Fic: Any Other Day: Friday (aka part 5a/8, team, NC-17)
Title: Any Other Day: Friday (aka 5a/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: I love this fic, because I love the team, I say, THE TEAM. Thanks to 51stcenturyfox for the beta! 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)
FRIDAY
If you're in a war, instead of throwing a hand grenade at the enemy, throw one of those small pumpkins. Maybe it'll make everyone think how stupid war is, and while they are thinking, you can throw a real grenade at them.
-----Jack Handey
Jack flipped the buff folder shut and tossed it on an ever-growing pile of identical folders. He was making a right mess of Ianto's clever organising system, a system that Ianto had tried to explain once, but Jack hadn't listened. As far as he could see, Ianto's system consisted of 'alphabetical order'. He was fairly sure that if he said that, he'd find himself sleeping alone for weeks and weeks to come.
He slammed the drawer in front of him shut and cursed when he caught one of Gwen's freakishly long nails in the edge. Okay they weren't freakish, not like Nostrovite freakish, but they were longer than his normally were, and he'd already managed to draw blood on himself by scratching too hard, and now Gwen's body had some nice arse scratches. He really hoped they healed somewhat before Monday, or he'd never hear the end of it. In private. She'd give him the moon-eyes. And she was really good at the moon-eyes.
There was something very bothersome about the Xarxian with the stomach cuts lying upstairs, and bothersome things were, Jack had learnt over the long years, not to be ignored. Much like strange rashes and that bizarre noise the car made when you cut the engine. Hence the little excavation down in the Archives, planned for a time when Ianto wouldn't hover . Ianto was doing the morning weevil cages, and then he'd be making coffee, and then he'd sort the post, and then he'd say, 'Where's Jack?' and it'd take at least another thirty minutes to find him, so Jack figured he had about another hour to toss files about and then clean them all up before-
"What are you doing?" His voice startled the shit out of him, and the massive and barely contained file labelled 'Raxicoricofallapatorius' flipped through his fingers and went up in the air like a deck of cards in the middle of a game of fifty-two pick up. His arm flailed and he slammed it on the metal cabinet to his left, scraping the length of it along the open drawer he'd neglected to close.
Gwen caught him before he stumbled further, mostly because his boot heel failed to get traction on the five-inch stack of files he was using as a stepstool and he fell backwards. He leant back against what he knew was Gwen, but at this moment smelled like he used to smell.
He paused for a second. He missed that smell. Gwen always smelt like strawberries, and he tried to honour that, but well, he missed English Leather.
Now wait, that was Ianto who smelt like English Leather. He missed it anyway, for obvious reasons.
"What are you doing down here" Gwen asked. "If Ianto sees this, you're mincemeat."
Jack pulled away and regained his balance, then stepped from the stack of files and pulled his top down, a gesture that people always seemed to do to cover up the fact that they were flustered. "Why do people always say that? Is it the mince part? Or the meat part? Why not, 'If Ianto sees this, you're fondue'? That would be just as bad."
Gwen shoved her hands in her pockets and leant back against a filing cabinet. "I don't think it matters what you say," she told him, her mouth smirking, "when he sees this you are unequivocally in the doghouse."
Jack grinned and shuffled a few files and stacked them neatly on top. Gwen had a point. The least he could do was stack all the files rather than leave them lying about on the floor. "Why do they say that? Is it something about dogs in general or-"
"You're stalling." Gwen bent down and picked up a wad of loose papers and arranged them so that they were all in the same direction. "Raxicoricofallapatorius? Do we have a Slitheen problem?"
Jack paused and thought about it. No, they didn't bother with ritual disembowelment. "No, I don't think so." He sighed. "I don't know what our problem is." He sighed again, and the pages in front of him ruffled.
Gwen set the stack of papers on top of the cabinet and regarded him with a critical eye. "Doesn't that hurt?" she asked, and Jack followed her eyes to his arm, where the stitches Gwen'd got on Monday night were open and slightly bleeding. Red dripped down the length of his arm down onto one of the papers still on the floor, a hand sketch of a Slitheen in its true form.
"Yeah," he admitted, because it suddenly did hurt, and he was aware that he'd done this himself, and more importantly, not to himself. Not really. He glanced at Gwen to see if she was upset, but she just looked concerned. Was that his concerned face? It looked a lot like his hungry face.
Gwen sighed. "Well, you should get that cleaned or stitched or at least get a plaster," she told him, her mouth drawn in a frown. He followed her up the stairs and to the first landing when she stopped and turned to look at him. "Is this something bad? I mean, of course it's bad," she reasoned aloud, eyes distant in thought. "But I mean, this is some sort of an alien threat to another alien, like a…territory war or something?"
