Fic: The Sea After a Storm (81/?)
May. 27th, 2015 06:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
buttononthetopTitle: The Sea After a Storm, Chapter 81
Rating: R
Warnings: None really, just Zombie!Owen ;-)
Spoilers: Season Two thru Dead Man Walking (2x07)
Pairings: Jack/Ianto
Disclaimer: Torchwood, Doctor Who and all their wonderfulness belong to the Mighty Beeb and He Who Must Not Be Named. All ©'s to Matt Jones for situations and dialogue borrowed from Dead Man Walking. No infringement, only worship intended!
Summary: In which the team attempts to save Martha from the brink of death and defeat Death itself...
Notes: I'm back! You can find all the previous chapters of The Sea After a Storm here. This is a sequel to Vizzini’s Rule and To The Pain. Thanks again and forever to my amazing beta and wonderful friendthraceadams for all the help and support and beta work; any mistakes are mine!
The Sea After a Storm: Chapter Eighty-One
Previously on The Sea After a Storm: The Resurrection Glove sucked the life out of Martha, leaving her an old woman. In the meantime, Death escaped through Owen and is now wandering around Cardiff unchecked...
The ride to the hospital was as quick as Ianto could make it. He parked right in front of the out-patient door, in blatant disregard of several signs, leaving the blue lights running on the SUV. He came around to the passenger side to help Martha out of the car whilst Gwen grabbed a gurney from just inside the sliding doors.
"What about Jack?" she asked, looking back at the SUV as they started rolling Martha inside.
"He'll find us when he wakes up," Ianto said. "I doubt he'll be out much longer."
As soon as they were inside the hospital, Gwen's take charge attitude reasserted itself and she called for a medic in her best police woman voice. Several nurses and a doctor came running, pushing Martha's gurney into a procedure area and beginning work on her right away.
Ianto glanced back and saw Jack coming down the hall behind them and let out a sigh of relief. He's okay. Jack joined them as they lingered in the doorway, watching the doctors work on Martha.
"So what happened to that thing?" Jack asked, not bothering with greetings of any kind.
"It's gone," Gwen said flatly.
"So it's out there?" Jack asked. He looked at each of them as if hoping someone would contradict Gwen. No one did.
"Yes, Jack! It killed you and then it escaped, okay? We couldn't stop it."
Ianto flinched when one of the nurses looked up at Gwen's shrill response. "Maybe we should..." He indicated to the sign pointing to the waiting area.
Before they could move, the doctor came over. "We'll get her admitted. Run some labs, see what we find out."
"Thank you," Gwen said.
The waiting area was crowded so they weren't able to sit all together, which Ianto considered a blessing. Tensions were running high and nothing they needed to discuss was appropriate for the general public to overhear. He watched Owen collapse into a chair, still breathing hard. Tosh hovered nearby, perching on the arm of Owen's chair, reaching out to touch him now and then as if reassuring herself that he was still there. Jack eschewed sitting altogether, choosing instead to stand in front of the large window, staring out into the dark with his arms crossed over his chest. Ianto noticed Jack using the window as a mirror too, their glances meeting several times while they waited for word on Martha.
They didn't end up having to wait very long. Ianto had just decided to go in search of coffee for everyone when a nurse came to fetch them. She led them back to Martha's room, asking that only one person go in at a time. The doctor stepped out of the room as Jack went in.
"How is she?"
"How do you know her?" the doctor asked instead of answering Gwen's question. "I take it you're not family."
"She's a neighbour," Gwen improvised awkwardly. "We look in, do her shopping, collect her pension, that sort of thing, you know?"
The doctor gave her a hard look and then relented. "Her red blood cell count is through the floor and she's massively dehydrated. All of which has placed a considerable strain on her heart," she explained, looking around at them as if they were somehow to blame.
"You've got to help her," Gwen said.
"We are," the doctor replied in a tired voice. "But you have to accept she's, what, eighty?"
Gwen's lips tightened but her tone was polite. "Just do what you can, please."
The doctor gave her a nod and left them alone.
"NHS's finest," Owen muttered.
"Come on," Ianto said, ushering them into Martha's room, blatantly ignoring the 'one person at a time' rule.
"It's stolen my life," Martha was saying in her weak, gravelly voice as they walked through the door.
Jack took the mirror Martha was holding away from her. "We'll find a way to reverse this," he promised.
Martha gave him a disbelieving look and then closed her eyes.
"Last time, back when Cardiff was a town, it killed twelve people," Gwen said.
"So?" Jack replied. This wasn't new information to any of them.
