Title: No place like home
Fandom: Torchwood/Warehouse 13
Characters: Ianto, Agent Woolcott, Jack
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 7,584 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for Challenge 297 - Amnesty and Challenge 15 - Double
Summary: Ianto gets a visitor that is more like him than anyone he's ever met.


Ianto's phone buzzed furiously in his pocket as he was halfway through pushing the crate back onto its shelf down in the archives. The buzzing caught him so much by surprised that the crate nearly slipped from his grip, and would have gone crashing to the floor spilling its contents everywhere, but for his razor shape reflexes that caught it.

What on earth was causing all the commotion in his pocket, he wondered, tugging it out to check the screen. It didn't usually make that much of a fuss unless...

Oh. Bugger, he thought seeing the hub's internal warning systems feed him the salient details. The hub had gone into lockdown. There were only two reasons the hub ever triggered an automatic lockdown. The first was when Tosh tinkered too much with something that could cause a power feedback loop strong enough to take out half that national power grid. The second and far more concerning, was something inside the hub that shouldn't be there. Thr hub would remain in lockdown until the threat was eliminated, or... Well, the "or" didn't really bear thinking about too much. Worse, the system was telling him that whatever had made its way inside was down here with him, in the archives, not all that far from where he was right now.

Ianto tapped his comms before stopping. Damn. He'd forgotten the rest of them had gone out to Barry to investigate a supposed exorcism gone wrong. Most likely it was just one of those alien neural interface projector thingies gone haywire again. They seemed to pop up all over the place from origins unknown and had a nasty habit of only ever projecting ones worst nightmares. At least this time it hadn't brought the zombie apocalypse down on the whole city. The range of those things was quite extraordinary in some cases. But at least today it was only happening in Barry. Barry was, in Ianto's opinion, a largely expendable part of South Wales, second only to Splott.

'Typical,' he grumbled in a hushed whisper, tiptoeing back towards his desk. 'First alien incursion in the hub for years and I'm the only one here to deal with it.'

He reached his office and carefully slipped open the second desk drawer, retrieving the gun he kept there for emergencies. This definitely qualified as far as he was concerned. It was one thing to let Gerald, a large furry cross between a dog and a dragon, wander about the archives unchecked, but he wasn't keen on anything else being down here without his express permission. Not that he exactly permitted Gerald to be there, he just always had been, and even then Ianto had seen him less that a dozen times, and only ever for a few seconds before he disappeared again, light as a feather and almost as quiet as one for a creature so surprisingly large. He didn't require feeding and he wasn't needy for tummy rubs or other undertakings of affection which made him less maintenance than just about everyone, the team included. That was the kind of pet Ianto could appreciate.

He doubled checked the gun in his usual compulsive way, ejecting and re-inserting the clip, pulling back the safety and keeping it aimed low, all the while listening hard for the sounds of their visitor. He wasn't anticipating being followed back to his desk but it never paid to be too cautious. Armed with his gun, he was Ianto Jones in stealth mode.

'Okay,' he said, consulting his phone once more. 'Let's go and take a peek at what you are.' He'd worry about the how later once he had a grapple of what he was dealing with. A small dot appeared in a overlayed schematic of the archives. It registered as a heat signature, and it shifted only about a foot from where it had been a moment ago. That made it living, possibly sentient, or at the very least, just slow and stupid.

He moved quickly and efficiently down several rows of archival shelves, three across two down, one left turn and two right turns, bringing him within fifty feet of its original location. He consulted his phone again, finding that the dot had moved on him and was now two stacks away. He strained his ears but all he could make out was a quiet shuffling. Possibly dazed and confused by its trip through the rift, though how it had breached their security protocols was a question for Tosh, or even Jack. Things just weren't supposed to be able to get in here. Not without some serious technical kit, or someone to leave the door open and let them waltz right in.

He suppressed a growl and dashed silently in the same direction until his phone buzzed against his thigh. Not another incursion alert this time, but a proximity warning alarm. It was closer than he thought. Blast. Now it was moving, and in the wrong direction. Ianto had meant to come around and shadow it from behind, getting a proper look at it, but it had done a number on him, outsmarting his initiative. It was coming in his direction and, looking around him, there was nowhere for him to go; not without being spotted first. He was halfway down a stack of shelves, fifty feet at least from the other end and any chance of ducking away and out of sight. He puffed out a breath. The only option was to get on the front foot and engage it first. Not ideal, since it might just pounce on him and rip his throat out, but hadn't he always known he'd probably go out in spectacular fashion? Please be something cute, fluffy and harmless, he prayed as he raised his gun and paced quickly forward, closing the gap and hoping to catch it flat-footed. He needed to round d the end of the sack before it did, giving him the element of surprise. He rushed forward, taking the shaep lefthand turn and held his gun high in a two-handed grip, his finger a hair's breath from pulling the trigger.

