Fic: Any Other Day: Wednesday (aka part 3b/8, team, NC-17)
Title: Any Other Day: Wednesday (aka 3b/8)
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Team, Rhys (Jack/Gwen, Gwen/Rhys, Jack/Ianto)
Ratings: NC-17 (in some parts)
Timeline: Post-Meat, Pre-Reset (assumes flashback knowledge from Fragments)
Summary: Hey, this one time? At Torchwood? Gwen and Jack switched bodies and everything went pear-shaped.
Author's Notes: Thanks to idyll, who caught four GLARING issues. Also? I love this fic, because I love the team, I say, THE TEAM. Thanks to 51stcenturyfox for the beta! Thanks also to Pornsultant Bob, who schooled me in the ways of cock, man-style. And I mean that practically-when you don't have one, you never stop to think about some of the day to day issues. Note: This was started back in May, when I wasn't nearly the TW freak that I am, and so I think it's more cracky than I had intended. It's funny. It's potboiler fic.
SPECIAL THANKS to laurab1 for the bitching fanart! Check that shit out!
This fic is a WIP, divided by days: Monday-Tuesday. It should have 8 parts, some longer than others, depending on what happens any given day. There you go.
PREVIOUSLY, on TORCHWOOD: Monday, Tuesday (A), Wednesday (A)
When they got back to the Hub, they found Ianto, Owen and Toshiko milling about the lounge area. Owen laughed as Tosh cursed and wound a string around something in her hand. Ianto was Walking The Dog with a yo-yo. A yo-yo that shot coloured sparks and hissed and whistled when it rotated on the end of its string.
Gwen felt herself laugh before the sound came out. "The Space Yo-yos again?" she asked.
Tosh threaded her finger through the loop at the end of the luminescent string. "I swear, I've got it this time," she said, then launched her yo-yo to the end of its string, spinning in place, sparks shooting from the spherical ball. It fizzled in a shower of red and blue and she cursed. Ianto snapped his yo-yo into his hand, smirked and proceeded to walk out onto the Hub grating, maneuvering the toy into an Around The World with a rainbow of colours.
Jack took the yo-yo from Tosh's hand and wound the string. "I thought we'd filed these in the Archives," he said disapprovingly.
"We did, but I think they might be useful." Ianto turned, spun out his yo-yo, and used his other hand's fingers to make a loop in the string and spin the globe around and through in a complicated series of gestures. The sparks that shot out from the yo-yo were vaguely hypnotic. Even Jack stopped to watch.
"That's fantastic," Owen said.
"It's called a Chain Reaction," Ianto said, watching the yo-yo with amusedly bright eyes. Gwen had to admit, the effect was stunning. "Thank you, internet tutorials."
"Ianto, you continue to have hidden depths," Jack mused.
Ianto's mouth quirked as the yo-yo zipped back into his hand. Smoke wafted past his face and he waved it away. "Misspent youth," he sighed.
"Right," Jack said, taking the yo-yo from Ianto and shoving the box under one arm. "I find it hard to believe that you'd call us back for this, as interesting as it is."
Owen put his feet up on the coffee table and his hands behind his head. "We've got two displaced people, two aliens possessed by dogs, three dead feral aliens who were probably dogs, and a kennel full of pups who could be aliens. And their Geelucks started a hell of a lot sooner than yours did."
Tosh tapped the side of her leg with her pen. "Exactly. Saturday should be the day that the Geelucks are up for Dylan, and Simran and everyone in that group. Two things could happen."
Jack poked at the yo-yos in the box. "They could all spontaneously switch, which would be extremely convenient."
And too good to be true. Gwen had learned that if something could go wrong with alien tech, it usually did. In their faces. "Or nothing could happen," she finished for him.
"Or only some of them could switch back," Ianto finished. "Though that would be troublesome and perplexing." He scowled at the box under Jack's arm. Sometimes he was like a four-year-old.
Owen cleared his throat. "In line with all of this switching back and forth," he said, waving a hand like a swimming fin. "Do you reckon that all the bodies have to be near for it to work?" Gwen felt her stomach drop as he continued. "I mean, say there's a proximity to the switching, and then there's a deadline, and then there's well, the fact that some of the bodies are, well, dead." He shrugged.
