Torchwood: Slow Decay (11 page)

Things between her and Rhys weren’t exactly
bad
, they just weren’t
good
. They weren’t the way she remembered them being, when they first met and fell into bed. The sex wasn’t the ‘wild, sweaty, so desperate for deep penetration that clothes got ripped’ kind any more. It was more the ‘it’s been a week and we really should have a romp even though we’re both knackered’ kind. And that was only one step from the ‘let’s not bother, eh?’ kind.

A horrible thought occurred to Gwen. The definition of getting old was that you’d already made love for the last time in your life, but you hadn’t realised yet.

At which point, just as she got into the wrong frame of mind, she heard Rhys’s key in the lock.

For a moment, all Toshiko could see, illuminated by the orange ceiling lights of the tunnels, was the bulky, stooped shape of a Weevil. Then her eyes adjusted and she saw that it was Ianto. Only Ianto, wearing a suit and looking like he belonged there, in the darkness, underground.

Physics. Light and shade, and the electrical reactivity of cells in the eyes. That’s all it was. Keep telling yourself that.

‘Ianto?’ Her voice was shriller than she would have liked. ‘What are you doing down here?’

He glanced casually back into the shadows behind him, and then turned back to Toshiko. ‘I’m… auditing the Archive,’ he said carefully. ‘The records from the early years of Torchwood are pretty vague. I try and get down here as often as I can and correlate the contents of the boxes with the files we keep in the Hub. You’d be surprised at the stuff I’ve discovered we have but don’t know about, or don’t have but think we do. There’s stuff here going back to 1885. I was just checking the chamber we have set aside for the remnants of Operation Goldenrod. Were you part of that?’

She nodded, remembering with a shudder the sheer chaos of Operation Goldenrod. It had been before Gwen had joined them, when Suzie was still part of the team. Toshiko had been working for forty-eight, perhaps seventy-two hours, on a hugely complex piece of alien technology that kept reconfiguring itself while she worked, but what she remembered, above all else, was the people that had been melted together during sexual congress by Goldenrod; their flesh joined, teratological monstrosities that Owen had to try to separate surgically leaving, for the most part, deformity and death behind him.

Ianto raised an eyebrow. ‘And what about you, Tosh? What are you looking for down here?’

‘That device we recovered from the nightclub – I think it’s part of a set. According to the files, we have several more of them in a box.’ She waved vaguely down the tunnel. ‘Down there somewhere. Tunnel sixteen, chamber twenty-six, shelf eight, box thirteen.’

‘Ah.’ Ianto took her by the elbow and guided her back down the tunnel, the way she had come, away from the chamber where he had been working. ‘You’ve come too far. It’s a little confusing, down here. Let me help you orientate yourself.’

They walked back, Ianto holding Toshiko’s elbow all the way. Something made a noise behind them, a movement, a scuffling, but when Toshiko turned her head she couldn’t see anything. And Ianto didn’t turn his head.

It was a rat. Just a rat. That’s what Toshiko told herself.

‘This chicken is delicious. What did you do with it?’

Gwen smiled. Suzanne Vega was still playing softly in the background, the alien tech was glowing a soft amber, which had surprised her but fortunately blended in with the candle, and Rhys was wolfing everything down with an enthusiasm she hadn’t seen for ages. ‘Nothing, really. I just marinated it for a while.’

‘There’s nothing “just” about that. It’s inspired genius. And it certainly makes a change from the usual pasta in sauce.’ He took another sip of his wine. ‘We used to eat like this a lot,’ he said reflectively. ‘We used to cook together, remember? We’d buy a recipe book and go through the recipes, one by one. Sometimes they were great, and sometimes they were… well, not so great… but they were always interesting.’

‘Remember the turkey with chocolate and chilli pepper sauce?’ Gwen giggled.

‘Which might have worked if we’d read the recipe properly and used dark chocolate instead of milk? I remember.’

‘Give us some credit, we were drunk.’ She wasn’t sure if it was the wine or the alien tech, but she was feeling like she was slightly out of control now as well. Or possibly she and Rhys were synching together, so in a sense they were both controlling each other. Whatever: it was a nice feeling.

He was laughing now. ‘What about the Brie wedges in breadcrumbs?’

‘Which we left in the deep fat fryer for so long that the Brie just melted away and all we had left were these breadcrumb shells that tasted faintly of cheese!’

‘What was the silliest thing we ever cooked?’ Rhys asked. He reached out a hand and placed it over the back of Gwen’s hand in a gesture of familiarity that took her breath away momentarily, it was so unexpected.

