Archive of Our Own

During a carnival men put masks over their masks.
--Xavier Forneret

We are tired. We hurt. We thought it would be better.

It was supposed to be better. This body was bigger. It was stronger. It used words and fingers.

It is bleeding us dry. We cannot go fast enough.

This thing is killing us.

***

Jack didn't have to make the rounds. In fact, it wasn't even his night to work, but he'd kicked Lois out and told her to go see a film when he'd caught her staring off into space at her desk around eight or so. She'd lit out as if her arse were on fire and he wondered what little trinket of thanks he was going to find on his desk tomorrow. Probably plums. Lois was the master at unearthing fruit in the winter.

So he made the rounds anyway, even though he didn't have to, down the stairs, through the sub-levels. Over to the cells to check on their 'resident' blowfish, who had just started on a new season of The Simpsons, then around to the range to check on all the lovely and non-sentient firearms.

"Hi there, pumpkins," he said to the locked cabinet of modified Kalishikovs he and Dee were modding together, a hobby that made him burn with excitement just thinking about it, but was about as foolish and frivolous as building model airplanes and expecting them to fly. He waved to the guns and turned out of the range to return the way he had come and possibly settle in on the sofa in his office with one of the used paperbacks he'd picked up earlier in the week.

There was a creaking noise at the other end of the long hallway, and he glanced in that direction. Someone was down there, tall, dressed in a suit.

"Hey there," Jack called harmlessly, taking a few steps. "What's up?"

The body at the end of the hallway turned towards him, and he blinked. It was Ianto Jones. He saw Ianto all the time, so this wasn't out of the ordinary. Usually, though, Ianto stayed nearby. This time, Ianto pressed the release on the door and opened it, walking through and into the stairwell. Ianto had opened the door and walked into the stairwell.

The body disappeared and Jack heard the door latch shut before his whole body jolted and his feet found their grip on the ground when he took off like he'd been launched, and thundered down the hallway to the stairwell access.

Ianto had a head start on him, but most likely he'd gone up, so when Jack got there he paused just for a second, sniffing the air. It didn't tell him anything, but he decided he had a fifty-fifty chance with up or down, chose up, and returned to the atrium, coming out the doors onto the main floor just by Dee's office.

Ianto was already on the other side of the atrium. He didn't slow, but he did turn and look at Jack over his shoulder, just for a split second, and Jack paused, as if he wasn't sure what that look meant. Ianto was too far away.

He found his voice. "Ianto—" he began, but Ianto didn't stop or look again.

He ran after the suit-clad body, and it turned down the East hallway, then headed for the medical lab. He almost hit the corner of Lois's monster desk as he rounded it, and that lost him a few seconds, but he skidded down the hallway and turned into the lab door.

Gretchen turned to him and screamed, yanking her lab coat over her body. "Jesus!"

Jack stared at her, then glanced about wildly. "Did you see…?"

Gretchen pulled a pair of sweatpants from the counter next to her and hastily put them on. "See what? God, you scared the shit out of me."

Jack looked about the lab. There was no other exit except for the emergency one that would have triggered a system alarm. Just Gretchen, half-naked and flustered. "Sorry," he said softly, not quite thinking about it. There had to be a cabinet.

Oh come on, why would Ianto hide in a cabinet?

"Are you all right?" Gretchen asked, pulling the lab coat off and tossing it into a bin for laundry, and pulling a jumper over her white T-shirt. Jack got a nice view of her breasts through the thin material, but it only registered as a blip in the back of his mind, the sex monitor that was always on like an anti-virus monitoring program on a computer.

"Yeah I'm fine. You didn't, this is going to sound odd…"

He trailed off and loosened his grip on the doorframe. Gretchen sat on a stool and unrolled a pair of tube socks.

"What?"

He blinked. He wasn't going mad. He knew what that felt like, and this wasn't it. "Nothing, just too many coffees, I guess."

Gretchen shrugged and picked at a knot on her trainers. "All right."

Jack watched her tie her laces, something nagging at his insides like eating a bad prawn. Many bad prawns, actually. "Why were you naked in here anyway?"

Gretchen smiled, rueful. "Did you know that Hoix corpses can still projectile vomit even after they're dead?"

***

Running laps in the stadium wasn't nearly as interesting if you did it all the time, Roger decided when he did his second lap in the darkness of the secondary lights. Somewhere out there, Bob was making his first rounds, probably in the lower levels first to check all the doors. The advent of cameras and modern surveillance was all fine and good, but management still wanted them making the rounds, and not relying on a few black and white images to tell them what was going on.

He never did exercise, always meant to, but by the time he got home from work, he was shot, and it was easier to go down to the pub and have a pint than it was to pull on some jogging clothes and do a few laps about the estate. But his last trip to the doctor had laid down the law—you have to exercise, mate, and then Maritza had told him that if he didn't start then she was going to pack up and move back to Liverpool, so he figured he had better do something.

So here he was, coming off the night shift, running laps around the outer rim of the stadium green, thinking that maybe he'd feel better if he pretended he was there for sport, someone famous or something, but really just wishing that he could go the fuck home and pass out on the lounger.

His heart was thudding like mad and the blood was roaring in his ears, so he slowed a bit and walked a while. It was dark and cool, and the wind whipped around the inside of the stadium like candyfloss in a spinning machine, trapped and spiraling maybe. His breath came ragged and his chest felt a bit tight. The smoking had been a bad idea, yeah, and they said he'd feel better the longer he didn't smoke, but this was bad.

Or he could just be out of shape.

His breath returned, so Roger started again. Thirty minutes of elevated heart rate, his doctor had said, so here he was, on—he checked his watch—minute six. This was going to be a horrible twenty-five minutes.

Oi, slow down, codger.

Roger paused for a second, listening. Someone had said…? He slowed to a walk (stopping was like putting a car in neutral when from 5th), and listened for Bob up in the stands.

Stop, mate. Your ticker's about to kark it.

Roger turned about and glanced around. Part of him knew that what he'd just heard was internal. He'd thought it, hadn't he? It sounded like his head, not something coming in his ears. Could one really tell the difference?

Yell or something.

Roger looked about. His heart was making little skips and his chest felt tight. It was getting harder to breathe, not easier, and that wasn't right.

For fuck's sake, just yell!.

Roger opened his mouth, but before he could make a sound, he fell to the ground, unconscious. His heart stopped, and he ceased to live.

Something in him kept going, though.

Gwen handed the man a fiver and saluted with her hands full of apples before turning back to Jack and Rhys. "Get them while they're hot," she joked.

Jack buffed his apple on the front of his shirt. Rhys just wedged his into his mouth and steered Duncan's pushchair further down the market lane. Gwen bit off more apple than she could actually chew and had to cover her mouth whilst they walked. Whoops.

"This has to be the best usage of company time ever," Jack mused as he passed a stall selling yarn. He pulled a pocketknife from somewhere and flipped it out, then began to cut into his apple vertically.

Rhys swallowed and waved his apple. "I'll say. I have about a million things to do, but I'll get to them later." He winked at Gwen. "It's good to be the boss."

Gwen's next bite was more manageable, and it was good, fresh apples, organic, no pesticides, not ferociously large from hormones, not irradiated, just an apple. Jack liberated a large wedge of apple, pared the peel from the outside, and bent down to give the meat to Duncan. Gwen almost stopped him, but then she watched Duncan take it and eye it before gnawing on an edge of it.

"Watch him like a hawk," Jack said to Rhys, but smiled out into the walkway, at a young man who passed them with his arms full of a box of live lobsters. "Oh hello, you."

Rhys rolled his eyes and bit back his reply with apple, and Gwen threaded her free arm through his as he pushed the chair one-handed. Jack on her other side, they ambled a bit, looking at fresh bread and crockery, bacon, cold meats and shoe repair. Gwen was about to suggest they go up to the balcony level off of St Mary's when she spotted a familiar pair of heads glancing about.

Lois Habiba and Maggie Hopley looked like two young professionals grabbing a few bits and bobs on a break from the office. Lois clutched her baked good in her hand as she scanned the crowd, shoving her change in her coat pocket. Maggie juggled her wallet, two bananas, tried to shove her hair behind her ear, smile at the shopboy and keep the flap to her messenger bag open all at once. In the end, she just dumped her change and wallet in the bag strapped across her chest and joined Lois. Gwen was about to raise a hand when her mobile rang.

She read the display and flipped it open. "Lois, three o'clock." Jack followed Gwen's gaze to Lois and he raised a hand when the woman finally saw them.

"They're like puppies," he mumbled.

She closed her phone and tucked it in her pocket when the others approached. "No they're not, hush up and eat."

Jack hushed up and ate, bless.

Rhys waved a hand and checked on Duncan as Lois and Maggie made their way through the mildly crowded market. Lois's eyes darted back and forth, and Maggie had a little bit of a skip in her step as she devoured her banana in the manner of one who hadn't seen food in days.

This was hardly coincidental, their being here. They hadn't called, so that meant that it was something routine. Gwen rather liked that they hadn't called—it meant that she hadn't even had to think of anything, even if it had just been something minute that she could ignore. She still would have had to go into 'work mode' and that sometimes ruined everything, a fact that she noticed more often now that she was in charge.

"Good morning ladies," she said and Jack smirked as he examined the tourist t-shirt offerings at the stall next to him. Rhys took another bite of apple, possibly so he wouldn't have to say anything, and just waved with one hand. "What brings you out here?"

"Dead man inside the stadium," Lois said, as Maggie shoved the rest of her banana in her mouth. "We just came for some breakfast first." She crouched down and made a face at Duncan in his pushchair. "And to see you! Hello! Hi there! How are you, little man?"

"This is on your way?" Jack asked as they all started toward the St Mary's street exit.

Maggie shrugged and waved a banana. "We came over on Wood," she said, unpeeling the fruit. "Everything is on the way."

Gwen wrinkled her nose as they passed the fish stall on the way out of the market. "So are we driving?" This was a convenient way to segue into the day; the leisure time had been nice while it lasted.

"We better be," Lois said, picking a currant from her welshcake. "We're double-parked on Eglwys Fair, and the medical kits are in the back."

Rhys stopped the chair at the street and reached out to give Gwen a kiss and a hug. "We'll be off, then, you lot have fun."

Jack winked and bit into his apple. Lois darted out and wiped juice from his chin with her paper serviette.

Gwen wrapped her arms about Rhys and squeezed, then let go to crouch down and reach into the pushchair for Duncan, doing the light hug that she had perfected from months of experience in saying goodbye to him from car seats and high chairs and the like. Duncan slapped his sticky hands against her face and waved the gnawed apple section. She rubbed the fine hair on his head and kissed his crown one more time before standing and shrugging.

"See you at six?"

Rhys smirked. "Aye, six."

When he walked away, Lois glanced from him to Gwen. "What's going on at six?"

Gwen smiled. "Supper."

"Special occasion?"

"Nope."

Lois shook her head and fell into step as they all walked down to where a PC was unsure about whether or not to ticket the double parked SUV with the big red "WE CAN PARK ANYWHERE" tag. "I keep forgetting," Lois mumbled.

"Forgetting what?"

"That you're normal."

***

"We have entrusted our sister Janice to God's mercy, and we now commit her body to the ground," the minister said from in front of the casket. All around crowded a large group of mourners, eager to send Janice on her last journey. It was unclear where her children were, where her husband—if she had one—might be. Somewhere in that massive crowd of people, towards the front, most certainly, and well out of sight from here.

Gretchen shoved her hands in her coat pockets and shivered, leaning against a huge stone angel about five rows of graves over. The cemetery was small, but it was well kept. The open grave itself was lined with green carpeting around the edges, to hide the scars of the digging the machines had done earlier that morning. They would wait to lower the casket until everyone had left. It used to be that they would do it right then and there with everyone watching, but the cold made the machinery unreliable, and no one wanted to remember the sight of their loved one's coffin falling head-first into the grave.

She didn't want to disturb anyone, and so she hung back—Gretchen didn't know anyone here and she hadn't even intended on stopping until she'd inadvertently become part of the funeral procession on her drive to work; she'd decided to listen to her rolling stomach and her gut instinct when she'd stayed in the caravan and come to the graveyard. She regretted it a little as her heels sank another centimeter into the damp ground.

"Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust: in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life…"

Gretchen played the small game with herself as she watched the people. What had happened? Was Janice very old? Very young? Had she died of natural causes? An accident? Cancer? Some other disease? Perhaps she had been murdered or had killed herself. Gretchen thought about looking up the obituary when she got to work, but knew that not knowing was more comforting in some ways. She didn't want to know that she had somehow benefited from the un/timely death of Janice MacNally.

