Destruction: Chapter 1 - Walls Fall Down
Aug. 1st, 2009 09:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aviv_b_artworkRATING: PG-13 for this Chapter for some swearing and sexual references
WORDS: ~ 1700
CHARACTERS: Ianto/Lisa, OC - Charlie Mackenzie
SPOILERS: None, Not canon. This Chapter set pre-Series 1. Ianto will eventually be involved with members of Torchwood Three - but not quite in the same way as the series..
SUMMARY: How Ianto joined Torchwood One and what happens to him during The Battle for Canary Wharf.
Within six months after being hired by Torchwood One, Ianto’s world was irreparably altered. Twice.
He had been hired straight from University after earning a degree in Software Engineering with a specialty in information architecture systems design. While he hadn't been the most diligent of students, he managed to snag an interview with a Torchwood on-campus recruiter. He had performed only adequately during his interview and normally would have not been asked to Torchwood for a round of intelligence and performance tests. But the recruiter sensed something unusual about Ianto and invited him to come to Torchwood for further testing. Her instincts were rewarded as he had shown astonishing aptitude on some of them. His ability to synthesize bits and pieces of information into a coherent framework scored in the 99th percentile. Memory capabilities tested at near perfect recall. He also showed above average empathic ability, which could be developed by Torchwood later in his career.
He could hardly believe it when Torchwood One offered him a job as a Junior Archivist. He wasn’t quite sure what actually went on at Torchwood, but he knew it was secret government business and that he was about to enter a very exclusive ‘club.’ He used most of his savings to buy a couple of nice suits, several dress shirts and ties along with a pair of dressy black oxfords.
Every morning he painstakingly prepared for work. The carefully pressed suit, the fresh shirt and tie and his polished shoes let the world know he was a professional, ready to make his mark on the world. He felt so proud to be working for Torchwood, even if he didn't fully believe that aliens existed.
His girlfriend, Lisa, however, was not impressed. She felt he could have done better. From her standpoint, he was nothing more than a glorified clerical employee. And in addition to being quite attractive, Lisa was a very ambitious woman. She was going on to graduate school and was sure she’d continue on to her doctorate degree in Applied Mathematics.
The academic world despised all things government in general and Torchwood in particular. When she told her graduate advisor that her boyfriend worked for Torchwood, he had looked at her over his reading glasses and sighed, “Ah yes Torchwood, we’re always hearing rumors about experiments and scientific discoveries going on there, but apparently they can’t be bothered to publish their results in respectable journals.” Lisa shuddered every time she thought about that conversation. Lately, she had taken to having lunch with Professor Whitman, a highly respected Associate Professor in line for a full Professorship in a year or two. He was much more in line with what she was looking for in a future husband.
Lisa planned her breakup with Ianto as carefully as she planned everything else in her life. She invited him out to dinner (her treat) at a quiet, rather posh restaurant figuring that the atmosphere would prevent him from getting too emotional and making a scene. She dressed rather severely for an evening out; after all she didn’t want his mind to be focused on other things. Nursing a glass of wine she gave him her most sympathetic smile and told him that she didn’t think things were working out in their relationship. She was quite surprised when Ianto told her that he agreed, wished her well, stood up and walked out of the restaurant.
Ianto smiled to himself, “Good thing Charlie told me about her messing about with that Professor. I’d be a right mess if she had caught me unawares.” In fact, he had had a bitter argument with his best friend at college Charlie Mackenzie, accusing him of making up the story because he was jealous of his relationship with Lisa. But later, Ianto couldn’t deny that Lisa had seemed cold and distant lately, and their lovemaking had become almost mechanical.
It didn’t take long for Ianto to confirm that Charlie was right. After an evening of watching a video at Ianto’s flat, Lisa had declined to stay over saying she had an early class the next morning. In her haste to leave, she forgot her cell phone on his coffee table. Feeling a little guilty, he checked her cell phone logs and found numerous calls to a number belonging to a Professor Whitman (she had him on speed dial no less). Many of the calls were made late at night. In fact, a few were made at about the time Lisa would have gotten home after declining several times recently to stay at Ianto’s.
He called Charlie and told him what he had found. Charlie knew Ianto was probably heartbroken; Lisa had been his first serious girlfriend and they had dated for over a year. “No, no, I’m OK, really. I guess I knew even before you told me, I just didn’t want to believe it.”
As he walked home from the restaurant, he realized that it really was OK. He had cried some the night he found the phone logs, but when he woke up the next day, he felt like a weight had been lifted off his shoulders. And now, he felt, well, happy, and more than ready to try his luck with dating again.
