Ianto looked up, suddenly aware he had sat there looking at the photo in his hand for several minutes.
Jack had always been a flirt; Ianto knew that. He had accepted it long ago and it had never been an issue for him. Ianto was confident that no matter how much Jack flirted he would never act on that flirtation. It was just part of who he was. The events around the time of Eugene Jones’s death, and when Ianto had begun to think there was something happening between Jack and Gwen, had reinforced that he could be trusted.
But now that trust appeared to have been shattered. Ianto thought Jack had told him everything that had happened in the 1940s, but apparently not. It seemed his trust had been misplaced.
Angrily, Ianto screwed the photo up and threw it as far away from him as possible. He got up and strode over to the door only to find it locked. He rattled the door, demanding someone’s attention. Bilis looked up at him and smiled. He shook his head at Ianto and turned away. Ianto slammed his hand on the door in frustration and, with nowhere else to go, sat back down at his desk.
Ianto looked over at the Secure Archives and laughed bitterly to himself. He had thought yesterday would be such a good day. Especially for Tosh as she would have Suzie back and for Jack, when Ianto handed over the package to him.
He should have known better.
Bilis walked down to the cells and stood in the passageway looking in at Gwen who had been placed in the end cell.
Gwen rushed over to the glass door. “Why have I been shut in here?”
Bilis ignored her and walked to the cell on the other end. That was the one that contained Suzie. She didn’t say anything and just glared at Bilis.
“How’s your father these days, my dear?”
Suzie looked away. That was one thing she had no intention of discussing with her captors.
Bilis chuckled quietly. “Not very talkative today Miss Costello?”
He walked back to the other end, preparing to go back up to the Hub.
As he passed Gwen’s cell, she banged on the glass. “You can’t keep us down here!”
Bilis stopped and looked sideways at her. “Oh, but I can,” he said started up the stairs.
“Let us fucking out of here!” Gwen yelled after him.
Bilis stopped halfway up the stairs. If there was one thing he didn’t like, it was profanity. He went back to her cell. “Thank you Miss Cooper. You have helped me to decide whom to deal with first out of the two of you. I trust you will mind your language the next time you speak to me, otherwise there will be consequences.” Bilis gave his grim smile and left the cellblock.
Gwen watched him go disbelievingly. “Suzie!” she called out when she realised he wasn’t coming back. “How do we get out of these cells?”
Suzie sighed. “There is no way out Gwen. They’re designed to be unescapable.”
“But there must be something we can do. There must be something in case we were ever trapped in here ourselves.”
“No Gwen. Unescapable means exactly that. Unescapable. Don’t you think Owen would have been able to escape when that Carys person locked him in, if there was some secret way out?”
Gwen flopped down on the bench in defeat. “I suppose.”
“Right. So we just have to wait patiently and hope that Ianto can find a way out for us.”
Gwen opened her mouth to give her opinion of that, but thought better of it and stayed silent.
As she sat there, she became aware of how quiet the cells were compared to the rest of the Hub. Up in the Hub the computers were always making noises, Myfanwy would either be flying around or squawking loudly and someone would always be talking. Down here there was only herself and Suzie, someone she didn’t feel comfortable talking to.
Sighing with boredom, she lay down on the bench and tried to get comfortable.
Gwen walked into the flat she shared with Rhys, the silence of the cells following her. She walked into the lounge room and looked around. Rhys was nowhere to be seen. Thinking she heard movement behind her she spun around but no one was there.
A voice sounded in the distance. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
That voice sounded familiar to Gwen but she couldn’t place it. A picture of an older man wearing a cravat and holding her hands crossed her mind.
She was in a shop, a shop where the walls were covered in all types of clocks. As she looked around at the clocks she could hear them all ticking in time with each other. This was wrong; she shouldn’t be there. She wrenched her hands away from the man’s grasp and turned and ran.
Gwen was back in her lounge room again. This time though, as she walked further into the room, her heart stopped as she saw a familiar body lying on the floor behind the couch.
“Rhys!” she called out desperately.
She dropped to her knees beside Rhys and tried picking him up. “Rhys!” she screamed again. As she fell to the floor she noticed that he was lying in a pool of blood and there was more blood splattered on the walls.