A toddler broke from the group and ran down a few graves, forcing her mother or minder to chase after her. It was true, Gretchen thought as she watched the little girl giggle and run all over the frozen grass, graveyards weren't inherently frightening or somber until someone instilled that idea. Gretchen thought about returning sometime when there was no funeral and testing that theory. She didn't do many graveyards (less now that she was in Torchwood, strangely). She could bring a picnic lunch.

"…will transform our frail bodies…"

Gretchen squinted and tried to imagine that the grief was radiating off of the group in waves, what that would smell like if it had a smell. She imagined that sadness smelled like mildew and fresh lemons. Then the imagined sadness apparently smelled like Simple Green. Her stomach thrummed and rolled a bit like after she'd eaten something fairly good, and she felt a little bit more energetic. A funeral giving someone more energy, now that was sad and pathetic and not a little bit creepy.

"To him be glory for ever."

"Amen," murmured the crowd, and that many people saying it at once turned something meant to be quiet into a dull roar. They milled towards the casket to put flowers on top.

Her mobile vibrated and she pulled it from her pocket: TORCHWOOD—REPORT ASAP. The table is hot. Oh god, it was one of Lois's many code phrases. She'd come up with about fifty of them and made everyone memorise them (Gretchen had failed Lois's administered multiple choice pop quizzes on them, but Gretchen failed most of Lois's pop quizzes, because she didn't care), and even though Gretchen only remembered three, she did know this one. They were bringing in something possibly alive that needed to be taken care of.

"Amen," she echoed before turning away and walking back to her car before the crowd could fully disperse. She rubbed the flat of her belly compulsively. That was enough for now.

SIX MONTHS AGO:

"The twitching, the memory loss and the burning sensation," the doctor, Samuel Croft, said as he opened her chart. "That was what brought you here."

Gretchen twisted the tissue in her hands. "Yeah, I'm a veterinarian," she said, "I've been keeping abreast of the whole thing." She didn't want to add that she'd given herself a CT scan. "And I spent time isolating and studying it in cows when I was in university." She laughed a little bit and the doctor blinked. "It's horrible to think that I did this to myself."

"There were spikes in your electroencephalograph, and the signal intensities they were looking for in your MRI," Croft said, his face drawn, as if he didn't know what else to say.

Part of Gretchen wondered if he was dying to do more tests. It wasn't often that something like her must have come across his desk. Gretchen's whole job these days was studying the novel and bizarre; she could recognise the curiosity in others.

"What about the spinal fluid analysis?" Gretchen asked, and his eyes pretty much told her.

"Yes, I am afraid so." He closed the folder. "There are experimental treatments," he said. "There's one right now that's using quinacrine—"

"There's no good treatment for mad cow disease," Gretchen said. When the doctor opened his mouth she waved a hand. "Yeah, I know, Cee Jay Dee, I just can't remember the way to say the name."

"New variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease," Dr. Croft supplied, as if he was being helpful. There was a soft chiming and he silenced his phone. Gretchen wondered if she'd turned hers off. She didn't want Lois calling her right now, asking her to hurry back so that she could finish cutting up a weevil or something. If she had to think about a weevil or anything in that lab right now she'd scream.

"Let me make some calls," Dr. Croft said, sitting back in his chair. "I can get you in some places."

Gretchen wondered if he actually believed that they could make her better. Or if he knew, like she did, that they could delay the inevitable, and perhaps not even that. She'd never seen it in a human, but she'd seen it in cattle, and that was something that she never wanted to think about for herself, for any human. She didn't want to think about the twitching and the memory loss and the dementia. Well.

Eventually, she'd have to tell Gwen. Tell everyone.

"How long do people have?" she asked. "I mean, people my age, with the new variant."

Dr. Croft stared at her, thinking. Maybe he was wondering about how to say it gently, which meant that it wasn't positive news. And maybe he was wondering if he should just be blunt, or if she really wanted to know. She really did.

"Twelve to fourteen months from manifestation, total," he said, "which you've had for about—"

"A month, I think," she murmured. Suddenly the diplomas on Dr. Croft's wall seemed quite important. "So, about a year then."

"Give or take. Depends. Let me contact the studies. They'll take you in a heartbeat."

Gretchen looked at his face, hope painted over realism, and wondered if that was what people meant when they said 'gilding the lily'.

***

PRESENT DAY:

Jack remembered when the stadium was Cardiff Arms, and that wasn't saying much, since the Stadium wasn't that old anyway. Gwen probably remembered when it was Cardiff Arms. But the Millennium Stadium was huge, a monument to the new Cardiff, though at ten years old, it barely qualified as 'new', unless you were Jack, that was, or the Doctor. Sure. In the morning light the sun poured into the open bowl and lit up the dew on the grass. Soon it would be burned off, but for now, everything was hazy and fresh.

"We wouldn't be here, actually, except that he's on the list, so we got a flag when his name came over the computer this morning," Lois said as they walked to the small area where Roger Davies was laid out on a litter left by the ambulance before one ring from Torchwood froze the scene. The medics milled about and drank shite coffee from styro cups, waiting. The police were already gone—it wasn't a homicide, or a suicide, or even an accident.

"The watch list?"

Lois smiled. "He picked it up in Cornwall at a pasty truck last year," she said, "as far as we can tell. Didn't even know he had it."

"They never do," Jack mumbled, and then thought about the last time he'd been out to retrieve a parasite/symbiote. Ianto had had the foresight to bring Tupperware. Jack wondered if Lois even had a laser saw. Well, the laser saw was probably a mangled burnt lump of metal under the Plass at this point.

Gwen waved to the medics and accepted a pair of gloves from the small box in their kit. "Gents, if you could give us a minute and then we can all be on our way."

One of the medics chuckled to himself and glanced down field. "Not often you get a chance to be in here like this," he said.

Jack smiled. They were sport fans. "Why don't you take a few laps, then? Bend it like Beckham?" he suggested, and the medic gave him a thumbs up sign and the two of them ambled across the grass. He could hear them talking goals and moves and players as walked away.

Maggie ran a scanner over the body. "Yeah, this is our guy. Looks like it's in the main cavity." She blinked. "I'm still getting a reading."

"We don't actually know what's inside him," Lois said. "It showed up on the list as alien, but we never got a special reading."

"Why didn't we extract it before this?" Gwen asked, flipping hair from her face with a frustrated twist of her head. "If it killed him—"

"We don't know what killed him," Lois argued, and Jack watched the two of them nearly go at it a few rounds. Lois was…there was something hard in her insistence on procedure that reminded him of Ianto, but something else, a staunch belief that she was doing the right thing, a feeling that Ianto, for good reason, never quite gave off. Lois nodded once, her mouth serious but with a turn at the end that said she was partially amused, anticipatory, and Jack realised that she loved her job.

How amazingly rare. Torchwood would either kill that with time or make her into a perfect agent. It would be fun to watch. Or very sad.

"Can you see it from here?" Gwen asked, moving towards the corpse. "I guess we'll have to take the body back to the Hub for extraction."

Jack flashed on a vision of a starving parasite sitting in a dead body, waiting for the next thing to get close enough that it could burst out and latch onto a new host. It wouldn't be the first time he'd seen it. "Gwen, watch yourself," he warned.

Gwen bent over the corpse and snapped the cuff of her glove. "Shake your ass," she said conversationally and then glanced over her shoulder at Jack. Oh, they were going to do this. Good times.

Lois raised her eyebrows. Jack looked away and put his shades on. "You've got to bend all the way over to dance off this," he said like he was asking Gwen for a time of death.

"Hope this indecent proposal make you do something to me," Gwen answered, smiling and pressing her fingers to the side of the man's neck.

"I'm sorry," Maggie said then. "I'm confused. I think I woke up this morning and now everyone is insane."

Jack laughed. "Few years back we had to fix a spaceship, and the only English, or language at all, that the creature—"

"The Allax," Gwen piped in.

"Yes, all the Allax, was able to, well, say, were the lyrics to Mystikal's 'Shake Ya Ass'." He stared down the field. "It really wasn't in the words, but the inflection. That was, unfortunately for all of us, just the song that happened to be playing on the radio at the time he downloaded a language template, poor guy."

Gwen glanced up. "The song is filthy. Most of us just kept repeating the chorus over and over in different tones."

Jack waved a hand. "Toshiko was enterprising. Also I think she just wanted an excuse to say the word 'booty' a lot."

Maggie turned to Lois. "Some day, we'll have fun stories like this," she said.

Lois tilted her head. "I think we already do."

"Oooh, look at this," Gwen said, pressing on the man's gut and then snatching it away when the stomach continued to ripple as something moved inside. "Get a containment unit."

Jack smiled as Maggie and Lois jogged back to the car for one of the new containment body bags, which were more convenient than the old containment units, big blocky boxes of metal that very rarely fit in anything smaller than a lorry. The body bags were lined with sensors and a copper-painted network of electrical netting designed to contain things much in the same manner as the boxes. He wouldn't put an angry Hoix in one, but still, useful for this little critter. Hopefully.

Gwen stood and peeled off her gloves. "Live one," she mumbled, staring at the body.

Jack shrugged. "It'll give Gretchen something interesting to do."

***

"Oh Mister Davies, you are a mess," Gretchen said as she looked at the jacked-open cavity and the blood pooled in it. Well, it wasn't pooled so much as it was just everywhere. She would use a vacuum on it, but she didn’t want to run the risk of sucking something vital up in it. At least she'd found the cause of death. She could probably see the burst aorta with her naked eye if she tried hard enough.

Instead, she went looking for their passenger. Her face was protected by a plastic shield, and her chest by one of the lead vests that she used for x-ray, and her neck by the thick leather gorget she used for Myfanwy feeding. She was ready. This was going to be awesome, in that John Hurt way.

Gretchen had a lot of experience with parasites. After all, hook and heart worms, tape worms, they were all just parasites, and she'd seen plenty of them in her line of work before Torchwood—dogs especially ate all kinds of things that turned out poorly for them. That this thing might be sentient, and that it might be able to somehow communicate was something of which she wanted to be hyper-aware. It was easy to be cavalier with the lives of things that didn't conform to what one considered aesthetically worthwhile life (Gretchen called this the "We Only Want To Save The Cute Animals Factor"), and so she determined that she was going to go in there with the idea that this was a life to save.

And if it got homicidal after that, then she'd feel justified killing the fuck out of it.

Her scans had pinpointed the thing's location, so it wasn't as if she'd have to go exploring or anything, cadaver diving, as she called it, and she pushed her triply-gloved hands into the lower cavity and felt around in the morass of duodenum. It was easier then to just get a handle on part of the intestine and pull it out, setting it on the sheet that covered Mister Davies's lower bits and thighs, and tug until she felt a bit of resistance; she figured that she was dredging the parasite from where it had settled in the cavity. It came easily, and she reached in her other hand to cradle it and extract it. She didn't want to simply yank it from the flesh to which it was anchored, but she also didn't want to give it an opportunity to decide to scarper off the table or lay into her through the arms of her lab coat.

The thing was about a big as a large potato, but definitely not as hard. She didn't squeeze to test it out because she knew she didn't like when people squeezed her, but she set it out on the paper cover with the intestines and tried to see how it was attached.

"Okay, let's see if we can detach you and find a solution for you to live in," she mumbled.

As soon as she said it, the creature--sort of shiny greenish pink and smooth-surfaced, covered in little striped ridges down the length of it--detached from the intestine and rolled its outer flesh a bit, as if that was how it moved along surfaces. Unfortunately it was tacky with blood and stuck to the paper of the cover. There were holes that might have been eyes, or sensors of some sort. It was hard to tell, and she didn't want to guess until she had more information.

Gretchen picked the creature up and set it quickly in the mixture that she'd developed, based on a guess of what the environment was like for this thing inside Mister Davies, and stood back to watch. The thing rolled around in the fluid, but it didn't seem to be in any death throes.

"Blink once if this works for you," she said to the container. The symbiote stopped for a second and then rolled over. "Okay, works for me."

"Glad to see you two are getting along," Jack said from the hallway.

"Hey there," she chirped at Jack and Gwen when they sauntered in. "Are you here to see our patient?" She tried to move the container with the creature on the counter as gently as possible. "He's out and safe, but I think he's sick. I was about to close up the body to send back to the morgue."

"I wish we didn't have to send it back," Gwen said wistfully. "It just seems like a waste of manpower, to have them do the autopsy."

"Well then, maybe you should get a real doctor," Gretchen snapped, and the little voice inside her that usually stopped her from saying things she would regret stayed eerily silent. "Besides, we'd want to return him to the morgue anyway. Torchwood can't be seen releasing bodies to funeral homes. It just raises too many questions."

