Title: Devil in the detail
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 2,453 words
Content notes: None
Author notes: Written for Challenge 410 - Leaf
Summary: Owen’s seemingly idle time hasn’t been wasted.


Owen spun at the sound of a gun being cocked. He threw his hands up and shouted “Don't shoot!” There was an expletive muttered, and then he saw the barrel of the gun lowered back down to rest at the side of its owner.

‘Jesus Christ, Owen,’ Ianto swore. ‘What the hell are you doing down here? I thought there was an intruder.’

Owen looked up at Ianto from where he’d been sitting cross-legged on the floor of the archives, deep within a vault full of filing cabinets, leaning back against one with a dusty old lamp plugged in thanks to several dozen yards of extension leads. Admittedly, it probably did look a bit strange sitting there in the otherwise dark, surrounded by files and folders in the middle of the night. He similarly found it hard not to laugh at Ianto standing there, even if he had been ready to shoot. ‘What the hell are you wearing?’

Ianto bristled, tugging the deep burgundy dressing gown sash tighter around his middle, revealing the lambskin slippers underneath that had silenced Ianto’s footsteps until he’d been just about on top of Owen, ready to blow his brains out. ‘It’s the middle of the night,’ he said, as if that explained his attire, which Owen supposed it sort of did. Then again, there was staying the night at a place that was basically their office, and then there was having moved in with your pyjamas and slippers. Ianto was definitely now in the latter category.

‘And do you often patrol the archives late at night in your jimjams?’ Owen teased, unable to resist needling the man. Even Jack wouldn’t be seen dead wandering around the hub dressed like that. Then again, Jack would wander the place naked, and that was way worse.

Ianto heaved a sigh. ‘Jack was tossing and turning and finally got up to do some work. Figured I'd sort out a couple of things as well, since we’d both given up on sleep. Don’t usually come down here and have eerie noises and strange glowing lights though. No life signs showed up on a scan so I was taking precautions. And the thirty miles of power cables kind of gave it away,’ he added, smirking.

‘I wasn’t trying to hide,’ Owen replied. It wasn’t his fault this place was so badly lit.

Ianto leaned back against a row of filing cabinets and frowned. ‘What are you doing down here, then?’

It was Owen’s turn to sigh. ‘Dead, remember? Can’t eat, can’t shag and most definitely can’t sleep. Gotta fill in the hours somehow.’

Ianto quirked an eyebrow. ‘Couldn’t take up collecting stamps?’

‘Har har. Thought I’d see what's down here.’

‘You weren’t the least bit interested before. Why now?’

Owen sighed again. ‘Refer previous answer.’

‘Point taken.’

‘There’s some interesting stuff down here,’ Owen said, leafing through one of the open files by his feet.

‘I know that.’

‘And none of this stuff has been digitised yet.’

‘Also a stated fact. If you want to be the one to scan it all into our systems, be my guest. God knows I don’t have the time to do it.’

‘What, with you now being a full, guns-blazing field agent to replace me?’ Owne said, through it didn’t come out with any bitterness. He knew he had his limitations now and that there was only so much he could contribute to the team without putting his fragile existence at risk.

‘I couldn't ever replace you.’

‘Course you couldn't,’ Owen agreed. ‘Don’t mind me. The being a cynic part didn't die.’

Ianto came to sit on the floor next to him. ‘I noticed. So… you mentioned something interesting?’

Owen spent the next two hours showing Ianto files and notes he’d made, trying to engage the Welshman who, not for a lack of attempting to maintain his interest, was clearly tiring. Apparently even Ianto had limits on what he could find interesting at four in the morning.

‘Why don’t you try and get an hour or two of sleep?’ Owen suggested. ‘This stuff can wait.’

Ianto took heed of Owen’s advice, but only as far as curling up right there on the floor, using his dressing gown robed-arm as a pillow. Owen didn’t argue with him. He’d just seen something else interesting in one of the files he’d just opened.



