Kotch, one of the Medical Examiners attached to the police force. Ianto wasn't sure where the man hailed from, but with a name like Vladimir, it certainly wasn't Cardiff. Or maybe yes, the world was becoming more global, the man could have been born and raised in Splott, for all Ianto knew.
Jack liked Vladimir, but then again, Jack tended to like anyone. Then there were the people that Jack really liked, of which Vladimir was not one.
Gwen liked Vladimir, whose affection for her would have been puppy-like if it hadn't been for the fact that he respected the ring, as Jack called it. Instead of something creepy, Vladimir always looked at Gwen with a mixture of admiration and respect.
"Vlad the Embalmer," Jack said, sticking his hands in his pockets and rocking back and forth. "I hear you have some interesting things for us down here."
Vlad grinned and pulled the gloves from his hands, tossing them in a nearby bin marked 'Biohazard'. Ianto hung his umbrella on the coat tree by the door and clasped his hands. He didn't like touching anything in the morgue unless he was gloved, even if it was by accident. It was unsanitary.
"My boss says that this is a boating accident," Vlad said, turning to wash his hands in the sink. But you know me," he glanced at them over his shoulder, "I see monsters everywhere."
Ianto had always thought that Vladimir was a loose cannon. He didn't like the idea that there were people out there who knew what he did, what any of them did, enough that if Vlad had felt like selling their stories to the press, he…well he'd sound like a nutter, but still. Jack always waved his hands and said that Vlad was harmless, cute, adorable, and more importantly, useful. Vlad liked being in on the secret, and that was enough for him. Gwen was pleased enough that he deferred to her when most of the police didn't bother, a fact that stuck in Gwen's craw.
Vlad opened the drawer and pulled the metal tray from the recesses. Ianto pulled on the cautionary gloves and watched as Jack and Gwen did the same. Jack generally didn't touch things; Gwen was the toucher, but if Jack was willing to be handling body parts then he was probably willing to let Gwen sit this one out, should she want to. Ianto wedged his fingertips in between his fingers, tightening the snug fit.
The morgue might have unsettled him, but he was Torchwood's body man (all jokes about being Jack's body man aside), and that meant that he got to dispose, arrange, incinerate and occasionally dismantle bodies in the line of duty. That didn't mean that he didn't still feel a little queasy when confronted with a person who fit into a washing up bowl.
"Tissue decay indicates that time of death was less than twenty-four hours ago. The, uh, flesh that we do have is, uhm, choppy. Chunky?" He glanced at Gwen, who looked away to study the prerequisite lab skeleton. "Yeah, well, this is what they brought in." He pulled the plastic cover from the basin, a plastic tub about a half-foot high and two feet long. Jack made a face, but then peered into the basin, his face hovering as far away as he could be and still look.
Jack whistled. "Whoa there, that's nasty."
Vlad shrugged and crossed his arms, tucking his gloveless hands into his underarms. "Yeah. I figure, it's got to be some sort of beastie. The cutting is too ragged to be a boat propeller, but you know the boss."
Ianto made a face. Examiner Wemble was not their favorite person in the world to deal with. Too smart to be hoodwinked easily, and possibly immune to retcon, Ianto was fairly sure that they would have hired her to take Owen's place if she wasn't so very rule-bound. Ianto was all for rules, but even he recognized that they had to be broken sometimes. Torchwood just had fewer, but more important rules to break.
In any case, Examiner Wemble, AKA 'the boss', was one of those people who staunchly refused to believe that 'The Truth Was Out There.' Sometimes Ianto wanted to hire her just so that he could put her down in the observation cells to watch Janet for a while, see what she thought about The Truth then.
Until they managed to officially work around her, Vlad was their go-to guy at the morgue.
"Give us a minute," Jack said, reaching out one hand to poke the contents of the basin.
Vlad raised his hands in a surrender gesture. "Hey, I get it. Sure. Just don't steal anything, all right?"
Ianto rolled his eyes. "We'll try to keep our fingers away from the tongue depressors." As Vlad gave him a weak smile and shuffled off to the back room, Jack cocked his head and grinned.
"Tongue depressors, huh?"
"Body, Jack," Gwen mumbled.
"Bodies," Jack said with a bit more emphasis than Ianto would have liked, a little waggle to his eyebrows that seemed wholly inappropriate when standing above a bucket of person, or rather, people.
Gwen inched forward, her hands still gripping the edge of the table. "Really?" Her hair swung in her face and Ianto couldn't read her eyes.
"Also? This was no boating accident," Jack said, lifting part of an arm from the basin and peering dangerously close at the strips of meat that hung from the bone. Ianto told himself that if he called it meat, then he could get through the autopsy without booting. Gwen wasn't doing much better, but at least she hadn't thrown up on a body in the past year.
Sometimes Ianto even missed Owen taking the piss about it.
Gwen leant forward but something hit her nose and she pulled back violently. Ianto reached out a hand to steady the small of her back. "May I have a glass of water, please?"
The smell hit Ianto then, acrid, like puke, like rotting seaweed, like beef mince gone off. He didn't want to know what all he was looking at, now that he could smell it.
Jack let Ianto get Gwen and himself a glass of water before he stepped back to the basin filled with…whatever that was. "Look at this." He lowered the arm and pulled out what most assuredly were thumbs. One of them was still attached to the meat of the palm and an index finger. Ianto wondered why people ever thought severed hands were funny, even as fancy dress on Halloween. Once you saw the real thing, it just wasn't amusing anymore. Well, unless you were Owen.
Again with the Owen; what was with him today?
"Two right thumbs, and one of them is dressed to go out on the town." He turned the thumb so that Gwen and Ianto could see the bright blue nail polish with glitter stars on it.
Ianto wondered who she was, who they were. They obviously had fingerprints, or thumbprints, but that wasn't always helpful. He'd get the prints from Vlad and take them back to the Hub. If they had ever been printed for anything in the world, Ianto could find them.
Jack replaced the thumbs and arm back into the basin, manhandled what looked like the left side of a left foot and then put everything back in the basin, covering it. "Neither one of you wanted to…?"
Gwen set her glass down on the desk next to her. "No, thank you," she said in a soft voice, her hand still covering her mouth.
The drawer slid back into the vault, and the door shut on it with a refrigerated vwip seal sound. Jack peeled off his gloves and stepped back. Ianto took the gloves from his fingers and noted that he hadn't even touched anything until now. At least Gwen had touched the table.
"So if it wasn't a boat," Gwen said, tossing her gloves in the bin with her empty paper cup. Ianto swallowed his water to cover the fact that he was still queasy from the odour, and blinked at the wordless exchange between Jack and Gwen, an exchange that he read as Gwen demanding answers and Jack being unwilling to provide them (yet. If he even had them.).
"We have to close the beaches," Jack said, then turned and barreled out of the room, leaving them standing in the deserted morgue.
Ianto blinked at Gwen. "He does know this is Wales, right?"
WEDNESDAY EVENING, OUTRIGHT WET:
"Oh I might have been transferred here last month, but I know all about you, Harkness," Colonel Storr said from the speakerphone. "Most recently, you called UNIT out for a series of mutilations and it turned out that a bunch of errant gang members were exploring things they'd seen in the films?" Ianto cocked his head at that—Storr said it like 'fill-ems', an accent hitch that he thought was rather endearing.
Storr was anything but endearing, especially right now. And he was right and wrong. They had called UNIT, but that had been because they needed about seventeen more men to patrol, and the police had just rolled their eyes and said something about allocation of resources.
Come to think of it, the police were doing a lot of sideskirting, they had been since, well since Gray had blown the city up. Not that they knew that, but Jack had gone easy on them, not demanding resources, nor demanding things that he used to demand (respect, mostly), possibly out of some twisted sense of guilt. In any case, the police scented the blood in the water, and they took the inch Jack had given them and made it a foot.
"They were hopped up on alien drugs!" Jack said loudly, a little too loudly. Gwen winced and mouthed the words, 'Indoor voice', and Ianto restrained a smile. "You were there, you saw it!"
"I don't know what I saw—"
"One of them put his fist through the skull of a police horse."
"I think we have enough to worry about with the Earth drugs, Captain," Storr sighed. "That doesn't change the fact that you've been known to exaggerate from time to time."
Jack's mouth worked and his jaw ground in the seconds of silence in which he was most assuredly trying to craft a response. Ianto sat on the edge of the desk and raised an eyebrow at the coffee mug in his hand. "I assure you, I am not exaggerating. You have to send some people out here. You have to tell the coast guard that they need to close out the waters—"
"For one body?"
