Broken Space

After some careful planning and with Nita and Alec's help, Dairine and Spot manage to work one more wizardry. Endymion is a real boy!

Having helped Ianto with the coffee and cacao beans, mostly by dumping the bag in the kitchen and scooting--hell, what does he know about roasting coffee and processing chocolate?--and after a few minutes of wandering around followed by a few more of standing in the hallway, Alec finds he's at a bit of a loss for what to do. Lilly is asleep--a perfectly reasonable expectation for the middle of the afternoon, if you're Lilly--and Fionchadd, he thinks, is off hunting. He hasn't seen Tory all day and Dairine has gone mysteriously missing. Which doesn't mean he can't find them, or something to occupy himself. There's a lot of stuff in the storage rooms he knows Ianto wanted to go through, and since his room's already as clean as he can get it, he may as well get started.

That, at least, is the plan. What actually happens is that he opens a door on one of the lower levels he thought had been a closet, and walks into a room that he's one hundred percent, bona fide, absofreakinglutely sure was not on the island before. For one thing, it's all in black and white.

Rows of sepia-toned beer cans form a pyramid between the cooler and the aisles, balanced against them a sign proclaiming "$2.19 six pack" which he thinks is cheaper than it ever was at home. Rows and rows of boxes, cans, and plastic packages line the shelves: mac and cheese, potato chips, candy bars, tins of stew and Campbell's soup like a bad print of that Warhol painting. A stocky, balding man leans on the counter behind a stand of magazines in shades of the same worn-out grey, paying no attention to Alec but staring, instead, out the glass facade to the parking lot, where a wood-panelled pickup truck waits by a gas pump in a cloud of settling dust. There's a Pepsi machine just outside the door, and not even that is in colour, the lightbulb inside dull, the bottom half the logo burnt out. The landscape beyond is the same dreary dull, brown and grey, flat and windy in the shadow of far-distant mountains like what Alec figures Nevada or Wyoming must look like.

This is definitely weird. More weird than the shit the island usually pulls. He turns back around to find himself face to face with a large metal door labelled FREEZER. He opens it, sees the familiar corridor of the Hub basement, and runs back in, yelling at the top of his lungs.

"FINNO! LILLY! IANTO!!"