"Why didn't it get to thirteen?" Gwen asked. "And where does this faith bit come into it?"
Jack nodded. "Ianto, we need answers," he said.
"I'm on it," Ianto said immediately. He glanced around the room and found the computer. He remoted into his workstation at the Hub and started plugging in all the information they'd gathered in the last few hours to both the archive database and the web. Behind him, he heard Jack order Owen back to the Hub and Owen, predictably, refuse to go.
"Jack, I'm free of it, I promise you, and I'm useful, I'm useful here. When it came through me, I felt it. I know what it is, I know what it wants, it's duroc."
Ianto's fingers paused on the keyboard, listening intently.
"And what is that?" Jack asked. He was shifting his weight back and forth, rocking uncomfortably as he looked at Owen with suspicion.
"Hunger."
Jack shook his head and turned to the window.
"Where do we look for it? Where do we even start to look for it?" Gwen asked.
No one had an answer for her. Jack spotted something outside the window, shoving the curtain back to get a better view.
"We won't have to go far," he said darkly. "It's here."
"Why would it follow us here?" Gwen asked turning to look out the window as well.
"I'm not sure it did," Jack said, striding across the room to the door. "Maybe it senses the near-dead. If you were Death, wouldn't you target a hospital?"
He pulled the door open and left the room, Gwen running after him.
Owen turned back to Martha and then quickly crossed the room to look out the window.
"What is it?" Tosh asked.
Owen hesitated for a second and then said, "Weevils. Right, well..." Owen looked over at Martha again. "I'll fix this," he promised softly. He hurried out to the hallway with Tosh on his heels.
Martha's eyes fluttered open as Owen stormed out of the room. She glanced around until she found Ianto at the computer. He rolled the stand closer to her bedside and smiled at her. "Just us Joneses now."
She rolled her eyes at him and tried to return the smile. Ianto kept searching the archives, cursing when the speed over the remote access was too slow for his taste. An alarm started blaring throughout the hospital. Ianto opened another window on the computer and efficiently hacked into the hospital network.
"Looks like Jack sounded the alarm," he told Martha conversationally. "He's told them to evacuate, get everyone to safety."
As if on cue, a nurse walked in and started bustling around, telling Ianto that they needed to evacuate all patients.
"Not this one," Ianto said brusquely with his eyes still on the computer. "We're Torchwood. We ordered the evac. We're staying."
The nurse pursed her lips and looked down at Martha. "She's, like, special police or something?"
Ianto schooled his expression and looked up from the monitor. "She's part of our elderly outreach program."
Martha snorted and Ianto had to try very hard to keep his lips from twitching with amusement.
The nurse glared at him. "I'm going to fetch the doctor," she threatened and left in a huff.
When the doctor returned, she was blessedly alone. "So you lot caused all this ruckus?" she asked, taking Martha's vitals.
"No, ma'am, we're just trying to stop it." He swallowed hard when he realised that was a lie. We did cause this, he thought miserably.
The doctor just gave him a nod and focussed on her patient, whilst Ianto went back to his computer search which was still producing no results.
Jack's voice crackled to life over the comms. "Ianto, I need you to crack into the hospital communication system."
"Already done it," Ianto said, clicking back to the network screen. He had a feeling he knew what Jack needed. "They've got multiple code fours in intensive care."
"Which floor is that?"
"Sixth."
Ianto watched the communications on the screen as each patient updated from critical to fatality, one by one.
"Seven," he muttered. And counting. God only knows if Death picked up any souls on the way here. We could already be too late.
He listened as the others discussed over the comms where they were and what they were seeing throughout the hospital as he kept searching and the doctor kept working on Martha.
"Jack, we still have no idea what to do if we find it," Toshiko pointed out.
"Ianto?" Jack sounded hopeful that Ianto had all the answers, but Ianto had nothing to give him.
He shook his head and punched at the keyboard harder than strictly necessary. "I have searched for the phrase 'I shall walk the Earth and my hunger will know no bounds' but I keep getting redirected to Weight Watchers," he joked hollowly.
He turned at a flash of green and white and watched as the doctor left with an ambulance driver. Clearly the evacuation was almost complete. He looked down with concern at Martha who was barely breathing and almost missed what Gwen said next.
"It was a medical journal," she said. "History of Medicine. Try under Tavistock or Wellcome."
His fingers flew over the keyboard, easily finding matches in the archives for all three – History of Medicine, Tavistock and Wellcome.