Lord, he hadn't even thought of that.
"I don't think so," he replied, starting up the stair and leaving her to follow. "But we should start planning ways to narrow this whole mess down. Is everyone here?"
"Ianto and Tosh went out to get the last Xarxian," Gwen said from behind him. "I have a nice arse."
Jack grinned over his shoulder. "Thanks. You work out." That earned him a swat, and he laughed, jogging up the last few stairs to the atrium.
Gwen barked a laugh herself, and they entered the atrium level of the Hub in general good spirits. Jack sauntered to the upper level of autopsy bay and held his arm out when Owen glanced up at them. "I require your medical technique, Mister Harper."
Owen rolled his eyes. "I already lost the bet that you'd be in here with an injury less than twenty-four hours after this whole thing started, so this doesn't help me much." He slammed the binder in his hand shut and set it on the table, waving his fingers. "Come on, then, let me impress you with my tender ministrations."
Jack watched him slip on a pair of gloves as he jaunted down the stairs, and it occurred to him that they had all thought he'd be more foolhardy than he actually was. Or maybe. "Really? You all think I'm that clumsy?"
There was the sound of clashing metal and crinkling plastic as Owen dug about in his drawers for gauze and antibiotics, a few loose steri strips and butterfly clips. Jack didn't want to tell him that he could do this himself, because his arm was rather throbbing, and when he held it out and Owen settled it on the table between them he looked up at him with a raised eyebrow. "Your boyfriend bet that you'd do this about three days ago. This is infected." He pressed on the wound where it was still stitched and yellow pus oozed out of the first open gap in the wound.
Gwen made a tsking noise. "What did I tell you on day one?"
Jack rolled his eyes. "I am not incapable of taking care of myself just because of that…other…thing," he said, trailing off because that was it exactly.
Owen doused Jack's arm with hydrogen peroxide and dabbed at it with cotton wool. "See the thing is, Jack, you have a rather devil-may-care about your body sometimes." He binned the cotton and dried the arm with gauze. "I admit from a psychological and medical standpoint, I was interested to see how you would handle being in a body that was a hundred percent normal."
"Hey," Gwen said, leaning on the chain above them. "You make that sound bad, 'normal'."
Owen glanced up at her. "Oh you know what I mean. But if it makes you feel better, you have a lovely set of-"
Gwen dropped a paperback book from Tosh's workstation on his head.
"Oi! I was going to say eyes! Jesus!"
Gwen rounded the theatre to come down the steps, crossing her arms and leaning against the wall behind her. Jack studied her. It was him, slightly stropped. If he'd worn that face, it would have been for different reasons. Like. Uhm, if UNIT had pissed him off, or John had waltzed back in, or Mickey Smith had set something important on fire. Yeah, that's what that face was for.
"You weren't," Jack whispered, when Owen turned back towards him with an unpeeled steri strip in his hands.
Owen made cupping gestures in front of his chest, out of Gwen's eyesight and mouthed the word, 'knockers'. Ah. Owen: making Jack look like the preferable male specimen since forever, even when Jack currently resided in the body with the kno-er, breasts.
"In the interests of earning the paycheque that I use to buy my skin rags, as you put it yesterday," Owen said as he pressed the steri strip down on the arm. Jack was surprised at how little it hurt, actually. Owen pinched the skin and pulled and yet. He wondered if Owen had slipped him a mickey. "I took the liberty of checking our inventory from the dead bodies, and we don't have anything remotely interesting to anyone, unless you like cheap silverware," Owen said as he finished the bandage. "And the live, Xogs-" he whispered that, even though Ianto wasn't about to correct him. "Their storage pouches are empty. That leaves the one Tosh and Ianto are fetching hither," he paused, patting Jack's arm. Or something we already have."
Jack stared at the bandage. "Why am I not comforted?"
Owen glanced up from the sink, distracted. "Oh sorry," he muttered. "I failed the comfort section of med school."
Jack poked at his arm, and the lancing pain that greeted him made him jerk. Huh.
"You do realise that they might have found what they were looking for in the one they killed, right?" Owen asked, shaking the excess water from his hands before looking about for a towel. "This could just be over." He gave up on locating a towel and wiped his hands on his thighs. Sanitary. "You know, tomorrow."
