m-findlow.livejournal.com

Title: Overheard
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Torchwood team
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 2,830 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for Challenge 197 - Loud
Summary: For once, Ianto isn't struggling to be heard.

'Please tell me you know how to shut that thing up!' Owen moaned.

'What?' Jack yelled. 'Tosh, can you fix this thing?'

'Huh?' she yelled back. 'I can’t hear you. This thing is too loud!'

'Somebody please turn it off!' Gwen cried, hands held painfully over her ears.

Ianto stepped in and gave it a gentle squeeze, and suddenly the horrendous noise dropped away into silence. The rest of them groaned in relief, looking dazed by the sudden lack of noise.

'How’d you do that?' Owen asked.

'Off switch,' he replied.

'No need to yell anymore Ianto!' Jack yelled back.

'I wasn’t yelling, sir.'

'Yes, you are!'

'Not so loud,' Gwen complained. 'We can all hear you just fine.'

'Must have burst an eardrum,' Owen said, trying to explain the unusual volume.

'I barely raised my voice.'

'Ianto!' Jack yelled again. 'Enough with the yelling!'

'I’m not,' he paused letting out a vexed breath, 'I’m not yelling,' he said in something just above a whisper.

'Thank you,' Owen muttered. 'Now perhaps you can tell us how you knew how to turn that thing off,' he said, pointing at the globular shaped red sponge.

'I was,' he stopped, seeing the four sets of faces cringing at him, remembering to lower his voice again. 'I was checking out our research in the archives on these things. I was on my way back here to warn you not to touch it.'

'Why not?' Tosh asked. 'What happens if we touch it?'

'If you touch it, you’ll end up like me, apparently.'

'Enough said,' Owen replied, trying to be funny. Jack on the other hand merely looked concerned.

'What do you mean we’ll end up like you?'

'Remember when we found this thing down along the foreshore this morning?'

'Yeah. Nice day for it actually. You declined my offer for us to go skinny dipping,' he added, trying to look offended.

'Yes, well, apart from that, apparently when I picked it up to put it in the storage container, I may have activated it by accident, or at least become affected by it.'

'Yes, but what does it actually do?'

'It’s a sound sponge. It feeds off the negative energy of the silence between sound waves, and projects it back out as amplified sound energy. Only when I touched it, I must have absorbed some of the sponge's residue on my hands. When I talk it sounds to you like I’m yelling. I was hoping it was only moderately loud, but obviously its effects don’t take that long.'

'Ianto, that’s brilliant,' Jack replied. 'I mean, not that you’ve become a walking speaker phone, but that you were able to find out all that since this morning.'

Ianto couldn’t help but flush with a small amount of pride. 'Well, the archives are my domain, and I’ve put a lot of work into digitising and indexing our current databases. It didn’t take long to find any and all references to red spongy things,although it might have been better if we'd checked all of that out before touching it.'

'Do the records say whether it's harmful?' Gwen asked, a look of concern on her face.

'Not that I call tell,' he replied.

'Yes, but how do we fix the problem of you?' Jack asked.

'I was kind of hoping you might be able to help me on that one. There’s a bunch of further data, but it’s all still in need of translation, and what I do have, well, it’s all a bit over my head.'

Jack reached out a hand and put it on his shoulder. 'Don’t worry, we’ll run it through this,' he said pointing to his vortex manipulator. 'Should be able to translate most things into a workable Galactic Standard and we can go from there. In the meantime, I’d like Owen to check you over. Owen, make sure he’s cleared of any more of that sponge residue from earlier. Go through whatever records Ianto can show you and make sure we're not dealing with anything more harmful than we think.'

'Roger that. Come on you,' he said, indicating for Ianto to follow him.

'Sure you feel fine?' Owen asked.

'Perfectly,' Ianto replied, watching Owen flinch at the volume. 'Sorry,' he whispered. 'I was hoping maybe it might be wearing off.' He grabbed another disinfectant towel and wiped his hands for the third time. 'Still can’t figure out for what purpose this could possibly be useful, and why its effects are transferred just from touching it. We're usually so careful about these things. I just thought it was a bit damp from being washed up on the beach.'

'One thing I’ve learnt,' Owen said, stripping off his rubber gloves with a satisfying thwack, 'is that half the stuff in the universe makes no sense whatsoever. On the plus side, I can’t find anything wrong with you.'

'That sounds like good news, Owen,' Jack replied, appearing from nowhere at the top of the stairs, leaning over the railing to look down at the pair of them.

'Apart from his internal volume control being totally screwy, I was going to say.'

Jack stepped down the stairs and took up a spot between Owen and Ianto.

'Well, Tosh and I did a bit more research based on what you dug up this morning. You were right, it’s not just a pretty looking sea sponge.'

'Told you so,' Ianto replied. 'Luckily at least I’m not just generally emitting a mass of sound. It seems to be restricted only to when I actually speak.'