Gwen tilted her head. "Point," she capitulated, and Gretchen felt a bit of regret. It wasn't that she thought she was holding them back; it was that she felt like she was the only one still playing catch-up. She'd been the last one recruited, and for the most part, her job was xenobiology, but in the past two months she'd had to sit-in on several human autopsies, not to mention the scare with Maggie. It was becoming abundantly clear that she either needed to step up her human medical experience or put measures in place to deal with her lack of knowledge, especially where the team's health was concerned.

On the other hand, she was starting to suspect that the biggest inhibitor to her performance might be her.

"Is this our guy?" Jack asked, in an obvious effort to change the subject. He poked the container with the symbiote and the liquid sloshed. "Man, what's in there?"

Gretchen tilted her head. "Water, blood, plasma, chyme, amino acids in a saline solution. On a hot plate. It lives inside a body, so safe bet it can't live out here. I'm not sure what it eats, but we can get to that. Probably nutrients it pulls from its host's gut. I'd love to ask it."

Jack smiled. "We have a few things we can do to try to communicate. I bet Maggie can think of other ones." He tapped the glass and spoke to the symbiote. "We're working on it, pal."

"A sort of Turing test, then?" Gwen asked. "I mean, we don't know if it's intelligent."

Jack cocked his head at the mix of blood and enzymes. "It's true. It could be Albert Einstein in there and we wouldn't know. We shouldn't assume that it's a murderous bastard just because it killed its last host."

Gretchen tutted a finger. "I ain't no expert, but this thing didn't kill him."

Jack smiled and crossed his arms. "Oh, Docta Jones, thrill me with your acumen."

Gretchen smiled at Gwen and rounded the table to stand in front of Roger Davies's corpse. "Our traveller was ensconced here, off the small intestine." She pointed to the mass of intestines still laid across the sheet on the man's lower extremities. She really should put that back. In fact, she was going to send this to the coroner to finish up, mostly because she was pretty much done with it, and Roger Davies deserved a proper autopsy and burial.

She took her scalpel and pointed up into the chest, past the lung tissue and the cracked sternum. "This is the cause of death," she said, miming a circle around the mass of congealing blood and tissue. "Clear as day."

Gwen squinted. "It there supposed to be that much blood there?"

Gretchen shook her head. "What you are seeing is a ruptured thoracic aortic aneurysm."

Jack smiled. "They make creams for that," he mumbled.

Gretchen rolled her eyes. "No, they don't. Har har yuck." She mimed a tube in the air with her hands. "An aneurysm is a thinning of the wall of the blood vessel. Sometimes you can have one for years and it never does anything. And you can have them in other places, like your stomach or your brain." She spread her hands. "Sometimes they bulge under pressure. All kinds of bad things can happen."

"Like this," Gwen said, shuddering and crossing her arms. "I feel the need to visit my doctor."

Gretchen shrugged. "I wouldn't worry. You don't smoke, have high blood pressure or have ever had a heart infection." She pointed with one gloved finger. "Mister Davies was an ex-smoker with high blood pressure and the unfortunate bad luck to rupture his rather large aortic aneurysm in the process of attempting to get in shape."

Jack leant against the counter behind him and shook his head. "Almost makes you want to give up on exercise. Unlucky sod."

"Quite." Gretchen reached in and took the brace out of the cavity and the ribs sagged shut. "There was nothing he could have done, and this guy, all the way down in his gut, couldn't have done that. He was just along for the ride." She wrapped some wire around the cracked sternum to hold it shut more securely and then reseated the intestines and pulled the skin back over the cavity. "I'm going to shut this with clips and then take it over to Greigg at Center," she told them. "He'll finish up."

Jack watched her seal the skin, and Gwen left the table to stand in front of the canister, where the creature was starting to stir a bit. "What do you think?" Gwen asked Jack. "Maggie's got that machine."

"Toshiko used that machine to give a Turing test to a Jaffa cake," Jack told Gwen. "It passed. Owen failed miserably." He winked at them both. "I don't think it was the machine's fault."

Gretchen glanced at the glass canister and back at the cadaver. Her stomach did a little flip and she bit her lip. It was too soon. She was hungry again. Well, antsy-hungry. Carrot sticks were not going to do the trick.

"Dee will go with you when you drop him off," Gwen said. "We're going to put Mags and Jack on the tech." She sighed. "Lois and I will look through the archives a bit more."

Jack shoved his hands in his pockets and followed Gwen out of the room. In the doorway, he turned and opened his mouth, then shut it. Gretchen waited for him to say something. "The other night, when I came in here?"

Her heart skipped a beat. "Yeah?"

Jack stared off into space and then shook himself out of his reverie and blinked. "Nah. Whatever." He turned to leave again and then turned back. "You don't have anything in your menagerie that could get loose, do you?"

Gretchen thought about the few live specimens she had in the lab, most shut in the small light room off to one side, and the one or two things she had housed in the night house out back. "No, why?"

Jack studied her face and then shook himself again. "Nothing. Going insane."

Gretchen looked at the symbiote in the jar, less green now and more pink. It waved what appeared to be a stump. Maybe she imagined it waving a stump. "Yeah," she said, "I know what that feels like."

***

Gwen was reading her personal email and thinking about lunch when the intercom sounded overhead, and Jack's voice, deliberately modeling the barbituate tones of an airline flight attendant, reverberated through the Hub.

"Will Director Cooper please report to sick bay. Director Cooper to sick bay at her earliest convenience."

Gwen pushed back from her desk and sighed. Kids and their toys.

"You're going to make her stroppy," Maggie said from further away over the intercom.

"How will that make someone angry? This thing is great. You have to live a little, Mags." Gwen left her office and jogged down to the atrium ground level, where she made eye contact with Lois, who shook her head.

"Oh God, is that thing still on?" Maggie said. Gwen walked down the hallway to the medical bay and watched from the doorway as Maggie tried to wrestle the intercom mike from Jack's hand.

Gwen cleared her throat, and Maggie let go of the mike so quickly that it hit Jack in the face and there was a loud thfud sound. "Do we need to get you two a minder?"

Maggie rubbed her temples and tried to look embarrassed. Jack put the mike away and smirked, turning back towards the table with the equipment. "Where's Gretchen? She'd love this," Jack said, waving at the glass. "Yes, hello, one more second."

The symbiote settled back into the bloody organic mixture and seemed to wait. Gwen tilted her head at it and then regarded the machine that sat next to the container: a boxy digital read out with some dials, and four cords running from the bottom. Attached to the end of each cord was a long metal rod, each about a centimeter in diameter.

"Gretchen and Dee are still taking the body to the morgue. Do you want to wait?"

Jack shook his head. "No, I don't think we should. This might not even work."

Maggie finished checking the plastic hooding that protected the connector between the metal rod and cord, satisfied that it was airtight, handed the rod to Jack. "Just insert it in there and make sure it's in contact with it," she said, and turned back to the monitor. Jack settled the rod in and the symbiote grabbed it as if it had been waiting for it.

"Okay," Gwen said, eyeing the thing with a bit of hesitation. "What now?"

"Now, we filter through all the frequencies until we find the one it's vibrating at, and…" she drifted off as she flicked the dial around and paused for a split second on each frequency.

Suddenly it boomed from the speakers, not so much loud as shockingly sudden: "--and that bloke was absolutely disgusting! There's only so much chip oil I can eat, and--oh fuck," Owen's voice said, "what took you assholes so bloody long?"

Gwen raised an eyebrow, and Jack laughed. "That's got to be the funniest thing I've heard in days."

Maggie shrugged. "It was either this or Steven Hawking, and I'm getting sick of Steven Hawking."

Jack crossed his arms and smiled at the symbiote. "He is a bit of a know-it-all," he murmured.

"Hello? Are you listening to me?" the symbiote said in a perfect intonation of a slightly-robotic Owen Harper. Maggie had created his vocal patterns from recordings and made his voice the default for the front gate and other computer systems, though Gwen would have preferred Toshiko or some generic voice, even she had to admit that sometimes it was comforting to hear Owen still vocalising about the Hub.

Right now, though, was some sort of sick justice, as the symbiote waved a stump and flapped in the mixture.

Maggie handed Gwen and Jack metal rods of their own and nodded. "Just…press it against your vocal cords," she said. "I know it feels dumb, but it's not."

"Hi," Gwen said, pressing the rod to her throat. "I'm Gwen Cooper of Torchwood." She glanced at Jack and lowered the rod, and then raised it back up. "We uh, uhm, we come in peace."

Jack rolled his eyes. "I'm Jack," he said. "You look like you were in a spot of trouble, but we don't even know who you are."

"I'm Glarg," Owen said. "From Traxis 3."

Jack started. "Traxis? No way." He turned to Gwen. "Once they made me a God on Traxis 3."

Oh he had to be kidding. Jack was serious, though, because he turned back to Glarg and waved a hand. "Have you ever heard of…shit, what did they call me? Blaggarag?"

Glarg waved the metal rod about violently for something that had no arms or legs. "The Defiler?"

Jack pulled the rod away from his throat and said sotto voce to Gwen, "Oh yeah, maybe 'god' wasn't the right word." And back to Glarg, "Never mind then." Gwen glanced at Maggie, who mouthed 'The Defiler?' Ammunition for later. "What happened? Trip through the Rift? Ship crashed? Two for one travel deals at the local agency?"

"Your fucking Rift, cuntmunch," Owen's voice said, and Gwen blinked. She was fairly sure she'd never heard Owen say that word, but yet there it was. Unless Glarg had thought of it. Which...there was something amazingly lurid and offensive about a parasite—no no, symbiote, let's be polite here—using the 'See You Next Tuesday'. Maybe he'd learnt it from his host. "I landed here and had to scramble to get in something that was reasonable."

"Mister Davies," Gwen said, nodding firmly. Could Glarg see her? Where were his eyes? Shit, were they recording this? Gretchen would kill them if they didn't record this.

"Is that what they called that sack of putrid shite?" Glarg's mouth was getting more and more abusive by the second.

Jack tutted. "Come on, now, he let you ride along."

Glarg jolted so sharply the metal rod fell and clanked to the side of the glass container. Maggie righted it so that the creature had contact with it again, and they waited. "You have to be kidding me," Glarg grumbled. "I was stuck in there, and the man had the diet of a rubbish disposal. Not to mention the things he sucked into his lungs. I bet I smell like a smoked sausage."

Jack sniffed, and Gwen wanted to be able to say it didn't work like that, but she didn't think that Glarg would care. "So what are you saying, you're just an innocent bystander?"

"Lady, why would you kill the thing you're living inside? Does that sound like the sane thing to do? How am I going to find another host, huh?" Gwen was almost sure she heard a sigh. "Jesus fucking Christ, you people."

Jack lowered the wand and looked at Gwen. "The thing is, he's…she's….it's probably telling the truth. It didn't kill Roger Davies, and we didn't bother to investigate it when he came across the radar because it was non-threatening." He waved a hand and raised the wand to his throat. "What was it about the diet?"

"What wasn’t it?" Glarg moaned, and Maggie snorted in amusement. Gwen bumped her with her elbow and when they made eye contact she mouthed, 'Are we recording?' Maggie gave her a thumbs up and she relaxed. This was pretty amazing. Or as Glarg would say, pretty fucking amazing.

"If it was deep-fried, the man ate it. If it was loaded with trans fat, the man ate it. If it was an internal organ and made of eighty-five percent cholesterol, the man ate it." Glarg paused. "If it had fifty-times the allotted amount of sodium required in a day, the man ate it. I tried to stem the tide. I tried to make sure that he wasn't absorbing as much, that he was passing some of the chemicals and fat, but it was just too much. I've been so sick I thought I was going to die."

"You're lucky he didn't die on holiday in Bangladesh," Jack said, "where there would have been no one to dig you out."

"Yeah, I'm counting my goddamn blessings," Glarg griped. "I don't want to sound ungrateful here, but if you are going to help me set up shop somewhere else, can you pick something else? A bovine? A frugivore? Something that doesn't eat meat or carbo-load like they're going to run the Chesham Stakes?"

Gwen lowered her wand and blinked at Jack. It hadn't occurred to her that they might have to…place the parasite—no no, fair was fair, symbiote—in another host, but now that he mentioned it., it did seem like it would be for the best. After all, they couldn't very well look after him for however long he had to live. Well, they could but that might get irritating.

"It would have to be some place where his host wouldn't go wandering, and where it would be well looked after," Maggie said. "For his safety, so we know where he is, and so his host doesn't suddenly get slaughtered or shot or something, you know."

Gwen glanced at Glarg and then at Jack. "Well, where do you suppose we could put him?"

Jack shrugged. "Somewhere where he'd have a good host with a long life? One that's not human, obviously, right, uh." He shook his head. "The circus?"

Gwen smiled. "What's the life span of a zebra?"

***

The cramping hit Gretchen's stomach as she and Dee were about to walk out of the hospital and it was surprising enough to make her stop. Her hand flew to her belly. Oh, not again.

