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Chapter Text

‘Balls,’ Ianto swore, turning on the bedroom light as he staggered from the bed, feeling like he hadn’t slept well at all. There, in the corner of the roof, was a large water stain, stretching out in a patina of grey and brown, with a single spot protruding further out than the rest of the stain, making it look like a creepy face in profile. The stain hadn’t been there yesterday, he was sure. It hadn’t even rained overnight, which meant the leak was coming from the pipes in the roof cavity. Someone else’s pipes, he reminded himself, occupying the third floor of the four storey complex. Great. That was all he needed. Just another headache in the joys of renting.

He swore again, this time so loudly that even Melvin took offence. The cat eyed him with a judicious glare from the spot on top of the duvet it had claimed for itself, forcing Ianto to keep to the left hand side of the bed. Sharing his bed with a cat. That was a new low. A cat foisted on him by his sister from some old lady in their street who'd had to move into a home, no less. He hadn't wanted a pet, and had told her he didn't think London was a very friendly place for a cat to live, cooped up in an apartment all day long, but now it was his sole companion. His sister had claimed she was doing him a favour. The way he saw it, the only one who was benefiting from the arrangement was Melvin. Some days he ate better than Ianto did, and he had the lion’s share of the bed.

Melvin stretched and stood amongst the thick rumples of dark blue duvet cover. He was black all over except for a single patch under his left eye that was white and the tip of his front right paw to match, as if someone had intended to paint him all black and then rushed the job. At least he wasn't a mouthy creature, forever making his presence known, along with demands for food. He instead spoke in a language of stares, which suited Ianto just fine. He employed a similar conversational language himself.

Ianto reached for his phone on the bedside table and then walked it over to the corner of the room, pressing up against a tallboy to get a couple of photos of the damage. He'd need it later to argue with his landlord. Just another thing to add to his to do list.

He tossed the phone back onto the unmade bed. Melvin didn't even react to the phone landing just a foot from his spot. ‘How did we end up here?’ he asked. Melvin returned a look that seemed to imply he was wondering the same question. He sighed. What was the use in despairing over it? At least he had his job, and that was, most days, enough. He grabbed for the duvet and Melvin politely leaped from the bed so it could be made. That put him one up on Ianto's last flatmate, who lived in a perpetually unmade bed. Once the sheets were crisp and the duvet back in place, he scooped up the cat, carrying it into the kitchen. ‘Breakfast, and then let's find out what Torchwood has in store for us today.’

Chapter Text

Once he was at work, there was nothing more than the usual tiresome pile of reports and phone calls to be made. Being executive assistant to Yvonne Hartman wasn't as glamorous as it sounded, and not nearly as exciting as what some of the others got up to. Occasionally he was able to help with certain research projects, but mostly it was chasing people up, being on top of everything that was happening, and making coffee. It was a little bit like being on the outside, looking in, except that he knew everything that went on, he simply wasn't involved.

He carried one of his many files to be reviewed into the kitchenette and set the coffee machine to begin percolating, taking a seat on a bar stool and flipping open the file as he waited for the machine to do its magic. It began to burble and drip, becoming the soundtrack to his summarising of one of Tommy's many research papers, cutting out all the extraneous swearing and complaining and refining the language enough to be considered readable. Tommy was of course brilliant, but terrible at paperwork. Like pretty much everyone else, he reminded himself.

‘If Mr Sands doesn't need a coffee I could go one,’ Guleraana said, sweeping into the kitchenette on one of her many self-imposed breaks. She wasn't much of a receptionist, keeping the general public from accessing Torchwood Tower, but she was the closest friend Ianto had around here, so he forgave her work ethic for the fact that she cared. That and her invaluable supply of office gossip which inevitably helped him in his job, staying informed on the things that didn't get put into reports.

‘Hey G,’ he said, sweeping the file shut. It went without saying that he was happy to make coffee for her. Her, Yvonne, and sometimes Pippa, but only if she grovelled. Everyone else could get their own.

She gave a gaping, loud yawn, stretching her arms wide.

‘Out on the lash again last night, were you?’

‘Life's too short not to. What about you?’

‘I was here til nine last night. All that business up on level sixty eight. Remember?’ Everyone was still in a gaggle over their latest acquisition. The massive golden orb that occupied most of the room didn't impress him as much as he'd expected. It was hard to get excited about something that looked like a giant Christmas ornament when nobody knew what it was or what might be inside it. Yvonne would be expecting another update when she arrived.

‘So, how's the new flat?’ she said, sliding up onto the stool opposite him, leaning her elbows on the narrow counter.

‘Don't ask.’

‘That good, eh?’

‘Between the leaking pipes and the lifts that rarely work. Yeah, it's got real charm.’

She gave him a wry smile. ‘I warned you about these funny little closed off estates.’

He stood and began pulling out cups and milk for the frother. ‘I thought it'd be nicer.’ No strangers. Locked off entry. A little bit of greenery tucked inside in the small courtyard, not that his flat looked out onto anything but the grey city surroundings. An inward facing flat was more than his salary could afford, even as Yvonne's personal assistant. He gave a wistful sigh. ‘It's a twelve month lease.’

Guleraana snorted. ‘So break it. Not like you'd be the first person who's done that.’

‘And lose my eight hundred quid bond?’

‘Fair point. You'll just have to suck it up then.’

‘Oh, Ianto,’ Yvonne said, poking her head in and finding him like a bloodhound. ‘When you're done with that, be a dear and get Jim on the phone for me. I'm going to be needing a favour from Whitehall this week.’

He stared sullenly into the milk frother at the flat, cold contents. ‘Great.’

Chapter Text

Ianto was glad to roll through the doors of his apartment complex. The day had been mundane without much to break it up apart from yet another visit to level sixty eight, where by all accounts there was no progress to report. There was a heated debate going on when he'd entered the room, Tommy loudly saying they should just crack the thing open and Dr Singh insisting that they take a more cautious approach. Ha! Tommy and the word cautious simply didn't belong in the same sentence. ‘Keep a leash on old Tommy,’ Ianto had told Tommy’s assistant Rachael Allen. She nodded, knowing he was setting her a slightly problematic task.

He fumbled with his wad of keys, trying to find the smallest one that unlocked the small post box in the lobby. He was still searching for it when he felt eyes on him. He turned to find a girl staring at him, loitering behind her mother who was collecting her own mail from the row of boxes directly opposite. She must have been about seven or eight he guessed. Her mousey brown hair was a few shades darker than her mother's, which was streaked with blonde highlights and tugged into a tight French bun. The girl’s own hair hung loose around her face and her green eyes were bright. He forced a small smile onto his face, without saying anything. He didn't want to be too friendly. He couldn't have people thinking he was the local paedophile, striking up conversation with children he didn't know. The girl looked at him with a penetrative gaze and then gave him a little smile of her own, which her mother spotted her doing, much to Ianto's alarm.

‘Hi,’ the mother said, sounding cordial rather than suspicious.

‘Hi,’ he managed back. She was too old for him, he decided with a thought that surprised him. She had to have been mid thirties though he saw no wedding ring on her hand. There were tiny crows feet forming at the corners of her eyes. Too young for those, but maybe single parenting did that to you.

‘I haven't seen you around. Have you moved in recently?’

‘About a month ago,’ Ianto replied.

She nodded her approval. ‘I'm Margie. This little monster is Grace.’

‘Hello, Grace. My name's Ianto Jones. Or Mister Jones. Or just Ianto.’ Grace didn't say anything but she did continue to look him in the eye and managed another small smile. He supposed that was as much as a child could be expected to do in the circumstances. It was one thing to be bold when no one was watching but Ianto knew all too well from his own childhood that as soon as a parent put you in the spotlight with grown ups you became a deaf mute, scarcely moving under the new level of scrutiny.

‘Well, we'd better get on,’ Margie said. ‘Nice to meet you, Ianto.’

‘You too. Bye Grace,’ he added, giving a little wave.

She didn't move. Not until her mother was leading them to the lift and then, with her mother's attention focused on the lift buttons, she turned and gave a wave, just as the doors were sliding shut. There wasn't time to wave back, only to watch the doors slide closed.

Chapter Text

The clear morning caught Ianto off guard as he exited the apartment block onto a rare cloudless day. It was the kind of thing that was bound to brighten any mood, saving him a twenty minute trek in the rain with his brolley to the tube station. It might not have been the most convenient place to live in terms of transport options, but it was cheaper, and there were less drunken winos loitering about on the streets. He supposed that in the grand scheme of things, he could forgive a little bit of leaking water for that. His neighbours, what little he’d seen of them, were all quiet types, much like himself. There was no banging coming through the walls or howling girls having a barney in the corridors, nor thumping music that started at three on the Friday afternoon and persisted until noon on Sunday. A quiet neighbourhood still within forty five minutes of central London was all one could really ask for.

He descended the tube station stairs, still feeling his good mood and the lack of other people jostling past him to make the train. He always left with plenty of time up his sleeve. The changeover between the Metropolitan and Jubilee lines was always a fraught affair, but he had it down to a fine art.

When he reached the platform however, he scrunched his face up in confusion at the details scrolling across the signboard. According to what was being displayed, all the train times were out by an hour. Not running an hour late, he noted, but running an hour early. He’d lived in London long enough to know that simply didn’t happen. Information displayed was always current and correct. He checked his watch, alarmed by the fact that it was reading 8.40am and not 7.40am. That couldn't be right. He’d left home at 7.15 just like he always did. He was a routine kind of guy and stuck to his schedule like clockwork. He’d have known if he’d slept over his alarm – which he never did. How could he have lost a whole hour of his morning? He hadn’t done anything other than follow his routine; shower, breakfast, ham and cheese sandwich and an apple packed in a ziplock bag for his lunch and then left.

He rubbed his face and studied the timetable information. No wonder there were less people around. He’d missed the peak hour rush by being an hour later. He groaned. This could only be a sign of things to come.

‘Walters and Hunt,’ Guleraana greeted him from the opulent reception desk. ‘How can I help you?’

Ianto pressed the lift buttons frantically, but to no avail. They were still locked and the only person who could set the release code was Guleraana. That was, basically, her job. ‘G…’ Ianto warned her. ‘C’mon, let me in the lift.’

‘Who are you here to see?’

‘I don't have time for this nonsense! I’m running late enough as it is!’

‘Sorry, Ianto,’ she apologised. ‘Company policy. No one is allowed in without an appointment.’

He huffed his vexation. ‘I’m here to see Mr Sands.’ It was the standard password used by all Torchwood employees. Given Guleraana knew them all by sight he often wondered why they bothered with a password at all. Unexpected alien possession, he assumed.

‘Thank you. Please proceed up to level twelve. Have a lovely day.’

Ianto thumbed the lift button with more force than was necessary. Sodding Torchwood and its sodding protocols, he grumbled silently as the lift ascended. He checked his watch again. Still over an hour and a half late now thanks to his apparent travel through time and the mismatch of train connections. He didn't dare stop for a coffee at his favourite Canary Wharf cafe. What would they think of him, wandering in with his double shot latte?

He tossed his coat over his chair and marched immediately into the briefing room, hoping that the meeting wasn’t about to wrap up just as he was filtering in. ‘Sorry. So sorry,’ he apologised, feeling every eye on him and not at whatever colourful schematic was currently being shown on the projector screen at the far end of the room.

‘Glad you could join us,’ Yvonne said, her tone somewhere between nonchalance and mockery. There’d be words later, he knew. Especially since Ianto was never, ever, late.

He sank down into his chair at the far end of the long table, conspicuously empty and waiting for him. Today was not going to be the good day he’d thought it would when he’d stepped out his door. On his lunch break, assuming he’d even have time for one now, he’d be getting a brand new battery for his watch.

Chapter Text

He was dozing on the couch in front of The Apprentice when there was a knock at the door. He hadn’t even realised he’d drifted off to sleep, let alone in the presence of Sir Alan, even if it had been taped. Who would be knocking on his door at this hour? Had he sleep-walked ordering a pizza? ‘Did you order us a pizza?’ he asked Melvin, who lifted his head from his curled up position on the sofa next to him. His poker face was excellent, leaving Ianto none the wiser.

He pushed up off the sofa, begrudging whoever had rapped at the door. If it indeed was a pizza delivery guy, having got the apartment numbers confused, he was going to take it without complaint. He hadn’t even bothered with dinner by the time he’d rolled in the door, making up for his late morning start. As was often the case, the only one who had been fed was the cat. Yvonne had been strangely accepting of his tardiness, but there was still that cool undertone that this was a one off exception. Tomorrow he planned on setting his alarm an extra hour early to make up for it. Ianto Jones was simply never late to anything.

He peered through the peephole, spotting a woman in a cream skirt and suit combination, and a face that he recognised from the lobby yesterday. He tugged off the latch and opened the door. ‘Hello.’

‘Sorry, I hope I haven’t got you at a bad time.’

‘No, not at all,’ he replied, hoping he didn’t look rumpled from his unscheduled nap on the sofa.

‘Grace wanted to give you this,’ she said, holding out an envelope. ‘I didn't want to just shove it under your door or in your post box.’ It had his name written on the front in childish penmanship, spelled Yanto with a Y. People always got his name wrong; so much so that he’d stopped caring about correcting them unless it was for important documents. Thanks, Mum, he always wanted to say, for giving him a Welsh name. He supposed it could be worse. He could have been a Rhys, or a Gryffudd, or a Gethyn. Most Welsh words lacked any vowels and he had three out of five.

‘It's just a drawing,’ Margie said before he could ask. ‘Grace loves to draw. Obsessed, really,’ she clarified with some small embarrassment. ‘Not television, not video games, just drawing. Keep her flush in pencils and she’s a happy camper.’

Ianto detected a discomfort in the admission, Margie's words spilling out in a rush to explain herself. He wondered what was so wrong with it. Less screen time for kids was meant to be a good thing, wasn't it? Not that he was one to know anything about parenting. All he knew was that his own niece and nephew couldn't be torn away from the thing unless there was ten quid in it for them. Mostly it was a relief when they went back to their video games and cartoons. Ianto was fine dealing with adults but kids were largely a mystery to him.

‘Um, thank you,’ he said, clutching the envelope. ‘I don't think anyone's ever given me a drawing.’ He was pretty sure his niece Mica had never drawn him anything.

‘I know it's all a bit weird,’ Margie said, plastering on a smile and that awkward shuffling body language of someone who just wanted to go. ‘But she insisted.’

‘It's fine, really. Thank you.’

Margie nodded, seemingly relieved. ‘Well, I'd better go. I left Grace upstairs on her own. Too shy to come down and give it to you herself but…’

‘I understand,’ Ianto replied, not really understanding at all. ‘Please tell her I said thank you.’

He closed the door and stared down at the envelope. It was sealed tight with as much licking as a child could muster to make sure it stuck. He could almost taste the glue, a semi-sweet, claggy remnant of his own childhood memories from licking stamps and envelopes for postcards sent on short seaside holidays. The postcards inevitably reached the recipients days after they'd arrived home from their destination.

He slid a fingernail under the outermost edge, levering a gap wide enough to continue sliding his finger along, prising the package open. He pulled out the folded paper and looked at it. It was just a picture of him standing there in his suit, with Melvin a black and white, slightly oversized, companion by his side. The expression on his face seemed melancholic, almost sad. Was that how he looked to a little girl, he wondered. Perhaps he didn't smile enough, or people simply took his serious face as being sad.

He walked it to the kitchen, tugging a magnet off the side of the fridge that offered a phone number for a twenty four hour handyman service and stuck the picture up. There wasn't much in the way of personal effects in his flat, but a picture on the fridge door somehow made the place feel more normal. Nice neighbours, he thought. Maybe he'd been too harsh on the place so far. Friendly neighbours were hard to come by in a city of millions. He gave the picture one last glance before a yawn escaped him and he reached over to flick off the kitchen light.

Chapter Text

Meow! It was less of a complaint and more of a command for Ianto to get a move on with breakfast. He blinked, caught staring off into space out of the tiny kitchen window at the grey clouds blanketing the city. Except for the fact that his eyes were open he might as well have been asleep. He'd tossed and turned all night, unable to settle for some reason. Probably the nap he'd had the evening before. No more napping before bed, he promised himself.

Melvin swished a tail at him as he looked down at the source of the noise. Both of them could see the tin sitting there unopened on the bench top. ‘Yep, I'm awake,’ Ianto said, moving back into motion. As he turned, he caught the drawing on the fridge from the corner of his eye and paused to look at it again.
‘She got a good likeness of you, don't you think?’ he asked. ‘Right down to your white patches.’

Melvin wound between Ianto's legs waiting for his breakfast and not the least bit interested in any likeness of himself that wasn't edible. Ianto took the small can of food and peeled back the foil on top, scooping out the contents into a shallow dish. Melvin waited patiently, knowing what was coming. He was good mannered like that, not sticking his nose in it until Ianto had it all the way on the floor in its designated spot.

With Melvin poised over his dish, chewing away, Ianto then leaned over to pop the toaster on his own breakfast, buttering the toast and then leaving it plain as he lifted it to his mouth to take a bite whilst his cafetiere carried on brewing. He chewed, leaning back against the kitchen counter and admiring the new artwork on his fridge. Then he stopped chewing and just stared at the drawing with a stark realisation. How could Grace have known he had a cat?

Chapter Text

‘Are you taking your coffee with skim milk or full cream this week?’ Ianto asked, making coffee for three as Guleraana made her timely appearance in the kitchen thirty two floors up from her position on the reception desk. It was a long way to go for a cuppa, which spoke volumes about the quality of Ianto's coffee making skills.

‘You asked me that already,’ she replied. ‘About five minutes ago.’

‘Did I?’ He tried to remember the answer and found he couldn't even remember the question.

Guleraana tipped her head sideways as she leaned on the counter. ‘Are you alright? You seem a bit off today. Has Pippa been foisting her bad news horoscopes on you again?’

He shook his head. ‘Nothing like that. Just got a few things on my mind.’ He was certain that the reason he'd had so much trouble sleeping last night was that he'd subconsciously already spotted the problem with Grace's picture.

‘Everything's okay though, isn't it?’ There was a genuine concern in her voice that he appreciated immensely.

He forced a smile onto his face. ‘I'm fine. Absolutely.’ He pushed a latte across the counter towards her. ‘And it's skim milk this week. You've got that engagement party coming up in two weeks.’

She rolled her eyes at him and clasped the cup. ‘Don't remind me. I hate diets.’

He held his smile in place, watching her walk away, coffee in hand until there was no risk of her looking back over her shoulder. It had been an educated fifty fifty guess.

He poured a second shot of coffee into his own mug before picking it up and carrying Yvonne's coffee in his other hand. ‘Get it together, Jones. You're Torchwood. Torchwood doesn't have off days.’

Chapter Text

The drawing was still nagging at him when he stepped off the train on his way home from work. He knew he shouldn't let something so silly get to him but there was that curious part of his brain that couldn't let it go. He liked to think of it as his Torchwood instinct. There was a certain vigilance required that came second nature to him. By the time he'd walked back to the apartment block he'd settled on letting it go, but then as soon as he slipped the key in the lock, it was back again. That sense that in such a closed off place they could know something about a total stranger.

He passed through the lobby and ignored the lift, instead walking through to the other side and out through the door that opened onto the courtyard. It wasn't much, really. A spread of lawn that stretched across the rectangular space, enclosed on all sides by the apartments that formed the perimeter of the city block. Two corners hosted low planters full of English box hedges and hollyhocks and a line of neglected wisteria edged up against two winding paths that crossed over in the middle with a wrought iron bench between them.

He strode out along one of the paths, stopping about halfway and turning back to look up at the balconies. It was guesswork at which one belonged to Margie, but he might have been one too far left or right to be certain. It definitely had no view of anything other than the courtyard and the adjoining apartments, all the way across. He had no such views. If he wanted greenery, he had to come out here like he was now, strolling through it at ground level.

He cast his gaze over to the roof, nothing more than a low, concrete wall and a stack of heating and ventilation units. Access to the roof wasn't restricted, though the body corporate bulletins frowned on it. He knew that smokers were encouraged to use it rather than the courtyard or milling about outside the front doors. There was absolutely no smoking inside the apartments, with smoke alarms every ten yards. Things other than smoking probably occurred on apartment block rooftops, not that he’d ever partaken. You could probably see most things from up there, he decided. He took one last look around the place and went back inside.

‘It's not important,’ he said aloud as he unlocked his front door. He slid off his coat and hung it on the hook by the side of the door, watching his cat leap down from the sofa to come greet him, but who instead wandered over to the kitchen and stood by the fridge, looking up at him expectantly. It wasn't feeding time but Melvin had his attention. He looked at the picture then tugged it off the fridge, instincts burning inside him. ‘Bugger it,’ he said. Time to prove he was overcomplicating things.

He stepped up to the lift and pressed the button. It arrived after a few moments and he stepped inside, hitting the button for the fourth floor, which was as high as the block went if you excluded the roof. The button was sticky and didn't register his finger. He pressed it again, knowing how temperamental it was, but no matter how many times he pushed it, the lift simply ignored him. Of course it bloody did.

Whilst he tried the button again one of his neighbours opened the doors on him and stepped inside. ‘Going down?’

‘Up, actually.’ He watched the man reach across and press the button for the ground floor, watching it light up without a problem. ‘You know what, I think I'll take the stairs. Shouldn't be so lazy,’ he said.

‘Suit yourself.’

‘Stupid lift,’ he muttered, marching down the hall towards the emergency stairwell.

He lost his bearings momentarily as he exited the stairwell. Each floor was numbered in the same way and his own apartment, 32B, which was on the outward facing side about halfway down. The stairwell had him turned around so that when he took the right hand corridor he found himself heading along the eastern wing, rather than the southern wing. He retraced his steps and reorientated himself.

He slowed at the door to 44A, then knocked gently.

There was a long wait before the door finally opened a few inches, the chain still keeping the door no more than four inches ajar. Margie frowned for a second. ‘How did you…?’ Then she stopped. ‘Of course. You saw us at the post box.’

‘Just observant,’ he replied. He didn't want them thinking he was some kind of stalker.

‘Is everything okay?’

‘Yes. Um, sort of.’ He fumbled through his reply, remembering the piece of paper clutched in his right hand, folded in half as it had been in the envelope. ‘Sorry,’ he tried again, reorganising his words. ‘It's just that there's been something bugging me about that picture Grace gave me.’

‘Oh, God,’ she ran a hand through her hair and looked panicked. ‘It was bad, wasn't it? God, I should have checked it before I gave it to you. I made her promise me it wasn't anything bad but I should have checked anyway.’

Margie's response struck Ianto as slightly odd. ‘It's not bad, honestly.’ He didn't know why she'd think that. It had been a stupid idea coming up here to harass this poor woman.

Margie chewed her lip. ‘Can I see it?’

‘Of course.’ Margie shut the door and he heard the chain being slipped off, before she opened it again fully this time. He unfolded the picture and handed it across. Margie gripped it with both hands and there was a visible relaxing of her shoulders. Then she looked him in the eye. ‘It's just…’

Ianto’s instincts picked up on the hesitation. ‘What?’

She pulled the door shut behind her, leaving them both standing in the hallway where no one else inside the apartment might hear them. ‘You remember I told you she likes to draw all the time?’ There was a furtive look as she paused, considering her next words carefully. ‘It's just that sometimes she draws things she shouldn't. Things that she dreams up in her head.’

‘You make it sound like having an imagination is a bad thing.’

‘It's not, really, it isn't. But the things she draws. Things from her nightmares. Except she isn't afraid of them. I thought maybe she’d drawn something like that. One of her nightmare demons.’

This was why he was useless as an uncle, he thought. He just didn’t get kids. Ianto forced a smile. ‘You know what? Honestly, it's nothing,’ he lied. ‘She just drew me with a sad face, that's all. I don't even know why I let that bug me. Guess I didn't want the neighbours thinking I was a grumpy sod, which I'm not, by the way,’ he added uselessly at the end.

‘Right.’ She blew out a breath like she'd been holding in it since she'd opened the door to him. ‘Okay, that’s good.’ She glanced down at the picture again, hand still shaking slightly, though not as much as it had been. ‘I’m sorry Grace drew you looking sad.’

