Title: Lost in the Past

Author: Soledad

Fandom: Torchwood/Cadfael x-over.

Rating: Teens, mostly for violence.

Genre: Drama, perhaps a pinch of angst.

Series: First part of a CoE fix-it trilogy.

Spoilers: "Countrycide" and "CoE – Day One" for Torchwood, "The Summer of the Danes" for Cadfael. Nothing too detailed for the latter, though.

Timeframe: A sort of fix-it to CoE for Torchwood, although no happy end in the conventional sense of the world. Around the end and after "The Summer of the Danes" for Cadfael.

Summary: The explosion of the Hub at the end of "CoE: Day One" tears the Rift wide open. Ianto finds himself in 12th-century Wales, together with Gwen, of all people. There is no way for them to get back to contemporary Cardiff, so they have to see how they can survive 900 years in the past.

Warning: not for Gwen-fans. None of my stories are. If that bothers you, do us both the favour and hit the BACK button, now. Thanks.

Disclaimer: the usual: don't own, don't sue! Everything belongs to the almighty BBC and the fabulously talented Ms Ellis Peters. I'm just borrowing everyone for the sake of this story. The historic characters belong to themselves, obviously, but I hope they won't mind featuring here. I tried to treat them with the utmost respect.

Chapter One – Awakening

Ianto Jones could feel himself waking up… but in that half-dream state where the line between dream and reality is blurred. He felt the slightly chilly yet gradually warming air of a summer morning not much after sunrise, and the pleasant, natural scent of the fresh outdoors – which was weird. Not unlike the day when they had reached the Brecon Beacons, actually, and started setting up camp. Before everything would have gone straight to hell, that is.

There they had been, sitting around on camping chairs, eating burgers. Gwen had started that stupid, thoughtless little Who was your last snog? – game of hers, and Jack had asked if only humanoid species would count. At which Owen had called him a sick, sick man…

JACK! Ianto bolted upright in shock, his eyes wide open, without actually seeing his surroundings. Brecon Beacons had been more than two years ago, and when he had last seen Jack, they had been in the Hub, Jack with a bomb ticking inside his stomach. A bomb set only two minutes till the explosion – an explosion with a blast radius of a mile!

He had not wanted to leave Jack to die alone – again! – but Jack had grabbed him and dragged him to the invisible lift, tossing him, after a fast, desperate kiss, onto the platform and sending him to safety. Gwen had already left through the tourist office, running for her life and for that of her unborn child, and Ianto had been rising with the lift towards the complicated opening mechanism of the roof. He could see Jack pushing buttons to lock down the Hub, to contain the explosion as much as possible, hand hovering over his wrist strap, anxious to see Ianto get away.

Ianto had wanted to stay with him. If they could not live together till they died, for the simple reason that Jack did not die, or rather, he would not stay dead, he had at least wanted to die together. Preferably in Jack's arms. But Jack had needed him to get away, so that he would have the strength to face another horrible death and save the people of Cardiff through his death, and for his sake, Ianto had left.

Jack had been afraid. Ianto could see him close his eyes briefly when the computer had counted down to zero. Before the roof would open and allow him to leave. Before the Hub would lock down behind him.

Ant then everything had gone white. Before the lift would deliver him onto the slab with the perception filter, his last thought had been whether there would be anything left of Jack after such an explosion.

"You know me; I can survive anything," Jack had said. "I'll come back. I always do."

For you, the unspoken promise had hung in the air between them. But in this case Ianto was not sure that Jack would be able to keep his promise.

Fighting back his nausea, a sure sign that he was seriously concussed, Ianto opened his eyes to take in his surroundings.

Then he blinked. Then he closed his eyes and opened them again, not sure that he was truly, fully awake just yet.

He had expected to see Roald Dahl Plass in ruins; debris and broken glass and bent metal everywhere. Not even the sealed Hub would have been able to contain an explosion of such magnitude without a great deal of collateral damage. He had been prepared to see dead bodies – lots of them. At this time of the year, the Plass was usually swarming with tourists.

What he saw instead made him question his own sanity. Profoundly.

There were dead bodies all right, complete with the unmistakable, sickeningly sweet odour of death. After the Brecon Beacons, he would always recognize the stench of dead human flesh, no matter what. So yes, there were bodies, although not all that many of them – but they were clad in some strange garb he had only seen in historic films about the Middle Ages. They were laid out in sombre order on the upland meadow grass, as if waiting for being collected and transported to their burial place.

Beyond them, looking down from the crest, Ianto could see the sea. Not the neatly ordered shore of Cardiff Bay, though. There were sand dunes, and beyond the dunes the morning mist was rising from the water like a diaphanous swirl of faint blue over the shore that still lay in quickly lifting shadow. Westward, the surface of the sea was bright already, flecked with the white shimmer of spray in the steady breeze.

