What Never Should Be: Two In The Hand

[blucougar]

Title: What Never Should Be: Two In The Hand
Chapter 5: Escalation
Author: blucougar57
Summary: Secretive behaviour and a persistent PC creates headaches for Captain Jack as he and Ianto continue working to reinvent Torchwood; and all the while the universe doesn't seem to want to let him forget he was once Torchwood's prisoner...
Rating: Strong T



Read more


Previous Chapter




"She's not here."

Ianto looked up from the coffee machine as Jack approached, looking pale and sick.

"Suzie?"

"Yeah. She hasn't turned up, and the glove and the knife are missing, too. And that's not all. Tosh found this in amongst the police reports about the recent spate of murders."

Ianto took the print-out from Jack and felt his stomach drop. He was looking at a very good rendering of the knife that Suzie had taken from the Archives.

"This is the murder weapon?" he asked hoarsely. Jack nodded. The Captain looked very much as though he wanted to cry, and Ianto quietly admired the fortitude he showed in reining in his emotions.

"Yeah. It's her, Ianto. Suzie is the killer."


* * *


"You're positive about all this?" Owen asked when he and Tosh arrived a short while later.

"It's beyond doubt," Ianto said. "I'm sorry, Tosh."

She glared half-heartedly at him, her anger not nearly enough to mask the hurt.

"Are you, Ianto? You never liked Suzie. I suppose you'll be glad to see her gone, no matter how it affects anyone else."

Her words stung, possibly because there was a grain of truth in them. Before Ianto could gather his thoughts to defend himself, though, Jack spoke gently.

"Toshie, stop it. This isn't Ianto's fault. If anyone's to blame, it's me. I should never have given her the glove to research."

"It probably won't help," Owen said, "but I think she was a crazy bitch long before she ever got a hold of that glove."

"You're right," Jack growled. "It doesn't help."

"I'm sorry, Ianto," Tosh apologised. He offered her a warm smile in return and squeezed her hand gently.

"It's okay. I know you and she are friends, but right now our priority has to be finding her. Tosh, do you have any ideas where she might have gone to ground?"

Tosh looked helpless and more than a little embarrassed.

"Sorry, not a clue. I mean, we are... were friends, but she never actually told me anything much about herself."

"I wouldn't care that she's done a runner," Owen said, "but I'm guessing she took the glove and the knife with her?"

"Yeah," Jack confirmed. "She's taken her gun with her, as well."

"Bugger," Owen muttered. "Okay, as much as I hate to add one more worry, we need to take this into consideration. That PC that you gave a guided tour to...?"

"What about her?" Jack asked, a touch irritably. "I retconned her. End of story."

Owen shook his head.

"Not necessarily. Look, we don't have time, so I'm going to spell this out. We know people can break retcon with the right trigger, and she's a cop." He pointed to the police sketch of the knife. "That thing is circulating around the Cardiff police as we speak. Suzie had that bloody knife out in plain sight last night when that PC was here and it's a fair bet that she saw it, if she's even halfway decent at her job. If she sees that sketch, and we have to assume that she will, then she could remember everything."

Acutely aware of the way that Jack had tensed, Ianto spoke in an urgent voice.

"Tosh, can we monitor her? Follow her with the CCTV?"

"Well, yes, but it'll be limited," Tosh admitted. "Why? Do you think Suzie might go after her?"

"Suzie might target her as a means of tying up loose ends," Jack guessed. "I taught her never to leave loose ends when she wrapped up a job. She learnt well."

Tosh was already on her feet, and heading to her workstation.

"I'll get onto it now."

Once she was gone, Owen looked grimly at Jack and Ianto.

"What are you going to do with Suzie when we catch up with her?"

"We're still working on that," Jack admitted. "I thought Flat Holm might be an option."

"You think you can rehabilitate her?" Owen asked incredulously. "Jack, mate, she's insane. She must be, to have done what she did."

"I brought her in," Jack said bitterly. "I owe it to her to at least try and see that she's taken care of."

Owen looked quizzically to Ianto, who nodded in silent agreement.

