Title: Target practice
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Ianto, Owen, Jack
Author: m_findlow
Rating: M
Length: 1,809 words
Content notes: None
Author notes: Written for Challenge 491 - Riddle
Summary: Ianto and Owen get caught in the crossfire whilst investigating.


‘Why couldn't today have just been a boring day of filing and paperwork?’ Owen complained, yelling loudly to be heard over the din of gunfire.

‘Since when do you like paperwork?’ Ianto replied, brushing bits of broken metal from his hair as he yelled across the five yard gap between them, each huddled behind a used metal oil drum that wasn't doing much more than deflecting bullets from hitting them directly. The loud ping, ping, ping, was making their ears ring and their heads hurt from the noise and the vibration.

‘We’re screwed if we stay here,’ Owen yelled. Eventually the guys with guns were going to close in on them and with nowhere to run, they were going to end up gunned down where they crouched. Conversely, they’d have been screwed if they tried to make a break for it too. Neither of them had a weapon on them. They hadn’t anticipated having to deal with anything violent or life threatening.

Who were these people? Ianto wondered. They certainly couldn't have had anything to do with what he and Owen had come here for. There'd been weird energy hovering in an isolated field just a few dozen feet about ground level in this particular spot for a few weeks. They'd been here once before, poked around for a bit and come up with nothing conclusive. Tosh reasoned that the field might just dissipate on its own and Jack had agreed that was the most likely outcome. The problem was that it hadn't, and Jack had grown annoyed that they’d obviously missed something, and so they'd come back again to do some more thorough investigation in case it was being generated by something else they'd missed the first time around. Jack didn't like unsolved riddles and expected his team to close out their investigations.

They hadn't found any alien devices capable of generating an energy field, but they did seem to have stumbled on the new hideout of some very burly, angry looking men with a lot of tattoos and not a lot of hairs – unless you counted their arms, which were the hairiest tree trunks Ianto had ever laid eyes on. It wasn't just their physical brutality that was cause for alarm, but rather more so the massive assault weapons that they very promptly produced, spraying bullets all across the metal crushing storage yard. Right now, all that metal junk was the only thing from stopping the bullets from ripping them apart, but they were a long way from the next large pile of junk and even further from the bulletproof sanctuary of the SUV.

Ianto wanted to stay positive but as he watched Owen crouch into an even smaller ball, hands clasped around his head as if that was going to protect him, Ianto suddenly thought “we’re going to die here.” They'd strayed into something they shouldn’t have and now these guys were going to make sure they never told anyone what or who they'd seen.

‘I'm sorry!’ Ianto yelled out in between rounds of automatic gunfire, strafing the entire area where they were huddled.

‘What for?’ Owen yelled back.

‘I don't know!’

After a beat, Owen finally said ‘I'm sorry too! Sorry that they both hadn’t figured this out weeks ago. Sorry that they'd missed noticing that the place had become a gangland compound. Sorry that they hadn't been nicer to each other and gone for a beer last night instead of trading barbed insults and arguing over the fact that they hadn't done their jobs properly the first time, according to Jack, who'd been uncharacteristically mad about the whole thing, making them come back to have another go.

Being sorry right now wasn’t helping either of them one bit. Ianto felt something knick his ear. At first he assumed it was a bullet, but when he reached up to touch it he felt the tiny shard of broken metal that had lodged itself there, sheared off from the edge of the oil drum and hitting him along the way. He could hear the bullets clanging through the side of the drum closest to the gang of thugs. There couldn't be much left of it by now and soon the other side that he had his back pressed up against was going to suffer the same fate, bullets ripping through it like a hot knife through butter and then straight into him. It felt wrong to be about to die like this, cowering from a bunch of humans when it was their job to protect the whole planet from alien threats.

Random thoughts flicked by in short one second bursts. Things that in his last moments he shouldn’t have been thinking about, like the milk in the fridge that had expired this morning but that he hadn’t poured down the sink, what would happen the the dry cleaning that wouldn't get collected tomorrow, and what a waste it had been buying up Christmas presents five months ahead of time.

Then the incessant gunfire seemed to halve, and then halve again, and then there was nothing but an eerie silence. Ianto looked across at Owen who looked just as confused as he was. Had they run out of bullets, or was this just some sneaky ploy to lull them into a false sense of security, waiting for them to crawl out from their hidey holes so that they could be shot more easily?

