Mirror, Mirror

[coffeeking]

Who: Ianto Jones, Jack Harkness, TBD
What: Thus begins this crazy plot.
Where: Jack and Ianto's fantabulous Victorian Duplex
When: Morning
Notes: This is the beginning of a Flyside-based plot involving a small number of characters and some NPCs, but it's by no means exclusive. If your character lives in Flyside or you just want to be involved in the plot somehow, feel free to drop one of us a line.
Warnings: General warning for Jack Harkness. Also warnings for mild but disturbing imagery including the mutilation and death of children.

Remodeling a house was no easy prospect, even when the remodeling was relatively minor. Removing a wall and installing new fixtures could take a lot out of a man, and so it was with a yawn that Ianto woke, stretching sore muscles after a long and satisfying slumber. It was no surprise Jack was no longer laid out next to him, the immortal man very rarely sleeping longer than Ianto, but the other side of the bed was still warm. Noises were coming from downstairs, presumably the kitchen, and that meant there was a possibility of breakfast sometime in the near future. Urged by both stomach and an aching bladder, Ianto reluctantly rolled off the comfortable mattress and made for the bathroom.

Once relieved, he blearily washed his hands and then splashed some water on his face to help him further join the land of the living. Glancing up at his reflection in the mirror, he was met instead by cold, dead eyes and dark skin in a halo of polished metal, the room awash in blood and the whine of saws competing with the terrible, shrieking sounds of human agony.

His Lisa. No. Not his Lisa, but the Cyberman, wearing Lisa's body, and the people in the conversion chambers were children and one of them was Mica. She was screaming for her mother as Lisa held her flailing limbs and strapped her in--

With a startled, terrified shout, Ianto reacted, grabbing the nearest heavy object -- the ceramic toothbrush holder -- and threw it forcefully at the vision. He didn't remember he'd been looking into a mirror until it shattered violently.

Flying shards cut into him, shallow, stinging scratches of little consequence, but they succeeded in reconnecting him to reality with a gasp. He stumbled back, hit the wall, and felt his legs go out from under him as he slid down abruptly. His eyes were locked to the fragments as he numbly wondered what in the hell just happened.

Comments

[coffeeking]

Ianto blinked as if dazed before Jack's words really registered, and he brought a hand up to his face. It came away wet with blood, but not much. Ianto had been injured often enough to know without looking that it would heal on its own without stitches. It wouldn't even leave a scar. He was more concerned with what he'd just seen, and if he hadn't worked for Torchwood so long, he might have been afraid Jack would think he'd gone insane. But when your life involved the amount of rubbish theirs did, seeing scary things in mirrors was more likely to be indicative of alien tech or creepy monsters than one's mental stability.

"Lisa... Lisa was in the mirror. She was...she was converting Mica." The words felt like acid on his tongue and he had to force them past his lips. Some part of him felt like speaking those words was a curse on his niece, and if he'd had anything in his stomach, he knew he would have brought it back up then and there. He could taste bile, and he realized he needed to find some calm and pull himself together.

He took a deep breath. He could smell Jack's pheromones, and the lemon scent of the cleaner he'd used on the tile. There was no smell of cordite or steel. It helped.

[51stcentury]

Jack turned to glance around them at the broken mirror all around them on the floor. Seeing visions in the mirror... It sounded mad, but Ianto wasn't a man to make something like that up. If he saw it, he saw it. "Converting Mica?"

He turned back to Ianto and noticed just how shaken the other man was, even in that moment. He stroked his cheek gently before leaning forward to put his other hand on the other side of Ianto's face. "Hey," he said, gently. "Are you alright? Why don't we stand up. Go into the bedroom. This place is a minefield of broken glass..." Plus, he thought that getting out of the bathroom and into a more neutral zone might be better for Ianto in that moment.

[coffeeking]

Ianto nearly winced when Jack repeated those damning words, but he was calming down as if waking from a nightmare, and the superstition of them was fading. Still, there was a niggling voice in the back of Ianto's head whispering about parallel universes and other worlds that he was studiously ignoring. It was just a vision. Just a bad dream, nothing more.

"Right," he agreed, composing himself and letting Jack help him to his feet. He looked around dubiously at the shards littering the floor and their bare feet, but with some careful maneuvering and Jack sweeping aside some of the worst of it (Ianto protested, Jack didn't listen), they somehow made it out of the bathroom with Ianto's feet glass-free. Jack had caught a few slivers with his minor heroics, but the damage was minimal at worst and already healed by the time they sat down on the rumpled bed.

"I have no idea what it was," Ianto admitted, his voice now free of the tremor that had troubled it in his shock. "I went in to wash my face. I looked up, and there she was. Like looking through a window." A beat. "Bloody good thing we weren't overly fond of that mirror," he muttered sourly.

