Chapter Text
The Rift brought all kinds of weird and wonderful objects and creatures to Cardiff from elsewhere in the universe; that was its only purpose, its reason for existence, and though Jack insisted it wasn’t sentient in any way, shape, or form, Ianto had long had his doubts. He also suspected that it didn’t merely bring things from other times and other planets, but dredged some of the more outlandish ones up from other dimensions, alternate universes, and in some cases, he wouldn’t be surprised if they’d been dragged from the depths of Hell.
That was what he was thinking this time, because Halloween was only a few days away, and he remembered only too clearly a few other instances around this time of year when he and Jack had found themselves dealing with what could only be described as monsters. Not that there was a monster this time, but if one happened to show up? Well, the way things stood, he wasn’t discounting that possibility.
On the face of it, the large, black birds weren’t anything to be concerned about. Ianto himself could be a large, black bird when he chose to be, although he was a crow, and familiarity with the entire genus told him these glossy, blue-black corvids were ravens. There were three of them, and unlike other ravens he’d encountered, the eyes of these were… unusual. Adult ravens, which these appeared to be, judging by their size, typically had black eyes, but of this trio, two had eyes that seemed to glow a faint icy blue in the fading daylight, and the third one’s eyes were green as apples.
There was something about them that made Ianto feel… unsettled, on edge, like they weren’t entirely natural, which, come to think of it, neither was he. Were-Crows weren’t exactly commonplace, on earth or anywhere else in the known universe. But despite his unique nature, the result of a run-in with alien technology, Ianto belonged in this time and place, in this world; it was his home, even now he was no longer entirely human, and every sense he had was screaming that these ravens were somehow wrong, even though he couldn’t put his finger on exactly why. It was more than just their eyes.
Ianto was starting to wish he hadn’t chosen to handle this retrieval on his own. Then again, the rest of the team were being kept busy dealing with other issues, and when the Rift alert had sounded, no one had been available to accompany him. Besides, it wasn’t as if he’d never handled a Rift retrieval alone. He did it all the time; it was part of the job, and he was a perfectly capable, not to mention experienced, field agent.
According to the data provided by Tosh’s Rift monitor programme, what had come through was inanimate but mostly organic in nature, and he’d found it easily enough: it was a tall, wooden staff made from what looked like a remarkably straight branch. Part of its length was bound in a strip of leather, and there was a bunch of glossy black raven feathers tied just below an ornate metal spear blade that appeared more decorative than functional, going by all the engraving on it.
There was a strange kind of beauty to the spear; obviously a great deal of care had gone into its making, although it was clearly old and much used. The wood of the shaft was smooth from frequent handling, the leather bindings stained in places, and coming unravelled a bit from the lower half. Under normal circumstances, Ianto would have simply donned a pair of gloves and picked the spear up, carrying it to the SUV to take it back to the Hub, where it would be catalogued and stored, but…
Well, there were a trio of ravens in the way, one perched on a crumbling headstone in this marshy corner of the mostly abandoned cemetery, one on the ground between him and the spear, its head cocked to one side, peering at him speculatively from one bluish eye, and the third perched on the spear’s shaft, where it lay at an angle, propped blade upwards against another headstone.
The raven on the headstone opened its beak wide, croaking almost eerily in the gloaming as the sun, hidden as it so often was by heavy clouds, slowly sank below the horizon, somewhere out of view. Ianto blinked, wondering how long he’d been standing there, trying to decide on his next move. Ravens lurking in an old cemetery was hardly unheard of, and under normal circumstances, he should have been able to scare them off, but these three weren’t at all alarmed by his proximity. They seemed almost to be waiting for something, and Ianto wasn’t at all sure he wanted to know what.
He couldn’t leave without what he’d come for though, couldn’t abandon the spear for someone else to find and claim, possibly an adventurous child or a reckless teenager. It didn’t belong on earth, that much Ianto was sure of; if it fell into the wrong hands, which basically meant any hands that didn’t belong to Torchwood, that could be a serious problem. There were very good reasons for Torchwood taking charge of anything that fell through the Rift; they were better equipped to deal with things that didn’t belong in this time and place, especially mysterious weapons of unknown provenance.
Ianto looked at the ravens, and they looked back at him. The nearest one clacked its beak. Their eyes seemed to be getting brighter as the waning daylight grew dimmer. Ianto dipped into his near photographic memory for what he knew about these birds. In mythology, ravens were considered variously as messengers, harbingers of death and destruction, even as tricksters. In Native American lore, they were also viewed as symbols of transformation… Well, anyone working for Torchwood Three for any length of time was intimately familiar with transformations, Ianto more so than most. He'd been a lot of different things over the years, everything from a tree to a fluffy pink duck, and, of course, a crow.