No one said anything for a moment, and than Jack turned to Ianto. "You haven't-"
Ianto shoved his hands in his pockets. "Nope. All three still on ice."
Jack sighed. "Oh good. I guess to be on the safe side, we should make sure that we get everyone in a room at the same time, right?"
Tosh turned towards the box, sitting on her desk, and pulled the tea cozy off. "I think I can manage to get some more information, but I might have to call Archie and hack into UNIT." She grinned. "That's always a good time."
Jack shook the box of space yo-yos, and a plume of sparks blossomed over its open lid. "And this? Are these part of your dastardly plan?" He looked at Ianto. "I warned you about these."
"They're shiny," Ianto said, snatching the box from under Jack's arm. "And they're harmless." He smiled wryly. "You just don't like them because you're rubbish at it."
Jack stared at the box before shrugging. "That's hard to deny."
Ianto shook the box, smiling when the shower of sparks turned magenta. "They're shiny, Jack. And you can see them in the dark. Just the kind of thing you might want when trying to track down a lumbering alien who is attracted to shiny things."
Jack smiled. "And if the aliens are inside a bunch of Yorkies?"
Ianto looked back down at the box and frowned. Gwen realised that he'd made a fatal error. He must have seen it too, because he shrugged. "The best game of fetch ever, then."
Tosh waved her equipment. "Or we could just use the scanner and trace the residual energy from the machine."
Ianto's mouth twitched. "Or we could do that." He shoved the box back at Jack but snagged a yo-yo and stuffed it into his pocket. "But I'm keeping this."
Jack walked to the stairs leading to his office. "Then you go and do that. Gwen, call DI Swanson and tell her that we're all settled here with the evidence and that we'll send it over in the morning."
Gwen frowned. "Evidence? We have evidence?" Jack didn't answer her, but waved a dismissive hand and he shut the door to his office behind him.
Tosh tossed the scanner to Ianto. "I'm allergic."
"I'll go with you," Owen said, and everyone turned to look at him. He shrugged. "What? I like dogs."
As they headed out the door, Gwen dropped her frame onto the sofa and put her head in her hands. Tosh perched on the edge next to her and smiled, her hands resting lightly on her knees.
"So," Tosh asked conspiratorially, eyes wide, "what's it like, you know, having-" She gestured to Gwen's pants.
Gwen rolled her eyes. "It's a miracle men get anything done."
"Jesus, Gwen!" Jack called as he jumped down the stairs and walked through the Hub. "Is your bladder the size of a walnut? I have to pee again!"
Gwen tipped her head back into the sofa and groaned.
Tosh sighed. "If I was a man, I'd fuck everything."
Gwen smiled. "I think this body already has."
***
Ianto dried his hands with a towel as he stood in the center of the Hub and stared off into space. Tosh had to wonder what he was thinking about. She followed his gaze to see if she could define the source of his musing, but his eyes were glued to the tiles of the wall, as if he were looking through them.
Owen had taken the SUV back over to the safe house and Simran, with the dogs. Well, Xarxian-dogs. Jack had agreed that they shouldn’t lock them in the cells, and Ianto had explained in a clipped tone over the comm that they were all rather dog-like, and that he was more than sure that Simran could manage to take care of them adequately, what with her being a veterinarian and all. He might have even dropped in a threat to book off ill for the rest of the week if Jack forced him to look after all the dogs and the dogs in the Xarxian bodies (Tosh secretly called them Xogs in her head; it was cute.)
He had also told them all that they were not going to call them Xogs, because that was just silly and demeaning.
Owen had picked up the eight (eight! Where were all the Xarxians, then? There were three out there in the loose!) of the dogs and was en-route to the safe house when Tosh made her breakthrough and jumped from her seat.
She sought out Jack and found him down in Owen's autopsy bay, opening and closing the drawers in search of something. He apparently had been looking for medical tape, but when he noticed her watching him, he jumped and pocketed the roll quickly. "What've you got? Tell me it's definitive and will solve all our problems."
"You are in luck," Tosh said as she leaned over the railing of the autopsy theatre. "The proximity circuit is there, but the deadline isn't a firm window. It's a deadline."
Jack came up the steps and threw an arm around her shoulder. Tosh leaned into it for a second. Jack was easier to see in Gwen than Gwen was to see in Jack. Did that even make sense? "What does that mean, then?"