It was a captivating sight – wild, untamed, unmarred by any human presence but the dead lying in the grass. A sight he could not remember having seen before. But again, he had not been to many places in his short life.

Where on Earth was he anyway? Cos sure as hell this was not Cardiff! How had he got here?

Well, unless he was still dreaming, the how would be the easiest part to explain. The explosion might have torn the Rift wide open. If that was the case, he could have ended up anywhere. Perhaps he wasn't even on Earth anymore. He just hoped that – should the Rift ever decide to bring him back to Cardiff – he wouldn't end up in Flat Holm, with his sanity stripped away from him due to the things he was about to see.

Let's hope I'm still on Earth, he thought, in which case getting help would have been the most important factor. He patted himself down, in search for his mobile phone, but found nothing.

Literally nothing. Not only was his mobile phone gone; there was not much left of his clothing, either. His suit was in shreds, his shirt torn beyond repair in several places, his tie hung frayed around his neck, one of his shoes was missing – only his underwear was still more or less intact.

"Well if that isn't bloody fantastic!" he muttered angrily.

He hated being in such dishevelled state. Could his father see him now, he'd be fit to be tied. Iefan Jones might have lost his small tailor's business due to economic recession, but he had been very conscious of appearances until the day he died.

Ianto looked around himself uncertainly. He was in the middle of a meadow that clearly served as the temporary resting place of those dead people in the strange clothes, but otherwise he could not see anything to identify his surroundings. He could see no fence or border markers anywhere – he was simply in the middle of the great outdoors, without specification. The sand dunes below did remind him of something… in his current, confused state of mind, however, he just could not remember what it was.

He shook his head. The fresh wave of nausea promptly reminded him what a stupid idea that had been, so he waited for it to ebb a little again. He would think about the location later. Right now, getting some help – preferably in the form of clothes and medicine before anything else, though any means of transportation would be nice, too – was the most important thing. Unfortunately, he could see nothing for miles into the horizon. No building, no moving thing anywhere that he could tell. He shivered slightly, despite the warm summer morning.

Perhaps the shock, he thought, rubbing his arms while considering his next move.

Turning away from the meadow, he looked down at the shore again. Far away at the horizon, he saw movement, after all. Several long, lean boats, dragon-headed fore and aft, were heading westwards, driven by long oars; perhaps as many as twelve pairs of them, if he was counting correctly, against the breeze. Their small, square sails were turned sideways, so that they would use what little speed they could catch, despite the wrong direction of the wind.

"Viking ships?" Ianto muttered in confusion.

He pinched himself. Hard. The ships did not vanish. He pinched himself again. Nothing changed. He was definitely awake. Of course, there was still the possibility that the concussion caused him to see things that were simply not there – or so he hoped. 'Cos the other possibility was just too weird to consider.

A loud moan startled him out of his muddled thoughts. Looking around again, in search for the source of that noise, he spotted the crumpled form of someone a good deal further, right close to the edge of the crest. It was a woman, by the shape of her, wearing a black leather jacket, with jeans and black leather boots, her clothes torn and bloodied, too.

"Oh, God," she moaned. "What the bloody hell… I'm so going to kill someone, once I'm back on my feet again…"

That voice… Ianto closed his eyes in pain, wishing the Rift would be a living entity that could be killed. Of all possible people, it had to throw him here – wherever here was – in the company of Gwen! Not that he would wish her any harm, but the perspective to be exiled on some alien planet with Gwen made him even more nauseous than he already was.

On the bright side, she looked basically unhurt, save from a split lip. She must have been a lot further from the explosion than Ianto himself had been; which was logical, considering that she had left a little earlier. And that she wanted to kill the people who had made them end up here – that was a sentiment Ianto definitely, whole-heartedly shared.

Unfortunately, he did not have the faintest idea who had been behind the attack against the Hub – he consciously and with great effort banned from his mind the mental image of Jack, lying in bloody pieces among the debris – or how to get back to Cardiff to kill the people responsible for the whole mess. If they could get back at all, which he began to doubt seriously.

He tried to clamber to his feet, but the spiking wave of nausea warned him that if would be a bad idea. So he crawled over to Gwen on all fours, as careful as he could, hissing as the uneven ground rubbed his bare knees raw. Gwen was so wrapped up in her own misery that she did not even notice his pitiful approach, until he touched her arm. Which proved another really bad idea, as Gwen lashed out reflexively, giving him a great clout upside the head that nearly knocked him out cold again.