He took a cautious step forward, vaguely hoping that the ravens would move aside and allow him to retrieve the spear, but no such luck. The nearest one spread its wings and uttered a series of shrill warning calls before snapping its beak at him with an audible clack.
Okay, that wasn’t going to work. If the ravens were unwilling to give up the spear to a person, maybe he’d have a better chance of reasoning with them bird to bird, as it were. Despite being smaller than the ravens in his crow form, Ianto knew from prior experience that when faced with a crow, the larger birds would usually back down. He didn’t enjoy being a bully, but if that was what it would take…
He didn’t particularly relish stripping off in the current somewhat chilly temperatures either, but needs must. He would have preferred to retreat to the SUV and change there, but that would take too long and he didn’t want to leave the spear unattended, so he moved back to where a gnarled old half-dead and mostly leafless tree overhung the cemetery wall and dug a couple of plastic carrier bags out of his coat pocket. These days, he made sure to be prepared for the kind of situation where he had to take his clothes off. Such was his life.
Stripping off, carefully folding his clothes and placing them in the bags, which he hung safely from a convenient tree branch, he stood on the wall, wincing at the coldness of the stone against his bare feet, and quickly changed form, thankful there was no one else fool enough to be out here. The last thing he needed was an audience. At least as a crow he no longer felt the cold, but he was keenly aware of the encroaching darkness, and he grumbled to himself under his breath about the inadvisability of being in a rundown cemetery behind a disused church, in the dark, less than a week before Halloween.
“Must be out of my mind,” he muttered. “CAW!”
Taking to the air, he glided to the ground a few feet from the nearest raven and spread his wings, ruffling his feathers to make himself seem bigger than he really was. It was a tactic he’d successfully used before. Glaring at the raven in front of him, he clacked his beak and hissed.
The raven hissed back, standing its ground, although it eyed him warily. Ianto hopped closer, hissing again, stretching his neck out, wings raised, and the raven shuffled backwards an inch or two. It wasn’t much progress, but it was something, so Ianto pressed his advantage, snapping his beak, cawing, hissing, using every bullying tactic he could think of, and managed to drive the nearest raven backwards a few more inches, but then…
Night fell like a curtain, and while Ianto, from his research into Corvidae, knew that ravens had some degree of night vision, crows, even were-crows, unfortunately did not. True, his eyes were better adapted to low light than a human’s, but out here, with no streetlights and the moon yet to rise, if it would even be visible through the clouds, he was now at a disadvantage. He could see the glow from the ravens’ eyes though, shining like sapphire and emerald stars in the rapidly deepening darkness.
He could see something else as well, flickers of blue fire rippling along the shaft of the spear, making a muted snapping and crackling sound, and much as he might have liked to take wing and make himself scarce, he found himself transfixed waiting with bated breath to see what would happen next. Maybe, in fact probably, that was unwise, but he was here, and dealing with whatever this new threat might be was his responsibility. As a Torchwood agent, running away was seldom an option.
The three ravens had lost interest in him, their attention drawn, just as his was, by the flickering blue flames illuminating the spear’s shaft, and the hand that now gripped it perhaps twelve inches below the blade. Even as Ianto watched, shadows seemed to congeal, forming a tall figure, clad in a cloak, leather armour, and a wide-brimmed hat. Leather gauntlets covered the hands, leaving the fingers bare, each gauntlet encircled with a metal band from which extended three savage metal claws…
All of that might have been bad enough, but the face below the hat’s brim was not that of a human, and from what Ianto could see in the flickering blue light, the person, alien, supernatural being, however it might be described, wasn’t wearing a mask. Two large, round, sapphire blue eyes shone brightly above the savage beak that dominated the unearthly visage.
Ianto-crow felt a chill of horror go through him, like ice water down his spine; whatever this creature was, it exuded a powerful sense of menace, practically reeked of malevolence! But he was Torchwood, and so he stood firm, even as the tall figure straightened up, the spear gripped tightly in its left hand.
One of the ravens, the one that had been perched on the spear, fluttered up to land on the figure’s right wrist, its eyes glowing as brightly as the apparition’s. It croaked at its master, who croaked back, voice deep and resonant, before turning its gaze on Ianto-crow.
He’d seen and fought more imposing monsters, Ianto told himself. There was that tentacled creature a few years back, and that had been so much taller and more impressive than a humanoid raven. Besides, for all the mythology about them, compared to crows, ravens were wimps! He wasn’t going to be afraid of this one, no matter what it might think. He cawed defiance at it. Just because it had a fancy spear didn’t make it special.