[51stcentury]

Jack sat Ianto on the bed before he joined him, still slightly concerned for him although his color was looking a little better now that he was out of the bathroom and that mirror. "You know, they're called looking glasses, but that doesn't mean that you're supposed to be able to see through them." He settled in against Ianto's side.

"Don't worry about the mirror. I'm more concerned with why it was showing that. I mean," he glanced at Ianto. "Was it just that mirror? Was the mirror possessed or something? Or is this bigger than that?" He paused for a moment. "...do we even have another mirror in this place?" Freshly moved in, Jack still wasn't quite sure where everything was, especially outside of the areas that he normally frequented.

[coffeeking]

Those were all very good questions that Ianto was unsure he really wanted the answers to. Ianto was silent for a few moments, not keen to test out any kind of theory in another mirror, but knowing it was probably inevitable if they wanted to get to the bottom of this.

"...There's another one in the loo downstairs, and in the other shower. And another in the foyer." He said it in the same hesitant tone of voice he'd so often heard in horror movies when the plucky teenagers were about to open the door to the haunted house. It was the same tone of voice Gwen used whenever she dared to suggest that Tosh might have gotten something wrong.

Tosh. Now there was an idea. "Maybe we should call Tosh. God knows what kind of tech she's hoarded by now. She could run tests," he suggested hopefully.

[51stcentury]

Jack nodded. "If anyone could figure out some sort of test to run by it other than just looking in mirrors all day, it'd be Tosh. I mean... Maybe it was just that one mirror, and maybe it was a one time thing, but. I think we'd both feel better if we figured that out first, don't you?"

Still, Jack sort of wanted to look in the mirrors downstairs. Even if it was a window into an alternate universe and not their own, if there was something they could do about saving Ianto's niece, then they were going to do it. They had to try at least.

"Call Tosh, then," he said to Ianto. "See if she's seen anything on her end? And barring that, if she can get over here and figure anything out as well." He debated cleaning up in the bathroom, but they were probably going to need to analyze that too.

[coffeeking]

Ianto nodded, pleased that they had a plan on how to approach this, even if it was just the usual slapdash winging it that normally constituted a 'plan.' It gave Ianto something to focus on, so he didn't start thinking too hard about the idea that somewhere, somehow, Mica really was screaming in a conversion chamber.

He slid his CiD off the bedside table and brought up the command to talk to Tosh. He had it programmed into the device like the equivalent of speed dial. Only this time, it came back with an error. Mildly irritated by what he thought was a glitch, he brought up the network listing so he could contact her manually. Tosh wasn't listed. He stared at the spot on the alphabetized list where she ought to be, but it remained empty. Scrolling up and down again, he couldn't find her name, even out of order. Swallowing, a cold feeling in his stomach, he tried one last search. No results.

"She isn't registered on the network..." he said quietly.

[51stcentury]

Jack froze in place, turning to Ianto. "What?" he asked. That couldn't be true. "Let me see..." He held out a hand for the device, and after Ianto handed it over, he did the exact set of searches that Ianto had done earlier, and then went even so far as to scan the device with his vortex manipulator (which he could have used by himself to investigate the mirror but that was besides the point) to make sure that its connection to the network was still working. Which it was.

A rock fell to the bottom of Jack's stomach. "...she's gone," he said. "She's not in the city. Unless there's been a terrible mistake on the network...she's not here." He looks to Ianto, trying not to let it effect him as much as it does. God, what if this happens to Ianto too? What if it leaves him alone here, with no way of getting back, for the whole of time?

[coffeeking]

Numbly handing the CiD to Jack, he waited for Jack to go through all the same step he had, not saying a thing. There was some vain hope Ianto had missed something, but then Jack scanned the device with his wristband, and Ianto knew very well there was nothing wrong with the device itself.

"Maybe... Maybe she had to hide for some reason? If anyone could make it look like she just disappeared, it's Tosh..." But his voice weakened and trailed off at the end, and it was clear from the desolate look on his face that he knew he was just clinging to false hopes. If Tosh had needed to disappear suddenly, she would have found a way to let them know. Tosh was gone, and Ianto's spinning thoughts were none too different from Jack.

What would he do if Jack disappeared and Ianto were left here without him? What would he do if he were forced to leave Jack behind in Baedal, never to see him again, never to find a way to rescue him? As it was, they now had reason to mourn Tosh for a second time, and coming on the heels of this morning's events, Ianto felt rats in his stomach like he hadn't since--

Swallowing his fear and sorrow, Ianto was glad to be pressed to Jack's side. He rested a supportive hand on his knee, determined against all odds never to leave this man until death took him.