Dee stopped and turned. "What? Is everything all right?"

Gretchen backed up a step. "Nothing, I just. I forgot to tell Griegg something, I cut the—" She jerked a thumb over her shoulder behind her. "When he looks at the intestines he's going to see, a, uh, well, there's some disembowelment, and a thing," she finished meekly.

Dee made a face. "I'll wait in the car."

Gretchen backed up another step. "No, no, you go ahead. I want to make sure he understands. I'll get a taxi."

Dee raised an eyebrow, as if she smelled that something was amiss. Gretchen tried to look like she was thinking about anything other than what she was thinking about, though if that showed on her face, she didn't know. She waved and backed up another step. "Seriously, go. I'll see you all later."

She didn't wait for Dee to respond; she just turned and skipped back into the hospital, heading to the left and in the direction of the morgue. She even went so far as to take the stairs down to the basement level. (Why morgues were on the basement level was a mystery that Gretchen figured had some sort of clear sociological reason she couldn't think of because she was a freak.) When she was reasonably sure that Dee was on her merry way back to the Hub, she took the lift to the third floor.

She knew the way to the outpatient chemo ward by memory. It was easy to wander up there because so many people were in and out; no one gave her a second glance as she walked down the hallway, keeping and eye out for nurses and other NHS workers. The chemo chairs weren't full, but at least a half dozen of them were taken up with people. Two of them were hairless women who looked to be in their thirties, chatting merrily and eating ice lollies. Another was an older woman who listened to headphones and was reading an Agatha Christie novel. Two were older men who spoke in hushed whispers over some sort of magazine they had on the table between then, and the last one—bingo.

She was in her fifties, she had to be, and she reclined in the chair and worried her lip. She still had her hair and so this might have been her first chemo. Her eyes flitted about the room, trying not to look at the bald women but unable to look away. The magazine in her lap was open but ignored. Gretchen wondered what she had. Ovarian? Lung? Liver? Something bad, obviously. Chemo was a horrible therapy, really, and whilst everyone here was making the best of a bad thing, it was, without a doubt, a bad thing. Anything that made your hair fall out had to be a bad thing.

Gretchen imagined that she could see the misery radiating off the woman in waves, much like the mourners from earlier in the day. If she stood here and watched the lady, though, someone was going to ask questions. So instead, she ducked into a supply closet right near the woman's chair and pressed her cheek against the wall facing her. Her fingers tingled where she pressed them to the drywall, and she imagined that the woman was miserable, sad, horrified and frightened, and all of that was unfortunate, but in the end, Gretchen didn't cause it. She just took it.

SIX MONTHS AGO:

The rest of the Hub was quiet. Gretchen preferred it this way; it was why she arrived late and stayed late. Unless there was an early staff meeting, Gretchen didn't come in before ten, and she didn't leave until nine.

"Subject is…flat…from the waist down. The steamroller did a…well." She peeled her gloves off and tossed them in the bin, then leant over the sink and splashed water on her face. She was going to vomit. At least she was over the sink. She grabbed the sides of the sink and retched.

While rinsing her mouth out, the jerking started in her hand, a twitch in the wrist that flipped it down and out to the side awkwardly. She stood there and watched it, and everything she had managed to forget for the thirty minutes she'd been setting up the theatre.

Twelve months.

And they weren't even going to be good months. Not with rapidly-progressing dementia and myoclonic jerking and the memory loss and all that on the way, she might have three good months left to her, and then. Well. She pressed her fingers to her forehead. Somewhere in there, prions were turning her brain into the texture of sponge, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

She sicked again, and this time it had nothing to do with what was on her autopsy table.

"Focus on this guy," she told herself, "focus on this guy."

It had been a shitty week since getting the official diagnosis, and while she had fully intended on telling everyone, she wasn't quite sure how, aside from blurting it out over a few cartons of take-away at lunchtime. Never mind ringing her mum and telling her. What did you say anyway? They would have questions and she didn't want to answer them right now, more importantly, she didn't want to feel as if she should have to comfort other people.

No, it was easier to try to forget it for now. That, and try to find something in the alien archives to fix it. What was the point in working for a place like Torchwood if they couldn't cure your incurable illness?

Gretchen spent every moment she had looking, for something, anything, to remove the prions, something to reverse the damage. Something that would arrest the progress of the disease. Chemicals, tech, alien secretions. Body parts, anything, really. Aside from freezing her body in the cryovaults, which she hadn't ruled out, there was nothing, actually. There had been one scanner that had looked promising, but it was on loan to Torchwood 4.

So no, but there was time. As long as she was in control of her faculties (most of the time), she still had time to look. Maybe if she bit the bullet and told everyone, they would be able to think of something. Maybe the reason she hadn't was that she was afraid Gwen would retcon her, dump her in a home. Maybe that paranoia was the dementia. Maybe she was already crazy. Maybe she was in the home already and imagining this. Maybe none of this had ever happened. Maybe she never worked for Torchwood. Maybe she wasn't sick. It could all be a—

"Okay, we talked about the crazy thinking," Gretchen told herself and then turned to look at the flat half of the man on the table.

He wasn't flat as much as he was squashed and lumpy. Skin was elastic, but it wasn't that elastic, so instead of just flattening like a cartoon character or putty, it was more like what happened when one steamrollered a potato or grape: the skin was split and ripped, the muscle strewn everywhere as it had tried to flatten but was too stringy to actually do it. The guts were--well. The smell made it pretty obvious. Gretchen didn't even understand why they had brought this in, except that the man's Rift readings had been off the scale. Something inside him, or something he'd done recently.

She hadn't even started looking for bones. She was impressed that they even managed to get him here in this condition, which they wouldn't have been able to, if he hadn't fallen on a giant sheet of plywood before he was run over. They'd just transported it here in a lorry from the service they usually used (Needless to say, the driver was sorry to be driving a Harwood's lorry yesterday, that was for damn sure.).

The Rift readings had died away hours ago, but that didn't mean that something wasn't off in the tissue, so Gretchen set about taking punch biopsies so that she could run them through the gas chromatograph and mass spectrometer. Using the GC/MS was one of the highlights of her job, so she was more than happy to do it. On the other hand, this poor man, still unidentified (possibly because his wallet was on the underside of the crushed part, most likely, and Gretchen wasn't going to retrieve it until she was completely ready to disturb the body that much), probably had a family he should be returned to. Gretchen was with Dee on this one: they should just let the family file a missing person's. Or something. Being run over by a steamroller was easily one of the most disgusting things Gretchen had ever seen, and a month ago a Cleegan had exploded in her lap.

She finished washing her hands and face, re-gloved and returned to autopsy. There was only so much that she could process at once, thank god, and this was certainly distracting. Gretchen prepped the first batch of samples and started the GC, listening for the reassuring whoom that signalled the start of the isotopic labelling. Comforting and irritating at the same time. It would have to run for an hour before she'd get any results worth looking at, and in the meantime, she still had to figure out why Mister Welshcake here was half man, half…flattened man. Well, no, she knew that part. It was the why he smelled like an alien when he didn't seem to be one that was the problem.

Gretchen re-gloved (again) and turned back to the body (again) to continue. The body had been all but separated around the waist, actually, a flat lower half, and the skin had pulled away from the upper half right about the bottom of the ribcage. The organs spilled out onto the lower half when she poked at it, so she stopped poking at it and inserted the scalpel in the chest to open the cavity proper.

The moment the skin opened and she was able to peel back the layers, find the sternum, there was a puff of something, something like steam, but thicker, dust-like. It hit Gretchen in the face and she blinked. She wasn't wearing a mask, though she should have been, she realised when she jolted away from the table and the cloud followed her. She wasn't thinking, and when she took a step back she also took a breath, and that was all the cloud needed to move of its own volition like a swarm of bees and race down her throat into her lungs.

Gretchen staggered backwards and couldn't stop herself from reaching up to her throat with both hands, her wet gloves slicking the blood from the corpse onto her skin. She couldn't stop breathing in, but she couldn't bring herself to breathe out for a good thirty seconds; just when she was sure that she was going to pass out, she exhaled in a huge billow, waiting for a cloud of smoke or something to be pushed out, but her breath was invisible. She sucked in more air and debated pushing the contamination button and closing the room off. That was what she was supposed to do.

Sick.

That came from inside her, she already knew even as she looked around for the thing that had said it. Her hand reached out for the contamination button but it never quite made it there. The room seemed to swim; she'd always read that description of a room swimming in front of someone and never understood what it had meant until now. The whole place was a moving blur. Straight lines became a raucous bunch of waves, and if she stopped moving, it kept on. Her lungs began to tingle, like when she'd used to use albuterol inhalers in university, and the sensation traveled along her chest to her arms and her throat, up the back until she was sure that she was going to vomit.

Better.

Her head burned on the inside, behind her eyes, and she pressed her palms into her eyes to keep them from boiling out. Something was crawling into her spine, it felt, sliding under the skin, in between the vertebrae and up into the fluid into the brain stem. Her legs lost function when it slipped into her brain tissue and played about, and her knees buckled; she fell to the floor and laid there, her arms and legs jerking involuntarily. From here she could see the door.

She wondered if anyone was around to see the monitors. Probably not. This might be where they found her in the morning, infected and putrefied, or whatever.

Better now.

The burning left her skull and she regained some motor function, but she still felt that sense that something was moving in her body, something that she couldn't control. Gretchen pushed herself to standing and braced both her hands on the counter, still not sure if she would remain upright. Her vision wavered, not unlike the way it did when she was exposed to heavy vibrations and she knew the fluid inside her eyeballs was jiggling about. There was a strange sensation like she was going to sneeze, and Gretchen reached over and grabbed one of the red biohazard bags from a supply box.

She leant over it and then watched as clear fluid ran from her nose and mouth and into the bag, dripping as if she was using some sort of neti pot. She knew what it was when she saw it, though there was no way for her to be able to tell, she just knew.

Gretchen shoved the plastic bag into the small lab incinerator and slammed shut the door, pressing the red 'fire' button and watching through the glass as the flame lit up and burnt the bag, the spinal fluid, all the damaged brain tissue and prions from her skull. Everything was reduced to ashes, and then even those were burnt to a fine dust that was evacuated to the bio waste cell buried in the ground a mile away. Gretchen pressed her forehead to the glass and stared at the cooling oven, then reached up and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

All better now.

***

PRESENT DAY:

"So you managed to wrap up a case in one day," Rhys said over the salad greens.

Gwen popped a cherry tomato in her mouth and chewed. "Well technically, it'll be finished tomorrow. But still, I know." She widened her eyes in astonishment. "Shocking. Did you get these this morning?"

Rhys shook his head. "Nah, Mandy brought them in from her greenhouse allotment." He glanced at her. "We ever get out of this place and into a proper house, we should look into getting an allotment." He turned and fed her a wedge of cucumber. "Fresh veg all summer for free."

Gwen unscrewed the lid from a jar of baby food, unappetizingly gray-brown but labelled, 'Lamb and potatoes'. Duncan eyed her from his high chair, slapping a long handled egg separator they'd got for the wedding and never used against the plastic tray table. "After you pay for the allotment and the plants and the fertiliser and the water and the god knows what else," she griped, "not to mention the man power." She glanced at him. "You want to spend an hour every evening digging in the dirt?"

Rhys bopped a scallion off her head and then reached over to brush it over Duncan's nose. "Sure, why not? Good to be outside. Digger here would love the dirt, wouldn't you, Mister?"

Duncan slammed the egg separator on the table in agreement, and Gwen dug about in the drawer for a spoon. "Well, fine then. This is like the dog discussion, you know."

Rhys shrugged. "All I'm saying is that if we get a dog, I will pick it out and name it, because eventually, I will be the one taking care of it."

Gwen glanced at Duncan and thought about the fact that she'd simply agreed when Rhys had named him, but she didn't point that out, because, well. Kids weren't dogs.

"Anyway," Rhys said, changing the subject, "you got the thing sorted and all, before tea, even."

Gwen spooned a bit of lamb and potatoes for Duncan and he opened his mouth dutifully. All good Welsh children loved lamb. It was a genetic predisposition, Rhys often joked. "Right at that. I sort of felt sorry for the thing, actually, trapped in a body like that. Glarg is going to live in one of the zebras at the Manor House Wildlife Park in Tenby. Jack, Gretchen and Dee are going to install him tomorrow."

"How did you manage to get out of that?" Rhys asked as he set the plates on the table and reached over the kitchen island for silverware.

Gwen gave Duncan a big spoonful and made a face at him. He gurgled lamb all over his chin. "I'm the boss, remember?"

Rhys wiped his hands on his trousers and checked the pot on the stove to see if his cabbage was done. Apparently not. "I mean, yeah, that's true, but how often does that happen?"