'Woah! Don't shoot!' Ianto's target threw his hands up in the air. The coat that had been folded neatly over his arm dropped to the floor in a messy heap. 'By jeepers!'

Ianto very nearly dropped his gun in disbelief as he took in the sight of the man standing there in surrender. It was like he was looking at a mirror, the man standing there was every bit as much like him as he thought it could be possible. It was utterly remarkable. He dismissed the idea of time travel immediately. If he had come back here from some point in the future - and that had to be the only logical explanation - since he'd remember if he'd been here before and wouldn't simply have been wandering around the archives like a lost sheep. Amazing how he'd spent so long hanging around Jack that he could rationalize complex time paradoxes in mere seconds. Once upon a time, just listening to Jack explain such concepts would give him a headache. It wasn't him but, bloody hell, it was a dead ringer if ever he saw one. Ianto relaxed the grip in his gun ever so slightly. 'Um, who are you?'

The man's eyes went wide with awe. 'Astonishing! By George, that's just utterly remarkable!'

Ianto frowned at his own thoughts being repeated back at him, studying his reflection in the flesh. The word dapper sprung to mind. Was he dapper? No. In his suit he was just neat. Occasionally smart, but mostly just neat. This guy had the top hat and tails and his suit screamed bespoke tailor. The sneaky little thought of "I wonder where he buys his shirts" crept in before Ianto shook it away. Alien incursion. Focus and stick to the script. It could be a shape-shifter for all he knew, trying to lull him into a false sense of security. 'You look like me and you sound like me. Are you me? Human, I mean. Are you human?'

His doppelganger smiled congenially. 'I doubt I could be anything else. Do you mind if I?' He cast his gaze down at the floor where his coat was still crumpled. It would be covered in a layer of dust now. 'I'm not armed, I assure you. I left my pistol in my desk drawer.' He gave a little chuckle. 'I was rather sure I wouldn't be needing it today!'

Ianto bit down on the urge to say "that's where I leave my gun", instead lowering his own and keeping both eyes on the man as he picked his coat up off the floor, giving it a fastidious dusting down with his hand. No two days are ever going to be the same, so it would seem. He seemed to be talking g to himself into, he remembered he wasn't alone. He gave Ianto a funny little wave, that same nervous gesture Ianto had used himself when he was in two minds as to whether he was facing something as yet undetermined as friend or foe. 'Hello! My my, I've grown accustomed to the strange but this is quite something else.' He extended a hand towards Ianto. 'William Woolcott, but my friends call me Woolly.'

Ianto took the proffered hand, giving it a shake and coming to a conclusion that this was most likely a ftiend. Or at least someone who didn't mean to kill him, and take over the hub. 'Ianto Jones,' he said, introducing himself. 'My friends call me... er, Ianto.'

'Splendid to meet you. I mean to say, at first I didn't ever realise I wasn't where I had been. This place looked so much like the warehouse I rather thought I'd day-dreamed for a moment and taken a wrong turn. I was trying to retrace my steps when I bumped into you. I presume it's me and not you that has been displaced?' He chuckled to himself again. 'Bloody warehouse. Where precisely are we, by the way?'

'Torchwood. Cardiff,' Ianto added, trying to be precise. Adding, Wales, UK and planet Earth felt like overkill. Wooly was human and spoke English. Ianto reasoned couldn't be from that far away, even if he dressed a like bit like Jack. He had that sort of early nineteenth century air about him.

Woolly's eyes lit up with recognition. 'Ah, my old home town, though I've not heard of Torchwood. Is it a new development?'

'Depends on which bit you're referring to.' Though he could hardly describe any part of the hub as being particularly recent, except as in recently cleaned and tidied. By him.

Woolly shook his head. 'So much going on these days. They say 1914 will be the peak of industrialization as we know it.'

'Nineteen four...' Ianto's mind drifted at the remark. 'You're from nineteen fourteen?'

'Of course. Fancy! Transported from London to Cardiff, a journey of many hundred miles, days by hansom, all in the blink of an eye.'

Not to mention few hundred years, Ianto thought.

Woolly frowned at him. 'Is there a reason why you wish to confirm the year? I assure you I feel quite compos mentis despite the journey.'