Jack shrugged noncommittally. It was true. This would probably be all over tomorrow Well, except for him and Gwen, but after tomorrow, they'd be distracted cleaning up after "yesterday" and before they knew it, it would be Monday night and he could pee standing up again (He'd tried this morning in the shower. No go on that front.).
Gwen pushed off from the wall and walked towards him to inspect the dressing on his/her arm. "In the meantime it can't hurt to poke around, right? See if those mysterious cuts are something to fret over?" She raised her eyebrows; wow, he had a lot of facial expressions.
"You can do that extremely boring thing. I'm about to make a trip over to the safehouse, to ease the tedium of my life," Owen said as brightly as he ever got, which was rather like a half-lit fluorescent shooting sparks from the socket. "Care to join me?"
Jack tapped the bandage gingerly. "Nope. We have work." He stabbed a finger at Gwen. "Call Storr at UNIT and sweet talk him into letting us have a submarine." He tilted his head and stared at the swirls on Owen's screensaver down here in the autopsy bay. Was that...was that a vagina? Did Ianto know about this one? Did he even care enough to tell him?
"That's busywork," Gwen murmured, and then looked at him. "I think it'd be cracker to have a submarine, though."
Jack grinned. "Go forth and succeed where I have failed, Grasshopper."
God help him, Jack observed in horror, Gwen skipped back to the stairs and up to his office. Mental note: never, ever skip when you are back in your own body. Sweet god. Unmanning.
"Real reason's that you wanna see the dogs, right?" he said over his shoulder, eyes still glued to Gwen's certainly deliberate sashay into his office.
Owen threw his labcoat onto the table. "Duh."
***
Owen had thrown the emergency brake out of habit, but he was glad he had, because he hadn't even cut the engine when he was distracted by something in the corner of his eye and he'd taken his foot off the brake without thinking. The car lurched forward a half-foot and then stopped short of bumping into the rear of some monster Hummer that Owen was pretty sure was illegal to own in the UK.
By the time he turned his head back to whatever he'd spied, it was gone, and he thought that maybe he was experiencing floaters in his contacts. These contacts were disposable. When was the last time he'd changed them? That he couldn't remember was a bad sign, and he should know better. At least, he consoled himself, he wasn't an ophthalmologist.
Owen liked to think that he had an eagle eye in the sense that he wasn't a completely unobservant moron. Sure, it was hard to tell when a woman had changed her hair, and he was not only supposed to notice, but say something glowing about it even if it looked like two birds mating on her head, but he often did notice things beyond his own personal hygiene and the footie on the screen at the bar.
Things like the shadows that moved across the carpark when he left his car and walked towards the safehouse building. Floaters be damned. There was something out there. He stopped and the shadow stopped for a second. Could be a mugger. Could be a drunk, though it was pretty early in the morning for that. Well, unless this was a leftover from the night before, desperately looking for a taxi and a bottle of paracetemol. Owen had been that way himself a time or two.
The lift in the carpark opened as soon as he pressed the button; not odd, since the building had barely any tenants. It was a clever ploy on Torchwood's part, since it now owned the building under a dummy corporation. Owen backed into the lift, one hand in his pocket, the other on his hip so that he could slide it back to draw the SIG from his inner trouser holster if he needed it.
The doors closed leisurely enough to allow him a glimpse of something tall and possibly not human sliping out from behind one of the few cars in the lot, the one that passed for a small lorry in another life. It could have been any number of things still, but something about the movement made him nervous. He'd been with Torchwood long enough to know that little dance his heart was doing was something he should listen to.
Owen heard the dogs before he even got off the lift, got to the door, barking like mad, which was odd since he hadn't heard them make a sound since they'd brought them here. Owen sensed the dominoes of suspicion lining up in his brain, making a pattern. He knocked on the door instead of using his key, and when he waved into the peephole, someone flipped the deadbolts on the other side. Simran cracked the door, and he heard her yell at one of the Xogs (Ianto wasn't here and wasn't in his brain) and it seemed she had to push them back from the door with her feet before she could get it open enough for him to slip in.
All of the things were agitated, barking, turning in circles. Three of them were lined at the sliding glass door to the balcony like rabid sentries, and the rest paced about the apartment, darting in and out of rooms, rapid-fire barking. Owen was glad that there weren't any tenants within three floors of the penthouse, else they'd be batty by now.
"What's going on?" he asked, trying not to scream, but instead raising his hands in a 'WTF' gesture to illustrate his point.
Simran threw her hands up. "I don't know!" she said loudly to be heard over the barking from eight throats of varying sizes. "They started about fifteen minutes ago and I haven't been able to quiet them!"