"Finally," he grunted. "Why couldn't she have told me that in the first place?" he asked Martha. He knew he wouldn't get a response, but it made him feel better to talk aloud. "I swear, that woman... Hold up..." He'd found the elusive phrase he'd been searching for, written in the original language with several different spellings than the guesses he'd made. His eyes scanned the pages quickly, reading the same information Gwen had shared earlier. There was a footnote at the bottom of the entry, directing him to another archive item. He clicked over to that entry and felt a small spark of hope begin to burn inside him.
He clicked his comm, but before he could say anything, Jack spoke again.
"Ianto, what have we got?"
"Back in 1479, the priest discovered that Death needed thirteen souls to walk the earth for eternity," he read, his eyes scanning ahead in the paragraph.
"He stopped Death at twelve..." Jack added, knowing this bit already.
"It was Faith," Ianto said joyfully as one of the mysteries was solved.
"I know!" Jack shouted in frustration.
"No," Ianto said, explaining more fully. "The little girl who was brought back to life. Her name was Faith. She stopped it."
"Well... how?"
Ianto's hope was snuffed out as quickly as it began. He read carefully through the passage again with no luck. "It doesn't say."
The comms fell silent.
"Shit!" Ianto yelled. He kicked the computer cart and watched it roll across the room and bang into the wall. His head fell forward and he let out string of curses in a mix of Welsh and English that was momentarily satisfying if not remotely helpful. He sighed, straightened, and walked across the room to roll the computer back to its position next to Martha and got back to work.
A few minutes later he heard Tosh frantically calling for Jack over the comms. There was a pause and the Jack yelled Owen's name and then the comms fell silent again.
"Jack?" Ianto tried. "Owen? Tosh? Gwen? Jack?" He clicked through the channels twice but no one was responding. He shoved his hands in his pockets to keep them from trembling and walked slowly to the door. He peered out into the corridor but it was deserted. They were all alone. Suddenly a shudder went through the entire building and all the electronics flickered. Ianto cleared his throat and tried the comms again. "Jack? Jack? Gwen? Anyone?"
A strong hand gripped Ianto's shoulder and he let out a startled cry of surprise that turned to delighted laughter as he spun around to see Martha – young and beautiful once more – sitting up and smiling weakly at him.
"They did it!" he said jubilantly, giving Martha a quick hug.
"They did," she agreed, still out of breath from her ordeal.
Ianto kept his arm around her and let her rest against him as they waited for the others to return.
TBC...
.
Rating: R
Warnings: None really, just Zombie!Owen ;-)
Spoilers: Season Two thru Dead Man Walking (2x07)
Pairings: Jack/Ianto
Disclaimer: Torchwood, Doctor Who and all their wonderfulness belong to the Mighty Beeb and He Who Must Not Be Named. All ©'s to Matt Jones for situations and dialogue borrowed from Dead Man Walking. No infringement, only worship intended!
Summary: In which the team attempts to save Martha from the brink of death and defeat Death itself...
Notes: I'm back! You can find all the previous chapters of The Sea After a Storm here. This is a sequel to Vizzini’s Rule and To The Pain. Thanks again and forever to my amazing beta and wonderful friend
thraceadams for all the help and support and beta work; any mistakes are mine!The Sea After a Storm: Chapter Eighty-One
Previously on The Sea After a Storm: The Resurrection Glove sucked the life out of Martha, leaving her an old woman. In the meantime, Death escaped through Owen and is now wandering around Cardiff unchecked...
The ride to the hospital was as quick as Ianto could make it. He parked right in front of the out-patient door, in blatant disregard of several signs, leaving the blue lights running on the SUV. He came around to the passenger side to help Martha out of the car whilst Gwen grabbed a gurney from just inside the sliding doors.
"What about Jack?" she asked, looking back at the SUV as they started rolling Martha inside.
"He'll find us when he wakes up," Ianto said. "I doubt he'll be out much longer."
As soon as they were inside the hospital, Gwen's take charge attitude reasserted itself and she called for a medic in her best police woman voice. Several nurses and a doctor came running, pushing Martha's gurney into a procedure area and beginning work on her right away.
Ianto glanced back and saw Jack coming down the hall behind them and let out a sigh of relief. He's okay. Jack joined them as they lingered in the doorway, watching the doctors work on Martha.
"So what happened to that thing?" Jack asked, not bothering with greetings of any kind.
"It's gone," Gwen said flatly.
"So it's out there?" Jack asked. He looked at each of them as if hoping someone would contradict Gwen. No one did.
"Yes, Jack! It killed you and then it escaped, okay? We couldn't stop it."