Gwen smiled at him, catching his eye for longer than they usually managed these days. ‘The pork, paprika and pears, when the pears just cooked down to this porridge-y mush?’

His gaze locked with hers. ‘No. No, I think it was the Cuban lamb. The one where the recipe said we had to marinade it in Coca Cola before barbecuing it.’

‘Oh! Oh!’ A sudden memory made her eyes widen. ‘Surely it was the peanut butter and apple soup?’

Rhys nodded. ‘Yes! Oh God, didn’t we do that for a dinner party?’

‘Rebecca and Andy came over. You found the recipe in a vegetarian cookbook. You were so proud of it.’

‘And it was so thick and stodgy that none of us actually wanted our main course.’ His fingers curled around her hand, touching the soft palm, stroking down to her wrist. ‘Oh, Gwen, when did we stop having so much fun?’ he asked softly.

She sighed. ‘When I got a promotion, and you got a promotion, and we both ended up working silly hours just so we could get together enough money to pay the bills and take an exotic foreign holiday, once a year, just to keep ourselves sane.’

‘Looking back, we may have made the wrong choice, somewhere along the line. No promotion, and a week in Criccieth every August. How does that sound?’

‘It sounds like hell. Have you ever been to Criccieth?’

Rhys looked down at the remains of his chicken. ‘Lovely though that is, I’m not sure I could finish another mouthful.’

‘You usually clear your plate. What’s wrong?’

He shrugged, avoiding her eyes. ‘I thought I could do with losing a few pounds.’

Gwen reached out and placed her hand over his.

‘I wouldn’t complain,’ she said, ‘but that doesn’t mean I don’t find you shaggable just the way you are.’

Gwen could feel a slight tugging in her hand, as if Rhys subconsciously wanted to pull her towards him. Or was it subconscious? There was a slight curve to his lip, a certain glint in his eye, that sent a tingle through her, from her head to her toes but lingering somewhere around her middle. She could feel her nipples getting hard, rubbing against her dress. ‘Er, you know I did dessert?’

‘Get thee behind me, temptress.’

‘I was rather hoping to have you behind me,’ she said, enjoying the way his eyes widened.

‘We could always bring the dessert with us,’ he said, teasingly. ‘I could lick it off your… stomach. And your breasts.’

‘It’s crème brûlée,’ she breathed. ‘I need to caramelise the sugar.’

Rhys stood up at the same time Gwen did.

‘The way I’m feeling right now,’ he said, pulling her towards him, ‘heat isn’t going to be a problem.’

As Gwen felt his fingers spread themselves through her hair, pressing her lips hard against his, she in turn pressed herself hard against him. They stumbled together towards the bedroom, not even noticing the amber light that pulsed in time with their heartbeats, from the dining table.

Tunnel sixteen, chamber twenty-six looked exactly like the twenty-five chambers that had come before it and the fifteen that Toshiko had overshot by: a red-brick arch in a red-brick tunnel, water trickling down and etching the mortar away, small patches of fungus spread across the walls. Toshiko hoped that they were good, old-fashioned Earth funguses, and not spores of something alien that were patiently eating their way into the walls. She hoped that the rats that she heard scurrying in the darkness sometimes really were rats, and not tiny things with many legs and many eyes that had snuck in along with some of the alien technology they had found. She had nightmares occasionally that something was growing, deep in the bowels of Torchwood. Something alien. Something bad.

Toshiko shivered. They were just dreams, provoked by some of the strange things they did and saw in Torchwood. They weren’t real. They weren’t backed up by observation, or evidence. By science.

She looked around, trying to work out where they were exactly, in relation to Cardiff geography. The Hub was directly beneath the centre of the Basin, but now they were probably some distance away, somewhere under the Red Dragon Centre, if she didn’t miss her guess. How much of Cardiff rested on Torchwood’s tunnels? How many ways in or out were there?

‘Here we are,’ Ianto said, stopping by a stack of metal, bolt-together shelving. ‘Shelf eight, box thirteen.’ He indicated a box at eye level: an ordinary plastic box – more of a crate, in fact – institutional grey in colour, half a metre along each edge.

There was nothing written on the box, apart from what looked to Toshiko like a random string of alphanumeric characters. She couldn’t work out how Ianto had got to the right box so quickly. In fact, she couldn’t work out how he had even got to the right chamber, given that there was no way of telling them apart. She gave him a sceptical look.

‘I have a system,’ he said, affronted.

