Fic: Any Other Day: Thursday (aka part 4b/8, team, NC-17)
Title: Any Other Day: Thursday (aka 4b/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), Thursday (A)
Owen found Ianto in one of the lower levels, away from the cells where they'd put up the Xarxians. He'd come down to offer them a bit of kibble, actually, since he figured, hey, they're dogs, albeit in large, potentially deadly bodies. Owen liked dogs. Never had one -was never allowed-but he had always liked to visit his friends who had dogs. There was something simple about a furry beast that would chase a stick about for you.
Owen decided that if he ever had a dog, he'd walk it in the park as much as possible, and then teach it to get beer from the fridge for him.
Ianto had taken the Xarxians out of their cells and led them to a huge underground room whose original purpose was…come to think of it, what the hell was this for? It was a concrete room much like a gymnasium, with high ceilings and cement floors, but pretty much nothing else. The two Xarxians were crouched on all fours, sometimes they stood up experimentally, but they seemed to prefer all fours, or at least a hunched-over lope.
Owen stood next to Ianto, who watched the aliens explore the room hesitantly, their big heads lowered as they tried to sniff the ground.
"I've been going through the list that we took from the shelter," Ianto said, glancing up from the paper on his clipboard. "I think I've their names straight. Observe."
Owen stood back and watched Ianto whistle. The two Xarxians turned, their eyes alight with anticipation, and Ianto held up a celery stick. "June! Come here, June!"
One of the Xarxians started forward, lumbering, loping steps, and if Owen hadn't known that they had consciousness in them that quite enjoyed a bowl of Bil-Jac, he might have been worried. Instead, 'June' clambered on all fours, not at all looking like something that one should have been comfortable seeing coming at them, and took the celery stick from Ianto's hand, pulling it into its maw with a practised tongue and chewing, unmistakably making a face.
Ianto smoothed his fingers along June's ear and sighed. "I know, celery, but you have to respect the body, love. I dipped it in beef flavouring."
Owen glanced back at the other one. "That's cool. Let me try." He pulled a celery stalk from Ianto's Tupperware box and waved it about. "Hey-what's its name?"
Ianto's mouth twitched. "Piddles."
Owen shook his head. "Oh you, you are a funny one." He waved the celery. "Oi! Piddles!"
They amused themselves for the next fifteen minutes, running the two creatures though a few paces around the underground area, throwing celery sticks for them to fetch. Owen had felt a little sorry about the whole thing; it seemed undignified, but then he figured that if he was transplanted into a dog, and what kept his human form happy during the whole thing was fetching celery and licking his privates, well then, he'd just have to live with the indignity, as long as he didn't have to watch it.
"Truth, though," he said finally, wiping his hands with a wet towel; they smelled like bullion. "What kind of a name is Piddles? Oh. Oh."
Ianto pursed his lips and cocked his head. "I'm quite glad I have a hose down here."
Suddenly, Owen realised one of the reasons he didn't actually want to have a dog.
"What's that, then?" Owen said, pointing to the leather-looking wrist strap on Piddles's left arm. It looked a little like Jack's wrist strap.
Ianto tucked his clipboard under his arm and reached down to touch the strap. Piddles lifted her hand automatically as if to shake his. Owen's mouth quirked. He would not smile at the cuteness. Not with Jones around. "It looks like one of those universal translators we got in a few years ago. But all of ours were broken."
Owen crouched down next to him. "Like, as in it translates what they're saying?"
Ianto shrugged. "That would be my best guess." He lifted the flap curiously and they examined the blinking lights of the interface. "It looks as if it's in working order." He glanced at Owen. "Fancy a guess about what dogs are trying to say?"
Owen sat back on his haunches and watched Ianto press the button. There was a beep, and then the hiss of static. But nothing. Disappointing. Ianto frowned.
"Wait a tick," Owen said, rolling forward on the balls of his feet. He opened Ianto's Tupperware container, fished out a stick of beefy celery and had to hold it out of reach, which wasn't easy, since Piddles had the height and girth of a rugby flanker. "Piddles, speak."
Piddles was quite eager to please, and let out a succession of growls and gruff horking noises that probably came as close to what it could do with an extra voice box or three, but that really didn't matter, because the wrist strap flared to life, and he an Ianto were inundated with, HUNGRYHUNGRYHUNGRYLICKLICK HUNGRYNUMNUMNUMHUNGRYLICKLICKNUMNUMNUMNUMNUM before Owen thrust the celery in its mouth and Ianto grabbed the translator, jabbing the buttons haphazardly until he deactivated it. Piddles, startled by the noise, jerked her paw/arm away and bolted to the other side of the room, celery hanging from her mouth. Ianto toppled over and landed on his arse.
They stared at each other. "Well," Owen said. "Pretty much what we've always known, then."
Ianto's eyes were wide. "Yeah. Pretty much."
They were on their way back up to the upper levels when Ianto's comm beeped in his pocket and he pulled it out, fitting it into his ear. "Yes?" There was a shouting voice that Owen couldn't make out, but Ianto nodded and glanced at him, curling a finger in a beckoning gesture. He led the way to the cell area, talking into the headset to who Owen had realised was Tosh. "Right, hold him, it, the thing. We'll be right there, and -"
There was a very audible shout through the comm, and Ianto broke out in a dead run, Owen hotly on his heels.
They found Tosh trapped by a Xarxian, her small body tucked in a corner, her stun gun brandished, but unable to get a good shot. Ianto barreled into it, and knocked it off balance, and Owen moved in front of her to make sure that she was out of the way of the Xarxian's long arms and claws. She was shaking, but if Owen had to guess it was from rage. Tosh wasn't a shrinking flower, he had to give her that. She dove past him for the alien and zapped it in the back as it wrestled with Ianto, who had one of its arms in a grip. The alien shrugged off the stun voltage, and it yelped a little, jerking back towards the open cell door. Owen tugged on the Xarxian's other arm, and between the three of them they inched it towards the door. Ianto rapped it on the back of the head with his clipboard and they made minutely more progress.