Ianto flinched when one of the nurses looked up at Gwen's shrill response. "Maybe we should..." He indicated to the sign pointing to the waiting area.
Before they could move, the doctor came over. "We'll get her admitted. Run some labs, see what we find out."
"Thank you," Gwen said.
The waiting area was crowded so they weren't able to sit all together, which Ianto considered a blessing. Tensions were running high and nothing they needed to discuss was appropriate for the general public to overhear. He watched Owen collapse into a chair, still breathing hard. Tosh hovered nearby, perching on the arm of Owen's chair, reaching out to touch him now and then as if reassuring herself that he was still there. Jack eschewed sitting altogether, choosing instead to stand in front of the large window, staring out into the dark with his arms crossed over his chest. Ianto noticed Jack using the window as a mirror too, their glances meeting several times while they waited for word on Martha.
They didn't end up having to wait very long. Ianto had just decided to go in search of coffee for everyone when a nurse came to fetch them. She led them back to Martha's room, asking that only one person go in at a time. The doctor stepped out of the room as Jack went in.
"How is she?"
"How do you know her?" the doctor asked instead of answering Gwen's question. "I take it you're not family."
"She's a neighbour," Gwen improvised awkwardly. "We look in, do her shopping, collect her pension, that sort of thing, you know?"
The doctor gave her a hard look and then relented. "Her red blood cell count is through the floor and she's massively dehydrated. All of which has placed a considerable strain on her heart," she explained, looking around at them as if they were somehow to blame.
"You've got to help her," Gwen said.
"We are," the doctor replied in a tired voice. "But you have to accept she's, what, eighty?"
Gwen's lips tightened but her tone was polite. "Just do what you can, please."
The doctor gave her a nod and left them alone.
"NHS's finest," Owen muttered.
"Come on," Ianto said, ushering them into Martha's room, blatantly ignoring the 'one person at a time' rule.
"It's stolen my life," Martha was saying in her weak, gravelly voice as they walked through the door.
Jack took the mirror Martha was holding away from her. "We'll find a way to reverse this," he promised.
Martha gave him a disbelieving look and then closed her eyes.
"Last time, back when Cardiff was a town, it killed twelve people," Gwen said.
"So?" Jack replied. This wasn't new information to any of them.
"Why didn't it get to thirteen?" Gwen asked. "And where does this faith bit come into it?"
Jack nodded. "Ianto, we need answers," he said.
"I'm on it," Ianto said immediately. He glanced around the room and found the computer. He remoted into his workstation at the Hub and started plugging in all the information they'd gathered in the last few hours to both the archive database and the web. Behind him, he heard Jack order Owen back to the Hub and Owen, predictably, refuse to go.
"Jack, I'm free of it, I promise you, and I'm useful, I'm useful here. When it came through me, I felt it. I know what it is, I know what it wants, it's duroc."
Ianto's fingers paused on the keyboard, listening intently.
"And what is that?" Jack asked. He was shifting his weight back and forth, rocking uncomfortably as he looked at Owen with suspicion.
"Hunger."
Jack shook his head and turned to the window.
"Where do we look for it? Where do we even start to look for it?" Gwen asked.
No one had an answer for her. Jack spotted something outside the window, shoving the curtain back to get a better view.
"We won't have to go far," he said darkly. "It's here."
"Why would it follow us here?" Gwen asked turning to look out the window as well.
"I'm not sure it did," Jack said, striding across the room to the door. "Maybe it senses the near-dead. If you were Death, wouldn't you target a hospital?"
He pulled the door open and left the room, Gwen running after him.
Owen turned back to Martha and then quickly crossed the room to look out the window.
"What is it?" Tosh asked.
Owen hesitated for a second and then said, "Weevils. Right, well..." Owen looked over at Martha again. "I'll fix this," he promised softly. He hurried out to the hallway with Tosh on his heels.
Martha's eyes fluttered open as Owen stormed out of the room. She glanced around until she found Ianto at the computer. He rolled the stand closer to her bedside and smiled at her. "Just us Joneses now."
She rolled her eyes at him and tried to return the smile. Ianto kept searching the archives, cursing when the speed over the remote access was too slow for his taste. An alarm started blaring throughout the hospital. Ianto opened another window on the computer and efficiently hacked into the hospital network.
"Looks like Jack sounded the alarm," he told Martha conversationally. "He's told them to evacuate, get everyone to safety."
As if on cue, a nurse walked in and started bustling around, telling Ianto that they needed to evacuate all patients.
"Not this one," Ianto said brusquely with his eyes still on the computer. "We're Torchwood. We ordered the evac. We're staying."
