Title: No stone left unturned
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,489 words
Content notes: None
Author notes: Written for Challenge 463 - Apart
Summary: Ianto won’t stop looking for Jack until he’s found.



‘He was just here,’ Gwen said, looking around puzzled. ‘Something's taken him. Jack's gone.’

‘Don't be so bloody rubbish,’ Owen replied.

Gwen gestured around the hub, all of their hard work to put everything back in its place upended by some kind of mini tornado.

‘Rift alert?’ Tosh offered.

‘Wouldn't he have waited for us to get back?’

Owen snorted. ‘Why, because Jack's never gone haring off after a rift alert without us before?’ That was true enough, but Gwen's words were troubling. Had she simply stopped at "Jack's gone" that might have been okay, but it was quite a leap to suggest that he'd been taken. Jumping at shadows, Ianto might have said. There was simply no way something or someone could have come in here in the ten minutes they'd been gone to fetch coffee and taken Jack. Not without them knowing, and certainly not without a fight on Jack's part. Owen was right. Gwen was talking rubbish.

Owen fixed Gwen with a hard look. ‘And where were you?’

She flushed slightly at the accusation that Jack had gone missing in her watch. ‘I stepped out to make a call to Rhys. Make sure he was okay.’

‘Oh, so it's your reason he's gone then,’ Owen said. ‘Turned your back for two seconds and let someone sneak in and grab him?’

Gwen blushed. ‘It wasn't like that.’

‘No one's agreed he'd been taken though, have we?’ Tosh asked, playing mediator.

‘Of course not.’

Ianto brushed past Gwen, making for Jack's office and the last place any of them had seen him, alive and well and back behind his desk where he belonged. Everything as it should be. He paused by the desk just long enough to drop off the tray with two coffees for Jack and Gwen plus his own in his free hand. He made for the hatch in the floor – Jack's private quarters. No one ever went down there, except for Ianto, and even then they'd only ever believed he was fetching Jack's laundry, which he often was. Jack wouldn't be far away but he might have gone down there for a moment to himself. Ianto had sometimes found him down there just standing and staring off Into space, a million miles away as his thoughts consumed him. Either he'd coax Jack out of his reverie or leave him to have some private time.

He descended the ladder and looked around the darkened space, calling out Jack's name quietly. He moved from one small corner to the other but there was no Jack hiding down here. He climbed back out to three sets of eyes waiting for confirmation. Ianto just shook his head.

‘Playing a sodding joke on us, I'll bet,’ Owen remarked.

‘Well, it's not very funny if it is,’ Gwen replied.

‘And you're sure he was just here?’

‘At his desk, catching up on things,’ she replied.

‘Not the paperwork,’ Owen muttered. ‘Tosh, what about our CCTV?’

‘All damaged when we opened the rift. New equipment is on order but for now we don't have anything monitoring the hub.’

‘What about life signs detector?’

‘We don't have anything monitoring the hub,’ she repeated as if he were a bit slow. ‘The rift machine survived, but everything else is either completely or partially damaged. It's going to take another week or two to get us fully back online.’

‘Do what you can, Tosh,’ Gwen said, taking an authoritative tone that made Ianto feel slightly uncomfortable. Until we can find out more information we assume he was taken under duress. We do what we can to track down the kidnappers and we focus on getting the place back online as quickly as possible.’

‘We should do a sweep of the hub, just to be sure.’ The words were out of Ianto's mouth before he had a chance to consider whether he had a right to speak as an equal.

‘Good idea,’ Owen said before Gwen could assert a view on it. ‘I'll go with you.’

‘Take weapons,’ Gwen said. ‘We can't be certain whoever took Jack isn't still here waiting to pick off the rest of us.’

Owen waved off her insistence at firearms. ‘Yeah, yeah. Come on, Ianto. Let's go.’



They searched the hub from top to bottom but there was no sign of Jack or anyone else. After Owen called off the search, Ianto kept going. There were places inside the hub that the rest of them didn't know about. Doors in corridors that were locked, or doors that when opened had nothing but wall behind them. Other places with no visible doors that contained hidden rooms and passages. Jack knew the hub better than any of them, and Ianto knew it almost as well as Jack. He also knew the archives better than even Jack, and spent hours moving up and down the pitch black shelves of catalogued artefacts, hoping beyond hope that Jack was somewhere there in the darkness; perhaps hiding, perhaps injured, perhaps on death's door. He'd somehow come back from being killed by Abaddon but it had taken a days. What if he wasn't nearly as healed as Gwen had led them to believe. He could be in dire need of their help, but like a wounded animal trying to hide the fact until he could right himself. Stupid! Ianto cursed. His coming back from death the first time had been shocking, but Ianto wasn't afraid. It didn't scare him to wonder what that meant or how it worked. He just wanted Jack back.



In the days that followed he became withdrawn from the rebuilding process, disappearing for hours at a time to keep searching places they'd already searched, tearing the place apart, desperate for answers. Desperate to find Jack. He refused to believe that Jack could just be gone. They simply hadn't looked hard enough or long enough and without all the usual technology that aided their work, the job only felt that much harder. But that didn't mean they'd give up. They’d only just gotten Jack back.



It was getting late in the afternoon when Ianto made a fresh round of coffee, handing them out in silence, each of the team grateful for the break in having to put the pace back together, one piece at a time.

‘I'm just going to check on a few files down in the archives,’ he said, making his excuse to leave. It was the same style of excuse he'd been making for days in one shape or another. Check on the weevils, check on some file, catalogue something that he'd been meaning to do for ages. It was only made worse by the fact that the rift had gone silent, as if atoning for what they'd done and giving them a reprieve so that they could piece the city back together after their naïve folly.

Owen sighed and leaned back in his chair, folding his arms and staring at him. ‘Ianto, give it up mate. He’s not here.’

Owen’s words incensed him. ‘We don’t know that for sure!’ He felt his cheeks grow hot as he said it. The cat was out of the bag now. Everyone knew that there was something going on between him and Jack, and had been for a while. He hadn't mentioned it and the others had been avoiding talking about it. No one wanted to open that particular can of worms.

Owen didn’t say anything for a moment, causing Ianto to look up at him and face the fact that Owen was probably right. If they hadn't found Jack by now…

Tosh chewed her lip. ‘Actually, we do,’ she said, sounding guilty. ‘I was just checking the CCTV around the plass at the time of Jack’s disappearance and this is what I found.’ She turned around a shining new laptop and the grainy CCTV images from somewhere around the entrance to the Millennium Centre came into view. The familiar coat flapping silhouette of Jack, running towards a blue police call box that was parked just beside the water tower directly overhead commanded their attention. Then, in just the blink of an eye, both he and it then disappeared in a flash of light.

‘I didn't check earlier because I didn't consider the possibility that he'd left the hub under his own steam.’ Tosh confessed. ‘I should have.

Gwen was suddenly there with an arm on Tosh’s shoulder. ‘It's okay. We've all had plenty on our minds.’ Then she turned to Ianto and offered him a sympathetic glance. ‘Everyone did their best. At least now we know what happened to him.’

It was little solace to Ianto who'd spent days searching for the man he'd slowly fallen in love with. Jack had left them, and that only led to even bigger questions: why'd he'd left, and most importantly, when or if he was coming back. Until then it would only tear his heart apart wondering.