Chasing Ghosts (attn: Ianto)

The streets were darkening as the day drew slowly to a close, and the Torchwood SUV skidded to a stop several feet away from the front door of the building they were intending to investigate - and at least a yard from the nearest parking space. The large house sat on the very edge of the city, just short of not counting as belonging to Cardiff at all, and it was as imposing as all old houses on outskirts of cities ought to be. The siding was streaked with weather and graying from time, and several of the shingles on the roof had fallen and, as ceramic was wont to do, shattered on the grass below. Birds had clearly nested in the beams under the awning of the porch, and the front door was cracked open, the doorknob hanging loose and useless from its broken fastenings.
Jack cast a glance up to the awning as he wrenched the door open with relative ease. "Home sweet home," he commented to Ianto, offhandedly, flicking on the torch. The hallway was dark and cobwebbed, and it almost seemed as though the torch failed to penetrate the gloom. The paint and wallpaper both were peeling merely with the passing of time, and chips of paint were speckling the scuffed hardwood floor.
They were chasing a Rift anomaly that Tosh had picked up on the sensors. It was minor, and Jack had thought that it wouldn't be too much trouble for the two of them. He'd left Tosh and the others at the Hub to keep track of the various spikes and shifts in Rift energy while they were gone, and take care of problems that could arise. Lately things had been difficult -- not as in hard, exactly, but there had been quite a lot of activity on the sensors.
As far as anomalies went, this one was being very quiet, though, and Jack frowned as he stepped into the hallway. The doors on either side were tightly shut, and there was a staircase leading up. It was accompanied by an eerie silence that Jack sought to put a finish to when he said, "Cheerful, isn't it?"

Ianto could only grimace at Jack's remarks, since his ideal place to be at that particular moment - or any - was anywhere but inside a dark, gloomy house filled with cobwebs and lord only knew what else.

He nodded at Jack's mention of cheerfulness - Ianto could think of a million adjectives for that house, and none of them were cheerful, but he didn't answer. This had been the moment when they'd come to a halt in front of a staircase, but despite Jack's little joke and also despite him not moving after that, Ianto still had no intention of leading his boss up the stairs.

"Aren't you going to climb up, sir?" He asked, inquisitively, as if he was really expecting Jack to do just that. Which he was.

"I was thinking on it," he replied, but nodded anyway, leading the way up the rickety stairs. They creaked as if they couldn't take the weight of anything heavier than a stray cat, but there was little choice but to trust them for the moment. Reaching the top of the stairs, somehow without managing to fall through the steps, revealed another cobwebbed hallway. "They need to hire a new interior designer," Jack remarked, trying the handle of the first door he came across.

It opened easily enough, sliding inwards, revealing a room that would have been at home in black and white Victorian photography. A bedframe, the yellowed mattress skewed at an angle atop it, was an ivory skeleton by one wall, and the tatted curtains on the lone window at the back wall hung loose and long like a wedding gown. There was an old desk, once painted white and now peeling to reveal the pine beneath, with crinkling stiff papers still sitting on it.

But for a moment, that wasn't what Jack saw. He saw a room with walls painted petal-pink, a girl's room, with toys and long curtains and a bed piled with dolls and comforters. A girl, no older than fourteen, sat at the desk in a chair that no longer sat there in his time, writing or drawing on papers that now sat haphazardly where she had left them.

She looked up, directly at Ianto and Jack, and he blinked, and it was gone. "What..."

The room Jack had entered, and Ianto had entered behind him, smelled of old age and, he suspected, moss. Everything inside it had had its day long ago, perhaps longer than Ianto thought.

He pointed his flashlight at Jack, who was strangely paralized, as if he weren't even there anymore.

"Sir? Jack?" Ianto tried, to no avail. Jack kept staring at the desk, fixated. "What's wrong?" Ianto furrowed his brow, feeling slightly scared and slightly strange. It was clear to him Jack was in some sort of trance, but Ianto couldn't understand why it was a selective state, since it didn't affect him at all.

"What are you looking at? What do you see?" Ianto asked again, placing a hand softly on Jack's left shoulder. He lifted one eyebrow, as a thought began forming in his mind. No, it couldn't be. It would be the biggest of cliches if the old, creaky house was haunted. Ianto shook his head and sighed heavily.

Jack came back into reality and it was almost startling, the difference between the room he had seen and the room now. It was the thought of a moment to realize that Ianto hadn't seen it, and that he had clearly been hallucinating. That was worrisome.