'Right on both counts,' Jack replied. 'Turns out that your body is absorbing silence and emitting the by product as additional noise.'

'Like the sponge?'

'Yup.'

'But why? I mean, what was the point in infecting me with the same properties? Is it a defence mechanism?'

Jacks face was somewhere halfway between a cringe and a smirk. 'Not exactly. Let's just say it was exuding a substance for the purposes of procreation.'

'Lovely,' Owen replied, at the same time as Ianto said 'Ew.'

'You mean I'm going to turn into one of those things?'

Jack laughed and grabbed him reassuringly by the shoulders. 'Relax. You're not going to be turning into anything. There's not nearly enough compatible DNA for it to work. Points for it trying, though. Shag enough things in the universe and eventually you'll come up trumps.'

'You'd be an expert on that, wouldn't you?' Owen smirked.

'I'm not nearly as easy as you think, Owen. You should meet the rest of the universe.'

'God help us,' he muttered in reply.

'So,' Ianto paused, 'if I'm not going to become one of those things, and I'm not about to give birth to one, how do we fix this?'

'We need to put you somewhere noisy to counteract it. Being cooped up in the archives half the day has actually compounded the problem. Down there, there’s nothing but silence. You've been absorbing it steadily and as soon as you opened your mouth to speak, well...'

'And the sponge? Why didn’t it go crazy when we found it? The only reason I came back upstairs was to warn you not to touch it. I didn't expect to find it screaming bloody murder.'

'I think it was because the beach was pretty secluded. Apart from a few waves breaking onto the shore, it was busy absorbing the peace and serenity, and after enough time had elapsed, it reached a critical mass, and then, kaboom!'

'So, if I turned it on again, couldn’t the noise be used to fix me?'

Jack looked at Owen and Owen shrugged back at him. 'I’ve heard crazier ideas.'

'Okay,' Jack agreed. 'But let’s take this somewhere where the rest of us don’t have to hear it, first.'

Ianto went to pick it up but Jack grabbed his forearm. 'Ah, ah. Gloves, or better yet, it goes in a box. No more touching it.'

'Good thinking,' Ianto replied. He didn’t fancy being stuck like this any longer than he had to.

Jack lead them downstairs to a disused room with thick concrete walls and directed Ianto to set it on a small table in the corner of the room.

'You know how to turn it back on?' Jack asked.

Ianto nodded. Owen handed him a double set of gloves and he slipped them on, before giving the sponge an odd little squeeze to the side.

The sponge began emitting the horrendous noise again and both Owen and Jack were forced to quickly shove fingers in their ears, slowly backing out of the room.

'Think we’ll just leave you to it,' Owen yelled, shutting the door behind him.

'Have fun!' Jack yelled over the din.

'Thanks, guys,' Ianto said talking to the empty room, slumping down on the floor, with nothing to do but listen to the garbled wailing from the sponge.

After about an hour, the sponge finally stopped its loud cries, and Ianto gathered it back up into the box and headed upstairs, relieved that it was over. It had been a less than pleasant sound, and he couldn't tell if the sound was still reverberating in his head or if it was just his ears ringing.

Gwen smiled when she saw him. 'Everything okay now?'

'It stopped making noise so I guess so,' he replied, then saw the way Gwen’s face scrunched up.

'Loud?' he asked.

'Very,' she replied, trying to look apologetic.

He sighed. 'Right. Well, back to the drawing board then,' trudging off to see Owen to break the bad news.

Ianto was slumped at the desk next to Owen's, leaning his elbow on its surface as Owen made him rattle off another round of verbal tests, sitting there waiting whilst Owen went through the results.

'I took a look at Tosh’s translation, and agree with Jack’s original idea,' Owen said, consulting the chart in front of him. 'Might be that you just haven’t been exposed to enough noise yet.'

Enough noise? He'd sat in a room with that thing for an hour. 'So, what do you suggest?'

Jack drove him out to a large construction site on the edge of the city, where they were erecting yet another fifteen storey block of apartments. Inside the car, there was loud music blaring from the SUV's stereo the whole journey, Jack seemingly oblivious to it though the volume irked Ianto's sensibilities.

He pulled up the car and they stepped out, standing there on the opposite side of the bright orange barricade mesh, listening to jackhammers and bobcats, post diggers and concrete trucks, rolling in and out of the site. Everywhere men in high-vis jackets mooched around, barking instructions and offensive jokes at one another, to be heard over their own protective earmuffs.

'Did I mention that I hate all this noise?' Ianto said, yelling to be heard over the ruckus, but not needing to.

'Nope, but you’re still yelling so we’ll have to stick around a while longer,' Jack replied, leaning casually back against the side of the vehicle. The look on Ianto’s face was one of devastation.