She smiled. "That you don't have to worry about having everyone collected and shoved into Dylan's hospital room or wherever by Saturday." She pointed to the screen, on which her Q'Nog translation was running. It was difficult, because the sibilant underscores and the glottal stops didn't have an equivalent symbol on her keyboard and she was having to draw them in with the light pen when she wanted to work with them in the text. "I figure that once we track down the last three Xarxians running about, we can put them all together when it's more convenient."
Jack squeezed her shoulder. "Toshiko, you are a beautiful genius." To Gwen he added. "You are also a beautiful genius, but Toshiko deserves it more right now."
Gwen rolled her eyes. "How do we get those last three Xarxians?" she asked Tosh, ignoring Jack to lean against the edge of Tosh's desk. It wobbled with her weight and she righted herself and settled for crossing her arms across her chest.
Tosh looked at the CCTV feeds from Bute Park. "I've cross-referenced all the reports, plus the few sightings that I was able to get on screen, but it's over a ten mile radius, and the last report was Tuesday night, so I don't have any new datum." She shrugged. "We could go out looking for them, or wait until they make appearances and sweep the area."
Jack ran a hand over his face, and his lipstick smeared. "Yeah, okay, that's a little ridiculous." And when her face fell, he shook his head. "That's a lot of space to cover. What about that scanner we used at Dylan Smith's and at the kennel? Couldn't we use that?"
"My yo-yo idea is looking better and better," Ianto said from across the Hub. He'd retrieved his yo-yo and was busy trying to do something that was a combination of a slingshot and apparently, The Monkey.
Tosh frowned. "Those aren't addictive, are they?" The last thing they all needed was a team member addicted to another alien toy. Owen and the alien pogs had been quite enough for her.
Jack sighed and watched him with what looked like wistfulness. "Only if you're seven, apparently."
Gwen left their group to saunter back towards the autopsy theatre, but she was deep in thought. "If we could track them, we could just pick them all up right now and have done with it on Saturday. Like that." She snapped her fingers.
Tosh hated to burst her bubble. "Not exactly. The scanner would be useful if you were trying to detect them from a five-foot distance, maybe, but it doesn't have a range. It's meant for scanning bodies that are, well, already in front of you." She smiled; sometimes she liked being the beautiful genius. "I could rewire it," she offered. "You know, give it more power."
Jack nodded. "Excellent," he said, clapping his hands once and rubbing them together. He glanced at his watch, seemed surprised to see Gwen's smaller version on his wrist, and then shrugged. "Is this going to take you all night?"
Tosh shrugged. "Not exactly. I have to upload the data and then expand the code. Extrapolate the…." She drifted off when Jack's eyes glazed over. "It has to work overnight," she said feebly. "I have to unspool the code and rethread it for a wider radius." There, she'd got it out. She knew that sometimes the things she said didn't exactly go over Jack's head -he'd obviously forgotten things about alien tech that she couldn't even begin to understand-but he wasn't following her terminology. Maybe it was a language barrier. Was English even his first language?
Jack stuck his hands in his back pockets, a maneuver that made Gwen's chest stick out. It was a nice chest, Tosh thought. He winked at her and shook it. Behind him, Gwen's eyes narrowed.
"Tosh, make it so." Good god, had Ianto been showing him bad action sci-fi films again? What did they do in their free time? "Gwen, what was it you wanted to ask me earlier?"
Gwen pulled him by the arm, away from Tosh and closer to the medical bay. It wasn't far enough away that Tosh couldn't hear them if she typed exteremly quietly. Gwen sighed and leaned towards Jack. "The 'Jack Harkness Experience' has stalled," she said cryptically. "There are some…issues."
Tosh leaned back and watched them in the reflection of her monitor. So what? She was inexplicably interested in Jack and Gwen this week. She didn't have issues of her own, not at all.
Jack was facing her, so she could see his eyebrow quirk. "Oh really? Anything that might require a tutorial?"
Gwen smacked his arm, and he staggered. Tosh shook her head; Gwen had to stop cuffing people. "Strictly academically." She shoved her hands into her pockets and leaned against the railing. "We could get a curry and discuss it over dinner."
