Torchwood: Fanfic: In a twist

[m_findlow]

Title: In a twist

Author: m_findlow

Rating: PG

Length: 3,835 words

Content notes: None

Author notes: Written for Challenge 406 - Twist

Summary: Owen and Ianto are out in the Beacons searching for yet another mysterious signal.

Owen had gone nearly a whole hour without grumbling about the traffic, the quality of the road they were travelling on, the weather, or the countryside. All in all, he counted himself accomplished for having done that.

There was plenty he could have moaned about – the traffic out of the city had been its usual nightmare, finally freed of that horrendous one way system, the weather was rubbish, with its persistent drizzle, and the road was getting more and more broken up the further into countryside they went. It was starting to kick up bits of bitumen and rocks that were hitting the underside of the chassis and probably scratching the paintwork. Jack would rip him a new one if the SUV ended up scratched, if only because Ianto would rip Jack a new one when he saw the damage. Not that he was saying anything now. He'd been silent for most of the trip, suffering through Owen's choice of radio stations, which hadn't made it past the first bend in the valley road before fizzling out to static. Perhaps he didn't want to give Owen a reason to voice his complaints, or perhaps he was silently agreeing with Owen for a change. This was a shitty investigation by anyone's standards, and neither of them had put their hand up for it. More of Jack's expert delegation at work.

One ping. One tiny little ping that had been picked up by one of the dozens of programs Tosh had devised to monitor rift and alien related activity. She couldn't even tell them what it was, or if it had even existed at all. The computer has simply logged one little blip that registered for half a second and then was gone. Not even long enough for their systems to be able to do any kind of analysis in it. No one knew what it was because it hadn't lasted long enough to be cross-referenced with anything they'd recorded before.

‘We should go check it out anyway,’ Jack said, giving Owen the look that said "we" meant “him”. ‘Take Ianto with you,’ he added, which garnered a quiet muttering of "what did I do wrong?" from the Welshman.

They both knew this would be a dead end assignment. What chance that they would ever locate that one tiny ping? Tosh's programs had given them a nine square mile area to search, which was as precise as she could get it given how little time their systems had to triangulate a position for it. Nine miles of rugged Welsh no man's land; might as well have been a thousand square miles, looking for a single, specific pine needle in a forest full of pine trees.

‘Tosh and Gwen never get shit assignments like this,’ Owen finally said, breaking the silence between them. ‘God,’ he groaned, ‘give me a rotting alien corpse in the middle of a city alleyway any day. Ianto didn't take the bait and reply. His silence was enough to confirm it for Owen. Maybe he was the one who’d done something Jack felt the need to punish. Owen instead looked at the small central console display. ‘Should be nearly there at least he said. At least we're in the nine mile zone, in any case.’ He spied a sheltered spot just off the winding gravel road where they might park the car without it being too obvious. ‘S’pose here's as good as anywhere,’ he said.

Once he'd killed the engine, Ianto reached forward and popped the glove compartment, pulling out a bundle of paper maps and began to laboriously unfold them and splay them across the dashboard, studying them.

‘Thought we were going to have a look around,’ Owen said.

‘We should study the area first. Figure out the lay of the land and how best to cover the search area.’

Owen huffed. ‘You couldn't have studied the maps whilst I was driving?’

‘Don't like to read while travelling. It makes me car sick.’

Owen groaned and mumbled a "Jesus Christ" under his breath as he shoved the door open, not waiting for Ianto to finish his cartographic analysis. He popped the boot, grabbed two backpacks, tossing the heavier of the two at Ianto's feet and then grabbed two guns from a locked box in the back, shoving his own in the back waistband of his jeans. Come on. Sooner we wander about for a few hours finding nothing, sooner we can go home.’

The countryside was everything Jack had promised it to be: damp, green and stretching for bloody miles. They might be looking for something that was the size of a pound coin for all they knew. Or perhaps nothing at all. Whatever might have pinged might have already buggered off. Jack couldn't really expect them to find anything out here, could he?

‘This is sodding pointless,’ Owen finally said after they'd been wandering up hill and down dale for the better part of three hours. The outside of his parka was now slick with the accumulation of drizzle, the inside damp from a layer of sweat gathering around the collar, and he was just generally sick of this wild goose chase. Ianto was still fussing with his maps, trying to direct Owen in what he described as a sequential search pattern, but all Owen saw it as was trying to make them go in directions against the natural lie of the land, forcing them to hike up slippery hillsides and then back down again on the rocky and treacherous other side. One of them was going to break a leg at this rate.

‘We've barely checked a quarter of the grid,’ Ianto replied, flapping the map into a new folded position as the wind threatened to whip it right out of his hands. Owen quietly wouldn't have minded it making an escape, watching Ianto chase after it, but that map he realised was probably the only way they'd find their way back to the SUV – and civilisation.