"Okay," Owen conceded with a sigh. "Let's track the crazy cow down before she hurts someone else."


* * *


"I taught her well," Jack admitted miserably as the day wore on, turning into evening, and there was no sign of Suzie anywhere. It seemed she had completely dropped off the radar and, if Jack hadn't known better, he might have given in to the hope that perhaps she'd fled Cardiff altogether. He did know better, though, and that was the problem to which he currently had no solution.

Tosh looked up at Jack has he came to stand beside her desk, looking somewhat forlorn. She couldn't quite bring herself to smile. It hurt to have to hunt down a friend like this.

"I've been keeping track of PC Cooper," she said, hoping both to shift the topic of conversation and to give Jack something other than Suzie to focus on. It seemed to work, to a degree, as his gloomy expression fell away to be replaced by renewed concentration.

"How's her behaviour been?"

"She seems a little on the vague side," Tosh mused, "but that's probably just a side-effect of the retcon."

"Hopefully she'll put it down to getting smashed and let it go," Jack murmured. Tosh hesitated, looking back up at him warily.

"What are you going to do if she remembers?"

Jack was not so caught up in his own thoughts that he missed the audible worry in her voice. With some effort, he offered her a gentle smile.

"I'm not going to shoot her, if that's what you're thinking."

She tried to laugh his words off, but the way her posture relaxed just fractionally betrayed her. Smiling sadly, Jack leaned down to hug Tosh and kiss her forehead.

"You know why I don't trust the police. I know you've seen the footage."

She paled slightly, horrified at being caught out.

"Jack, I..."

"It's okay. I don't mind that you know. It's just that I haven't told Ianto about it yet. He thinks I hate the police because they represent the kind of authority that locked me up. I don't think he realises there's more to it than that."

"You are going to tell him, aren't you?" she asked. Jack sighed, and Tosh felt her heart break just a little at the distant and pained look in his eyes.

"There's so much I haven't been able to talk about yet. This is just one more thing. But, yeah... I will, when I'm ready to."

"You know he thinks we ought to hire her?" Tosh said tentatively. "If she remembers, that is."

Jack huffed.

"Over my dead body, and that's not an invitation or a suggestion."

"Jack," Tosh said softly, "we've already lost Suzie, no matter how this ends. We'll be a person down and we're going to have to replace her, preferably sooner rather than later. Look at it logically. She was accepted as a PC, so she must be reasonably competent. She'd be used to dealing with people. Aside from Ianto, none of us is especially good on that front. Lastly, if she remembers, it would at least be a way to keep her under surveillance."

Jack's lips twitched.

"So would locking her up in the cell next to Brad."

Tosh's expression hardened.

"I'm going to pretend you didn't say that, Jack Harkness. Now please go away and let me work."

She turned back to her computer, not needing to look in order to know what expression was on Jack's face right then. As much as it went against her instinct to turn her back on him, at the same time it appalled her that he could even joke about locking someone up like that. She was simply not prepared to let him get away with it, even as a joke.

He was still behind her, and she was about to tell him again to go away when his arms suddenly folded around her in a fierce hug.

"I'm sorry. You're right. That was a bad thing to think."

Tosh sighed and allowed herself to relax into his embrace.

"Yes, it was, but I forgive you. Now..." She lightly slapped his arm. "Shoo! I really do have work to do."

Reassured, Jack bounded off towards his office. Tosh barely had time to settle back in to work, though, before Owen joined her.

"Got a problem?" she inquired, hoping her distracted tone would be enough to put the medic off. No such luck, unfortunately.

"No, not a problem," Owen said quietly. "I was just wondering, how are you doing? I mean, I know you and Suzie were friends, and this can't be easy for you."

Tosh melted a little at the concern in his voice. Owen may have had the propensity to be a bastard, but he'd been nothing but a gentleman towards her specifically since that first day when Jack had brought him to the Hub.

"Like I said this morning, we're friends... We were friends, but we weren't exactly best buddies. I never saw this coming, Owen. Not for a second..."

