Title: When Love Walked In
Author: pinetranio
Prompt: An American In Paris
Beta: jooles34
Pairing: Jack/Ianto.
Rating: M
Summary: Pre-Season One AU When Jack and Owen find themselves in a different world, they must become part of the society while they wait for rescue. Jack's tired of waiting and decides to start living instead. But as his borrowed time comes to an end, will he be able to walk away?
Word Count: 47,321
Inspired by the 1951 movie musical starring Gene Kelly.
Written for reel_torchwood Round 2

A/N: If you don't know the movie, I highly recommend it! Please leave a comment. This is my first Torchwood fic and I'd love feedback. At the end of the story, is a track listing of the songs used or mentioned. Enjoy!

When Love Walked In.pdf



When Love Walked In
by PineTranio


PROLOGUE

It was dark that night; the cold, ever-present Cardiff rain fell down steadily onto the empty black streets of the wealthy neighborhood. The lamplights did little to illuminate the affluence, not that the few occupants outside cared about the view. Their thoughts centered around, “Run!” and “Faster!” and “I should have worn better shoes.”

Said shoes, brown lace-ups with moderate traction on the soles, were pounding into the pavement as their owner chased after another man only a few meters ahead of him. He was gaining on his target; the large, awkward parcel in the other’s arms no doubt slowed down his progress. They had been running through the winding roads of the gated community for nearly ten minutes, cutting across slick grass and hopping over the boots of cars.

“Don’t trip, Harper,” he told himself. “If you lose him, Harkness will kill you. Bloody Harkness!”

Owen Harper grumbled as he breathed heavily. “Where the hell is he anyway?” They had been tracking this guy for weeks now. Already, he had made off with several alien items and Captain Jack Harkness was not pleased. Owen tapped the silver device in his ear. “Come on, Captain. You going to let me have all the fun? Get yer arse out here!”

Nothing.

“Jack! Where the fuck are you? Suzie?” he called for Torchwood’s second-in-command. “Is anyone there?”

“I’m here, Owen.” came a female voice.

“Great. Is there anyone there who can bloody well do something?” he asked Toshiko Sato, who was currently monitoring the group from the safety of the Hub, miles away. “I can get this guy, but backup would be nice!”

“I can’t get a hold of Jack. Last contact, he said Suzie was down and the owner was locked in a panic room.”

Another growl from the medic. His anger fueling him, he put on a burst of speed. “Keep trying, Tosh. Give him my location and tell him to get the car. I’m ending this now!”

“Be careful Owen. We don’t know what he stole.”

“I’m soaked. I’m tired and the only thing I care about right now is not breaking my pretty little neck. Fucking rain! Fucking Cardiff!”

As Owen stumbled off a kerb, his soaked shoes heavy with water, he saw the thief just ahead of him have a similar problem. The man tripped over his sodden trainers, landing on his knees in the mud. His large, stolen parcel fell to the earth with a splat. Owen saw the thief scramble to it, pull something from his coat pocket and lift the thick covering off the object. From his vantage Owen still couldn’t tell what it was, but that the thief was frantically attacking an area of it. A sick, tight crack resounded over the raindrops. Why was he destroying what he took in the first place? Owen wondered as he arrived behind the man.

“Don’t even try it,” Owen warned evenly, pulling his gun from the small of his back.

The thief, his stolen prize still in his hands, slowly stood and turned to face Owen.

“Drop it to the ground, nice and easy,” ordered Owen.

The thief did not comply. He just stood there, his eyes darting all around him, looking for a way of escape. They were still alone, but if the thief had a weapon he would have to relinquish his parcel.

“Give it up, mate. Put it on the ground or I will shoot you where you stand.” Owen cocked back the hammer. The thief’s dark eyes widened slightly and before Owen could react, the man hefted the object into the air.

“Fuck!” Owen ran forward to catch it. The last thing he needed was for something alien to break and blow things up on his watch. The object fell into his waiting arms, Owen grunting with the weight of it, and the thick covering, some sort of canvas material, fluttered to his feet. Quickly, he looked up and saw the thief disappearing behind a cluster of trees some distance away.

Cursing under his breath, he called out to his teammates through their comms. “Tosh, I lost him.”

“Do you have it?”

What happened to the concern? he begrudgingly thought. Owen lifted his catch to his face to finally have a look at it. A painting, was it? But, it wasn’t like any sort of painting he’d ever seen. It wasn’t even paint under the glass.

Frowning, he turned to head back towards the pavement. “I have it, but I can’t tell- Shit!” His shoes caught the canvas and he was falling. He tried to prepare himself for the impact of smashing into glass, but it never came. Instead, he landed, face first, onto a solid surface.