Gwen shrugged. "Not very. So gift horses."

Rhys waved a spoon and looked about to say something, and then stopped, closing his mouth. Then he opened it again, his face hesitant. "I admit that when you said Jack had come back, I thought there was going to be a problem. But I think it might actually be a very good thing."

It was an astute observation, actually, and Gwen knew what he was driving at. To be honest, she hadn't been sure what it was going to be like when Jack had come back. Part of her had worried that they would butt heads more often than they did. The first time Jack had left and come back, the weeks after his return had been a constant battle, two people fighting over a too small blanket.

This time, though, she hadn't stepped in with a team that he'd assembled and then abandoned. This time it was all hers, her building, rules, personnel, and Jack seemed content to smile and take orders. In fact…

"If I didn't know better," she said, realising that she'd been holding Duncan's spoonful of lamb and potatoes just out of his reach, and the poor kid has been craning his neck towards it, "I'd say that Jack is almost relieved to be, well, relieved."

***

"You know, most blowfish that come through the Rift are small-time crooks," Jack said. "Loan sharking, gambling, theft. You took it to a whole new level."

Lionel changed the disc on the DVD player carefully. "What can I say, I'm enterprising."

Jack crossed his arms and watched the blowfish set the DVD player on the table in the cell and lie down on the bed so that he could still see the screen.

"Yeah, but hacking apart humans, that's a big step."

Lionel shrugged, eyes flitting to Jack. "I never knew the love of a real family," he said, a tinge of sarcasm in his voice. "My parents abandoned me and I was raised a hatchery, devoid of the touch of others, save the beating fists of my schoolmates."

Jack rolled his eyes.

"This is the one where Marge auditions for A Streetcar Named Desire," Lionel said. "Care to join me?"

Jack thought about it for a split-second, then realised that he was actually thinking about it. "No, no thank you, Lionel."

"Whatever you want me to say, Harkness, it's not going to make you feel better." Lionel shifted as if he was uncomfortable, but it was probably just the shite mattress on his damp bed. "And from what I know of the history of this organisation, me cutting open a few of you is shadow compensation." Then he looked at Jack, blinking. "Not that I'm a huge believer in an eye for an eye, as your book says, but I do know that one about the pot and the kettle." He paused. "I could go for some tea."

Jack pushed off from the transparisteel. "Sorry. Fresh out. Use your water dispenser."

"Pity. I'll no longer be recommending you for Inspector's Choice."

Jack smiled and wandered towards the cell hall. "No one is available to cater to your whims, pal."

"What of that other nice bloke I see every once in a while?" Lionel said, eyes not leaving the screen. "He's concierge-like."

Jack stopped. "Come again?"

"The young man with the suit and tie, well-dressed."

"Gray pinstripe."

"Why yes, I do believe so."

Jack stared at Lionel's eyes, still riveted to the DVD player. "Here, in this building."

"No, on my daily constitutions about the grounds of Buckingham Palace." Lionel tsked. "Of course here, you idiot."

Jack squinted, as if he would be able to read Lionel better if he were blurrier. He just looked like the same beat up blowfish in a bad boiler suit (And how great was Gwen for getting boiler suits just like the old days? Consistency might be a hobgoblin, but it was a comforting one.).

"When did you see him?"

Lionel sat up and folded his webbed hands together. "Oh, please, tell me that I hit some sort of intrigue here. I do love intrigue."

Jack shook his head and smiled. "TV rots your brain," he said cheerfully as he left. "You should watch a lot of it."

Whatever Lionel might have said in reply was masked by the slamming of the metal door to the cellblock. Jack stood in the hallway and tried to think about what the blowfish had just said, but all he could see was the image of Ianto walking across the atrium without turning, without speaking.

Jack wandered back into the atrium and sat at a general workstation. He keyed up the footage from two nights ago and watched the video feeds as Ianto Jones seemed to appear out of nowhere. He stepped out of the lift in the sub-basement (the lift camera was conveniently broken, funny for a place this new), and walked about, down in the hallways until Jack spotted him. Jack watched himself chase after Ianto, and finally Ianto's entrance to the lab, but the autopsy lab doors never opened. Ianto never arrived. Instead, he rewound the internal med lab camera and watched Gretchen fiddle with Hoix guts, get covered in Hoix guts, and then disappear off screen, presumably for clothes. She reappeared later much as he had seen her when he walked in on her: panties and shirt and lab coat.

The front door of the Hub opened and Gretchen sailed in, her heels clicking and her purse swinging. She had a celery stalk wedged in her mouth and an ASDA bag dangled from her fingers.

Jack sat back from the workstation. "Oh hello, you're back late."

Gretchen glanced at her watch. "Seven is late?"

Jack shrugged. "It is when everyone else is gone," he said, closing the camera boxes. "You missed all the fun of the symbiote and all."

She shrugged. "Fun in human autopsy land. Just want to make up some time." She walked down the hallway to her lab and he followed her. "What happened?"

Jack watched her arse in her pencil skirt as it made its way down the hell with the rest of her. Sometimes, he thought that Gretchen would be more than eager to romp around. Play Naked Twister. Hide The Speculum. Something in her eyes said that she was into that. He was into that. By all rights, he should be more than halfway into her knickers by now. Or she could be halfway into his knickers, if he had been wearing knickers. Jack didn't believe in proper protocol for sexual advances like that.

"We recorded it for you," he said, tearing his eyes from her rear. "Maggie has a machine set up so you can talk to Glarg."

Gretchen glanced over her shoulder. "Glarg? Tell me he asked you to call him that."

The lights flickered on when they arrived, motion-activated, and Gretchen tossed her things on one of the lab tables, then stood in front of Glarg's container and put her hands on her hips.

"Okay then, so what do we do here?"

Jack picked up a wand and held it to her throat. "Just talk. We left it on."

In his solution, Glarg rolled minutely. "If this is who you have in mind for me," Owen's voice said, and Gretchen started. "That's a fucking waste."

Jack picked up one of the other wands. "Now, now, be nice. These are the delicate hands that pulled you to safety."

"Oh, did you make this shite I'm wallowing in?" Glarg grouched. "It needs more chyme."

Gretchen glanced at Jack and then pressed the wand to her neck. "Uhm, okay. I can do that."

"Say," Glarg said after a short pause. "Who are you anyway?"

"Gretchen," she told him, and then shrugged at Jack.

"No, dipshit, I mean who are you?" The metal rod in the mixture trembled when Glarg all but tossed it about with his violent rolling.

Gretchen raised the rod again. "I'm Gretchen," she said. "And if you don’t knock off the language I'm not getting you anything else."

"Fine, fine, be that way," Glarg griped, and rolled to the side in a dismissive gesture. Jack snorted. If he didn't know any better, he would say the thing was pouting. He didn't actually know any better, anyway.

Gretchen made a face at Jack. "I don't even get what he's talking about," she said, waving the rod and her other hand in a small circle. Jack sighed.

"He's an ornery one, our Glarg."

"I'm no one's fucking Glarg."

Gretchen set the rod down and reached for her lab coat. "Well, I guess I'll have to get some chyme from somewhere." She glanced into the mixture. "I could make some."

Jack clapped a hand on her shoulder. "That's the spirit. Do you want help?" He walked towards the cupboard to snag another coat.

Gretchen beat him there and stood in front of the cupboard, then turned and reached above it for a box of Weetabix. "No, no, that's fine," she said, "really. I just." She smiled. "You're distracting."

Jack shoved his hands in his pockets. He knew when he was being herded. On the other hand, he had footage to look at. "Oh really? What kind of distracting?" Gretchen was fondling the cereal box and he liked that idea. Okay, not that Weetabix were a great sex aid, but her hands were lovely. He hadn't been lying when he'd told Glarg that her hands were delicate. Delicate was good for some things. Delicate was good for fetishes.

He was getting distracted a bit himself. It occurred to him that he'd been working here almost three months and Gwen had not yet sat him down and given him the 'sleeping with your co-workers is bad' speech. Maybe she had given it to everyone else.

"The kind that makes me spill acid in bad places," Gretchen murmured.

Jack jolted. "Right then." He backed up a step and winked. "I'll be around if you need anything." He smiled. "Just whistle."

Gretchen raised an eyebrow. "Whistle."

Oh man, they fell for it every time. "Yeah, you know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? Just put your lips together and…blow."

She laughed when he turned down the hallway. "That would be a lot more suave if my name was Steve," she called after him.

***

FIVE MONTHS AGO:

Gretchen sat in her chair, hands flat on the hotel conference room table, and blinked at the PowerPoint presentation Lois was giving about the retinal scanner in the new Hub. Gretchen couldn't have cared less, because Dee hadn't eaten her pastry and it was sitting across from her on the table.

It had apples in it. Gretchen could smell them from here.

The thing was, no matter how good the pastry, Gretchen shouldn't have been able to smell it from here, and so her head was taken up with two trains of thought: first, that she really rather wanted to reach across and take that pastry. Second, that maybe there was something going on inside her that she should examine more closely.

It had been a month since the thing with the creature that Gretchen had decided was a symbiote of some sort. It had to be, since according to Gretchen's self-scans, it was still inside her, somewhere, in the blood, only cellularly-corporeal at this point, but there. But it wasn't leeching anything away that Gretchen could tell. In fact, she felt better than she had in months.

More importantly, the one thing that she had needed erased from her body was gone. Gretchen had the spinal test done again and an MRI at a separate location (it was amazing what lines you could get bumped to the front of by saying 'Torchwood' and waving about a few thousand quid), and everything was in the clear. No more spikes. No more positive receptors. No more myoclonic twitching, no more anything prion-related. No more sponge brain.

At this point, Gretchen reflected as she licked her lips and heard Lois say the word "arrest", she was so rather busy being stunned and relieved at her amazingly good luck that she figured if the thing had side effects she'd take them in stride. Hell, if she grew an extra appendage she'd still count herself fortunate.

"—to add?" Gretchen glanced up from the pastry to realise that they were all looking at her.

"Uhm." She sighed and spread her hands. "This is one of those times when I'm just going to admit that I wasn't paying attention, okay? Are you going to eat that?"

Dee glanced at the pastry and then slid it across the table.

Gwen shook her head. "Well, this has been productive. I'm going to head over to the new building. Gretchen, do you need a lift?"

Gretchen shoved the pastry in her mouth and shook her head. Her stomach was flipping and even as she ate the thing, it tasted bad, like it would sit in there and not get rid of the growling in her belly. She had a giant lunch tucked away in a bag, and she knew that she could always go out and pick something up later if she needed a quick bite.

"I swear, Gretchen," Maggie said as they all gathered their things and broke up the meeting, "you have either a hollow leg or a tapeworm."

Gretchen raised an eyebrow and tried to be 'Bitch, please'. "What makes you say that?"

Maggie just rolled her eyes and trundled off to the set of conference rooms that were designated her lab. Gretchen finished the pastry and licked her fingers.

Gwen sat on the table. "She has a point. You do have a high metabolism."

"She eats like a hobbit," Lois said as she walked past.

Gretchen shrugged. "I don't know what that means, but I just get hungry." She raised a finger. "And I'm not losing weight. I do not have a tapeworm." And when Gwen's mouth made a little squiggle she waved her finger again. "And I am not bingeing and purging. I just eat. A lot."

Dee and Lois left for a supply run and to move more servers over to the Hub, and Gwen sat at her makeshift desk to field a load of calls. Gretchen gathered her stuff, a few packets of information, and then left her itinerary with Lois: hospital for some research, then the new Hub for labwork. It would be nice when they were firmly ensconced at the new location, but the freedom of being mobile was refreshing. Not being confined to a clinic was a novelty that Gretchen hadn't felt since she'd done her rotation in livestock medicine up in Cheshire. That was ages ago. Now she had the benefits of being free and mobile, but didn’t have to trade in her heels for wellies. Bonus.

She was still hungry when she pulled out and on A4161 and popped a disc in the player for the short trip to Llandough, oh what was this? Stone Roses? Yes, please.

'Breaking into Heaven' was only on :37 when a car coming from the opposite direction lost a wheel, hit the median and flipped up into the other side of the road. It landed partially on top of a sports car, which then turned into the next lane and hit a Land Rover. Gretchen watched it all happen metres and metres in front of her and pulled to the side of the road quickly as the cars accordioned into each other with grinding crunches and squealing rubber on asphalt. When it was all said and done twenty seconds later, traffic was stopped behind her and the three lanes were covered in bodies, cars, glass, and fire.

Gretchen unbuckled her seat belt and dove from the car, rounding the back for a med kit from the boot. Someone was probably already calling 999, and sure enough, if she glanced back at stopped cars, every driver had a mobile pressed to his or her ear.

She heard a groan from one of the cars near her and she hurried to peer inside the demolished side window. "Hello?"