It was no wonder then that Gwen and Jack had had to put down the other three, if they had been as bad as this one. Compared to June and Piddles (Jesus, Piddles.), it was a monster.
"Where are Jack and Gwen?" Owen grunted. This fucker was heavy. And thrashing. He and Ianto pulled at the upper arms and Tosh pushed from behind.
Tosh didn't answer right away, too busy avoiding the claws that swiped backwards; Owen adjusted his grip on his arm so that it wouldn't catch Tosh across the gut. "Faking a call to the constabulary." She pushed harder and the Xarxian-dog broke free of Ianto's grip and used its free hand to brace against the door, not unlike a cat trying to avoid the carrier.
"Oh bugger this," Ianto murmured, and lined up behind the thing, hunching and ducking his head and then body slamming the Xarxian squarely in the back. They both fell into the cell, but Ianto bounced out again, on the balls of his feet like a prizefighter.
"Does it answer to anything?" Owen asked as Tosh slammed the cell shut. The door banged with the weight of the alien. Tosh's hand was red with angry scratches and she was probably going to need stitches and antibiotics for her leg.
"Yes," she said dully. "Complete bastard."
Ianto checked the clipboard. "That's not on here. We should call him Oscar."
***
"You know what I hate?"
"I'm going to assume it's still not a mystery," Ianto said over the comm. He and Owen were in the middle of Bute Park, somewhat chattering into comms, somewhat sweeping the area with scanners and Mag-lites. It was rather a wasted effort, since they couldn't see anything even with the lights; it was pouring down rain.
"Oh ha ha," Jack grumbled. "No, these stupid elastic bands. "Gwen, Your hair is in my face, and I can't do this for shit-"
"Just let me-"
"Ow!"
"Sorry."
None of them were particularly happy to be there, and the rain, which had been coming down all day since sunrise, actually, had slowed everything down. The Xarxian dog was likely to hole up somewhere drier in the face of such weather, and so there hadn't been many sightings of it. Despite that, Jack and Gwen had agreed that they should look one last time, based on a short squawk on the police band about a shiny bright creature in Bute Park. Ianto could feel his shoes sinking into the mud as he walked, and he knew that the others would make fun of him forgetting wellies. Not that they had wellies, either, just that they would expect him to have thought of it.
There was one Xarxian out there on the loose, only one, and it was proving to be elusive. Like the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot. Ianto was fairly sure that even if the poor thing were out in this weather, they would never ever find it, because Cardiff wasn't the largest city, but she was pretty big, and the thing could be anywhere.
It was probably halfway to Caerphilly by now. Or stuck in the skip behind Positano's. Ianto shivered. It was hard to focus when one was wet, cold and hungry. He was starting to understand why wet cats on the windowsill looked so amazingly pathetic.
Beside him, Owen whistled ineffectively. "Here boy. Here you go. Ianto has a nice stalk of shitty celery for you."
Ianto sighed. If he had celery, he'd be eating it. He knew that Tosh was holed up in front of the monitors of the Hub, warm, dry, and probably working her way through a carton of leftover Chinese. He vaguely remembered the days when he was the one always left at the Hub. Jack and Gwen, he could tell from listening to their grumbling over the comm, weren't faring any better out in Cooper's Field. Jack had apparently discovered that his shoes weren't made for trudging through Welsh mud and Gwen had, before they hit the expanse of green, clocked herself in the head a few times with very low tree branches.
After they had secured Oscar in the cells and shoved some food into its (his) compartment, Ianto and Owen had "put away" Piddles and June for the evening, and Owen had stitched Tosh up and declared that she should probably have the rabies series (it didn't really occur here, but who knew what Xarxians had?), hence her current location. Ianto considered that going through the rabies series was probably a small price to pay for not having to go out in Cardiff monsoon season. On the other hand, they were abdominal shots, and that was never fun. He figured that it said a great deal about how unhappy he currently was that he would rather be in physical pain than in Bute Park at this exact moment.
Jack had been mum about the whole dead alien thing, though he had said something about looking around the Archives, which usually meant that he was hiding something. In such circumstances, Ianto considered as he tried to ignore the fact that water had just seeped underneath the join of his toes to his foot (possibly the worst place to feel water whilst wearing a shoe), he usually let Jack go down and make a mess of things, and then in the clean up process followed Jack's haphazard research trail in a manner that revealed everything Jack was looking for and found. It was how he learnt most things before the rest of the team. Well, that and he actually read the things in the Archives, which was more than he could say for the rest of his colleagues.
That was fine with him. It was his lot in life: coffee and reading. And occasionally stun-gunning things in the head, which he was also not a little disturbed to find didn't bother him.
Tosh sighed into the comm. "I take it you haven't seen anything?"
Owen kicked a rock and it pinged off a tree trunk and into a giant puddle off to the side. "Nothing but a lot of mud."
"Sweet Jesus," Gwen grumbled, "we're never going to find it. It's late and dark, and who would be out in this weather? Aside from us."
Ianto had to agree. This was futile, and his suit was soaked, and Owen was inching towards the park fence, as if he was going to bolt any second for home. Ianto's mind flashed on a picture of a scabby-kneed eight-year-old Owen, running full tilt down a grubby street, and the image was too familiar. He didn't want to sympathise with Owen too much, especially over cooked-up possible memories.