Ianto yawned through his cup of coffee as he sat at his desk trying to focus on the reports in front of him. He should have stayed in bed last night, he thought ruefully, rather than think he could just carry on without sleep. Not that he hadn't snagged an hour or two with Owen's permission, but the floor that hadn't seemed so bad at the time was now making itself known, thanks to his sore neck and aching hip bone. He yawned again and this time someone caught him in the act.

‘Don't let me catch you sleeping on the job,’ Jack teased.

‘In this job? Never,’ Ianto replied, though unable to stop yet another yawn escaping.

‘I told you to stay in bed last night.’

Ianto narrowed a pair of eyes at him. ‘I said the same to you.’

‘Well, since you should have a few hours of work already done, why don't you knock off early and get some real sleep?’

That's when he had to confess to Jack he hadn't been working at all.

Jack seemed amused. ‘Owen down in the archives reading files? Now I've heard everything.’ Neither of them could deny that it must be inherently boring not being able to fill in the hours with eating, sleeping and all things in between, but there had to be something else to do. 'Guess that puts a dent in us using the hub to play naked hide a seek for a while. Unless Owen wants to join us.'

‘The archives are off limits for hiding, as you well know,’ Ianto replied, inferring from Jack’s comments that just as he cheated in many other ways, he was also breaking that rule as well.

Jack shrugged it off. ‘I'm sure it's just a phase he’s going through. He’ll be back to clanking around his medical bay, tossing sharp implements in no time.’




‘Okay, this has to stop,’ Ianto loudly declared, storming into Jack's office a few days later and startling him from a rather impolitely worded email from the Undersecretary of Unit's national security arm.

‘What are we stopping?’ Jack said, accustomed to Ianto’s sometimes-tantrums.

‘Owen. He's been down there in my archives again, hiding away like an owl at night, pawing through whatever he likes. Multiple times, so it would seem, judging by the fact that there are papers strewn absolutely everywhere. You should see the mess.’

Jack didn't have to. Even a few files out of place could have been described by Ianto as the fallout from a cyclone. ‘First of all, they're not your archives, and secondly…’ Well, he didn't have a second point at this stage but he was sure he could come up with one before he ran out of other things to say.

‘Can't you give him some real work to do?’ Ianto begged.

‘I have! He's as busy as anyone else on the team.’ Except for the fact that Jack was carefully choosing if and when Owen was allowed to go out on investigations. He didn't want to risk permanent injury to Owen, knowing he wouldn't heal. He wouldn't have let him go out on so much as a weevil capture except for the fact that weevils now feared Owen, which ironically made him the best person for the job. As for anything else physically dangerous, he was benched.

Ianto’s jaw clenched and Jack noticed that little vein pulsing in the side of his neck that spelled trouble. ‘Find him a more current investigation before I kill him,’ came the warning before Ianto strode bad-temperedly back out.



Jack didn't want to get involved in whatever thing it was that Owen and Ianto had gotten into. On the whole, those two bickered like schoolchildren at the best of times. It was, in some ways, a relief that even though Owen was technically dead, that much hadn’t changed. That he was taking an interest in all things Torchwood could surely only be a good thing, right?

He decided to wait until a grumpy Ianto had left for the day, content to spend the night alone in his own bed rather than having Jack bounce him out at three in the morning when Jack was no longer able to stay asleep, having had his requisite four hours rest. He toddled around the hub for a bit, letting the clock tick past eleven pm and then began wandering down to the archives to see if there was anyone there.

The glow from somewhere at the back of Vault 12 gave Wwen away. Jack followed the long winding power lead that was yet another reminder that they’d never properly done this place up and put lighting into all of the vaults and sections of shelving. Someone probably thought it was a good idea to keep everything preserved in the dark, except that it also made finding anything a nightmare.

Jack saw what Owen had been up to long before he saw the man himself. ‘Okay…’ he muttered to himself, taking it all in. Ianto had said Owen was leafing through a few of the old files. He’d slightly understated the enormity of what Owen had actually done. There were files all over the floor, on the desk in haphazard piles, and spilling from the filing cabinets that lined the walls, their drawers all sticking out at various positions, like there was an army down here, working their contents. No wonder Ianto was pissed off. It would take days to piece it all back together and file it away where it belonged.