“He’s gone! He’s gone! Please… No! Please! No!” she screamed to the empty room. Gwen pulled Rhys’s upper body onto her lap and rocked him, wailing desperately.
“My boy. What am I going to do? What am I going to do?”
“Gwen! Gwen!” Suzie called, spooked by what she heard coming from Gwen’s cell. “What’s going on?” Suzie hadn’t heard anyone come back down to the cells, so she wasn’t sure why Gwen was crying so mournfully.
Gwen sat up quickly. She must have fallen asleep and had some sort of nightmare. She vaguely heard Suzie calling out to her, but she was so unnerved by the dream that she was unable to respond.
“Gwen!” Suzie called again.
Gwen looked around the cell blankly. She was about to reply to Suzie when she realised her hands were wet. She gasped as she looked at them – they were covered in blood. As she stared at them, somehow she knew it wasn’t her blood. It was Rhys’s blood. It took all of her self-control not to scream hysterically but she had to say something to Suzie.
“My hands are covered in blood,” she said, totally unaware of how it would sound to Suzie.
“What!” Suzie exclaimed. “Are you hurt? What happened?”
“Rhys’ blood,” replied Gwen cryptically. She couldn’t get the sight or smell out of her head.
Suzie screwed her face up in confusion. “Rhys? How?” Gwen was not making sense.
“Just leave me alone!” Gwen cried.
Suzie shook her head in frustration and tried getting Gwen to tell her what had happened. No matter what she said to Gwen though, all she got in return was the sound of Gwen crying.
Bilis walked down to the garage area and looked over the SUV. He had no real interest in the vehicle; he was simply filling in time, waiting for the girl to arrive. She wanted to enter the Hub through the garage entrance, as she still did not want any of the Torchwood team to see her. If he wasn’t so close to getting his Lord back, Bilis may have stopped to think why this would be. Or why, after so many years, she still had not told him her name.
As it was, it wouldn’t be that much longer before they could perform the final ceremony and that was all Bilis was concerned about. He had felt the anger and hurt towards the freak coming from Mr Jones and with everyone but Miss Costello having experienced the first part of their visions, it wouldn’t be long before they too were at odds with either the freak or Mr Jones. Tearing the freak’s life apart was something he had looked forward to for a very long time.
Bilis smiled as the garage door finally opened to reveal the girl, his biggest ally in restoring his Lord to his rightful place.
“Welcome to Torchwood,” he said majestically.
The girl smiled indulgently at him and pointed outside the entrance. Bilis looked and saw the body of Rhys Williams lying there. Bilis smiled in delight and called for two of the committee to come and grab the body for him.
“Is everything ready?” the girl asked.
“Yes. Everyone but Miss Costello has seen their visions. They are all ready for a second vision, if that’s what we decide to do.”
The girl nodded. “Let’s go and see Gwen then.”
With a final glance at Rhys’s body, Bilis followed the girl through the corridors to the cells. They stood in front of Gwen’s cell and watched her silently. When she finally realised someone was there, she stood up and stared back at them. Her face was red and puffy from crying and the blood on her hands had been smeared over her clothes and face.
“What do you want now?” she asked, all signs of her normal feistiness missing.
Bilis and the girl stood there saying nothing, with Bilis merely smirking at Gwen. After a few minutes of this, Gwen lost her patience and completely lost her temper.
“I said, what the fuck do you want!” she yelled at the top of her voice. She ignored Suzie’s warning to calm down.
Gwen slammed her hand on the door, leaving smears of blood behind. “Fucking tell me!”
That was enough for Bilis. “I did warn you, Miss Cooper, that there would be consequences for not speaking appropriately to me.”
Bilis turned to his men standing in the doorway to the cellblock and gestured at them. They picked up Rhys’s body from the floor where they had dumped him before and then dragged it in front of the cells.
Gwen’s eyes widened when she saw whose body they were dragging.
“No, no, no, no, NO!” she screamed. “You bring him back.”
Bilis shook his head, with clearly faked regret. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. But that’s not something I can do. That’s up to Mr Jones to fix.”
“Ianto?” Gwen asked.