'Um...' It was time for some hard truths. 'I hate to break it to you, but this is 2008.'

Wooly pulled his hat off and clutched it to his chest. 'Egads! But is it really?'

Ianto cringed at the exclamation and vowed never to used the term "egads", ever. At least it made marginally more sense that someone from the past might accidentally slip through a crack in time to his own time, even if it was about a trillion to one that the very person who came through the rift would be his own identical twin from a century earlier.

'Just be be clear, you're not related to the Woolcotts of Bute, are you?'

Ianto tried not to cringe, shoving his hands on his pockets. 'Genealogy isn't really my thing.'

'My word, but it's positively uncanny that we two could resemble each other so markedly. It's almost as if we were meant to meet like this.'

Ianto attempted to shrug off the coincidence. 'You get used to that sort of thing working for Torchwood.'

Woolly grinned. 'And at the Warehouse as well,' he agreed. 'Curiosities have a habit of surprising you.'

'This warehouse you work in, it's in London?'

'Yes.'

'But it's not called Torchwood.'

'I'm afraid I've never heard of it.' He looked around at the tall shelves that surrounded them with the kind of expression Ianto could only describe as fascination. No one, other than him , found any of this stuff particularly interesting. It was rather refreshing to have someone show an interest in his years of hard work. 'Marvellous. What a wondrous hall of curiosities you have here. Are you a collector?'

'We... I suppose you could call it that.'

'And are you part of the Regency?'

Ianto quirked an eyebrow at the term he'd never heard of. 'If by regency, you mean the monarchy?'

'No. I'm quite sure the monarchy would be positively shaken to their core by everything the Regency had done and what it stands for. Not to say I'm not a King's man. I have every respect for monarchy. Are they still around in 2008?'

'Oh yes,' Ianto nodded emphatically. 'They bankroll us.' Where would they be without that never-ending stash of money? The danger pay alone of every agent who'd ever worked here could bankrupt the country.

Woolly continued to gaze around in amazement. Ianto supposed that the place was quite overwhelming for the uninitiated, though mostly people jut looked at it as a really big, really cluttered garage. 'And are all of these things stored here curiosities?'

'Well, some of them are alien, some are, well I suppose you'd called them advanced technology, and the rest well... well, just junk really. But junk soaked in rift radiation,' Ianto was quick to clarify. 'It's being stored here until it's deemed safe to be returned to the general public domain. The rift is-'

'Alien?' Woolly exclaimed. 'Like War of the Worlds, alien? I often wondered about such possibilities but I suspected perhaps it was all just fancy.'

'The twenty-first century is when everything changes.' God, but he'd always wanted to be able to say that!

Wooly paused and scratched his chin. 'It would explain a lot, he said, giving an understanding nod of his head. I too am something if a collector. I work for Warehouse Twelve in London. Have you heard of it?' He spotted the look of confusion on Ianto's face. 'No, I suspect not. We're quite under the radar.' He said it with pride overbrimming. 'You have to be, dealing in these sorts of artifacts.'

'That is true.'

Woolly's gaze fixed upon a small ovoid object which glistened golden in the muted light. He reached for it and lifted it up, inspecting the flawless surface. 'Pray tell what does this one do?'

'Ah, I wouldn't touch that if I were you,' Ianto warned him, gently prising it from Woolcott's hands. 'It has a tendency to explode,' he added, setting it very carefully back on the shelf.

Woolly chuckled. 'Sorry, old boy. I quite forgot myself there for a moment. H.G. is always warning me that my impetuous curiosity might be my undoing. Not that she shies away from adventure herself, mind you. Never a dull moment with that one!'

'H.G.?' Ianto queried.

'Oh! Helena Wells, of course.'

'As in H. G. Wells?'

'Oh, so you have heard of her. It'll be those books of hers, I assume. Everyone thinks her brother writes them but that's just a lark. H.G. doesn't want the credit, not that such things are generally accepted, women writing books and all. How she ever devises such mind bending plots is quite beyond comprehension. Aliens and time machines... One would think you could merely draw on real life experience.'

Ianto was still struggling to wrap his head around things. To be fair, it was enough just to come face to face with his doppelganger, let alone have to grapple with the idea that H.G. Wells was not just some crackpot writer. 'You work for H.G. Wells?'

'Oh, yes. We've worked together for years and gotten into all sorts of scrapes and adventures. She's quite, uh... One of a kind. I must be the only man in London with some small immunity to her charms.'