Together they pulled the box off the shelf and lowered it gently to the floor. It was about the weight of a portable TV. Funny, she thought, how they kept comparing alien devices to ordinary things, like iPods and portable TVs, as if they were just different examples of the same thing. But they weren’t. They really weren’t.

The box was sealed with tape. Ianto ran his thumbnail around the edge of the lid, splitting the tape in two.

‘Do you need me for anything else?’

She shook her head. ‘No. Thanks for helping me find the stuff. I might have been down here for days looking for it, otherwise.’

‘Helpfulness is my middle name.’ He looked down the tunnel, towards where Toshiko had seen him earlier on. ‘If there’s ever anything else you need down here, let me know. I can find it for you much quicker than you can find it yourself.’ And with that he walked off, back towards the Hub, walking fast and not looking backwards.

Dismissing Ianto from her mind, Toshiko reached down and pulled the lid off the box.

Afterwards, when all passion was temporarily spent, when they were lying with Gwen diagonally across Rhys’s chest and with his hand cupping the heaviness of her breast, with the sweat and the moistness of their bodies cooling on their skin, the silence between them was the silence of lovers who didn’t have to say anything, not lovers who couldn’t think of anything to say. Gwen had climaxed twice: once quietly, biting her lip, while Rhys touched her with insistent gentleness, and once again gasping, hips raised, while Rhys moved deeply within her. Rhys had climaxed once, crying out like a man who had just run into a brick wall, the sweat trickling down his face and dripping onto Gwen’s shoulder blades. Now they lay there, on the same bed where they had made love so many times before, trying to incorporate this latest time into the story of their lives.

‘That was incredible,’ Rhys said. He was still breathing heavily. ‘
You
were incredible.’

‘You weren’t too shabby yourself.’

‘Don’t expect me to recover any time this week. You’ve used me up.’

‘I could go again. Just give me a few minutes.’

He shook his head. ‘It’s no good. I’m finished. You go on without me.’

Gwen laughed quietly beside him, her breast moving gently in his hand in time with her laughter. He felt himself stir. Perhaps he could manage one more time. Once he’d caught his breath. And had a piss.

‘I need to go to the bathroom,’ he said. ‘I’m exhausted. Drained. I need vitamin pills. Lots of vitamin pills. In fact, I may just try to dissolve as many of them as I can in a glass of water and drink it.’

Gwen giggled, and rolled off him. He rolled in turn to the edge of the bed and stood up. His clothes were strewn across the floor. Responding to a half-formed thought provoked by the mention of pills, Rhys reached down and burrowed in his pocket for a moment. There, wrapped in a piece of tissue paper, was the blister pack that he had been given by Doctor Scotus that afternoon. Closing his fingers around the pills, he looked down at himself, at the curve of his stomach, at the way his thighs flattened out against the mattress. Gwen still loved him, but if he wanted to show her that he loved her then he needed to do something dramatic. He needed to lose that weight.

Padding to the bathroom, he was already pushing the ‘Start’ pill from its blister as the door was closing behind him. The pill was larger than he had realised, spherical and a mottled yellow. He popped it into his mouth and swallowed. The pill stuck in his throat for a moment, as if fighting to get out, then a wash of saliva carried it down.

As he returned to the bedroom, the night air cold against his naked skin, thoughts of the pill led Rhys to think about the Scotus Clinic, and that in turn led him to think about Lucy, who had given him the Clinic’s address. His brain wasn’t editing his thoughts properly: he was feeling tired, in a good way, and still turned on. That’s why he suddenly said: ‘So have you thought any more about Lucy coming to live here?’ He listened to the words coming out of his mouth with horrified fascination, knowing exactly what kind of reaction they would provoke but unable to call the words back. ‘Just for a while,’ he added, weakly.

Gwen’s head popped up from the tangle of sheets on the bed. ‘If that’s a joke,’ she said, ‘it’s in really poor taste. What’s the matter – one woman in bed not enough for you?’

The candle back in the dining room was flickering a deep crimson, casting dancing shadows across the hall and around the bedroom, illuminating Gwen’s incredible breasts with a bloody wash of colour. Although part of Rhys’s mind knew that he’d stepped into a minefield and he ought to back out rapidly, by far the greater part felt a sudden and brutal surge of anger, a dark wave that washed over him, knocking rationality off its feet and leaving something older and nastier behind. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ he snapped. ‘She’s just a
friend
. Do you want me to write it down for you to make it easier to understand? Or shall I just text you the details, since you seem to pay more attention to whatever appears on your mobile than anything I say?’