Fic: Closer Together and Further Away. (5/11)

[silver_sun]

Lying on its side in the marshes, the wreck of the Perisson was not immediately obvious and Ianto knew that without Pon-Pel to lead the way he would never have found it.  

It must have been an immense ship once, as large perhaps as the Millennium Centre back in Cardiff and far beyond the scale of anything he can imagine ever getting airborne.  Although maybe it never needed to be, perhaps it had never been designed to break atmosphere, docking instead on space stations, which would help to explain its disastrous landing.  

Now just a few sections of hull stood clear of the marsh. Twisted and torn, with rust having cut strange filigrees from the metal panels, the wind whistled eerily though them giving the place an almost otherworldly atmosphere.

“A few more winters and I doubt there’ll be a way into it anymore.” Pon-Pel said looking sadly at the remains of the Perisson. “There used to be so much more to see when I was a kid. We used to play in it. It's too dangerous now.”

Ianto shivered, not relishing the prospect of entering the wreck. “But we're still going in there?”

“It's safe enough if you know what you're doing. It's just that it's easy to get lost in there and find yourself on the wrong side of a flooded section. Speaking of which, it’s going to be pretty damp and we might even have to swim for a bit if we're going to get to the storage section, so you'd best lose most of those clothes. I can't think you could swim too well in them.” She looked at Jack's wrist strap on Ianto's arm. “Will it be all right getting wet?”

It wasn't something Ianto had given any thought to, but he'd seen Jack end in up in the bay or the  Taff a few times while chasing something that had come through the Rift and he'd not seemed too worried about what the water might do to it. “I think it should be all right.”

“I hope so. I like being able to speak with you.”

“I should learn to speak your language, not rely on this,” Ianto said as he started to unbutton his jacket. “Jack is going to want it back and if anything did happen to it I'd rather not have become reliant on it.”

“You should speak to Con-Mai, he organises the classes for the children. I don’t think he’d mind an extra pupil or two.” She watched him for a moment then said, “You do not think you will be going home soon?”

He laid the jacket down on a mound of stones near the ship, the too obvious and painful answer sticking in his throat. He sighed and fidgeted with the buttons on his waistcoat, which despite no longer having a shirt, he still wore. “I'm not sure we'll ever go home at all.”

“I'm sorry,” Pon-Pel said. “You did not mean to come here, did you?”

Ianto shook his head. “It was an accident. We were trying to make a piece of technology safe, but it went wrong. We're lucky to be alive really. When it went off I...”

Pon-Pel held up a hand. “It is not good to dwell on such things. Where there is life there is always hope. Perhaps someone will miss you and come to take you home?”

If anyone could find them it would be Tosh and Gwen, but it would be an almost insurmountable task. Even if they had the technology capable of travelling to wherever and whenever the planet was whether they could get it to work safely and reliably was another matter. “I don't know if they can.”

“Uncertainty doesn't mean it is hopeless,” Pon-Pel pointed out, putting a hand on his arm. “You must live in the now, but always carry hope for the future with you. It is the only way. It is how my parents and grandparents survived here.”

After all he'd seen and been through, Ianto wasn't sure he could actually cling to that faint shred of hope. Life had left him with the outlook of when you think it’s as bad as it can get it, somehow it will always manage to get worse. He didn't want to argue about it so he just nodded and said, “Maybe you're right.”

Striped to the waist, his clothes and shoes piled up neatly for when they returned, Ianto shivered, the air cold and damp on his bare skin.

“Let me go first,” Pon-Pel said climbing easily onto the curving hull and scrambling across its mossy sides to one of the holes.

“Do all your species have so little hair?” Pon-Pel asked as he joined her on the hull.

Ianto supposed it must seem like a little to a race that’s entirely covered in it, but he felt a little self-conscious all the same as he replied, “I suppose so. A lot have less.”

Pon-Pel looked surprised. “It must very cold for you. Or is your planet very hot so you don't need it?”

“Some parts are,” Ianto said, trying not to think too much about the fact that he was unlikely ever to see it again. “It rained a lot where I was from.”

“A bit like here then,” Pon-Pel said walking along the hull until she reached what had been the door to a cargo bay.

Ianto looked up at the grey sky, the clouds low and heavy above them. It could almost have been autumn day out in the Brecon Beacons. With one last look at the open sky, he followed her in to the wet gloom of the ship.