"Oh god, oh g—" came a weak voice from inside the car. Gretchen couldn't see into the back, but her ears had pinpointed the sound. She wondered if that was the driver, if they had been thrown back there, or if the driver was somewhere else. The windshield was completely out, the bottom half of it rolled safety glass like a peeled top of a sardine can. There was blood all over the glass and after a few seconds she was able to parse the leg on the dashboard, sandwiched between the bonnet and the other vehicle that sat on the front of the car. Oh.

"I'll get you help," she said. "Don't try to move."

When she turned, she came face to face with another man who had also stopped. He held a small first aid kit in his hands. "Is there anything we can do?" he asked. "Can we move people or…I'm not a doctor."

Gretchen shrugged the med kit on her shoulder. "I'm not either. I'm a vet."

The man glanced about. "Maybe if there—"

One of the cars in the upper pile groaned and creaked and tilted, and then fell down the heap about a metre or so. There were screams from inside the metal mass of vehicles. Gretchen felt something in her stomach uncurl and thought for a moment that she was going to boot, but she didn't. In fact, the sensation felt like the releasing of tension that she hadn't even known she was holding.

"I think we might want to help people out," she said. "Normally I'd say to leave it, but that doesn't look good." She pointed to the Forrester teetering on the top of the pile like a see-saw board. How it had even got up there was anyone's guess.

Gretchen and the man set about helping people from cars if they were trying to get out. "You really shouldn't move," Gretchen said to one man as he dragged himself from the window of his overturned Vauxhall.

"Help me out, help me out," the man said. "My leg is broken, help me out."

Gretchen looked about for someone to consult and then, finding just herself, reached down and helped the man pull himself from the car. The moment her skin touched his and he grimaced, Gretchen felt a singing sensation deep inside her, like something snapping into place. She grasped the man's skin and tugged.

Oh. So much better.

That voice again. Sometimes she heard it in her head, but it was rarely helpful. She knew what, or who it was, but her new passenger wasn't precisely corporeal, or coherent, and it didn't talk all that much.

For a while, Gretchen sat with the man as he lay on the ground waiting for a litter. He held her hand and nodded in and out of consciousness, and when he was finally loaded into an ambulance, Gretchen moved on.

It went that way for a few more minutes, as emergency responders arrived and took over rapidly prising people from the wreckage and onto boards and then into ambulances. Gretchen and the others who had tried to help wiped the blood from their hands with some wet-wipes someone had pulled from a glove box. She made her way back to her car, where she sat, in stunned silence, as she tried to process the last twenty minutes.

Her phone rang she picked it up, knowing it was Lois. "Are you all right? I've been calling."

Gretchen sat back in her seat and stared at the cars as they pulled away. "Yeah, there was a crash. I stopped to help."

"Everything all right?"

Gretchen blinked. Everything was so in focus. She wondered if that was just adrenaline in her system. "Yeah. Well, it is now. I was about to get back on the road."

Lois paused for a minute. "I was calling to ask what you wanted me to order for you from Thai One On tonight. The usual metric tonne of food?"

The car was silent as she thought about it. Instead of growling, like it usually did when she thought about food every second of the day for the past month, her belly was quiet. And full. "No," she said slowly, "no, I think I'm okay with my old order."

"Really?" Lois asked. "That's new."

Gretchen looked at the stretch of road, covered in broken glass and blood, and the mangled wrecks of the cars being dragged onto flatbed lorries for hauling. Her heart danced a little bit at the sight of all that blood, and the thought of all of those people in pain made her tongue water just a little.

"Yes," she agreed absently, "it is."

***

PRESENT DAY:

Lois had had a busy day. It wasn't every day that she had to do the jobs of two other people, but she made do. In reality, Jack and Dee didn't do that much office work that couldn't wait for them, but Jack hand wrote his reports sometimes, and though he promised to type them up, he often left that part to the last minute, so whilst he was gone, Lois rifled through his desktop and stole all his handwritten reports to input. There were seventeen.

Dee, well, Dee made all the lists for parts and ammunition, but Lois was the one who ordered them from surplus and UNIT. She used to get their ammunition from a third dealer, but apparently he'd been cheap because he'd been fuelling a Chechnyan revolution or something, and she'd lost his contact info when he'd fled the country.

That terse email with Interpol about her buying activities had not been a good one. Live and learn.

UNIT gave her grief ("You want that? Who uses that? And that? Isn't that anti-tank? Sure we can get it, but what do you need it for?"), but they gave her what she wanted, and more importantly, they didn't haggle price with her. And they never actually ever said "no", which was amusing since a great deal of the things that they gave her were things UNIT itself didn't use. Sometimes when there was something big (which wasn't often) they dropped it off here, and Lois always watched the slightly jealous faces of the UNIT soldiers when they unloaded the boxes.

She wondered what they'd think of the big guns.

Gwen had been in and out all day, updating the symbiote list and rechecking the scanning equipment with Maggie, and then they'd done some rounds of Cardiff in the SUV with sensors, hanging about the houses of well-known parasite and symbiote hosts, just to check their readings, see if everything was on the up and up. It had been irritating work, but apparently everything had checked out. Gwen had mentioned that in the case of Glarg, they had been handed a wake up call. What if there were other sentient beings out there trapped in hosts that were all but killing them? Lois sensed that in the future they'd be having an 'Ethics of Premature Symbiote and Parasite Removal' meeting, and then they'd be administering some retcon and doing some surgeries.

That would make Gretchen nervous. Maybe there was something to be said for bringing a human medical doctor on board. Not that she didn't like Gretchen, and she would trust Gretchen to get the symbiote out of her, but the stitching her up with minimal scarring was another matter. Gretchen stitched up corpses and pets.

Sometimes, Lois knew she was being unfair, and she still didn't change her mind. This was one of those times.

She finished the last typed report from Jack and saved to his drive, then submitted them to the proper locations in the databases and the archive, collated the case files and CCd everyone in a mass email listing complete cases for the week.

Gwen and Maggie gone, and the other three still on their way back from the Manor House installing Glarg, Lois enjoyed the quiet and thought about packing it in. Dee would get back soon, and Jack was supposed to be in evening light duty, which meant that he just had to stick close to home. Hub. Same difference.

She did a last circuit of the Hub, turning out extraneous lights and placing some of them on motion detection. Then she deposited files in Gwen's office and swooped by Maggie's office to grab any stray cups or mugs. They didn’t need a replay of the live spore creature what almost ate the lab. Last, she swung down the med bay hall to put the light in there on standby, since Gretchen would be—

Sitting in her lab with her feet on her desk, watching recorded video on a computer.

Lois blinked and rerouted the perception she'd had for the past three hours that she was the only one here. Gretchen hadn't come out, not once. There was a toilet back here, so it wasn't as if Gretchen had to come out or something, but still. Gretchen usually played music at high decibels. Her lab equipment sounded like a construction site in full swing. Instead, Gretchen was sitting in the lab with headphones in, her eyes glued to the screen, her lips moving as if she were memorising something.

Lois knocked, but Gretchen must not have heard, so she flicked the light switch manually. Gretchen jumped and yanked the ear buds out. "Jesus!"

"No, just Lois."

Gretchen paused the video she was watching, something from the old Hub with Doctor Harper and Ianto Jones, and put her hands in her lap. "I didn't know anyone was still here," she said.

Lois sighed. "Paperwork. I thought you were to go with Captain Harkness and Dee."

Gretchen shrugged. "I begged off. I've been feeling…" She paused. "Under the weather," she finished, cocking her head. "I don't know. A cold or the flu or something." She patted her belly. "Maybe it was something I ate," she mused.

***

"And that is what happens when you put ex-lax in tea," Jack finished as they walked into the atrium from the garage. The lights were out in most of the Hub, but the nighttime lights shone in low fluorescence to light their way.

Dee disappeared into her office and re-emerged a minute later with a different pair of shoes and coat. "That was a most memorable lecture," she told Jack. "Sometime I might listen to the recording of it, as I was busy not paying attention this time."

Jack sat on the edge of Lois's desk and imagined that she could sense it, wherever she was. "It's okay. I wasn't paying attention either." He waved his hands. "I could have said anything."

Dee shrugged on her long coat and toed out of her unlaced boots, slipping on a pair of shiny dress shoes. Jack watched with interest. "Hot date?"

Dee didn't look up. "Yes."

"Really?"

Dee looked up then. "Yes, a hot date in my sensible shoes. These things are sure to bring the boys a-running, Harkness." Something must have shown on his face, because she smiled. "I'm meeting my financial advisor to set up some things."

"Why did I think you were independently wealthy?" Jack mused.

"Because you assume people from an upper class must automatically have money," Dee shot back. "Times have changed." She shrugged. "Or actually, not really."

Jack watched her check her pockets for her things: money, keys, gun, breath mints, et cetera. Her hair foamed around her face now that it was down, and it didn't suit her. Dee needed to have her hair pulled back so that you could see that swan neck, that patrician nose. She needed the slight lift to her eyes that she got from pulled back hair.

"Don't tell me you're from one of those families that sold their title," he said, not sure if it was funny or not.

Dee's face was less than charitable. "You can't sell a title," she told him. "But even if you could, I wouldn't."

Jack crossed his arms and heard the creak of his leather jacket. "I knew there was no way Johnson was your real last name." Dee gave him the finger. "Ladylike."

"I'm leaving," she said then, and walked towards the front door, hands swinging freely at her sides. "Enjoy the rest of the night."

Jack watched her go, and when the front door clicked shut and the security seal light changed from red to green in the door panel, he turned away, shrugged off his coat, and tossed it and his firearms on the sofa in his office. Now was a good time to meander, but first, he'd promised some pittins some treats.

"Just when I think I have her figured out," Ianto said from above him, and Jack had to look up to see him. He was farther than normal. Usually, Ianto was right next to him. And--

"That’s nice," Jack said. "Suit change. Different tie."

Ianto glanced down at himself and shrugged. "I had ectoplasm all over the other one."

Oh har har, ghost jokes, possibly worse than Zucker jokes. Jack opened the fridge door and pulled out the bag of Swiss chard. In the Habitrail across the way, Sam and Dean went apeshit. They knew this game. The tubing rocked as they raced from either end of the large enclosure to the feedbox in the center that Jack favoured. Dean had to climb a giant loop and fall down the other side to get there, and that was mildly amusing. He dug in the bag of greens for the heavy thick center stalks and opened the lid all at once.

Sam and Dean ignored the Swiss chard when he put it in there. Oh, it was affection time. Jack snorted and fished the pittins from the bin, depositing one on either shoulder. His hands, still wet from the chard, left green streaks in their fur.

"So another case solved by team Torchwood," Ianto mused. "How does it feel to have gone from Fred to Scooby?"

Jack smiled. "I look great in an ascot." He let the pittins run all over his arms and caught one, possibly Sam, Dean, it was hard to tell, before it fell off his arm to the floor. The grab made him squeeze too hard and the pittin snapped at his hand. Jack set the creature on his shoulder and it nipped at his ear. "Hey," he told it. That was an accident.

"Watch yourself, Jack," Ianto said, and Jack glanced over his shoulder.

"Shake ya ass," Jack replied.

Ianto shook his head. "Pardon?"

Jack tilted his head and lowered his hands. "I said shake…" Ianto's face was knitted in confusion and something stabbed Jack in the chest, below his ribs, as things slotted into place. "Nothing. Just talking to myself, as usual." He dumped Sam and Dean onto the Swiss chard alps in their cage.

Ianto leant on the railing and smiled. "You know what they say about talking to yourself."

Jack snapped the lid shut on the Habitrail. "Yeah, but I think we both know that I'm not crazy." He paused and stared at Ianto's reflection in the glass of the eyrie wall. "Well."

Ianto's eyes met him in the glass and he blinked before his image was broken up by movement inside the eyrie, Myfanwy mantling her wings in her gigantic nest. Jack wiped his hands on his trousers and climbed the stairs to the second level, and Ianto pushed away from the railing, hands in pockets.

"Are you quite all right?" Ianto smiled, but he glanced at the other end of the railing, past Jack, to the steps.
"Testing a theory." Jack didn't stop when Ianto backed up; he reached out and grabbed Ianto's tie and twisted it, pulling him in, even as his other hand reared back and he brought it in, connecting with Ianto's face.

Ianto flew back with the punch as Jack released his tie, and he hit the railing. There was a sound of clicking a little bit when his forearm bounced against the metal.

Jack backed up a step and wished he had his gun. He should have waited until he had his gun. "Who are you?"

Ianto shook his head and wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand, coming away with blood. "That was barbaric."