Owen blinked his brown eyes and took several deep breaths. He twitched his fingers, his shoulders and then his legs. Nothing broken, just sore, very sore. He lifted his head slowly. There was no glass scattered around him, no wet grass under his hands, no lamplight, no houses! Gingerly Owen moved his bruised body to its feet. The sun was out. Why was the sun out?

Beneath his feet lay a white stone path that led to an open gateway in front of him. Beyond he could see many people and buildings; it looked vaguely familiar.

“What the fuck?” he exclaimed when he realized what he was seeing. He stepped backwards quickly, very confused. What was going on? And then he thought, fearfully; where was that alien parcel he had been holding?



CHAPTER ONE

“Alien artwork? You can’t be serious!” exclaimed Susie Costello, as she glanced over at Torchwood’s genius technician, Toshiko Sato.

“I don’t know what else to call it,” she confessed, typing on her computer. “You saw it for yourself. The images move! They completely change shape, color, and even style. It’s either alien or from the future, but Jack thinks it’s from another planet.”

“I didn’t see much before Jack grabbed it and covered it up. It looked like a sophisticated screen saver if you ask me.”

“This is more complicated than that, Susie. That thing, whatever it is, took Owen!”

Susie snorted at this. It had to be one of the most ridiculous specimens she had encountered since joining Torchwood. “From the CCTV,” Susie pointed to the footage on Toshiko’s computer, “it doesn’t look like he was snatched. One moment he was there, holding it and then the idiot fell into it.”

“He could be dead, Susie! Don’t you care?”

“Of course, I care. But I can’t wrap my mind around this.”

“Think Alice and the Looking-Glass,” a voice said from behind her.

Susie jumped in surprise and turned to face her Captain. “Christ, Jack! I didn’t hear you come over.”

Captain Jack Harkness flashed a grin at her. “I’m stealthy. So, it seems we have some sort of artistic porthole and it’s been under our noses for the last ten years or so.”

“Is that how long the owner of the house said he’s had it?”

Jack nodded. “Yeah, right before all hell broke loose and he locked himself in a panic room. But I don’t completely believe him. Geoffrey Dear has been on Torchwood’s list of ‘persons of interest’ since the 80s. He’s never caused a problem, but he or one of his assistants has been spotted at a few underground, shall we say, specialty auctions.”

Tosh turned to face her boss. “And we’ve never stopped him from purchasing items before?”

Jack shrugged. “He didn’t buy anything dangerous. Well, we didn’t think he did. And I’m not Yvonne Hartman. I wonder if Mr. Dear knows exactly what this painting is capable of?”

“I wonder if we do.” Tosh mumbled.

Slapping his hands together loudly Jack began to divulge his plan of action. “Alright ladies, lots to get done. Susie, go round to Dear’s manse and have a chat with him.”

“Think he’s out of his coward room?” Susie asked snidely.

“It has a time lock feature on it. Should open up in,” Jack fiddled with the buttons on his wrist strap, a mischievous look on his face as he overrode Mr. Dear’s programming, “an hour. Find out if he has any background on this artwork, and find out who got it for him. Even black market dealers have purchase of sales receipts. See if you can’t get him to show you more of his collection while you’re at it. If need be, we’ll do a complete sweep whether he likes it or not. There’s Retcon in the med bay. Make sure he gets it before you leave.” Susie rushed off to get the amnesia pills. “Tosh, we need to run some tests on this painting, find out where it’s from, find out what that guy scratched off it before he ran off. Grab your scanner and meet me in the cells.”

“But, Jack, we can’t expose this to testing! What about Owen? What if something happens to him or to the painting during the scans?”

“No choice, Tosh. Unless you think a blanket search through the database of ‘Alien Art’ is going to help, we have to examine it.” Jack turned away, but quickly added with a smirk, “And don’t try it. You’d be amazed what some species consider art!”

Tosh sighed, knowing her Captain was right. They had no idea what the painting was or where it originated. Opening her desk drawer, she removed her trusty hand scanner. It wasn’t invasive, but she didn’t think she could garner much information from it either. But, it was all she had for the moment. First things first, she wanted to know what it was made of.


When she arrived in the cells, Jack was waiting for her with the painting set up on a table, leaning against the wall. The covering was folded up beside it.

“Why have you brought it down here?” Tosh asked as she readied her scanner.

“Worst case scenario. This way, if anything catastrophic occurs, it will be deep underground and hopefully wouldn’t impact the population.”

“Except for us,” she murmured.

“Part of the job, Tosh. You knew that when you joined.” Tosh merely nodded her head. “So,” Jack began, “I have good news and bad news.” Tosh waited for Jack to choose which to deliver first. “I think I have an idea what that thief took from the frame.” Jack gestured to the bottom of it, where, at the center, was a circular gouge, marring the bright gold frame.

“So, what is the bad news?”