‘Jack’s just taking the piss out of us,’ Owen declared, hoping beyond hope that Ianto would agree with him.

There was no huff of indignation which signalled to Owen that Ianto thought this was as pointless as he did. ‘Another hour, then we'll call it quits,’ Ianto promised him.

Owen sighed. ‘Alright, but I'm holding you to that.’ Another hour and Ianto would be just as fed up as Owen was. Owen had seen a small pub a few miles back that looked like it might serve a decent pie and chips. They could always hide out there for a few more hours then come home and tell Jack they'd searched all day and gotten nowhere. If that didn't satisfy him he could come out here and look for it himself.

‘We should try looking here,’ Ianto said, thrusting his flailing map half in Owen's face and stabbing at it with a finger. ‘There's a rocky outcrop which connects further down to a network of caves.’

‘Caves?’

‘Not here,’ Ianto confirmed. ‘This is just the end of the vein of rock, but it might be too dense for our equipment to register anything unless we're much closer.’

‘If you insist,’ Owen said, letting him take the lead. ‘Just so long as it's not another giant sodding badger thing hiding its spaceship out here.’

Ianto gave him a grin. ‘Just imagine how brilliant it'd be if it was.’

Owen's eyes rolled in response and he hefted his backpack back onto his shoulder. ‘You get far too much enjoyment out of this job.’

‘You should try it sometime.’

The outcrop was about a mile’s walk from their last position. There were boulders poking up out of the grass at random intervals the closer they got, threatening to trip them up or break an ankle. Some weren't even visible, covered in sedges that moved about in the breeze, camouflaging them until the last moment.
Owen pulled out his scanner and began recalibrating it to check a series of different things. Most of it was beyond him but Tosh had just instructed them what to scan for and the rest would be up to them just using their eyes. ‘You go that way and I'll go this way,’ Owen said, indicating a roughly circular route that would take them around the perimeter. ‘Meet you in the middle.’

‘Roger that,’ Ianto said, already with his scanner ready to go, maps now folded into a tiny square and shoved in his jeans pocket.

Owen clambered up and over one large stone, getting a higher position. The outcrop was about fifteen feet tall at its highest point, making it impossible to see around it as jagged rocks poked up at different heights like a bundle of giant abandoned marbles. He did an initial sweep before climbing back down to begin wandering around, half watching his scanner and half keeping an eye on the ground.

He eventually reached what he thought must have been the halfway mark and expected to run into Ianto as he finished his own search of the area. He waited another ten minutes and then groaned aloud. Bloody Teaboy was taking ages – probably scanning every bloody rock and blade of grass. Owen huffed again and continued working his way around the outcrop, hoping to speed up the process rather than wait for Ianto to do his share of the searching. Eventually he did find Ianto, who was just standing around, looking a bit lost.

‘What the hell?’ Owen complained. ‘I was waiting for you. What's taking you so bloody long?’

Ianto frowned, still focused on his scanner and the immediate area around his feet. ‘There was a ping. I just… can't find it again.’

Owen snorted. ‘You sure?’

‘Yes. It's got to be around here somewhere. See if you can pick it up.’

Owen did as he was told, if only because Ianto wasn't in the habit of making things up. Maybe they just weren't close enough yet. He moved through the cluster of large rocks, squeezing between the gaps they left, waiting for his scanner to show him. Anything other than a static blue line. Just when he'd convinced himself maybe Ianto had gotten it wrong, there it was. One little spike on the screen, then about thirty seconds later, another. ‘Over here,’ he called out, moving his scanner around to try and get a closer bead on the signal.

He was well and truly hidden from view as he moved deeper between the craggy outcrop. Ianto eventually found him just as Owen was kneeling down, finding a slightly stronger signal. ‘Reckon it's just behind this rock,’ Owen said. ‘Give us a hand,’ he added, beginning to try and push the boulder aside, certain that it was not only moveable, but that it had been moved at some time. With their collective strength they managed to roll it away.

‘Well, I'll be buggered,’ Owen remarked, seeing the tumbled pile of rock behind the one they'd just moved. ‘Doesn't that look like a gap to somewhere?’ he asked, seeing the ragged, horizontal crack in the stones that appeared to run deep into the outcrop. Owen held out a hand and without asking Ianto passed him a torch from his own backpack. Owen switched it on and shone it down into the gap. ‘Thought you said there were no caves around here.’

‘None that have been documented,’ came the reply. ‘Might not connect up at all. Could just be a crack that goes nowhere.’

‘Well,’ Owen said, holding his scanner out and leaning into the gap with it, ‘it's coming from down there. Doesn't look to be more than fifteen feet long.’ He indicated with his torch that Ianto should go in and investigate.