Jack smiled. "Ah. Strictly academically. Right. Tosh, is that data…extrapolating to the principle of the….the basic setting of the manipulator…?" Tosh snorted; Jack did that to her when he knew that there was no way he was going to be able to repeat what she had told him earlier. When he did it, it was charming. When Owen tried it, she usually threw things at him.
She fiddled with a few more keys and jacked the scanner into the USB port. A few timed sequences, and her screens flickered in yellow and green code, scrolling faster than she could actually see, but the glimpses that she could make out showed the right strings.
"It's all set," she said, turning. A glance at her own watch showed that it was seven thirty-eight.
Jack smiled at her. "Go home."
She blinked. What? "What?" Ianto came down from one of the upper levels and stood there with her as Gwen and Jack both smiled in ghostly mirror images, though Gwen had a bit of an apologetic air about her.
Jack shrugged. "Gwen and I can take care of anything that pops up, and we have some things to do, so-"
Ianto set his files down on the nearest surface. "What things?" he asked suspiciously. Not just another pretty face, Ianto Jones. Tosh was starting to get the picture pretty clearly.
Gwen held her hands out. "Not…that, Ianto. Just, body switching things that we both…" she glanced at Jack.
Jack shrugged. "…have to work out?" he finished, making it a question.
"Like a project?" Gwen added.
Jack pointed at her. "Like a project. Exactly." Then they both smiled. It was unnerving.
They sat down on the sofa simultaneously. Ianto frowned, and Tosh had to pity him. Having Jack in Gwen's body sitting there, grinning next to Jack's actual body, also grinning, it was like looking at two Jacks. One was quite enough, actually.
"We'll be fine," Gwen said. Jack leant over and laid his head on her shoulder, and then she tilted hers so that it rested on his. They looked like some terrifyingly conspiratorial Normal Rockwell painting. Not remotely comforting.
The thought about what they might have planned for the evening made Tosh tilt her own head. 'The Jack Harkness Experience', indeed. Was monogamy off them menu when you weren't in your own body? Was monogamy off the menu when the person you were sleeping with was, well, you?
She decided to save the question for later, when she'd had a glass of wine. Perhaps two.
"Yeah," Jack affirmed, blinking and waving his hand in a shooing motion. "Go on, scram. Scat. Flee for your lives."
END WEDNESDAY
On to Thursday
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Team, Rhys (Jack/Gwen, Gwen/Rhys, Jack/Ianto)
Ratings: NC-17 (in some parts)
Timeline: Post-Meat, Pre-Reset (assumes flashback knowledge from Fragments)
Summary: Hey, this one time? At Torchwood? Gwen and Jack switched bodies and everything went pear-shaped.
Author's Notes: Thanks to idyll, who caught four GLARING issues. Also? I love this fic, because I love the team, I say, THE TEAM. Thanks to 51stcenturyfox for the beta! Thanks also to Pornsultant Bob, who schooled me in the ways of cock, man-style. And I mean that practically-when you don't have one, you never stop to think about some of the day to day issues. Note: This was started back in May, when I wasn't nearly the TW freak that I am, and so I think it's more cracky than I had intended. It's funny. It's potboiler fic.
SPECIAL THANKS to laurab1 for the bitching fanart! Check that shit out!
This fic is a WIP, divided by days: Monday-Tuesday. It should have 8 parts, some longer than others, depending on what happens any given day. There you go.
PREVIOUSLY, on TORCHWOOD: Monday, Tuesday (A), Wednesday (A)
When they got back to the Hub, they found Ianto, Owen and Toshiko milling about the lounge area. Owen laughed as Tosh cursed and wound a string around something in her hand. Ianto was Walking The Dog with a yo-yo. A yo-yo that shot coloured sparks and hissed and whistled when it rotated on the end of its string.
Gwen felt herself laugh before the sound came out. "The Space Yo-yos again?" she asked.
Tosh threaded her finger through the loop at the end of the luminescent string. "I swear, I've got it this time," she said, then launched her yo-yo to the end of its string, spinning in place, sparks shooting from the spherical ball. It fizzled in a shower of red and blue and she cursed. Ianto snapped his yo-yo into his hand, smirked and proceeded to walk out onto the Hub grating, maneuvering the toy into an Around The World with a rainbow of colours.
Jack took the yo-yo from Tosh's hand and wound the string. "I thought we'd filed these in the Archives," he said disapprovingly.
