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Ianto crossed off another day on Jack’s tiny little desk calendar. Six months. He’d been sitting in the Hub for six months, with nothing to keep him company but the computers and the animatronic shells of his friends. He didn’t even have the Archive to talk to anymore now that they had combined. They were one thing now, and he hadn’t spoken to anyone since he’d sat in the boardroom and begged Owen not to die.
He watched the world slowly change and still, the buildings crumbling, animals turning into little clockwork machines and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He could remember when UNIT in London had finally caught wind of it all. He remembered watching the soldiers rush out in their uniforms, with their weapons. Remembered watching them fall, twitching, changing in moments, the virus growing stronger. Everything had stilled, and Ianto was glad for the paranoia of the Torchwood leaders. The entire base was self-sufficient, and there were enough supplies to keep a team of eight alive for five years at least.
And so he was alone. The Archive’s physical body could destroy the virus inside of him, but that meant nothing to the others outside. That meant nothing to his friends. He went downstairs to check on them. His life had become a horrible routine: wake up, check on the team, eat, check the CCTV, clean up any messes (there were rarely any), check on the team, read a book or something, check on the team, etc. He hated going down there. There was never any change. He could hardly remember what their faces had looked like. He could barely tell who was who in the cell, only able to recall because of their clothes and the fact that he knew where he had placed them, sitting blank-faced, staring at each other, in the cell. But he had to know they were okay. He had to know.
So he checked on them. More times a day than anything he had ever done, except maybe serve coffee. And just thinking about coffee made him depressed. Even if he could drink it now without bizarre side effects, he didn’t want to. Because it reminded him of everything he’d lost.
Sometimes he thought he was going crazy. There was nothing to do in the Hub. There was no one to talk to. And he was six months gone. It hurt to even think about looking outside. Janet and Myfanwy had long since succumbed to the virus and stilled. Sometimes he slipped into a sort of daydream, sorting through the massive amounts of information stored by the conglomeration of his own brain and the Archive. In those moments, he would either forget the world or hear whispers of the past inside his head and he wondered if the loneliness or the machine inside him was driving him mad.
He had sunk into a reverie on the Hub’s sofa when a grating noise filled the air and startled him to alertness. Maybe he really honestly had gone mad. But the grating noise had a source, suddenly, as the TARDIS materialized in the middle of the Hub just long enough for Jack to step out with a short wave before it disappeared again. Ianto was left gaping.
“Guys? I’m home!” Jack called into the Hub, not yet noticing Ianto. “Guys, I—Oh.” He peered at Ianto, who stared dumbfoundedly back at him. “Ianto, where is everyone?”
Ianto opened his mouth and only a croak came out. It had been too long since he had spoken aloud. He coughed, swallowed, tried again.
“Gone, sir.” He whispered, partly because of his throat and partly because he still felt that the truth was too terrifying to say aloud. “The entire world has died. Stopped.”
Jack frowned. “What are you talking about, Ianto? Is this some metaphor, a riddle?”
Ianto shook his head and crossed to Tosh’s computer, pulling up a CCTV of the Plass, where animatronic creatures still roamed jerkily, their dead eyes staring out at the empty city landscape.
“What’s going on? What’s happened?”
Ianto felt the grief swell in him as he sat Jack down on the sofa and began to explain. “After you left, we saw a strange signal from the sewers. We found this Weevil that looked like it had been experimented on. It looked like someone had put gears and glass and metal where biological compounds should be. We killed it and Owen autopsied it, but it turned out to be a virus from Xarvic system. Even there, no cure was ever found. It took over the entire planet.”
“Why are you still here, then? You look fine.”
“I am fine.” Ianto sighed. “I don’t know if you knew anything about it, but before I came over here, Torchwood London was doing experiments on their own employees. Apparently, sometimes against their will and without their knowledge. Because I worked in the archives, they implanted an alien Archive in me. It was called an Artandex. It stored all the information from the Torchwood London Archive. I guess they did it to make sure it survived if the building itself was destroyed. When we found that Weevil, I fell and hit my head. That jostled the Archive and brought it, basically, to life. Out of a dormant state.”
“Where is it now?”
“Still inside my head. Sort of. It couldn’t access any of its information. So we had to become one, if you will. We integrated ourselves together. So it’s a part of me. It was a mutual decision. We had to. We didn’t know if there might be a cure for this thing or not.”
“And there wasn’t.” Jack said flatly, staring at his hands.
“No, there wasn’t.” Ianto agreed. “But the physical body of the archive reacts to foreign substances and bodies within my body. It sends out a sort of radar to lure the problem to it and then destroys it. But it only works inside me. We couldn’t make it work outside of my body. There was no cure.”
“So now what?”
“I can’t get sick but you can.”
“But if I do, I can die and I’ll come back normal.” Jack sighed and dropped his head to his chest, his shoulders slumped. He looked defeated. “I was hoping to come back to a warm welcome.”
“There’s nothing left on this planet but frozen people.” Ianto said. “How can we live like this?”
“I want to see them,” Jack said abruptly. His shoulders were still sloped in defeat, his face grim.
“I don’t—”
“I want to see them.”
They stood in the dim hallway outside the cell, staring in at the still figures as Ianto had done thousands of times. Jack brought a palm up to the glass.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen.” Jack stated quietly. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. I don’t know how to fix it.”
“Can you call the Doctor?”
“He didn’t give me a way to contact him. And he wouldn’t want to help me anyway. He practically shoved me out of the TARDIS. There’s nothing we can do.”
“So they’re never going to get better. They’re always going to be like this. They’re going to die like this.”
“Yeah.”
“And we’re stuck here.”
“Yeah.”
They stood outside the cells with tears in their eyes, looking in at the friends they could never get back, mourning a world they couldn’t fix and a future that held nothing at all but loneliness and deaths.