m-findlow.livejournal.com

Title: Mirror, Mirror
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Torchwood team
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,725 words
Content notes: Maybe a little spoiler fix for CoE...
Author notes:  Written for Challenge 101 - Mirror
Summary: Sometimes the truth cannot been seen, but must instead be believed

It was a slow day at the hub, so Jack had decided to go and visit Ianto. If he was lucky they might be able to find a dark corner somewhere where they could kill some time.

His musings were momentarily dashed as when he found Ianto very busily at work in one of the archive vaults.

'Whatcha doing?' Jack asked.

Ianto stood up from his crouched position between the shelves, dusting off his hands. There was a cute little smudge of dirt on the tip of his nose that Jack wasn't going to tell him about.

'Cursing the hundred hundred and forty years of Torchwood operatives who couldn't manage to file anything properly.'

Jack noticed a tall object covered in a thick brown dust sheet.

'What's this?'

'A quirk,' Ianto replied.

'How so?' Jack enquired, pulling the heavy covering off the object to inspect it further, revealing a tall mirror in an ornate wooden frame.

‘I found it when I was clearing up. The notes are missing but the tag has your handwriting on it, dated 1911.’

Ianto looked directly at him, raising an eyebrow and expecting some outlandish tale, or at least something interesting to come of it.

Jack stood quietly, looking into his own reflection standing there. His brow furrowed.

‘Looks like a plain old mirror. What’s it doing down here?’

‘I’m not sure,' Ianto replied. 'More to the point, it’s odd to find it here, specifically, I mean. This section houses most of the stuff collected from the 1960’s. Seems strange and out of place. Did you move it perhaps?’

‘Not me. I don’t even remember it the first time round.’

‘I checked some of the files for the surrounding objects, but no mention of this being connected with any of them.’

‘Weird,’ Jack commented vaguely, 'then again, the archives are all over the place.'

'I think you meant that in past tense,' Ianto corrected.

'Okay, fine, the bits you've fixed are perfect, the rest still needs work.'

'And it'll never be finished. Not at the rate you lot keep going.'

'Priorities, Ianto Jones,' Jack chastised.  

Ianto had insisted that it was too unusual for the item to have been stored where it was, so it had been brought up from the archives for further examination. He had a nagging feeling that Jack was holding out on him, but knew better than to press him for an answer. If it was at all dangerous, he wouldn’t have let them anywhere near it, so it had to be something else. Ianto had always liked puzzles, and Jack Harkness was the biggest puzzle of them all.

Owen and Tosh looked at it curiously. Just as expected, when they stood in front of it, they saw their own reflections.

When Ianto brought a tray of fresh coffee round and passed one to Owen, Tosh caught his reflection in the mirror.

‘Hey! Owen’s gone!’

‘Course I’m not, I’m right here!’ looking at Tosh as if she were mad.

‘No, I mean, in the mirror. I could see Ianto, but not you.’

Both men looked at her skeptically, but stood up and placed themselves in front of it.

Tosh was right. Ianto’s image was there just as before, but Owen next to him was invisible. He waved at himself just to be sure that the image was definitely a reflection and not some static image.

‘Must know we don’t get along,’ Owen quipped, pulling a rude gesture at him in the mirror.

‘Can’t imagine why,’ Ianto replied dryly.

They amused themselves taking turns in various combinations in front of the mirror. Sometimes one of them would be missing, and other times not. Ianto was slightly disappointed that his reflection didn’t disappear like Owen and Tosh’s did. Every time he tried it, he just saw plain old him, staring back.

When Gwen arrived, they invited her to join in. She seemed to have the same problem as Ianto, her image never faltering, except for one difference.

‘I look old! Not old, old, but just, older. And it’s only sometimes. The rest of the time I just look normal.’

‘Maybe it shows you how old you are on the inside,’ Owen joked.

‘In which case when you looked into it, there’d be a little five year old boy,’ Gwen retorted.

Owen grinned malevolently.

‘And Ianto would look about one hundred and eighty.’

Ianto scowled at him. ‘Was that another round of decaf you were after?’

‘It must have some unique refractive properties,’ Tosh murmured, ignoring the banter going on. ‘I’d like to run some tests, see if I can determine if it’s running any high frequency emissions that might be affecting how the light refracts back from its surface.’

At some point Jack had returned from his office to join them. They’d all been so engrossed in what they’d been doing that they hadn’t noticed him, nor the look of concern that flickered across his face.