He called Charlie when he got home, telling him what had happened and agreeing to go clubbing with him over the weekend. “You just wait and see Ianto, the girls are going to be all over you.” Ianto laughed.
Ianto had been somewhat shy when he started college, and the teasing he came in for over his Welsh accent hadn’t helped. His first year had been pretty lonely. But gradually his quick wit and dry humor had won his classmates over; he joined a chess club and played rugby with some of them on weekends. His dating life had improved as well. He matured physically, his gawky, too thin body adding some muscle and grace. Lisa had met him just as his popularity was rising, and they quickly became an item. And Lisa made sure that nobody interferred in her relationship with Ianto.
Now, as Ianto nervously re-entered the dating world he was astonished to find that Charlie was right. Dressed in slim black jeans and a plain black T-shirt that accentuated his pale skin, he attracted the attention of quite a few women (not to mention a few men as well). His remaining touch of shyness just added to his charm. Whether they wanted to mother, romance or just fuck themselves senseless with Ianto, he never seemed to be without admirers.
Charlie was happy for Ianto. He had never liked Lisa and was glad that Ianto was getting a chance to just have some fun without getting serious again with someone right away. And most of women Ianto met were very impressed that he worked for Torchwood. It made quite a nice change, really.
One thing that Lisa was right about was that his job as junior archivist was mostly clerical in nature. He was charged with describing alien artifacts and logging them into the data system so that more experienced employees could analyze how they might relate to other items already in the system. It didn’t take long for his supervisors to realize that Ianto could look at an item and with almost without exception see the similarities between it and anything else he had logged in.
Within three months (and a week after Lisa broke up with him) he was promoted to Artifact Analyst I. After the junior archivists logged an item, Ianto’s job was to search the entire database and compare the items to everything in the archives. To be successful, he spent hours studying not only the database logs but the items themselves. Something about the rows and rows of strange looking gadgets fascinated him. Having always been interested in understanding how things worked and fit together, he’d lose himself for hours in the archives, walking the aisles, reading item descriptions, thinking about how they could be related to each other.
His obsession with alien artifacts was what saved him. He was alone in the lower level of the archives the morning the Cybermen attacked. He heard people running and screaming, large items crashing around, and instinctively moved to a remote corner of the vast space. Horrible inhuman voices shouted out strange commands; it seemed to go on for hours. Just as suddenly he felt something shift, almost like time had stopped. He could still here people screaming and sobbing, but the sound of machinery and voices yelling “Upgrade” and “Exterminate” were gone.
He tried to leave the archives only to find both exits blocked by debris. He smelled smoke and began to panic. There was no way out. He paced the archives and yelled for help as his mind raced with terrible thoughts. He was sure no one would find him before he was crushed or burned to death. “Shit,” he thought, “I don’t want to burn to death, anything but that!”
He yelled for help again but no one came. He had a bottle of sleeping pills on him that he had picked up at the pharmacy that morning. All the talk about ghost shifts by his coworkers had made him edgy and he’d had trouble sleeping the past few weeks. Rationally he knew that 10 pills wouldn’t be enough to kill him, but maybe he could drug himself enough so that he wouldn’t be aware when the smoke or fire or crushing weight of the building finally ended his life. Ianto pulled the bottle out of his pocket and palmed the tiny white tablets.
He sat down on the floor and stared at them. Tears fill his eyes when he thought about his Mam and Lisa. Would his body ever be found? Would his Mam at least be able to have a funeral? Would Lisa even care? “Oh, that’s a good one Ianto,” he thought, “she dumped you like yesterday’s garbage and you’re worrying about how she’ll feel when she hears you’re dead. You’re an idiot.”
Ianto could feel that he was beginning to lose control of his emotions. If he was going to do this, it had to be now. Quickly, he tossed the pills in his mouth and choked them down. He sat down, back against a storage closet, pulled his knees up toward his chest and wrapped his arms around his legs. A little while later, as he was beginning to feel foggy, he heard something in the building give way and the ceiling of the archives began to fall on him. Something smashed down directly on top of him; it hurt like hell but he couldn’t react except to think “this can't be good.”
Chapter 2 is here: http://aviv-b.livejournal.com/2159.html
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Date: 2009-08-02 01:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-03 04:34 pm (UTC)I'm finding that writing this is fun but challenging. Crack fic is much easier. Chapter 2 will be up tonight hopefully.
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Date: 2009-08-04 06:05 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2009-09-18 07:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-18 09:06 pm (UTC)