Jack reached into his pocket and took out a five pence piece. He turned it over in front of Tosh’s eyes. “One ordinary coin.” He stepped back and threw it at the picture. Tosh instinctively ducked away from the impending impact. But nothing happened. She turned to Jack; his expression was blank. Hesitantly, she took a step towards the painting. As she reached out to touch the surface, Jack clamped his hand tightly around her wrist.

“Don’t,” he warned. He released her hand and stepped back once more, his eyes back on the moving images.

“It’s open,” Tosh said. “It’s still open. But, the glass-”

“Obviously, not your average, tempered glass. Whatever was at the bottom there must have stabilized the portal. When we were at the mansion we all touched the glass and none of us fell through.”

“Does it go both ways?” Jack let out a loud laugh at that. Tosh blushed at her unintended innuendo. “I mean if things from here can enter the painting, can things from the painting enter here?”

“I suppose that would depend on if anything is alive in there. Besides Owen, that is.”

“If he’s still alive.”

“We’re getting him back, Tosh. I’d go in right now if I thought it would help, but it won’t, not yet. We need more information. Now, I know you’ve seen some strange things since being here, but why would aliens create a portal to somewhere just to have it kill what’s inside? There are much easier ways to get that done. My guess is that it’s a prison or containment space. The best thing we can do for him is to start these scans. How about base materials scan first? Check this covering. It seems ordinary enough, but we never know.”

Tosh ran her scanner slowly along the edge of the material. “Did it come from Mr. Dear’s mansion?”

“Couldn’t say. I was a bit preoccupied.” When the tech finally got hold of him on the comms, he had only recently revived from a broken neck. Of course, he didn’t say that. He said that both he and Susie had been knocked unconscious for a few minutes. And since that indeed did happen to Susie, no one was there to witness his death or his resurrection.

Jack crossed his arms over his chest and watched Toshiko work. He didn’t care about lying to his team, not anymore. It worried him a little bit in the beginning because this was his team, hand picked. They were all special, but they were still very human. No, he couldn’t trust them with this secret, couldn’t trust them to keep it or to stay with Torchwood once they learned it. He did not want to have to recruit other members; finding this group was hard enough! They weren’t perfect, but they functioned well, each one doing their jobs and adapting quickly to all of this new and scary knowledge of alien life. Jack did not want to risk becoming an additional scary thing in their lives.

Pulling himself out of his reverie, he turned to his brilliant technician. “Anything interesting yet?”

“Only if you if find analysing Earth made fabrics and Welsh dirt interesting.”

“Well, it’s not in my top five list of pastimes.” Jack turned to the picture. “Alright, my pretty, where are you from?” he asked it. His eyes roved over it, captivated by the undulating colors as they formed landscapes, then buildings and oceans. Each image lasted only a few seconds, long enough to make out a few details, but vanishing before Jack could take in all of the beauty. It truly was gorgeous and Jack could understand why someone would want to own it. He was sure he could waste many an hour lost in this work.

“It’s extraordinary.” Tosh commented, equally enthralled with this alien masterpiece before them. Tearing her eyes away from it, she looked up at Jack. “What do you think happened to Owen? Where is he?”

Jack looked into Tosh’s dark eyes, wide and glistening with concern. He felt a lead weight drop in his stomach. His beautiful, smart, naïve Toshiko had a thing for his abrasive medic, who seemed forever in mourning, a medic who was also sleeping with Susie. What a tangled web. This was one reason why Jack kept his romances out of Torchwood. Not that he had any recently to speak of, and not that the ones in recent past were worthy of discussion anyway. Jack sighed, for both him and Toshiko. Seeing that glimmer, that crack in Tosh’s work persona, revealing the depth of feeling, reminded him why love was both grand and why he was better off without it. There was work to be done. “Like I said,” Jack began to answer her question, “Looking Glass. He’s somewhere in there.”

“Surrounded by all these bright colors, he must be going crazy!” She gave a half-hearted laugh, which Jack return equally. They lapsed into silence as Tosh continued her work, the occasional beep from the scanner the only noise breaking the tension.

“I think I might have something, Jack,” Tosh said after several minutes. “The frame is not made of Earth material.” She glanced at the readings on the back of her device. “I’ll have more information upstairs, but it seems like some kind of alloy.”

“It’s a start. Keep going. I’ll be back in a minute.”

Tosh did as instructed. Her initial scanning was just completing when Jack reappeared, a digital camera and a tripod in his hands.

“Home movie time!” he exclaimed in answer to her confused expression. He began to set up the equipment directly in front of the painting. “I’ve navigated the feed from the camera to our monitors. That way we can keep an eye on it from there.”

“What are you hoping to see, Jack?”