Ianto took the picture back from her. ‘You know what? I’m going to keep it on the fridge as a reminder to be more happy in life.’

‘We should all try to do that more,’ she agreed. ‘And I'll be keeping an eye on Grace’s drawings from now on.’ She gave a tight lipped smile but there was an anxiety in her eyes that didn’t quite match. Parenting, Ianto thought. ‘But thank you for coming to speak to me. I know how hard it is to live on your own with no one. Having Grace is such a blessing. You should get yourself a pet. Grace clearly thinks you should. Everyone needs a little bit of company these days.’

Ianto nodded. ‘I’ll definitely consider it,’ he promised, feeling that same unease return.

Chapter Text

An evacuation alarm at Torchwood was usually just a false alarm, but today it had proved otherwise. At least they didn't have to lie about the reasons for it. It really had been a chemical leak, and the team in Chem Analytics would be getting a roasting for it tomorrow. That was assuming any of them had skin enough left on their fingers to type up the incident report.

The joys of working for Torchwood, Ianto mused, though everyone else was chuffed to be getting sent home early. Apparently some of the fumes had gotten into the air circulation system and no one could be certain how far they might travel or what effect they could have. The canisters containing the as yet unidentified compounds had been picked up from a garden in an Essex nursing home, ostensibly dumped or lost by passing extraterrestrials.

‘Ianto, I want you to make sure that it's made clear we are not a Class Five dumping ground,’ Yvonne told him, instructing him in setting up yet another deep space transmission in as many languages as he could suitably wrap his tongue around – which to be fair, wasn't nearly as many as everybody seemed to think. “Please be advised that this planet is not a rubbish tip. Sanctions and pecuniary penalties will apply.” Never a dull day for Torchwood One's highest ranking executive assistant.

At a loss to translate a suitably equivalent Agjtuk word for pecuniary, he'd skipped the offer of a late afternoon pint with Guleraana, Rachael and the others, opting instead for an early train ride home and a smorgasbord of curries from his local. Eating for one didn't have to be boring, and it did provide a lot of leftovers. He enjoyed his co-workers, but given how early they were planning on starting drinking, chances were the lot of them would still be partly mulletted tomorrow morning. That was a headache he could do without.

When he turned the corner of the street heading on to his block of apartments he was taken aback by a congested road full of emergency vehicles. There were no sirens to announce their presence ahead of time, but there were flashing lights and a lot of people in various uniforms on the street and moving in and out of the doors to his block. No fire engines so it wasn’t a fire, but plenty of paramedic vans, police cars and other vehicles he couldn't identify precisely, but were, on the balance of probability, crime scene related investigators.

He strolled up to the building, prevented from going further by a barrier of yellow police tape that flickered and spun in the light autumn breeze like a child’s pinwheel toy, trying to free itself from where it was tied to a parking sign pole. A slightly bored officer in his high vis yellow and blue jacket and peaked hat pushed back from leaning against the side of a patrol car and stepped forward to meet him.

‘What’s going on?’ Ianto asked.

‘Police incident. We’re asking the public to stay clear for the moment.’

Ianto pointed at the building as two more uniformed paramedics came out of the door and moved towards their van, collecting equipment from the back. There was no sense of urgency from either of them; no medical emergency that was life or death. ‘That’s my apartment block,’ Ianto said. ‘I was just coming home from work.’

‘I'm sorry, sir, but we're not letting anyone in the building at this time until the scene has been secured.’

‘But–’

The policeman held up a placating hand, clearly having had this conversation several times already. ‘We’re simply asking the residents to give us a few hours. There's a cafe round the corner where you can stay. We'll pop by when things are done and let you know it's okay to return.’

Ianto wanted to protest but what was the point? They weren't going to let him in either way. His dinner of a korma coupled with a homemade ham and cheese toastie was still on the cards, it was just going to cost him five quid more than it would have to make it at home. Maybe someone at the cafe would know more about what was going on than he did right now.

Chapter Text

When he finally slipped the key in the door and let himself in, Melvin was waiting for him. “Where have you been?” was plastered all over his feline features. He reached down and stroked the head in silent apology. ‘Don't suppose you saw what went on,’ he said. He'd already used his phone to hack the police database and to discover it was a suspected murder. That was going to go down a treat among the residents. Maybe he'd be allowed to terminate his lease early. He was certain there'd be people wanting to leave now. Still, a murder was a big deal. People didn't usually get murdered. Abusive boyfriend? Stalker? Home invasion gone wrong? Perhaps he didn't want to know.

At least his neighbours at the cafe, most of whom he was meeting for the first time, had known very little about what was going on. There was some speculation that it was someone found after having suffered a heart attack or a brain aneurysm. “Those kinds of things happen all the time,” one opinionated woman told anyone who'd listen. “You just drop dead and they find your body weeks later all bloated and festering.” She was a real charmer, that one.

Images of bloated festering bodies put him off stopping on the way home to pick up his curry. It just didn't seem nearly as tempting when you’d been listening to people discuss rotting corpses and the life cycle of maggots. He didn't dare mention what he'd uncovered to anyone. They’d all get their own version of events in time no doubt. Also, he worried that if he was in possession of too much information, someone might put a word in the ear of the police that the young man they barely knew, who'd only recently moved in, seemed to know an awful lot about it. Being hauled in as the prime suspect was not something he wanted to go through, nor to have to explain either to the police or to Yvonne, knowing only his Torchwood credentials would get him out of the former, but that the fact he’d done so would be passed back to the latter for verification. Both would be inevitably unpleasant.

He wandered over to his living room windows, pulling back the sheer curtains to check the street several floors below. There were no emergency vehicles now, not even a single police car left to mop up, questioning people on what they had or hadn't seen. It was as if nothing at all had happened. Everyone was simply moving on with their lives.

Apart from a few obvious repairs needed, he'd considered this to be a better part of town. Less crime, more happy families with kids and dogs. Murder hadn't come into the equation. Even when he'd grown up on the estates back in Cardiff there was crime but generally not murder. She must have been targeted specifically, he decided. It was supposed to be something of a gated community, but he knew it didn't take much to let in a total stranger. If you could buzz in the pizza delivery guy, anyone could slip through along with them. Safer, but not by much. Poor woman. What had she done to deserve that?

Melvin snaked between his legs, smooching in and out between them, leaving behind a trail of hair that clung to his pinstripe trousers. ‘You'd warn me if some axe murderer tried to get in here, wouldn't you?’ Melvin carried on smooching without providing any reassurance. Ianto sighed. Rhiannon couldn't have given him a Doberman, could she? ‘Still,’ he said, carrying on the one-way conversation, ‘bigger things for us to worry about, eh? Aliens might try to take over Surrey tomorrow. That or Pippa will have read about all our impending deaths in her tea leaves. Hard to say which is worse.’

Chapter Text

In all of the commotion the day before, Ianto had neglected to check his post. In the lobby the small post box was over brimming with magazines wrapped in plastic, shoved partly through the gap, and the rest that wouldn’t fit hanging out for all to see. He wondered what passing neighbours would think of his odd subscriptions – UFO Monthly, Nexus and Fate. Most of it was utter garbage, some of it slightly amusing, and just occasionally, something that warranted Torchwood's attention. They used to have a department of people who regularly monitored print and online publications but the whole lot of them had gone missing after following up a story about Incan runes etched into a cave in the Lakes District. It turned out that it didn't pay to be too curious.

He was still trying to remove the last of the magazines, folded in half and jammed just as tightly as possible through the slot as it could be when he caught a flash of someone coming out of the lift doors. He hadn’t even registered the ping in the middle of his tug of war battle. In fact, he'd taken the stairs this morning, after the lift yet again refused to yield to his patient button pressing.

With a brief look over his shoulder he clocked the lift’s passengers as Margie and her daughter Grace. Margie’s hair hung loose around her face, a far cry from the coffied french buns he’d so far seen her sporting. Her clothes were likewise altered, pencil skirts and tailored jackets exchanged for a pair of straight legged faded jeans and sneakers, a pale grey t-shirt and a loose fitting dark blue cardigan. She was bent over at an unnatural angle, tugging hard at something, just as he’d been doing with his post.

‘No!’ a tiny voice cried out loudly, making it obvious that the thing Margie was tugging from the lift was her daughter.

‘Get out of the lift, Grace,’ came the stern motherly words, almost bereft of any kind of warmth.

Grace fought her at every turn, crying and sobbing and protesting for all she was worth. Ianto had seen the kinds of tantrums put on by children in supermarkets, dragged kicking and screaming away from stands offering chocolate bars and lollies, but this was something else. Ianto felt the frisson in the air from the fear in that little girl's cries. She wasn't just being petulant or stubborn, she was genuinely frightened.

‘What's wrong?’

‘None of your business,’ Margie snapped at him, grabbing Grace by the wrist with both hands. ‘Grace, come on!’

‘No!’

‘Are you sure everything is okay?’ He didn’t like to intervene in parent’s business, but there was something wrong and he couldn't put his finger on it.

Grace collapsed onto the floor sobbing, a tiny little ball of fluffy grey jumper, pigtails and pale pink denim. Not dressed in a school uniform even though it was a school day. Wherever Margie planned on taking Grace, it wasn’t to school. That sent up yet another red flag.

‘Grace?’ Margie took pity on her, dropping to her knees and trying to bundle up the sobbing child in her arms. Grace curled instinctively away, continuing to cry. ‘I'm sorry. It's okay, sweetie. I'm here. I was only trying to help.’

Grace remained there for a few moments before looking up and spotting Ianto still standing there uselessly in the lobby, clutching his mail. She pushed up and away from her mother and ran towards him, clinging to his legs, partially hiding herself behind him. Ianto froze at the sudden grip, unsure what to do. He wasn’t known for being the kind of person children ran to for protection. He tentatively put a hand on her head, stroking the soft mousey hair in an attempt to be comforting. ‘Are you sure everything is okay?’

Margie looked equally as surprised by Grace’s sudden attachment. ‘I… It's not…’

Grace didn't let go of his leg, clutching him for dear life. ‘It’s okay,’ he said, addressing Grace, but trying to convince himself at the same time. He checked his watch. He should be getting off to work, but that was rather difficult with everything that had happened in the last sixty seconds. ‘Look, why don't you come up and I'll make some tea.’ He twisted slightly so that he could put a hand on Grace's shoulder. ‘Grace? Would that be okay? Would you like to come upstairs with me and your mum?’ She looked straight up at him, big blue eyes like saucers as she slowly nodded her acquiescence. He chanced bending down to pick her up, forgetting just how heavy children were and doing his best not to drop her back down now that he’d committed to carrying her back upstairs, awkwardly sticking his post under his arm simultaneously. Her legs instinctively wrapped around his waist whilst her arms encircled his neck, keeping him so close he could smell the candy floss scent of her shampoo, one pigtail tickling his neck just above his shirt collar.

Margie shrunk back against the lift wall as she pressed the up button. There was a visible relief to either be in an enclosed space away from other prying eyes or just glad to be going anywhere other than where she’d been intending on going.

By the time they were entering Ianto's apartment Grace had calmed down completely. Ianto set her down and she went straight for Melvin, who was basking in the pale sunshine trying to make its way through the balcony window. Rather than be perturbed by the intrusion, the cat simply stood up and started weaving circles around his newest friend, allowing her to stroke his fur without argument. He’d always assumed Melvin was a territorial beast, who guarded his personal space. Being okay with strangers, let alone children, came as a surprise.

‘Tea?’ Ianto asked, flipping on the kettle for a lack of anything else to do.

‘Gin would be better,’ Margie replied.

‘Sorry. I can only offer you a beer or some reasonably priced single malt. Or coffee,’ he quickly added. ‘The coffee is typically excellent.’

‘Tea’s fine,’ she said, distractedly, dropping down onto a stool by the kitchen counter, watching Grace who looked to all the world just like a happy, normal child enjoying petting and making friends with animals. ‘Thank you.’

Ianto pulled out two mugs, his obvious lateness for work completely forgotten, and dropping a teabag into each, along with a spoon. ‘Listen,’ he began in a low voice, ‘I don’t mean to pry or anything, but what was all that about?’

Margie combed her fingers through her hair. Ianto noticed only now close up that she had deep purple marks under her eyes indicative of a sleepless night. ‘I’m a terrible mother, Ianto. That’s the truth of it.’

‘I’m certain that’s not true.’ He didn’t know her, really, but very few people were bad parents. Especially not ones who considered themselves to be bad.

‘I just couldn't take it anymore,’ Margie said. ‘She needs help.’

Ianto frowned at the happy looking child playing with his cat. ‘Help?’

‘The drawings. Maybe it's my fault. In fact, I know it is.’ There was a pregnant pause. Ianto chose not to fill it but instead waited for more explanation. ‘I didn't want her to be frightened by what happened yesterday so I tried to explain it.’ She lowered her voice even further, leaning over the counter. ‘All I told her was that someone had died and that the police had to come and make sure everything was okay. I said sometimes people die even when they aren’t old.’ Ianto simply nodded, pouring water into the two mugs. He didn't envy her the task of trying to explain something like that to a child. ‘The next thing I know she's got dozens of them. Pictures of a body lying in blood.’ She reached down into her large handbag and pulled out a yellow manila envelope. It wasn't crisp but looked reasonably new, crumpled as if the contents had been shoved into it in a haste. ‘I wanted to throw them in the bin, burn them, I don't know. Just get rid of them, but then I thought maybe the doctor would want to see them.’

She tugged at a sheaf of papers, pulling them out and setting them on the kitchen counter. Ianto cautiously splayed them out. Jesus. They weren't just stick figures and scribbles, but proper drawings of people, just like the one he had on his fridge. A woman, brutally lying covered in blood. Blood everywhere in fact. At the edges of the drawing and the top as well.

‘It was on the news this morning,’ Margie said. ‘That a young woman had been murdered and possibly raped.’ She gave a hurried look over her shoulder. ‘How could she have known that? My little girl?’

‘I heard something similar last night,’ Ianto lied. ‘Maybe she overheard someone else talking about it. Or it could just be coincidence.’ Not that he believed in such things in his line of work.

‘It's not just about last night,’ she said, swirling the teabag around in the cup, causing a little bit of tea to splash over the side. Ianto did everything he could not to reach across and wipe the bench around the mug as she continued toying with it without extracting the tea bag. ‘It's all the time. Dark things. Black men with wings and monsters and all manner of nightmarish things. I booked an appointment with a child psychologist. That's why she threw a tantrum in the lobby. She wouldn't go. I just want to get her help. Is that so wrong?’

‘It's not wrong at all,’ he agreed, still frowning at the haunting images committed to paper. He got the same uneasy feeling as he’d had before, wondering how a child could draw something she’d never seen. ‘Maybe it’ll just take time before she’s ready. Give it a couple of days. It might all just blow over.’

She lifted her head, a hopeful gleam in her eyes. ‘Do you think so?’

Not a chance, his head told him.

Chapter Text

Another day late to work and another bollocking from his boss. At least on this occasion he supposed he had no one to blame but himself.

‘My neighbour was having trouble with her daughter,’ he tried to explain, though leaving out a lot of the salient details. He wasn't sure Yvonne would take kindly to “I’m late because my neighbour has a child with a sixth sense who draws creepy stuff. Oh, and someone in our apartment block was brutally murdered yesterday.”

Yvonne was instead amused by his words. ‘You with your font of parental wisdom?’ There was a smirk and a heavy dose of sarcasm in her words that made him feel about ten inches tall. She had a point. What did a twenty five year old know about any of that? Then again, Yvonne was single without kids and no prospect of her ever getting maternal urges, so she could hardly judge. She could face down an alien threat without so much as raising an eyebrow, but a gaggle of toddlers coming towards her would have her reaching for a gun to fend them off.

‘I just happened to be the only one there at the time to help,’ he said, realising how paltry that sounded.

‘Well, perhaps remind your neighbours that the defence of this great empire relies on people like us making it to work on time, hmm?’

‘Yes, Yvonne.’

Even Guleraana had little sympathy for him. She was put out at having missed her morning coffee and Ianto being too busy to rustle her up one later in the day as well. It was nothing however compared to the ribbing he got from Kieran.

‘So, how good looking is she on a scale of one to ten?’ he asked. He was of the view that the only reason a man like Ianto turned up late to work was because he had a good looking girl in his bed that he most certainly wasn’t going to kick out.

‘There was no girl,’ he reiterated a second time.

‘Okay, don’t tell us, but we’re Torchwood,’ Kieran reminded him. ‘We have ways of finding out.’

Ianto rolled his eyes. ‘Knock yourself out.’

Chapter Text

Ianto opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle of beer. He didn't normally drink on a weeknight, but tonight he couldn't make sense of anything. All day he'd been distracted at work thinking about what Margie had said and shown him. Why would a little girl draw scenes of a murder she hadn't witnessed? Why would a child draw scenes of that nature at all? Margie was probably right that Grace needed some kind of professional help.

On a whim, he searched for architectural plans for the apartment block. There must have been some quirk in its design, or perhaps a connected system of ventilation shafts that snaked around the building. A child would be small enough to crawl into a space like that, moving around, perhaps seeing things that they wouldn't otherwise be able to see.

He studied the plans in detail, finding nothing that could explain his theories. There was nothing special about the construction of the apartments, nor any significant shared infrastructure. Even the electrical cabling and water pipes were densely packed in the spaces between floors. There wasn’t room for anything else, let alone a small human.

He then pulled up the police files for the current investigation on his laptop using his Torchwood credentials once again to hack their system. It read as a murder rape. SOCO would have gone over the scene and the police would have made sure the apartment was cleaned after the body had been removed and forensics gathered but that didn't mean there wasn’t something they'd missed. He shouldn't get involved, he told himself. He wasn’t the police. He wasn’t even a Torchwood field agent, strictly speaking, but something was nagging at him. He could go and take a look at the apartment for himself. Just to satisfy himself that there was nothing more to it.

The photos from the scene were brutal. The poor girl hadn’t just been murdered, she’d been butchered. The body was covered in deep gashes, flicking this way and that. He hoped she’d struggled. No weapon was reported as being found. There was some speculation that it had been some sort of military style hunting knife, jagged edged, thick and heavy. And the blood was everywhere. SOCO were scratching their heads, according to initial reports. The spatter patterns simply weren't consistent with a conventional stabbing. Everything in the apartment had been upended like a cyclone had gone through it. The strangeness of their reports didn't end there. Curious to understand what it was they found so strange He opened up a chain of emails from the lead detective.

Tell me you’re not fucking serious. Who misses someone walking out of a building with a ladder covered in blood? SOCO are taking the piss. Tell them to go back and have another go. I want a proper crime scene assessment, not some half baked rubbish. I’m not having the CPS on my back.
(Attachment 1).

He clicked on the attachment, opening up a written report from the head SOCO investigator.

CRIME SCENE REPORT
Case No.: GJ683D-87S-2006
Incident Date: 02-11-2006
Crime Scene Investigator: Niall Westall, Hampstead Division
Incident Location: 52 Squires Road, Finchley N12 0AF

SUMMARY REPORT OF SCENE
Crime Scene Investigator’s Narrative
Primary Body Examination:
Investigator arrived at 9:35 am. Investigator was directed through the hallway, and found a dead body, female in her late 20s, laying on the floor facing the floor at an unnatural angle. Approximate height 165cm tall. Investigators verified the victim had no signs of life including respiration and heartbeat and pronounced the victim deceased at 9:45am. Visual inspection indicated the victim was naked. A long sleeve sleep top, pyjama bottoms and underwear suspected of being worn by the victim prior to death located on the floor nearby, in tattered state, indicating removal by force, using a sharp object.

Victim found with multiple deep lacerations covering torso arms and legs, each of approximately wound length between 8cm and 12 cm. Apparent cause of death is multiple penetrating trauma due to penetration of a sharp object. Indications of vaginal penetration and pelvic trauma.

Evidence Collected on Body:
Swabs taken from the pelvic area to be tested for seminal fluids.
Skin tags from fingernails

Opinions:
Apparent Manner of Death: Murder
Apparent Cause of Death: Penetrating Trauma

Remarks:

Possible immediate cause of death could be catastrophic blood loss or, internal bleeding, suggest further autopsy.
Suggest further checking on liver temperature to determine the actual time of death.
Sexual assault assessment to be undertaken.

Crime Scene Investigation:
Blood spatter found at the scene, consistent with slashing action of bladed weapon. No blood footprints, fingerprints or other marks pertaining to the perpetrator found. Personal effects of the deceased were damaged, possibly in struggle, many items knocked onto the floor. Blood stains were also found on the bedroom roof above where the body was located. Directional blood spatter on roof and walls noted as unusual for wounds inflicted either whilst victim was standing or lying on floor.

Remarks:
No fingerprints found on any objects dislocated. Suggest further examination of fingerprints pulled from door, entranceway and lift for possible suspects.
No traces of seminal or other body fluids on floor or in vicinity of victim. Check rubbish bins in the immediate area for clothing or prophylactics. No blood residue located in sink areas or pipes indicating the perpetrator did not wash evidence from objects or their person. Departed scene in pre-existing state.
Based on directional blood spatter, the crime scene appears “upside down”. Possible that the victim was somehow restrained to the roof for all or part of assault. Possible fetish or religious tendencies? Suggest presence of ladder and or other equipment to facilitate this. Items removed from the crime scene.
Recommend psychological profiling to be completed based on unusual modus operandi.

Evidence details and position: see crime scene floor plan and inventory of evidence.

Upside down? What was that supposed to mean? Now he knew he just had to take a look for himself.

Chapter Text

Ianto was convinced he’d chicken out of the idea before he got around to actually doing it. He wasn’t naturally nosy, even if he did enjoy a good bit of gossip. There was something about the whole thing not making any sense that grabbed him. Police must deal with these sorts of crimes all the time so for them to come up with a question mark hanging over the who, what and how made him that much more determined to understand where the confusion lay. And maybe, just maybe, there was something alien involved, in which case, he was well entitled to be poking his nose in.

Okay, so maybe someone else from Torchwood ought to be poking their noses in, but for now there was no definite yes or no as to whether something else was going on. He was, he told himself, slipping out of his apartment doorway at some time well after midnight, just gathering facts.

He skirted down the hallway, still lit for public access twenty four hours a day, turning the corner into the southern wing of the block and then counting along the doors before skipping down the stairs to the second floor and working his way back. It didn't take much to find the door in question. It was the only one in the corridor that still looked like a crime scene.

There was only a single bank of yellow police tape, stretched diagonally across the doorway. It was hardly going to stop anyone going in, apart from being a psychologically preventative measure. He checked in both directions, feeling ridiculously exposed in the well lit hallway which, thankfully, had no internal CCTV cameras. He’d be sunk if anyone recognised him as a resident, and even if they didn’t, him flashing his Torchwood credentials off as some investigative branch of the London Met was going to be met with a good deal of suspicion. What police detective came to review the scene at this hour of the night?

He pulled a set of lockpicks from his pocket and began wedging the first one in the lock, followed by the second, which he slowly jiggled and turned. He'd known how to pick a basic lock since he was sixteen. It wasn’t a skill he'd always been proud of but it had come in handy on more than one occasion.

It took a bit of fiddling but eventually he was able to lever the second pick in just such a way that he felt the pressure of the lock tumbler give way under the first pick and he was able to turn both ninety degrees to the right, releasing the locking mechanisms. Ianto Jones, masterful cat burglar, his internal monologue congratulated him. He pushed the door ajar and ducked under the police tape, shutting it closed behind him.

A pair of black nitrile gloves went on next, along with plastic covers for his shoes. From his other pocket he extracted a small torch – Torchwood issue – and able to be adjusted between normal light and black light.

No one had been back to clean up the scene yet, but the pervasive smell of chemicals still lingered. The main entrance and living room appeared mostly intact, along with the kitchen. No rush to the knife block to grab a weapon in defence, he noted. The bedroom was another matter entirely. Smudgy black fingerprints lay on every surface where they’d been powdered and pulled, leaving just a residue. It was hard to tell where to start taking prints since the room was in complete disarray. Everything that had been on the dresser was knocked to the floor, either whole or in pieces. The mirror was splintered outward from a central spot where something, or someone, had slammed into it. Bedclothes and pillows were strewn and shredded over the mushroom coloured carpet, streaked and spattered in blood. The walls too had long slashes of blood which glowed black under the torch’s UV light.