‘I wouldn’t get too bogged down on it Tosh,’ Jack replied nonchalantly, ‘probably just one of those trick mirrors like you see at the fun fair. Across time and space, some things never change. And I'm still waiting for those mission reports from you two,' he said, pointing accusingly at Owen and Gwen.

Jack’s comment seemed to put them all at ease, but it was purposeful misdirection. He wasn’t entirely sure of it himself, but he thought he was pretty certain he knew what it was and what it did.

He may have denied it earlier, but he remembered finding it in 1911, and had been experimenting with it sporadically over the decades, just to confirm his suspicions.

He’d let it sit in his office for a week, on the basis that it was a low priority, and idly glancing across at it whenever someone came in to hand over a report, to complain about not having had a day off, or just to bring fresh coffee.

Tosh was sometimes there and sometimes not. Same with Owen. Gwen too was occasionally missing, but more often just looked older, sometimes quite a bit older. He hoped she hadn’t noticed.

It had more or less confirmed what he’d thought. This was a mirror that reflected future versions of oneself. He hadn’t figured out how it worked precisely, only that the mirror seemed to pick random future points in time. It explained why sometimes people appeared, or were absent. 

As expected, every time he’d ever looked into the mirror he always saw himself, just as he was now. Immortal,  never ageing, never dying.

When he’d stood there with Alice Guppy in 1911, she’d been invisible, which had irked her just as much as it had amused Jack, and because at the time, none of them knew why. The same thing had happened with Harriet Derbyshire and Gerald Carter. And Greg Bishop. How could he forget Greg? Greg had stared into the mirror and seen himself exactly as he was. A week later he was gone. After that, Jack was almost certain he knew, and had buried the mirror in a very dark corner of the archives, determined not to see another friend, lover or colleague disappear when they stood next to him and gazed into its depths.

Despite that, when Ianto had insisted on further investigations, he couldn’t help but give it one last experiment.

He’d overheard snatches of their conversations during the week, and had pieced together the only explanation that made sense. Tosh and Owen always saw each other, Gwen and Ianto almost always saw each other, but Gwen was oftentimes older. Tosh could see Gwen and Ianto, as could Owen, but when they stood with either Gwen or Ianto, they couldn’t see themselves. The only explanation that made sense was that Tosh and Owen would die young, and they’d die together. Somehow that didn’t comfort Jack at all. Gwen and Ianto would outlive them, and Gwen would reach a ripe old age, if their comments, and what he'd seen for himself, were anything to go by.

But he couldn’t figure out Ianto’s fate. He’d carefully glimpsed his reflection coming and going from his office all week. Always looking just the same as he was now. He dared not look at the mirror when both of them were stood in its sights. He didn’t want to see it, however inevitable. He knew that if he looked, he would see exactly the same thing he always saw. Just him, alone. They were all going to die and leave him there alone.

What perplexed him was Ianto’s reflection. If he never saw himself age they way Gwen had seen her own image, it had to mean that he would suffer the same fate as Tosh and Owen, a premature death. Yet they could all see him, even the older versions of  Gwen. It didn’t make any sense. He kept all of this to himself. It would bring neither comfort nor certainty to any of them. Knowing your own future was, at best, of no use at all, at worst, it was a curse.

One afternoon Jack was following Ianto out of his office, off on the trail of a rogue weevil, when Ianto stopped him, catching his reflection in the mirror as they passed. He'd almost forgotten it was there.

‘I think you’re right about it being a trick mirror. It just doesn’t work very well. All I ever see is my normal reflection, same as you. I suppose it could be broken.’

Jack had turned his head toward the mirror and looked at it. He hadn’t meant to. He didn’t want to. It was just an instinctive reaction. But what reflected back surprised him. Ianto was right. The two of them were stood there, looking just the same. Jack had never seen anyone else in the reflection with him before, but there they were.

Perhaps he’d been wrong about the mirror’s purpose. Otherwise, how could Ianto be standing there?

‘Maybe you’re right,’ Jack said distractedly, still staring at the mirror.

‘We never did get anything further from it. Even Tosh is baffled. Shall I put it back in archives? In its proper place, of course.’

Jack didn't reply for a moment, blinking, but still finding Ianto's image stood there beside his own.

‘Yeah,’ Jack agreed, ‘Perhaps some things we’re better off not knowing.'