'I have a boss like that,' Ianto replied. 'Captain Jack Harkness.' There must be something about doing a job like this and needing to be ruthlessly charming and not entirely unattractive either.

Woolly was intrigued by this. 'Captain, eh? Sounds like a rather dashing sort.'

'Oh, he is very dashing,' Ianto agreed, unable to wipe the smile from his face. Jack's sex drive would be going into meltdown right now at the sight of two of them. Thank God he wasn't. He could handle Jack but he didn't think poor Woolly was quite ready for a full on dose of Jack Harkness. 'You said you were based in London?'

'Yes, but not for much longer I'm afraid. The Regency have decided to move us to America. I suppose it makes sense, given how terribly overpopulated london is becoming. Why, I estimate that by nineteen fifteen we'll have reached nearly a million people. Shocking, isn't it? '

'Shocking,' Ianto nodded.

'America has whole swathes of unpopulated land where we could safely store everything from the Warehouse. But, not for a few months yet. Still got to do a full inventory of everything before we set sail. Thousands of artifacts and not all of them safe to travel together if you catch my meaning. A bit like that delicate thing over there,' he said, pointing at the object he'd so brazenly picked up earlier. 'Clearly I've upset something I shouldn't have. It's half a wonder my clipboard didn't arrive with me! But what a privilege to be sent here of all places. There must be a connection between the two, don't you think? May I ask what you were working on before I arrived?'

Ianto had to agree. If this Warehouse that Woolcott worked in housed things that were of alien origin, whether they believed that were the explanation for it or not, there was every chance he'd stumbled over something capable of transporting him through time and space. For a brief moment Ianto wondered whether it was a vortex manipulator, like Jack's, only one in working order. That could be a real game changer for them, and no doubt make Jack deliriously happy. He didn't even feel any qualms about Torchwood perhaps borrowing it on a permanent basis. After all, if Woolcott and his colleagues didn't know what it was, what was the harm in them having it? And it would negate any possibility of someone back in nineteen fourteen using it and accidentally screwing up history. Ianto was personally quite fond of how his life had turned out so far and didn't particularly want someone mucking that up, not that he'd probably even be aware it had happened. Perhaps this was even one of those fixed points in time where he prevented it from happening by getting it out of pre-war London and safely in the archives of the new millennium. He sighed. Time paradoxes again. It could drive you mad.

'This way.' Ianto walked him around the end of the tall shelving unit and into the adjacent row. 'We can't exactly have you stuck here in the future. There must be a way we can send you back.' They did have a rift and a rift machine, but using it was devilishly tricky and fraught with peril. Better if there was another way. One that wouldn't splinter time itself.

He came to a stop in front of the shelf he'd been near where he'd first received the alarm signaling the lockdown. He wrapped his hands around the edges of the crate that had only been back in place a few moments. I don't thinks there's anything of particular interest in here, he said, creating new grooves in the dust that lined the shelf as he tugged the crate back out. 'This stuff is all level three artifacts.'

'Level three?' Woolly asked.

'Twelve point risk assessment scale for extraterrestrial artifact archival.' He beamed. 'I devised it myself. Level three is nothing. No more harmful than a kindle or an alarm clock.' He paused a moment, realising his cultural faux past and trying to think of an early twentieth century equivalent. 'No more harmful than a sewing machine.'

'Ah, I see. A clever way to store artifacts.'

How do you store yours?' He was intensely curious to know. He'd never had anyone to talk to about all things archival.

Woolly just shrugged. 'Wherever it fits, mostly.'

Ianto worked hard to hide the disappointment on his face. He tugged the lid off the crate and they both had a look inside but Woolly confirmed that nothing inside resembled anything he'd seen before.

'Okay,' Ianto said, putting the crate back. 'Well, what about we take a look at the stuff near where you first arrived.' He pulled his phone from his pocket. 'I've got the exact coordinates here.' He lead them back through the stacks, reaching the point of entry and deciding where to begin the search. He hadn't been down this part of the archives for a while. If the team didn't make any requests for things to be retrieved, whole decades could probably go by before anyone would come down here to reopen any of the dozens of boxes and crates and containers housing everything from the completely mad to the completely mundane.

'You're welcome to have a look around,' he said. 'Remove the lids but perhaps just don't touch anything inside.' Woolly nodded and together they began systematically removing items from the shelves one by one to inspect the contents.

'Ah!' came a cry from Woolcott.

'What is it?' Iato asked, setting down a box of ugly ceramic vases.

'Why, it's a second Marcosian harp!'