‘Jesus,’ he breathed, swallowing back the lump in the back of his throat from where his mouth had gone dry. He’d never seen anything like it. How the hell could the people living in the apartments directly above, below and either side not have heard the commotion and surely the screaming? Had she screamed, he then wondered. Had she been drugged? If so, why was the place in the state it was in? Everything indicated a struggle of epic proportions.

He moved carefully through the debris, inspecting each object with a critical eye. Had the killer been looking for something specific? Had they found it? He went through the obvious choices, finding a box with jewellery spilling out of it, the woman’s phone charger still plugged in by the bed, the phone itself in the log of items taken into police custody for further analysis, and a wallet still tucked at the bottom of a handbag hanging on the back of the bedroom door, cash and credit cards accounted for. ‘Not a robbery, then,’ he muttered to himself.

He moved toward the window, gently drawing down the roller blind so that no one outside would notice the light going on. He wanted to take a few pictures of the scene for himself. When he found the switch and flicked it on, he nearly yelped out as the true horror of the scene made itself visible for the first time. His eyes were drawn immediately to the ceiling above the bed, which was more red than it was white.

‘That’s not possible,’ he said, even though he’d seen all manner of impossible things. The smudges of red that painted the ceiling weren’t just a haphazard splodge of red flecks. He blinked, trying to see if his mind was playing tricks on him, only to realise it wasn’t. He’d seen pictures of people who made outlines in the snow, calling them snow angels, but this was altogether too creepy. Above him was a pale outline of a body, surrounded by an aura of red, but it was what spread out from the upper body that freaked him out the most. Large patches of blood, swept into the shape of giant wings. His brain stopped computing for a second, before he raised his phone towards it, capturing the stark image on video. An angel of death, painted in the victim's blood, looking down on them.

‘What the hell?’ he muttered.

Chapter Text

He couldn't sleep after that, dozing fitfully in bursts until his alarm went off. He had visions of terrifying angels with talons and fangs, dripping in blood as they came for people, swooping down to murder them and leave the bodies where they lay in a pool of their own blood before flying away into the night.

He left early for work, on his third coffee of the morning already as Guleraana stumbled into the kitchenette just barely on time for the start of her day. He should have kept quiet about the whole thing but he found he simply couldn't. He was a private person by nature, but with G he felt like he could be himself, and before he knew it, he was telling her about the murder and how he'd broken into the apartment to take a look for himself.

‘You did what?’ she cried, not even touching the coffee he'd made for her. ‘Bloody hell, Ianto.’

He took offence at her response. Usually she lived for gossip and news. ‘It's not like you to be so judgy,’ he said, verbalising his disappointment. It wasn't weird, was it?

She looked torn between trying to be his friend and trying not to tell him she thought he was crazy. ‘Well, yeah, but this is a crime scene. As in actual police. You can’t just go in there and have a snoop around.’

‘Why not? It wasn't like there was anyone there.’

Her look turned to one of worry. ‘You could have, I don't know… messed up evidence, or worse, left evidence that you were there. What if they arrest you thinking that you had something to do with it?’

‘I was careful. You'd think with everything we do here that I'd know a bit about how to go about without leaving a trace behind.’ He hoped that didn't come off as standoffish or superior. He'd been very careful, he thought, and had dumped his gloves and shoe coverings in three separate bins on his way to work, including one that poked out from the fence line of a private residence. ‘Besides, what if it had been something alien?’

Guleraana didn't look convinced. ‘Still… So, what did you find? Was it alien?’

‘I dunno. Blood everywhere. Everything everywhere, actually.’ The description of it being like a cyclone had gone through wasn't far off the mark.

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘Do you know who killed her?’

‘No, of course not!’

‘So, why do it?’

He chewed his lip. It felt like too much to get into the whole neighbour with the child drawing murder scene pictures, so he said nothing. He also didn't mention the blood on the ceiling. She might have been his best mate at work, but there was a line you didn’t cross, and having your friends think you were compelled by nightmarish crime scenes didn't seem like something he wanted to be known for.

‘You know what? You're right. I should just leave this thing with the police.’

G nodded. ‘You know what? I think that’s the smartest thing you’ve said all week.’

It probably was, but that didn't change the fact that a little girl had drawn the scene without ever having seen it.

Chapter Text

‘What's this?’ Kieran asked, walking into the room and holding up a report attached to a small sampler jar in an overly large snaplock bag. ‘Just came up from Chem Analytics.’

Ianto quickly moved to cut in front of him, snatching the bag from him and walking it back to his desk. ‘Ah, that’s mine. Last night he'd taken several samples from the dead girl's apartment and had used his early morning arrival to forge a request for priority analysis of them. It wasn't ethical necessarily, but the lab was hardly under a lot of pressure. Mostly they were still grovelling from their cock up the other day and doing their best to keep a low profile. The fact that they could turn around the results in just a few hours justified it for him, even if he had made it a Priority One request. The police might do their own forensics but that could take weeks and still be totally inconclusive.

Keiran cocked his head and reached up to scratch the back of his head. ‘I don't remember you being involved in any chemical analysis work.’

‘Special assignment from Yvonne,’ he lied.

‘Am I going to be read in at some point?’

Ianto shrugged, wishing Kieran wasn't so keen to be on top of things. ‘Probably depends on what comes back on these results. If it's nothing, that’ll probably be the end of it.’

That seemed to satisfy him. ‘Keep me posted, yeah?’

‘Yeah.’ He waited until Kieran had left before slipping a finger under the lip of the envelope, pulling out the report on the samples. It was disappointing to read that there was nothing of substance in any of the samples he'd submitted. All the blood belonged to the victim and was one hundred percent human DNA. So too the other fluids he'd found, presumably seminal. Nothing alien at all and nothing that matched to CrimInt records. It was devastating to say the least. The police were going to come up empty once they'd done the same analysis he had. Unless they had other leads they were never going to solve it. The only lead left now was the one the police didn't know about. The one that had drawn the crime scene exactly as it was.

Chapter Text

Ianto felt stranger approaching Margie's door this time than he had the first time around. He was convinced however that Grace knew something about the murder. If not, it was one hell of a coincidence.

He waited until after dinner, trading his usual stiff suit and tie for something a bit more casual in the form of jeans and a hooded jumper. There was a time and place for storming in with an air of authority, suited and armed for anything. This wasn’t it. He needed Margie to trust him, and that what he was suggesting wasn’t totally crazy.

He knocked and waited an agonising time until the door was finally opened. ‘Hello. Is everything okay?’

‘Yes… No… Everything is fine,’ he said, making a poor first impression. ‘I was wondering if we could talk for a few minutes.’

Margie looked back over her shoulder and closed the door behind her. ‘Okay.’

‘Listen, I was thinking about the other day. I'd like to help if I can. With Grace,’ he clarified. ‘I have some experience with the unexplained.’

She arched a neat eyebrow at him. ‘Unexplained?’

‘You said it yourself the other day. You think something is wrong. So do I. Not necessarily something wrong with Grace, though.’

Margie’s brow creased in perplexment. ‘I don't understand.’

‘The people I work for…’ How was he supposed to explain this without freaking her out? ‘They investigate things like this. Help people to make sense of things that don’t make sense.’

‘Things?’

‘Things that can't be explained.’ Like how she drew a picture of me and my cat without actually knowing I had a cat. That sounded a lot better than bringing up drawings of a murder she couldn't possibly have witnessed.

‘You're a shrink? Is that why you weren’t freaked out at me trying to drag my child off to one?’

He shook his head. ‘No. More like I talk to people who see strange things. Help them to understand that none of it is real.’ That wasn’t at all what he did, but it sounded good.

‘So, you're saying this is just some kind of psychological problem.’

He shrugged. ‘I can’t be sure of anything. That’s why I'd like the chance to spend some time with her and understand what she’s experiencing.’

‘Why would you do that? I mean, obviously if it’s your job, and I can pay you and everything.’

‘That’s not why I'm doing it. I just want to help. And, if I'm honest, I'm fascinated by people who believe in the paranormal. That’s a lot of what we see. Things that appear supernatural but aren’t.’

‘But you don't believe it yourself?’

‘I believe what I can see with my own eyes.’ It sounded better than saying he covered up alien intervention. As for ghosts and other phenomena, he stoutly denied their existence. Aliens made sense to him. Sort of.

‘You’re a mythbuster?’

He shrugged. ‘Of a kind, I suppose.’

‘So, will you talk to her?’

‘Just to be clear, I’m not a child psychologist. That really isn’t my field of expertise.’ His sister scarcely let him babysit. Putting him in charge for more than five minutes was considered a trust exercise.

‘But it’s part of what your company does, right?’

‘For now I'd like to just keep this between us. Maybe it's nothing, but I don't want to involve anyone else unless I'm sure. For Grace’s sake, more than anything.’

There was a small smile from her after having scrutinised every word he’d said so far. ‘I appreciate that. Really. And whatever it costs, please just let me know. She’s really taken a shine to you, and I know it’s only been a few days, but she keeps to herself, you know? Latching on to anyone is a big deal. You could convince her that they’re just things in her mind, couldn’t you? I know it sounds stupid. Maybe it’s just a phase she’s going through but I'm really worried that it could be the start of something worse.’

He sympathised with her. What could be worse than being a single working mother worrying that your child isn’t like all the other kids in school. ‘Let's take things one step at a time. As I said, it could be nothing. I hope it is. All I want to do is spend some time with her and talk to her.’

Margie sighed and ran a hand back through her hair, ruining the neat bob it had been in. ‘I've tried. Don't think I haven't.’

‘Maybe she just hasn't found the right person to tell yet.’

‘If you think it'll help.’

‘I can't promise anything but we can try, right?’

Margie fixed him with a determined look. ‘Did you want to start right now?’

Chapter Text

‘Gracie, Mister Jones from downstairs is here to visit,’ Margie called out. At first there was no reaction, and then a small head popped out from the edge of the doorway to what must have been her bedroom. Her hair was no longer in tight little pigtails but hung loosely around her tiny face. Ianto gave a little wave. There was a split second of panic where she made no moves but then there was a tiny wave back, then a smile.

‘Can I come hang out with you? Maybe do some drawing together?’

‘That'd be nice, wouldn't it?’ Margie said, encouraging Grace to acquiesce.

‘Okay,’ she said, ducking back inside her room. Margie gave Ianto a single look that was both worried and hopeful. Well, what did he have to lose? He'd asked for this, after all.

He wandered down the hall, giving a polite little knock at the edge of the doorway before stepping inside. The room was decorated in pink and white and purple. It looked all the world like his niece's bedroom, and probably that of every little girl under the age of ten. The only difference was that instead of posters of barbie dolls and unicorns, Grace chose to adorn the walls with her artwork.

She had a little fold out card table in one corner of the room that counted for a desk. It was littered with pieces of paper, drawings half finished, others awaiting an available spot on the wall, along with crisp white sheets untouched by pencil that sat in a pile, eager to be filled.

There was only one small chair in front of that table so Ianto perched on the end of the bed, side on to Grace, picking up a clean sheet of paper and retrieving a hardcover book from a small shelf to balance it on. He reached for a grey pencil, thinking it would be an unpopular choice, but Grace quickly lunged for it, so he subtly switched his hand across for a blue one.

‘I really liked the picture you drew me,’ he began. She didn’t reply, just looked at him as if she were staring right through him. It was a little bit creepy. ‘In fact, I liked it so much that I was wondering if you might draw me another?’

There wasn't a yes, but neither was there a no. She just scrutinised him for a few moments before turning to the fresh page in front of her and beginning to sketch.

Ianto set aside his own paper on the bed next to him and leaned forward a little, resting his forearms on his legs. ‘Can we play a game while we draw?’ This time her look turned to one of curiosity.

She didn't say yes right away, rather waited to hear the rules first. A child after his own heart. Adults simply weren’t to be trusted, even ones you clung to in a moment of panic. There was no way of going in hard and asking the tough questions. He was going to have to earn the right to delve into that.

‘So, the game is played like this. I ask you a question, and then after you’ve answered it, you get to ask me a question. If I don't answer it, you get to ask me two more questions. The person who gets the most answers wins. How does that sound?’

She chewed her lip, thinking it over. ‘Okay.’

‘Good. Let's start off easy. What’s your name?’

‘Grace. What’s yours?’

‘Ianto,’ he replied, even though they’d already exchanged names days ago. ‘How old are you, Grace?’

‘Eight and a half. How old are you?’

‘Twenty five.’

She studied his face for a moment, trying to parse the information. ‘You don't look old.’

He nodded. ‘I guess I am old, but thank you for saying I don't look it.’ To a child, everything must seem old. Even for Ianto, the idea of thirty, or even forty, felt old, even knowing that one day that would be him, and that he probably wouldn't feel old at all when he got there. He scarcely felt older now than he had when he'd been a teenager. He still had all those awkward traits that had haunted him through high school. His only self confidence came from his job, knowing that he was part of something bigger and more important than what most people did. And that he was good at what he did.

He looked around the room, taking in the pictures posted up on the walls. They were mostly of dark angels with big silvery wings, though there were other more obscure pictures as well. No puppy dogs or rainbows and flowers, though. ‘There’s lots of pictures here of things that fly. Is that something you’d like to be able to do? To fly?’

‘No. People can’t fly. They don’t have wings.’

Of course not. How silly of him.

‘I could draw you with wings,’ she offered.

‘I’m not sure I'd like wings,’ he replied. ‘I’m a bit afraid of heights.’

‘Okay,’ she said, as if he'd said nothing at all. She went back to her pencils, building up a picture of him, tall and thin in his dark grey suit, rather than drawing him as he was dressed now in his much more casual attire. He made a mental note of it; that Grace opted to draw from memory rather than from life.

‘Grace,’ he said as she was deep in concentration, ‘there's something I wanted to ask you about the first picture you gave me. How did you know that I had a cat?’

She shrugged as if it were of no consequence. ‘I just did.’

‘Did you see us move in?’ He'd had Melvin in a cat carrier at the time and he wasn’t sure Grace understood what that was, or what people put inside them. ‘Was he out on the balcony?’ He was mostly housebound but every now and then Ianto opened the sliding door a crack and let him prowl around on the narrow balcony. He always went for the warmest spot, sunning himself in whichever beam of light there was. ‘Did you look down and see him?’ He wasn’t entirely sure how. His flat faced out onto the street, whereas theirs faced inwards, looking over the lawn and the tiny courtyard. It was only from the roof that it was seemingly possible.

Grace shrugged again, focusing on choosing the right colour pencil to fill in the pinstripes of his suit. ‘I just know certain things,’ she said.

He nodded, it was undoubtedly code for “I get out and go exploring when Mum isn’t looking.”

When she'd finished she handed him the picture for his approval. ‘I like this one,’ he said. ‘I don't look sad in it like before.’ There was even a funny looking sun up in the corner shining down over his shoulder, though it was more brown than yellow. ‘Could I come over again some time? Maybe you could show me more of your pictures?’

‘Maybe you could draw me a picture,’ she counter offered.

Margie was perched nervously on the edge of a short cream coloured sofa. In front of her was a mug of tea that looked to have gone cold, no longer steaming and almost entirely untouched. She stood, smoothing her hands down skinny jeans as she waited for him to close the gap between them so that they could speak without being overheard. ‘So, what do you think?’

He stuffed his hands in the front of his hooded sweater pocket. ‘I don't know. I’m not sure there’s anything in it. Maybe she truly was just projecting after you told her about the… the accident,’ he said, choosing his words carefully.

‘You don’t think it's strange? You saw all the drawings on the walls, didn't you? I tried to take them down once and she screamed bloody murder so I put them straight back up.’ She shivered, rubbing hands up and down her arms. ‘They make me feel like I'm being watched.’

He didn't openly agree with her but whilst he'd tried to stay focused on Grace he got the sense that the pictures could be unsettling in the right context. ‘I don't think we can equate pictures of angels to pictures of death and murder scenes.’ They were a tad on the obsessive side, but then kids fixated on stuff all the time.

‘Angels?’ Margie shook her head. ‘They’re not angels.’

He frowned. They looked like angels to him. ‘If they're not angels then what are they?’

‘She calls them her Mothman.’

Chapter Text

‘Mothman,’ Ianto muttered, clicking away at his keyboard. His coffee, brewed to perfection with the exact half an inch of milk froth on top, covered in a light dusting of chocolate sprinkles went untouched. He frowned, deep in concentration, deleting his first search and starting up a new one. ‘Moth Man… Man of Moth, maybe?’ There wasn’t so much as a town called Moth, according to their extensive database.

Kieran strode past the cluster of desks, showing off his ample biceps through the short sleeves of his t-shirt and carrying one of his green smoothies that he swore by. Looking that good might be worth it except the smoothies were the worst thing Ianto had ever tasted, offered once out of generosity and politely declined ever since. He’d rather suffer through an enduring beer belly in his thirties than repeat the green smoothie experiment.

‘Kieran,’ he called out as he was passing. ‘Have you ever heard of a thing called a Mothman?’

‘Is that a clue from this morning's cryptic crossword?’ he asked, before tipping back the plastic smoothie container to take a few swallows.

‘No , it's just… I can't find anything here. Nothing.’ Torchwood’s database could drum up pretty much anything. It had been indexing data from Earth and from places much further afar than that for well over a century. Rumours were that a giant tentacled beast was housed up at Torchwood House deep in the Scottish heartland throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that was responsible for creating the extensive databases that modern twenty first century Torchwood now relied upon, but even that was too far fetched for most Torchwood employees to believe. ‘Well, except a rather obscure reference from a case in the USA back in the sixties.’

‘And we know how reliable those are,’ Kieran said. ‘Roswell. God what a disaster that was. Ended all Torchwood cooperation with the US government after that. We had more luck with the Russian KVI and that's saying something. What's all this about, anyway?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Ah… This isn't about Mothmen at all, is it?’ He grinned. ‘This is one of Yvonne's little tests. She wants to make sure I've been listening during our weekly briefings. You know, just because I come in a bit late sometimes, still a bit damp from the shower after my ten mile run doesn't mean I'm not across everything. This is one of those red herrings you've slid in to make me think I've missed something.’

Ianto forced a smile. ‘Yep, you got me. All a test. Congratulations. You passed with flying colours. I'll be sure to let Yvonne know.’

‘It's all the kale,’ Kieran explained, taking another slurp. ‘Keeps your mind sharp. You should try it, really.’

Ianto's stomach churned at the mere idea of it. ‘I'll think about it.’

Chapter Text

Ianto shook off his sopping wet umbrella before he stepped into the building, feeling the chill in the air creep in along with him. Winter was fast on the heels of autumn and the rain was cold like a Nordic ice bath. Once he climbed the three flights of stairs and entered his apartment he dumped the umbrella in the sink to drain off the rest of the water.

‘Not great out there,’ he said conversationally as Melvin appeared from the living room to greet him. He watched the cat look up at him before moving towards the door and lowering his head to sniff at something on the floor. Ianto's eyes followed him, spotting a small white card on the carpet that he'd stepped over without noticing in his haste to relieve himself of the dripping umbrella. He knelt down and picked it up; a business card for a Detective Inspector Callum Watts, and a hastily scribbled note on the back stating “please call”.

An icy chill went down his spine that had nothing to do with the rain outside. Someone from the police wanted to speak to him. That couldn't be a coincidence. He panicked for a moment. Had Guleraana been right? Had he violated a crime scene and left behind some evidence that he'd been there? Oh God. What if they thought he'd been going back to remove something incriminating? What if someone had in fact seen him? He shouldn't have gone in there. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

‘What to do, what to do…’ he muttered to himself, beginning to pace the room as Melvin stepped aside to avoid being trampled in the process, instead sitting and watching his owner chew over the problem.
He could just ignore it, couldn’t he? Say he'd never seen the card. The cat must've found it and hidden it. God, that sounded ridiculous. Like saying the dog had eaten his homework. Hoovered it up without noticing? Would that fly as an excuse?

He went to the kitchen and dropped it in the bin like it was burning his hand. Then he paced some more. If he didn't call back would they take that as a sign that he was guilty? If they searched his apartment they'd go through his rubbish and find the card in there. He couldn't plead ignorance then. He went back to the bin and pulled it back out. He reread the messy handwriting. “Please call.” Not “please call ASAP.” No sense of urgency. He didn't have to call back right away. That bought him time. Time to do what, he wondered.

He wasn't going to run. That was stupid. His landlord had all his details. It'd take the police five minutes to find him, and he wasn't about to quit his job either. Was now the time to just play dumb and admit he had a fascination for the macabre and that was the only reason he'd been in there? Would that wash with the police? He had a solid alibi for the hours he was at work, but as for the rest of the time, he was a bit of a loner.

He tugged open the fridge and pulled out a microwave pasta. He didn't feel hungry anymore but it gave his hands something to do, shoving it in and pressing the buttons with more fervour than was necessary. The hum was a nice distraction to his internal cyclone of thoughts.

He pulled his phone from his pocket and began tapping in the number. He should just call back and get it over with. He hadn't done anything wrong. Well, not apart from potentially incriminating himself or ruining potential evidence that might be needed in court to prosecute whoever was responsible. He'd been so careful. How could he have ballsed this up? What if he was in trouble? What if they told Yvonne? Goodbye to the best job he'd ever had.

His fingers stopped at the second to last digit and then deleted them. ‘I don't know what to do,’ he said, searching Melvin's placid expression for answers. The microwave pinged and went ignored. He reached for his umbrella, pulling it back out of the sink. He just needed to go out and walk, he decided. Time to think and come up with a solution. Being cooped up here made him anxious. ‘I'll be back,’ he promised, unsure if that was actually true.

He almost made it to the door before there was a knock from the other side. He froze for a moment, clutching the umbrella like a weapon before closing the gap and pulling the door open. Outside stood a man in a blazer and dark trousers, both flecked with more than a share of dark raindrop marks. ‘Good evening, sir. I'm Detective Inspector Watts from London metropolitan police.’ He showed Ianto his identification card. ‘I was wondering if you had a few minutes to chat?’

Ianto nodded dumbly and pulled the door open wider, letting the inspector inside. This was out of his hands now.

‘Hello, puss,’ the inspector said, bending down to stroke Melvin on the head as he'd come to greet the police officer. Sell out, Ianto thought, dropping the umbrella back in the sink before returning to the living room.

The inspector stood back up. ‘You'd be aware that there was an incident here last Tuesday. A girl in her twenties was found murdered in her apartment. Maddie Stevens.’

Ianto nodded, trying and failing to find his voice.

‘We're just doorknocking all the residents. It's all procedural. Nothing to worry about. Just a few questions, if that's okay. Figured I might catch you at tea time. I was still in the area. Thought I'd do another round of the building to catch all the nine to fivers.’

Ianto felt his legs go to jelly underneath him. Procedural. Just a few questions. They weren't here to arrest him. He felt the tightness in his chest recede enough to be able to breathe again.

The detective pulled out a small notepad and pen, flipping it to the first available clean page. ‘First of all, did you know Maddie?’

‘No.’ Ianto swallowed, finding his mouth still dry. ‘I haven't lived here long. I only know a couple of people by name. Some faces I'd recognise but no names.’

‘Understandable. Big city. Lots of people don't know their neighbours these days.’ Ianto didn't doubt the Detective probably knew every last person on his own street personally. He just had that air about him. ‘Are there any faces you haven't recognised hanging around? Anyone hanging by the front doors that might not have had a reason to be here?’

‘No.’ Even though he was off the hook he decided to keep his answers brief.

‘And as a resident, how easy is it for someone to get in without a key, would you say?’

‘Not that hard. Like you said, people can let someone in if he looks like the guy carrying pizzas or a package.’

The detective nodded. ‘That's what I thought. And you were at work all day Monday?’

‘Yes. I mean, no,’ he said, correcting himself. ‘There was a problem in the afternoon with a gas leak in the building at work, so we were all sent home early. When I arrived there were already police cars and ambulances here.’

‘What about Sunday? What were you doing on Sunday?’