Bilis nodded. “Yes. Mr Jones. He’s already been told he needs to open the Rift, but as you can see, he has refused to do so. He is the one in charge of Torchwood, he is the one who has the access to fully open the Rift and let it suck back everything that fell through. Isn’t that right Miss Costello?”
Suzie chose not to answer.
“Then tell him about Rhys!” Gwen begged desperately. “Tell him we need to bring Rhys back.”
Bilis smiled. “Oh, but he does know. Do you think we would be able to bring Rhys through the Hub without Mr Jones seeing? He does know, and has chosen not to do a thing!”
Gwen was horrified. “No. Please.”
Bilis laughed. “Do you know what? I told him you would want him to open the Rift to bring Rhys back and do you know what his response was?”
Gwen shook her head.
“He laughed and said he wasn’t going to do a thing for you!”
“No, he can’t do that. Not to me,” Gwen started to panic.
“Don’t listen to him Gwen,” Suzie yelled from her cell. “You know Ianto wouldn’t say that.”
“Hush, Miss Costello,” Bilis warned. “Your turn is coming.” He turned back to Gwen. “You know full well Ianto would indeed say that. You know he’s always been jealous of the place you hold in Jack’s heart.”
Gwen nodded in acknowledgement. Although she didn’t remember thinking it before, she knew instantly that Bilis was right. Ianto was jealous of her, that’s why he tried to stop her investigating Eugene’s death. And why it wasn’t until he knew Jack was on her side that he let her do her job.
“Ianto knows?” she asked weakly.
Bilis nodded triumphantly. “The question is what are you going to do about it?”
She looked at him. “What can I do, when I’m locked up in here?”
“You won’t be here forever. Just be ready to act when the time comes!”
“Be ready,” she repeated.
“Gwen!” Suzie yelled again.
Bilis sent an impatient look down to the other end of the cellblock and waved a hand in the direction of Suzie’s cell, rendering her instantly silent.
Bilis and the girl took one last look at Gwen. “Be ready,” Bilis said again and they both left the cellblock.
In her own cell, Suzie had gone quiet. Not because Bilis had physically done something to her, but because, standing in front of her cell, was her father.
Her father, who as far as she knew, was sick in hospital, dying of cancer. But now he was standing there, looking perfectly healthy.
“Suzita Naidoo,” the man said.
Suzie shuddered at the memories hearing her birth name brought. She closed her eyes, not wanting to see her father.
“Sarah Pallister,” her father continued. “Is a very lovely lady. The world would have been a much sadder place if you had succeeded in killing her.”
“How are you even here?” Suzie asked. “Shouldn’t you be dead by now?”
“I had a visitor. Someone with very special powers that could heal me,” her father said.
Suzie looked in the direction where Bilis had been standing.
“No, not him. Someone much closer to you than that.”
Suzie looked at him in confusion. There was no one she knew of that had any ability to heal people. Unless…
“Think about it Suzita, who do you know that has a ‘special’ ability when it comes to beating death?”
Suzie looked at him in horror. It could only be Jack that he was talking about. It had to be. Surely there wasn’t anyone else in the world that came back to life when they were killed? “But why would Jack do that? What good would it possibly do him to heal you?”
“Isn’t it obvious? For Gwen.”
“Gwen?”
“Yes, for Gwen. You tried killing her and he would do anything to protect her. Come on. You’ve discussed it before, with that girlfriend of yours. You know there’s something going on between Jack and Gwen, despite what he says to Mr Jones.” Her father paused for a moment to see how Suzie was reacting to the news before continuing.
“Jack knows I am the only one who was ever able to keep you under control properly, to discipline you the way you needed. That’s why I’m here. You need to be punished. Over and over again.”
Suzie shuddered again. This couldn’t be happening. The effort she and her mother had gone to trying to escape this tyrant. All undone because Jack had an itch he wanted scratched?
Suzie’s attention drifted as she heard the last part of Bilis’ conversation with Gwen, “Be ready.” She looked back to her father and gasped when she saw he had disappeared. She tried looking up and down the corridor but couldn’t see anyone.
“Be ready for what?” she called out to Gwen but only muttering could be heard from Gwen’s cell now. Suzie concentrated hard to hear what Gwen was saying but the only phrase she could make out was “got to open the Rift”.