"We did, but I think they might be useful." Ianto turned, spun out his yo-yo, and used his other hand's fingers to make a loop in the string and spin the globe around and through in a complicated series of gestures. The sparks that shot out from the yo-yo were vaguely hypnotic. Even Jack stopped to watch.
"That's fantastic," Owen said.
"It's called a Chain Reaction," Ianto said, watching the yo-yo with amusedly bright eyes. Gwen had to admit, the effect was stunning. "Thank you, internet tutorials."
"Ianto, you continue to have hidden depths," Jack mused.
Ianto's mouth quirked as the yo-yo zipped back into his hand. Smoke wafted past his face and he waved it away. "Misspent youth," he sighed.
"Right," Jack said, taking the yo-yo from Ianto and shoving the box under one arm. "I find it hard to believe that you'd call us back for this, as interesting as it is."
Owen put his feet up on the coffee table and his hands behind his head. "We've got two displaced people, two aliens possessed by dogs, three dead feral aliens who were probably dogs, and a kennel full of pups who could be aliens. And their Geelucks started a hell of a lot sooner than yours did."
Tosh tapped the side of her leg with her pen. "Exactly. Saturday should be the day that the Geelucks are up for Dylan, and Simran and everyone in that group. Two things could happen."
Jack poked at the yo-yos in the box. "They could all spontaneously switch, which would be extremely convenient."
And too good to be true. Gwen had learned that if something could go wrong with alien tech, it usually did. In their faces. "Or nothing could happen," she finished for him.
"Or only some of them could switch back," Ianto finished. "Though that would be troublesome and perplexing." He scowled at the box under Jack's arm. Sometimes he was like a four-year-old.
Owen cleared his throat. "In line with all of this switching back and forth," he said, waving a hand like a swimming fin. "Do you reckon that all the bodies have to be near for it to work?" Gwen felt her stomach drop as he continued. "I mean, say there's a proximity to the switching, and then there's a deadline, and then there's well, the fact that some of the bodies are, well, dead." He shrugged.
No one said anything for a moment, and than Jack turned to Ianto. "You haven't-"
Ianto shoved his hands in his pockets. "Nope. All three still on ice."
Jack sighed. "Oh good. I guess to be on the safe side, we should make sure that we get everyone in a room at the same time, right?"
Tosh turned towards the box, sitting on her desk, and pulled the tea cozy off. "I think I can manage to get some more information, but I might have to call Archie and hack into UNIT." She grinned. "That's always a good time."
Jack shook the box of space yo-yos, and a plume of sparks blossomed over its open lid. "And this? Are these part of your dastardly plan?" He looked at Ianto. "I warned you about these."
"They're shiny," Ianto said, snatching the box from under Jack's arm. "And they're harmless." He smiled wryly. "You just don't like them because you're rubbish at it."
Jack stared at the box before shrugging. "That's hard to deny."
Ianto shook the box, smiling when the shower of sparks turned magenta. "They're shiny, Jack. And you can see them in the dark. Just the kind of thing you might want when trying to track down a lumbering alien who is attracted to shiny things."
Jack smiled. "And if the aliens are inside a bunch of Yorkies?"
Ianto looked back down at the box and frowned. Gwen realised that he'd made a fatal error. He must have seen it too, because he shrugged. "The best game of fetch ever, then."
Tosh waved her equipment. "Or we could just use the scanner and trace the residual energy from the machine."
Ianto's mouth twitched. "Or we could do that." He shoved the box back at Jack but snagged a yo-yo and stuffed it into his pocket. "But I'm keeping this."
Jack walked to the stairs leading to his office. "Then you go and do that. Gwen, call DI Swanson and tell her that we're all settled here with the evidence and that we'll send it over in the morning."
Gwen frowned. "Evidence? We have evidence?" Jack didn't answer her, but waved a dismissive hand and he shut the door to his office behind him.
Tosh tossed the scanner to Ianto. "I'm allergic."
"I'll go with you," Owen said, and everyone turned to look at him. He shrugged. "What? I like dogs."
As they headed out the door, Gwen dropped her frame onto the sofa and put her head in her hands. Tosh perched on the edge next to her and smiled, her hands resting lightly on her knees.
"So," Tosh asked conspiratorially, eyes wide, "what's it like, you know, having-" She gestured to Gwen's pants.