‘Sleeping, laundry… I had to work Saturday so by Sunday I was knackered.’ It was the honest truth. Tommy had thrown a fit at some of the research team and Rachael had begged him to come and be an arbiter to get them back on task so that they'd meet their project deadline. He had no idea why people thought he'd get Tommy back in line. Tommy was a Torchwood veteran who did what he wanted, how he wanted it, and so help you God if you wanted to do things differently. He was also ridiculously brilliant which is why they put up with his offhand attitude. Ianto had eventually appealed to their better conscience and gotten the team back in the room, but not without having bargained with both sides several times, chewing up his weekend.

‘Tell me about it,’ the detective agreed. ‘At least I've got the missus handling laundry.’ He tucked a hand in his pocket. ‘That's all I wanted to ask. You've got my card?’ Ianto nodded. ‘If you think of anything, just give me a call on that number.’

‘Okay.’ Ianto followed him to the door before the detective turned on his heel. ‘Actually, there is one other thing I wanted to ask. I know you haven't been here long, but have you noticed anything odd in the building?’

‘Odd?’ That was a bit vague, especially for a police officer to ask.

‘Just a couple of the residents made some strange comments, that's all. Taps that stop working randomly, walls that rumble. I checked and there's no tube tunnel running underneath here. Closest station is two miles away.’

‘I have a water stain on my bedroom roof from leaking pipes, but that's just a maintenance problem.’

The detective nodded back. ‘That's what I thought as well. Don't make anything like they used to.’

Ianto wrapped his hand around the door knob, readying to usher the detective out. ‘Just out of curiosity, do you have any leads on what happened? One of my neighbours upstairs lives on her own with her eight year old daughter so she's a bit worried.’

‘We're pursuing a number of lines of inquiry,’ DI Watts replied. Ianto didn't have to read between the lines to understand what that meant. The police didn't have a bloody clue. ‘Thanks for your time.’

Ianto closed the door and leant gratefully against it, knowing he'd dodged a bullet. The police had no genuine leads or suspects. Forensics, if they were anything like the ones he'd taken, had come up empty. The police weren't going to solve this. The only person with a lead was him, a girl who had possibly drawn the murderer and had dozens of pictures of him on her walls.

Chapter Text

Ianto didn't wait long for the detective to be gone before he too left the apartment. He didn't take his umbrella with him this time. Instead he went up, taking the stairs two at a time. He knocked on Margie's door. Like him, she was unattached except to her daughter, and reliably home without plans to go anywhere.

‘This is… I mean, you're here early,’ Margie said, stumbling over her words at the sudden unannounced appearance of her downstairs neighbour.

‘I just had a police detective at my door asking questions,’ he said. ‘Nothing serious,’ he added, trying not to be too anxious.

‘DI Watts was here earlier this afternoon,’ she confirmed.

‘You didn't tell the police about the picture Grace drew, did you?’

Her eyes went wide. ‘Don't be daft! Of course not. Why would I do that? I told him I didn't know anything and that's the truth.’

Is it, Ianto wondered.

‘We don't know anything, right?’ she repeated, this time asking him to confirm for them both.

‘Right,’ he said without sounding convincing

She pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘Sorry, I'm being snappy,’ she apologised. ‘It's all just been very unsettling for us both.’ She gave him a sympathetic look.

‘You're back,’ Grace said, appearing out of nowhere from behind her mother, interrupting them.

‘Yep. I thought we could draw together some more. Is that okay?’

‘Actually, we were just about to have tea,’ Margie said. ‘Have you eaten?’

He shook his head, remembering the pasta pot he'd abandoned in his microwave, probably now just one congealed, gelatinous brick of unappealing carbohydrates.

‘It's just a risotto, she said, but we can stretch it three ways, can't we Grace?’

Grace nodded enthusiastically, pleased to have a visitor for tea.

‘If it's not too much trouble,’ he replied.

‘I know what it's like to work all day and then be faced with cooking. It's no trouble.’

Ianto was quietly glad for the company. The police turning up at his door had rattled him. He was sticking his nose in where it possibly didn't belong and he knew it. Talk over dinner was carefully kept away from the subject and he soon found himself learning more about Margie's life. She'd once been a twelve hour a day paralegal working in the financial district but was now a contractor for specialised legal research projects and expert court testimony, giving her the flexibility to work from home when she needed to, and time to ferry Grace to and from school. There was no mention of Grace's father being in the picture.

‘We do okay, don't we, Gracie?’ she said, reaching across to squeeze Grace's shoulder whilst her daughter shepherded the last few peas in her risotto to one side of the bowl. Ianto perceived the slight tension between them.

‘This was lovely,’ Ianto said, complementing the meal. ‘I don't cook enough. Not from scratch anyway. There was a time when. I used to make my own pizza dough. Now I can scarcely be bothered ordering one online.’

Margie smiled as she downed the last remnants of her glass of white wine. Ianto had politely declined the drink. He wasn't sure mixing alcohol with nerves and a troubled conscience was a good idea. She began gathering up their plates, taking Grace's away before she could corral the peas back across the other side of the bowl.

‘I'll help wash up,’ Ianto offered. It was the least he could do for turning up to dinner uninvited.

‘No, it's fine. It's only a few pots and plates,’ she said, walking them to the sink. ‘Oh, not again,’ she said, flipping the mixer tap up and down, then side to side.

‘What's the problem?’

‘It's these stupid taps.’ He watched as she raised it every which way, with no water coming out, before pulling open the cupboard under the sink and bending down to look inside it. ‘I don't understand it. One second it's fine and then the next, nothing.’

Ianto tried it for himself, getting nothing, and then suddenly water shot out, splashing everywhere before he had the presence of mind to flick the tap back down. ‘Probably just a bit of air trapped in the pipes,’ he said. He gently lifted the tap again and this time a steady stream of hot water came out, slowly filling the sink. ‘There you go. Not ideal but not the end of the world.’

‘You’re a real Mister Fix-It, aren't you?’ she joked. ‘What did we do before you came along?’

‘Fixed things all on your own,’ he replied, trying to keep the mood light.

‘I'll sort these. Grace, would you like to entertain our guest? He might like to play Chinese checkers with you.’

‘Or we could draw,’ Grace replied.

Ianto smiled. ‘Sounds great.’

She let him follow her back to her room, but shifted her chair over slightly so that there was space next to her where he might kneel at the table. Margie appeared in the doorway, carrying a chair from their small dining table. ‘Thought you might like something to sit on this time.’

‘Thanks.’ Before seating himself he noticed the single ball of scrunched up paper tucked in the corner. He picked it up and flattened it out, wishing he hadn't. Another picture of the dead woman downstairs. He hazarded a guess that it wasn't Grace who scrunched it into a ball and explained why Margie had been so short with him when he'd knocked. Normal children did not fixate on drawing dead people.

‘Have you always liked drawing?’ Ianto asked, starting up their game of questions again.

‘Mostly. What about you?’

‘I'm not a very good drawer,’ he replied. ‘Not people, anyway.’ He took up the pencils and sketched in earnest this time, choosing to draw a simple scene from his walk work, where the road bifurcated around an old pub. It was mostly straight lines and simple shapes. There was a bus stop on the right hand side of the road where he sketched, just for fun, a bright red double deck bus. There were of course no famous red buses on the route, just plain old white buses of a kind that could be found in any city across the globe. If kids could draw things that didn't exist, why could he?

‘What do you think?’ he asked, showing her the beginning of his double decker.

‘The wheels are a bit funny,’ she said, and he had to agree. Sticking to square lines had been a good idea.

They drew in silence for a little while, Ianto beginning to enjoy the mind-emptying nature of focusing on putting colour on the page.

‘Are you a policeman?’ Grace asked.

Ianto was taken aback by the question. ‘No. What makes you say that?’

‘Policemen ask lots of questions. There were lots of policemen asking questions.’

Ianto assumed she meant the detective that had also door knocked their own apartment. Presumably Grace had taken in far more of that exchange than her mother believed. ‘Did they scare you?’

She didn't say anything in reply. ‘Ah, you broke the rules by not answering,’ he said, trying to be teasing. ‘That means I get two more questions. Did the policeman tell you what happened the other day? Is that why you drew a picture of it?’ He pulled across the picture shed drawn that had been crumpled into a ball and then flattened back out. It was a crude representation of a woman lying in a pool of blood, but not the sort of thing any child should draw. Ever. If she was frightened by it she didn't show it.

She pulled the picture closer and then turned it around. ‘You had it upside down,’ she said, before pushing it back towards him. The woman was now lying at the top of the page, like she was splayed on the ceiling. Ianto’s stomach did a backflip.

‘Did you draw this after the policeman came to ask you mum some questions?’

‘No. I wanted to show him my picture but Mummy told me to go to my room until he was gone. She was angry when I showed her afterwards. She put it in the bin but I got it back. She looked up at him with an expectant gaze. Do you like it?’

What the hell kind of question was that? ‘It's um, very lifelike,’ he said, struggling to find a diplomatic way to describe the drawing. Ianto’s frown deepened as he continued looking at it, a realisation dawning on him. ‘Are you saying you drew this before the policeman came?’

She pulled out a fresh sheet of paper and began drawing something new without answering his question. Rather than continue playing their game he let it slide. She was just confused. She couldn't have drawn it before it happened.

He picked up a sheet of paper and pencil himself, joining her drawing. He doodled a poor attempt at a hessian sack overbrimming with coffee beans, but really just killing time as he watched her newest creation take place. ‘You like drawing people,’ he said, observing a swathe of green erupting from the bottom of the page and then the side of the apartment complex rising up on the left. Inside on the green verge she began drawing a figure. It was much shorter than most of the figures from her other pictures, short and bowed to one side. More squarish stick shapes appeared next to the emerging figure. ‘Who’s that?’

‘Mister Cuthbert. He lives on the ground floor.. He’s old and has a funny cage thing that he uses to help him walk.’

‘Ah,’ Ianto said, acknowledging the childish attempt to replicate a zimmer frame. ‘Is he out enjoying a walk in the gardens?’

‘He was. Then he fell,’ she said, explaining away the curled sideways slant of him.

‘Is he okay now?’ He really didn't know the residents well enough to know what was going on in the complex, but clearly a child, with a lot of spare time on her hands, a view of the entire courtyard and an active imagination, did.

‘He will be, but not for a while. The ambulance is coming to take him away,’ she replied, beginning to sketch in a large square green and yellow truck.

‘That's a pity,’ Ianto said.

‘It wasn't his fault. The ground was shaking. That's why he fell over.’

Chapter Text

‘Ianto, my office please,’ Yvonne called out. Ianto locked the screen of his computer and stepped inside, passing through the smoky glass door behind him, PDA at the ready to take whatever instructions Yvonne had. They worked well together, mostly because Ianto was a stickler for detail and Yvonne liked to be across absolutely everything and everyone. He didn't mind her demanding nature. If he was in charge of as many things as she was, he imagined he'd be pretty demanding too.

‘Close the door behind you.’ Ianto did, and readied himself for something that was on their strict need to know list of projects. The file sitting on top of the matching smoke coloured glass desk was extremely thin, but there was no mistaking the name on the front, printed below the stark black on white Torchwood symbol. Project Llewellyn. His stomach sank.

‘I had Kieran in here earlier this morning pacing around and wearing out the carpet, complaining about a case file he was supposedly meant to be read in on. Apparently this is the one he was referring to,’ she said, lifting it up. ‘Would you care to explain why you were using Torchwood resources for personal use?’

‘Sorry?’ He went for playing dumb as a first line of defence even though knowing it wasn't going to wash.

‘Don't get cute with me, Ianto. Chem Analytics coincidentally followed up with me. Wanted to know if they needed to complete any further analysis on project Llewellyn. Only there is no project Llewellyn. I didn’t have to look far to know how it had come into being. Honestly, it had your fingerprints all over it.’

He flushed with embarrassment. He hadn't expected to get caught out. ‘Just trying to help out the police with a local murder investigation.’

‘A murder investigation?’ Her voice ratcheted up a notch in its incredulity. ‘Next you'll be telling me Torchwood should dedicate resources to finding lost puppies.’

He stiffened in his chair, shoulders rising defensively. ‘It wasn't any of Kieran's business,’ he said, sounding a tad childish and petulant.

‘He's my head of security. It was absolutely his business to question things.’ She flicked through the thin file again, forehead creasing. ‘Why did you want this analysed?’

‘It's just a bit odd, that's all,’ he said, feeling it to be an inadequate response. ‘The police haven't got any leads and our equipment is better than theirs.’ He knew it was wrong. He'd taken advantage of his position, knowing it wouldn't, or shouldn't have been questioned.

Yvonne dropped the file back down on her desk, her face an impenetrable shield of disappointment. ‘Your sudden social conscience of late is, whilst commendable, very clearly impacting on your work. I want this to be your first and last warning, Ianto.’

‘Won't happen again, I promise.’ It wouldn't because it had been a dead end. The real question was what did a little girl and a fictitious winged man have to do with murder?

Chapter Text

Ianto wandered down the corridors of his apartment block feeling slightly silly. It was ridiculously late and no sensible person, who wasn’t up to no good, would be haunting the passages at this hour. The idea of a monster lurking the complex though had him intrigued. If there was something around here, it would only come out at night, surely. That’s what any smart monster would do, he told himself.

He pressed the button for the lift, which pinged gently open, and for once didn’t protest at his request to be taken to the top floor. The butting simply lit up and the doors curled shut, beginning the slow ascent.
He’d begun his search on his own third floor, then moved down to the second, then the ground floor, before heading out into the courtyard and surveying the area there before coming back inside. Now he strode from the lift along the main southern wing and up through the fire stairwell to the roof. He’d left it to last, deciding that statistically that was the most likely hideout for a monster.

He pushed through the heavy fire door, getting a rush of chilly autumnal air hit him in the face. The roof was not an inspiring architectural feature of the building. It was cluttered with air condensers spewing out a constant stream of cloud and stink pipes issuing even less pleasant emissions from the combined plumbing of its eighty or so residents.

He moved quietly between them, but there was no one else up here having a sneaky 2am cigarette, and no teenage lovers using it as an illicit rendezvous point for the quickie that their parents disapproved of. Even the pigeons had abandoned it for the night, leaving only traces of their droppings painting the concrete parapet wall that ensconced the roof. He stared out over the edge. It wasn’t the greatest view, but it was a view. Sodium lights twinkled in predictable patterns, intersecting this way and that. Smaller, brighter lights snaked between them at intervals as London’s residents came off and went on shift. Some small part of the city was always on the move.

He went from scanning the lights to scanning the shadows. A monster like the one in Grace’s pictures couldn’t be hard to find; not unless it was slipping through from some other dimension or place in space/time. Such things were possible, he knew, but mostly those things occurred in Cardiff, where Torchwood Three had been posted for over a century, monitoring a tear in the rift that did indeed allow things to pass through it from other places.

He huddled there, in the lee of one of the air condensers, trying to keep warm in its steamy breath until his eyelids grew heavy and he knew that nothing was going to make an appearance tonight. It had been a long shot, he supposed, picking himself back up and yawning widely.

Inside the stairwell, the light flickered once, then twice. He skipped down the last few steps and pushed out onto his third floor landing before the dodgy lighting in the stairwell died altogether. Back in the comforting embrace of the well lit apartment hallway, he pictured his bed waiting for him, ready to fight for whatever space Melvin would give him. He was so tired he didn’t think he’d care much if all he got was the very edge.

Without warning, the hallway lights went out. Ianto swallowed down a surge of panic as the corridors around him turned from brightly lit to dark as night. It blinded him for a few seconds, being pitched into the sudden darkness.

Screams erupted from somewhere further down the hallway. Instinctively he ran towards them, pinballing along the corridor walls until his eyes could adjust to the total lack of light. He reached the door behind which the screams were coming, loud and terrified. The kind of screams that came from pain being inflicted. In his mind he imagined a woman being restrained against the ceiling, having her body slashed apart.

He grabbed for the doorknob, pulling at it hard but it refused to budge. ‘Hello!’ he yelled out. ‘I can help! Please just let me in!’ There were more screams and then they abruptly stopped, dying in the throat of whoever had been making them. He rattled the door again, still trying to get inside to help, then trying to unsuccessfully shoulder barge it open.

More screaming began, this time behind him, somewhere off down the other way. He debated with himself for only a second before running back towards the new cries for help. That door too was barred against him. Then there were more screams, overlapping with the first lot. Another door, more screaming until no matter which way he turned there were just more locked doors and more blood curdling screams and nothing but him and the darkness to help them.

‘Please!’ He begged to nothing and no one in particular, banging on the door. ‘Let me in!’

A shiver ran down his spine and he felt a shift in the air. He turned his head to the right and there, right at the end of the black corridor, was a single set of blood red luminous eyes staring straight at him. He didn't have to guess that it was coming for him. He yanked at the door as hard as he could, feeling the eyes and whatever they belonged to getting closer and closer.

The door shuddered in its jamb as he fought against it, trying mightily to get it to open. The red eyes were almost upon him now and, in the darkness, his eyes had adjusted just enough to make out the edges of huge silvery wings, not made of feathers but made of millions of tiny glistening scales; like those of a moth. The walls began to rumble and shake around him. Huge, sharp talons swung out to slash at him and he screamed.

Chapter Text

Ianto was shaken out of his bed, nearly throwing himself from it in a tangle of bedsheets and sweat soaked pyjamas. For just a few seconds the world continued to shudder around him, a table lamp toppling off onto the floor and a cheap framed print of the seaside on the wall coming to hang at a severe tilt. Then the world stopped moving and Ianto let out a shuddering breath of his own. Just a dream, he realised, or a nightmare, yet the shaking he’d felt within that nightmare had been real.

He pushed himself to his feet, grabbing his phone and his slippers. Something leapt out from the corner of his eye and he gasped until he realised it was only Melvin, leaping up onto the bed.

‘Shit,’ he swore, catching his breath. ‘You scared the hell out of me.’ If Melvin was contrite he didn't show it, swinging his tail from side to side and looking at him for some sort of explanation as to what was going on.

Ianto rubbed a hand down his face, feeling the aching exhaustion in his facial muscles before running his hands back through his hair, letting his fingers curl into the short hair tugging it away from the scalp, trying to stretch out some of the tension. He was wound up like a spring, still reeling from the nightmare, making him jumpy and irrational. Having the world around him rattle and shake hadn’t helped to calm his frayed nerves.

He pushed open his front door, stumbling down the corridor. Only a few faces dared open their doors, jolted from early morning slumber as he had been. “Are you okay?” “Was that an earthquake?” The flurry of short questions peppered him as he made it to the halfway point along the corridor, opening out onto large windows that overlooked the courtyard and the other side of the complex. It was early morning, the first light already appearing and washing the world outside in a pale grey hue. Everything outside looked okay until he caught a small figure huddled on the ground, with something blue and metal lying beside it. Alarmingly, the figure wasn't moving.

He flew down the stairs and out into the courtyard, finding an old man lying on the ground, writhing in pain. He rushed forward, moving the fallen walking frame away from his body. ‘Are you okay?’

The old man winced and cried out. ‘I can't get up!’ Ianto tried to get arms under the man to help him to his feet but the more he tried to move the man the more he cried out in absolute agony.

‘My hip,’ the elderly man groaned. Ianto realised it must have been broken in the fall. He dialled 999 and gave them the address, with a request to please hurry. Their instructions to him were limited and generally unhelpful in doing anything to relieve the man’s pain and distress.

‘It's okay,’ Ianto said, trying to be reassuring, which was hard to do standing in the frigid morning air dressed only in his pyjamas and slippers. ‘I've called for an ambulance. They're on their way now. What's your name?’

‘Englebert,’ the man wheezed in between gasps of pain.

‘Englebert,’ Ianto repeated. ‘Is that your first name or your last name?’

‘First. Surname’s Cuthbert. Like the archbishop. Just going for my morning stroll and then everything was shaking.’

Ianto nodded. ‘An earthquake, I think,’ he said, even if it sounded foolish.

‘Never had one of those before.’

‘Me either,’ Ianto replied, surprised at how metaphorically shaken he felt, or maybe that was just the residual terror from his nightmare. ‘It's okay, Englebert,’ Ianto told him. ‘We’ll have you patched up and back in no time.’

As he waited for help to arrive he looked up at the row of windows on the fourth floor and saw Grace standing there, curtain pulled back and staring back out at him. Then she smiled and gave a little wave that made him go cold all over. Everything was just like her drawing.

Chapter Text

Ianto strode through the office checking his watch for the umpteenth time and despairing the fact that the digits began with a nine and not an eight. He hadn't meant to be late but the paramedics had held him up to get his story for their notes before taking Mr Cuthbert away in their ambulance, gratefully dosed up on painkillers.

Kieran was already loitering by his desk as he tried to enter unnoticed, knowing that was no avail. ‘Sorry I dropped you in it the other day,’ Kieran said, looking genuinely apologetic as he hovered, clutching yet another one of his power smoothies. ‘Like everyone hasn't occasionally used Torchwood research for their own personal benefit,’ he said, trying to pretend that he didn’t think Ianto had broken the rules, which he, as their Head of Security, was meant to be enforcing. ‘Not that I’m condoning that sort of thing… Speaking of,’ he said, tugging a folded printout from his tight, buttock cupping sage chinos, ‘I got this for you. A bit of a laugh to make up for the bollocking.’

Ianto took the piece of paper and unfolded it. ‘What is it?’

‘Remember that set-up you gave me about a Mothman the other day? Well, I found this. Not exactly a direct link, but this town where weird stuff kept happening and they put it down to some crazy monster creature with big wings and red eyes and that turned out to be nothing more than migrating waterbirds. Not exactly Friday the 13th stuff, but thought you'd get a kick out of it.’

He read the first paragraph, stating that “In West Virginia folklore, the Mothman is a humanoid creature reportedly seen in the Point Pleasant area from November 15, 1966, to December 15, 1967. The first newspaper report was published in the Point Pleasant Register, dated November 16, 1966, titled "Couples See Man-Sized Bird .. Creature... Something". The national press soon picked up the reports and helped spread the story across the United States. The source of the legend is believed to have originated from sightings of out-of-migration sandhill cranes or herons.” He didn’t bother reading the rest. ‘Thanks,’ he replied, trying and failing to sound convincing.

‘Really, mate,’ Kieran insisted. ‘No hard feelings, okay? Just doing my job. If there's anyone around here I'm worried about being cloned and trying to destroy Torchwood, it'd be someone under the radar like you.’

‘Yeah,’ Ianto absently agreed. Because he was doing such a fine job of it so far.

He waited for Kieran to depart before tossing the piece of paper on the desk and opening up his computer. The only thing he wanted to know right now was what the hell had happened this morning. Google had come up with nothing but Torchwood's sensor equipment was far better than anything else.

When he searched the register of seismic and other activity he came up empty. That couldn't be right. No tectonic shifts, no fluctuations in seismic radars anywhere in the UK, let alone isolated to a single apartment block in West London. Even if it wasn't an earthquake it still would have registered the movement. He hadn't imagined it, he'd felt it. He'd seen things in his apartment knocked over. His neighbours had felt it. A frail old man had broken his hip because of it. It wasn't just some massive lorry driving by. Everything had shaken. But how did you have an earthquake without registering the slightest geological motion?

‘Ah, Ianto. You're here.’ Yvonne stepped from her plush office, just in time to see the perplexed look of worry on his face. She checked her expensive silver watch. 9:45. ‘Ianto, this is starting to become a habit,’ Yvonne sounded annoyed this time.

‘It won't happen again.’

‘Won't it? That's what you said last time. Honestly, late to work on multiple occasions, using facilities like your own private lab, I don't know what's gotten into you lately.’

He blushed at her words, knowing that anyone within earshot was listening intently to every humiliating word. ‘There was this thing at my apartment,’ he began, but Yvonne raised a hand to silence him before he could explain any further.

‘Take the rest of the day off.’

‘But I just got here.’

‘And I'm telling you to go home. Think long and hard about whether you still want this job.’

All his muscles clenched defensively at the insinuation. ‘Of course I still want this job,’ he said, trying to keep his voice level and not let his anger and frustration seep through.

‘Like I said, take the day. Think on it.’

Chapter Text

He was furious by the time he got home. So much so that he marched straight up to apartment 44A and thumped on the door.

Margie frowned as she opened the door to him. ‘Ianto? It's the middle of the day.’