'A what harp?' he asked as Woolcott pulled out the small instrument.

'Marcosian. As in Marco Polo. It was fabled he carried this harp with him all across the world as he journeyed from continent to continent. They say he used it to charm his female companions. Some even say he was able to lure men with it.'

'Like a snake charmer.'

'Precisely. I checked this off the manifest not an hour ago.'

Ianto gave it a tentative brush of the strings with his hand. It didn't sound particularly musical to him, but perhaps it needed tuning, like a piano. 'What if it was more than just a musical instrument?'

'I'm afraid I don't follow you, Ianto.'

'Well, you say this was one of the last things you inventoried before you ended up here, and Marco Polo was renowned for traveling great distances.'

'Oh! You think it's a traveling device! By golly, but that would make sense. But how to make it work?' Woolcott reached back into the crate and had a rummage around. 'You don't have the scepter it came with, do you?'

'Scepter?'

'The gift he received from the King of Persia. Well, at least we assume it's the same one. This harp and the scepter were both found buried in boxes in a field in Surrey. They were discovered years apart by the local farmer, but there didn't seem to be any historical doubt as to their providence, or the fact that they must have been meant to be hidden away.'

Ianto studied the tag on the harp and sighed. 'This thing has been part of the Torchwood archives for nearly a century. The records weren't so great back then, and some of the information has faded or been lost. I don't recall it ever being paired with anything but then again, I wasn't in charge a hundred years ago. Do you remember what it looked like?'

Woolcott furrowed his brow. 'I only got a brief glimpse of it as it checked it off the inventory. It's called Marco's scepter but it's not quite how you'd describe one.' He made some gestures with his hands about the relative size and dimensions. 'It's a funny shape, sort of bobbly at one end and rather curved like... I'm not explaining myself very well, am I? Oh, you haven't a pencil or something, have you? I could try drawing a likeness of it.'

Ianto fished a pen from inside his jacket pocket, along with a small notepad he kept there.

Woolcott eyed the pen and frowned. 'Am I to assume that pens in the future don't require ink?'

'Ah, the ink is inside. Self-inking pens.'

'Ingenious,' Woolly murmured, flipping open the notepad to the first available blank page. For several minutes he sketched diligently, producing a picture that was both accurate and highly detailed. Ianto was slightly jealous of his ability to draw so well.

'Do you have anything that looks like this?' Woolly asked, finally showing him the completed sketch.

Ianto studied it, putting every last shred of his his eidetic memory to the test but coming up empty. 'Nothing that I recall, but I can try running this through our computers to see if they can find a match.'

'I only say it because it strikes me as baffling that you should have the harp and not the matching scepter,' Woolly replied. 'What must have happened to the Warehouse for it to end up here in your archive, I wonder.'

Ianto sympathised with him. While he wouldn't be alive a hundred years from now, he'd still be troubled to know that Torchwood might fall and that all of its carefully curated technology and other artifacts might be cast to the wind, ending up, well, anywhere. Any archivist worth his salt could lost sleep over thoughts like that. 'Don't worry, Woolly. If it's alien like I think it is, then there could be dozens of them scattered across the world. Yours might still be safely tucked away in your warehouse.'

He nodded, looking somewhat reassured by the comment. 'You're probably right. The Regency would never let the Warehouse be destroyed.'

Ianto clapped him on the shoulder, an odd tingling feeling in his hand for the briefest of moments as he connected with his counterpart. 'So, let's go see if we can find your scepter.' Maybe it had nothing at all to do with how he ended up here, but maybe it did. Ianto had learned that there really was no such thing as coincidence.

Back in his office, he settled behind his desk, twirling around in the chair only long enough to open up the lid of the small multifunction printer on the ledge behind him and take a scan of the detailed drawing, loading it into their computer systems to start scanning. Tosh's systems were brilliant. If anything even remotely resembled the picture it was going to come up.

'Do you use some of your curiosities in your daily work?' Woolcott asked, unable to tear his eyes away from the computer screen and keyboard on Ianto's desk.

Ianto grinned back. 'Sometimes, but this stuff is just boring old twenty-first century technology.' The tapped a few commands in to the system, widening the search to any references to scepters, wands, rods all things related that might be referred to only in passing in a report or for which they had no photographic reference.

'Pens that don't need ink and typewriters that don't need paper,' Woolly mused, hanging his hat and coat on the coat stand in the corner.

'Just wait until you get plays that don't need theaters to watch them. That will blow your mind.'