He didn’t like loud noises. In fact quite the opposite. He enjoyed the sound of absolutely nothing at all. It was what made the archives such an appealing place to work. He quite enjoyed his own company and the fact that he could hear himself think. Sometimes he might have the radio set on a very low volume, or even hum to himself to pass the time, but for the most part, he was simply content to work away in silence. Loud, bustling places just weren’t his thing. Anything noisier than a busy coffee shop was usually given a wide berth. He found it hard to believe that he’d been into heavy metal and grunge music when he was younger.

Face it, Jones, you're getting old, he told himself. Soon you'll be referring to people your age as whippersnappers, and telling them off by pointing your walking stick at them. Your idea of music will be morning melodies on Radio Wales. Assuming he made it to old age, that was.

Jack made him put up with it two hours longer, before Ianto made for the car, unable to stand it a minute longer, shutting out the sound behind him. Jack followed him back to the car.

'Talk to me, Ianto.'

'I couldn’t take it anymore. I thought my head was going to explode.'

'Well, your voice has come down a few decibels,' Jack smiled. 'I say we keep at it. Owen thinks prolonged exposure is best. A few more hours and you should be back to normal.'

No. He couldn’t. Just couldn’t. This was a nightmare. His head was killing him from all the noise. He’d rather whisper for the rest of his life. Or perhaps he could become a mute and use sign language.

He folded his arms over in a way that broached no argument. 'Find something else. Please.'

Jack looked back at him. He had no idea how he was supposed to fix this without driving his lover crazy. Where could they possibly take him that would be loud without all the negative aspects?

It was Gwen who came up with the brilliant idea.

She nudged Jack playfully as they walked towards the stadium, caught up in the swelling tide of people.

'I kept saying we’d eventually get you to a rugby match, Jack.'

'Yes, you did,' he agreed. 'Wasn’t quite how I imagined it, but hey.'

'You’re lucky there’s an international on tonight,' Owen added. 'I’ll be in the England camp, of course. If you’re smart, you’ll do the same.'

'Can’t I be impartial?'

'No!' Gwen and Owen both answered emphatically.

The noise inside the stadium was roaring, filled with eighty thousand fiery England and Wales supporters, horns tooting, hands clapping, boisterous male voices belting out the national anthem at random intervals. It was pandemonium, but despite the noise, at least it was more endurable than jackhammers and chainsaws.

'What do you think, Ianto?' Jack asked him, sporting a temporary tattoo of a red dragon on his cheek, having elected to support the local side. He was really getting into the swing of things, even if he didn’t understand the game properly, though Gwen was more than happy to lay out the finer points for him, buying him a scarf as well.

'I think Wales need to be stronger in defence,' Ianto replied.

'What?'

'I said, their defence is rubbish,' Ianto replied, raising his voice, but drowned out by the rowdy mob behind them chanting derogatory things about the England team, waving their plastic pints of beer from side to side as they cheered and booed, annoyed that the margin they were winning by wasn’t bigger.

'Say that again?' Jack yelled.

This time, Ianto did yell, and realised that Jack could barely hear him, despite sitting right next to him.

'I think it’s working!'

'Good!' Jack yelled back. 'Because if Wales don’t win, there’ll be nothing for you to be happy about!'

In the end, it was Owen who went home unhappy, made worse by the Welsh fans that had singled him out as they exited, jeering all the way.

'The sooner we get you back to the hub and cleared, the better,' Owen grumbled.

'Sore loser,' Jack teased.

Back at the hub, it did appear that Ianto’s voice had levelled off back to its regular volume, as Owen made him repeat sentences endlessly at what he perceived to be differing levels.

'Should be okay, I think,' Owen said, 'but I’ll check you out again in the morning to be sure.'

'Thanks, Owen,' he said.

'Yeah, no worries. I’d go drown myself at the pub, but there’s too many smug Wales supporters going around. I’m going home.'

'See you tomorrow,' Jack said, waving him off with the end of his scarf. 'So,' he said, turning to Ianto, 'what’s left for us tonight?'

'A quiet night in would be preferable,' Ianto replied, being quite sick of noise after today.

Jack frowned at him. 'Hmm, not sure that’s such a good idea. I mean, we think you’re cured, but a little bit of noise might knock it on the head once and for all.'

'Please, no more noise,' Ianto begged.

'Really?' Jack asked. 'I was only thinking maybe we could do something really loud in the bedroom. There’s a few things you could do that would really get me screaming out for more. Who knows? Beside, I quite like it when you’re loud,' he added, grinning lasciviously.

Ianto grinned back. 'Now that's something I do like the sound of,' he said, wrapping his arms around Jack's waist, kissing him.

Jack kissed back pulling him closer. 'The best part is that if it doesn't work, we can just try again and again.'

'Yes,' Ianto agreed. 'We ought to make sure I'm properly cured.'

'We can go all night if we have to,' Jack replied. 'I'm prepared to make that sacrifice.'