He pushed past her, still fuming from Yvonne's dismissal and the. Fact that he couldn't tell anyone what was really going on because he simply didn't know himself.

‘Grace is at school.’ He didn’t miss the annoyed tone in her voice at gaming him barge his way into her apartment.

He twirled on his heels, all that pent up frustration finally having a suitable audience. ‘She knew,’ he said. ‘She fucking knew, Margie. She had a picture of it and everything, predicting what would happen.’ As he'd been putting together his comments for the paramedics reports one of them admitted to him that the fall looked bad and that the poor old sod would probably spend months in a rehabilitation facility learning to walk again. He might never come back was the sad reality.

Ianto stormed out of the room and into Grace’s bedroom, rifling through the piles of drawings until he found the one he was looking for. He strode back out and held it up for her to see in his still shaking hand. ‘The earthquake, the old man being outside when it happened, the ambulance. She put it all down on paper days ago.’

Margie took the page from Ianto’s hand, brow furrowing as she looked at it. ‘Couldn't it just be a coincidence? She said she saw you this morning down there helping. You’re not in this picture. She didn't draw that.’

No, she hadn't. He hadn't considered that until it had been pointed out to him. What did that mean? Was it really just a coincidence?

‘He goes for a walk most mornings,’ she said, trying to rationalise it. ‘I've seen him when I've had early meetings to get ready for. Grace would see him all the time from her window.’

That was true enough. And was it really that much of a stretch to imagine an old man hunched over his walker having a fall and needing an ambulance? ‘She said he fell because the ground was shaking.’

‘When?’

‘When she drew it. That’s what she told me.’

‘Right…’ Margie sank down onto the end of the sofa, still clutching the paper.

Watching her deflate at the news was enough to defuse Ianto's own temper, moving to sit on the other end of the sofa. ‘Has her IQ ever been tested?’

‘No, why?’

‘She’s very perceptive. She sees things, makes connections that children her age shouldn’t.’ Maybe she was somewhere on the autistic spectrum but there was no way of knowing that either. It was crazy to think that she was predicting things that hadn’t yet happened. You could see an old man with a walking frame and assume that with his age and frailty that he might one day have an accident. That was speculative, not premonitory. You might assume someone who lived on their own had a pet, though knowing it was a black cat with two very distinct white patches was terribly specific.

‘Should we be worried? You look worried. God, she’s damaged or autistic or something, isn't she? Her and this imaginary friend of hers, this Mothman thing.’

‘I don't think we should jump to conclusions. I had an imaginary friend when I was a kid. Didn't you?’

‘Well, yes, but…’

‘And we turned out okay, didn't we?’

Margie chewed on that thought for a while, forcing them both into silent contemplation until she spoke again. ‘You said you investigate paranormal things. This is paranormal isn't it?’

‘I…what I do is not that clear cut,’ struggling to explain Torchwood without actually explaining it. The Official Secrets Act existed for a reason, and as he was teetering on the edge of his job as it was, he didn't want an act of treason slapped on top of it. ‘And no, I'm not sure if this is paranormal,’ he said, lying outright. It was creepy and weird and starting to freak him out a little bit though he didn’t like to admit it. ‘It's something tangible but Grace is somehow receptive to whatever it is. Maybe it's just a prepubescent thing, I don't know.’

‘What if this Mothman thing she keeps drawing is real?’

‘You think it might be?’ Ianto was genuinely curious as to just how far Margie was willing to believe in things from another world.

‘I don't know. But someone killed that girl and strange things seem to have been happening ever since.’ He pulled Kieran's now crumpled printout from his pocket and handed it across to her.

She frowned as she read it with a careful paralegal eye. ‘Are you saying this was a hoax? That maybe we’re just talking about a man wearing a mask or a costume or something?’

‘I'm saying I don't know what it was. Maybe it was just birds back then and someone has picked this up and thought they could start scaring people with it. Margie… I…’ He didn't like asking a protective mother such difficult things. ‘I think we need to start asking Grace some hard questions about who this man in her pictures really is.’

Margie nodded, trying to hand back the paper whilst Ianto indicated with his hand that she should keep it. ‘Alright. But tomorrow, okay? After this morning I just need a break from it.’

‘Okay. Tomorrow, then.’ He needed a break too. If he didn't, it wouldn't matter what happened. There'd be no Torchwood to back him up if it came down to that.

Melvin was waiting for him when he came back downstairs. It was too early for a meal but that didn't stop him from snaking around Ianto's legs endlessly as he undressed from his barely worn suit into loose track pants and a hoodie. It was the kind of clothes he wore when he wanted to feel sorry for himself. On another day he might have been delighted to have the time off, able to catch up on a pile of laundry or doing a decent grocery shop rather than just the quick handful of items he usually grabbed. He could even go for a walk around the neighbourhood, getting himself familiar with the surroundings that still felt new despite the few months he'd been here. There was always another quaint pub to find, or a dusty little bookstore, or even just a nice bench under a nice tree where someone might sit and just watch the world go by.

Ianto’s world was going by seemingly without him as he flopped back on the sofa, quickly finding a heavy warm lump occupying his lap. He ran his fingers through the soft fur, earning himself a consistent thrumming purr as reward. Sometimes he was grateful for the company of his adopted feline. When had he last been out on a date? Hell, when had he last even gone out with his friends at work? Guleraana had probably stopped inviting him along. Without noticing, he'd fallen into a nomadic life of solitude, focused on his job and not much more. If it weren't for Margie and Grace, he’d have had no company at all.

He just knew something was wrong, but until he could prove what it was, Yvonne wasn't going to take him seriously. She of all people should have understood that he'd seen things most people couldn't even dream about and instincts were everything. The trouble was, he just didn't know what to do to figure it out. You could lock up an alien or an adult and force them to talk, but Grace was just a little girl. At least he was pretty sure she was a little girl. God, what if she wasn't? What if she was something else, or possessed or infected or something…

Melvin mewled out a noise, breaking him from his spiralling thoughts. He picked up the cat from his lap and hugged him close, scratching his head and ears. Animals knew when something was amiss and Melvin had welcomed Grace with open arms when she'd been here. ‘If something wasn't right about her, you’d know, wouldn’t you?’ he asked the cat. Melvin didn't reply, simply enjoying the petting and attention. The calming presence was just what he needed right now.

Chapter Text

He felt refreshed when he woke up the next morning, a full hour before his alarm was due to go off. He had energy and a renewed perspective. He was going to bounce into work and dispel any concerns Yvonne had about him. What he was doing outside of hours would stay that way from here on in. He was going over to see Margie and Grace tonight and he had every intention of being direct and getting to the bottom of the issue. It was, however, not his job. He didn't have to take this on. He could walk away from it if he chose. Ultimately his fate was in his own hands. He could keep the two separate, he told himself. In fact, he simply had to.

He pushed himself out the door earlier than usual. He'd get to work before the rush, before everyone else, and have a pile of things from his to do list done before anyone even gave a thought to coffee. He owed it to them for all the time he'd wasted being distracted.

A light drizzle that had begun the night before had carried on through the night and persisted even as he walked along the street toward the tube station. It clung to the fibres of his charcoal grey overcoat, settling on the outside as tiny beads of shimmering water without seeping in, not heavy enough to warrant opening an umbrella.

The street lights still glowed overhead, forcing small patches of brightness through the drizzly gloom. As he passed his local pub at the fork in the road there were more lights, this time flashing from a cluster of police cars and paramedic vehicles parked in the area. Not even a Thursday or a Friday night and the pub was pushing out casualties, he thought. The pub itself wasn't cordoned off but the right hand road and the pavement had been, forcing him to cross the road to go around it.

Ianto saw the police cars and the yellow. Incident tape, forming an impenetrable barrier between themselves and whatever it was happening within their confines. He kept on walking. He wasn't even mildly curious. Probably just a pair of blokes who'd had far too much booze passed out in the bus shelter. The paramedics would then proceed to waste an hour trying to assess if they were unwell, only to spend the time watching them slowly sober up enough to trundle back home under their own steam. Ianto had one task only for today and that was to get to work on time and do a damn job. Yvonne wasn't likely to give him a third chance. One more screw up and he'd be toast.

The police were here, doing their job. Whatever it was, it shouldn't concern him. No more than the murder of the girl downstairs. Maybe they had no leads but that didn't mean it would stay that way forever. They might solve it tomorrow. Then it wouldn't be his problem any more. He was just going to tell Margie that everything was okay and that he'd overreacted. There was nothing wrong with Grace and let that be the end of it. If she heard it from him she'd have to believe it. As the cars swept by on the road slowly navigating around emergency vehicles he reminded himself again that it wasn't his job. Strictly speaking it never had been. So he kept on walking, focusing just on his job and nobody else's.

Chapter Text

‘You seem to have a spring back in your step,’ Guleraana remarked as he set her coffee down on the desk behind the expansive reception counter.

‘Do I?’ he said, still searching for the coaster to put her coffee mug on, knowing that she never bothered with such things and had probably shoved it in a drawer somewhere. Forced to make do, he set it down, knowing it would leave a ring on the lacquered wood surface.

‘You haven't even stopped to say hi,’ G replied, ‘just been like the busiest bee in Torchwood, rushing around here, there and everywhere. Didn’t think I was going to get a coffee today.’

‘Just trying to keep my job,’ he said with no small amount of resentment. He was still reeling from this morning’s slightly condescending “much better” remark from Yvonne. It was head down and bum up from now until he was back in everyone's good books. He had been distracted by life outside of work, he admitted, but it hadn't been trivial things.

‘And you've been on time for a change,’ Guleraana added, reaching for the coffee mug before Ianto could take it away as punishment.

‘Oh, har har. It was twice, G.’

‘Three times,’ she corrected him. ‘Three times in the last week and not once in all the time before that.’

‘Everyone's entitled to a bad run every now and then.’

‘Yeah,’ she nodded, taking a sip. ‘I reckon now that you've put all that murder business behind you, things should be back to normal, right? Back to chirpy, friendly Ianto who makes me my coffee before I even have to ask. Can't tell you how nice that is.’

He nodded in agreement, feeling guilty. How could he break it to her the fact that he’d done the complete opposite? If anything, that was the puzzle that was keeping him going. Just not right now. Right now he had a reputation to rebuild. He shrugged. ‘Can't explain it, G.’

She paused over the rim of her mug and studied him. ‘It's not a girl, is it? Is that what's got you floundering and turning up to work late?’

He rolled his eyes at her. ‘Now you're sounding like Kieran.’ Why was it that everyone equated his obsession with something that was possibly a case for Torchwood with being stuck in clumsy first date mode? ‘Maybe I was away on important Torchwood business.’

Her eyebrows arched in readiness for some high quality gossip. ‘Were you?’

‘Maybe.’ G was the one person he might be able to admit it to without it getting back to either Kieran or Yvonne. She loved to gossip, but she'd never betray him for a water cooler moment.

There was a conspiratorial grin over the lip of her mug. ‘But you're not going to tell your Auntie G what it is?’

‘Nope.’ As much as he loved Guleraana, it didn't pay to be too trusting.

Chapter Text

By the time the tube train had pulled up to whisk him away from the bustling of Canary Wharf Ianto felt decidedly guilty. How could he just ignore what he knew didn't make sense? He couldn't abandon Margie and Grace until he understood what the connection was between them and all the other odd goings on in his apartment block.

The tube carriage swayed from side to side with each turn in the track. The sensation just about had Ianto nodding off to sleep, packed in cheek by jowl with the rest of his fellow passengers. Whilst he’d been bright-eyed first thing this morning, now he felt like he’d run a marathon instead of just an ordinary day at the office. Yesterday it had been good just to have a few hours of not thinking about Grace, but now it was back at the forefront of his mind, the problem burrowing away him.

The rain hadn’t let up during the day, and was still coming down in small apathetic droplets, making the journey home feel even more dreary and exhausting. Across the road from the pub, the bus shelter remained bedecked in yellow police tape. Though there were no actual police to be found, a temporary bus stop sign had been erected a few yards further down the road, and a lone disgruntled commuter huddled under a coat hood offering the only protection against the inclement weather, bearing down an unhappy glare at the unoccupied, but off limits shelter. Life was, at times, decidedly unfair.

He was damp and cold by the time he reached home. His collar clung heavily against his neck, the chill dampness of it soaking into his skin. It was made worse by the refusal of the lift to work, no matter how many times he stamped his finger into the buttons, forced instead to march up the stairs in his heavy sodden state, dropping his keys as they likewise refused to slide into the lock on the first attempt. More unfairness. He needed a hot shower and change of clothes before he contemplated anything else.

‘You'll have to wait too,’ he told his feline flatmate, already dropping clothes on the floor as he stripped them off, all the usual care and regard for putting them directly in the laundry hamper going unheeded. The shower was the one place where he could finally have five minutes all to himself.

Five minutes of scalding hot water hadn't been much but it had helped strip some of the tired ache from his body. He scrubbed his face and scalp extra hard, massaging out some of the tension, watching the soapy water spiral hypnotically down the plughole. He now felt ready to tackle a mystery, even if his head told him he should probably leave it well alone.

No one answered the door when he first knocked, waiting the requisite thirty seconds, so he knocked again. It was a full minute before there was any movement and he'd been about to turn around and go, assuming that the girls had gone out to get takeaway or had some other reason to be out when they were supposed to be in.

The chain slid noisily in the latch before the door opened a few inches. Margie squinted at him, and if he wasn't mistaken she looked like she was in pyjamas and a dressing down. ‘Ianto? For god’s sake,’ she mumbled, rubbing a hand over her face. ‘What are you doing here now? You could have called to say you weren't coming tonight.’ She used that tired, slightly irate motherly tone on him, which took him aback.

‘What? Why?’

She gave him a look like he was mental. ‘Ianto, it's nearly eleven. I put Grace to bed hours ago after you didn't show.’

‘No, that's not right. I literally just got home.’

‘Well then, your boss needs to pay you some serious overtime,’ she said. ‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow or some other time.’ She was about to close the door on him but he jammed a foot in the gap to stop her, confused by what she was saying.

‘No, I… Wait,’ he implored. He checked his watch. He'd gotten in a quarter of an hour ago, taken a quick shower and headed straight upstairs. It couldn't have been later than seven o'clock, yet his watch was telling him otherwise. He toggled the buttons on the side, flicking through the date and the alarm time, but only confirming what he knew to be wrong. No. He had absolutely, unequivocally left work on time and had arrived home on time. Four hours could not simply have disappeared in the time between stepping out of the shower and walking upstairs. Just like the time he'd been late to work by an hour he realised. He was certain at that time as well he hadn't just lost an hour or set his clock wrong. ‘I swear to you I left my apartment a few minutes ago. It was seven o'clock.’

There was an impatient eye roll from Margie, as if she wanted nothing more than to crawl back into bed and forget Ianto had ever darkened her doorstep. ‘Well, it's not now. Please, Ianto, can I just go to bed and we'll catch up later? You've obviously got a lot on right now.’

He didn't let her passive aggressive suggestion deter him. ‘Please. Can we just talk for a few minutes?’ She heaved a sigh at him but the door closed and the chain was unlatched before opening back wide enough to let him in. ‘Thank you.’

He stepped inside and Margie reached for a floor lamp flicking it on to give the apartment living room a glow. Ianto paced the room without speaking for a few moments, trying to make sense of things. ‘Do you ever notice time moving funny around here?’ he asked.

Margie pulled the tie on her robe tight around her waist and folded her arms. ‘What?’

‘Like losing an hour. Or four. Things that seem to take ages one day and take no time at all another day.’

She shook her head in disbelief. ‘That's just life.’

‘No, I mean like actual time differences. Think about it for a second.’

She humoured him but still sounded unconvinced. ‘I don't know. Maybe? Does it matter?’

‘Of course it matters! You don't just lose four hours when you step out your front door.’ If time was being skewed then that changed everything. There was no proper timeline for events. Things could happen out of order, or happen in between periods when. It felt like no time at all and passed. People might be able to see or do things that others didn't notice due to anomalies in time. Like murdering a woman in her apartment and having no one hear her screams.

He moved across to the living room window and drew back the sheer curtains, staring out into the night. He felt like he’d done this before, except that before he’d been standing on the rooftop and it had all been in his head. Except this time he knew exactly what he was looking for. He’d seen the thing now, knew what it looked like beyond the sketches of a child.

‘What are you looking for?’ When he didn't answer her, she drew her own conclusions. ‘You think there's really something out there. That she's seen it for real? God, could it have been the same thing that killed that other woman this morning, couldn't it?’

He twisted his head away from the window and frowned. ‘What other woman?’

‘It was on the news.’ Margie reached over to the coffee table, flicking on the television to the end of the ten o'clock news where they were going over the headlines from the top of the hour. She keyed the volume down low so as not to wake Grace. A brutal murder in London's West, a body mutilated and dumped on top of a bus shelter roof, thought to now be linked to a similar murder just a mile away the week prior, the female anchor reported. Murmurings of a serial killer on the loose. The police are appealing to anyone who may have been in the area at the time or seen anyone suspicious.

‘They mean us, don't they?’ Margie asked. ‘Here. That girl downstairs. Someone is killing women and Grace thinks it's a monster from her drawings.’

The news hit Ianto like a punch in the gut. ‘I walked straight past it,’ he said, feeling stupid that he'd been so self-centred and ignorant. It wasn't like him at all.

‘Ianto, I'm scared. How can time just shift? And what does my little girl have to do with all of this?’

Margie moved to the coffee table and picked up a sheaf of papers, shuffling through them until she found the one she wanted, which she thrust in his face. It was not a drawing per se, but just a whole lot of scribbled black pencil, covering the entire page, except for one corner where she'd run out of black pencil and started using dark blue and grey all swirled together in her best attempt to recreate black. ‘What’s this, then? Is it death? Is it the apocalypse? What?’ Margie demanded to know.

He didn't get a chance to reply. The lamp in the room flickered out in the blink of an eye. The television followed suit, plunging the room into darkness. He panicked for a second, feeling that same dread as he had in his nightmares and then stumbled towards the windows, bumping painfully into a sharp corner of a coffee table. He swore at the table before being able to pull back the sheer curtains and peer outside.

‘A localised power outage, perhaps?’ he offered, trying to dispel his own uneasiness. He couldn't see any lights from any of the adjacent apartments or the ones on the opposite side of the courtyard, yet beyond that the glow of the distant city skyline still twinkled in the night.

‘That's insane. I know you’re only saying that to try to make me feel better. I’m not stupid.’ She moved to the kitchen and began rifling in a drawer, before coming out with a small emergency torch, switching it on and pointing it in his direction, safely illuminating the space between them so that he wouldn't injure himself on anything else.

‘Look, I’m not saying the two are connected.’ Like hell they weren't his mind screamed.

She shook her head at him, blonde highlights catching in the torchlight as they swung around her face. ‘That’s it. No more of this softly, softly approach. I’m taking her to a proper doctor like I should have from the start.’

Ianto grabbed her wrist to stop her, holding it tight. ‘Don’t! Do you know what they do with kids like Grace? Do you? They lock them up. Throw away the key.’ There was still every chance they might be able to save Grace from whatever this was.

‘Then tell me what the hell I’m supposed to do? Just trust you? You and your paranormal bollocks?’

‘Mummy?’ Grace’s tiny voice floated down the hall from her bedroom doorway.

‘Gracie! It's okay sweetheart. It's just a little blackout.’

‘You don't have to be scared, Mummy. The Mothman will keep us safe.’

Scared. Ianto was bloody terrified. He skipped back to the window and pulled the curtain back open a few inches, fearful that he’d finally come face to face with the creature in Grace's drawings and his own nightmares, lurking out there in the darkness of night, or perhaps waiting right there at the window, ready to break through it and kill them all. He couldn't be sure when he started to believe that the creature was real. Everything else from Grace’s pictures had a life of its own, why not the monster?

He scanned the courtyard, unconsciously holding his breath as he searched the darkness for those red glowing eyes. His gaze tried to pierce every last shadow, searching for the one thing he didn’t want to find. Then the lights flickered back on, the television humming some mindless infomercial music, and the sudden brightness made him squint. Throughout the courtyard, lights twinkled from the other apartment windows, filling the blackness with reassuring light. Margie was knelt down hugging her daughter and stroking her hair.

‘Everything's fine,’ Ianto said, more for his own reassurance than theirs.

‘Go back to bed, sweetheart, and I'll come tuck you in in a minute.’ They watched Grace totter off back to her room as if nothing had happened. Margie closed the gap between them. ‘Tell me this isn’t anything to do with us. Please.’

‘I don't know,’ Ianto said. ‘Just don't do anything yet. I’ve got some friends I need to speak to. They have equipment, technology.’ He had to tell Yvonne, there was no two ways about it now. This was getting way beyond him. Torchwood must be able to pinpoint exactly what was going on around here. Maybe a morphic field generator or something. Something he couldn't detect with just his own basic equipment. There had to be a reasonable explanation for why a little girl was having premonitions about things and committing them to paper. Something had to be forcing those images into her consciousness. It's time to bring in the cavalry.

Margie frowned at him. ‘Who exactly are you, Ianto?’

‘I'm Torchwood.’

Chapter Text

He rapped on Yvonne's door with a firm purpose. Now was the time to get Torchwood properly involved.
Under his arm he now carried a thick file. Everything he had on Project Llewellyn, which he’d stayed up all night to compile. From the initial DNA testing that came back with no known results to the photographs he’d taken from the murder scene, the police reports from the two murdered women, the paramedics handover notes for the incident involving Englebert Cuthbert and the earthquake that wasn’t, to his own incident reports on the slippages in time being experienced in the vicinity of the area. The only thing he kept from the file were Grace’s drawings. If she was an innocent victim in all of this he didn’t want her getting dragged into it. He’d promised Margie that he’d do everything he could to protect Grace, and it was only his gut instincts that were telling him that she wasn’t the reason everything was happening; only an unwilling participant somehow picking up on the unnatural occurrences. He didn’t like to admit that if things didn’t progress with the investigation, he would probably have no choice but to raise the fact that he’d omitted facts from his report file.

‘Hitting the ground running this morning,’ Yvonne observed as he stood at the door with the file clutched in his hands. ‘Much more like your old self.’ She keenly eyed the file. ‘That doesn’t look like the overnight updates from level sixty eight. Do they need reminding how much funding we’re putting into that project? I’d like to hear that they’re making some kind of progress every now and then.’

Ianto moved forward, putting the file on the desk and sitting down in the chair directly opposite. ‘This is more important right now,’ he said, making sure he sounded as official as possible.

Yvonne raised an eyebrow at him, clocking the name on the file. ‘Is it now? Assume I don't have time to read it all. Give me the precis.’

‘There was a girl murdered in my apartment block two weeks ago.’

‘Yes, you told me that bit already. Your naughty little misuse of Torchwood DNA analysis, if I recall correctly.’

‘Only the police can't understand how she was murdered because the culprit was somehow able to suspend her from the roof before he slashed her to bits.’

‘Sounds gory.’

‘It was. Then, night before last, a second woman was murdered not far away. Also slashed to death, this time lying on the roof of a bus shelter where the police found enough blood pooled on the roof to suggest she had been killed in situ, not dumped there afterwards.’

‘Ah yes, I remember seeing that on the news.’

‘Ask yourself who murders someone on the roof of a bus shelter?’

‘And how does one lift a live victim onto the roof of a bus shelter? Presumably narcotics are involved?’

‘No drugs in her system, and no witnesses or CCTV. The police are clueless on both cases. No leads, no suspects. Nothing.’

‘Ianto, this sounds awfully like a normal police murder investigation…’

He could sense he was losing her already. ‘Just hear me out. There's been other things too. Pipes that leak or just stop working altogether. Walls that shake with no recorded seismic activity.’

She toyed with the edge of the file, running a fingernail up and down it but making no move to open it and explore the details further. ‘And?’

‘And there are temporal anomalies occurring. Chunks of time that just disappear or allow a person to pass through them unawares.’

‘And they're isolated to the building you just happen to live in?’ Yvonne sounded anything but convinced.

‘Yes! No! I don't know. That's why we need to send in a team to check it out.’ He looked at her expression waiting for it to change. ‘I'm serious. I wouldn't be asking if I didn't think there was something wrong.’

‘First murder, now time distortions?’