Jack took the mug from Ianto and shrugged. "You mean the two bodies we saw this morning that fit in a chip basket? Those bodies? Yeah, them." He sipped from his coffee. "I'm telling you that something is in the waters off South Wales, and until it's found, these bits and bobs of human flesh are gonna keep washing up and scaring everyone along the Bristol—"
There was an audible sigh, like the deflating of a balloon, and for a second Ianto thought Jack's visceral imagery had struck a chord.
Not so much. "I sympathise that you want to take a proactive stance on…whatever it is that you have out there, but you have to understand that we're stretched thin. It's the height of the environmental summit, and UNIT is overworked with security. There's all that Dalek damage to deal with—"
Jack rolled his eyes and Ianto didn't want to point out to him that there had, in fact, been a lot of damage from the Dalek invasion. In fact, UNIT's numbers had been cut in half.
"At least take the Valiant over the water here, run some infrared—"
"The Valiant is over Copenhagen," Storr said, audibly irritated, or more irritated than he was before. Maybe he was making an effort. "At the environmental talks. We're not pulling out the model of the UN's green-powered vehicular initiative just so that you can wheel it about like—"
"Wheel. It. About?" Jack's voice was cold and crusting over with ice. Ianto winced and exchanged a worried glance with Gwen. Jack had a sensitive spot about the Valiant. He didn't even like to know when it was scheduled to fly over Cardiff, and that he would even ask for it to be deployed was a tiny signal to Ianto as to the gravity of the matter.
"I'm afraid that you're going to have to have more than a box full of possible boating accident victims before UNIT can even begin to think about authorising the assignment of personnel."
Something that Jack saw in those bodies scared him, it was writ across his face when he stared at the speakerphone. "Tell me, how many more bodies do I need before you decide to help? Three? Eight? Baker's dozen?" He crossed his arms. How long before this thing capsizes a ferry—"
"Well, if it does, you'll be sure to call," Storr drawled. "Look Harkness, we'll keep the request on the table, but I can't go to my superior officers with what you gave me."
Jack shrugged, and the coffee mug dangling precariously from his fingers sloshed lukewarm Guatemala Antigua all over his side. Ianto rolled his eyes and threw a wad of serviettes at Jack while Gwen sat back in her chair. "All right. Fair enough." He jammed the button on the phone with his finger and disconnected the call. "That went well," he said brightly, holding out his mug so that Ianto could refill it.
"Do you really think that was wise?" Gwen asked. She snapped a digestive in half and licked the broken edge. "Now it will be harder to bring him in later."
"Oh, that was never going to be easy. Storr has the willpower of a mule on strike." Jack sipped from his coffee and looked at Ianto blankly before raising a finger and pointing at Gwen. "I want you to make a note. This is one of those things that is going to come back to bite everyone on the arse." And then to Ianto, "Prep an 'I Told You So' bouquet for the Colonel."
Ianto smirked, but it was wan. "A rose for every body, then?" The joke remained as flat as ever.
Gwen shuddered. "We could do it ourselves."
Jack glanced at her and saluted her. "I admire your perspicacity, PC Cooper, but we are three and that's hundreds of miles of water."
"And what are we looking for?" Ianto settled in one of the free chairs and crossed his legs at the ankles. "I like to believe that my faith in you is sacrosanct, but Jack," he paused, trying to figure out how to say it without sounding as if he questioned Jack's reaction. "It's two chewed up bodies." He shrugged. "Sad, I'll warrant but—"
Jack set his mug down and stared at the glass wall in front of him. "There'll be more."
"How do you know?"
Jack shrugged. "I don't." That toothy smile, frosted with doubt. "But there will be."
FRIDAY MORNING, THE SUN AND THE SURF AND OH THE BLISS. A NICE DAY SUR LA PLAGE:
Ianto found Jack standing on the Quay, looking out at the water with a pair of binoculars.
"Lemme guess," Ianto said, leaning on the rail and squinting out to sea. "White whale. Goes by the name of Moby Dick."
Jack paused, lowered the binoculars, and shook his head. "Too easy. Besides I was going to make a peg leg joke."
Ianto choked back a response about 'wood' and handed Jack the iced coffee. So he would never love Starbucks, but they made the iced coffee for him, and that was a plus (He might have also asked for hazelnut syrup, but he'd only admit it under duress, and he'd use the heat as an excuse.).
Ianto took the lid off the coffee cup and sipped; he was okay with syrup, but he'd be damned if he were going to drink from a straw. Jack let the binoculars hang from the strap around his neck and drank his coffee from his straw. Jack Harkness: secure in his manhood.
"You know, the bodies were in Barry, so the odds that we'll see our beastie here in the Bay are—"
"Just as likely as they'll be in Barry," Jack said, waving a hand and leaning on the rail. "Or Sully, or Porthkerry or any other place along the Channel." He squinted and frowned. "There's something out there. I can feel it in my bones."
Ianto wondered where Gwen was. He glanced up at the CCTV camera and winked. The camera wasn't a stationary one, and it bobbed up and down. Oh, hello, Gwen.
The wind picked up off the water and carried a bit of spray. Ianto leant against the railing and tilted his face to the sun. He was up here in shirtsleeves, no jacket, and though it didn't raise any eyebrows, to him, it felt as if he were topless. Even the waistcoat gone, otherwise his sweat would have painted the shirt directly under it a distinctly darker shade of blue than it had started life this morning.
"What do you think it is, Jack? You know, what are your bones telling you?"
"It's telling me that all the ducks are gone." Jack sipped his drink and cocked his head. "Did they put vanilla in this?"
"Caramel," Ianto replied distractedly, looking for the ducks and geese that usually kept close to the stone walls of the harbour so as to benefit from the food detritus of humans: they were gone. Not one. Even the gulls were roosted on the railings, as if they didn't want to sit and float out on the tide like they normally did. It also explained why they seemed unusually hungry.
"Hrng."
Rattle of ice in plastic cups. Three kids dancing on the dock for the water taxi. Gwen was right—it was a nice day and he was glad that she'd shoved him up the stairs to the door. The sun was just bright enough that he could have used some sunglasses. Pity he hadn't any; he made a mental list of things he should own but did not: sunglasses, a professional shoe polishing kit, a metric tonne of Scotchguard, a PSP. Games for said PSP. A case for PSP. An extra three hours a day to play PSP.
Sunglasses. He could do something about that one. Someday.
There was a shriek and they whipped their heads around to see a girl running down the Quay, a determined gull in pursuit. She threw whatever it was that she'd been eating at the gull and bolted. Jack barked a laugh and Ianto his his smile behind his cup.
"Well, if that's the worst we see today it—"
Off in the bay out on the water, there was another shriek and they glanced out in time to see a yellow WaterBus, about a hundred yards off the docks, bend in half, as if someone had pulled a line in the water and folded the boat. The railings of the ship ground with a metal noise and the stern flipped with a crunching sound before the whole boat sank—no, was yanked—under the water. Jack dropped his coffee and bolted for the stairs, vaulting the railing instead of going down the last five.
It was at that moment that the boat shot out of the water like an air-filled balloon would when held under the surface. It flew into the air, parts of it flying in high arcs, more than one person—Ianto could see a body flailing like a licorice whip out one of the semi-crushed windows of the flattened pilot house. The boat flipped over in the air, a few crunching somersaults, and then landed in the water like the world's largest cannonball.
Ianto handed his cup to a passing tourist without explanation, ran down the steps at a brisk clip, and wondered if they were going to be able to—
Jack jumped on the second WaterBus still moored to the dock, ordered the driver out and was already throttling the engine when Ianto jumped on the edge, nearly falling back into the water as the boat surged forward. He grabbed onto one of the awning supports and fished in his trouser pocket for his commlink, fitting it in his ear. Over the sounds of the few people screaming out in the water, Gwen was already calling his name.
"Ianto? Ianto?"
"Gwen, we're on the way out, what can—"
"No rift spike, no rift activity at all, except for some very minimal residual traces out in the bay."
The screaming tapered as they approached, as if those left alive and floundering in the water were disappearing like guttering flames in the wind.
Ianto watched Jack yank on the throttle and swing the wheel about in what he would admit was a bit of an overly dramatic manner. It occurred to him that Captain Jack was…captaining, but he saved that nugget for later, when they weren't about to possibly confront a giant sea monster that left bits of people to wash up on the shore.