"Yeah," Jack said over the comm, and Ianto could tell that he was frustrated. Frustrated Jack was always difficult to deal with. "This blows. Let's pick it up tomorrow."
Ianto rolled his eyes and wiggled his toes in his soaked shoes. Finally.
***
Owen and Tosh had streaked out around nine-thirty, Owen looking like a drowned rat and Tosh looking a little green around the gills. Ianto was sifting through some paperwork on his workstation, a towel wrapped around his shoulders, and Jack was nowhere in sight. Gwen finished buttoning the blue shirt (from a seemingly endless array of blue shirts, each one folded professionally and wrapped in plastic), and worked the braces up her shoulders, even though the belt was already in place.
Ianto heard her footsteps and glanced up, smiling before he could help himself. She smiled back and waved a little, and something in that made him redden and look away.
Poor Ianto. She wondered if this was how Jack would feel around Rhys, or how Rhys would feel around Jack. Probably, in a way. Her hands ran down the rails as she thunked down the stairs from her office and to his workstation.
"Food arrived whilst you were downstairs," Ianto said, waving a bag. "The rest is in the conference room. samosa?"
Gwen realised that she hadn't eaten since lunchtime, an oversight that surprised her. Jack's body wasn't really hungry, actually, hadn't ever really expressed hunger in the way that her body would be if she hadn't eaten in eight hours. She dug her hand in the bag and fished out a hand-sized pocket, the dough still warm to her touch. Ianto bit into one, set it on a serviette, and wiped the tips of his fingers on the edge before picking up his pencil again and jotting more notes on the papers spread out in front of him.
"What are you working on?" Investigative nibbles revealed that the inside of her pastry was filled with potatoes and peas.
Ianto glanced at her, opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it. "Small side project. And a new side project," he added hastily, pulling yet more sheets of paper over the ones he'd been jotting on. "Plans to house the Xarxian dogs, should the body transfer not actually, uhm, work." He sighed. "Just in case. We can't adopt them out, like they're normal dogs."
Gwen perched on the stool opposite Ianto and set both her hands on the tabletop. "Yeah, I would imagine." She stared at him, then, wondering where Jack was.
"He's changing and getting some of your things together," Ianto answered, and then, sotto voce, he leant towards her and commented, "If it's all right with you, I'll take him to mine. To sleep." Ianto nodded at the sofa. "That thing is horribly uncomfortable." There must have been something in her eyes that gave him pause, because he stuttered. "To sleep, Gwen." His eyes sought out Jack's office, the light on and the only illumination at that level of the Hub. "He deserves a chance to actually sleep."
Gwen hadn't thought about that angle, actually, she considered as she bit her way around the samosa.
Ianto watched her mouth for a second before shaking himself minutely. "Are you? Sleeping at all, I mean."
Gwen shrugged. "Sort of. I passed out last night, but before that, not so much." She sighed, and set the samosa down, wiping her hands on her trousers. "He was right when he said he doesn't sleep. It's like…drifting. Like falling asleep in front of the telly."
Ianto bit his lower lip. Something was obviously playing about in his head, and she was pretty sure that she knew what it was. "What's it…what's it like? Being Jack?"
Right. Gwen smiled then. "I'm not really Jack, you know. Or maybe I am." She frowned. She was right back where she started. "What makes me Gwen? What makes him Jack?"
Ianto shrugged. "Poor phrasing, then. I'm sorry."
Hand waving on both their parts, a form of 'sorry, sorry'. Gwen listened to the ticking of the clock, the hum of Tosh's equipment, the tinkle of water on water on water in the Hub Tub. She wondered if she was hearing differently. She wished that she could record it the way she heard it now and then compare it once she was in her own body, but the filter of Jack's ear would be gone, and she wouldn't have a frame of reference anymore.
"You know, if you really want to know, I bet we could get the two of you in a room with that box after all of this is over-"
"Oh god no," Ianto said hastily. "Well…" His eyes off-centred when he stared at one of the screensavers at Owen's nearby station, scrolling text that read something about official Torchwood policy. Gwen was fairly sure that Owen would have never put that up, so she guessed that Ianto had hacked it. Again.
Ianto shuddered. Wherever his daydream had gone, it had not been to sexy happy times. In his defense, hers hadn't gone there either, much to Jack's dismay, she was sure.
"My ears were burning, and I thought I'd hurt myself," Jack called, pounding down the steps, small bag in his hand. "And then I realised that someone was talking about me."
Gwen drummed her fingers on the tabletop. "Has that line ever not been cheesy?" she asked. Ianto stabbed at his papers with his pencil, obviously trying to reinvest himself in the job at hand. The tips of his ears were red, and she wondered what he had been imagining. Maybe it hadn't been sexy, but it had been something.
She didn't want to think about the other thing, the other Jack thing, because she didn't have any information about that and she didn't want to ever have any.
Jack tossed the bag on the floor and kicked it under the table and out of the way. He leaned on the table perpendicular to them both, is arms crossed and elbows holding his weight. "When something works, you should stick with it."
Ianto set the pencil down and groped for a pen. "Yes, because that's working for you."
Jack glanced down at the papers on the table, obviously nonplussed. "What's going on here?"
"Housing plans for the Xogs-" she stopped when Ianto glared at her. "The Xarxian dogs," she amended. "And I'm still worried about our find from this morning."
Jack slid some of the photos from the morning's autopsy out of the folder and stared at them, brows knitted. His eyes travelled the lines of the cuts, and his jaw ground.
"You have to fess up now," Gwen said, ruffling Jack's sodden hair. He narrowed his eyes at her but didn't say anything. "What do you know about those cuts?"