Woolly chuckled. 'I'm sure it will. H.G. will probably find it all terribly boring.'

The computer pinged a result and it automatically brought up the file on screen. 'That's it!' Woolcott cried. 'Marco's scepter.'

Ianto make a few clicks and came up with a location for it. 'Typical,' he muttered. 'Three vaults away.'

'Is that far?'

'Let's just say I hope you like walking,' Ianto replied.

'Walking is excellent for the constitution.'

'I'm glad,' Ianto added deadpan. 'Bring that thing with you,' he said, pointing to the harp. 'I don't fancy having to come back all that way if we need it.'

Woolly grabbed it and bounded after Ianto. 'Is it just you down here all on your own, Ianto?'

'No. I have a team. Well, I mean, it's not my team, it's Jack's team. Just the five of us, actually. Hard to have a big team when you have to keep everything you're doing a secret. But the archives are kind of my project.' Basically because no one else cared about it, but that wasn't the point.

'Yes, the Warehouse is not dissimilar,' Woolcott agreed. 'Though I daresay we're not as organised as you. Perhaps when we get to America we'll be able to make a clean slate of it. Get everything ship shape from the off.' He chucked to himself. 'Mind you, it's going to take a good many ships to get it all over there. But America... Have you ever been?'

'Can't say I have.' America didn't really grab him as a bucket list holiday destination. If he had a holiday - and what were the chances of that working in a job like this? - he'd much rather a quiet beach with a nice big palm tree he could nap underneath.

'Nor I,' Woolly replied, 'but I'm terribly excited. H.G. says there must be all sorts of unfounded curiosities over there, just waiting to be discovered.'

'Sounds like quite an adventure,' Ianto mused. 'Some days I'd give my right arm just to see daylight.' Other days, he'd happily forgo daylight if it meant a weevil or some other alien wasn't trying to take his right arm from him. Or any other limb for that matter.

'Where is the rest of your team now?'

'Out in Barry dealing with an exorcism gone wrong. Only when you arrived here, it instigated an automatic lockdown of our hub. So no one can get in and no one can get out, including us. Our systems registered you as a threat, which clearly isn't the case, but I don't know how we go about overriding it. Not without getting rid of you, and I mean that in the nicest way possible.'

'Oh. Sorry about that.'

'Don't apologise. Usually it's our own doing. Refreshing to have it be somebody else's fault for once. The systems can be a bit twitchy about things like this. They have a tendency to overcompensate or err on the side of caution.' It was small wonder they didn't get locked in more often, to be fair. Jack and Tosh were always tinkering with things, Owen's autopsies had lead to a string of unexpected contagions and other biological headaches and Myfanwy had even once chewed through a power cable that set it off. It was lucky she hadn't been electrocuted in the process.

They walked in companionable silence for a while, Ianto expertly navigating them through room after room, row after row of what appeared to the untrained eye to be identical storage shelves. To Ianto however they were like a fingerprint, unique from every other. Whole sections hadn't been given more than a cursory wave of his archival wand and still remained a cluttered jumble of miscellany. There were only so many hours in his day, in between world ending calamities, for getting it all in order. Newer sections made for low hanging fruit, since most of the items were at least documented reasonably well. It made putting them in a logical system quick, meaning he could get through larger amounts of items in less time. The older archives were looked down upon with reticence. There the items had faded tags, or no tags at all. Some would have rotted away over time, others probably never had them to begin with. Those that they could identify needed to be checked that they were still in working order or fit for purpose. Those without identification, well, that was a whole other process, and a time consuming one at that. He didn't think even Jack truly knew what was down here.

They entered a room with a set of large filing cabinets, each as high as a man and lined up in their dozens. Ianto counted them off, selecting the second drawer from the bottom of the seventh one along and tugged it open. It squealed its protest as rusting runners got their first use in forever, stiff and unloved. Ianto rifled through locked boxes and stacks of manila files, tied up in red legal ribbon, finally unearthing a metal box about a foot long and half as wide. It had been buried almost ast the bottom. This should be it, he announced, removing a key from an envelope at the front of the cabinet and sliding it into the small padlock on the tin. Even the padlock was rusted and stiff and it took a decently hard twist to get the key to turn in the lock. He flipped it open and there inside was Marco's scepter.

'Identical in every way,' Woolly breathed, leaning over his shoulder to get his first proper look at it.

'Not the first time today,' Ianto joked. Everything seemed to be coming in pairs.

'Quite.'