The last screaming voice, a man, waving his arms in the water at their boat, was cut off as he was pulled violently under. Ianto glanced about for life vests, then realised that if this thing was going to take their boat like it had the first WaterBus, there was nothing he could do to stop it. Sobering. His hands twitched for the comforting ineffectiveness of the stun gun.
The taxi slalomed as Jack tried to take her out in a wide turn, almost overshooting the site. The sides of their vessel thunked when they passed the area where the boat had been sucked under water. Ianto scanned the surface for bodies, people, and also, he wasn't ashamed to admit it, tentacles or arms, or whatever it could have been that could collapse a WaterBus like closing a briefcase.
"So—did you see anything?"
"No," Gwen sighed, and he understood. The cameras simply weren't advanced enough to focus that far off in the water. He added better cameras to his list of things he wanted. "But the police are on their way. Lots of chatter."
"Gwen," Jack said finally, as the boat swung while he tried to steer and fit his earpiece in at the same time. "Gwen, radio the harbour master and tell him to lock it down. Then call the coast guard and tell them we need a salvage crew." A long pause as Jack brought the boat around for another pass at the wreckage. "And call UNIT and tell them at least I didn’t send them flowers."
Gwen made a noise that sounded like assent, but Ianto was too busy cataloguing the items that passed by his side of the boat. He should be going to the front to ask Jack what he wanted to do, but he couldn't. There: a coffee cup, here: a life preserver, farther away, a straw tourist bag that proclaimed, 'Cardiff!"
"Ianto, keep an eye out!" Jack shouted, though he didn't need to because the comms were still on. He didn't need to say what he was supposed to be keeping an eye out for, though he should have: monsters, survivors, bodies, et cetera, actually. Jack parked the boat in the wreckage, cutting the engine. The boat glided through the water before coming to a relative halt, as much as any boat could in a moving body of water. He left the wheel and exited the pilothouse on the other side of the craft.
"Ianto," Gwen whispered, "what do you see?"
Ianto peered over the railing at the waves below, eyes scanning the wreckage for anything. A plastic doll floated on the current, blonde curls drenched and waving as it drifted towards him as if pulled by a magnet. His eyes followed it when it bounced off the hull of the boat and flipped, sinking as water filled the hollow head, and the hair slid away, on its way to the bay floor.
SATURDAY, SUNNY AND OVERWHELMINGLY CHEERFUL, IF YOU THINK RED CAPS ARE CHEERFUL:
The Quay and marina were filled with trucks and boats, some of them military, some of them UNIT, some of them Heddlu. None of them Torchwood, Ianto noted sadly. It was just as well, he decided as he stood in front of the Norwegian church and contemplated simply not going to work today. He hated the water, ironic for someone who lived so close to it.
Jack was nowhere in sight, which was odd, because Ianto had expected him to be all over the place like…Jack interfering in military business. He was good at that. Maybe he was going to leave it to Gwen, who liked to use every opportunity presented to her to liaise with police and military, something with which she said she wanted practise. It was also a good way to grease some wheels, wheels that Jack often made un…greased.
He walked down the Quay a little, then doubled back and sat on the stone ledge framing the grassed area between the church and the water railing, and thought about the Milka bar in his office drawer. He also thought about some vegetarian chili. And then he thought about maybe going down to pull rank on a few low-level UNIT officers, just for kicks (It was amazing what he could get a Lieutenant to do if he scowled and said, 'Torchwood'. He might even be able to get them to load all that debris from the sub-basement to the incinerator. It was taking him ages at his pace of three runs a day.).
His comm crackled to life. "Ianto," Gwen said, "you have to get down here. They're loading a sonic disrupter onto one of these boats."
He stood then, eyes trying to pick out the boat. It would be a UNIT craft. "Where's Jack?"
Gwen sighed. "He's arguing with the harbour master about letting civilians out on hunting yachts."
Ianto's pace doublestepped. "They are actually going to discuss this?" As he approached, Ianto watched a small two-man motorboat take off from the jetty, loaded with about ten men. "They're all going to die."
Gwen grunted and he heard her cover the mic with her hand as she yelled. Her voice had that loud 'POLICE CONSTABLE' air to it, and he smiled. You could take The Man out of the police, but you couldn't take the police out of The Man. Or something.
"Do not move one more step, sir. That is not cleared ordinance." Ianto increased his pace until he was jogging, catching the eye of a few constables until they saw his glaring green badge. He liked the green badge. He and Jack had made them once as a sign of, 'BACK OFF—TORCHWOOD' for crime scenes, and had successfully trained all the local Cardiff police to respond to it by averting their eyes and never asking them what they were doing anywhere. Occasionally they asked if Ianto wanted coffee. He never did.
Gwen turned away from a disgruntled civilian who had parked his gamefisher johnboat on the edge of the dock, between a police cruiser and a UNIT Ocean Yacht patroller. Ianto's eyes widened when he saw what she cradled in her arms.
"Is this," he paused when she gingerly handed the red sticks to him. "Is this dynamite?" He'd never actually ever seen dynamite before. Some childish part of his heart raced and wanted to go out with the man and throw a few sticks.
No, of course not. Adult.
Most of the civilian boats had taken off, despite Jack's screaming and flailing arms, which Ianto could see from down here. Up in the office, Jack was stabbing fingers out at the water and shouting, and even as he did so, the last boat launched and they were left with a few decommissioned UNIT vessels that were there just to salvage things. The coast guard had authorised the wet lease of a few Sikorskys to clean up the creature when, not if, they brought it in. Ianto figured they thought they'd need the 'copter for recovery of a carcass large enough to squeeze a WaterBus like a snapdragon.
Ianto stood on the dock next to Gwen, arms full of dynamite, and felt vaguely like a cartoon character. Jack slammed the flimsy wooden door to the Harbour master's office and trotted down the steps to join them.
The last of the boats disappeared on the horizon, which wasn't hard, because the sun was blinding again.
Gwen sighed. "They're all mad."
Jack crossed his arms. "I'll say. A dozen pleasure crews manned by a bunch of amateur weekend fishermen, three decommissioned UNIT cruisers with no ordinance heavier than a few bad Saiga 12s, two police pandaboats as cuddly as pandas themselves, and two coast guard boats off the port, ready to recover." Jack laughed and Ianto considered the mental image of a panda floating out in the ocean, Heddlu Neighbor Totoro. He stopped before he created a dopey music theme song for it.
One of the families from the WaterBus had put up a 12 thousand pound reward for the capture of the creature, and that was being matched by a local ferry service that hadn't wanted to see their business dry out while the terror that stalked the bay…stalked the bay.
The downside was that every Rhys, Bran and Daffyd with a boat had decided that he was the bloody Crocodile Hunter, and the harbour master, urged by the ferry owners, had allowed them to dock in the arena. The police hadn't been happy, but they had figured, Ianto understood from what he had overheard, that the civilians would go out, have a pleasure cruise, and then just return empty-handed. In fact, the current scuttlebutt down at Heddlu headquarters was that the WaterBus accident had been a faulty engine explosion and subsequent cover-up.
Ianto almost wished that it were that easy to plant a cover story. Whenever he needed people to believe one, they never did, but when he would prefer that they take him seriously, their sense of cover-up came into play.
"UNIT had a sonic disrupter," Gwen told him, turning her head to look at his face and then Ianto's.
Jack laughed. "Can't fire it under water. Refraction. Nice, guys." He shoved his hands in his pockets.
There was a burst of seagulls off the harbour master's roof, flying overhead and coming to land in the water of the bay. Ianto frowned. Something was wrong about that.
Jack wasn't lost, though. "Gulls in the water. It's nowhere around here." He shoved his hands in his pockets. "Let's go back to work. I'm sure we'll hear them screaming from downstairs if they come back with anything good."
Ianto turned to walk next to him, Gwen in the lead, for the information centre. Jack double-taked at his arms. "Is that dynamite?"
THAT SATURDAY AFTERNOON, AS WE HAIL THE CONQUERING HEROES:
It hadn't been screaming as much as the internal sensors on the rift monitors going off that had brought the three of them topside again, alarms that detected traces of residual rift energy. Nothing had come through the rift now, but something that had once come through it was approaching.
Ianto squinted in the afternoon sun. "Ah, look at that."