Ianto had never considered himself to have a problem with enclosed spaces, but the cramped corridors designed for the Star-Chosen were rarely more than five foot high and, combined with the knee high water, made him wish for the open skies of the marshes again.

The light Pon-Pel carried lit the way for a small area around them, but did little to help, the blue-green bio-luminescence of the substance in the lantern throwing out far less light than he would have liked. Pon-Pel seemed confident though, and led them through the ship with barely a pause. Some sections were flooded, while others were merely incredibly damp, mosses and lichens covering the walls.   Deeper into the ship, where there was no natural light, the walls were still bare, the metal cold and slick under his fingertips.

As they descended deeper into the wreck the water in the corridor they were following grew deeper, until it was chest deep on Pon-Pel. Unable to stand upright because of the low ceilings, Ianto followed her thought the increasingly flooded ship.


His back ached from where he was hunched over, despite the fact that the rest of him felt almost numb with the cold. Pieces of cable and wiring, as well as loose floor panels caught and snagged at his legs, threatening and occasionally succeeding in tripping him, but Ianto pressed on.

As he spluttered back to the surface for a fourth time, Pon-Pel took his arm. “Are you sure you want to go on?”

The rational part of him was yelling 'No. Let's get out of here while we still can.' Yet when he spoke, what came out was, “I can't. I've got to find something to help Jack, to make him well again. I can't go back without having tried.”

“He's very sick, isn't he?” she asked as Ianto leant against the wall, trying to get his shivering back under control.

“Owen thinks he might die.” It was too hard to admit that he feared the same, because admitting it felt too much like accepting it as inevitable, and he couldn't think about losing Jack. He stopped and closed his eyes, trying to compose himself, the idea of a life without Jack in it threatening to drag him down.

“Cisca-Mar is helping him. He will come through.”

“You know Cisca-Mar quite well? You visit her a lot,” Ianto asked, trying to find something to focus on that wasn't freezing water swirling about his waist or his fears about Jack's health.

“Yes. But it’s not her I’m really going to see,” she said sounding rather shy. “You'll have seen Rila-Bek. She's one of Cisca's assistants. The really pretty one who's a bit shy.”

Ianto frowned, his mind feeling like it was wading through mud as he tried to think which one of the two Star-Chosen what worked with Cisca-Mar she meant.

“It doesn't offend you, does it? That my choice of partner, if she'll have me, is the same as myself.” There was fear and sadness in her eyes when she looked up at him. “Our grandparents told us how when we lived amongst the stars there were cultures where such things meant pain or death. You do not believe such a thing, do you?”

“No,” he reassured her, wondering if he should tell her that unfortunately there were still people who thought like that back on Earth. “It doesn't. It really doesn't.”

She looked at him for a moment, head tilted to one side. “Your friend, Jack, he is more than a friend then?”

“It's complicated. Once we were...” Ianto stopped and sighed. “I really don't know what we were or are. But I care about him. He's a good man and he's been through a lot. Too much.”

“And your other friend, Owen, he is more too?” Pon-Pel asked. “I see how he looks at you. How he made sure you had a blanket when you fell asleep on the floor.”

If the situation with Jack was complicated then whatever there was between him and Owen was even more so. There had been times when Jack had been gone when things between them could have changed into something more, but it hadn't and Ianto wasn't sure why. “I don't know.”


Right now Ianto would settle for Jack being well, even if they weren't ever together again.

“If we are going to find anything it will be in these rooms here,” Pon-Pel said leading them into yet another set of partially flooded corridors. “These were the upper storerooms. Although I suppose they are the lower storerooms now.”

Everything looked as it had been thoroughly ransacked, although he could tell it that was because the rooms had been stripped of anything of value or, if was damage, caused in the crash.  Open crates bobbed in the water, scraps of fabric and plastic like packaging floating around them.

Room after room along the corridor continued the same. Cold and disheartened, Ianto was beginning to wonder if they would find anything and whether it was possible to get so cold you couldn't move, when Pon-Pel called to him.

Wedged between the sliding doors of what had probably once been a lift was a crate.

“Help me get it loose,” Pon-Pel said, tugging on the crate to trying to get it free.

Taking hold of one set of handgrips in the side, Ianto pulled. For a moment nothing happened and Ianto was about to suggest looking around for something to pry it loose when it suddenly came free, sending them falling backwards into the water.

Ianto barely registered the cold this time and scrambled back to his feet so he could get a better look at the crate. Made of metal, the box was cube about a metre square, with handholds set into each side. On the top was a peeling plastic label.