‘I never said it makes any sense. Maybe they're not even related. Or maybe they are. Maybe whatever killed these women is also responsible for these other things. Maybe it's able to pass through tears in time and space which are causing ripple effect distortions or tremors.’

‘And they're moving through the pipes when all else fails,’ Yvonne said, though sounding like she was mocking him.

He was growing annoyed by her lack of interest in taking him seriously. ‘I don't know. But this is what we do though, isn't it? Investigate possible alien activities. What else could possibly explain all these things that keep happening in one isolated area?’

‘Ianto…’ There was a warning in that single word that he needed to navigate carefully.

‘Please, Yvonne. You know I wouldn’t bring this to you if I wasn't absolutely sure there’s something here we should be investigating. I’ve seen things with my own eyes that I simply can’t explain. Just take a look at the file.’

She sighed. ‘One two-man response team. That's all I'm giving you. They can run a sweep of the building, do a preliminary assessment and set up some basic equipment for ongoing monitoring for a week.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Don't thank me yet. Get me a result and prove to me why I shouldn’t doubt you.’

Chapter Text

Ianto felt a lot better knowing there was a proper Torchwood team now investigating. Well, perhaps not investigating precisely, but going over the place with far more advanced equipment than he could have legitimately laid his hands on.

He didn’t even have to wait. Usually, procurement for anything serious took at least twenty four hours, except in emergency response situations, but Yvonne had pulled some strings and within an hour, there was a two-man unit waiting for instruction from him. It felt strange to be coordinating a response team. Usually he just analysed their initial reports before taking them to Yvonne to brief her on the salient points. It had certainly raised a few eyebrows around the office when the two men in tactical gear turned up at his desk awaiting further orders.

‘You might want to consider changing into civilian clothes,’ he suggested, fearing that his neighbours would be alarmed if two men in black military gear suddenly started going around the place. Whilst they looked brawny and more at home with an assault rifle in their hands, they were actually more adept at handling complex analysis equipment. Military by nature, scientific by training.

‘Whatever you say, sir,’ one replied, making him feel strange at being referred to as sir.

He followed them to a large dark grey utility vehicle, and they drove out to the West London area, parking in a small laneway where the residents usually stored their communal rubbish skips, keeping the vehicle out of sight of prying eyes as they unloaded some of their equipment, tucking it into pockets and belts, leaving the large equipment in the boot until, or if, it was needed.

He let them into the building using his own key and then left them to it. He didn't know either of the two men personally and they looked back at him like he was only going to get underfoot. They didn’t much seem to care that he was executive assistant to Yvonne Hartman. Their orders came from Yvonne and she was the only voice they intended on listening to.

He went outside and sat on the park bench that nestled next to a slightly overgrown buddleia in the courtyard. He hadn’t been given the day off per se, but he was there to assist the investigation team if needed. From the body language they’d given him, they wouldn’t be requiring his help.

It felt strange to just be sitting there and doing nothing. He gazed around the four enclosing walls of the apartments and finally landed on the windows belonging to Margie’s apartment on the top floor. He was surprised to see Grace standing at the windows, smiling and waving to get his attention before disappearing out of sight. A few minutes later both she and Margie were exiting the doors and walking towards him. Grace didn't run towards him but instead stopped and began collecting leaves that had fallen or been blown into the courtyard. Margie approached with a plastic thermos mug and sat down on the bench beside him, watching Grace play with the leaves.

‘She's not in school today?’ Ianto asked, remembering what day it was.

‘I decided to keep her home.’ She took a long sip from her thermos. ‘Well, not entirely true. Her teacher may have suggested it.’

‘Why?’

She gave him a look. ‘Why do you think?’

Ianto turned sideways to face her. ‘I meant to ask you. Does she really think this Mothman is real? I mean, does he follow her around, talk to her, go to school with her?’

Margie shook her head, rubbing her hands up and down the warm sides of the mug. ‘No, I don't think so. But she still manages to freak out the other kids. She never gets asked to go on playdates, never talks about other kids that she's made friends with at school. I get that some kids are more withdrawn and prefer their own company, but even shy kids have friends. I try not to make a big deal of it. She’ll grow out of this phase, I keep telling myself. She’ll become more confident in her own skin in time.’

‘Why did her teacher want her to stay home? Has she been drawing things at school as well?’

‘Worse. She threatened a boy. He was picking on another girl and Grace told him that the Mothman would come and grab him and fly away with him.’

Ah. He could see why a teacher might take issue with that.

‘And you know, with everything else going on, I just wanted to keep her close and keep her safe.’ She took another long drink from her mug, staring across the courtyard. ‘Just look at her now. Doesn't she look to you just like any other child?’

It was true, seeing her dive from one patch of grass to another, gathering up a small bouquet of russet coloured leaves with an expression of delight on her face. Grace looked up towards them and Ianto gave her a little wave back just like she'd done earlier. She turned and jogged back toward the pair of them.

‘You’re going to put the gardener out of a job, Grace,’ her mother said. ‘There won’t be any leaves left for him to rake up.’

‘They look just like wings, don't you think?’ she asked, holding the leaves in two bunches splayed out either side of her. She said it with such a curious joy that it was hard not to smile back. ‘One day maybe I'll have wings and be able to fly too. We’ll be able to go flying together.’

Ianto held his smile in place despite her words. He prayed that the Mothman stayed as far away from her as possible. And the sooner Torchwood found it, the better.

They sat for a while longer as Grace went back to collecting leaves and inspecting the sparse gardens for butterflies that wouldn’t be there. Margie made small talk and asked Ianto more about where he’d grown up and what had made him move to London. Whilst he rarely talked about himself much, it was nice to talk about something that wasn’t confusing and slightly terrifying. His old life back in Wales suddenly seemed so comforting that he almost contemplated what it would be like to go back to it.

He received an invitation for lunch, which he gratefully accepted, despite the promise that it was only sandwiches and some soup. Grace extended the invitation to Melvin and there was very little chance that Ianto could decline on his behalf. He assured Margie that Melvin was very well housetrained and wouldn’t be a bother. If he could put up with Ianto and all his neuroses, he doubted the cat would mind prowling someone else’s apartment for an hour or two.

‘I’ve just got to go check in with the team and I’ll be up shortly,’ he promised. He double checked his watch to make sure he hadn’t lost any time before locating the two men installing a small hidden camera in one of the hallways, just beneath the lift doors. More cameras and monitoring equipment had been set up on the roof and dotted around the various floors. They’d also done a sweep of the dead girl’s apartment, though they were reluctant to share any of their results with him. He got the impression from them that he could review their report once they were done and not before.

Resigned to the fact that they weren’t going to confirm anything for him yet, he returned to his own apartment and bundled Melvin into his carrier. It may not have been far, and he was fairly certain the cat would have been quite content just to be carried in his arms, he didn’t take any chances. He hadn’t been outside the confines of Ianto’s apartment since they’d moved here. Much as he’d loathed his sister foisting charity upon him, he’d be devastated to lose his companion now.

‘Is he in there?’ Grace asked when Ianto set the carrier down.

‘See for yourself.’

Grace knelt on the carpet and peered into the small opening. ‘Yes, there he is. I can just see his little white patches.’ She opened the latch on the carrier and Melvin sauntered out, as if going on an adventure was an everyday thing. He greeted Grace with a fond affection. That was somehow reassuring to Ianto.

They ate lunch, though Grace mostly played with Melvin, distracted from ham, cheese and tomato, whilst sneaking as much of the ham under the table for her visitor as possible. All of last night’s drama seemed to melt away at the normalcy of just sharing food and company. In the light of day, there was no fear of Ianto looking over his shoulder to find a monster hovering at the window, or a tremor about to bring the building crumbling down around them. Then again, perhaps this was just the calm before the storm. He briefly wondered what the team downstairs was discovering. He’d no doubt find out soon enough.

Margie stifled a yawn at the table, scarcely able to conceal it as her brain begged for more oxygen. Despite the earlier caffeine she looked exhausted. He couldn't blame her for that. He hadn’t slept since yesterday either, too busy trying to put forth the case to mobilise a team to investigate.

‘You look like you could do with some sleep,’ he observed.

She rubbed her face, a few strands of hair falling from her ponytail as she did. ‘I didn't get much sleep last night. Between everything else and this expert witness deposition I'm supposed to be preparing for next week…’ Somewhere along the way he’d forgotten that though she was freelance, she had a difficult, time consuming job that paid the bills.

‘Why don’t you take a break? Get a few hours rest. I could stay here and keep an eye on Grace.’

‘No, I can't ask you to do that. I’m sure you’ve got more important things to do.’

‘Oh, please Mum, can Mister Jones and Melvin stay?’

‘It's just a few hours,’ Ianto replied. ‘I’ve not got anywhere to be today.’ No doubt he had a mountain of work piling up for him back at the office, but he was meant to be here to supervise the response team, even if they appeared to need no supervision whatsoever.

She looked relieved, which spoke volumes about just how tired she must have truly been, bottling it up until she collapsed. ‘That would be brilliant. Thank you.’

‘We can draw together,’ Grace said.

‘No.’ Ianto was caught by surprise that both he and Margie said the same thing at the same time. Ianto, however, was the first to backtrack the remark. ‘Didn’t I hear you mention something about Chinese checkers the other day?’

‘Yes, that’s just what I was about to say,’ Margie agreed.

If Grace was put off by their refusal she didn't show it. ‘Okay,’ she said, trundling back to her room to gather up the box and bring it back to the coffee table.

‘Thank you, really,’ Margie said, reaching out to touch Ianto’s arm. ‘Is there anything I can do to thank you?’

‘Show me where you keep your jar of coffee and the mugs and I'll be fine,’ he assured her.

She smiled warmly at him. ‘If I were ten years younger you'd be in big trouble.’

He blushed, not realising that he’d been inadvertently charming, or that anyone might think there was more between them than a budding neighbourly friendship. ‘Off to bed with you, Mrs Robinson,’ he teased.

‘Why did you call Mummy Mrs Robinson?’ Grace asked, unfolding the game board and putting it on the coffee table.

Oh god. How the hell was he supposed to explain that to a child. ‘It’s just a joke,’ he said. ‘Like calling someone a silly sausage.’

‘Oh. And why would you be in trouble? What's wrong with Mummy’s age?’

‘Nothing. It's just something adults say to each other sometimes.’ Good grief. He absolutely did not harbour feelings for her and he was pretty sure that was mutual. Either that or he'd been out of the dating game for so long that he’d completely forgotten all the signals.

Grace counted out the game pieces, ten purple ones for herself, and then doled out ten green pieces to Ianto, whose triangle faced opposite hers on the board. ‘She always says she’s twenty one. She’s younger than you.’

He didn't agree or disagree. Getting into the psychology of desiring youth was far too complex a discussion to have with someone who was only eight. Margie was easily ten years older than him, it was true, but apart from a few crows feet in the corners of her eyes, she was still an attractive woman, capable of rekindling romance and a new life partner despite already having a child from a previous failed relationship. Who knew? If Ianto was ten years older perhaps he'd be the one thinking of her in those terms. He hadn’t set out to be a bachelor, it had just happened that way.

Grace, with all the normal social cues of a child, didn’t offer for him to start the game, making the first move herself, jumping one of her pieces over another to move out onto the main playing section of the board. Ianto replicated the move, remembering not to be too clever and make sure that Grace won. Melvin wandered over and settled beside Grace, curling up into a ball and choosing to take no interest in their game.

‘Do you like not having to go to school today?’ he asked.

‘School is okay,’ she said.

‘Do you have lots of friends there?’ He was curious to know if Grace’s view on the matter matched that of her mother.

‘Not really.’ There was no disappointment in her voice, simply stating it as fact. Autistic kids sometimes did that, he remembered, not having the self awareness to understand or appreciate that it wasn't normal behaviour. They lived in their own heads, which is where Ianto often found himself these days, even though as a kid he’d ridden bikes and run around just like all the other kids he’d grown up with. Introversion had come to him later in life.

‘I’m guessing you like art class best?’

Grace nodded. ‘Maths is okay, too.’

‘I never much liked maths,’ he confessed. Only because he’d had to work damn hard at it, stealing away precious hours he might otherwise have been bunking off with his mates. He was glad of it now though, able to do rather complicated sums in his head and figure out the exact change needed at the cafe before the amount was even keyed into the register, which tended to amaze the teenage cashiers who often gave him finny looks when he offered then a ten pound note plus change for something that cost less than ten pounds.

For a few minutes they fell into companionable silence, moving pieces across the board, skipping over them like frogs on lily pads. The only sound was the thrum of Melvin's deep sleep purring. He let Grace claim two of his checkers before taking one of hers in a four skipping move that was meant to impress.

As they played, it gave Ianto a chance to take in the finer details of the apartment and their lives within it. There was an air or organisation about it, but enough touches of random mess to indicate it was lived in. he didn't fail to notice a sheaf of slightly crumpled pages stuffed into a magazine rack that had failed to make their way to hand either on grace’s bedroom walls, their fridge or on the mantel. Some of the thoughts that had been bothering him these past few days came back to haunt him.

‘Why do you keep drawing him?’ Ianto asked, mentally picturing the array of winged men scattered amongst the other drawings on her walls. ‘The man with the wings?’

Grace didn't look up, focused on the pieces on the board in front of her. ‘He’s always here these days,’ she replied.

‘Does he live in one of the apartments?’

She shrugged. ‘Yes.’

That got his attention. Here was Grace, confirming that she believed one of the residents was the monster. ‘And you’ve seen him?’

She nodded. ‘He only likes to come out at night, though.’ She turned her gaze towards the bedroom window looking out onto the courtyard below and Ianto’s gaze followed hers.

‘Does he come to your bedroom window?’

‘No. But he knows I'm here. I wave to him sometimes. He doesn't really wave back. It's hard to wave when you have claws instead of hands.’

Ianto refused to look at her face, fixated instead on his own slender hands and how astute an observation that was for someone so young. He reflexively balled his hand up into a fist as the stark image of those claws coming slashing towards him flashed in his mind again. ‘Yes, I suppose it would be,’ he said.

Chapter Text

Ianto didn’t see the response team leave for the day. The only sign that they'd finished and had headed back was the fact that their utility vehicle was no longer parked in the side laneway. Perhaps they found something and rushed back to bring in the big guns, but nothing reached him and his phone remained silent until thirty six hours of being awake made him unable to keep his eyes open any longer. He was in bed by six pm and so tired that he didn’t dream of anything at all.

He rushed into work, certain that when he got there he’d be walking right into the middle of something big. It was that same feeling he'd had as a boy on Christmas morning, that sense of anticipation churning in his stomach, waiting for the moment when his Dad finally said that they could go into the living room and see what Santa had left them under the tree. This was what he lived for, working at Torchwood; that excitement of the next big reveal at just how big the universe was and just how small they, the human race of planet Earth, really were in the grand scheme of things.

‘I'm here to see Mister Sands,’ he declared as he entered the lobby, noticing that Guleraana appeared still slightly hungover. He didn't even feel stupid saying the trite password as he usually did.

‘Good morning to you, too,’ G replied, rifling through her handbag for the tube of berocca tablets and dumpling one in a tall glass of water, watching it fizz and turn a lurid shade of orange.

‘I’ll get a coffee going for you as soon as I can,’ Ianto promised, neither confirming nor denying whether that would be ten minutes from now or three hours from now. He got the impression today was going to be a busy day for him.

When he reached level thirty two, all was quiet. He was virtually the first one in, with only two other sleepy analysts looking like they’d pulled an all nighter and forgotten to go home. Even Yvonne wasn't in yet, which filled him with nervous anticipation. Perhaps they’d found something major and had worked deep into the night to investigate it further. He checked his phone again but he hadn’t missed any calls or text messages overnight, demanding he drop everything and make his way to the office ASAP. Strange. He dwelled on the permutations as he made a batch of coffee to fill in the time, unsure where to begin except to clear out his inbox of other trivial matters.

He heard the click of the expensive Jimmy Choos before he saw them. Yvonne was immaculate as ever, not a hair out of place as she strode in, without so much as a shadow under her eyes to indicate a late night reviewing the results of Project Llewellyn.

‘Ah, Ianto, you're here. Excellent. My office, and bring coffee,’ she ordered. His pulse quickened slightly at the command. This was it. They’d found something. It was all kicking off now and he was right in the middle of the action.

It didn't take long for him to whip up a second round of coffee, though only making one for Yvonne. He was too wired up for a second coffee. Carrying it in, he shut the door behind him.

‘Thank you,’ Yvonne said, curtly setting the cup and saucer to one side out of the way as she extracted a crisp file from the drawer under her desk. ‘I knew you'd be eager to hear the results from yesterday’s sweep of the building.’

He nodded, trying hard to keep a poker face even though he was gripping the edge of the chair hard.

‘I’m sorry to report that we’ll be closing off Project Llewellyn effective immediately. There was no conclusive evidence of any spatial, temporal or other anomalies. The team were extremely thorough.’

Ianto's heart sank even as his pulse ratcheted up further notch. No, that couldn't be right. They couldn't have found nothing.

Yvonne reached over to her phone, tapping the speed dial as she slipped in a tiny bluetooth earpiece. ‘Kieran, yes, it's Yvonne.’ She listened as something was said on the other end of the line. ‘No, no. I'm afraid your power green juice just isn't going to entice me. I think I’ll stick to my espresso. Black. Double shot. Ianto’s just made it fresh. No, we can’t all be buff like you. Now, anyway. I need you to pull up a bit of research for me. Ianto here is having a little bit of a moment with something at home. Of course. we’ll debrief in my office in say ten? Thanks, Kieran. You’re a star.’

She pressed the button on the phone speaker off, ending the call and extracting the earbud. ‘There we are. Now, as for you, I think it's best if you stick with light duties today.’ She put her hands up before he could protest. ‘No, no. I insist. You just put all of those worries of yours out of your head.’

‘Out of my head? It's not in my head!’

Yvonne eyed him with a patient stare that was bordering on losing patience. ‘We've investigated the area thoroughly,’ she said. ‘Everything came back as inconclusive.’

‘That's not the same as nothing,’ he insisted. ‘I've worked for you for two years. Why won't you believe me? You saw the file I put together.’

‘Ianto,’ she began in that patient tone again, ‘it's not that I don't believe you. You've done marvellous work, truly, but we expended Torchwood resources on this and that's more than I can say for some. This has become an obsession for you, I can see that now. Which is why I'm impressing upon you the need to take some time to put distance between yourself and it.’

‘But the police,’ he began to argue. He hadn’t even mentioned Grace and her drawings yet. Surely that would sway Yvonne.

‘It's tragic. No one is disputing that. But neither is there any evidence that what happened has anything to do with alien beings or technology. The world is sometimes cruel, Ianto. People do things to one another that are simply unjustifiable. But our job is to protect this planet for the larger majority of good people. There are far worse things out there than anything we can conjure up for ourselves. I need you to be part of that team. You just need to take a few days to clear your head and refocus on what matters. Now, The research team supposedly has a mountain of files for shelved projects that need sorting and archiving. Perhaps you might help them out?’

Despite the upward inflection in her tone, there was a clear order rather than a suggestion that he do just that. She wasn’t going to be receptive to any further details at this point in time, and might even be annoyed that he'd withheld facts from his own investigation, casting doubts on whether he was acting with a clear head in the first instance. ‘Meticulous work is good to help one relax the mind, I find. Coffee first though; you look like you could do with one, and no doubt Guleraana is chomping at the bit by now for one as well, then pop on down to research, there’s a good chap.’ That was him dismissed.

Ianto spent the next hour clearing out the rest of his emails before knowing he’d be forced to head down to research and get bogged down in their mess. He was simply delaying the inevitable, that his semi demotion was the direct result of his thinking he could be a field operative and bring in credible investigations for Torchwood to pursue. He also resented the fact that Kieran was now deeply involved. It wasn’t that he didn't like Kieran. Everyone liked Kieran, either for his beach ready good looks and stunning physique, or simply because Kieran was just a nice bloke. It wasn't long before Kieran was once again haunting his doorstep, carrying his laptop and indicating that the remainder of their conversation was going to be conducted in one of the private meeting rooms, ostensibly to save Ianto from the embarrassment of having his concerns dispelled publicly.

‘Ianto, mate. I hear you’re having a bit of trouble. Never mind. I’m here to put your mind at ease.’

Ianto couldn't see how anyone could put his mind at ease lest they had located and captured the monster from Grace’s pictures.

Kieran flipped open his laptop and brought up the files on the wall screen, revealing a dossier file of various research he'd clearly been compiling since yesterday, or perhaps from even earlier. Had security been watching him for days now since he started turning up late and acting a little bit distracted? ‘What you’ve got here is a simple case of apophenia.’

Ianto's face scrunched up at the word. ‘Apo- what?’

‘It's the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random objects or ideas. Like seeing a street sign with the name of someone you lost, then looking down at your odometer and the mileage numbers coming up with the date of their birthday. You think that the person is trying to send you a message from the grave but they aren't. It's just a coincidence. The mind is trying to create patterns out of nothing. Then there's pareidolia, which is a common form of apophenia that involves imagery. For some people, these images become signs of something significant, such as a message from a loved one or a sign of something yet to come. like those people who think they've seen an image of the virgin many in their morning toast, or believing that everything happens for a reason.’

‘Kieran,’ Ianto began, trying to hold onto his patience, ‘don’t insult my intelligence.’

‘Ianto, mate. Yvonne told me everything. That response team came up empty. There is literally nothing going on. No time distortions, no black holes, no rift activity, Nelson seepage or any other kinds of unusual activity. Have you considered that maybe it's just stress? When was the last time you had a holiday? Pippa could check, I suppose.’

‘I don't need a holiday, Kieran. And I don't need Pippa going through my leave balances.’ Pippa was more at home going through his horoscope than doing any real human resources work.

‘Still, I'm putting you on extended leave,’ Yvonne announced appearing in the doorway. ‘It's a wrench, I know, but I really do think that you need some time to clear your head and get some perspective.’

Perspective? We're they kidding him? He clenched his jaw feeling his tongue stuck painfully between his teeth as he clamped down on it focusing on the pain rather than losing his temper in front of the two people most likely to fire him. ‘You're right,’ he said, hating how docile he sounded. There was something going on. He needed a plan. B. One that didn't involve Torchwood. He just didn't know what that was yet.

Chapter Text

Ianto trailed half a butternut snap through his mug of tepid black tea, swirling it around and watching the crumbs break away and drift down through the amber liquid before settling at the bottom. He dropped the rest of the biscuit into the tea, neither hungry or thirsty and just generally sulking at the futility of it all.

He was sitting behind the reception desk, hiding from the judgemental looks of everyone, seeking solace in only having to face the odd person coming and going through the lobby, each with an appointment with Mister Sands and some not even bothering to make eye contact with him, or perhaps just a forlorn smile of sympathy for the downcast expression on his face.

‘People around here think I’m crazy,’ Ianto complained to the one person who he knew wouldn't judge him.

Guleraana put a placating hand on his shoulder. ‘You know you really do work too hard, Ianto. Maybe what you need is a bit of a holiday, eh? My cousin Sharna just came back from Portugal. Apparently it's lovely there this time of year.’

‘I don't need a holiday!’ H\he said, raising his voice, repeating what he'd already told Kieran and Yvonne to no avail. ‘There’s a killer monster on the loose and a girl who draws pictures of things she’s never seen before and a whole lot of weird shit going on in my apartment block. What I need is a tactical assessment team. Full search and scan, top to bottom.’

Guleraana didn't let Ianto's raised voice bait her. It was one of the things he loved about her, how she didn't put up with his bollocks when he was being a prat. ‘I heard they put you on leave at the end of today.’

‘Jesus, news travels fast around here, doesn't it?’ No wonder people were avoiding looking him in the eye. Failure was considered contagious in a place like this, and no one wanted to attach themselves to someone who was heading down floors rather than up. Even the research team knew he’d been benched to help them and his help wasn't quite as well received as it might have been if he’d been assigned there as executive assistant to the leader of Torchwood, rather than executive assistant currently on gardening leave.