‘Why me?’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t like being underground.’

Owen clenched his jaw at the response. ‘You work in the hub. Down in the archives, no less.’

‘That's not the same.’

‘It absolutely is,’ Owen argued.

‘It looks tight,’ Ianto said, frowning as he peered into the narrow crag, which would have to be crawled through on his stomach.

‘You're skinny,’ Owen replied.

‘So are you.’

‘Yeah, but I've got the torch and I'm in charge.’

Ianto narrowed his eyes at Owen. ‘That's a very flimsy delineation.’

‘Just shut up and go. Then you can be the teacher’s pet and tell Jack how you were the one that found it.’

‘Whatever it is.’ He studied the gap and how to best proceed through it to get to the space on the other side. ‘Lucky Jack isn't here, I suppose,’ he finally said.

‘Because he's broad shouldered and wouldn't fit?’

‘No, because his ego wouldn't fit.’

Owen laughed. ‘Good point.’

Ianto pulled his gun from the belt of his jeans and handed it to Owen. He was going to have to go in there unarmed, but at least Owen would be here to attempt to shoot anything that might try and make an escape. The first part of the gap was wider and he was able to get down on hands and knees to lever his body into the gap, but from that point on he was shuffling along on his stomach, with Owen giving him light and suggestions on where he thought the widest part of the gap was.

Owen knew Ianto had finally reached the end when he made an “ack” sound. ‘You okay?’ Owen called out.

‘Yep, just sort of fell out that other side unexpectedly,’ Ianto replied, his voice echoing. ‘There's definitely a sort of cavern thing on the other side.’ He was quiet for a minute or two. ‘Not very big really, judging by the feel of it, maybe only a few feet in each direction.’

‘Found anything alone down there?’ Owen asked. His torchlight didn't reach all the way down, eaten up before it reached the end of the crack in the stones. Fortunately, Ianto had a much smaller torch in his pocket attached to his set of keys. It wouldn't show up much, but it was better than nothing.

‘No one living down here,’ Ianto reported back. ‘I'm not even sure if–’ another pause. ‘Nope, found it,’ he said.

‘What is it?’

‘No idea. Orb. Gold coloured. Really cold. Like really, really cold. About the size of a grapefruit. Don’t think you’d find it listed in an ornithological guide to the Brecon Beacons.’

‘Alright, well,. Bring it back up here and let's go home. Tosh can figure it out later.’ If it hadn't zapped anyone to another dimension after touching it, it was probably safe enough.

‘D'you think it ended up down here on its own?’ came the question from Ianto as Owen heard the scuffling and scraping of someone working their way back through the gap.

‘Dunno and don't care,’ Owen said. ‘If someone was trying to stash it down here then they'll be in for a rude shock when they come back and find it gone.’

There was a lot of grunting and complaining as Ianto tried to crawl back out. Then it all went quiet for a minute, followed by the sound of Ianto swearing a blue streak.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I'm stuck, he said.

Owen didn't take him seriously. ‘You're not stuck. Just twist around a bit.’

‘Yeah, I've tried that.’

‘Well, try some more.’ He was getting impatient now. Outside, the drizzle had become rain. He just wanted to go home.

There was more grunting and some heavy breathing. ‘No, I'm really stuck.’ This time when he said it, there was a slight hint of worry in the statement that hadn't been there before.

Owen gave an annoyed huff and then stuck his head through the gap trying to reach out with his free arm, but Ianto was nowhere close to being able to reach him easily. He wasn't keen on trying to crawl in any further. Unlike Ianto, without the torchlight, he couldn't see a bloody thing. ‘Keep trying,’ he urged. He was sure it was nothing. A little bit more twisting and he'd be on his way out. ‘If you can shag Jack in seventeen different positions this should be a piece of piss.’ Not that Owen wanted to think about that, but if Jack's stories were anything to go by, Ianto was way more flexible than Owen thought he'd be.

There was another wave of grunting and groaning and then a frustrated sob. ‘It's no use, Owen. I'm jammed tight. Must've gone a slightly different direction coming down.’

‘Look, it's fine. You're just going to have to go backwards a bit and try again.’

‘I tried that already. I told you, I can't move. One arm is stuck beside me and the other is out in front, but my shoulder is wedged against the rock and– What's that?’

‘What's what?’

‘It's wet.’

‘Yeah, it's bucketing out here now.’

‘Oh, God, it's running down into the cavern, isn't it? It's going to flood.’

‘It's not going to flood,’ Owen said, trying to quell any rising panic. ‘You don't even know that it's sealed down there.’ It’d probably just keep on flowing elsewhere, down into whatever cave system it was attached to.