Gwen rolled her eyes. "It's a miracle men get anything done."
"Jesus, Gwen!" Jack called as he jumped down the stairs and walked through the Hub. "Is your bladder the size of a walnut? I have to pee again!"
Gwen tipped her head back into the sofa and groaned.
Tosh sighed. "If I was a man, I'd fuck everything."
Gwen smiled. "I think this body already has."
***
Ianto dried his hands with a towel as he stood in the center of the Hub and stared off into space. Tosh had to wonder what he was thinking about. She followed his gaze to see if she could define the source of his musing, but his eyes were glued to the tiles of the wall, as if he were looking through them.
Owen had taken the SUV back over to the safe house and Simran, with the dogs. Well, Xarxian-dogs. Jack had agreed that they shouldn’t lock them in the cells, and Ianto had explained in a clipped tone over the comm that they were all rather dog-like, and that he was more than sure that Simran could manage to take care of them adequately, what with her being a veterinarian and all. He might have even dropped in a threat to book off ill for the rest of the week if Jack forced him to look after all the dogs and the dogs in the Xarxian bodies (Tosh secretly called them Xogs in her head; it was cute.)
He had also told them all that they were not going to call them Xogs, because that was just silly and demeaning.
Owen had picked up the eight (eight! Where were all the Xarxians, then? There were three out there in the loose!) of the dogs and was en-route to the safe house when Tosh made her breakthrough and jumped from her seat.
She sought out Jack and found him down in Owen's autopsy bay, opening and closing the drawers in search of something. He apparently had been looking for medical tape, but when he noticed her watching him, he jumped and pocketed the roll quickly. "What've you got? Tell me it's definitive and will solve all our problems."
"You are in luck," Tosh said as she leaned over the railing of the autopsy theatre. "The proximity circuit is there, but the deadline isn't a firm window. It's a deadline."
Jack came up the steps and threw an arm around her shoulder. Tosh leaned into it for a second. Jack was easier to see in Gwen than Gwen was to see in Jack. Did that even make sense? "What does that mean, then?"
She smiled. "That you don't have to worry about having everyone collected and shoved into Dylan's hospital room or wherever by Saturday." She pointed to the screen, on which her Q'Nog translation was running. It was difficult, because the sibilant underscores and the glottal stops didn't have an equivalent symbol on her keyboard and she was having to draw them in with the light pen when she wanted to work with them in the text. "I figure that once we track down the last three Xarxians running about, we can put them all together when it's more convenient."
Jack squeezed her shoulder. "Toshiko, you are a beautiful genius." To Gwen he added. "You are also a beautiful genius, but Toshiko deserves it more right now."
Gwen rolled her eyes. "How do we get those last three Xarxians?" she asked Tosh, ignoring Jack to lean against the edge of Tosh's desk. It wobbled with her weight and she righted herself and settled for crossing her arms across her chest.
Tosh looked at the CCTV feeds from Bute Park. "I've cross-referenced all the reports, plus the few sightings that I was able to get on screen, but it's over a ten mile radius, and the last report was Tuesday night, so I don't have any new datum." She shrugged. "We could go out looking for them, or wait until they make appearances and sweep the area."
Jack ran a hand over his face, and his lipstick smeared. "Yeah, okay, that's a little ridiculous." And when her face fell, he shook his head. "That's a lot of space to cover. What about that scanner we used at Dylan Smith's and at the kennel? Couldn't we use that?"
"My yo-yo idea is looking better and better," Ianto said from across the Hub. He'd retrieved his yo-yo and was busy trying to do something that was a combination of a slingshot and apparently, The Monkey.
Tosh frowned. "Those aren't addictive, are they?" The last thing they all needed was a team member addicted to another alien toy. Owen and the alien pogs had been quite enough for her.
Jack sighed and watched him with what looked like wistfulness. "Only if you're seven, apparently."
Gwen left their group to saunter back towards the autopsy theatre, but she was deep in thought. "If we could track them, we could just pick them all up right now and have done with it on Saturday. Like that." She snapped her fingers.
Tosh hated to burst her bubble. "Not exactly. The scanner would be useful if you were trying to detect them from a five-foot distance, maybe, but it doesn't have a range. It's meant for scanning bodies that are, well, already in front of you." She smiled; sometimes she liked being the beautiful genius. "I could rewire it," she offered. "You know, give it more power."