The harp in Woolly's arms began to hum a low sound. With a slightly panicked look, he set it on top of the cabinet and backed away. Ianto still had the scepter his hand as he'd joined Woolcott in putting some distance between them and it, cursing himself for not leaving it behind as well. Once they'd backed up far enough, the harp stopped humming, or at least not at any discernable volume they could hear.

'It's never done that before,' Woolly said. 'At least I don't think it has.'

Ianto chanced getting closer but as he did, the harp started humming again, a little louder than before. He looked down at the scepter in his hand and backed away again, hearing the harp once more give up its tune. There seemed to be a distinct connection between the sound it was making and the relative proximity of the scepter to it. 'You said these were in separate boxes when they were found?'

'Yes. I had a note to pack them back together for shipping across to America.'

Ianto frowned. 'I'm wondering if there was a reason for that.' He studied the scepter a little closer. He hadn't noticed the little white dots on the end before. There were two, and now a third one lit up. He took two steps forward and a fourth little dot lit up. 'I think maybe it's charging or something.' True enough, as he stepped closer more dots along its side lit themselves. When he backed away however, they did t disappear, merely remaining lit. He approached against and set it down next to the harp on top of the cabinet which hummed a low note as he backed away again. More and more little dots began to light up along its length. Like a countdown clock, both he and Woolly held their collective breath as they watched it, waiting for what would happened next.

When all the dots lit up nothing happened.

'Well, that was a bit anticlimactic.' To say he was disappointed was an understatement. Usually when one of the team did something like this, something always happened. Not always something pleasant, but their hunches were pretty accurate most of the time.

'Maybe I should go over,' Woolly offered. 'Maybe there's more that needs to be done, like activating something on either the scepter or the harp.'

'Is that a good idea?' If it had sent Woolly a century into the future without him doing anything to it before, God alone knew what pressing buttons might do. It was just the sort of thing he was forever scolding Jack for doing.

'If it's going to do anything and transport anyone anywhere, at least it should be me and not you. I'm already displaced.'

'If you're sure,' Ianto replied. He was no Tosh, but he knew that tinkering without knowing what you were doing was never a good idea. Woolcott seemed to possess a bravery that he didn't.

'You know,' Woolly pondered before touching it, 'there was just one other thing I remembered.'

'What's that?'

Woolcott blushed. 'For a moment back there as it was packing these away I had a moment of weakness. I might have held the scepter up and pretended like I was Marco Polo himself. He made a gesture like he was holding it aloft. Onward to lands as yet unseen by these eyes!' He blushed again. 'I feel rather foolish having done that. H.G. would have thought I'd lost my mind.'

Ianto gave him a sympathetic smile. 'We've all been there.' He'd been busted once doing Bond villain impersonations in the armory. Jack had never let him live it down. Timing really was everything. Perhaps the harp was never really meant to be a harp. It looked more like a docking station that someone had merely fashioned into an instrument, either to hide its true purpose or simply because they had no idea about its true purpose. Seeing the two artifacts together now they genuinely looked like a pair. If the harp was the docking station, and having it close by helped to power up the scepter, then maybe the scepter was like the remote control. Woolly had been holding it when he'd asked to be taken somewhere he'd never seen before and it had done just that. Perhaps it could only take him somewhere there was a matching harp and scepter, or maybe it was sheer coincidence, or maybe the rift had played its part, diverting Woolly from wherever it had meant to send him. Marco Polo might have done the same thing. It would certainly explain how he'd survived the trips to sometimes completely inaccessible parts of the world, avoiding being captured by native peoples who might have simply killed him on sight. And he'd made it safely back home to Venice at the end of it, even if they had locked him up in jail when he got there. If it was a travel device he had clearly mastered its use.

'I think maybe you should ask to go home,' Ianto suggested.

Woolly gave him a curious look. 'Ask?'

Ianto shrugged. 'You deal in curiosities and you think that's weird? What's the worst that could happen? Maybe nothing happens. Maybe you're right and there's some other specific machinations required. I'm no expert on this by any means, but in the absence of anything else. You had the two items together, then you picked up the scepter, said some words and here you are.'

'That's true, I suppose.' He tentatively picked up the scepter. 'What do you suppose Marco Polo would have said when he wanted to return to Venice?'

'There's no place like home?' Of course he would have said it in Italian most likely, but Ianto didn't think he'd have clicked his heels or had magic ruby slippers. And from experience, it was amazing how often alien problems could be solved with the simplest of solutions.

Woolly gave him a half-hearted smile. 'There truly isn't. I'd like to stay a while and find out more about your future world but I don't know how long this artifact will remain in its powered up state.'

