Title: Door to nowhere
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack, Ianto
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,183 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for Challenge 477 - Amnesty, using Challenge 90 - Doorway
Summary: Ianto is frustrated by Jack’s complete lack of curiosity.


‘It can’t just go nowhere,’ Ianto argued, for what felt like the hundredth time since he’d first come down here. ‘That’s ridiculous.’ He felt like he’d used that word at least a dozen times as well. He yanked it open again, revealing the plain concrete wall behind it, just a continuation of the corridor on the other side of it, right down to the painted horizontal line that ran the entire length in bright yellow paint.

‘I don't know what to tell you, Ianto,’ Jack said, sounding like he wished Ianto would simply let the damn thing go. ‘That door has always been there for as long as I've worked here.’

‘That’s entirely my point. I’ve gone through every record – every single record – from the date Torchwood first started construction on this facility all the way up until twenty years after you started working here and there's nothing. No reports of why a door has been put here, or what must be behind.’

He could appreciated that someone in their abundant wisdom might have considered whatever it was to be highly dangerous and had taken meticulous steps to conceal it, right down to making it look like the door was just there for a practical joke, but if you really, truly wanted to conceal something terrible, why put a door there at all? Why not just patch up the wall and leave it at that? Then nobody, anybody the likes of him, would ever have had reason to question the existence of this particular section of corridor. Either that, or actually have a case file somewhere that everyone could find, that very clearly articulated the problem and what had been done to overcome it, so that no one might ever tempt fate by poking their noses somewhere they didn’t belong. That’s what he would have done, or perhaps on the wall behind that very door, painted, in big, bold yellow lettering “do not ever damage this wall.” Probably with a case file reference painted underneath it, just to be perfectly clear.

There were no other rooms down here, just one long wall that traversed under the labyrinth of pre-Victorian age Cardiff, its sewers, the bay and everything else overhead. The hub's reach was extensive and for whatever reason, there’d either been no need, or no ability, to hollow out more than a singular narrow passageway, leading to a much wider expanse further down, where anyone hardly ever went. The large rooms down there were only used for storage of true rubbish – tat that had come through the rift so heavily soaked in rift radiation and other pollutants that it was simply being housed down there for safety reasons, waiting for a day when all that excess radiation had broken down to something less than a miniscule amount of half life. It was not a place you took visitors on the official tour. He scarcely brought employees down here, coming only out of necessity to complete random yet regularly scheduled audits on the stuff they still kept down here, disposing of what was not considered safe, and adding stuff that was too dangerous to keep anywhere else.

‘Ianto…’ Jack was starting to use that tone on him now. That “you're beginning to try my patience” one that was usually reserved for the others. ‘You are not the first person to wonder about this door. Let me just put that out there first. Second, we’ve done every kind of test you can think of over the years: density scans, geophysical surveys, time space distortion studies, samples of the concrete itself. There is nothing suspicious about it and nothing lying beyond it that shouldn't be there and that isn’t directly behind every other part of this wall.’

‘But Jack…’ Surely he could see that it must warrant another more exhaustive analysis. They’d missed something important, something vital, that would explain why it was here.

‘Isn’t it enough just to consider all the reasons it might have been put there in the first place? What if it's holding back something terrible? Remember Abaddon? Do you really want another one of those being set free upon the city?’

‘That’s a little extreme, don’t you think?’

Jack looked down at him, face stern, hands placed firmly on hips. ‘Is it? Really? You wanna be the one that takes those odds, cause I don't.’

Ianto chewed his lip, sensing that he was being overridden, albeit very politely.

Jack clutched at his shoulders to emphasise his point. ‘Let’s assume it's the worst thing that the planet has ever encountered, lurking behind that wall. Then consider that for the past century and a half, it has been safely kept at bay by whatever means or technology were used. The chances of that technology failing seem pretty slim. And,’ he said, underscoring the point, ‘that’s just the worst case scenario. If there’s nothing there, then who cares? It's just some stupid door that someone put there out of incompetence or as a horrible practical joke for everyone who has come along since then. Either way, if we leave it alone, nobody gets hurt. That's a win-win in my books.’

Ianto stared longingly at the door. He loved Torchwood and all its many secrets and mysteries, but mostly because it gave him something to fill in his spare hours, puzzling them all out so that he could savour the fact that what was mysterious and perplexing to everyone else was just something that Ianto knew all about. Only Jack knew more about this place and its history, and the margin between them was getting narrower by the day. Soon the only secrets around here that Ianto didn’t know about would be those surrounding Jack personally that he refused to give up to anyone, even Ianto.

‘Please don't make me order you to leave this alone,’ Jack begged, his tone turning soft and beseeching, clearly he could see the cogs whirring in Ianto’s head, trying to figure out a way to defy Jack’s instructions and also pull away the veil so that he could find out who the man behind the curtain really was, figuratively speaking. Then again, what if Jack was right and tampering brought about something so terrible and deadly that there was no way of stopping it. Could he live with himself if that happened, all for the sake of relentless curiosity?

‘I really don't like not knowing,’ he said, visibly showing his unhappiness.

‘I know,’ Jack said, rubbing his hands up and down ianot’s arms in a show of comfort. ‘That's just life, y’know.’

Ianto heaved a sigh. ‘Fine. I promise not to bring about the possible end of the world by wondering what's behind door number 2.’

Jack smiled, leaned forward and pecked him on the cheek. ‘Good choice. Now, let’s go back upstairs and you can revel in the mystery of the coffee machine that no one else can operate.’

Jack's arm snaked around his waist, leading them both away, but Ianto risked one final glance over his shoulder at the doorway to nowhere. One day, he promised himself.