When she realized it was Ianto she had hit, she was terribly sorry, of course, but that didn't make Ianto's concussion – or the increasing nausea – any better. He wasn't really angry with her, though; not this time. Under the given circumstances, no-one could blame her for panicking. Hell, he was a hair's breadth from, panicking himself, and after the Battle of Canary Wharf and the Brecon Beacons he wasn't one who would panic easily.

"It's all right, Gwen," he waved off her profound apologies, "it wasn't your fault. I should have made more noise."

"You're bloody right, you should have!" she replied in a slightly hysterical tone; then she looked down herself and founded. "I look horrible, don't I? Look at my clothes! And my hair! I'm filthy, and in rags, and my boots are torn, too!"

"It's a good thing that I don't have that problem, then, isn't it?" replied Ianto dryly. "Seeing that I haven't got any clothes left and whatnot."

Gwen was terribly ashamed at once, realizing that fact for the first time. She did have a good heart, basically… when she wasn't too preoccupied with her own problems.

"Oh, Ianto, sweetheart, I'm so sorry!" her eyes were wide and full of tears. "But we'll get you help, right away! Just let me find my phone…"

Ianto, who hated being called sweetheart, or love, or any other endearments, unless it would come from Jack, who rarely ever used any of them, rolled his eyes in exasperation but let her have her way. She actually managed to fish her mobile phone from a surviving pocket of her once so fashionable leather jacket, but no matter how much she tried, she couldn't get access to any known phone numbers. Or to any random, unknown ones, for that matter. Now she began to panic in earnest.

"Why can't we reach anyone?" she demanded, her tears flowing freely. "How am I going to get home? What's happening to us?"

Ianto suppressed a sigh. He could never deal well with hysterics; both Lisa and Rhiannon had been blessedly free of such tendencies, so he'd never had the chance to get used to them. He wished he'd be stuck here with Tosh, poor, practical, brave Tosh… even Suzie would have been preferable. But the Rift hadn't asked him in advance, of course.

"Get a hold on yourself, Gwen," he said through gritted teeth; perhaps a trifle more forcibly than intended. "We need to find a landline somewhere, as mobile phones are apparently useless. Or a person. Anyone. There has to be somewhere nearby a house or a farm or something. I mean, those dead bodies were laid out there by somebody."

"Dead bodies?" Gwen repeated, her eyes widening to the size of dinner plates. "What dead bodies?"

"Over there," Ianto vaguely gestured in the direction of the corpses. "No, don't go there! It's gross, and they can't help us anyway."

Of course, telling Gwen not to do something was the surest way to practically force her to do it anyway. Not heading Ianto's warning, she rushed up to take a look – only to fall to her knees and become violently ill right afterwards.

Ianto resisted the temptation to say "told you so". Instead, he crawled to her, still on all fours, for standing up without help seemed a really bad idea, and shook her a little… as much as he dared without worsening his own condition.

"Gwen… listen to me! I need to get to the edge of the crest to take a good look at the landscape; perhaps I'll see something familiar. But I can't get there on my own. I'm concussed and dizzy and won't be able to stay on my feet. Can you help me?"

Momentarily forgetting her own misery, Gwen was all compassion and understanding at once… like a mother hen.

"Oh, Ianto, love, of course I'll help you! Come, lean on me! It will be all right, you'll see, everything will be all right."

Ianto hated being called love as much as he hated being called sweetheart (again, with the exception of Jack who hardly ever used such words) but found it better not to fight with Gwen about semantics right now. Neither did he believe that anything would be all right, any time soon. But he needed Gwen's help, so he shut up and accepted it.

Even so, it was hard going. He kept stepping on sharp pebbles, thistles and other stinging things – and with one foot unshod and missing the sock, too, it wasn't a pleasant experience. He swayed by every other step, and nearly fell, despite Gwen's best efforts to keep him on his feet. She was simply too short and too weak to be of sufficient support, although she did try hard, he had to give her that.

It seemed a pain-filled eternity until they finally reached the rim of the crest – but the sight offering itself was well worth of the effort.

Before their stunned eyes a long, sandy shore stretched towards the horizon. The anchorage at the mouth of a great river was separated from the broad, sandy reaches of the bay to southward by a long spit of shingle, beyond which the water of another rivers and their tributaries wound its way to the strait and the open sea, in a winding course through the waste of sands. The long stretch of shallow tidal water extended more than two miles to the south from their vantage point, with a green shore beyond the pale gold shoals and the gleaming silver water rolling back into distant hills.

"It's beautiful!" Gwen whispered in awe. "Where are we, Ianto?"

"I can't be sure, of course," Ianto replied in a manner that revealed that he was, in fact, fairly sure about it. "The coastal line is familiar – but not familiar enough. In any case, those hills look a lot like Afron Menai on those prospects I sell in the tourist office."