"That," Jack said, raising his eyebrows as the winch lifted as much of the carcass into the air as it could. The flashing of cameras was blinding, even in the light of day. "Is an Amaldan."
Colonel Storr stood in front of the dead, squid-resembling Amaldan and waved a hand, pointing out the contours of something. Two officers jumped to and reached out to pry open the Amaldan's mouth. It was huge, Ianto had to admit, razor teeth and all. He wasn't particularly upset to see it, now that it was dead.
"Amaldan," Gwen said slowly. "That's not from this planet."
"Too true, Gwennie-me-love, the Amaldan was indigenous to the tropic moons of Quasis, before they were burnt out by a raiding—well, it wasn't pretty." He lifted a thumb in front of him and squinted, as if he was measuring something. "Forty-five."
Ianto watched the UNIT officers drag a tentacle from the water onto the dock so that the press could see the arms that had pulled the ferry under. It was possible, actually. Those tentacles were huge, as wide in diameter as the length of his forearm, and long—they pulled for a solid three minutes before reaching a relatively tapered end. The dock stank with the smell of rotted fish.
"What are you measuring?"
"Bite radius," Jack said airily. "Perspective from here, how many feet away, the size of my thumb multiplied against the proportions of—"
"I'll take your word for it," Ianto said. And then, "Nerd."
Colonel Storr approached them and stopped short, crossing his arms. The press was having a field day behind him, and the two officers explored the Amaldan's large and grisly mouth with metal pokers.
"Well, Harkness, you were right," Storr mumbled. "Far be it from me to not admit when I'm wrong—"
Jack shrugged. "How do you know this is it?"
Storr's brows became a solid line across his forehead. "Excuse me?"
Jack smiled. "Get some of your strapping young men—who look stunning in those little red caps, by the way—to cut that bad boy open. We'll check the contents of the stomachs, plural, and make sure we have the right creature."
Storr glanced back at the Amaldan, as if he were trying to find a physical sign that they'd caught the right thing. "This is the creature," he said, voice painted with uncertainty. "It has to be."
"The waters of Earth are the last great frontier, Colonel," Jack said breezily, and Gwen nudged him when Storr wasn't looking. A UNIT officer bumped into Ianto's shoulder as he hauled cargo nets down the wooden dock.
The Colonel seemed to consider that for a split second before he caught a glimpse of the press again, swarming along the creature, digital cameras working overtime as the officers pulled it from the water. Ianto wondered what they were going to do until he heard the rumble behind him, and understood that hauling lorries were coming across the Plass. He wondered if they'd get past the circular monument he referred to as 'the sphincter of Cardiff' in his head.
"It's a hundred to one chance," Jack said, "hundred to one. Let's just cut her open and—"
Something seemed to resolve in Storr, because he closed the last few feet and grabbed one of Jack's shoulders. "Now see here, Harkness," Storr whispered loudly, "I am not going to cut that thing open and have parts of those people from the ferry spill out all over the dock!"
"Should have thought of that before you invited the press," Jack murmured, eyes still on the Amaldan and its bite radius, no doubt. Ianto shifted from foot to foot and tried to look horrified at the suggestion that Torchwood was willing to display such grisly matters in the light of day.
Storr nodded. "This is the creature. We're done here." And with a nod, he was back to the press, all smiles and attaboys.
Jack shrugged. "Have it your way, Colonel."
The three of them watched as one of the lorries backed up, narrowly missing a WaterBus placard. The press was starting to disperse, and Ianto wanted to be out of the way when one of their wandering eyes caught the three of them, in civilian clothes but green badges, standing to the side and watching the show. Ianto had no urge to be the 'man on the street' in this case (or any case).
Jack didn't want to either. He patted Gwen's shoulder. "Okay then. We're done here."
"Really? So that was it?" Ianto asked as another UNIT soldier almost rammed into him from behind.
Jack shoved his hands in his trouser pockets as they strolled down the pier, away from the press and the din, right back into the Tourist Centre. "Nope."
On to Part Two
Author:
amand_rPrompt: Jaws
Characters: Jack, Gwen, Ianto, random OCs
Rating: R for violence
Wordcount: 24,700
Spoilers: You don't have to have seen Jaws. But you should. You really should. All canon through season two of Torchwood is assumed.
Disclaimer: I do not have any rights over Jaws and/or Torchwood, nor can or do I make any money off any fictive enterprises that I might undertake with them. All I have are a handful of Skittles that are all warm in my pocket. Sue me and taste the linty rainbow, people.
Author's Notes: Read it before you go swimming. In Wales. Where it's cold.
Real Author's Notes: Thanks to
misswinterhill and joanwilder for the beta goodness. And to the mods, for patience. alba17, you're beyond deification. Also, I might've played merry cob with maritime authorisation rules, though for the most part, jurisdictions et al are correctly observed. I'm not Tom Clancy. Also, I wrote this to so much techno, I might have given myself an arrhythmia.Summary: South Wales had everything. Clear skies. Gentle surf. Warm water. People flocked there every summer. No wait, they didn't. That doesn't really matter. It was the perfect feeding ground anyway.
Careless went the Scottish rogues
Full of farmers' food and rest,
Scenting Gustav's bloody gold
Sweden-bound from Norway's west.
Then at once steel arrows flew,
Woods alive with musketball.
First Sinclair went to his death
Shortly, they had slain them all.
(Tempest, 'Sinclair')
The thing about a shark, it's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes. When it comes at you it doesn't
seem to be livin'... until he bites you, and those black eyes roll over white and then... ah then you hear that
terrible high-pitched screamin'. The ocean turns red, and despite all the poundin' and the hollerin' those
sharks come in and... they rip you to pieces. (Peter Benchley and crew, Jaws)
IT'S TUESDAY AFTERNOON, AND NOT REMOTELY SUNNY. IN FACT, IT'S DOWNRIGHT DARK (OH AND HOT):
The sodium lights on the boat were so bright Ianto thought he'd need shades. Jack seemed to think that because the water had no painted lane lines, he could turn the wheel any way he wanted, and for the past fifteen minutes the boat had been making lazy wavering lines. It was rocking with not just the bad weather, but the accumulated effects of the poor steering, and now it listed back and forth perilously. Ianto steadied his hand on the edge of the boat, flipped another scoopful of fish parts and blood over the side and closed his eyes, resisting the urge to vomit.
"You keep doing that," he muttered, "and I'll make you come down here and shovel some of this shite."
Jack's coat billowed about him as he worked the wheel at the top of the pilothouse with one arm. "Ianto! Starboard side!"
Ianto looked aft.
"No no! Starboard! Look right!"
Ianto glanced toward the water just in time to see it shoot up from the waves, crest and submerge back into the water. He dropped the scoop in the bucket and stumbled backwards, moving his galoshed feet until his back hit the wall of the main cabin.
"Fuck," he mumbled. "We're gonna need a bigger boat."
"Hey Ianto!" Jack called over the wind, his voice almost chipper. "I think we're gonna need a bigger boat, yeah?"
A WEEK BEFORE, A TUESDAY EVENING, IN FACT, SLIGHTLY CHILLY FOR SUMMER:
What he hated most about pulling was the actual pulling part. Drunk birds stumbling up to his flat, or letting him into their flat, or the time before that when he had to chat them up and look like he cared about a) their problems, b) anything they liked or didn't like aside from a drink preference or c) anything remotely personal about them, such as job, friends, etc.
The beach fire and piss-party was supposed to be an easy way in, but the girl –Jennifer? Ginny? Ginevra, no that was a Harry Potter bint—wanted to tell him about her ex-boyfriend while she downed the shite Irn-Bru and rum someone had made in a plastic jug and dragged out into the sand. On one hand that meant that she was on the rebound. On the other hand it meant that he had to work to get any, like a fucking monkey peeling a banana.
Maybe she'd be really grateful.
But now, he was almost in there, and she had wanted to go off somewhere private. She had been swaying, and he had had too much of that fucking rum, too, and so she ran down the beach, pulling off her top, and he could feel himself plodding along behind her to keep up, like his cock was a goddamn divining rod, pointing: this way—pussy.
Ginn..nnunvana whatever ran further away, her bra gone and pants peeling when she stopped for a split second so that he could catch up. Just these little knickers. Not a thong, but meh, he'd live.
"Come on, then!"
The water was fucking cold, and what did she think this was? The fucking Cote d'Azur? He stood on the rocks with his feet almost in and looked for her, but it was too dark to see anyway. There was no way he was going in that fucking swamp, no matter how summer it was supposed to be.