"Nothing that's here now," he answered Ianto after a moment's thought. Maybe it was a cop-out not to explain more fully, but that wasn't totally out of the norm for him. "Just taking a guess, but that's probably what brought us here. Something to do with the Rift." He grinned, shaking off the ghost - pun entirely intended - of what had happened, "So we're not in a house that Stephen King built." It was a figure of speech, of course, given that Stephen King wrote books, not building houses.

What he meant was that it wasn't haunted. Probably not haunted, at least.

Ianto sighed in relief, glad to have shaken the notion of a haunted house before Jack did it for him. He was being mysterious again, though, and Ianto didn't think he ever could get used to that. It annoyed him only slightly that Jack kept things from everyone just to seem more interesting.

"So...It's not haunted. No ghosts, no spooky poltergeists either?" He asked, although he didn't really mean for Jack to respond, because he already knew the answer. "Is it a time overlapping issue?"

This he wanted Jack to answer to. This, and the reason why Jack had mentioned Stephen King. Just the thought of Jack reading that sort of thing amused Ianto to no end, but he didn't say anything. Maybe later.

Jack shrugged, but he didn't immediately discount the idea. "Good suggestion. Lines up with what I saw, but I'm not convinced. We'll have to get a better look," he said, backing out of the room and into the hallway again. "Oh," he added, "No poltergeists, no. Last time I found one of those, it turned out to be a rogue Calethian clinging to somebody's ceiling."

That was an amusing thought. Much more amusing than what met him when he opened the next door, which screeched on its hinges as it swung open by degrees, the rust on the metal fittings complaining of the movement. The room was dark, the window boarded up and the only illumination was Jack's torch, reflected back at them by a long, cracked mirror mounted on the wall above a bureau that was stained by water damage dripping down from the ceiling. A bed, little more than a mattress half-suspended and half falling through a damaged, rotting away wooden frame, stood to one side, opposite the obscured window. On the wall near the door was a desk nearly identical to the one in the previous room, the wood dark and darkly stained, unpainted, tiny pockmarks from age and disuse peppering its surface.

That was what Jack would see, anyway. In Ianto's vision, the room would be painted pearly white on the walls, the whole of it pristine, the window unshuttered and open to the mild sunlight of a day long past, light creme-colored curtains ruffled by a wind he could almost feel, but then again not at all. The bureau held many things, small bottles of perfumes and other small things scattered over its unmarred surface. On the bed, made up in soft pinks and whites, a young woman sat braiding her long, dark hair. It was a moment in time, a woman who would have died long before Ianto was born, wearing a dress the color of cornflowers. Her eyes widened, and she gasped, looking at him...

And then the spell was broken.

Ianto's face turned to stone once the...vision? was ended, and he almost couldn't keep on his feet. He leaned against the wall, next to the door he had opened, still feeling not quite like himself.

"There was a woman. In there." Ianto tried, almost whispering, trying to clear his voice and swallowing hard several times. "Once."

He couldn't shake the image of someone who wasn't supposed to be there looking at him like he was the one who wasn't supposed to be there. A crack in time, perhaps, two worlds colliding, it could be a million things, and Ianto slowly realized that it was very possible that most of the so-called ghost sightings hadn't been real ghosts at all. It still was not a good experience, as he could tell by the sweating that had caused his button-up to glue to his back.

"Ianto?" During the quiet, Jack had realized that it was possible - probable, given the blank look in the other's eyes - that he was seeing the same thing that he had seen before. And when Ianto spoke, he confirmed that, and Jack frowned. He touched the other man's arm lightly. "It's just a vision. Once we figure out what's causing it, we can get the hell out of here." It disturbed him a little, these visions, and he couldn't help at once being madly curious about what was causing them, and wanting to end it as soon as possible to stop experiencing them.

"You know, ghosts are only supposed to be apparitions. Did you see the whole room, too?" He acted as if it were natural - as if he'd shared that much about his own vision before. He hadn't, of course, but since when had that stopped Jack?

Ianto nodded, and nodded again, hating to feel like this, and aching to regain composure.

"It was not a ghost." Ianto told Jack, hoping he would understand that what Ianto really meant was that he'd seen the whole room.

It took him a few more sighs, and Jack's protective hand on his arm a little longer for him to be back to his usual self. He sighed one last time, and grimaced. He was still a little nervous, as well as ashamed.

"I wasn't expecting..." He mumbled, trying to excuse his behaviour.

"Yeah, definitely not." He nodded, confirming Ianto's statement that it wasn't a ghost. Ghosts didn't, as far as he knew, make you see rooms, or moments in time. They were just specters, solitary, confined to the place they had died-- if you believed the stories. Jack considered them unlikely, but he was loathe to discount anything out of hand after working for Torchwood for so long.