"Afron Menai?" Gwen repeated in surprise. "You mean we're in bloody Gwynedd? How on Earth did we end up here, of all places?"

Ianto sighed. "Gwen, Torchwood Three has been studying the Rift since its discovery in 1879, but in more than two hundred years, no-one has managed to figure out how it works."

"True," Gwen admitted. Then she scanned the shoreline again. "You know, I only ever saw postcards of Afron Menai, but I could swear that the coastline looked differently. Not so empty, for starters. There ought to be tourist shops and cottages and ships and jetties… and stuff," she finished, a bit lamely.

"Well, I did see ships heading westwards a short time ago," Ianto admitted," but they're gone now. Perhaps they were just a fringe of my imagination, 'cos I'm concussed. At least I hope they were."

"You hope?" Gwen echoed, nonplussed. "Why?"

"Cos if they were real, then we've been replaced in time as well as in place," Ianto said grimly. "Those were Viking longships, Gwen! Drakkars! If they were real, then we've landed in the Middle Ages, and I can't even begin to guess when. The Danish kingdom in Dublin lasted for a bloody long time, and the Danes raided the Welsh lands frequently in those years."

Shocked, Gwen scanned the surface of the bay again, trying to find any trace of those ships but found none. That gave her new hope. Poor Ianto must have hit his head pretty hard to see ships that weren't there. The more important it was, then, to find some help. Granted, there were no signs of life anywhere that she could tell, but Ianto was right, somebody must have laid out those dead people in the meadow grass. It was worth a try, if nothing else.

She cupped her hands to her mouth and yelled as loud as she could, voice rising an octave from the effort.

"HELLOOO! ANYONE AROUND? HELLO! HELP! ANYONE!"

She could hear her voice being carried away in the breeze, gliding along the surface of the water, but there was no answer. She strained to listen, but had no chance to catch anything above the humming of the breeze and the clashing of the waves against the shore.

She raised her hands to give it another try, when Ianto caught up with her, hobbling miserably, his face dark with anger.

"Are you bloody insane?" he demanded. "You could get us both killed!"

"But Ianto, we need help, love!" Gwen argued, wide-eyed with sympathy. "You need help! Look at yourself: you're all but naked, and the sole of your foot is as good as shredded to ribbons. There, let's try to get to that river; there must be a road of some sort alongside it. There may even be a car we could flag down. At the very least it would lead somewhere. To a house. Or a town. Or a village."

"Yeah, cos we've been so lucky with villages in the outdoors," Ianto muttered. "If we're especially lucky, we might even meet the people who've killed all those blokes over there.

And he gestured in the vague direction of the dead bodies.

"Perhaps those are just dummies," Gwen tried to deny the sobering fact heroically, because accepting them would make her freak out too much. "I mean, have you got close enough to them to see if they're real blokes at all? What if someone is making some historic film here, and this is all just, you know, location?"

"Sure, and denial is just a river in Egypt," Ianto returned sarcastically. "Trust me; those are real, down-to-earth dead bodies over there. They could fake the corpses, the clothes, event he dirt and the blood – but not the stench. Not to me. Not after the Brecon Beacons."

The recall of those memories shut up Gwen efficiently. She even considered getting sick again, but then realized that as she had already lost everything she had eaten in the last twenty-four hours, that wasn't really an option anymore. Dry heaves were so not her idea of fun.

"We should still try getting down to the river," she said after a while, a lot more subdued than before. "At least we could have some water to wash off the dirt. We may even find a road."

"Oh, I agree," Ianto sighed. "I just don't know how I'll get down there."

"Yes, you'll need something for your foot," Gwen gnawed her lower lip in frustration, trying to come up with a useful idea, but to no end.

Fortunately, Ianto was already ahead of her. "Help me to get out of my shirt," he said. "It's a lost case anyway, but perhaps I can bundle my foot in it."

The first couple of efforts led to nothing – the damaged shirt was too big and clumsy a piece of fabric to work with. Finally Ianto tore it to shreds, about a hand's breadth each, and Gwen swathed his bare foot with them like a mummy's, fixing the makeshift bandage with his frayed tie. The deep burgundy one. Jack' favourite. It looked ridiculous, but when Ianto gave it a try, it held as if glued on, and at least now he could walk without injuring himself any more.

"It will be hell to take off," Gwen warned. "Your foot is full of cuts and scratches; the drying blood's gonna glue the fabric to your wounds."

"I'll have to soak my foot, then, before taking it off," Ianto answered with a very careful shrug. His head really disliked any sudden movements. "Let's go."

~TBC~