Jack flipped the photo over and stared at the Xarxian's chest. "I know I've seen them before, and not on this planet. And I know that whatever made them did it on purpose." He stared at her then, his eyes going from her face to the samosa in her hand then to her face and then to the samosa. "There have been so many bodies, you see, I just-are there any mo-"
Ianto lifted the bag and waved it about without looking up from his list, and Jack dug into it gratefully. Gwen rolled her eyes. By the end of this week she'd be lucky if Jack didn't put a half-stone on her. On the other hand, she's probably just run it off in the following month. And those samosas were rather good. Trust Tosh and her fried food detector to have found them.
"Like I was saying," Jack said around the half-samosa in his mouth. Ianto snorted softly; Gwen could see his shoulders bobbing with amused and probably resigned laughter. "I can't put my finger on it. But I will." Jack gestured with the samosa and a pea flew out of it, plinked off Ianto's plans and bounced down onto the floor, rolling into the Hub Tub.
Gwen raised her eyebrows.
Jack smiled. "You're a messy eater, Gwen."
She was about to answer, when Ianto straightened, shuffled his papers into a pile and swept them into a desk drawer. "Right. Make the rest of that take away."
***
One of the things that Ianto had simply not thought of in this whole exchange was the fact that Jack didn't sleep. Now granted, Jack liked to say that he didn't sleep, and it was, for the most part, true-he had this sort of sleep thing, but it wasn't what Ianto would call restful, but it worked for him, and that was one of the main reasons that Jack never stayed over at Ianto's on the rare occasions they ended up there.
Now that Jack had been sleeping the last three nights, and sleeping well, sleeping the sleep of the hedonistic, one might have said, Ianto decided that it was only right and proper that he sleep in a real bed, and not one designed and handed out by the RAF fifty years prior. They'd said goodnight to Gwen, who was still prowling about the Hub much like her body's normal inhabitant, and set out for Ianto's, with, chastely and sincerely, sleep the only thing on their minds.
What Ianto hadn't counted on was that Jack (and he should have seen it coming) had nightmares. And if Jack was a talker for all activities that could take place in a bed, the REM cycle was no exception.
Jack thrashed in bed, and Ianto caught the arm before it hit him in the face. As he touched Jack, his current form came roaring awake, a litany of garbled nonsense on his lips.
"-with the wheat and she ate Squeaky Fromme!" His hair fell into his face as he all but hyperventilated, hands shaking and grasping in the air. Ianto sat up slowly, trying to ascertain if Jack was awake or in some sort of fugue state.
"Hey," he murmured, deciding that a hand on the back was pretty innocuous. He rubbed it over Jack's shoulder blades. That's what his mum used to do for him, and later, a few times after mum had gone, Rhiannon. "Hey, you were having a nightmare."
Jack flopped back onto the bed, trapping Ianto's hand. "Oh man, I must have eaten something bad." He glanced at Ianto. "What did we have for dinner?"
Ianto racked his brain, even though he knew this was Jack's way of not talking about the screaming and flailing. "Indian, I think."
"Does no one brown bag it anymore?" Jack grumbled, rubbing his face with his hand. Once again he'd forgotten to wash Gwen's make up off, and the eyeliner he'd painstakingly put on this morning in the car (Ianto had hit as many bumps as possible in retribution for being shut out of the Hub the night before) was smeared in the corners of his eyes like some Welsh-Egyptian statue. It was also all over Ianto's white pillowcase.
Jack flung the covers back, which was a feat since most of them were tangled about his legs. He stood and stretched, looking a little ridiculous in the sweatpants that he'd claimed once again, despite his bag full of Gwen clothes. He hadn't wanted to wear a shirt to bed, but Ianto had put his foot down and so there he was, in those pants that were too big and a skin tight undershirt of Gwen's that was too small, it seemed, a refugee from a nineties hip-hop dance video.
"What are you doing?" Ianto groused, sitting up and turning on the light. They both blinked, and Ianto wondered why squinting like this always made people look like they were angry. Was Jack angry? His lips moved and his eyes darted about the room.
He ran a hand through his hair and sighed in frustration when it snagged halfway through. "I'm going to sleep on the sofa." He sighed. "If I can sleep."
Ianto glanced pointedly at the queen size bed, one of the only luxuries he had bothered with after making full salary at Torchwood. "I thought you were doing well," he said carefully. "I can move to the sofa if you wa-"
"You should sleep in your own bed," Jack said firmly. "Really," he said waving a hand to cut off Ianto. "I know what you were trying to do, and it was nice. It was great, but, look, it doesn't matter where I sleep, and I don't want to get used to it anyway, because in a few days I'll be back at the Hub. Anyway," he finished, waving a hand dismissively and padding out into the hallway. "I'm fine."
Ianto ran his hands through his hair, flopped them in his lap. Stared at the moon coming in the window. He heard the fridge open and the unmistakable sound of the Brita pitcher hitting everything on the shelf as Jack clumsily extracted it. The padding of bare feet on the hardwood as he made his way to the television, flipped it on, and settled on something too low for Ianto to discern.
The decision was made then. Ianto tossed the covers back and touched his feet to the floor. He opened his sock drawer and dug around in the back, extracting what he wanted, and then stripped the blankets from the bed, dragging them into the living room.
Jack was curled in the corner of the sofa, cupping a glass of water in his hands, looking pathetic and sad and overwhelmingly not like himself or Gwen, not even when he turned those big soulful eyes on Ianto and frowned.
"I was saving this for a special occasion." Ianto tossed the Barbarella DVD at him. "I think this merits a special occasion," he said, trying to make his voice as dry as possible.
Jack glanced from him to the DVD and then back to Ianto when he flopped down on the other end of the sofa, billowed the blankets over himself, and flipped one end down and made a 'come on, then' gesture. "It's cold, Jack. Get a move on."