"I'm starkers! It's nice."
He liked water sex. It made lifting the birds easier. But his fingers didn't want to work, and he plunked down on the rocky beach and tried again to pull one trainer off to no avail. The laces were all scrotty and tangled and he couldn't pull hard enough to get them off and—he fell over onto the rocks and stared at the sky. There were billions of stars. He was pissed.
He could hear Ginninniny splashing in the water and raised a hand to get up, but his body felt heavy. He was just going to lie here for a while and sleep. Well, close his eyes. Charge his prick for action. She'd come out of the water all wet and shivering, and he'd fuck the heat right back into her. He'd never fucked cold pussy before. Huh.
There was a noise from out in the water, sounded like gulls or screaming. Were there gulls this late at night? Did seagulls ever sleep? Come to think of it, where did seagulls sleep?
He was still sort of thinking about that and what it would be like to screw Ginny's icy cunt when the thing came out of the water and just…took him away.
WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, DAMP; GOOD WEATHER FOR A CUPPA. ALAS:
"Ianto! Just the man I wanted to see!" Jack called as Ianto ran across the car park. "And the lovely Mrs. Williams! Come on down!" Gwen peered out at him from under a drenched newspaper as she approached from the opposite direction. Only Jack looked remotely dry, shoulders square and gait loose as he strolled along the front of the building under a giant black umbrella that read "Torchwood" down the paneling in red letters.
"It's not Mrs. Williams," she told Jack for the millionth time as they entered the side door to the police station, the one closer to the morgue.
Jack collapsed the umbrella, handed it to Ianto and watched with some amusement as he hung the hook handle over his arm. "I know, I just hope that we can get you in a catsuit and Ianto in a bowler hat and the two of you can fight crime."
"We're perfectly capable of doing that without the catsuit and bowler," Ianto sniped, and Gwen hit Jack in the chest with her newspaper, leaving a wet black ink smear down the front of his blue button-down. Jack's lips twitched, but he didn't say anything. "Though if Gwen really wants the catsuit," Ianto capitulated as they strolled the hallways, looking for the entrance to the port mortem rooms. "Far be it from me to protest her fashion decisions." With that he earned his own bad dog smack, albeit a black smudge on a black coat was rather futile.
Jack took the newspaper and tossed it in the bin as they passed. "Right. Cult TV jokes later," he admonished, as if hadn't started it. "For now, let's go see what happens when a killer shark prowls the coastal waters."
Gwen cocked her head as he held the door for her. "A shark."
Ianto nodded and walked through the door past Jack, just a little too close. There was the shadow of something on his arse. Oh hello there, Jack. It was going to be one of those days, where they sort of almost perhaps touched until it drove them crazy and they ended up shagging in the archives.
Ianto liked those days.
Jack raised an eyebrow, and it had nothing to do with aquatic life. "No," he said distractedly to Gwen, "not really. I just wanted to say that." He shoved his hands in his pockets now that they were standing in the small arena that held the open litters waiting for drawers. The morgue must not have been full because they were all empty. Or maybe zombies. Ianto reached to his arm and wrapped his fingers around the cane of the umbrella.
"Oh, hello," came a voice before a head popped into view from one of the litters. The head was attached to shoulders, which were attached to a scrawny chest and the tall form of Vladimir Kotch, one of the Medical Examiners attached to the police force. Ianto wasn't sure where the man hailed from, but with a name like Vladimir, it certainly wasn't Cardiff. Or maybe yes, the world was becoming more global, the man could have been born and raised in Splott, for all Ianto knew.
Jack liked Vladimir, but then again, Jack tended to like anyone. Then there were the people that Jack really liked, of which Vladimir was not one.
Gwen liked Vladimir, whose affection for her would have been puppy-like if it hadn't been for the fact that he respected the ring, as Jack called it. Instead of something creepy, Vladimir always looked at Gwen with a mixture of admiration and respect.
"Vlad the Embalmer," Jack said, sticking his hands in his pockets and rocking back and forth. "I hear you have some interesting things for us down here."
Vlad grinned and pulled the gloves from his hands, tossing them in a nearby bin marked 'Biohazard'. Ianto hung his umbrella on the coat tree by the door and clasped his hands. He didn't like touching anything in the morgue unless he was gloved, even if it was by accident. It was unsanitary.
"My boss says that this is a boating accident," Vlad said, turning to wash his hands in the sink. But you know me," he glanced at them over his shoulder, "I see monsters everywhere."
Ianto had always thought that Vladimir was a loose cannon. He didn't like the idea that there were people out there who knew what he did, what any of them did, enough that if Vlad had felt like selling their stories to the press, he…well he'd sound like a nutter, but still. Jack always waved his hands and said that Vlad was harmless, cute, adorable, and more importantly, useful. Vlad liked being in on the secret, and that was enough for him. Gwen was pleased enough that he deferred to her when most of the police didn't bother, a fact that stuck in Gwen's craw.
Vlad opened the drawer and pulled the metal tray from the recesses. Ianto pulled on the cautionary gloves and watched as Jack and Gwen did the same. Jack generally didn't touch things; Gwen was the toucher, but if Jack was willing to be handling body parts then he was probably willing to let Gwen sit this one out, should she want to. Ianto wedged his fingertips in between his fingers, tightening the snug fit.
The morgue might have unsettled him, but he was Torchwood's body man (all jokes about being Jack's body man aside), and that meant that he got to dispose, arrange, incinerate and occasionally dismantle bodies in the line of duty. That didn't mean that he didn't still feel a little queasy when confronted with a person who fit into a washing up bowl.
"Tissue decay indicates that time of death was less than twenty-four hours ago. The, uh, flesh that we do have is, uhm, choppy. Chunky?" He glanced at Gwen, who looked away to study the prerequisite lab skeleton. "Yeah, well, this is what they brought in." He pulled the plastic cover from the basin, a plastic tub about a half-foot high and two feet long. Jack made a face, but then peered into the basin, his face hovering as far away as he could be and still look.
Jack whistled. "Whoa there, that's nasty."
Vlad shrugged and crossed his arms, tucking his gloveless hands into his underarms. "Yeah. I figure, it's got to be some sort of beastie. The cutting is too ragged to be a boat propeller, but you know the boss."
Ianto made a face. Examiner Wemble was not their favorite person in the world to deal with. Too smart to be hoodwinked easily, and possibly immune to retcon, Ianto was fairly sure that they would have hired her to take Owen's place if she wasn't so very rule-bound. Ianto was all for rules, but even he recognized that they had to be broken sometimes. Torchwood just had fewer, but more important rules to break.
In any case, Examiner Wemble, AKA 'the boss', was one of those people who staunchly refused to believe that 'The Truth Was Out There.' Sometimes Ianto wanted to hire her just so that he could put her down in the observation cells to watch Janet for a while, see what she thought about The Truth then.
Until they managed to officially work around her, Vlad was their go-to guy at the morgue.
"Give us a minute," Jack said, reaching out one hand to poke the contents of the basin.
Vlad raised his hands in a surrender gesture. "Hey, I get it. Sure. Just don't steal anything, all right?"
Ianto rolled his eyes. "We'll try to keep our fingers away from the tongue depressors." As Vlad gave him a weak smile and shuffled off to the back room, Jack cocked his head and grinned.
"Tongue depressors, huh?"
"Body, Jack," Gwen mumbled.
"Bodies," Jack said with a bit more emphasis than Ianto would have liked, a little waggle to his eyebrows that seemed wholly inappropriate when standing above a bucket of person, or rather, people.
Gwen inched forward, her hands still gripping the edge of the table. "Really?" Her hair swung in her face and Ianto couldn't read her eyes.
"Also? This was no boating accident," Jack said, lifting part of an arm from the basin and peering dangerously close at the strips of meat that hung from the bone. Ianto told himself that if he called it meat, then he could get through the autopsy without booting. Gwen wasn't doing much better, but at least she hadn't thrown up on a body in the past year.
Sometimes Ianto even missed Owen taking the piss about it.
Gwen leant forward but something hit her nose and she pulled back violently. Ianto reached out a hand to steady the small of her back. "May I have a glass of water, please?"
The smell hit Ianto then, acrid, like puke, like rotting seaweed, like beef mince gone off. He didn't want to know what all he was looking at, now that he could smell it.