Jack reached forward again and hauled the man to his feet by the suit lapels. There was something about the suit that scraped at his insides. This was Ianto's suit. And if not, then a damn good replica. "You have about three seconds to tell me who you really are." He pressed the man's shoulders back onto the railing as if he meant to push him over. He was betting that no matter who or what this really was, a fall from a high second storey would slow him down. Or at least break something. Anything that would let him lie on the floor, gasping in pain while Jack went to get his gun.

Ianto's face was red and he spluttered a little bit, and then he sighed and stopped fighting.

The eyes changed first, the blue of them melting like ice into a dark brown, and then it spread, this wave of change. The skin darkened a shade or two to something more tan, less Welsh, the body lost a few inches while the cheeks and lips changed, the hair grew, arms shortened and hands became thinner. At the end of a long and confusing thirty seconds or so, Jack grasped the lapels of Ianto's suit still, but inside that suit was Gretchen Jones.

She closed her eyes and raised her palms. "This isn't nearly as bad as it looks."

Jack heard a crunching noise and realised that he was grinding his jaw. "Yeah," he said though his teeth, and then swung her about so that he threw her into the conference room behind them. Gretchen stumbled. The shoes were too big now, and the trouser legs were too long. She clutched at her middle as if she were holding the belt up. The neck of the shirt with its delicately knotted tie resembled a pendant and less of a choker now.

"I've seen a lot of things," Jack said lightly. "This isn't even the weirdest. That's not going to save you if you don't start talking."

"I haven't hurt you," Gretchen said, dabbing at her mouth sullenly.

Jack snorted. "Define hurt."

"Fine," she admitted, shrugging, "I haven't touched you."

"Nor anyone else, I gather. Lucky for you." Jack gestured to the table. "Sit down."

"Are you going to kill me?"

"That depends on what your explanation is, Gretch. Are you Gretchen Jones?"

"Yes, yes, I am," Gretchen said, and then sat down dully in one of the conference room chairs, leant on the table and put her head in her hands. "Fucking Torchwood."

***

FIVE MONTHS AGO:

At first it was a pit stop at the hospital a few times a week, maybe the terminal children's ward, maybe the cancer ward. Sometimes the A&E if it was busy. A few times she went to grief counseling support groups, but they expected her to talk about her trauma, and she was fairly sure that it wouldn't go over well if she said, 'Oh don't mind me, I'm just back here, siphoning your despair. Be done in a few.'

It was easy, actually. Just being there in the room helped. She didn't have to actually do anything, which was good because she didn't know what to do even if she thought about it.

Gretchen turned circles in her lab chair and stared at the ceiling. She was taking a break from cataloguing weevil body parts, and lately her favorite break activity consisted of staring at the ceiling whilst she spun about in her chair and contemplated how she was going to fit her next feeding into her busy schedule.

Sometimes it took an hour, sometimes longer. Sometimes she just needed to be there for fifteen minutes. Large groups were better than single people, of course, and anxiety, pain or grief were the best sources. She'd tried the maternity ward once, but there was too much happiness to get a good feed. Gretchen tried not to think about the fact that the creature in her lived off despair and sadness. It made her wonder if she could feed it herself if she got depressed enough.

There was some point to wondering if it was herself she was feeding or the thing inside her, or if they were one and the same. If she thought of it as something else, then she didn't feel as bad about it all. She was a hostage to the thing, not a monster.

At one point, she wondered if she couldn't hide in the hospital at night and feed whilst she slept, but what kind of life was that? Wasn't that some sort of junkie behaviour? How soon before she started sleeping in graveyards like a weevil? Not reassuring.

There was a knock on her lab door and she stopped spinning and lifted her head from the back of her chair. Maggie stood in the doorway and smiled. "I'm here to donate to the cause," she said.

Gretchen slapped the arms of her chair and propelled it backwards on the rollers. "Finally. You're months overdue."

Maggie sidled in the door and leant against one of the lab tables. "I hate needles."

Gretchen pulled a selection of red and lavender top Vacutainers and set them on the counter with the sterile needle packet. "Oh come on, Maggie, you're a big girl." She snapped on the gloves.

Maggie sat on the stool closet to the table and tucked her feet on the rungs. "I know, I just. Everyone has something, right?"

Gretchen smiled and tied the rubber tourniquet around Maggie's upper arm. "I know. She pressed lightly at the bend of Maggie's elbow with two fingers. "You have great veins, Mags." She swabbed the area with alcohol and cotton wool. Maggie watched her dispassionately and stared at the needle. "Okay, pinch."

Maggie winced a little and Gretchen felt a little warm uncurl in her gut, like an amuse bouche hitting an empty stomach. It occurred to her that Maggie was a pretty good source of food right here. In general. Grieving widow and all.

No, she though as she stuck the first lavender top in, she was not going there. She'd have to be very desperate to bring her feeding issues into work.

A few minutes later she waved Maggie out the door and set the test tubes in the rack in the cooler, keeping one out so that she could do a set of preliminary tests on it for a baseline. She'd need a CBC on file anyway.

Gretchen was still sitting in the roller chair, and that was a good thing because the symbiote inside her did something it didn't normally do: it tried to talk to her.

Taste.

Maggie's sample was in her hand and she prised off the red rubber top. The blood in the vial sloshed a little when pulled and the top finally came free, and she peered inside at it.

It was blood. No big deal.

She didn't think about it. She stuck her finger in and dunked it, then pulled it out and licked it clean. By the time she'd even processed what she'd done it was over.

Gretchen capped the vial and held it in her hand, then sat on the stool and stared at her writing on the label. What the fuck had that been about? She closed her eyes and gritted her teeth, and when she opened them again the room was hazy, out of focus. She squinted to see, but that action made her head hurt.

She just needed to focus. Gretchen closed her eyes and took some of the cleansing breaths that she'd learnt in yoga: four counts in, hold for two, eight counts out, hold for two repeat again and again. Her whole body felt light and fluid as if it wasn't solid. Maybe her symbiote made blood a narcotic. Maybe she was tripping.

Maybe her brain was going to explode.

Maybe…maybe she still had CJD and the symbiote was part of her dementia. Sobering thought.

She opened her eyes again and looked at the vial in her hand, and that was when she realised that it wasn't her hand. Her hand was suddenly paler, with longer, thicker fingers and a smaller palm. This wasn't--

"Gretchen," Lois said as she rounded the corner and leant on the doorjamb, eyes on her clipboard. "That thing you ordered is at the front—oh!" She stopped when she looked up at Gretchen and blinked. "Mags, have you seen Gretchen?"

Gretchen widened her eyes and looked down at her chest—huh. "Uh, no. I was just dropping off…" She set the test tube back into the rack and stuffed her hands in her lab coat.

Lois shrugged. "Maybe she's in the nighthouse. If you see her, tell her I'm looking for her?"

Gretchen gave her a thumbs up and pretended to tinker with a piece of equipment. Lois tilted her head, lost in throught as she stared at Gretchen, and then she shook herself.

"Right then."

When Lois was down the hall, Gretchen dashed into the attached bathroom and toilet and stared in the mirror. Maggie Hopley blinked back at her, from her pale skin to her blue eyes and thinner frame. The hair Gretchen'd pulled back into a tail was blonde and not brown. Her bra was hopelessly large in the cups.

She was Maggie. Oh holy fuck.

"Holy fuck," she said, exactly like Maggie.

What the hell had just happened? Was she going to stay like this? How was she going to explain this one? The cats were ripping the bottom out of her bag. Hell, her bag had lost the bottom a long time ago. It was just a matter of time before the cat left.

"Okay, so you're Maggie," she said to herself in the mirror. "You aren't usually Maggie. So you should stop being Maggie."

The thought was there and the intent behind it—she really didn't want to be Maggie—and Gretchen watched as her body seemed to melt and change, skin and hair darkening, body shape morphing. She lost an inch or two vertically but her breasts felt present again, and when she looked at her eyes they were brown. Her face was hers again.

What a relief.

The next time the passenger in her told her to do something, she was not fucking listening.

Gretchen licked her lips and stared at herself in the mirror. If she looked hard enough, could she see the parasite…symbiote…creature in there? Was she the creature? Was it, even now, controlling things she did that she couldn't even tell? Aside from her obvious newfound emotional vampirism.

"Oh god," Gretchen moaned, rolling her eyes and waving a hand at the mirror as she walked out of the room. Vampires. Fucking cliché.

On the other hand, dear god was she hungry.

***

PRESENT DAY:

"Why me, though? Funerals and hospitals not doing it for you anymore?"

Gretchen shrugged. "You're a convenient source of angst," she said sharply, glancing up. "You were starting to get better, and I just. I couldn't let you go. I already knew you talked to him, hallucinated him. It was easy to get into storage and nick one of his suits," she said when she was finished, changing the subject. "Watch video and study his movements. His speech patterns. I'd only shifted once or twice, and he was easy to do."

Jack thought about it. It wasn’t the first time some alien had thought he was tasty because of his whole…thing. The last time had been at Jackson's Leaves, but that had been ten times worse than this. "What happens if you don't…do something about this?"

Gretchen shrugged. "I make it happen."

"You make people sad."

"Or afraid, or panicked. Or doubtful." She looked up. "I can't let that happen."

"So you put on a suit and pretended to be my dead boyfriend."

Gretchen sat back, hands still on the table. "When you say it like that, it sounds insane."

Jack chose to ignore that issue, because it was insane, and it wasn't. "The shape-shifting. When did that start?"

"I told you."

"Yeah, so how often do you do that?"

"Not very. I mean, what's the point? I have to ingest a little bit of the person to take their shape and…" She trailed off when she saw how he was looking at her. "It's not like I lopped off his fingers," she said hastily and Jack's stomach started because he hadn't even thought about her eating huge hunks of Ianto, and also because for the first time he realised that they had Ianto on file. Here. In this Hub.

He had been so sure that Gwen had released his body to his sister. That was the way it should have been, or, like all the bodies in the Thames House, incinerated due to contamination, actually. But no, she must have brought it here. She could have had UNIT store it, like they must have stored the bodies from the last Hub—Toshiko and Suzie and Emily—and then installed it. Jack wondered if there was a little plaque with his name on it in the vaults, with all of their names on them, or if they just had numbers. Were names to personal to put on a drawer, like an office nameplate?

Ianto B. Jones, Office Hours: 1983-2010, Leave a message on the board.

"Here are your choices," Jack said, and her eyes flashed.

"You're not my boss."

"No, but I'm the man whose dead lover you impersonated to feed off my anguish and emotional distress, and you're damn lucky that in my fragile mental state I didn't throw you over the balcony and break your back."

Gretchen blinked. "What are my choices?"

"Resign. Quit. Say you were sick. Say you are sick. Say you're compromised. I don't care. Something Gwen will buy."

Gretchen raised an eyebrow. "Does that mean retcon?"

Jack gave her the once-over. "Gwen won't retcon you. She’ll make you sign promises."

"It won't take anyway," Gretchen said, and her hand drifted to her belly absently. Jack considered that. It might very well be true, and Gretchen would know better than he would what her symbiote was capable to filtering out. He wondered if she was immune to poisons as well. If she would age. If she could regrow a limb. He wondered if Gretchen wondered these things.

If they had another medic or xenobiologist he would have shut her in a cell until they found out.

Well, then Gwen would have fired him and let her out. So, maybe if Owen were still alive. Or…present, as the case had been towards the end.

"What are my other choices?"

"I could tell them all everything. Let Dee decide what to do with you." When Gretchen laughed, Jack shook his head. "She has a very cut and dried idea of justice, you know."

"Anything else?"

"You can disappear. Though to be honest, Gwen will waste resources looking for you and I don't fancy having to fake it for weeks and weeks that I don't know what happened to you. You'd have to leave tonight, and I don't gather you are savvy enough of have a fake ID and cash handy."

Gretchen waved a hand. "We're not all of us masters of crime."

Jack sat back. That rankled a bit. "Careful where you're going there," he told her.

"Tell Gwen the truth," she said finally, not looking up at him. "Just tell her I resign and tell her the truth. But don't," she began and then stopped. "Don't tell them what I did," she said finally. "To you. It was not my finest hour and I'm not proud of it. I never touched any of them, not even Maggie, and I don't want them wondering. I don't think I could take knowing that—"

Jack agreed, mostly because he didn't want them knowing for his sake. "Agreed."

Her face was a mask of relief; she blinked and Jack realised that she was crying. He wondered if she could feed off herself. Probably not. If she could, Jack was fairly sure Gretchen would have preferred self-cannibalism.

He wondered what Maggie would think of this. He didn't ask.

***

"The symbiote compromised Gretchen," Jack said softly as Gwen looked at the photos and scans and test results, all undoctored, the result of her own tests. Jack didn’t need to lie, because most of it was the truth anyway. "She's still at her home. I didn't retcon her." He paused. "I didn't know what you wanted to do, but she said that she'd resign."