‘Everyone just wants what's best for you. A few weeks someplace sunny would do you some good. Bit of a tan, some of those silly cocktails with umbrellas in them. The coffee will be rubbish while you're gone but…’

‘Forget it.’ He pushed up from the chair. Clearly no one was going to back him in this. He was on two weeks official administrative leave, with an option for a further two if he didn’t come back with a respectable psych assessment. Two weeks to figure it out on his own and prove them all wrong.

Chapter Text

Ianto couldn't remember the last time he’d felt so low. Being put on administrative leave was practically the same as being fired. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t that bad. He was going to be able to come back in two weeks, provided he kept a low profile and stuck to his job. Still, it hurt that he’d gone from being highly respected to pariah in the space of a week. For the first time in a long time he yearned to be back home, subjected to cups of tea and episodes of Coronation Street with his mum. Even putting up with his sister’s judgemental comments would have been a welcome relief. At least he knew when she said something negative, she didn’t really mean it in a life destroying way. She was just being her nagging, protective older sister self. He could have done with someone wanting to wrap him up in cotton wool right now. Times like this make him realise he really did cut a lonely figure and that all of his Torchwood friends were just a few harsh words away from abandoning him completely.

There was a mountain of laundry that needed doing, bed sheets that should have been changed and a pile of dirty dishes accumulating in the sink. All of it went ignored as he curled up on the well worn second hand sofa, huddled under a thick blanket, to ward off any more misfortune as much as it was to keep him warm. He planned on staying there until the need to do anything to preserve life overrode him. He wondered how long until he'd get so hungry he’d need to get up and eat, or need water, or to use the bathroom. Right now he didn’t desire any of those things. He’d already gone a full day and a half without moving from the spot, napping intermittently when the glow of the television failed to keep his mind occupied. Quite the opposite, he felt like he could hermit himself on the sofa for years if need be. Or at least until he ran out of money to pay his rent, which would come a lot sooner than that without a job.

There was a knock at the door that caught him by surprise. He’d been so engrossed in the mind numbing television in front of him – some protracted morning program that was attempting to sell non-stick cookware by the dozens – that he’d tuned out everything else around him. Even the adverts in between weren’t their usual annoying presence which is what normally put him off watching commercial television. Instead he was just zombified in front of the screen, letting the world slip by unawares.

He shuffled towards the door without bothering to check who was on the other side of it. Some tiny part of him hoped it was Kieran, or perhaps even Yvonne, coming to apologise that they had uncovered some new insight and that he was fully justified in bringing the unfolding crisis to their attention. Instead, his crisis melted away in an instant when he saw Margie standing there instead, bringing home to roost the remainder of his misery.

‘I’ve got your post,’ she said. ‘It was so full that half of it was on the floor. Apart from that I was worried why you looked like you hadn’t collected it for a few days.’ More plastic covered, glossy-paged subscriptions about ghost hunting, paranormal sightings and conspiracy theories were clutched in her hands, though she wasn’t perturbed by the overarching theme given what little she knew about what he did, or at least had done, for a living.

He took it from her with a mumbled thanks, keeping his eyes down at the floor and considering cancelling all the subscriptions on the basis that they were just the sort of thing that had gotten him into this mess to begin with.

‘You look terrible,’ she said with a worried frown. ‘Is everything okay? What did your friends find? Do they know what it is? Can they help?’

Every question came at him like another stab in the gut. He sighed, wishing he could have put off this conversation for a few more days, or perhaps forever. ‘They’re not coming, Margie. No one is coming to help us.’

The silence hung in the air for a beat. ‘But you said…’

Frustration surged through him at the idea he was the one being made to suffer for someone else’s problems. ‘There’s nothing going on as far as they’re concerned. They all think I’m stupid or crazy or losing it. Maybe I am. Maybe I'm stupid for ever getting involved with you. Your kid is messed up.’

‘How dare you!’

‘You said it first, not me!’ Ianto’s resentment continued to boil as he gripped the edge of the door, readying to slam it shut in her face. ‘You were dragging her to some quack before I intervened. I wish I never had.’ He took one look at the shocked expression on her face, tears beginning to fill her eyes and immediately regretted his words. He closed his eyes for a second and took in a deep breath, feeling his anger ebb away. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.’

She blinked back her fledgling tears. ‘Me too. I know all you were trying to do is help. I’m sorry if I’ve messed things up for you.’ She sighed. ‘Look, I was just on my way down the street to pick up some lunch from the cafe. Would you like to come?’

He gave a tired shake of his head. ‘Not really. Just feel like staying here for a bit.’

‘Okay.’ He wondered if she was looking over his shoulder, seeing the unkempt state of the place. ‘Perhaps I could get us both something and bring it back here instead? You look like you could use some company. Or at least something to eat.’

He relented without much enthusiasm for debating it. ‘Just make sure they don't put any of that roasted eggplant from a jar on it. I hate that stuff.’

‘Roger that.’

Chapter Text

He managed a shower whilst she was gone, and put a pouch of fresh wet food in Melvin’s bowl. The cat looked put out that it had taken so long to get a meal that wasn’t from his self-service dry kibble feeder. He’d moped around the house in much the same manner as Ianto, feeding off the negative vibes. It took all Ianto’s energy to do just those few small things, tugging on clean clothes and making some effort to pull himself together. He must have dallied under the hot water because no sooner did he have a clean zip-up jacket on than she was back at his door with lunch.

She set the paper bags on the kitchen counter, then ran the hot water in the sink whilst she looked for the cupboard where he kept his plates, taking over cleaning up his kitchen in between serving lunch without even being consulted on it. He was reasonably house proud but found that right now he just couldn't care, and cared even less than someone else had taken notice and was doing something about it. Dishwashing liquid went into the sink with yellow, lemony scented squirt and a thick foam of soap bubbles formed over the water.

‘You didn’t want to go back to work?’ she asked, sliding a panini onto each plate and then flipping open the top of one to double check she had them the right way around before sliding the plate across towards him.

‘They put me on temporary leave,’ he replied, looking at the freshly made roll which looked and smelled excellent but he had no appetite for it.

‘Oh.’ She dipped her hands into the sink full of water, washing the days old coffee mugs and plates. Her guilt at his current predicament was palpable.

He gave the roll a lethargic poke, breaking off a flake of crusty bread. ‘I really thought they were going to help.’

Margie reached for the tea towel and began drying off the few dishes on the side drainer. ‘You said you’re Torchwood. What is that? Or, who is that?’

Did he risk breaking the Official Secrets Act just to tell her? What did it matter now? ‘Torchwood is an organisation set up by the Crown to protect the planet from alien threats and to investigate alien activity and technology with the purpose of researching and understanding that technology so that we can arm ourselves against hostile forces that may be out there.’

She set a freshly dried mug down on the bench. ‘You’re joking, right?’

‘No.’

She sank down onto the bar stool next to his. ‘Bloody hell. Aliens?’

‘They’re real. And they’re out there. And sometimes, not very often, but sometimes, they find their way here. It’s our job to deal with them.’

‘And you think that it was an alien that killed those girls?’

‘I did. But it turns out I was probably wrong. They ran a whole lot of tests and scans and surveillance and found nothing. Inconclusive,’ he added, repeating the word he’d been given.

‘So, what are you saying? You think that it’s actually just some crazy person going around killing people?’

‘Serial killers are unfortunately a thing. Chances are though, that they’ll catch him and lock him up. It's probably just a matter of time until the police track him down.’ It had taken Ianto an awful lot of soul searching to come to the conclusion that he had been trying to see things and make connections where there were none. He’d set himself up for failure and it had taken Torchwood to bring him back down to earth and accept that he'd manufactured a scenario that didn't exist. It was a dishearteningly hard lesson to learn.

‘Aliens,’ Margie muttered again, her own lunch forgotten.

‘I could be arrested and imprisoned for treason just for telling you that,’ he said. ‘Official Secrets Act.’

‘I'm a lawyer by trade, Ianto. I know what you’re risking by telling me, but I appreciate the truth. We can call it client attorney privilege and let that be the end of it. I won't breathe a word of it to anyone.’

Ianto took an experimental bite of his roll, surprised at how good it tasted. He chewed slowly, still getting used to the idea of having food again, and then taking another bite as his appetite came back.

Margie's mobile rang and she rifled through her handbag for it, the poppy little ringtone gradually getting louder as she wrapped a hand around it. ‘Margie O’Malley,’ she answered without checking the caller, having left them waiting long enough as it was. ‘Yes. Uh huh.’ She pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘Surely someone would have– Yes, no, I understand. I’ll be there shortly.’ She snapped the phone shut with a crisp sound that cut through the quiet kitchen. ‘That was the school. They’re getting the kids to paint a mural on the side of the school building which faces the road. Except Grace decided that instead of painting happy school kids playing in the sunshine to paint a black monster with wings and red eyes.’

‘Balls.’

‘Yeah. The principal is apoplectic about it. Pity the teachers weren’t watching the kids to stop her before she’d done it. I’ve got to go pick her up. Then I've probably got to consider whether she’s better off being home-schooled.’ She dropped her phone back in her bag and gathered it up, her lunch remaining untouched on the plate. ‘When is the world ever going to cut either of us a break, huh?’

Ianto blew out a breath. ‘I wish I knew.’

Chapter Text

With a bit of food in his stomach, Ianto felt a bit more energetic. He downed the second roll as well, finding a renewed appetite after days of nothing, then moved around the place, tidying and cleaning to bring back a sense of self respect. Even Melvin seemed to approve of it, moving out of the way so that Ianto could dust window ledges and crisp up rumpled duvet covers. Things could have been worse for him, he decided, trying to put a positive spin on it. He only had himself to look after, plus occasionally feeding his cat. He didn’t have to look after another human being, let alone one that was troubled.

He went for a walk, setting himself a brutal pace that had him puffing slightly and his calves protesting on the incline. When he was about to go streaming past the local supermarket he went inside instead and left with several bags full of oranges, tinned tuna, corn, fresh tomatoes and leafy greens. He didn’t have to go the full Kieran, but he planned on stocking his fridge with healthy foods and going back to having a meal planner and cooking proper meals for himself. Either he got himself together now, or he was going to be heading back to Cardiff with his tail between his legs. The latter simply wasn’t an option. He’d fix his diet, make time for basic exercise and stop trying to think of himself as the victim. With luck, he could get back on the invite list with Guleraana and his workmates, go out and be more social, and maybe even get himself back in the dating game. If not now, when?

When he got home he had a proper nap, then refreshed, he made a full lasagne and side salad, and then, on a whim, cut half of it and took it upstairs.

‘Figured you’d had a hell of a day,’ he said, returning the favour as he held out the heavy oven dish in apology.

Margie narrowed her eyes at him. ‘Who are you and what have you done with the Ianto I met for lunch?’ she teased.

‘Yeah, I wasn't at my best,’ he admitted. ‘Sometimes I really need a good kick up the backside.’

‘By kick up the backside you mean someone doing your dishes?’

He nodded. ‘That’s pretty much a high crime in my books.’

‘Well, I’m glad I didn’t try to put on a load of washing, then. I hate to think what crime laundering your smalls would be classed as.’

‘You have no idea. People have been murdered for less.’ The joke fell flat and Ianto cleared his throat to try and dispel some of the awkwardness.

Margie clutched at the lasagne dish, still warm from the oven, covered in foil and wrapped in a tea towel. ‘So… two weeks off. Can I expect a home cooked casserole every night? God, it’d be nice to not have to cook every night for a change. Not to mention this smells amazing.’

He blushed at the compliment. ‘I wouldn't get your hopes up too much. At least maybe I can use the time to finally catch up on a few things. Like calling a plumber to fix my leak.’

‘Oh, I can give you a reference for a chap I used if you like. Hang on, I've got his number in a notebook in my bedroom.’

Ianto followed her into the room and then he caught sight of the stain in the corner of the ceiling. ‘You have a water leak too?’

Margie looked up. ‘Oh, that's been there ages. I’ve tried to get the body corp to come look at it to get it fixed, then I tried the insurance company. Everybody finger points at everybody else that it's their problem. It's like the lifts, isn't it? Everyone knows they don’t work properly but is anyone fixing it? I was thinking of calling this guy to come and take another look at the air in the pipes problem too.’

‘No, I mean, the stain,’ he said, pointing up at it. ‘It's the same as mine. It's even in the same spot.’

She rifled around in her drawer, not paying that much attention as she searched for her notebook. ‘Must be dodgy pipes. Whole building is falling apart. It's not even that old.’

‘No, as in I swear it's exactly the same.’ He pulled out his phone and scrolled back to the images he'd taken of the leak in his own bedroom ceiling and then wandered over, raising his phone and comparing the picture to the stain emerging from the corner of Margie's room. ‘It's the same. Exactly the same,’ he said, stunned that it could have the same outline and contours, right down to the angry pointed nose in profile. ‘Look,’ he turned his wrist so that she could see the picture on his screen and then look back at the watermark on the ceiling.

She came across and looked over his shoulder, then back up at the ceiling. ‘Well, I mean it's very similar, but then if you've seen one water stain you've seen them all, right?’

Ianto grew frustrated at her apathetic response. ‘So tell me you can't see that they’re an exact match, that’s totally impossible.’ His eyes landed on a piece of paper that Margie had pulled from the drawer during her search, now lying on the coverlet beside it. He picked it up and looked at it more closely. It was a drawing by Grace, just her and her mother holding hands and over their heads in the corner was a brown sun. A brown sun just like in the top corner of the picture Grace had drawn him the first time he'd visited. Just like so many of her pictures, he now realised. Not a sun, but a stain. His stain. Now also Margie’s stain. The stain that looked like a face in profile, watching them. ‘It's in the pictures. All of them,’ he said.

Margie remained unconvinced. ‘What does this have to do with anything?’

‘What does any of it have to do with anything?’ he countered. All of the rationalisation he’d put himself through in the last few days that there was nothing alien involved disappeared in an instant. Something around here was very, very wrong. ‘Where's Grace?’ he said, suddenly realising he hadn't seen her.

‘In her room, going without dinner as punishment for today. I tried to get sense out of her but she was being difficult. She claimed the reason she painted the monster was so that it would protect her at school.’

Ianto pointed at the picture, wondering about the idea of feeling protected. Was there something about the mark that scared her? ‘Is there a mark like this in her room?’

‘No, just mine.’

He stared down at his phone again, then at the picture, then back up at the ceiling. ‘What does it mean?’ he muttered to himself. It had to mean something. He had all the dots and no way to connect any of them.

‘Ianto, it's not a big deal. It's just a bit of water damage. It happens to people all the time. So what if Grace included it in her pictures, assuming that's even what it is?’

He scrolled back through the pictures on his phone, going back to the week before when he’d broken into the murdered girl’s apartment, and then swiped through the photos he'd taken. There, barely discernible for the bloody angel imprint on the roof, up in the top corner of the room near the doorway, was a small brown stain, exactly the same shape as the other two. Three identical stains in three different apartments. Who knew how many more had the same mark. That was absolutely impossible.

‘Would it be okay if I visited her? I know you said she's being punished but… There has to be an explanation for this and why she drew it.’

Margie sighed, giving in. ‘I’ll go reheat the lasagne.’

Ianto knocked on Grace's door before opening it a crack. ‘Hello, Grace. Your mum said it would be okay if I visited.’ She didn’t look like she was being punished much, just working away at her drawing table as if nothing at all were wrong. Margie had made the mistake of not confiscating her paper and pencils. Ianto didn't have to be a parent to see the obvious failure.

‘Hello,’ she said back, not the least bit of contrivance in her voice. ‘Can we play the question game?’

Ianto stepped inside, caught slightly off guard by the direct request. ‘Sure.’ they hadn’t played for a while. Ianto found that he didn’t have to now. She simply engaged in conversation with him without needing a quid pro quo.

‘You can start if you like,’ she offered.

‘Okay,’ he said, easing down onto the edge of the bed. ‘Your mum told me what happened today. I guess my question is why you painted him.’

She carried on drawing as she spoke, the scratching of pencils on paper filling the small silences in between. ‘I like having him around. He protects me. I wanted him to know he could come visit at school and it would be okay.’

Like hell it would, Ianto thought.

‘Have you been to school before?’

It felt like a slightly strange question to ask. Surely even a child knew that grown ups had done all the same things that they did as kids. ‘Yes, a long, long time ago when I was your age. I didn't like school much, though.’

‘You could come to school with me, if you like. It would be better then.’

‘I'm not sure my boss would be happy about that. She’s like a scary school principal,’ he said, finding that a perfect way to describe Yvonne. ‘I’d probably get in trouble.’ Like he wasn't already, he thought. Grace hunched over her drawing and said nothing, then he realised it was his turn to ask another question. ‘Everyone else thinks he's pretty scary, the man in your drawings. How come he doesn’t scare you?’

‘He's my friend. He wouldn't hurt me.’ There was more scratching of pencils on paper as she became fixated on her creation.

‘It's your turn to ask me a question,’ he said, reminding her of the rules.

She went quiet for thirty seconds, then her pencil paused over the page and she turned to look him straight in the eye. ‘Why did you kill those ladies?’

He frowned. ‘Sorry?’

‘The lady downstairs and the one at the bus stop. Why did you have to kill them? Had they done something bad?’

‘What?’ He was sure he must have misheard the question.

‘These ones,’ Grace said, indicating the piece of paper directly in front of her, leaning back so he could see it properly.

It was another picture of the Mothman. He'd noticed that she had dozens of them freshly drawn in a manic burst during her short period of incarceration this afternoon, spread all across the small table and spilling out onto the floor around her feet, but this one was starkly different. The image was the same, tall, dark and black with huge talons for hands and feet, large silvery wings spread out, but the face on the creature… those red eyes still boring out from the paper, except the rest of the face was his. Not the childlike scribbles of a face but his face drawn in exquisite detail. It couldn't be mistaken for anything else. On either side of him were drawings of two women, covered in blood, lying on the ground, terrified but clearly dead.

When he looked back at the other pictures on the wall and the floor he began to notice something else disturbing. They weren't all alike as he’d first observed them to be. In fact, with each drawing the details in the face were becoming more distinct, slowly morphing from an indistinct monstrous mask into his face, long before Grace had even met him that first time. Now, apart from the devil red glowing eyes, the rest of it was him. In the top corner of each picture he now also noticed the brown patch, which he'd always assumed was some kind of sun she’d included in all her drawings or perhaps a stain in the paper itself like tea of coffee spilled and soaked in, including the first one she'd gifted him, but now which resemble the stain on the roof that matched both his bedroom and Margie’s. Like a face in profile, staring out at them. And the monster in all her pictures that terrified her mother and her classmates alike, was him. It always had been.

His chest tightened like it was trapped in a vice, squeezing more and more. He struggled to pull in a breath as his head began to spin with panicked thoughts. ‘It wasn't… I didn't…’ He wasn't the Mothman, he was certain of it. It was an alien creature; something from a place nothing like their own world. That was the only explanation for it. An alien monster with a taste for women and a sexual rapaciousness that ended with their deaths. He'd never seen those women before, never even known they existed. He had a life and a job and… "He only comes out at night." Grace’s words reverberated inside his skull. No, it just wasn’t possible. They couldn't be one and the same.

He reached across and grabbed the paper from under her hands, tearing it in half and then scrunching it into a ball. ‘No!’ He gathered up the other pages on the floor and crushed them up into a ball as well. ‘Stop it! Just stop it!’ He then began wildly tearing at the walls, ripping down all the other pictures. They fluttered to the floor in savage shapes where his hands had torn at them. It wasn't him. It wasn't him, he kept repeating, seeing his face slowly emerging from every one of her drawings, like he was looking into a mirror in a house of horrors. It couldn't be. She was a child drawing stupid things that she dreamed up all on her own. It had nothing to do with him.

‘It's not me!’ he yelled at her, bringing Margie running to the door to see what the commotion was. He pointed a vicious finger at Grace who didn't even react to his anguished hysteria as torn shreds of paper scattered around them, tumbling to the floor. ‘You're the monster! You!’

Margie took one look at the chaos and the torn down drawings from the walls, her face twisting in fury. ‘Get out!’

He didn't need to be told twice. His mind was racing and his breath coming in shallow laboured breaths. Getting out of there was all he wanted.

Chapter Text

He stomped down the stairs, each thudding as loud as his own heartbeat. He slammed the front door so hard that Melvin howled at him, hackles raised at the sudden intrusion, but Ianto ignored the defensive posture.

He ran his hands through his hair, still panicked and breathless as he paced in circles. It was wrong, all of it. She was just some stupid little girl drawing stupid little pictures that meant nothing. ‘Nothing,’ he repeated aloud, delivering the affirmation to Melvin who merely stared back at him with a slight swish of his tail. None of what she’d said was true. There had to be a way to prove it, and then to prove that the real monster was somehow hiding inside her.

He remembered that the Torchwood response team had installed cameras in the building that were supposedly still running. Yvonne had promised him a week of basic surveillance after they'd done a sweep of the building and surrounds. He could prove it wasn't true just by going through the footage.

He logged onto his Torchwood laptop, thankful that his credentials hadn't been suspended when he'd been put on administrative leave. He opened up the files for Project Llewellyn and located the folder where all the camera recordings had been automatically saved and scrolled through the list of them by location. He was stunned to discover that one had been set up in his own apartment bedroom, presumably whilst he'd been sitting outside watching Grace play in the autumn leaves. It made him feel queasy to know that Torchwood had been spying on him all this time; that Yvonne had likely given them special instruction to do so. Perhaps however, this one time it would serve him well.

When he checked the logs though he found that no one had even so much as reviewed a single frame of footage from any of the cameras in the building, let alone the one in his own apartment. They'd simply dismissed the initial investigation results and forgotten to deactivate the cameras when they closed things off. The monster might have been caught on film days ago and no one had even logged it, sparing him the indignity of being dismissed as a crackpot.

He scrolled through the video logs, desperate to scrutinise them all, but forcing himself to remain focused on the camera in his own apartment. Vindicating himself was the priority. He clicked back to the beginning of the recording, then fast forwarding to eleven pm on the first night the camera had been in operation. He sat and watched the footage on speed setting for the six hours between him going to bed and getting up the next morning. The screen glowed from the night vision filters on the camera recording, giving the whole room a green-tinged aura around the bed where he saw himself fast asleep. There'd been nothing apart from getting up for a loo break at 3.12am. He breathed a heavy sigh of relief. His paranoia was totally unfounded. He slumped back in his chair, letting the solace wash over him. He had to stop this, for his own sake if nothing else. Yvonne was right, he’d become obsessed with this thing to the point he was actually believing in it. He'd been crazy to think that a child would understand what she saw.

He sucked in some long, deep breaths, trying to reclaim his senses until something on the computer screen caught his eye. The video had fast forwarded all the way through the following day and into the next night, and that’s when he saw movement from his sleeping form that sent a bolt of ice running down his spine.

He watched in horror as he saw his sleeping body move, writhing, thrashing about and arching up, his flailing arms and legs throwing off the warm duvet to leave him lying there completely uncovered. His clothes began to meld into his skin, turning black and forming a layer around his body, like a black cloak. He arched again and silver grey objects began to spread out underneath his body. His torso stretched, arms and legs lengthening abnormally, adding height and the appearance of a thin, tall man. His hands and feet morphed into long three-pronged talons and the wings grew large enough to stretch beyond both edges of the bed. Eyes shot open and he gasped at the glowing red eyes staring back at him in the otherwise greenish darkness, impossible to ignore. The figure sat up from the bed, wings unfurling even more, then stood, stooping slightly before reaching up to its full height. A monster just like the one Grace had drawn a hundred times. It was him, but not him. He was the monster and the monster was him. Then it turned and looked straight at the hidden camera and gave a rictus grin. He bolted backwards in his chair before the feed went dead and there was no more footage. With a shaking hand he rewound it and watched it a second time before panic set in and he deleted the clip from Torchwood's servers altogether, using a pilfered password from Yvonne's own personal access permissions. He didn't need to see it again and no one else could be allowed to. The irrefutable evidence was too damning to do anything else.

He chewed his thumbnail, biting it all the way down to where it attached to the skin, worrying at what he'd just seen before pulling the hand away and staring down at it. It was just a normal human hand, pale British skin and five slender fingers. Normal. Not a monster. Not him. He was human. He always had been.

