Title: Evolution (2/?)
Author: Emma
Characters: Jack Harkness, Ianto Jones, Rhys Williams, others
Rating: Starts PG, but hey, it’s got Jack and Ianto in it!
Disclaimer: Oh, please. If I owned them, would I let some of those idiots write the scripts? And if I were making any money off them, would I be where they could find me?
Summary: Rhys Williams has his own monsters to fight, but why can't he remember?
Author’s Note: This story takes place in a totally different AU from Homecoming. In this one, Gwen and Owen died at the end of TW2.
Prologue is here; Part one is here

 

           “Rhys? You okay, mate?”

            I shook my head to clear it a bit. I hung on to the name – weevil – because I was absolutely sure that if I didn’t, if I didn’t repeat it to myself over and over again until it was burned into my memory, I would have forgotten it in the morning.

            “Rhys?”

            “Yeah. Sorry, Thomas. I thought I saw someone run into the woods.” I wasn’t going to tell him about the weevil. Somehow I knew that t would be a really big mistake. “We’ll need to search tomorrow.”

            “Tomorrow hell.” He started for the door. “I want to get my hands around that…”

            “Thomas, no!” I pulled him back. “We need to find Ollie and make sure he’s okay. We need to check the horses, too, just in case whoever it was got into the stalls.”

            “Oh, God. I need to call Euan and report this, otherwise we’re going to have trouble with the insurance company.”

            “You go ahead. Ask Euan if he can swing by the pub and pick up a couple of the more sober guys. We’re going to need some help.”

            I waited until he had gone back into the house before I set out to retrace Ollie’s usual circuit. My main concerns were basically the stables and the cellars, mostly the cellars, because, in spite of all the fifth rate Dick Francis imitators, there’s damn little reason to steal a thoroughbred these high-tech days. You couldn’t race it and you couldn’t breed it; that left ransom, but those guys were professionals, and this certainly wasn’t. Besides, there was the weevil.

            Woodstall Grange is built like a squared-off eight, with the living quarters in the center and a group of buildings on either side arranged around courtyards. Thomas calls it Oxford bastard architecture. Me, I’ve never even visited Oxford so what do I know.  The cellars are on the furthest side of the other square, as far away from the stables as possible. Good single malt needs to age in peace and quiet. Ollie made a complete tour of the courtyards three or four times a night, but mostly he monitored everything from a small room in the business office where live views from the surveillance cameras fed into four monitors.

            “Privacy? What’s that?” Gwen laughs as she presses me against the wall, hands playing wicked games inside my trousers. “If the coppers don’t see us, Toshiko will. What Tosh can do with a CCTV camera is downright obscene.”

            The sudden vision froze me in mid-step. Tosh. Toshiko Sato. The beautiful Asian woman in my dream had a name. She was shy, and sweet, and brainy, and loved expensive shoes, and she and Gwen used to have girls’ nights where they gorged on Belgian chocolate and got pissed on champagne.

            This time when the pain hit, I was ready. Rubbing my temple, I repeated her name over and over like a talisman. The sound of the door shutting was a distant, impotent thing.

            By the time I finished the circuit, I was really worried. Ollie wasn’t anywhere I’d looked, and I’d looked everywhere I could think of. I hoped Euan had been able to find some of our lads in a fit condition, because we were going to have to search the woods, weevil or no weevil. I’d be damned if I left Ollie at the mercy of that thing.

            Euan and Thomas were standing by the stable door when I got there. If you never saw them side by side, it would never occur to you that they were brothers. Thomas was all dark Welsh while Euan was ridiculously Norman, hawk nose and all. But like this – well, like my mam-gu used to say, blood will tell.

            “No sign of Ollie, then?” Euan sighed. We’re going to have to search the woods.”

            “Were you able to get any of the lads?”

            “Yeah. Peter, Graham, Lily, and Johnysais came back with me. They’re searching the outbuildings now, but so far, nothing…”

            A high-pitched scream cut  him off. It had come from behind the grooms’ quarters. We ran across the yard, Euan muttering curses at the mud sucking at his regulation shoes. As we turned the corner, we all skidded to a stop, partly because Euan’s cop instincts kicked in and he put out his arm to hold us back, but mostly because we had to give our brain a chance to catch up with our eyes.

            Ollie lay in a heap against the side of the old through the lads used for wiping off the worst of the muck before going indoors. The left side of his head was all bloody, and blood had gushed down his anorak, his pants, everywhere. And cradled tenderly in his arms, wrapped in an old horse blanket I remembered buying myself, was a baby.