Jack nodded. "Excellent," he said, clapping his hands once and rubbing them together. He glanced at his watch, seemed surprised to see Gwen's smaller version on his wrist, and then shrugged. "Is this going to take you all night?"
Tosh shrugged. "Not exactly. I have to upload the data and then expand the code. Extrapolate the…." She drifted off when Jack's eyes glazed over. "It has to work overnight," she said feebly. "I have to unspool the code and rethread it for a wider radius." There, she'd got it out. She knew that sometimes the things she said didn't exactly go over Jack's head -he'd obviously forgotten things about alien tech that she couldn't even begin to understand-but he wasn't following her terminology. Maybe it was a language barrier. Was English even his first language?
Jack stuck his hands in his back pockets, a maneuver that made Gwen's chest stick out. It was a nice chest, Tosh thought. He winked at her and shook it. Behind him, Gwen's eyes narrowed.
"Tosh, make it so." Good god, had Ianto been showing him bad action sci-fi films again? What did they do in their free time? "Gwen, what was it you wanted to ask me earlier?"
Gwen pulled him by the arm, away from Tosh and closer to the medical bay. It wasn't far enough away that Tosh couldn't hear them if she typed exteremly quietly. Gwen sighed and leaned towards Jack. "The 'Jack Harkness Experience' has stalled," she said cryptically. "There are some…issues."
Tosh leaned back and watched them in the reflection of her monitor. So what? She was inexplicably interested in Jack and Gwen this week. She didn't have issues of her own, not at all.
Jack was facing her, so she could see his eyebrow quirk. "Oh really? Anything that might require a tutorial?"
Gwen smacked his arm, and he staggered. Tosh shook her head; Gwen had to stop cuffing people. "Strictly academically." She shoved her hands into her pockets and leaned against the railing. "We could get a curry and discuss it over dinner."
Jack smiled. "Ah. Strictly academically. Right. Tosh, is that data…extrapolating to the principle of the….the basic setting of the manipulator…?" Tosh snorted; Jack did that to her when he knew that there was no way he was going to be able to repeat what she had told him earlier. When he did it, it was charming. When Owen tried it, she usually threw things at him.
She fiddled with a few more keys and jacked the scanner into the USB port. A few timed sequences, and her screens flickered in yellow and green code, scrolling faster than she could actually see, but the glimpses that she could make out showed the right strings.
"It's all set," she said, turning. A glance at her own watch showed that it was seven thirty-eight.
Jack smiled at her. "Go home."
She blinked. What? "What?" Ianto came down from one of the upper levels and stood there with her as Gwen and Jack both smiled in ghostly mirror images, though Gwen had a bit of an apologetic air about her.
Jack shrugged. "Gwen and I can take care of anything that pops up, and we have some things to do, so-"
Ianto set his files down on the nearest surface. "What things?" he asked suspiciously. Not just another pretty face, Ianto Jones. Tosh was starting to get the picture pretty clearly.
Gwen held her hands out. "Not…that, Ianto. Just, body switching things that we both…" she glanced at Jack.
Jack shrugged. "…have to work out?" he finished, making it a question.
"Like a project?" Gwen added.
Jack pointed at her. "Like a project. Exactly." Then they both smiled. It was unnerving.
They sat down on the sofa simultaneously. Ianto frowned, and Tosh had to pity him. Having Jack in Gwen's body sitting there, grinning next to Jack's actual body, also grinning, it was like looking at two Jacks. One was quite enough, actually.
"We'll be fine," Gwen said. Jack leant over and laid his head on her shoulder, and then she tilted hers so that it rested on his. They looked like some terrifyingly conspiratorial Normal Rockwell painting. Not remotely comforting.
The thought about what they might have planned for the evening made Tosh tilt her own head. 'The Jack Harkness Experience', indeed. Was monogamy off them menu when you weren't in your own body? Was monogamy off the menu when the person you were sleeping with was, well, you?
She decided to save the question for later, when she'd had a glass of wine. Perhaps two.
"Yeah," Jack affirmed, blinking and waving his hand in a shooing motion. "Go on, scram. Scat. Flee for your lives."
END WEDNESDAY
On to Thursday