"Neither was I," he remarked, turning to look down the rest of the hall with a slight frown. "It might be worth heading back to look up the people who lived here last, for now." Because affirming whether or not their time-transgressant ladies were actually real people or not was important. Although it was particularly tempting to keep exploring... "Or we keep going, see if the root cause is planning on making itself known."

Ianto had gone back to normal now, and he was standing straight, no longer needing the help of a wall. He considered both options Jack had offered, and although his mind jumped right to the first one - the easy one - Ianto didn't allow himself to decide before thinking about it.

If on one hand they could use as much background information on the house and its owners as they could attain, on the other hand the little child Ianto supposed he still had inside him wanted to keep exploring a "haunted house" and see what other frightening things Jack and him could find.

Finally, he supposed they could just phone Toshiko and she would dig up the information and tell them about it over the phone. After all, if they had hi-tech, they should use it.

"Couldn't we just ask Tosh to retrieve the information for us, and keep searching?" He ended up suggesting, not the least bit hopeful, unlike the little child inside.

Jack smiled a little at Ianto's answer, nodding. "Right." Over the comm, he gave a brief request to Tosh to look up the house's previous owners. Once that was done, he could address the house itself (and Ianto, for that matter) again. "So. We're seeing things, little windows in time... what do you think that means?" His tone was light, and the question mostly rhetorical as he moved to the next door. Above this was only the attic, so he would save that for last.

It would be entirely too cliche if the cause of all of this was in the attic. While good for a laugh, he wasn't counting on an obvious answer. While it would be nice to find, say, a Meletean sparker on the fritz somewhere around here, he seriously doubted things would be that easy.

Ianto didn't know what it meant, safe for the few possibilities that had popped into his mind earlier: crack in time, Rift malfunction, Parallel dimensions colliding. Either way, Ianto was far more inclined to believe the crack in time theory, since he was quite sure he had seen a Victorian room, with a Victorian woman inside it. He decided not to answer Jack's question, also because he was quite sure Jack didn't need his opinion right then.

He walked behind Jack, as he moved next door. If another Victorian scene appeared before the eyes of either of them, he would be ready for it this time.

The door to the next room was nearly trapped shut by the rust accumulated on the hinges, remnant of a leak in the ceiling just above them. It was as old as the rest of the house, though, and gave when Jack pushed against it hard enough, shoving inwards more forcefully than he had intended it to. The banging sound it made when it hit the wall made Jack wince slightly, and he reached out to catch the door before it could rebound and swing shut again. "Easy," he muttered, to the door, pushing it more gently open again.

This time, the room appeared, at first anyway, to both of them as it ought to have, an old bedroom with wrought-iron bedframe somewhat twisted, a dark-wooded bureau, desk and chair. The window here, too, was boarded up, and if there ever had been curtains, they had long since been taken down, stolen, or destroyed. Jack knew without really having to look further that, going by Victorian standards, this was a boy's room - darker furniture, sparser, the walls that pale blue favored for boys and bluebirds.

Rather than stay by the door, now Jack stepped into the room more properly. Absent the visions of the previous two rooms, this one seemed less forbidden, and it seemed less of an intrusion to walk in it. Touching one of the intricate corner pieces on the bedframe, he sighed, trying to think. "Here we have the boy of the hour," he said at length, referring to the room's former inhabitant, though they hadn't made themselves clear.

He kept thinking he saw something out the corner of his eye, though.

Ianto looked around the room and didn't feel like anything was out of place with that room - it was what it looked like, an old, battered room. He didn't have any visions either. Anyone else would've been relieved and thought nothing of it, but Ianto thought that this room being unlike the others probably didn't mean relief.

"There's no weird visions in this one." He said, rhetorically, even redundantly. Ianto saw Jack looking around without moving anything other than his eyes, as if he was looking for something.

Soon, Ianto, too, was looking around the room again, and outside it.

"I think we're being watched." He said, for it was clear by then that they were not alone. His stomach took another tumble, but he didn't say it out loud.

"I wouldn't be surprised," he replied, shaking his head. It was surreal, even moreso than the visions, really, to feel as if one was hovering on the edge of something else altogether. Disturbing, a bit, as well, but he wouldn't let that show. "There's something here, too. We just can't see it right."

Jack turned to go back to the door, and that was when things became infinitely clearer. The scene shifted, and they -- Jack and Ianto both -- were back into the visions, the room changing from dilapidated and aged to a picture of a day long since passed, fresh and new.