Jack let Ianto get Gwen and himself a glass of water before he stepped back to the basin filled with…whatever that was. "Look at this." He lowered the arm and pulled out what most assuredly were thumbs. One of them was still attached to the meat of the palm and an index finger. Ianto wondered why people ever thought severed hands were funny, even as fancy dress on Halloween. Once you saw the real thing, it just wasn't amusing anymore. Well, unless you were Owen.
Again with the Owen; what was with him today?
"Two right thumbs, and one of them is dressed to go out on the town." He turned the thumb so that Gwen and Ianto could see the bright blue nail polish with glitter stars on it.
Ianto wondered who she was, who they were. They obviously had fingerprints, or thumbprints, but that wasn't always helpful. He'd get the prints from Vlad and take them back to the Hub. If they had ever been printed for anything in the world, Ianto could find them.
Jack replaced the thumbs and arm back into the basin, manhandled what looked like the left side of a left foot and then put everything back in the basin, covering it. "Neither one of you wanted to…?"
Gwen set her glass down on the desk next to her. "No, thank you," she said in a soft voice, her hand still covering her mouth.
The drawer slid back into the vault, and the door shut on it with a refrigerated vwip seal sound. Jack peeled off his gloves and stepped back. Ianto took the gloves from his fingers and noted that he hadn't even touched anything until now. At least Gwen had touched the table.
"So if it wasn't a boat," Gwen said, tossing her gloves in the bin with her empty paper cup. Ianto swallowed his water to cover the fact that he was still queasy from the odour, and blinked at the wordless exchange between Jack and Gwen, an exchange that he read as Gwen demanding answers and Jack being unwilling to provide them (yet. If he even had them.).
"We have to close the beaches," Jack said, then turned and barreled out of the room, leaving them standing in the deserted morgue.
Ianto blinked at Gwen. "He does know this is Wales, right?"
WEDNESDAY EVENING, OUTRIGHT WET:
"Oh I might have been transferred here last month, but I know all about you, Harkness," Colonel Storr said from the speakerphone. "Most recently, you called UNIT out for a series of mutilations and it turned out that a bunch of errant gang members were exploring things they'd seen in the films?" Ianto cocked his head at that—Storr said it like 'fill-ems', an accent hitch that he thought was rather endearing.
Storr was anything but endearing, especially right now. And he was right and wrong. They had called UNIT, but that had been because they needed about seventeen more men to patrol, and the police had just rolled their eyes and said something about allocation of resources.
Come to think of it, the police were doing a lot of sideskirting, they had been since, well since Gray had blown the city up. Not that they knew that, but Jack had gone easy on them, not demanding resources, nor demanding things that he used to demand (respect, mostly), possibly out of some twisted sense of guilt. In any case, the police scented the blood in the water, and they took the inch Jack had given them and made it a foot.
"They were hopped up on alien drugs!" Jack said loudly, a little too loudly. Gwen winced and mouthed the words, 'Indoor voice', and Ianto restrained a smile. "You were there, you saw it!"
"I don't know what I saw—"
"One of them put his fist through the skull of a police horse."
"I think we have enough to worry about with the Earth drugs, Captain," Storr sighed. "That doesn't change the fact that you've been known to exaggerate from time to time."
Jack's mouth worked and his jaw ground in the seconds of silence in which he was most assuredly trying to craft a response. Ianto sat on the edge of the desk and raised an eyebrow at the coffee mug in his hand. "I assure you, I am not exaggerating. You have to send some people out here. You have to tell the coast guard that they need to close out the waters—"
"For one body?"
Jack took the mug from Ianto and shrugged. "You mean the two bodies we saw this morning that fit in a chip basket? Those bodies? Yeah, them." He sipped from his coffee. "I'm telling you that something is in the waters off South Wales, and until it's found, these bits and bobs of human flesh are gonna keep washing up and scaring everyone along the Bristol—"
There was an audible sigh, like the deflating of a balloon, and for a second Ianto thought Jack's visceral imagery had struck a chord.
Not so much. "I sympathise that you want to take a proactive stance on…whatever it is that you have out there, but you have to understand that we're stretched thin. It's the height of the environmental summit, and UNIT is overworked with security. There's all that Dalek damage to deal with—"
Jack rolled his eyes and Ianto didn't want to point out to him that there had, in fact, been a lot of damage from the Dalek invasion. In fact, UNIT's numbers had been cut in half.
"At least take the Valiant over the water here, run some infrared—"
"The Valiant is over Copenhagen," Storr said, audibly irritated, or more irritated than he was before. Maybe he was making an effort. "At the environmental talks. We're not pulling out the model of the UN's green-powered vehicular initiative just so that you can wheel it about like—"
"Wheel. It. About?" Jack's voice was cold and crusting over with ice. Ianto winced and exchanged a worried glance with Gwen. Jack had a sensitive spot about the Valiant. He didn't even like to know when it was scheduled to fly over Cardiff, and that he would even ask for it to be deployed was a tiny signal to Ianto as to the gravity of the matter.
"I'm afraid that you're going to have to have more than a box full of possible boating accident victims before UNIT can even begin to think about authorising the assignment of personnel."
Something that Jack saw in those bodies scared him, it was writ across his face when he stared at the speakerphone. "Tell me, how many more bodies do I need before you decide to help? Three? Eight? Baker's dozen?" He crossed his arms. How long before this thing capsizes a ferry—"
"Well, if it does, you'll be sure to call," Storr drawled. "Look Harkness, we'll keep the request on the table, but I can't go to my superior officers with what you gave me."
Jack shrugged, and the coffee mug dangling precariously from his fingers sloshed lukewarm Guatemala Antigua all over his side. Ianto rolled his eyes and threw a wad of serviettes at Jack while Gwen sat back in her chair. "All right. Fair enough." He jammed the button on the phone with his finger and disconnected the call. "That went well," he said brightly, holding out his mug so that Ianto could refill it.
"Do you really think that was wise?" Gwen asked. She snapped a digestive in half and licked the broken edge. "Now it will be harder to bring him in later."
"Oh, that was never going to be easy. Storr has the willpower of a mule on strike." Jack sipped from his coffee and looked at Ianto blankly before raising a finger and pointing at Gwen. "I want you to make a note. This is one of those things that is going to come back to bite everyone on the arse." And then to Ianto, "Prep an 'I Told You So' bouquet for the Colonel."
Ianto smirked, but it was wan. "A rose for every body, then?" The joke remained as flat as ever.
Gwen shuddered. "We could do it ourselves."
Jack glanced at her and saluted her. "I admire your perspicacity, PC Cooper, but we are three and that's hundreds of miles of water."
"And what are we looking for?" Ianto settled in one of the free chairs and crossed his legs at the ankles. "I like to believe that my faith in you is sacrosanct, but Jack," he paused, trying to figure out how to say it without sounding as if he questioned Jack's reaction. "It's two chewed up bodies." He shrugged. "Sad, I'll warrant but—"
Jack set his mug down and stared at the glass wall in front of him. "There'll be more."
"How do you know?"
Jack shrugged. "I don't." That toothy smile, frosted with doubt. "But there will be."
FRIDAY MORNING, THE SUN AND THE SURF AND OH THE BLISS. A NICE DAY SUR LA PLAGE:
Ianto found Jack standing on the Quay, looking out at the water with a pair of binoculars.
"Lemme guess," Ianto said, leaning on the rail and squinting out to sea. "White whale. Goes by the name of Moby Dick."
Jack paused, lowered the binoculars, and shook his head. "Too easy. Besides I was going to make a peg leg joke."
Ianto choked back a response about 'wood' and handed Jack the iced coffee. So he would never love Starbucks, but they made the iced coffee for him, and that was a plus (He might have also asked for hazelnut syrup, but he'd only admit it under duress, and he'd use the heat as an excuse.).
Ianto took the lid off the coffee cup and sipped; he was okay with syrup, but he'd be damned if he were going to drink from a straw. Jack let the binoculars hang from the strap around his neck and drank his coffee from his straw. Jack Harkness: secure in his manhood.
"You know, the bodies were in Barry, so the odds that we'll see our beastie here in the Bay are—"
"Just as likely as they'll be in Barry," Jack said, waving a hand and leaning on the rail. "Or Sully, or Porthkerry or any other place along the Channel." He squinted and frowned. "There's something out there. I can feel it in my bones."
Ianto wondered where Gwen was. He glanced up at the CCTV camera and winked. The camera wasn't a stationary one, and it bobbed up and down. Oh, hello, Gwen.