“A pattern? Maybe these movements aren’t as random as we think they are. We’ll take turns watching the images, maybe take some stills and run a program to compare them. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky and see a flying banner that says: ‘Owen’s here. Please take him back!’”

Tosh ignored the joke as she turned off her scanner. “I’m going to head up and start sifting through this data.”


It was well into the following day before they had any leads. Tosh sat at her terminal, trying to find matches to the compounds her scanner picked up on the frame. Jack and Susie were shut in Jack’s office, presumably discussing Susie’s findings at the Dear house. And the monitors were showing the continual changing images from the cells. That was one mystery solved; the pictures ran in about a two-hour loop. They still did not understand why or what it meant, but it was something. Wherever this portal went, it consistently revisited those places.

With a weary sigh, Tosh rose and made her way over to the kitchenette to grab a few biscuits. Luckily, there were a few chocolate ones left in the package; she needed some sugar. Her eyes wandered up to her Captain. She could see him pacing back and fourth, his hands stuffed deep into his pockets. Over the last few hours, she kept hearing raised voices. Jack’s frustration was growing increasingly. She recalled his determination when they began the scan the previous evening. He seemed calm, his confidence never wavering. But that seemed to change with the sunrise. Jack was worried and that made Tosh more concerned than ever.

As she chomped on her treat, mulling over last night’s events for the hundredth time, a loud beep filled the Hub. Tosh quickly ran over to her computer. She could hear Jack and Susie bounding out of the office.

“What is it? What have you found?” Jack demanded.

Tapping the keys of her computer, Tosh quickly read the information that flashed before her. “It’s that alloy I found on the frame. There is a match in the database.”

“To a planet? A species? What?!”

“Calm down, Jack,” Susie said, glaring at him. “Give the girl a second to read it.”

Jack took a deep breath, but it just made him tenser. He waited impatiently tapping his finger against his crossed arms while Tosh hit a few more keys.

“Alright, it looks like Torchwood has seen objects made of this material before, a very long time ago. It was catalogued as being manufactured on a planet called Dulrilkl, species…” her voice trailed off as she tried to figure out the pronunciation.

Jack leaned over her to read the screen. “Fogniaccztir,” he supplied.

“Have you heard of them?” Susie asked.

“Yeah, I have.”

“Dangerous?”

“No, not really, not unless provoked.”

“Well, that’s good, yes?” Tosh commented, still scrolling through the information. “If they aren’t dangerous, than that painting downstairs might not be harmful either.”

“True,” Jack agreed. “But the problem is not their behavior; it’s their location. Dulrilkl is light years away. We need to find some way of contacting them now. We might not get a reply back for ages. And while this might not be immediately harmful to Owen, being stuck away from your home world, all alone…” He did need to finish the sentence. Both Susie and Tosh knew what it felt like to be alone amongst their own society and that was bad enough. “Okay, so, we need to find out all we can about these aliens. Tosh get the database going.”

“Already doing it,” she informed him.

“Good, while that’s running, get the translator program up. If it can’t translate their native tongue, then there are about half a dozen basic intergalactic languages they might know. Susie, with me.” Jack turned and started to jog towards the stairs.

“And where are we going?” she asked, trailing after him.

“Archives!”

“What the hell do you hope to find down there?!” No one went into the archives, if they could help it. All of the recent finds were piled up in one area for easy, if messy, retrieval. Otherwise, the rest of the objects, files and detritus were aimlessly scattered around the shelves and alcoves. Jack mentioned several times that he wanted to organize it, but it became more of a joke over time and just sat there, taunting them with its nonsensical stacks.

“A faster way to contact Dulrilkl besides sending a message out into the universe and hope that they respond in the next ten years.”

“And we have something somewhere in the archives?”

“Somewhere, yes. Alex found it a few years back. Never really said where, just that the Rift spat it out one night. I’ve never had much need for it.”

“And what exactly is it?”

“Think of it like an alien operator.”

When Jack offered no further explanation, Susie pushed on. “So, it has their phone number and we can then just ring them up directly?”

Jack snickered. “No, that would be silly. We contact the operator, give it the address and then it contacts them with who we are and that we want to discuss the retrieval of one of their portals.”

“And do we need to worry about nosy listeners during this exchange?” Susie asked, sarcastically.

Jack looked at her incredulously. “It’s not an actual being, Susie. It’s tech. If it were alive, I certainly wouldn’t keep it in the archives. In the cells maybe, but there aren’t many creatures out there that I would subject to the nightmare that is our archives.”

As they entered the first alcove of the archives, Susie had to agree with the reference. The mess was even worse than the last time she visited the dark and depressing place. “Oh, Jack, you can’t be serious. We’ll never find it.”

Jack stepped forward and picked up the nearest box. It was full to the brim with items marked “small and not harmful.” He passed it to his second-in-command. “We have to.”