Title: Swept away
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Torchwood Team
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,857 words
Content notes: None
Author notes: Written for Challenge 510 - River
Summary: Jack was hell bent on catching their alien, but now it’s become a rescue mission of another kind.


‘Don't let it get away! ‘Jack's yell could scarcely be heard over the rain that was lashing down.

The team were soaked to the skin but that didn't distract them from the job at hand. The alien was fast and was leading them halfway across the city in a mad chase that had been conducted on foot for the last half hour. There wasn't an inch of them that wasn't saturated and cold. The rain wasn't impeding their quarry nearly so much. It was semi-amphibious, and the inches of rainwater sluicing down the roads were giving it the advantage it desperately needed to get away.

Jack was out in front, leading the charge. He was a good five yards ahead of the rest of the team, though how that was possible was beyond belief. The rain that soaked into his heavy great coat must have added at least another ten kilos to his body weight dragging him down constantly, yet he persisted nonetheless trying to close the gap between them and the alien.

‘It's heading for the river!’ He yelled back at the others who now that he said it could see exactly what its game was. Just over the other side of the road with the riverbank and on the opposite side of the riverbank they could see the Millennium Stadium in all its glory, lights sparkling in the blackness. As they beamed into the night they caused the rain drops to glitter and shimmer. It might have been beautiful on another night but they had a job to do. It was serving only as a beacon toward the alien marking out an escape route. They all came to realise exactly what Jack meant. If it made it to the river and into the water they were never going to catch it. It would slip out into the bay and into the ocean and from there who knew where.

Jack sprinted forward, pushing his legs even harder, boots sloshing through the deep puddles forming on the road. The others tried and failed to keep up with his impossibly long strides, unable to do much more than watch the chase unfold before them. They reached the road and sprinted across it, not even pausing to check for incoming traffic, reaching the other side just in time to see Jack lunge at the alien, catching it around its slippery body with both arms, before the pair of them went rumbling down the embankment and disappearing into that black water of the River Taff.

The team grabbed at one another to prevent each other from slipping down the embankment themselves, following Jack and the alien into the rushing water.

‘Where are they?’ Gwen called out, barely able to fight again the sound of the rain and the churning river ten feet below them.

‘I can't see anything!’ Owen yelled back.

‘All the rain and the stormwater is flooding into the river system,’ Tosh replied. ‘It's running twice as fast as it would normally. It'll have swept them both downriver already.’

‘Well, come on, then!’ Gwen shouted, already breaking into a run. ‘We can't just leave Jack like this!’

They ran alongside the churning water, under the rail bridge, past Cardiff Central Station, all the way down to the Heol Penarth Bridge and half a mile past it, but between the dark and the rain and the blackness of the water, there was no sign of either Jack or the alien, struggling to stay afloat in the raging waters.

Gwen stopped to catch her breath as the rain began to ease, casting a look up and down the waterline. ‘Are they too far past us? Did we miss them swimming to the other shoreline and getting out?’ She didn't see how that was possible. The embankment was steeper on the other side where the river hugged the city centre.

‘I could calculate the distance they might have travelled based on the speed of the current and the time they entered the water,’ Tosh said.

‘Assuming they didn't get dragged down,’ Owen replied. ‘That coat must weigh a bloody tonne in the water.’

‘I didn't think of that.’

‘Jack's wrist strap,’ Ianto blurted out. ‘It's got a signal.’

‘Of course!’ Tosh tapped her PDA wiping the screen to get a clear picture on it. She frowned. ‘According to this we've gone past them. They're two hundred metres back upstream.’

‘What did I tell you,’ Owen said. ‘They've gotten caught on something under the water line.’

Tosh shook her head, long strands of sopping hair flicking back and forth. ‘No. The signal was stopped for a bit but now it’s still moving. It's heading this way.’

They clambered down the less steep embankment where the park and walkway hugged the river's western edge, squinting through the darkness and the remaining drizzle for any sign of Jack and the alien. The waters were churning and black, making it virtually impossible to detect movement.

‘There!’ Gwen cried, pointing at something indistinct moving up and down through the blackness. She ran to the water, feet sloshing through the shallower waters edge. ‘Ianto, help me!’

He was rushing at her heels as she tried to move out into the water, their arms locked at the wrist.