END THURSDAY
On to Friday
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), Thursday (A)
Owen found Ianto in one of the lower levels, away from the cells where they'd put up the Xarxians. He'd come down to offer them a bit of kibble, actually, since he figured, hey, they're dogs, albeit in large, potentially deadly bodies. Owen liked dogs. Never had one -was never allowed-but he had always liked to visit his friends who had dogs. There was something simple about a furry beast that would chase a stick about for you.
Owen decided that if he ever had a dog, he'd walk it in the park as much as possible, and then teach it to get beer from the fridge for him.
Ianto had taken the Xarxians out of their cells and led them to a huge underground room whose original purpose was…come to think of it, what the hell was this for? It was a concrete room much like a gymnasium, with high ceilings and cement floors, but pretty much nothing else. The two Xarxians were crouched on all fours, sometimes they stood up experimentally, but they seemed to prefer all fours, or at least a hunched-over lope.
Owen stood next to Ianto, who watched the aliens explore the room hesitantly, their big heads lowered as they tried to sniff the ground.
"I've been going through the list that we took from the shelter," Ianto said, glancing up from the paper on his clipboard. "I think I've their names straight. Observe."
Owen stood back and watched Ianto whistle. The two Xarxians turned, their eyes alight with anticipation, and Ianto held up a celery stick. "June! Come here, June!"
One of the Xarxians started forward, lumbering, loping steps, and if Owen hadn't known that they had consciousness in them that quite enjoyed a bowl of Bil-Jac, he might have been worried. Instead, 'June' clambered on all fours, not at all looking like something that one should have been comfortable seeing coming at them, and took the celery stick from Ianto's hand, pulling it into its maw with a practised tongue and chewing, unmistakably making a face.
Ianto smoothed his fingers along June's ear and sighed. "I know, celery, but you have to respect the body, love. I dipped it in beef flavouring."
Owen glanced back at the other one. "That's cool. Let me try." He pulled a celery stalk from Ianto's Tupperware box and waved it about. "Hey-what's its name?"
Ianto's mouth twitched. "Piddles."
Owen shook his head. "Oh you, you are a funny one." He waved the celery. "Oi! Piddles!"
They amused themselves for the next fifteen minutes, running the two creatures though a few paces around the underground area, throwing celery sticks for them to fetch. Owen had felt a little sorry about the whole thing; it seemed undignified, but then he figured that if he was transplanted into a dog, and what kept his human form happy during the whole thing was fetching celery and licking his privates, well then, he'd just have to live with the indignity, as long as he didn't have to watch it.
"Truth, though," he said finally, wiping his hands with a wet towel; they smelled like bullion. "What kind of a name is Piddles? Oh. Oh."
Ianto pursed his lips and cocked his head. "I'm quite glad I have a hose down here."
Suddenly, Owen realised one of the reasons he didn't actually want to have a dog.
"What's that, then?" Owen said, pointing to the leather-looking wrist strap on Piddles's left arm. It looked a little like Jack's wrist strap.
Ianto tucked his clipboard under his arm and reached down to touch the strap. Piddles lifted her hand automatically as if to shake his. Owen's mouth quirked. He would not smile at the cuteness. Not with Jones around. "It looks like one of those universal translators we got in a few years ago. But all of ours were broken."
Owen crouched down next to him. "Like, as in it translates what they're saying?"
Ianto shrugged. "That would be my best guess." He lifted the flap curiously and they examined the blinking lights of the interface. "It looks as if it's in working order." He glanced at Owen. "Fancy a guess about what dogs are trying to say?"
Owen sat back on his haunches and watched Ianto press the button. There was a beep, and then the hiss of static. But nothing. Disappointing. Ianto frowned.
"Wait a tick," Owen said, rolling forward on the balls of his feet. He opened Ianto's Tupperware container, fished out a stick of beefy celery and had to hold it out of reach, which wasn't easy, since Piddles had the height and girth of a rugby flanker. "Piddles, speak."
Piddles was quite eager to please, and let out a succession of growls and gruff horking noises that probably came as close to what it could do with an extra voice box or three, but that really didn't matter, because the wrist strap flared to life, and he an Ianto were inundated with, HUNGRYHUNGRYHUNGRYLICKLICK HUNGRYNUMNUMNUMHUNGRYLICKLICKNUMNUMNUMNUMNUM before Owen thrust the celery in its mouth and Ianto grabbed the translator, jabbing the buttons haphazardly until he deactivated it. Piddles, startled by the noise, jerked her paw/arm away and bolted to the other side of the room, celery hanging from her mouth. Ianto toppled over and landed on his arse.
They stared at each other. "Well," Owen said. "Pretty much what we've always known, then."
Ianto's eyes were wide. "Yeah. Pretty much."
They were on their way back up to the upper levels when Ianto's comm beeped in his pocket and he pulled it out, fitting it into his ear. "Yes?" There was a shouting voice that Owen couldn't make out, but Ianto nodded and glanced at him, curling a finger in a beckoning gesture. He led the way to the cell area, talking into the headset to who Owen had realised was Tosh. "Right, hold him, it, the thing. We'll be right there, and -"
There was a very audible shout through the comm, and Ianto broke out in a dead run, Owen hotly on his heels.
They found Tosh trapped by a Xarxian, her small body tucked in a corner, her stun gun brandished, but unable to get a good shot. Ianto barreled into it, and knocked it off balance, and Owen moved in front of her to make sure that she was out of the way of the Xarxian's long arms and claws. She was shaking, but if Owen had to guess it was from rage. Tosh wasn't a shrinking flower, he had to give her that. She dove past him for the alien and zapped it in the back as it wrestled with Ianto, who had one of its arms in a grip. The alien shrugged off the stun voltage, and it yelped a little, jerking back towards the open cell door. Owen tugged on the Xarxian's other arm, and between the three of them they inched it towards the door. Ianto rapped it on the back of the head with his clipboard and they made minutely more progress.
