Title: What goes up…
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,212 words
Content notes: None
Author notes: Written for Challenge 428 - Rain
Summary: Even the weather in Cardiff can fall victim to the rift.



‘It's doing it again!’ Owen yelled as he came lumbering into the hub, looking unusually damp around the knees and ankles. He was strangely early. Even Tosh hadn't arrived yet, leaving Ianto in what had been relative peace, brewing his first coffee of the morning. He found he needed it more than usual, having pulled more than his share of overnight shifts. They'd all taken for granted how easy it was to go home and let Jack worry about what the rift got up to when the rest of them were tucked up in their beds. Without Jack here, that meant it was now their job.

‘Doing what again?’ Ianto asked, hypnotised by the slow dribble of dark liquid into the cup. He could scarcely tear his eyes away from it, that sense of being too tired to even sleep making his mind fixate on things that didn't require brainpower.

‘The weather,’ Owen replied, coming up beside him and grabbing the tea towel from the bench to dry himself off. ‘Ianto, are you even listening to me?’

Ianto blinked, then stared at Owen. ‘Hmm?’

‘Christ,’ Owen swore. ‘The bloody rain, Ianto!’ he said in an annoyed tone. ‘It's going up instead of down again. Haven't you even noticed or have you not left the hub for days?’

Ah. So that would explain the persistent beeping from the computer that he'd been ignoring for the past half an hour. He knew every bleep and whoop their systems made and the one that indicated things blowing up on social media was one he didn't relish attending to in a hurry. Coffee first, then he could deal with whatever Facebook had to throw at him. After all, if no other alarms were going off how bad could it be?

‘What do you want me to do about it?’ he said, determined to get a decent crema on his coffee. At least some things in his life he could still control. Not much, but he’d take it. The coffee machine was pretty much the only thing around here that ever did what it was told and behaved in a predictable manner. Would that Jack had only left him in charge of that while he was gone.

Owen huffed. ‘I don't know. Something.’

Well, that was very helpful. No one had been able to determine how it had occurred the first time. One second all was normal and then sudden rain was rising up from the pavements in the sort of thick heavy sheets that often drenched the city from above, before settling into more of a persistent drizzle for days on end. There were clouds in the sky but there was a definite change in direction of the water droplets, making umbrellas useless unless your intention was to catch the rain as it headed skyward. Previously, it eventually stopped, blowing over with the clouds and any hopes that they might conduct further analysis on it blew away with the low pressure system. ‘Can I suggest fishermen's dungarees?’

‘Oh, har bloody har,’ Owen said, tossing the tea towel back at him, forcing him to catch it so it didn't pelt him in the face. ‘You know it's not normal, right?’

Ianto rolled his eyes. ‘Of course I do.’ Even Welshmen accustomed to the rain knew it was supposed to travel down, not up. ‘You checked that time isn't running backwards or something, didn't you?’ It seemed like a logical thing. Falling rain could be un-falling if time was moving backward instead forwards.

‘Don't we have an alarm for that sort of thing?’

Probably, he thought. Lately it felt like they had an alarm for just about everything, and all of them going off one after the other. Had alarms whopped as often when Jack had been around? Perhaps he’d simply never noticed. He sighed. It was going to be one of those days. ‘Call Tosh and see what she can find out. Start with all the analyses she was going to do before it stopped the last time.’ That sounded like a sensible course of action that, in theory, Ianto shouldn’t even have to instruct.

‘It's a black hole!’ Tosh called out, jogging through the main cogwheel door as if summoned by magic.

‘What?’ Ianto and Owen asked the same question in unison.

‘A black hole,’ Tosh repeated, moving over to her collection of computer monitors and bringing up several different programs on each screen. ‘It was the first thing I checked this morning when I stepped out to fetch the newspaper and saw it. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it the first time around, but afterwards there was no way to confirm it.’

‘Black holes suck stuff up, Tosh,’ Owen said. ‘So, how can the water be coming up from the ground? Shouldn't it be going up from the clouds instead?’

‘It's not rainwater. It's groundwater, being pulled up by the gravitational forces.’ She made it sound like it was completely obvious.

‘Black holes are bad, aren't they?’ Ianto wasn't sure he wanted the answer. Jack always had a way of making even the most dire situation seem perfectly fine, even funny. The others weren’t so good at making light of their predicament.

‘Normally, yes,’ she replied, ‘but this one isn't in our universe. Rather it's off in some distant part of the universe and the rift just happens to be close by, resulting in its gravitational effects being felt here.’

Owen frowned, mirroring Ianto’s own unconvinced sentiment. ‘So, we're going to be sucked into the rift first and then a black hole?’ he asked. That didn't sound good. Why did these things have to happen on their watch when Jack was no longer here?

‘Unlikely,’ Tosh said, clacking a few more keys on her keyboard. ‘The rift moves around all the time, never settling into any one fixed place in space and time even though the end here seems to be locked in place. It's just moved in proximity to a black hole somewhere. The rift itself has no mass, so there's very little chance that the rift could become tethered to the gravitational field if the black hole.’ She brought up a schematic that appeared to be like a graphical depiction of the very thing she was trying to explain without drowning them in technobabble. ‘Like before, the rift brushed near one, we saw the gravity altering effects of it, and then as it moved away from the black hole, the effects felt here stopped. Amazing that it hasn't happened before now, really.’

Owen set his hands on his hips. ‘And you don’t think this happening twice in as many weeks is anything to be worried about?’

‘If it was a problem, we'd have been trapped and sucked into the first black hole the rift encountered last month. But it's fascinating, don't you think?’

Ianto closed his eyes and gave a silent inward groan. Black holes, upside down rain, potential end of planet earth stick down by statistical improbability… He abandoned his half made coffee. ‘I'm going home to bed,’ he announced. ‘Someone call me and wake me when the world is back to normal.’

Preferably not until Jack was back. These were the kinds of headaches he could do without.