‘You’ll get swept downriver!’ Owen yelled, even as he moved towards the bank, taking Ianto's other hand as the two of them were now waist and chest deep in the water. Gwen gasped at the coldness of the water as it tried to pull her along and under, but she had eyes only on the pale blue shirt drifting ever closer. It wasn't going to be enough. Even with her arm stretched as far as it could go, she was still going to miss him by a yard or two. She kicked out. ‘Ianto, grab my leg!’

Owen was in the water now as far as he could go without getting caught in the current. His arm was straining to keep hold of Ianto’s, which was in turn being pulled even more strongly by Gwen whose feet would not even be reaching the bottom anymore. Owen grabbed Tosh, who was clutching a tree branch hanging over the water. Owen could see what Gwen saw now that he was up to his chest in the water. They only got one chance to grab Jack but they needed greater reach. Another half a body length would do it. ‘Do what she says!’ he yelled at Ianto.

Ianto gritted his teeth and reluctantly let her go, floundering for a brief, panicked moment until he found her ankle and gripped it tight, making sure she didn’t slip away with the river speeding past them.

Gwen drifted, the full weight of the current pulling at her body. The body came closer. She only had to get a handful of clothing. That would be enough. She stretched and gagged on the filthy river water as it rushed her face. The body twirled like a star in the water and it was just enough for her to latch on to the fabric. It quickly pulled taut and for a split second she thought it was going to rip straight out of her numb fingers but she grabbed it with both hands and clung to it for dear life. ‘I’ve got him!”

The chain of bodies swung to the side, failing to fight the river’s pull, but it was enough for Owen to begin pulling back as they were pushed not deeper into the river’s current, but away from it due to the sheer resistance caused by their bodies in the water. Owen finally managed to get his feet firmly under him and slowly dragged Ianto to shallower water, carefully clinging to Gwen so that he didn't lose her. With much pulling and struggling, Ianto reached the bank, bringing Gwen with him, and in her grip, the clearly lifeless body of Jack Harkness.

Gwen could barely get her feet under her as she reached the bank, pulling Jack out of the water. Her whole body was soaked and frozen to the core, and she shivered hard. Tosh ran to her and began hugging her, trying to rub warmth into her numb limbs as she watched Owen and Ianto take charge of Jack.

His face was white despite the dark drizzly night. The jaw was slack and his skin grey and lifeless. Ianto was shivering himself but that didn't stop him clutching Jack to him before Owen helped him to lie Jack flat and then turn him on his side.

Shivering and cold, they all waited what felt like an age before Jack gasped and then coughed, and then proceeded to vomit up half the river. No sooner than he’d managed to rid himself of all his excess river water, Ianto had him sitting upright, leaning against his body as the pair of them shivered against one another, Ianto’s arms wrapped a tightly has his numb limbs could manage.

‘What happened to the alien?’ Tosh asked.

‘Really?’ Ianto gave her an incredulous look between chattering teeth. ‘That’s w-what’s important r-right now?’

Jack waved off the overprotective moddycoddling, sitting up a bit straighter. ‘It put up a hell of a fight. Had me in a choke hold and wouldn't let go. I managed to get my hand around its own neck and my thumb in one of its eye sockets and it still wouldn’t give up. It was hell bent on killing me if I didn't let it go. I heard a snap before everything went black.

‘So it’s dead?’ Owen asked.

Jack nodded, hair dripping water down his face. ‘I think so. It was kill or be killed.’

Owen shuddered from the cold and sucked his teeth. ‘Well, the body is going to wash up at some point if it didn't survive.’

‘That could take weeks,’ Tosh added. ‘The bay currents aren't usually strong enough to wash things back ashore. And that assumes it doesn't end up down in the wetlands. That bog will suck down anything and everything.’

‘By then it should be so decomposed no one will know what it was,’ Owen replied. ‘Now, can we go home before we all die of hypothermia?’

‘P-p-please,’ Gwen stuttered, arms folded tightly across her body as her hair and clothes dripped heavily, taking up even more falling rain which had started up in earnest again.

‘I’ll m-make us coffee j-just as ss-s-soon as I can f-feel my f-fingers again,’ Ianto stuttered. Jack rubbed his arms up and down even though it was pointless given how soaked they both were.

‘Thank you,’ Jack said, making sure he met each of their gazes.

‘We couldn't just let you drown and get swept all the way out into the bay,’ Tosh replied.

‘Even if the rest of us almost ended up the same way,’ Owen said, returning to complaining.

‘I don’t deserve you,’ Jack said.

‘You got that right,’ Owen said. ‘Now get a move on before I have popsicles for patients. And next time, if an alien wants to go for a swim in the Taff, I say we let it.’