The wind picked up off the water and carried a bit of spray. Ianto leant against the railing and tilted his face to the sun. He was up here in shirtsleeves, no jacket, and though it didn't raise any eyebrows, to him, it felt as if he were topless. Even the waistcoat gone, otherwise his sweat would have painted the shirt directly under it a distinctly darker shade of blue than it had started life this morning.
"What do you think it is, Jack? You know, what are your bones telling you?"
"It's telling me that all the ducks are gone." Jack sipped his drink and cocked his head. "Did they put vanilla in this?"
"Caramel," Ianto replied distractedly, looking for the ducks and geese that usually kept close to the stone walls of the harbour so as to benefit from the food detritus of humans: they were gone. Not one. Even the gulls were roosted on the railings, as if they didn't want to sit and float out on the tide like they normally did. It also explained why they seemed unusually hungry.
"Hrng."
Rattle of ice in plastic cups. Three kids dancing on the dock for the water taxi. Gwen was right—it was a nice day and he was glad that she'd shoved him up the stairs to the door. The sun was just bright enough that he could have used some sunglasses. Pity he hadn't any; he made a mental list of things he should own but did not: sunglasses, a professional shoe polishing kit, a metric tonne of Scotchguard, a PSP. Games for said PSP. A case for PSP. An extra three hours a day to play PSP.
Sunglasses. He could do something about that one. Someday.
There was a shriek and they whipped their heads around to see a girl running down the Quay, a determined gull in pursuit. She threw whatever it was that she'd been eating at the gull and bolted. Jack barked a laugh and Ianto his his smile behind his cup.
"Well, if that's the worst we see today it—"
Off in the bay out on the water, there was another shriek and they glanced out in time to see a yellow WaterBus, about a hundred yards off the docks, bend in half, as if someone had pulled a line in the water and folded the boat. The railings of the ship ground with a metal noise and the stern flipped with a crunching sound before the whole boat sank—no, was yanked—under the water. Jack dropped his coffee and bolted for the stairs, vaulting the railing instead of going down the last five.
It was at that moment that the boat shot out of the water like an air-filled balloon would when held under the surface. It flew into the air, parts of it flying in high arcs, more than one person—Ianto could see a body flailing like a licorice whip out one of the semi-crushed windows of the flattened pilot house. The boat flipped over in the air, a few crunching somersaults, and then landed in the water like the world's largest cannonball.
Ianto handed his cup to a passing tourist without explanation, ran down the steps at a brisk clip, and wondered if they were going to be able to—
Jack jumped on the second WaterBus still moored to the dock, ordered the driver out and was already throttling the engine when Ianto jumped on the edge, nearly falling back into the water as the boat surged forward. He grabbed onto one of the awning supports and fished in his trouser pocket for his commlink, fitting it in his ear. Over the sounds of the few people screaming out in the water, Gwen was already calling his name.
"Ianto? Ianto?"
"Gwen, we're on the way out, what can—"
"No rift spike, no rift activity at all, except for some very minimal residual traces out in the bay."
The screaming tapered as they approached, as if those left alive and floundering in the water were disappearing like guttering flames in the wind.
Ianto watched Jack yank on the throttle and swing the wheel about in what he would admit was a bit of an overly dramatic manner. It occurred to him that Captain Jack was…captaining, but he saved that nugget for later, when they weren't about to possibly confront a giant sea monster that left bits of people to wash up on the shore.
The last screaming voice, a man, waving his arms in the water at their boat, was cut off as he was pulled violently under. Ianto glanced about for life vests, then realised that if this thing was going to take their boat like it had the first WaterBus, there was nothing he could do to stop it. Sobering. His hands twitched for the comforting ineffectiveness of the stun gun.
The taxi slalomed as Jack tried to take her out in a wide turn, almost overshooting the site. The sides of their vessel thunked when they passed the area where the boat had been sucked under water. Ianto scanned the surface for bodies, people, and also, he wasn't ashamed to admit it, tentacles or arms, or whatever it could have been that could collapse a WaterBus like closing a briefcase.
"So—did you see anything?"
"No," Gwen sighed, and he understood. The cameras simply weren't advanced enough to focus that far off in the water. He added better cameras to his list of things he wanted. "But the police are on their way. Lots of chatter."
"Gwen," Jack said finally, as the boat swung while he tried to steer and fit his earpiece in at the same time. "Gwen, radio the harbour master and tell him to lock it down. Then call the coast guard and tell them we need a salvage crew." A long pause as Jack brought the boat around for another pass at the wreckage. "And call UNIT and tell them at least I didn’t send them flowers."
Gwen made a noise that sounded like assent, but Ianto was too busy cataloguing the items that passed by his side of the boat. He should be going to the front to ask Jack what he wanted to do, but he couldn't. There: a coffee cup, here: a life preserver, farther away, a straw tourist bag that proclaimed, 'Cardiff!"
"Ianto, keep an eye out!" Jack shouted, though he didn't need to because the comms were still on. He didn't need to say what he was supposed to be keeping an eye out for, though he should have: monsters, survivors, bodies, et cetera, actually. Jack parked the boat in the wreckage, cutting the engine. The boat glided through the water before coming to a relative halt, as much as any boat could in a moving body of water. He left the wheel and exited the pilothouse on the other side of the craft.
"Ianto," Gwen whispered, "what do you see?"
Ianto peered over the railing at the waves below, eyes scanning the wreckage for anything. A plastic doll floated on the current, blonde curls drenched and waving as it drifted towards him as if pulled by a magnet. His eyes followed it when it bounced off the hull of the boat and flipped, sinking as water filled the hollow head, and the hair slid away, on its way to the bay floor.
SATURDAY, SUNNY AND OVERWHELMINGLY CHEERFUL, IF YOU THINK RED CAPS ARE CHEERFUL:
The Quay and marina were filled with trucks and boats, some of them military, some of them UNIT, some of them Heddlu. None of them Torchwood, Ianto noted sadly. It was just as well, he decided as he stood in front of the Norwegian church and contemplated simply not going to work today. He hated the water, ironic for someone who lived so close to it.
Jack was nowhere in sight, which was odd, because Ianto had expected him to be all over the place like…Jack interfering in military business. He was good at that. Maybe he was going to leave it to Gwen, who liked to use every opportunity presented to her to liaise with police and military, something with which she said she wanted practise. It was also a good way to grease some wheels, wheels that Jack often made un…greased.
He walked down the Quay a little, then doubled back and sat on the stone ledge framing the grassed area between the church and the water railing, and thought about the Milka bar in his office drawer. He also thought about some vegetarian chili. And then he thought about maybe going down to pull rank on a few low-level UNIT officers, just for kicks (It was amazing what he could get a Lieutenant to do if he scowled and said, 'Torchwood'. He might even be able to get them to load all that debris from the sub-basement to the incinerator. It was taking him ages at his pace of three runs a day.).
His comm crackled to life. "Ianto," Gwen said, "you have to get down here. They're loading a sonic disrupter onto one of these boats."
He stood then, eyes trying to pick out the boat. It would be a UNIT craft. "Where's Jack?"
Gwen sighed. "He's arguing with the harbour master about letting civilians out on hunting yachts."
Ianto's pace doublestepped. "They are actually going to discuss this?" As he approached, Ianto watched a small two-man motorboat take off from the jetty, loaded with about ten men. "They're all going to die."
Gwen grunted and he heard her cover the mic with her hand as she yelled. Her voice had that loud 'POLICE CONSTABLE' air to it, and he smiled. You could take The Man out of the police, but you couldn't take the police out of The Man. Or something.
"Do not move one more step, sir. That is not cleared ordinance." Ianto increased his pace until he was jogging, catching the eye of a few constables until they saw his glaring green badge. He liked the green badge. He and Jack had made them once as a sign of, 'BACK OFF—TORCHWOOD' for crime scenes, and had successfully trained all the local Cardiff police to respond to it by averting their eyes and never asking them what they were doing anywhere. Occasionally they asked if Ianto wanted coffee. He never did.
Gwen turned away from a disgruntled civilian who had parked his gamefisher johnboat on the edge of the dock, between a police cruiser and a UNIT Ocean Yacht patroller. Ianto's eyes widened when he saw what she cradled in her arms.
"Is this," he paused when she gingerly handed the red sticks to him. "Is this dynamite?" He'd never actually ever seen dynamite before. Some childish part of his heart raced and wanted to go out with the man and throw a few sticks.