‘Owen?’ He scanned the room again but couldn't see the man in question. His sixth sense however told him Owen was definitely down here… somewhere. ‘Owen?’ He wandered around the large room, stepping around masses of papers strewn about the place. He kept his eyes peeled for all the dark corners where someone might be lurking, not that he thought Owen was down here injured or anything of the sort. Just… Jack had several lifetimes of being warily cautious and not making assumptions. ‘Owen?’ he called out again.

‘Over here,’ came the reply, and Jack followed the voice to a space between large stacks of shelves, Owen kneeling down with a torch and looking for something in one of the many tattered boxes with their peeling labels and musty air of disuse. ‘Give us a sec,’ Owen said, still running his torchlight along the row, knees dragging through the dust on the floor and leaving a path behind him, like a snail leaving a trail. ‘Ah ha, yes.’ He grasped for a box and tugged it out, creating a plume as he disturbed the decades of dust.

Jack followed behind him as he carried it over to the desk and plonked it down, sending up a secondary cloud. ‘Is this…’ Jack wasn't sure what this was.

‘You won't believe the stuff that’s down here.’

Jack pushed idly at a file with his finger, preventing it from toppling off the edge of the desk. ‘I think I do.’ He’d been avoiding most of it for years. That Ianto had taken charge of doing something about it all filled Jack with a sense of relief that it was no longer his problem. ‘Owen, what exactly is all this?’ It seemed like a reasonable question to ask in the circumstances.

Owen looked up at him, frozen with a file lifted halfway. ‘You have no idea, do you?’

‘I get that a lot,’ came the blithe response. ‘Did your hatred of paperwork not get resurrected with the rest of you? I was all for you finding yourself a new purpose but I don't think this is it.’ There'd been a time when Jack had worried about having Owen just rotting away in front of the television at home, but now having him prowling around the hub at all hours of the night was somehow even more disturbing. That habit was reserved for him and even he wandered the empty halls less now than he used to.

‘It's all here, Jack,’ Owen said, eyes glowing with the kind of fervour Jack hadn't seen in a long while. He began tugging out bits of paper and laying them across the desk, splayed in different piles, and intermingled with pages of lined, yellow note paper, complete with the Torchwood logo on top, and covered in the familiar indecipherable scrawl of Owen’s handwriting. ‘1887 when everything first went to shit and good old Queen Victoria wanted to show off to the Russians. 1912 when the Titanic sunk. The stock market crash in 1929. Even the Los Angeles earthquake of 1994.’

‘Owen…’

‘Don’t you get it? It's all connected.’

Jack was beginning to wonder if Owen’s brain cells were starting to deteriorate at a faster rate than the rest of his undead body. ‘An earthquake is connected? To what?’

Owen huffed. ‘Look, I know Teaboy thinks I have a screw loose and I'm upending his precious little filing room…’

‘It's not quite little,’ Jack said, feeling the need to remind Owen that the job of keeping this place in order was a big one and that when Ianto was unhappy about the state of things, he became unhappy at Jack and that was not a state Jack enjoyed being in.

‘Shut up. Okay, so maybe it started off as a way to fill in the hours. But it's not now.’

‘Owen you're still not making any sense.’

‘The Committee, Jack. The sodding Committee. It's all here. We were just to stupid to see it. It’s been buried down here for a century.’

‘What has?’ Jack knew all about The Committee and how elusive they were. Ultimately they wanted control of the planet's resources so they could sell them off, but as far as Jack could tell they hadn't succeeded, or perhaps had given up altogether and just left. Perhaps that was wishful thinking.

Owen's eyes lit up as much as they could for a man who was dead. ‘I bloody know where they are. We can finally take the fight to them. Bring them down before it’s too late’

Jack stared incredulously at all the papers littered everywhere, feeling slightly stunned. Under their noses this whole time? Could the answer really be here in the endless sheaves of yellowed and crumbling posterity?

Jack grabbed a handful of them. ‘Show me.’