The writing on it remained stubbornly unreadable and Ianto realised with a sinking feeling that the translation device was either not functioning properly or, perhaps more likely, just unable to translate text. “Do you know what it says?”

Pon-Pel pointed at a symbol on the crate that might have been a fan or a stylised webbed hand. “It’s emergency supplies. They were meant for people in crashes or pioneers on uninhabited worlds.” She ran her hand around the rim. “It is still sealed for travel. Someone must have been trying to take it with them, but something happened.” She looked at the green, slimy watermark near the top of the corridor. “Flooding perhaps. We shouldn't stay here too long.”

“Does it say what's in it?” Ianto asked, reaching for the catches on the lid.

“No, but it will probably be a mixture of tools, dehydrated ration packs and medical supplies.” She put her hand over Ianto's. “If you open it will no longer be waterproof. Better to get it outside first. If there is anything in there that could help Jack we should wait to open it safely.”

Ianto nodded. He could feel weariness dragging him down already, his body not fully recovered from the time spent in the marshes before they were found.

The crate was heavy and even with Pon-Pel's help it was a slow, arduous task to move it back up through the ship. There were little more than half way when she stopped and looked at the water swirling around them.

“Is something wrong?” Ianto asked, wondering if it was just his imagination that it seemed deeper than it had before.

“It has started to rain,” Pon-Pel said, concerned. “We should hurry.”

The water even in the upper sections of the ship was rising fast. Water, which had been ankle deep when they'd first entered the ship now rushed icy cold about Ianto's waist. Ahead of him Pon-Pel was already swimming, the lantern with its feeble light bobbing in the water next to her on its cord.

There was no way to swim and carry the crate, so when they came to sections where the entire corridor was filled with water Pon-Pel either found them a way around it or scouted ahead to find out if the flooded section was short enough that Ianto could hold his breath and walk through it.

Waiting alone in the dark and cold, water rising about him was worse, Ianto found, than the walking through the flooded sections. The fear that they might become separated and that he might never find his way back to light and warmth, chilled him as much as the frigid water.

Eventually though, the darkness of the ship started to give way to the greyer light of a wet afternoon sky as they neared the shattered hull.

“You are very brave,” Pon-Pel said as she helped him lift the crate out of the ship and place it on the exposed hull.

Cold, wet and so tired he felt dizzy, Ianto shook his head and sat down next to the crate. It seemed secure, but he couldn't shake the fear that perhaps water had leaked in and ruined what was inside. “No, I'm not.”

“You risked your life for another,” she said, helping him get the crate down from ship and onto the waterlogged ground beside it. “What is that if not brave?”

“I don't know. Maybe you're right.” He still didn't feel it, although at that moment he wasn't sure he was capable of feeling anything other than cold. He wasn't going to argue if Pon-Pel wanted to believe it, he'd let her. He'd become very good at letting people just assume things about him, to the point where sometimes he wasn't sure any more who the real Ianto was.

His clothes, which he'd taken off in an attempt to keep dry, were saturated with rain, but Ianto put them back on, as it was easier to wear them back than carry them when he had the crate to transport.

The walk back to the lake seemed endless, the world narrowed down to just putting one foot in front of the another, the mud squelching beneath them as the rain fell incessantly. Carrying the crate was soon abandoned in favour of pulling it behind him on a short length of cord Pon-Pel had brought with her.

Head down against the torrential rain, Ianto only noticed that they had left the marsh when he stumbled, feet slipping on the rain-slick pebbles on the lake shore.

“Nearly there,” Pon-Pel said, putting a hand on his arm to steady him. “My boat is just over there.”

The crate seemed to have gained weight and Ianto struggled to lift it onto Pon-Pel's raft. Ianto looked at how low it was sitting in the water. “Will it take us all?” he asked doubtfully.

“Of course it will.” Pon-Pel climbed on near the front of the raft. “You just need to sit opposite it to keep the weight balanced.”

Even with her reassurances that it was all right, Ianto still had the unnerving feeling that it was about to sink at any moment. Pon-Pel though continued to paddle it back across the choppy waters of the lake to the village.

Looking out into the wind and spray, Ianto could see a lone figure waiting on the jetty. Too tall to be one of the Star-Chosen, he felt his heart sink.

Owen should have been with Jack. If he wasn't, did it mean... He tried to shut down that line of thought and failed. The idea that Jack might be gone, that he might never get the chance to say goodbye, sat like a lump of lead in his chest.

Link to part six