'That's okay. If it works maybe you can come back for another visit. If not, it's a round of coffee and jammie dodgers to brainstorm our next move. And perhaps it's best you don't know too much about the future. I wouldn't want to be responsible for accidentally changing the course of human history.'

Woolcott looked down at the device in his had. 'That's a very good point. You know, I have a good feeling about this. I can't explain why, I just do.'

Ianto was about to wish him well when another thought occurred to him. 'Wait. This isn't going to disappear with you, is it?' Ianto would have a hard time explaining that to Jack.

'WelI, daresay since my own didn't travel here with me it's a fairly sure thing that yours will stay right here as well. If not, I'll be sure to post it to Torchwood, care of Cardiff. It should arrive in say, oh, about a hundred years.'

Ianto smirked at having his own warped sense of humor turned on him. 'Today has certainly been one for the diary.'

'I shall be very keen to report on my adventures to the Regency when I return, I am certain that there is much we could benefit from by having our two organisations coordinate their efforts. It seems are interests are very much aligned.'

'I'll wait for your memo,' Ianto replied. 'Perhaps you should attention it to Captain Jack Harkness. He'll be around in nineteen fourteen. Somewhere.'

'Right then.' Woolcott gripped the scepter, focusing his attention on it. 'Take me back to the place of home and good friends and better adventures.' And then, in the blink of an eye, he was gone. The scepter tumbled to the floor and the harp ceased its humming, its power spent, either permanently or just for now.

'Safe travels, Woolly,' Ianto said to no one. 'I hope you made it back okay.' When he got back to his desk he was going to have to do some research. If Woolly survived the journey there should be some record of him in London. He would be very interested to know what happened to him and whether some message would ever reach him here in the future. For now though, he picked up the scepter and carefully packed it back away in its tin, soundlessly repeating the mantra "there's no place like home" just in case. He quite liked 2008 and wasn't ready to travel anywhere else just yet. With the scepter locked away again, he picked up the harp and began the long march back to his office to put it away. This time he'd be making some very detailed notes, warning the next person who might come across it what the connection between the two artifacts was and how he believed it currently worked. It wasn't an exact scientific assessment, but nor did he wish to research it further by testing it out. Sometimes a warning was enough to make the next person take heed. Maybe one day they'd have a need to travel through time, but without knowing just how to get exactly where you needed to go, it was a harbour of last resort.

When he arrived back athis office, he was doubly surprised to find Jack standing there. It hadn't even occurred to him to check that Woolly's departure had released the lockdown. He mentally kicked himself from that. He'd have been in all sorts of bother if it hadn't worked.

'Where have you been?' Jack asked, leaning against the wall. 'I've been standing here for like,' he paused to study his watch, 'at least twenty minutes.'

'You poor thing,' Ianto quipped, setting the harp on his desk. 'Some of us have been busy.'

'I can see that,' he said, giving the harp barely a glance. 'And what's all this about a lockdown? I got an alert while we were out.'

'Nothing to worry about,' Ianto assured him. He caught sight of Woolly's coat and hat still hanging there in the corner and wondered if Jack would notice them and ask. He might be able to explain away the coat, but the hat was going to require something more creative. 'I think maybe one of Tosh's experiments set it off. Everything's fine now.'

Jack looked put out by the lack of an exciting explanation. 'Huh. Oh, well. I suppose at least now you're back we can get back to business.'

Ianto quirked an eyebrow at him. 'And by business you mean?' he asked, even as Jack was already snaking arms around his waist, pulling him close.

'I've been making a mental to do list all the way back from Barry.'

Ianto snorted. He could just imagine the sorts of things that would feature on such a list. Before Jack could go in for the kill, Ianto paused. 'Jack? Have you ever heard of a place in London called Warehouse Twelve?'

Jack pulled back and gave him a curious look. 'Bar, nightclub or other?'

The question took Ianto aback until he realised that it did indeed sound more like the name of some underground nightclub. 'Um, other. Definitely other.'

Jack set his hands on his hips and blew out a breath as he chewed it over. 'Nope, can't say that I have. Should I?'

Ianto shook his head. 'No.' Just because Torchwood was the worst kept secret didn't mean this Warehouse Twelve had the same issue.

Jack resumed his position, close enough that Ianto was already beginning to feel giddy from the scent of Jack's pheromones. 'How about we start a little closer to home and see where that leads us?'

Ianto gave in, letting Jack smother his lips. 'Mmm,' he hummed. There's no place like home.

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