They crouched there and waited in the silence, just looking at each other, waiting for the crunch of footsteps to come nearer and finish them off. They must have stayed like that for several minutes before Owen signalled that he was going to risk taking a look. He waved a hand out first, risking having it blown off by another round of strafing bullets, and when nothing happened he pulled it back to his body, curled to his left and peered around the opposite edge of the drum. He muttered the word “shit” and then he was on his feet, running towards something.

Ianto cast aside any good sense and immediately followed after him. What he saw both surprised and shocked him. There had been three men with guns, now all lying dead in various contorted positions where they'd fallen, each hit in the head or neck by just one or two bullets. On the opposite side of the scrapyard was the unmistakable corpse of Jack Harkness.

Owen was first to reach the body, but Ianto wasn’t far behind him. Jack was a mess of blood and gore, his torso riddled with bullets, trusty webley just two feet away where it had fallen from his hand as he must have got off the last good shot, killing his assailant.

There was nothing they could do for him. Ianto knelt beside him, trying not to be sick at the sight of his mutilated and broken body, whilst Owen took the webley, checked it still had bullets and swept the area in case there was anyone still around. Ianto stroked Jack’s cheek with his hand, Jack’s face speckled with tiny red dots of cast off blood from his own injuries. It frightened the life out of Ianto when Jack finally gasped back to life, unable to tell that the wounds underneath the bloody and torn clothing had healed.

Ianto reached down and kissed him. ‘You stupid, stupid…’ The words came out without anger or judgement. He didn’t know what else to say. Only Jack would risk getting torn apart and filled full of bullets to save someone else. He peppered Jack's face with kisses, barely letting him get a breath as he came back to full cognition.

‘Are you okay?’ Jack asked, slowly sitting up, patting Ianto down for injuries.

‘Am I okay?’ He was more than okay, or at least he would be once the shock of it wore off.

‘We’re clear,’ Owen said, returning with the gun held low. ‘Looks like there was only the three of them, and you got them good.’ He offered Jack back the gun, which Jack slid back into its holster. ‘We were about to be swiss cheese. Where’d you come from?’

Ianto stood and reached down a hand to pull Jack to his feet, edging close to his body as Jack wobbled just slightly, pressing into Ianto's side. ‘I felt bad about chewing you guys out last night,’ he said, wrapping a casual arm around Ianto's waist, steadying each other. ‘Figured you could do with a spare set of eyes to help search the place. Looks like I got here just in the knick of time.’

‘They killed you,’ Ianto said, putting it bluntly and emotionally.

‘Better me than you,’ he replied. ‘I’ll take a thousand bullets if it keeps you guys alive.’

‘I think it's fair to say we’d both prefer you didn't take any bullets,’ Owen said, ‘but thank you.’

Jack's wrist strap beeped loudly. He withdrew his arm from around Ianto to check it, then looked skyward. ‘The energy field has gone.’ He continued to stare up at the sky for a long while, pensive and silent. Then he looked at the corpses of the three goons who’d killed him and done their level best to kill Owen and Ianto. ‘Maybe it was inside of them. Maybe it died. Maybe we’ll never solve that particular riddle.’ Ianto couldn't tell if Jack was upset by the notion of having killed something accidentally or not. His voice was flat and dispassionate, still distracted by some other thought.

‘Or maybe it took one look at what just happened here and decided to move on,’ Owen offered. ‘God knows I'm ready to.’ He gave himself a cursory once over, finding a slit in the elbow of his jacket and a small cut from some passing shrapnel. ‘Anything I need to patch up, Ianto? You’ve got some blood there,’ he said, noticing for the first time and pointing at Ianto’s head.

Ianto touched it and felt it slowly congealing as it ran down the right side of his neck where the cut in his ear had been bleeding. ‘Just a scratch. I’ll be fine.’

Jack frowned. ‘You sure you don’t want Owen to take a look at it?’

Ianto’s hand found Jack's – warm, whole and perfect, even if the rest of him looked a horrific mess. One day maybe he would find a way to return the favour, so that Jack didn’t have to suffer for their sake. ‘Let’s just go home.’ All he wanted to do after a day like today was to lose himself in Jack's body to dispel the memories of having seen it as anything less than perfect. Death had come just that little bit closer once more, but not today. Today he was going to make the most of still being alive to enjoy it.