The stress she'd felt since that morning's revelations finally took its toll and her voice broke. Owen didn't hug her, but his hands on her shoulders, massaging lightly, offered as much reassurance and comfort as Jack's bear hugs.

"It's not your fault, Tosh." He glanced towards Jack's office. "Not his fault, either. Sometimes, shit happens and no one can do anything to stop it."

Tosh looked back over her shoulder at him in wry amusement.

"I don't suppose you plan on saying that to Jack?"

Owen snorted.

"Not a chance. It's Teaboy's job to comfort Captain Sunshine, not mine."

He walked away before she could reply. Smiling ruefully to herself, Tosh reapplied herself to finding their errant colleague.


* * *


In hindsight, Ianto supposed he shouldn't have been surprised that it was him who found Suzie... or rather, Suzie who found him. He'd headed up to ensure the tourist office was properly locked and secure. If, by some slim chance, PC Cooper did break through the retcon, he didn't care to have her stumbling back into the Hub that way. At least, not without some forewarning, and they were all too focused on Suzie bloody Costello to be worrying about...

Ianto faltered as he caught a glimpse of the Plass on the CCTV monitor, and swore softly. PC Gwen Cooper was walking slowly across the Plass towards the water tower.

"Ianto?" Jack's voice sounded in his ear, reminding him that his comm. was still on. "What's wrong?"

"It's Cooper," he answered. "She's on the Plass."

"Brilliant, just what we need. Get back down here so we can figure out what to do with her."

Ianto took some small relief in that Jack had said 'with her', and not 'to her'. He turned to head back down into the Hub, and walked straight into Suzie. His mind skidded, and then went into overdrive as he realised that she had quite likely been hiding there the entire day. In all of the team's frantic efforts, not once had any of them considered that she might have been hiding right under their collective noses.

Seriously, he wanted to kick himself for the massive oversight.

In the semi-darkness, she looked truly menacing, a look that was aided by the alien knife clutched in her hands. Her expression betrayed her distress, though.

"Suzie, put it down," Ianto said in a deliberately low voice. Over the comms., he heard Jack utter a startled yelp, followed by a promise to be there as fast as possible.

"You know, I did actually like you, Ianto," Suzie said in a tremulous voice. "Despite everything, I really did, but you never wanted to give me a chance."

"Suzie, it isn't too late," Ianto pled, thinking of Jack's idea to send her to Flat Holm Island for rehabilitation. She shook her head.

"I'm sorry."

She lunged, and Ianto threw himself out of the way, landing on the floor with a jarring crash. Then she was on top of him and Ianto cried out in panic as he belatedly tried to defend himself, but there was no actual attack. Instead, she scrabbled for the keys in his jacket pocket. Then she was gone. He was still trying to lever himself off the floor when Jack burst in, with Owen close behind.

"Yan!" Jack cried out. Ianto was about to insist that he was fine when he became aware of an extremely unpleasant throbbing in his left arm. Suzie might have missed him with the knife, but it seemed that he hadn't escaped the altercation unscathed.

"Bugger," he mumbled. "I think my arm's broken."

"Easy," Owen said as he and Jack eased Ianto around into a sitting position. "Let me see."

He ran his hands down Ianto's arm, and sighed when the gentle touch induced a pained yelp.

"I'll need to check it with the scanner, but I reckon you're right. It is broken."

"C'mon," Jack said grimly. "Let's get you downstairs."

"No, you have to go after Suzie," Ianto insisted in between grunts of pain as Jack and Owen pulled him to his feet. "I'll be okay, Jack. Just go."

Jack looked torn, but the decision was taken out of his hands when Tosh's voice spoke over the comms.

"Jack, Suzie's out on the Plass with Cooper, and she's got her gun. I think she's going to shoot her!"

"The invisible lift," Owen said urgently. "If you go up on that, Suzie won't see you coming. Go!"

With an apologetic look at his lover, Jack took off back downstairs.

"You think he'll make it in time?" Owen wondered once Jack had gone. Ianto looked grim.

"I hope so. He has enough trauma to cope with already without the added extra of a guilt trip."


* * *


to be continued...