Gwen blinked. "I don't think I understand," she said, "you discovered this last night, and you didn't ring me." Her eyes bored into him. "Even though I'm the one that should be making these decisions."

Jack bit his lower lip and leant forward, his elbows on his thighs. He was tired. "It happened so quickly, after you left." He shrugged. "She broke down so fast." He tried to make eye contact with her, because this was one of those times when he missed being in charge. If he had been in charge, she wouldn't have been able to ask these questions. Now it was all a matter of topping from the bottom, actually.

Because he couldn't tell her, not about Ianto. It wasn't right. It wasn't. That was his thing, and he didn't want her to know. Even if she already did know, he couldn't say it to her.

"So she acquired this symbiote while she was working here, because she was sick," Gwen said, shuffling through the papers and test results. "And it cured her, but she's become some sort of emotional vampire?"

Jack shrugged one shoulder. "She's been feeding off of hospitals and funerals, but she can't always control it." He made eye contact with Gwen. "Am I wrong in thinking that…?"

Gwen stared at the photos. "Is it going to kill her?"

"Nah," Jack answered, glancing out at the others milling about in the conference room, probably eating the donuts that he'd bought earlier that morning and set out for them, as if a few baked goods were going to make up for the sudden departure of a teammate. "But she's not stable. We can monitor her from here, make sure that she and her symbiote are getting along, and she's not bothering anyone, but—"

Gwen sighed and closed the file folder, tossing it on the desk and leaning forward, head in her hands. It took a second for Jack to notice that she was massaging the bridge of her nose with two fingers. "How did I not see it?" she mumbled. "She had a horrible disease. How did we not see that?" Gwen looked up at him. "One of my team was dying, and I didn't see it."

This was one of those moments in which Jack was more than happy to hunker down in front of her at the desk, reach out and take her hands in his, and tell her what he would have told himself: "Some people are good at keeping secrets," he said slowly. "You can't ferret out everything there is to know about your team, especially things they're determined to hide."

Gwen grimaced. "She has an alien inside her. How did I not—"

"That alien helped her change and alter things so that you wouldn't know it," Jack said. "She was the medical officer, of course she could change all kinds of things." He shrugged. "She messed with the CCTV feeds so that we wouldn't see any suspicious activity. She even input her bioscans discreetly so you wouldn't notice the readings the symbiote gave off."

Gwen put her head in her hands and shook it. "I should have seen it."

"Well you didn't," Jack grumbled finally. Gwen could play the 'coulda shoulda woulda' game for hours and it wasn't going to change anything. He'd learnt long ago that parts of that game had to be turned off, because they were never going to be solved. "The fact is she's damn lucky to be alive, and she'd be the first person to tell you that. Go ask her. Then decide what you think is best."

***

Gwen had never seen the inside of Gretchen's house before, but it was as she had imagined—bare. Gretchen had moved out of her Newport terrace house and into Grangetown shortly after she'd begun working for Torchwood, and Gwen knew all about being too busy to deal with decorating or anything of that nature. Of course, shortly after she'd joined up and moved in, Gretchen had apparently had something wholly different to deal with, and wasn't that just infuriating.

"You could have told me," she said.

Gretchen sighed. "True."

"What do you want me to do?" Gwen asked. She knew what Jack wanted her to do, and she remembered a time when she might have argued with him for the sake of arguing. Now she wasn't about to do that, but she also wasn't going to agree for the sake of agreeing. It was time, at last, to step up to the plate and deal with an employee.

She had always thought that it would be Dee.

Gretchen shrugged. "I think that's my question."

Gwen knitted her fingers together and leant forward, elbows on knees. "For fuck's sake Gretch, do you know anything about it?"

"It was an accident," Gretchen said, "but I'm not taking it back. I still don't take it back." She sipped from her tea and glanced out the window. "What did Jack tell you?"

Gwen picked up her tea. Gretchen wasn't going to poison her. Or maybe she had more faith in Gretchen than she should. Oh hell, she'd carried that symbiote for five months; it seemed unlikely to go homicidal now. "What he told me is irrelevant," she said. "What do you want to tell me?"

Long silence, as if she was considering her next words. And then, "Even you just sitting here, wracked with indecision," Gretchen said, "I can taste it like veal on my tongue."

"So it's true. You're feeding from emotions."

Gretchen's mouth twitched. "Only the bad ones." She blinked once. "Well."

Gwen set her tea down. Even if it was legit, she didn't have the stomach for tea anymore. "I need you to answer some questions, and then we'll see about not having to fire you."

"You don't get it, Boss," Gretchen said, leaning forward. "I quit. Didn't Jack tell you?"

"He did, yes, but he's not the one you have to tell that to." Gwen leant forward herself and Gretchen pushed back a bit. "I'm the one in charge, and I get to say when you leave and under what conditions."

Gretchen's eyes were hard, and Gwen wondered what they were hiding. Something Jack knew? Something no one knew? Was that Gretchen, or the symbiote? She tried to remember Gretchen before the symbiote, think of the dates and trace back, looking for personality changes, but she found that she couldn't remember anything specific.

"Then you better name your conditions," Gretchen said slowly, "because I think we both know you can't allow me to come back."

Gwen stared at those eyes and tried to connect with them, but somewhere, it failed. "No, I can't."

***

Rhys didn't usually expect to see his wife in the middle of the day, but Gwen opened the door to his office, Duncan balanced on her hip and a wan smile on her face.

"Oh god," he said, and then dropped his voice to a whisper when she walked towards him, "do we have to run away again?"

Gwen bounced Duncan a little bit and laughed, but the smile didn't meet her eyes. "No, no, nothing like that. Just thought you'd like to skive off with us and get out of town for a day or so,"

Rhys stood and picked up his phone receiver. "Let me ring Bill and get him to cover. He owes me big."

Bill was more than willing to cover, mostly because then Rhys could stop hassling him about all that poker money he owed him. Rhys didn't need the money more than he needed the time, and he'd gladly pay for it anyway. Besides, if he'd won it, it was free money, so this was pretty much free time. That he had to justify all this in his head while he talked to Mandy on the phone and stacked his files in his Out bin made him worry that he wasn't processing things right these days.

Too many episodes of The Wiggles, maybe. It made him too honest. And something about sharing. And maybe something about self-esteem. He had to stop watching children's programming.

"Would it be obvious if I pointed out how rare this is?" he asked jovially as the three of them walked out to Gwen's car, already loaded with bags and all of the things that Duncan required for his upkeep and maintenance.

Gwen settled Duncan in his car seat and began to buckle the straps. Rhys double-checked the windows on his car before he felt safe leaving it in the Harwood's carpark for the weekend. Middle week. It was Wednesday. He wondered what Gwen thought was 'a day or so'.

"Remember what I said about gift horses?" Gwen asked him, and he settled in the driver's seat before she could object. They both had keys to the cars, so he didn't even have to ask for hers, he just used his own.

"Yeah, yeah," he told her when she slid into the passenger's seat. "Buckle up. Still," he said jovially, "I'd like to know who I should be thanking over there at alien central."

"Gretchen, my medic, our medic, resigned, because she's been melded with an alien symbiote," Gwen said as Rhys started the car.

He paused with his hand on the key. "I'm sorry?"

Gwen looked at her hands. "I went to see her, just now, told Jack I needed some time, after." She glanced at him. "She'd resigned, and I didn't see what was going on, right under my nose."

Rhys reached out and took one of her hands in his. "Is she dangerous?"

Gwen shrugged. "Not really. But she's a security risk in Torchwood. The symbiote is sentient, so we can't vouch for it. So, yeah, she's terminated."

"You're not actually going to—" He glanced back at Duncan, even though he couldn't really tell what they were saying, it wasn't good to discuss snuffing people in front of one's children, ever. He nodded his head back in his best impression of the 'nudge nudge wink wink' gesture. "You know, terminate—"

"Fired, Rhys," Gwen said, sighing and resting her head on the back of the seat. "Fired. I can't even retcon her because the symbiote won't allow it. She gets a free pass." Gwen blinked at him. "I might be fired after this," she said, "when I have to explain that massive security breach to her Majesty's liaison."

"Bah, didn't Ianto secretly keep his robot girlfriend in the basement?" he asked as they pulled out of the gravel driveway and onto the road.

Gwen snorted. "When did you learn that?"

Rhys merged onto the road and waved to a driver who let him in. It was just good manners. Besides, a good mood was going to be his job right now; Gwen's was justifiably somber, and if he didn't try to distract her, it would be a mess. They didn't cover this part in the wedding vows, but he was fairly sure it might be in the 'to have and to hold' part. What did that mean anyway?

"I know lots of things," Rhys said, shrugging. "He told me once when we went out for beers. Was plenty pissed." He smiled at her. "Almost got me in a fight with a bunch of Arsenal fans."

Gwen shook her head. "Ianto was full of secrets…" she trailed off and stared out the window.

They drove in silence for a few minutes until Rhys was sure they were truly on their way out of town and going to have a nice time in the countryside. In the backseat, Duncan shook his industrial reinforced rattle and chewed on a taggie book. "Are they okay back there with two men down?"

Gwen smiled and closed her eyes, head lolling with the rhythm of the car. "Yeah, they're okay. I left Dee in charge."

"That has to twist Jack's knickers in a bad way," Rhys laughed, then frowned. "Somehow the mental image of Jack in knickers won't leave my brain."

Gwen pressed her temple to the glass. "Welcome to the club," she joked, but it didn’t sound like one.

***

Jack sat in the SUV for a few minutes, staring at the lights in the house, butter yellow window blocks that blurred and became undefinable when he squinted at them. Beyond the sheer curtains, a shape moved from one room to the other, probably making a late supper, packing boxes, maybe, who knew.

He stared at the display on the dashboard, the one that told the Hub where the SUV was at all times, and then he turned it off. The clock still read ten fifty-three, but then the clock, like few things in the universe, was always running, another lie.

It took another ten minutes to get out of the SUV and walk up street to the house, dip into the bare Grangetown patio, stare at the soffit and fascia of the upper gutter, try not to block the window so that he couldn’t be seen, and he put one hand on the painted door.

It had nothing to do with anything, he told himself. Nothing.

She answered the bell almost immediately, as if she had been passing by when it rang. His finger was still sliding away from the button when she leant in the doorway, one hand on the handle of the door, the other on the jamb opposite the hinges. Her eyes met his and she froze, but she didn't slam the door.

It took him three times to say it. Her fingers clenched the doorway, and her eyes never left his face, as if she was afraid what might happen there if she looked away.

"I want—I want you to do it," he said, not even sure if he said it out loud, or if when he said it, that it was audible.

That hand tensed on the door, waiting to raise away to protect her from some imaginary blow. "That's a change of heart," she said lightly, head tilted. "You know it's not really…"

He blinked once, as if that was all he needed to do, and it had better be enough, because he wasn't asking again.

Her hand relaxed, he could see, and she sucked in her lower lip, considering. "Are you sure?"

He pulled his hands from his pockets and used them to sort of shrug. He tried to hold her eyes, because he just couldn't say anything else. Anything else sounded horrible and piteous, and he wasn't that man. He wasn't here, in a way, he told himself. He just wanted some sort of resolution, and he obviously wasn't getting one alone. Didn't shrinks say that roleplay was helpful?

Her eyes darted over his face, looking for something, and she must have found it, because Jack watched as the brown of them began to frost over blue. It was the same slow melding of images and body parts as before, and he watched, forcing himself to understand that this was all show and not reality. Well, not the reality he wanted, and if he was going to get even a little comfort from illusion, he should pay with it by watching the reality of its creation.

Ianto held out his hand, and smiled. The T-shirt and sweatpants were tight around his form, but not completely out of the realm of possibility. The bare feet danced a little when he stepped back, curling his toes in the cold gust of air that rolled in from the open door. "Come on then," he said lightly. She'd studied all the sound and film she could get, and Jack wondered if it was enough.

Ianto reached out and grabbed one of his wrists and pulled a bit. "Jack, my heating bill is already sky high."

Jack stepped into the foyer of the house, one of those long and tall but not wide deals, and looked about. It wasn't cluttered or bare, but utilitarian, like the person living there didn't know what they liked, so they had a bunch of bland things and left the rest blank until they could figure it out. Ianto's flat had been much the same way, but mostly because he hadn't the time to fill it with things.

Ianto closed the door and flipped the deadbolt, then turned to him and crossed his arms. "It's well after hours, sir. Is this a social call?"

Jack raised a hand. "Wait—no, not that just—"

"All right." Ianto uncrossed his arms and reached out with one hand to catch Jack's upraised one. "It's okay."

***

I'll do this last one and I'll grow me some wine
Leave them troubled boys all behind
What you stole, I would have given freely
Code Red staring Code Red staring

--Tori Amos, 'Code Red'

END