Blue fire flickered in the bare branches of a dead tree behind the imposing form, etching glowing runes into the bark and illuminating the surroundings to a level bright enough for Ianto to work with. Any light in the ultraviolent range was his friend; his crow vision allowed him to see far more of the visual spectrum than he could as a human, and now that he was able to see more clearly, he no longer felt at such a disadvantage. Whatever this being was, he felt confident he could deal with it. He hadn’t quite worked out how, but he was sure something would come to him.
“Nice outfit! CAW! Going to a fancy dress party?” he taunted.
The raven man hissed at him. Ianto clacked his beak, hopping closer.
“CAW! What are ya anyway? Wizard of the Ravens?” Ianto cackled. “They your familiars? CAW! Poor choice. Should’ve chosen crows instead!”
Raven man croaked and hissed angrily, brandishing the spear, pointing the blade at Ianto, jabbing it towards him, but Ianto-crow merely fluttered out of range.
“Missed me! CAW! That the best you can do?”
Perhaps goading the stranger wasn’t the best course of action, but Ianto needed to get some idea of his opponent’s abilities. Know your enemy: that was the first step in any battle. He needed to gauge the strengths of this potential threat before he could decide on a suitable strategy to deal with it.
Swinging the spear towards Ianto again, the raven man croaked angrily, a stream of blue fire shooting from the blade, setting the marshy ground sizzling and hissing, steam rising in a cloud right where Ianto-crow had been standing. His opponent was on the slow and clumsy side, perhaps not yet accustomed to his current form, or to earth’s gravity. That didn’t mean his movements wouldn’t speed up as he adjusted, or that his aim wouldn’t improve, so Ianto-crow knew he couldn’t afford to get overconfident, but at present he could dodge the fire easily enough.
So far, the outlandish figure was telegraphing his movements well in advance, meaning that Ianto-crow was able to take evasive action before he was in any serious danger. He fluttered up onto one of the crumbling headstones.
“Too slow! Caw! Neat trick, though; what d’ya do for an encore?”
Raven man swung the spear at his tormentor again, but Ianto-crow was airborne with a single powerful flap of his wings, landing in a nearby tree in time to watch the ornate spear blade slash through the air a few inches above the headstone, before cleaving the next stone in half, slicing through the weathered limestone as easily as a hot knife through butter.
Ianto bobbed his head, eyeing the destruction. The spear’s blade was clearly a lot sharper than it looked, which was valuable information. Nothing natural could slice through stone, even something as worn as an old grave marker, in a fraction of a second. Well, maybe a laser could, so maybe the spear itself was a form of laser, or at least possessed similar qualities… That was worth knowing.
Aside from the metal claws that were attached to his gloves, and the sharply pointed beak, it looked as if the spear was this being’s only weapon. Ianto didn’t see the trio of ravens as any threat, despite their earlier defiance of him. They were bigger, and less agile than he was, and despite there being three of them, if they tried to mob him, all they’d succeed in doing would be to get in each other’s way. Their wingspan was greater than his, but the way he saw it, that put them at a disadvantage. He needed less room to manoeuvre than they did.
Raven man was the real danger, and most specifically, his spear. Without that, Ianto-crow’s opponent would have nothing but his hands and beak to fight with. But how could he be disarmed? Using his sharp crow eyesight, Ianto studied the weapon. Leather thongs bound the head of the spear to the shaft. If they could be loosened, cut through, or torn away, the blade might come loose. Getting close enough to try would be the trick, however, especially since it would mean putting himself in the line of fire, possibly in a literal sense. He would need to be very careful.
Taking flight again, while the spear blade was pointed away from him, Ianto-crow soared skywards, then dropped, lunging at the birdman’s head, snatching at the wide brimmed hat, his claws snagging in the suede-like fabric. From the texture, he had an unpleasant suspicion that it might be skin, possibly even the skin of some sentient being… Nevertheless, he dug his talons into it and flapped upwards once more, ripping the hat from the raven man’s head, revealing a cap of slick black feathers in place of hair.
His enemy lashed out with its right hand, the fingers curled into a fist so that the fake claws jutted out, unhindered. The raven still perched there flapped its wings madly to keep its balance, snapping with its beak, but Ianto-crow was already well out of reach, dropping the loathsome hat to the swampy ground even as raven man swung the spear towards him once more.
Blue fire lashed out, missing Ianto-crow by several feet as he dropped low, then soared upwards, circling around to dive on his opponent again, raking his talons across the bared head, ripping out a clump of feathers, and causing the creature to screech in pain and anger. It was a surprisingly un-ravenlike sound. Ianto-crow chortled to himself; he’d done some damage, drawn first blood. Score one for the crow, zero for the raven! Hah!
“Take that! Crow Power Rules! CAW!”
Maybe this fight might even be fun, a chance to test out his crow abilities in a battle situation. After all, you never knew what you could do until you tried…
TBC