‘It's squeezing my chest. Getting tighter,’ came the breathless shout.

‘It's not,’ Owen barked back at him. ‘It's just your imagination. Listen, I'm going to go back to the SUV and get us a rope or something to help get you out.’ Not that he wanted to admit he didn't have the first clue which direction the SUV was parked. Ianto was the one with all the bloody maps in his back pocket.

‘No! Please. Don't go,’ Ianto begged him, panic completely overtaking rational thought. ‘I don't want to die down here.’

Owen cursed. He couldn't leave now. Ianto was likely to panic himself into doing something stupid desperate, making things worse. ‘Okay, okay. I'm not going anywhere, alright?’ A small whimper in reply. ‘I'm going to come down there and we're going to pull you out.’

The rain was coming down in thick sheets now, but Owen stripped off his jacket and anything else that was going to add unnecessary bulk, dropping it all in a pile beside a boulder. It wasn't like anyone was going to come along and steal it. Only the torch he left, perched at the edge of the gap in the rocks, trying to angle it so that it would stay put without him there to hold it. Once he was down to just his jeans and pullover, he lowered himself into the opening and began feeding his body into the gap. It wasn't as easy as it appeared and he scraped elbows and knees as he managed to get down onto his stomach to wriggle inside.

‘Christ,’ he swore, twisting himself into knots to try and get under unhelpful protrusions in the rock. It wasn't nearly as easy as Ianto had made it look, and now Owen's body was blocking most of the torchlight. ‘How the bloody hell did you get through here?’ he asked, making slow progress.

‘Not as easy as it looks,’ Ianto said, some of the panic in his voice gone just long enough to not pass up the opportunity to rag on Owen.

Something poked Owen in the stomach but he ignored the sharp jutting rock because at the same moment he brushed something that wasn't cold, hard and wet. It was a hand. He reached for it again and this time managed to grab it. ‘That's it, I've got you,’ he said, feeling Ianto wrap around it in a death grip.
Owen crawled a little further in, getting his other hand up to where Ianto's shoulder was wedged in, feeling around it to see if he couldn't get it free. Ianto had been right in that there was no room at all between him and the gap. It couldn't have been more than six or seven inches.

‘Need you to let go of my hand,’ Owen finally said, having assessed the situation as best he could without being able to do much more than feel his way around. ‘Try and relax everything,’ he added. ‘I'm going to try and move your arm to free your shoulder but I'm going to have to bend it in a direction it won't want to go.’

‘Please just do it,’ Ianto replied, but tensing as he said it, which was the opposite of what Owen wanted him to do. ‘Relax,’ he repeated. ‘Try and picture something else. Something nice and soothing. Slow, deep breaths.’ To his credit, Ianto did manage to slow down his breathing, but it was taking time and Owen could feel his jeans becoming soaked as more water poured down into the rock, heading down the natural slant, trying to get past them. The trickling sound was becoming more persistent. He couldn't wait any longer, grabbing Ianto's upper arm and twisting it back which made him cry out in pain. Owen waited for the sickening crack of a bone breaking, or the popping of a dislocated shoulder, but he didn't hear either.

‘Try to move sideways a bit,’ Owen said, feeling the way the rock opened up just a little more to Ianto's right. There was a shuffling sound of boots and then an inch of movement. ‘That's it. Little bit more to the right.’

With a bit of effort, he could hear Ianto wriggling free, panting from the effort, but moving was better than nothing. Owen shuffled back a bit, making sure he didn't become wedges himself. Going backward was a lot harder than going forwards, but he used his hands to push himself back through the gap he'd come in through, making sure that Ianto was following the same path. Owen's feet kicked out into air and he knew that he was at the opening, sliding ungracefully out and reaching it to pull Ianto by the shoulders until he too was free. The collapse onto the muddy ground, puffing from the effort.

‘Thank you,’ Ianto said as Owen double checked his arm for any injury and then, out of an abundance of caution, put it in a sling anyway, fishing the medical kit from his saturated backpack.

‘Where's the alien orb?’ Owen asked, remembering why they were here.

‘Ianto patted himself down with his free arm. ‘It must have slipped out of my jacket pocket.’ He cast a look over his shoulder at the craggy stone. ‘I'm not going back in there to get it. I don't care what Jack says.’

‘Wasn't going to ask you,’ Owen replied, putting a reassuring hand on his shoulder. ‘If Jack wants it he can shove that big fat ego of his in there and stay there.’ That earned him a brief, half-hearted chuckle. ‘Let's just go home. Tell Jack we didn't find anything.’

‘First kebab van we see is my treat,’ Ianto told him.

Owen tossed his soaking jacket over his shoulder, helping Ianto to his feet. ‘Too bloody right it is.’