[51stcentury]

Jack put his arm around Ianto, pulling him against him, sitting there thinking for a while. "I'm sorry, Ianto," he said, using that voice that said that if there anything he could do about this situation, anything, that he'd be right on that at that moment. But there wasn't. There was nothing and the pair of them knew that they had lost their friend again. "She's gone."

With the timing of this morning's event and then finding out about Tosh, Jack couldn't help but wonder... No. No, he wasn't going to think that. He wasn't going to go anywhere near that thought until he had reason to assume that she had been stolen into the mirror and taken away. If Tosh was gone, though, that meant that they were on their own for this investigation. "We're going to have to scan the mirror ourselves. We have this," he said, motioning to the wriststrap. "We can see what sorts of readings I get off of the mirror with it."

[ooc: do we know at all whether jack's wriststrap would pick anything up from the mirrors? :x]

[coffeeking]

Ianto straightened after a few moments of comfort in Jack's embrace, glad to have something to focus on, to take away from his thoughts of Tosh and thoughts of eternal separation from Jack. The idea was easily more horrifying than leaving Jack by virtue of the mortal coil. Dying was both inevitable and natural, but being alive and knowing one of them was trapped beyond all help... If he dwelled too deeply on it, he knew he would become paranoid and he needed to keep his wits about him.

Nodding stiffly but determinedly, he stood and headed back over to the bathroom. "If this one doesn't tell us anything, maybe another mirror will. Or maybe it was a one-off." They could always hope.

[51stcentury]

Jack nodded and followed the other man into the bathroom, trying to get a scan off of the mirror for something, anything. But there wasn't anything. Nothing more than the residual trace of something that was pretty much all over everything within the city and had more to do with how everything got there than just this one mirror fiasco.

"Nothing," Jack said frustratedly. "There's absolutely nothing. It's just a mirror." Not to say that he didn't believe Ianto. He did. The man didn't just see things and freak out about them without good reason. But this mirror wasn't telling them anything. Nothing useful, nothing concrete.

[coffeeking]

"Maybe it's because I broke it," he muttered, unreasonably annoyed with himself for panicking and possibly destroying their only lead. It had been a perfectly normal reaction, but now the mirror was just a pile of broken glass.

"Let's get dressed and test the mirrors downstairs. Maybe they'll give us something." And if the other mirrors in the house were as horrific, he'd feel much more secure if he weren't in just his shorts and nothing else.

[51stcentury]

"Hey," Jack said firmly, sensing the other man's displeasure, "don't beat yourself up about it, okay? We'll figure it out. But you're right. Much as I would love to watch you battle monsters in your underwear, we should put some clothes on. C'mon..." He led Ianto back out into the bedroom and started getting out everything that he'd need: a fresh t-shirt, another button-down, his trousers, his braces, belt. Jack had more pieces of his outfit than the average man did, but just as he could get out of them in a split second, he could dress into them almost as fast too, and it wasn't too long before Jack was fully dressed, rolling the cuffs of his shirt up to his elbows. He thought about grabbing his gun.

"What were you doing when you saw this in the mirror? Were you thinking of anything to do with what you saw? Did they seem to be aware of you at all?" Jack needed the information to know whether it was something that might have been generated by Ianto's thoughts, or if this might even be a threat against the pair of them.

[coffeeking]

By the time Jack was finished dressing, Ianto was already tugging on the sleeves of his suit, looking unfairly immaculate. Dressing quickly -- very quickly -- was a skill Ianto had achieved while working at Torchwood One, and had perfected during the course of his liaisons with Jack in the hub. He probably deserved some kind of mention in a record book for the time Owen had come in unexpectedly just as they were in flagrante up against the counter in the kitchen. Jack had still looked rather happily disheveled when Owen stumbled upon them, while Ianto had been smugly in the middle of preparing a coffee as if it had been his entire purpose for being in the kitchen all along.

"I wasn't thinking of anything but breakfast," he replied after a thoughtful pause. "I could hear you down in the kitchen. I splashed water on my face, looked up, and there they we. Neither of them looked at me or acknowledged me." Ianto too thought about grabbing his gun, knowing the bullet situation in Baedal could be bothersome. But they couldn't go unarmed either, so after only a short hesitation, he tucked his away.

[51stcentury]

Jack nodded, tucking his holster into his belt as well, having similar thoughts about not being able to go around unarmed. "So...it was just a window. Or an image. From here to wherever they were, but not back." He nodded to the door, alert and on the defense, something which he'd never thought he'd have to be here, not in their new home and all. "After you. We'll try another mirror, see if it does the same thing..." He wondered, vaguely, if it would make a difference whether he looked into it first or not, or whether he'd even be able to see the same thing as Ianto, but. Well, they'd try, at least. They had to do that much.