No, of course not. Adult.
Most of the civilian boats had taken off, despite Jack's screaming and flailing arms, which Ianto could see from down here. Up in the office, Jack was stabbing fingers out at the water and shouting, and even as he did so, the last boat launched and they were left with a few decommissioned UNIT vessels that were there just to salvage things. The coast guard had authorised the wet lease of a few Sikorskys to clean up the creature when, not if, they brought it in. Ianto figured they thought they'd need the 'copter for recovery of a carcass large enough to squeeze a WaterBus like a snapdragon.
Ianto stood on the dock next to Gwen, arms full of dynamite, and felt vaguely like a cartoon character. Jack slammed the flimsy wooden door to the Harbour master's office and trotted down the steps to join them.
The last of the boats disappeared on the horizon, which wasn't hard, because the sun was blinding again.
Gwen sighed. "They're all mad."
Jack crossed his arms. "I'll say. A dozen pleasure crews manned by a bunch of amateur weekend fishermen, three decommissioned UNIT cruisers with no ordinance heavier than a few bad Saiga 12s, two police pandaboats as cuddly as pandas themselves, and two coast guard boats off the port, ready to recover." Jack laughed and Ianto considered the mental image of a panda floating out in the ocean, Heddlu Neighbor Totoro. He stopped before he created a dopey music theme song for it.
One of the families from the WaterBus had put up a 12 thousand pound reward for the capture of the creature, and that was being matched by a local ferry service that hadn't wanted to see their business dry out while the terror that stalked the bay…stalked the bay.
The downside was that every Rhys, Bran and Daffyd with a boat had decided that he was the bloody Crocodile Hunter, and the harbour master, urged by the ferry owners, had allowed them to dock in the arena. The police hadn't been happy, but they had figured, Ianto understood from what he had overheard, that the civilians would go out, have a pleasure cruise, and then just return empty-handed. In fact, the current scuttlebutt down at Heddlu headquarters was that the WaterBus accident had been a faulty engine explosion and subsequent cover-up.
Ianto almost wished that it were that easy to plant a cover story. Whenever he needed people to believe one, they never did, but when he would prefer that they take him seriously, their sense of cover-up came into play.
"UNIT had a sonic disrupter," Gwen told him, turning her head to look at his face and then Ianto's.
Jack laughed. "Can't fire it under water. Refraction. Nice, guys." He shoved his hands in his pockets.
There was a burst of seagulls off the harbour master's roof, flying overhead and coming to land in the water of the bay. Ianto frowned. Something was wrong about that.
Jack wasn't lost, though. "Gulls in the water. It's nowhere around here." He shoved his hands in his pockets. "Let's go back to work. I'm sure we'll hear them screaming from downstairs if they come back with anything good."
Ianto turned to walk next to him, Gwen in the lead, for the information centre. Jack double-taked at his arms. "Is that dynamite?"
THAT SATURDAY AFTERNOON, AS WE HAIL THE CONQUERING HEROES:
It hadn't been screaming as much as the internal sensors on the rift monitors going off that had brought the three of them topside again, alarms that detected traces of residual rift energy. Nothing had come through the rift now, but something that had once come through it was approaching.
Ianto squinted in the afternoon sun. "Ah, look at that."
"That," Jack said, raising his eyebrows as the winch lifted as much of the carcass into the air as it could. The flashing of cameras was blinding, even in the light of day. "Is an Amaldan."
Colonel Storr stood in front of the dead, squid-resembling Amaldan and waved a hand, pointing out the contours of something. Two officers jumped to and reached out to pry open the Amaldan's mouth. It was huge, Ianto had to admit, razor teeth and all. He wasn't particularly upset to see it, now that it was dead.
"Amaldan," Gwen said slowly. "That's not from this planet."
"Too true, Gwennie-me-love, the Amaldan was indigenous to the tropic moons of Quasis, before they were burnt out by a raiding—well, it wasn't pretty." He lifted a thumb in front of him and squinted, as if he was measuring something. "Forty-five."
Ianto watched the UNIT officers drag a tentacle from the water onto the dock so that the press could see the arms that had pulled the ferry under. It was possible, actually. Those tentacles were huge, as wide in diameter as the length of his forearm, and long—they pulled for a solid three minutes before reaching a relatively tapered end. The dock stank with the smell of rotted fish.
"What are you measuring?"
"Bite radius," Jack said airily. "Perspective from here, how many feet away, the size of my thumb multiplied against the proportions of—"
"I'll take your word for it," Ianto said. And then, "Nerd."
Colonel Storr approached them and stopped short, crossing his arms. The press was having a field day behind him, and the two officers explored the Amaldan's large and grisly mouth with metal pokers.
"Well, Harkness, you were right," Storr mumbled. "Far be it from me to not admit when I'm wrong—"
Jack shrugged. "How do you know this is it?"
Storr's brows became a solid line across his forehead. "Excuse me?"
Jack smiled. "Get some of your strapping young men—who look stunning in those little red caps, by the way—to cut that bad boy open. We'll check the contents of the stomachs, plural, and make sure we have the right creature."
Storr glanced back at the Amaldan, as if he were trying to find a physical sign that they'd caught the right thing. "This is the creature," he said, voice painted with uncertainty. "It has to be."
"The waters of Earth are the last great frontier, Colonel," Jack said breezily, and Gwen nudged him when Storr wasn't looking. A UNIT officer bumped into Ianto's shoulder as he hauled cargo nets down the wooden dock.
The Colonel seemed to consider that for a split second before he caught a glimpse of the press again, swarming along the creature, digital cameras working overtime as the officers pulled it from the water. Ianto wondered what they were going to do until he heard the rumble behind him, and understood that hauling lorries were coming across the Plass. He wondered if they'd get past the circular monument he referred to as 'the sphincter of Cardiff' in his head.
"It's a hundred to one chance," Jack said, "hundred to one. Let's just cut her open and—"
Something seemed to resolve in Storr, because he closed the last few feet and grabbed one of Jack's shoulders. "Now see here, Harkness," Storr whispered loudly, "I am not going to cut that thing open and have parts of those people from the ferry spill out all over the dock!"
"Should have thought of that before you invited the press," Jack murmured, eyes still on the Amaldan and its bite radius, no doubt. Ianto shifted from foot to foot and tried to look horrified at the suggestion that Torchwood was willing to display such grisly matters in the light of day.
Storr nodded. "This is the creature. We're done here." And with a nod, he was back to the press, all smiles and attaboys.
Jack shrugged. "Have it your way, Colonel."
The three of them watched as one of the lorries backed up, narrowly missing a WaterBus placard. The press was starting to disperse, and Ianto wanted to be out of the way when one of their wandering eyes caught the three of them, in civilian clothes but green badges, standing to the side and watching the show. Ianto had no urge to be the 'man on the street' in this case (or any case).
Jack didn't want to either. He patted Gwen's shoulder. "Okay then. We're done here."
"Really? So that was it?" Ianto asked as another UNIT soldier almost rammed into him from behind.
Jack shoved his hands in his trouser pockets as they strolled down the pier, away from the press and the din, right back into the Tourist Centre. "Nope."
On to Part Two
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2010-01-14 01:26 pm (UTC)Cult TV jokes later - you do know about JB in Shark Attack 3, Megalodon? B-movie, used the original Jaws shark... bad movie but JB in wetsuit :D
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Date: 2010-01-14 02:27 pm (UTC)And chapter titles!
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Date: 2010-01-14 03:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-14 03:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-15 05:36 am (UTC)I think my favorite bit is how excited and gung-ho Jack is about everything, and how amused Ianto is by him. I really, really like your characterizations!
Will finish the rest tomorrow! Thanks for this, mandr!
(And I drink all my coffee from a straw. Hee! Cold, baby, cold!)
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Date: 2010-01-15 05:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-16 03:14 am (UTC)Heddlu Neighbor Totoro
I BLAME YOU FOR THE EARWORM. Drinking more now. :D
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Date: 2010-01-16 03:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-19 03:14 pm (UTC)Onwards to part two...
PS - I vote for International Jewel Thief - you have the laugh for it!!!
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Date: 2010-01-19 04:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-19 04:43 pm (UTC)Nah, you don't want to be quiet and sneaky - that just arouses suspicion! You have to be brazen about it! Oh, and forget the stripey jumper, the bag marked "swag", and the mask.