There was no one in the room this time, nor did it fade immediately.

Assuming he knew how to deal with the situation this time around, Ianto merely stood there, hardly daring to move a muscle, waiting for everything to go back to normal.

Except it didn't. And when he realized that fact, Ianto looked to Jack, to survey his expression - he wasn't looking at him worryingly, which probably meant Ianto wasn't "tripping" alone.

"Sir? Are you...Here? I mean, are we both seeing this room as it used to be?" He asked Jack, steadily, albeit his teeth were a little on edge by that point. Ianto didn't even know if he could say "as it used to be", for it still wasn't clear if that was, indeed, them jumping to the past, or having visions of it. He wondered, then, if they had somehow been transported.

"Seems like it..." Jack was trying to think through this, but no amount of mental gymnastics, it seemed, was going to make this image fade. He settled for reaching down to press the palm of his hand against the bedspread, feeling rough cotton and frowning. "Either this is real, and we picked the wrong day to come here, or something's messing with our heads."

Withdrawing his hand and turning around, he raised an eyebrow, looking suddenly curious. "Well, guess we know which it is, then," he said, indicating the hallway. It was exactly as they had left it, with no sign of the bizarre timelessness of the room they were standing in.

If they had, indeed, been transported, they hadn't gone far. Once Jack pointed at the hallway, Ianto could see for himself that despite standing in a victorian room - this time, for roughly seven minutes now - the hallway leading to that room was still very much the same they had been in minutes before.

Ianto tried walking back out of the room, but for some unseen force, he couldn't. Nothing was pushing him, or holding him back, but he couldn't physically bring himself to walk past the threshold.

"I can't get out." He announced, looking to his left, and then looking ahead at the hallway again. "There's nothing holding me in, but I can't get out." Ianto said again, the contradiction very present in his voice. He was beginning to feel slightly annoyed.

"Something wants to keep us here," Jack said, frowning. This was more than annoying. It was a little worrisome, as well. "Like being locked in a museum after-hours, huh?" That he asked a little more lightly, as he crossed to the window to see out, but all the view yielded him was an indistinct image of the side of the house and the yard, and... ah. The SUV, parked just enough to the side to be visible. So it was just the rooms that were effected.

Moving back from the window, he returned to the doorway, though he found the same bizarre aversion to crossing through it that Ianto had. "Something in our heads, then. That's nice." Sarcastic, a little.

Ianto observed in awe as Jack slid his head out the window. The safest way out was, indeed, the door, but if they couldn't walk through that, the window had to do. He did some peaking of his own, and decided that even though the fall was deep, they had to try.

Amusingly, Jack couldn't walk through the door and to the hallway either. It was funny to look at when you were not the one being held in place by your own mind.

"We're trapped by our own minds?" Ianto's voice sounded even more annoyed than before. "We'll have to jump out the window, I suppose." He said, as if he wouldn't die in case he fell awkwardly off the very tiny window sill.

"Or...We'll have to sort this thing out from in here." Ianto said, sounding sarcastically excited.

"That sounds about right." He paused at the suggestion of the window, glancing at it before he shook his head. "If we can't get out the door, chances are whatever's causing this won't let us jump out the window, either. Anyway, that's one hell of a fall." A fall which he would, of course, survive, or at least come back from; Ianto he couldn't be as sure about (for obvious reasons).

Sorting it out from within the room sounded easier said than done, but it was the only option really left. "If it's something in here, we should be able to find it, at least," he suggested, nodding.

Ianto nodded a couple of times, and looked suspiciously at the desk chair, considering sitting down, but afraid the chair would go up in smoke if he did. He touched it, and it did, in fact, feel as real as anything. Finally, Ianto felt comfortable enough with the reality of the room to sit down. And so he did.

"Well then, if we're not going anywhere, we might as well get comfortable." He said, leaning his back against the back of the chair, and crossing his arms over his chest. Then, he had another idea. "Can we communicate with the outside world?"

"Not sure.." And Jack added, realizing, "I haven't gotten anything from the Hub in a while." There wasn't any static or anything to let him know, but his request for communication from Tosh ended with silence on the line. "Nothing," he reported, cursing.

He was beginning to seriously consider tearing the room apart to see if whatever was pulling them into this would be-- where? Under the bed? Right. He settled for going to the bureau and opening some of the drawers, looking through them and ignoring the clothes and whatnot he should have expected. The thought occurred to him that he was going through someone's belongings, someone else's memories.