It was no wonder then that Gwen and Jack had had to put down the other three, if they had been as bad as this one. Compared to June and Piddles (Jesus, Piddles.), it was a monster.
"Where are Jack and Gwen?" Owen grunted. This fucker was heavy. And thrashing. He and Ianto pulled at the upper arms and Tosh pushed from behind.
Tosh didn't answer right away, too busy avoiding the claws that swiped backwards; Owen adjusted his grip on his arm so that it wouldn't catch Tosh across the gut. "Faking a call to the constabulary." She pushed harder and the Xarxian-dog broke free of Ianto's grip and used its free hand to brace against the door, not unlike a cat trying to avoid the carrier.
"Oh bugger this," Ianto murmured, and lined up behind the thing, hunching and ducking his head and then body slamming the Xarxian squarely in the back. They both fell into the cell, but Ianto bounced out again, on the balls of his feet like a prizefighter.
"Does it answer to anything?" Owen asked as Tosh slammed the cell shut. The door banged with the weight of the alien. Tosh's hand was red with angry scratches and she was probably going to need stitches and antibiotics for her leg.
"Yes," she said dully. "Complete bastard."
Ianto checked the clipboard. "That's not on here. We should call him Oscar."
***
"You know what I hate?"
"I'm going to assume it's still not a mystery," Ianto said over the comm. He and Owen were in the middle of Bute Park, somewhat chattering into comms, somewhat sweeping the area with scanners and Mag-lites. It was rather a wasted effort, since they couldn't see anything even with the lights; it was pouring down rain.
"Oh ha ha," Jack grumbled. "No, these stupid elastic bands. "Gwen, Your hair is in my face, and I can't do this for shit-"
"Just let me-"
"Ow!"
"Sorry."
None of them were particularly happy to be there, and the rain, which had been coming down all day since sunrise, actually, had slowed everything down. The Xarxian dog was likely to hole up somewhere drier in the face of such weather, and so there hadn't been many sightings of it. Despite that, Jack and Gwen had agreed that they should look one last time, based on a short squawk on the police band about a shiny bright creature in Bute Park. Ianto could feel his shoes sinking into the mud as he walked, and he knew that the others would make fun of him forgetting wellies. Not that they had wellies, either, just that they would expect him to have thought of it.
There was one Xarxian out there on the loose, only one, and it was proving to be elusive. Like the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot. Ianto was fairly sure that even if the poor thing were out in this weather, they would never ever find it, because Cardiff wasn't the largest city, but she was pretty big, and the thing could be anywhere.
It was probably halfway to Caerphilly by now. Or stuck in the skip behind Positano's. Ianto shivered. It was hard to focus when one was wet, cold and hungry. He was starting to understand why wet cats on the windowsill looked so amazingly pathetic.
Beside him, Owen whistled ineffectively. "Here boy. Here you go. Ianto has a nice stalk of shitty celery for you."
Ianto sighed. If he had celery, he'd be eating it. He knew that Tosh was holed up in front of the monitors of the Hub, warm, dry, and probably working her way through a carton of leftover Chinese. He vaguely remembered the days when he was the one always left at the Hub. Jack and Gwen, he could tell from listening to their grumbling over the comm, weren't faring any better out in Cooper's Field. Jack had apparently discovered that his shoes weren't made for trudging through Welsh mud and Gwen had, before they hit the expanse of green, clocked herself in the head a few times with very low tree branches.
After they had secured Oscar in the cells and shoved some food into its (his) compartment, Ianto and Owen had "put away" Piddles and June for the evening, and Owen had stitched Tosh up and declared that she should probably have the rabies series (it didn't really occur here, but who knew what Xarxians had?), hence her current location. Ianto considered that going through the rabies series was probably a small price to pay for not having to go out in Cardiff monsoon season. On the other hand, they were abdominal shots, and that was never fun. He figured that it said a great deal about how unhappy he currently was that he would rather be in physical pain than in Bute Park at this exact moment.
Jack had been mum about the whole dead alien thing, though he had said something about looking around the Archives, which usually meant that he was hiding something. In such circumstances, Ianto considered as he tried to ignore the fact that water had just seeped underneath the join of his toes to his foot (possibly the worst place to feel water whilst wearing a shoe), he usually let Jack go down and make a mess of things, and then in the clean up process followed Jack's haphazard research trail in a manner that revealed everything Jack was looking for and found. It was how he learnt most things before the rest of the team. Well, that and he actually read the things in the Archives, which was more than he could say for the rest of his colleagues.
That was fine with him. It was his lot in life: coffee and reading. And occasionally stun-gunning things in the head, which he was also not a little disturbed to find didn't bother him.
Tosh sighed into the comm. "I take it you haven't seen anything?"
Owen kicked a rock and it pinged off a tree trunk and into a giant puddle off to the side. "Nothing but a lot of mud."
"Sweet Jesus," Gwen grumbled, "we're never going to find it. It's late and dark, and who would be out in this weather? Aside from us."
Ianto had to agree. This was futile, and his suit was soaked, and Owen was inching towards the park fence, as if he was going to bolt any second for home. Ianto's mind flashed on a picture of a scabby-kneed eight-year-old Owen, running full tilt down a grubby street, and the image was too familiar. He didn't want to sympathise with Owen too much, especially over cooked-up possible memories.
"Yeah," Jack said over the comm, and Ianto could tell that he was frustrated. Frustrated Jack was always difficult to deal with. "This blows. Let's pick it up tomorrow."