He remembered the samples he'd taken from the dead woman's apartment days ago. Nothing alien had been identified but he had a DNA profile that he hadn't bothered to match. He'd been too preoccupied with understanding the connection between Grace and the murder itself. He ran it through every system they had and his stomach dropped when it came back with one perfect match. A match pulled from Torchwood's employee records. His own. His DNA mixed in with the blood and other fluids found at the scene of the murder. More of the same had been found at the second crime scene which he hadn’t yet considered, cross matching it to the SOCO evidence collected and logged into the London Met's databases. Both a match to his DNA profile.

He pulled his laptop closer, hacking into the police database and searching their logs for all case files pertaining to the brutal murder of young women, then narrowing the search to unsolved cases, slashing stab wounds and rape. He prayed that only the two current case files would appear in his search. Instead there were dozens, going back years. Ten years to be exact, stretching across London for the most part, but with the earliest cases originating in Cardiff. Some had unidentified DNA samples, and all were a perfect match. The only reason it hadn't been flagged by Torchwood was because Chem Analytics had been asked to cross reference external DNA databases. There'd been no reason to run a match across their own internal employee files.

‘Oh my god,’ he breathed, unable to comprehend it as he began to skim read over the unsolved case files. Murder after murder, rape after rape, each strange in its own way, leaving the police no wiser as to the perpetrator. Every last one of them women aged between fifteen and thirty. Young, full of life, full of potential.

He went all the way back to the first case in the list. There’d been a teenage girl who'd been killed on the estate where he'd grown up. He remembered it for the angst it had caused; neighbours blaming the gangs for too much violence and vandalism, neighbours blaming the police for not doing enough about it. He must have been sixteen or seventeen at the time. People had put it down to the estate itself. It was never a good place to be, what with all the gangs and crime. A girl getting raped and killed was almost to be expected.

She'd been found draped over the edge of the roof of a council estate block of flats by someone who thought she was a jumper, or just so drunk that she’d passed out, dangling over the edge. That was until you got a close look at the police photos. Blood dripped down the side of the cinder block wall, and more pooled under her from the hundreds of cuts to her body, brutally sexually assaulted before she'd been murdered. Jesus. He'd done that. He didn't even know who she was. Just another teenager on the estate, probably older than him. Old enough to have been asking for it in that short skirt and even skimpier tank top, but deserving no less. Just the first in a long line of conquests.

Who was he? Moreover, what was he? A monster. He had no recollections of any of it. How could he simply not know? How could anyone wake in the middle of the night and transform into that …thing? That thing that had a voracious appetite for young women. He’d never hurt anyone, much less a woman. How had no one seen a monster somehow escaping from his apartment, attacking people and then finding his way back home, tucking himself back into bed as if nothing at all had happened?

He wasn’t a monster! His mind kept yelling at him, denying what he'd seen with his own eyes. That wasn’t him. He fled from his apartment, unable to face the mountain of unsolved case files, rushing towards the lift and madly pressing the buttons. He needed to get out of here, out of this building. It was too claustrophobic, pressing down on him, making it hard to breathe. He pressed and pressed but the buttons refused to work. ‘Come on!’ he yelled at them but still nothing. The lift doors closed on their own and then the whole thing began to shake and tremble. The more his anxiety took over the more the shaking got worse. He slid down the wall pulling his knees to his chest and curling up into the smallest shape he could as huge sobs wracked his body and the lift carried on shuddering along with him. It wasn't him. It wasn't him.

Chapter Text

Something disturbed him from sleep. He hadn't even remembered falling asleep, but as he opened his eyes and the world reformed around him, he found an old woman looking down at him from where he was crumpled in a ball in the corner of the lift.

‘Are you alright, love?’ She had that perennial grandmotherly tone about her, clutching to her reusable shopping bags.

‘No,’ he mumbled, feeling every part of his body ached and cramping from where he must have spent the whole night, dissociated sobbing devolving into an exhausted sleep.

‘I know the earthquake last night was a bit scary but you can't be sleeping rough in people's elevators,’ she said. ‘There's a Salvation Army refuge just a few blocks from here, and here's five pounds to help you out,’ she added, reaching down with a crumpled banknote from her purse in an act of unnecessary charity.

‘I'm okay,’ he said, waving away the money and struggling to pull himself to his feet, feeling that cramping coming home to roost in his neck and lower back. He didn't dare admit he was actually a resident. Being considered homeless was less embarrassing.

‘Well, so long as you're sure,’ she said, standing back and giving him space to exit the lift. ‘Everyone falls on hard times now and then. The important thing is to not give up, especially for one so young. You've got your whole life ahead of you, don't forget that.’

He stood there stupidly and watched as she pressed the down button, and the lift doors closed as it descended, leaving him standing there alone in the hallway.

A shiver ran through him and he rubbed his arms, feeling cold and shaky all of a sudden as last night's terrible discovery came flooding back. His mouth went dry and his head spun and then his stomach lurched violently and he knew he was going to throw up. He staggered back towards his apartment, finding the door still unlocked and shoved his way through to the bathroom when he only just made it. He vomited over the toilet bowl until his legs couldn't keep him standing any longer and he sank down, gripping the porcelain edges as he continued to gag on his retching stomach contents, of which there were little. It didn't stop his stomach from clenching over and over, trying to force up something that wasn’t there. Perhaps the essence of a demon that had taken up residence in his body for the last decade. If he could have brought it up he would have, finally collapsing on the cold tiles in a damp, sweaty mess.

His eyes drooped shut as the cool tiles pressed to his hot cheek and then something else brushed his cheek making him flinch in terror. It was however only a curious cat, whiskers tickling his face as it bent to inspect its owner. Melvin didn't fear him, didn't sense the inner monster. He moved away, giving Ianto space and proceeded to go through a thorough grooming just a few feet away, licking his paw and then rubbing it over his face as Ianto stared right through him in unblinking denial.

He’d spent nearly two weeks trying to prove that a little girl had all the answers to a brutal murder and the proof was right there before him and yet he couldn't tell anyone.

He couldn't do this. Not if it was true. Had he really killed those people? Why couldn't he remember any of it? It was like he was two different people: one that was just a normal guy living a relatively normal life, the other… a monster. A killer. That wasn’t him. He didn't even have any romantic interest in girls, let alone a need to satiate some predatory sexual desire. The odd hand job every now and then but that was normal for guys, right? It just couldn't be, but what if it was? Could he learn to become consciously aware of it? Could he stop it? Or was he just a passive host to something darker and more sinister than his wildest imaginations? Most important of all, could he be cured?

He couldn't go to Torchwood for help. He knew how they operated. Aliens were experimented on, analysed, and dissected. If he was any kind of hybrid host to something, he didn't like his chances of being the exception that proved the rule. He’d be locked up so that they'd have access to him when it suited them. Maybe he should be locked up, if not for his own safety then for everybody else's. He was clearly a danger to people, especially since he had no knowledge of it and seemingly couldn't control it.

He continued to lie with his face pressed to the cream coloured floor tiles, hypnotised by the movement of Melvin, running a washed paw across his face in methodical rhythmic motions. The very real possibility that he was an uncontrollable murderer left him paralysed.

A persistent knocking began on his door, louder and louder, more and more insistent, and then he could hear the voice on the other side; Margie.

‘Ianto! Ianto, are you in there? Ianto, I'm sorry about last night, okay? Ianto, please open the door. Ianto, I… I didn't mean what I said. I'm sorry. Please, Ianto. Ianto?’

He let her continue banging on his door, pleading with him to get up and answer it but he couldn't move. It was safer for everyone that way.

Chapter Text

His cheek was stuck to the floor, his eyes caked with sleep. More uncomfortable napping in ridiculous places had him hurting all over and yet the dread of the first thought that entered his mind was just the same. Some part of him was a deadly monster and nobody knew it but him and one little girl, plus a whole string of dead women who couldn't have spilled his secret even if they'd wanted to.

He dragged himself up off the tiles, reaching over to flush the toilet that was still full of his stomach contents, beginning to generate a stringent acidic smell as they lingered in the bowl. He crawled across to the shower, Melvin stepping out of his way, having kept a snoozing vigil over him. Ianto tugged at his clothes, struggling with them like he'd never undressed himself before and then crawled into the shower stall, reaching up on his knees just long enough to set the hot water running before dropping back into a heap at the base, steaming water raining down, dribbling out of his hair and down his face. He stared uselessly down at his pale naked body, suddenly foreign to him. He clawed at the wet skin with his fingers, trying to tear away the outer layers and see if what lay underneath was black, but his fingernails had already been chewed down to nothing and he couldn’t break the skin no matter how hard he dug at it.

He didn't know what to do. There was no one who could help him. The one place with the people and resources to potentially fix him was the one place he simply couldn't go. They wouldn't fix him. They'd just want to know what made him tick. And that assumed that he could be fixed at all. If this wasn't a possession style scenario then the only conclusion he could draw was that he'd been born like this. What did that even mean? His family was normal. They were not monsters like him. How could his mother have given birth to such a creature?

He despaired at the lack of options, finally crawling back out of the shower, still on hands and knees, but wrinkled like a prune from having sat in there for at least an hour. He took an age to towel himself off, shivering the whole time at the sudden lack of warmth pressing down on him. He took even longer to pull on fresh clothes. It was as if he'd forgotten how to do anything at all, regressing into a mindless state where his body wasn't his own. It was a battle to force himself to think and act. Part of him was still human. He had to keep holding onto that. Perhaps if he did, he could repress the monster inside.

He leaned forward and looked at his face in the mirror. He focused on his eyes, searching for that red glow hiding underneath but he couldn’t see it. The thing inside his was completely hidden from view; a perfect disguise for the monstrous killer, passing itself off as a dry-witted young Welshman of no consequence.

He drifted back to the bedroom, finding his phone on the bed, showing several missed calls and text messages. He scrolled through them without enthusiasm, finding three progressively more drunken messages from Guleraana, insisting his come out for a drink with them despite things, and another separate message from Kieran, reminding him that we needed to complete a mid-break assessment by tomorrow, and to reach out if he wanted to talk. Talk? What a joke. There was no one he could talk to about this. He deleted all of them without responding and then pocketed his phone and wallet.

He took the stairs, unable to face the lift that seemed to know he was a monster and refused him passage. Perhaps it was only coincidence, but now he wasn’t so sure. He prayed he didn't run into anyone on the stairs, especially not any young women who might inadvertently become his next victim. Fortunately it was the middle of the day and most people were either at work or tucked up on their sofas watching mindless daytime television. He didn’t fit into either category right now.

He hit the street and just started walking, regardless of the direction, letting his feet wander as his mind did the same thing. Every significant milestone in his life that had become a deeply embedded memory was now overshadowed by a complete absence of memories. Kissing one of his female cousins at his seventh birthday party, wasting his entire pay from his first ever shift packing shelves at the co-op on cheap beer and junk food simply because he could, standing at his father’s funeral, unable to find a kind word to say for all the bitter resentment he felt for his father having died on them. All of those things were now rendered meaningless by the things he couldn’t recall. His entire collective memory felt like a sham, papering over the real memories of what he was deep down.

Why then, did he still feel so hopelessly human, awkward around strangers, unable to find, let alone hold onto, love, and just generally lacking any confidence that he was now an adult and not a child. When he was making coffee and filing reports, he felt in control of the world around him, small as that might have been. It was the overarching premise of what his employer did that had given him meaning. He’d loved his job, but what chance now that he could go back to it? Maybe no one would ever be the wiser. If he could learn to control it, or to stop it altogether, then the only way someone might connect the dots would be for his DNA to get matched to one of these unsolved crime scenes. Right now, the only risk of that happening was if he carried on pursuing Project Llewellyn, which he very clearly wouldn't be.

Then again, was it really that simple? Suggesting he could control the thing that up until last night he hadn't even known about sounded crazy. This was no innocent case of sleepwalking.

He must have walked for miles, feeling a slight ache in his legs as he started to take in his surrounds, and finding himself having come nearly full circle as his local pub came into view. Across the road, the bus stop where the girl had been murdered – by him, if he was not mistaken – had all of its crime scene tape removed and had been returned to its former unassuming state. Curious, he crossed the two lanes of traffic and walked up to it, wondering if being in close proximity might help him recall his repressed memories.

It was late afternoon now, school kids had found their way home and it was too early for the rush of office workers to do the same. The bus shelter remained empty except for him. He sat down on the metal bench and took in the view. It wasn’t much of one, just a few drab London streets that looked much the same no matter the suburb. Had his victim been sitting where he was now, simply minding her own business as she waited for a bus to take her home that night? Had she felt safe? Did she regularly travel late at night or had this been a one off instance.

He remembered the notes from the police file, that she hadn’t died in the bus shelter, but on top of the bus shelter. He couldn’t very well climb up there so instead he lay back along the bench and stared up at the roof. What had once been clear perspex held together by intervals of steel was now cloudy from years of being out in the elements. All traces of blood had been removed from it, but he continued staring skywards, then closed his eyes, trying to picture the scene as it might have played out. His mind drifted into a plausible rendition of the horrific events.

‘Oi!’ Sharp masculine voice pierced through the scene as it played out in his mind. He might have ignored it but for the fact that it shouted once more, even louder and angrier, forcing him to open his eyes and register to furious man in tradesman coveralls and a heavy five o’clock shadow. ‘Disgusting perverts like you should be arrested. Get out of here before I call the coppers on you.’

Ianto blinked, for a moment not understanding why the man had taken issue with him just lying there on the bus shelter bench until he looked down and saw his hands. His fly was half undone and one hand tucking inside it, stroking a burgeoning hardness. His hand immediately shot out and he sprung up from the bench, zipping up his fly and scurrying away before the man did call the police or tried to handle the situation himself.

He must have power walked half close to a mile before he was able to do anything other than think of escaping the scene. His mind began to race. He still couldn't remember any of it, yet subconsciously, some part of him was there again, reliving the moment. Worse still, enjoying it. Buried somewhere deep inside of him was a creature he couldn't control; one that was, for all intents, controlling him, even if he wasn't aware of it. The moment at the bus stop had just proven it.

He looked back down and found he was still embarrassingly hard. He needed to touch it, to make the desire go away. He doubled back, having just passed a slim lane way and ducked down it, able to conceal himself behind a large dumpster bin. He quickly undid his jeans and forced a hand down there, tugging himself free. He'd get this over with quickly, rubbing hard and fast. He closed his eyes and pictured a woman underneath him. She was scratched and bloodied but didn't scream and didn't struggle. She just looked back into his hypnotic eyes and went still as could be as he forced himself inside her. He clawed at her skin, breaking open even more wounds, slashing at the tender flesh, seeing the fresh red blood bubble and spill from them. He felt light as a feather, a breeze whipping up around the two of them as large wings enveloped them.

Ianto cried out as he climaxed harder than he ever had, shocked at how much the mental imagery had turned him on. He gripped the side of the dumpster as his breath came in heavy gasps, head spinning with euphoric rushes and a sticky mess dripping down the rusted green metal to pool on the ground between his feet. He hadn't just enjoyed it. He'd revelled in it, the slashing and the blood and the sex, knowing it would all culminate in killing. The deepest, darkest desires of the thing inside him were there for him to see and feel once he let go and imagined what it would be like to embody the monster fully. That was who he could be if he wanted to. That was how incredible he could feel all the time.

Now you know, he thought, realising that there was no escaping who he was. He came back to himself, fixing his clothes and sucking in a deep breath. He couldn't be cured. He wasn't sure every part of him wanted to be cured. Some tiny part wanted it and that was enough to know that there was only one thing he could do. For the safety of everyone, Ianto Jones had to die.

Chapter Text

There was a strange calm that washed over him as he accepted the realisation that there was more to him than just being executive assistant to one of the most important people in London, doing the most important work that a person could do on this planet. He understood, if not accepted, that he’d done terrible things to innocent people, but that it hadn’t been something he could have controlled or stopped. He was a monster and there was nothing he could have done that would change that. All he could do now was choose what he did next.

His feet led him back to his apartment, and then from his apartment to the top floor and to door 44A. He still had unfinished business there and wasn’t going to leave until it was done.

He wouldn’t have been surprised if Margie had refused to open the door to him. If she was furious with him for having screamed at her daughter that would have been perfectly understandable too. She had no idea how truly dangerous he could be. Instead, she pulled the door all the way open, not even just a mere inches gap with a solid chain still standing between them, though she kept her eyes on the patch of carpet between their feet, unable to meet his eye.

‘I came to apologise,’ Ianto said, offering the first olive branch. ‘I just lost it. All of it became too much. I couldn't stand looking at those drawings anymore.’ It was all true. Even knowing what he knew now, it was still a bitter pill to swallow. Grace had known all along what he was and yet she kept her silence, never once accusing him, publicly or in private, of being a monster. If anything, she was the one person who didn’t fear him, either rightly or wrongly, and for that he had to come and make amends.

Margie kept her eyes cast at the floor. ‘Grace told me what she drew. Your face on that monster, and I’m sorry for that. I probably would have reacted the same way you did. She's just a child. She's latched onto you. I’d rather her be drawing pictures of you than that horrible creature but it was wrong all the same. It's kids isn't it? They bounce from one obsession to another but I accept that there's a line and she crossed it.’

‘I’m not a monster,’ he said, wishing it were true.

‘I know that. It’s what helped me finally make the decision that she needs proper psychiatric help.’ She finally looked up and met his gaze. ‘I can't keep denying it. I don't know if I'm a bad mother or it was the divorce or my job or bad schooling, but something has made her act out this way and I need to fix it, however hard that is. I kept denying it, that there was something wrong, wanting there to not be anything wrong. I see it now. You helped me see it. We got ourselves caught up in this crazy notion that something paranormal was going on when right under our noses it was nothing more than a little girl crying out for help.’

Ianto didn't bother to correct her for oversimplifying matters. It still didn't explain the gruesome murders or their strange circumstances, it didn't explain why the building shook at random intervals, or the lifts that didn’t always work, the blackouts and the strange markings on the ceilings. Nor the fact that there really was a monster and Grace had seen it, and was convinced that it wouldn't hurt her. Perhaps that was true, if she were ten years older however, Ianto suspected the outcome might be very different. Just the thought of finding her and raping her made him feel sick. There was a part of him that would get off on the idea and that was even more frightening. It made his decision that much more important. He had to protect Grace, and everyone else along with her.

‘You don't have to worry about it any more. It will all be over soon, I promise. Grace is going to grow up a happy, normal child.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘I just am. Can I see her? I just want to say sorry to her as well and then I'll go.’

Margie pulled the door open a little wider. ‘You don't have to go.’

‘I do, actually. I decided to take a break, go travelling. Just get away from it all for a bit. I think the change will be good for all of us.’

She chewed her lip, unsure about his sudden desire to leave. ‘Well, I hope it's somewhere nice you're going.’

‘I haven't made any firm plans on a destination yet. I think I'll just see where my feet take me.’

‘Do you need someone to look after your cat while you're gone?’

He'd almost forgotten about Melvin. He'd already had one owner abandon him. Like Grace, he was the only other creature that had given him the time of day, knowing what he was. ‘I do. I’ll leave a set of keys with you.’

‘He can come stay up here with us,’Marie assured him. ‘It won't be for that long. I’m sure you'll be back before we know it.’

He nodded with a smile. ‘Holidays are always shorter than we like, aren't they?’

‘And the bills don't pay themselves,’ she added.

She stepped aside and Ianto slipped past her, treading the well worn path to Grace’s bedroom. She was at her table, but there were no coloured pencils and no drawings adorning the walls anymore. Just a little girl sitting there, forced to fill her blank pages with line after line of childish writing that read “I must not draw monsters” on repeat. It felt like a cruel punishment for having done her best to break the news to him subtly. He’d caused her nothing but trouble since the day he’d moved in.

‘Hello, Grace,’ he began tentatively, unsure what kind of reception he’d get. ‘I came to say sorry to you for yelling at you and tearing up all your drawings.’

She waited until she’d completed a full sentence on the page before putting the pencil down and looking up at him. ‘You have a sad face.’

‘Yep.’

‘Why?’ She sounded genuinely curious.

He moved over and knelt down next to her so that he could meet her eye to eye, rather than towering over her like all the other adults in her life. ‘Because I'm sorry. And because I have to go and I don't want to.’

‘Will you be coming back?’

He shook his head. ‘I don't think so. Not this time.’

Grace's mouth began to quiver as the realisation dawned on her. ‘But I'll miss you.’

Tears pricked at his own eyes. ‘I’ll miss you, too.’ She reached out and swung her tiny arms around him and he found himself hugging her back, tears dripping into her soft pigtails as she refused to let him go. Eventually he was able to get his emotions under control enough to pull back from her. ‘I might need you to look after someone for me. I can't take Melvin with me where I'm going. I’m going to leave some food for him and you can come and take him home in a few days, okay?’

She wiped her hand under her nose. ‘Okay.’

‘He’ll be able to keep you safer than I ever could.’

Grace scowled at him. ‘Mummy says it’s bad to lie to people.’

‘She’s right,’ he agreed. ‘But neither of us told her the real truth, did we?’

Grace shook her head and he felt a swell of affection for her, leaning forward to kiss her on the forehead. ‘That’s okay too, sometimes. It can be our special secret forever.’

Chapter Text

Ianto took another pull on the bottle of scotch, watching the amber contents swirl in the moonlight. The bottle had started off brand new, and now it was three quarters empty. He’d moved past feeling happy drunk and moved onto morose drunk. That combined with the pills he'd taken were making everything fuzzy at the edges and rather hard for him to stand or walk in a straight line. Thank god he'd come up to the roof before he started drinking in earnest. He belched, then leaned back against the air condenser unit and lifted the bottle to his lips again, taking several large swallows and then wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. 'Fucking love scotch,' he said to no one but himself, slurring the words.

Something brushed his leg and he looked down past the bottle in his hand. ‘What're you doing here?’ he said, not even bothering to wonder how Melvin had escaped the apartment and made it all the way up here. ‘Come to send me off, have you?’

The cat sat and its head dipped to one side, either considering his state or simply passing judgement on him. ‘You knew and you never said anything,’ Ianto said. He reached out and gave the cat a rub of its ears, stroking Melvin's head and brushing a thumb over the white patch on his face. ‘Doesn't matter. Got you a nice family lined up for you, better than me or the old lady.’

He tipped the bottle again, draining the last of it as it burned down the back of his throat. A whole bottle of scotch and he should have been unconscious by now but instead he just felt miserably drunk. ‘Twenty five and its all fucking over, Melv.’ If Melvin had an opinion on it he didn't show it. He simply leapt up onto the ledge and sat there, tail swinging out into the night air.

‘You’re right,’ Ianto said, putting the empty bottle down and wobbling to his feet. ‘No more fucking about. Time to do this and get it over with.’ He climbed up onto the ledge and threw his arms out as his legs swayed unsteadily under him until he was standing there without faltering. He looked down. Just high enough up that he could still make out the road below, the occasional car passing by in the dead of night. Just the sound of it moving through the quiet night time streets made him despair that it would be the last time he heard that sound. The last time he'd done so many things had passed already without consciously knowing it, no longer able to go back and appreciate it for what it was. Just the simple mundane everyday bits and pieces of life.

Tears began to pour down his face. He'd never asked for this. He'd just wanted to live a normal life and now he knew he never would. He'd never again know what it felt like to laugh or to smile, to fall in love and to be happy. He railed against the cruelty of it all.

He had to protect the city from the monsters that stalked its streets. That’s what he'd prided himself on at Torchwood, knowing that he was contributing to people being able to just live their lives in blissful ignorance. The only monsters they saw were the ones in films and on television.

Death was the only way. The only way to be sure that he put an end to the killing and the horror. it's what any good Torchwood agent would have done. Yvonne would have been proud of him if she’d known. Instead they'd tut and bemoan the wasted life, perhaps regretting their actions for a few brief moments on the assumption that they'd contributed to his choice to end it all. If only he could have told them. If only he hadn’t deleted the camera footage, perhaps they would have understood the sacrifice he was making. Torchwood through and through.

He swallowed hard, no longer resisting the urge to delay the inevitable, and leaned forward over the edge. He didn't cry. He didn't scream. He didn't even register the sensation of falling. His mind entered a blank state and then wings erupted from his morphing flesh. Red eyes glowed in the darkness as the Mothman flew off away into the night.