The nurse pursed her lips and looked down at Martha. "She's, like, special police or something?"
Ianto schooled his expression and looked up from the monitor. "She's part of our elderly outreach program."
Martha snorted and Ianto had to try very hard to keep his lips from twitching with amusement.
The nurse glared at him. "I'm going to fetch the doctor," she threatened and left in a huff.
When the doctor returned, she was blessedly alone. "So you lot caused all this ruckus?" she asked, taking Martha's vitals.
"No, ma'am, we're just trying to stop it." He swallowed hard when he realised that was a lie. We did cause this, he thought miserably.
The doctor just gave him a nod and focussed on her patient, whilst Ianto went back to his computer search which was still producing no results.
Jack's voice crackled to life over the comms. "Ianto, I need you to crack into the hospital communication system."
"Already done it," Ianto said, clicking back to the network screen. He had a feeling he knew what Jack needed. "They've got multiple code fours in intensive care."
"Which floor is that?"
"Sixth."
Ianto watched the communications on the screen as each patient updated from critical to fatality, one by one.
"Seven," he muttered. And counting. God only knows if Death picked up any souls on the way here. We could already be too late.
He listened as the others discussed over the comms where they were and what they were seeing throughout the hospital as he kept searching and the doctor kept working on Martha.
"Jack, we still have no idea what to do if we find it," Toshiko pointed out.
"Ianto?" Jack sounded hopeful that Ianto had all the answers, but Ianto had nothing to give him.
He shook his head and punched at the keyboard harder than strictly necessary. "I have searched for the phrase 'I shall walk the Earth and my hunger will know no bounds' but I keep getting redirected to Weight Watchers," he joked hollowly.
He turned at a flash of green and white and watched as the doctor left with an ambulance driver. Clearly the evacuation was almost complete. He looked down with concern at Martha who was barely breathing and almost missed what Gwen said next.
"It was a medical journal," she said. "History of Medicine. Try under Tavistock or Wellcome."
His fingers flew over the keyboard, easily finding matches in the archives for all three – History of Medicine, Tavistock and Wellcome.
"Finally," he grunted. "Why couldn't she have told me that in the first place?" he asked Martha. He knew he wouldn't get a response, but it made him feel better to talk aloud. "I swear, that woman... Hold up..." He'd found the elusive phrase he'd been searching for, written in the original language with several different spellings than the guesses he'd made. His eyes scanned the pages quickly, reading the same information Gwen had shared earlier. There was a footnote at the bottom of the entry, directing him to another archive item. He clicked over to that entry and felt a small spark of hope begin to burn inside him.
He clicked his comm, but before he could say anything, Jack spoke again.
"Ianto, what have we got?"
"Back in 1479, the priest discovered that Death needed thirteen souls to walk the earth for eternity," he read, his eyes scanning ahead in the paragraph.
"He stopped Death at twelve..." Jack added, knowing this bit already.
"It was Faith," Ianto said joyfully as one of the mysteries was solved.
"I know!" Jack shouted in frustration.
"No," Ianto said, explaining more fully. "The little girl who was brought back to life. Her name was Faith. She stopped it."
"Well... how?"
Ianto's hope was snuffed out as quickly as it began. He read carefully through the passage again with no luck. "It doesn't say."
The comms fell silent.
"Shit!" Ianto yelled. He kicked the computer cart and watched it roll across the room and bang into the wall. His head fell forward and he let out string of curses in a mix of Welsh and English that was momentarily satisfying if not remotely helpful. He sighed, straightened, and walked across the room to roll the computer back to its position next to Martha and got back to work.
A few minutes later he heard Tosh frantically calling for Jack over the comms. There was a pause and the Jack yelled Owen's name and then the comms fell silent again.
"Jack?" Ianto tried. "Owen? Tosh? Gwen? Jack?" He clicked through the channels twice but no one was responding. He shoved his hands in his pockets to keep them from trembling and walked slowly to the door. He peered out into the corridor but it was deserted. They were all alone. Suddenly a shudder went through the entire building and all the electronics flickered. Ianto cleared his throat and tried the comms again. "Jack? Jack? Gwen? Anyone?"
A strong hand gripped Ianto's shoulder and he let out a startled cry of surprise that turned to delighted laughter as he spun around to see Martha – young and beautiful once more – sitting up and smiling weakly at him.
"They did it!" he said jubilantly, giving Martha a quick hug.
"They did," she agreed, still out of breath from her ordeal.
Ianto kept his arm around her and let her rest against him as they waited for the others to return.
TBC...
.