Ianto rolled his eyes and wiggled his toes in his soaked shoes. Finally.
***
Owen and Tosh had streaked out around nine-thirty, Owen looking like a drowned rat and Tosh looking a little green around the gills. Ianto was sifting through some paperwork on his workstation, a towel wrapped around his shoulders, and Jack was nowhere in sight. Gwen finished buttoning the blue shirt (from a seemingly endless array of blue shirts, each one folded professionally and wrapped in plastic), and worked the braces up her shoulders, even though the belt was already in place.
Ianto heard her footsteps and glanced up, smiling before he could help himself. She smiled back and waved a little, and something in that made him redden and look away.
Poor Ianto. She wondered if this was how Jack would feel around Rhys, or how Rhys would feel around Jack. Probably, in a way. Her hands ran down the rails as she thunked down the stairs from her office and to his workstation.
"Food arrived whilst you were downstairs," Ianto said, waving a bag. "The rest is in the conference room. samosa?"
Gwen realised that she hadn't eaten since lunchtime, an oversight that surprised her. Jack's body wasn't really hungry, actually, hadn't ever really expressed hunger in the way that her body would be if she hadn't eaten in eight hours. She dug her hand in the bag and fished out a hand-sized pocket, the dough still warm to her touch. Ianto bit into one, set it on a serviette, and wiped the tips of his fingers on the edge before picking up his pencil again and jotting more notes on the papers spread out in front of him.
"What are you working on?" Investigative nibbles revealed that the inside of her pastry was filled with potatoes and peas.
Ianto glanced at her, opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it. "Small side project. And a new side project," he added hastily, pulling yet more sheets of paper over the ones he'd been jotting on. "Plans to house the Xarxian dogs, should the body transfer not actually, uhm, work." He sighed. "Just in case. We can't adopt them out, like they're normal dogs."
Gwen perched on the stool opposite Ianto and set both her hands on the tabletop. "Yeah, I would imagine." She stared at him, then, wondering where Jack was.
"He's changing and getting some of your things together," Ianto answered, and then, sotto voce, he leant towards her and commented, "If it's all right with you, I'll take him to mine. To sleep." Ianto nodded at the sofa. "That thing is horribly uncomfortable." There must have been something in her eyes that gave him pause, because he stuttered. "To sleep, Gwen." His eyes sought out Jack's office, the light on and the only illumination at that level of the Hub. "He deserves a chance to actually sleep."
Gwen hadn't thought about that angle, actually, she considered as she bit her way around the samosa.
Ianto watched her mouth for a second before shaking himself minutely. "Are you? Sleeping at all, I mean."
Gwen shrugged. "Sort of. I passed out last night, but before that, not so much." She sighed, and set the samosa down, wiping her hands on her trousers. "He was right when he said he doesn't sleep. It's like…drifting. Like falling asleep in front of the telly."
Ianto bit his lower lip. Something was obviously playing about in his head, and she was pretty sure that she knew what it was. "What's it…what's it like? Being Jack?"
Right. Gwen smiled then. "I'm not really Jack, you know. Or maybe I am." She frowned. She was right back where she started. "What makes me Gwen? What makes him Jack?"
Ianto shrugged. "Poor phrasing, then. I'm sorry."
Hand waving on both their parts, a form of 'sorry, sorry'. Gwen listened to the ticking of the clock, the hum of Tosh's equipment, the tinkle of water on water on water in the Hub Tub. She wondered if she was hearing differently. She wished that she could record it the way she heard it now and then compare it once she was in her own body, but the filter of Jack's ear would be gone, and she wouldn't have a frame of reference anymore.
"You know, if you really want to know, I bet we could get the two of you in a room with that box after all of this is over-"
"Oh god no," Ianto said hastily. "Well…" His eyes off-centred when he stared at one of the screensavers at Owen's nearby station, scrolling text that read something about official Torchwood policy. Gwen was fairly sure that Owen would have never put that up, so she guessed that Ianto had hacked it. Again.
Ianto shuddered. Wherever his daydream had gone, it had not been to sexy happy times. In his defense, hers hadn't gone there either, much to Jack's dismay, she was sure.
"My ears were burning, and I thought I'd hurt myself," Jack called, pounding down the steps, small bag in his hand. "And then I realised that someone was talking about me."
Gwen drummed her fingers on the tabletop. "Has that line ever not been cheesy?" she asked. Ianto stabbed at his papers with his pencil, obviously trying to reinvest himself in the job at hand. The tips of his ears were red, and she wondered what he had been imagining. Maybe it hadn't been sexy, but it had been something.
She didn't want to think about the other thing, the other Jack thing, because she didn't have any information about that and she didn't want to ever have any.
Jack tossed the bag on the floor and kicked it under the table and out of the way. He leaned on the table perpendicular to them both, is arms crossed and elbows holding his weight. "When something works, you should stick with it."
Ianto set the pencil down and groped for a pen. "Yes, because that's working for you."
Jack glanced down at the papers on the table, obviously nonplussed. "What's going on here?"
"Housing plans for the Xogs-" she stopped when Ianto glared at her. "The Xarxian dogs," she amended. "And I'm still worried about our find from this morning."
Jack slid some of the photos from the morning's autopsy out of the folder and stared at them, brows knitted. His eyes travelled the lines of the cuts, and his jaw ground.
"You have to fess up now," Gwen said, ruffling Jack's sodden hair. He narrowed his eyes at her but didn't say anything. "What do you know about those cuts?"