Open the Rift? Why would they want to open the Rift again, not after they had seen the damage Owen had done when he opened the Rift the day before. They couldn’t risk any more damage happening.
“If we open the Rift, everything will be undone. I’ll get my Rhys back!” Gwen yelled suddenly, disturbing Suzie’s thoughts.
Everything will be undone? What was Gwen talking about now?
All Suzie knew was that for some reason Jack Harkness had healed her father; he would have to pay for that. Her father’s words echoed in her head. “You need to be punished. Over and over again.”
“That went well,” the girl said to Bilis as they walked back to the Hub.
“Agreed. There should be some interesting conversations happening when the precious team are reunited.”
“Ianto and Owen have been dealt with?”
“Oh yes,” Bilis replied. “I could almost taste the raw emotions coming off the two young men. When they see each other again, the freak is going to get a decidedly different response from Mr Jones to what he expected. The emotions that will be in that room will be glorious.”
“And Toshiko?”
“She will react exactly how we want. Once she finds out from her girlfriend what the freak supposedly did and why, she will side with Miss Costello without question. As you know, Miss Sato and Mr Jones are very close, and she won’t stand by and watch the freak hurt him again.
“And that will bring Doctor Harper into the picture as well; his current animosity towards Miss Cooper and his previous anger when the freak hurt Mr Jones by bringing the Cyberman into the Hub will combine with his unsettledness over seeing the pilot woman again. He will most definitely bring a lot of anger and emotion into play.”
The girl smiled. “Then let’s go see the Captain.”
Jack had lost track of how long he had been left there in the total darkness. All he was aware of was that anything could be happening to Ianto and he couldn’t do a thing about it. The crude threats from the two men who had hung him up left all sorts of unwanted images going through his head. He wondered what had happened to the rest of the team, but they hadn’t been threatened personally, so he was less concerned for their safety.
Whatever the committee wanted, it would either come from Ianto as the leader of Torchwood or from him, their pet plaything. Jack had a bad moment when he remembered the committee’s earlier threat against Alice and Steven. Would they act on that now that they had decided to move against him?
Jack didn’t know whether to be relieved or apprehensive when he heard the door open. He squinted against the bright light that suddenly flooded into the room. He started to yell when he saw Bilis walk in, completely forgetting they had gagged him.
Bilis raised his eyebrows questioningly. “What was that? Can’t quite hear you there!”
Jack continued trying to yell at Bilis and started struggling against his restraints.
Bilis looked at him thoughtfully. “You know, we’ve been having a lot of fun with your team mates. So much fun.”
Again, Jack tried to scream at Bilis through the gag.
“Oh here, let me help you with that.” Bilis walked over and removed the gag. “There, that must be so much better for you.”
Jack took a few deep breaths. “Fuck you!” he said to Bilis.
The smile fell off Bilis’ face. “Now, now, freak. I already warned Miss Cooper what would happen if she spoke disrespectfully to me. She didn’t listen and now she has paid the price.”
Jack’s face paled. “What have you done with her?”
“To her? Nothing, personally. As for that unsuspecting boyfriend of hers, that’s another story.”
Jack remained silent. There was nothing he could do for Rhys now, nothing anyone could do.
Bilis glanced towards the door. The girl was standing just outside, waiting for the right moment to make her appearance. Bilis couldn’t wait to see the look on the freak’s face when it saw who she was. Especially when it thought the girl was dead.
“And as for you, we are overdue for a long chat.”
“I have nothing to say to you,” Jack replied defiantly.
Ignoring him, Bilis continued. “You were given a task. Hide one Cyberman and keep working towards getting it free of the equipment. You were told quite clearly what the price of failure would be. And yet you were the one that killed it.”
“How would you even know that? Ianto never reported the incident.”
The smile returned to Bilis’ face. “You would be surprised exactly how much I do know about you. It’s almost as good as having an inside source.” Bilis turned to the door again.
Jack turned his head also as someone entered the room.
“There’s a saying,” came a girl’s voice. “Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer.”
Jack gasped as he recognised someone he had never expected to see again.
Standing in front of him, standing beside Bilis Manger and clearly working with him, was the Tarot Card girl.