Jack flipped the photo over and stared at the Xarxian's chest. "I know I've seen them before, and not on this planet. And I know that whatever made them did it on purpose." He stared at her then, his eyes going from her face to the samosa in her hand then to her face and then to the samosa. "There have been so many bodies, you see, I just-are there any mo-"
Ianto lifted the bag and waved it about without looking up from his list, and Jack dug into it gratefully. Gwen rolled her eyes. By the end of this week she'd be lucky if Jack didn't put a half-stone on her. On the other hand, she's probably just run it off in the following month. And those samosas were rather good. Trust Tosh and her fried food detector to have found them.
"Like I was saying," Jack said around the half-samosa in his mouth. Ianto snorted softly; Gwen could see his shoulders bobbing with amused and probably resigned laughter. "I can't put my finger on it. But I will." Jack gestured with the samosa and a pea flew out of it, plinked off Ianto's plans and bounced down onto the floor, rolling into the Hub Tub.
Gwen raised her eyebrows.
Jack smiled. "You're a messy eater, Gwen."
She was about to answer, when Ianto straightened, shuffled his papers into a pile and swept them into a desk drawer. "Right. Make the rest of that take away."
***
One of the things that Ianto had simply not thought of in this whole exchange was the fact that Jack didn't sleep. Now granted, Jack liked to say that he didn't sleep, and it was, for the most part, true-he had this sort of sleep thing, but it wasn't what Ianto would call restful, but it worked for him, and that was one of the main reasons that Jack never stayed over at Ianto's on the rare occasions they ended up there.
Now that Jack had been sleeping the last three nights, and sleeping well, sleeping the sleep of the hedonistic, one might have said, Ianto decided that it was only right and proper that he sleep in a real bed, and not one designed and handed out by the RAF fifty years prior. They'd said goodnight to Gwen, who was still prowling about the Hub much like her body's normal inhabitant, and set out for Ianto's, with, chastely and sincerely, sleep the only thing on their minds.
What Ianto hadn't counted on was that Jack (and he should have seen it coming) had nightmares. And if Jack was a talker for all activities that could take place in a bed, the REM cycle was no exception.
Jack thrashed in bed, and Ianto caught the arm before it hit him in the face. As he touched Jack, his current form came roaring awake, a litany of garbled nonsense on his lips.
"-with the wheat and she ate Squeaky Fromme!" His hair fell into his face as he all but hyperventilated, hands shaking and grasping in the air. Ianto sat up slowly, trying to ascertain if Jack was awake or in some sort of fugue state.
"Hey," he murmured, deciding that a hand on the back was pretty innocuous. He rubbed it over Jack's shoulder blades. That's what his mum used to do for him, and later, a few times after mum had gone, Rhiannon. "Hey, you were having a nightmare."
Jack flopped back onto the bed, trapping Ianto's hand. "Oh man, I must have eaten something bad." He glanced at Ianto. "What did we have for dinner?"
Ianto racked his brain, even though he knew this was Jack's way of not talking about the screaming and flailing. "Indian, I think."
"Does no one brown bag it anymore?" Jack grumbled, rubbing his face with his hand. Once again he'd forgotten to wash Gwen's make up off, and the eyeliner he'd painstakingly put on this morning in the car (Ianto had hit as many bumps as possible in retribution for being shut out of the Hub the night before) was smeared in the corners of his eyes like some Welsh-Egyptian statue. It was also all over Ianto's white pillowcase.
Jack flung the covers back, which was a feat since most of them were tangled about his legs. He stood and stretched, looking a little ridiculous in the sweatpants that he'd claimed once again, despite his bag full of Gwen clothes. He hadn't wanted to wear a shirt to bed, but Ianto had put his foot down and so there he was, in those pants that were too big and a skin tight undershirt of Gwen's that was too small, it seemed, a refugee from a nineties hip-hop dance video.
"What are you doing?" Ianto groused, sitting up and turning on the light. They both blinked, and Ianto wondered why squinting like this always made people look like they were angry. Was Jack angry? His lips moved and his eyes darted about the room.
He ran a hand through his hair and sighed in frustration when it snagged halfway through. "I'm going to sleep on the sofa." He sighed. "If I can sleep."
Ianto glanced pointedly at the queen size bed, one of the only luxuries he had bothered with after making full salary at Torchwood. "I thought you were doing well," he said carefully. "I can move to the sofa if you wa-"
"You should sleep in your own bed," Jack said firmly. "Really," he said waving a hand to cut off Ianto. "I know what you were trying to do, and it was nice. It was great, but, look, it doesn't matter where I sleep, and I don't want to get used to it anyway, because in a few days I'll be back at the Hub. Anyway," he finished, waving a hand dismissively and padding out into the hallway. "I'm fine."
Ianto ran his hands through his hair, flopped them in his lap. Stared at the moon coming in the window. He heard the fridge open and the unmistakable sound of the Brita pitcher hitting everything on the shelf as Jack clumsily extracted it. The padding of bare feet on the hardwood as he made his way to the television, flipped it on, and settled on something too low for Ianto to discern.
The decision was made then. Ianto tossed the covers back and touched his feet to the floor. He opened his sock drawer and dug around in the back, extracting what he wanted, and then stripped the blankets from the bed, dragging them into the living room.
Jack was curled in the corner of the sofa, cupping a glass of water in his hands, looking pathetic and sad and overwhelmingly not like himself or Gwen, not even when he turned those big soulful eyes on Ianto and frowned.
"I was saving this for a special occasion." Ianto tossed the Barbarella DVD at him. "I think this merits a special occasion," he said, trying to make his voice as dry as possible.
Jack glanced from him to the DVD and then back to Ianto when he flopped down on the other end of the sofa, billowed the blankets over himself, and flipped one end down and made a 'come on, then' gesture. "It's cold, Jack. Get a move on."
END THURSDAY
On to Friday