"Where Dylan?" he asked Simran, who rolled her eyes and pointed at the hallway.
Owen had brought the man (woman) to the safe house the night before after signing her (him) out of custody, and Dylan had pretty much gone to one of the bedrooms, slammed the door like a distraught teen and sulked for the forty-five minutes Owen had stuck around, eating some dumpling things that Simran had made and which ran laps around the take away samosas he'd planned on getting on his way home. He'd checked that the windows hadn't been the opening kind (They had assured and reassured Dylan that he was getting his body back the next day, but sometimes brains snapped, and he didn't want to have to explain to Simran that her real body was street pizza because he'd been too shortsighted to check the windows.
"Well, get him out here, and stay in the main room," he tried not to shout. It was difficult not to want to shout.
Owen pulled out his mobile to call the Hub, but the barking didn't cease with the appearance of his magical phone device, and it wasn't likely, so he raised a hand to Simran and gestured to the door. "Lock this behind me and don't open it unless I say the magic word."
Simran shrugged, but her face was slack with relief. "What's the magic word?"
Owen said out the first word his mind generated, like a lottery machine spitting out random numbered balls: "Splott."
Simran raised her brows, mouth working in amusement. Glad that someone was amused. "I thought it was pronounced 'Splott'."
Owen opened the door to slip outside. "Only if you're an estate agent," he muttered absent-mindedly. He closed the door behind him and scrolled to the number of the Hub, but before he could press 'dial', the lift dinged and started its descent. It went all the way to the carpark level and stayed there before starting up again. It could be anything. It could be some little old lady on the fifth floor with her groceries. Some sexy college co-ed on her way back from the gym, all sweaty and-
"Harper, you know better." Whenever he thought it was something sexy, it was a surefire bet that it was something that had more teeth in its head than he had bones in his body. The lift glided up and up, three, four, five-
This floor only had one flat, so if it came up here they-
He hit the failsafe built into the lift panel and the car stopped where it was, somewhere between the fifth and sixth floor, if the display was anything to go by. Another second revealed that the doors weren't about to bang open, and there was no sound like something was ripping through the lift ceiling to use its three-inch talons to climb the shaft wall up to his level, so Owen decided that he wasn't going to take the pause for granted, and he was a big believer in being prepared.
He pressed 'dial'.
***
Tosh looked at Ianto mournfully. "I'm getting rather good at this," she commented, glancing at the Xarxian in the back of the SUV.
Ianto smiled at her. "You have a way about you, Tosh."
The Xarxian licked the back window where her hand was pressed against it. Tosh pulled her hand away quickly. "I really am allergic," she offered feebly.
Ianto was glad that this was the last of them. And this was almost the last day of caring for them. Sometime tomorrow, all the dogs and Xarxians and Dylan Smith and Simran Parikh would be back where they belonged (except for those four dead ones; that actually bothered him more than he cared to admit aloud, and he hadn't actually been responsible for any of their deaths directly.). There would be no more bouillon celery, no more using the firehose, and no more strange echoing horking noises while he tried to clean the cages. He was a little disappointed about the firehose-that was quite fun, actually. Not that Ianto ever harboured a secret childhood dream of being a fireman since being…oh, five or so.
In any case, caring for possibly four Xarxians inside the bodies of normal dogs was something he was much more inclined to be happy about, despite the lack of need for a firehose and the continuing need to stock rawhide bones.
Rawhide had disappointingly few other uses, no matter what Jack said, and smelt much like beef.
The metal access door clanged open and Ianto and Tosh both swiveled their heads to watch Jack and Gwen, a.k.a. Gwen and Jack, respectively, depending on how you looked at it, stride out of the Hub and into the carpark. Ianto opened the back door of the SUV and held in the Xarxian, whose name he was fairly sure was "Sweetie Pie" but which he would never say aloud for all the tea in China.
"Owen called. Something outside in the carpark, looking alien," Jack called across the secure area, loud enough that anyone outside the secure area could hear everything. He'd finally given up Gwen's muleheels, and the trusty red converse plodded noiselessly on the cement.
The opposite of that were Jack's boots, which should have been just as silent, but Gwen's giant clod-hopping steps caused a dull thump on the pavement. "We're going over to check it out," she told them both, trying not to look Ianto in the eye.
Ianto didn't have the heart to tell her that he was over it. After the night before, falling asleep on the sofa with Jack drooling on his T-shirt, his breasts pressed up to Ianto's arm, Barbarella getting it on with Pygar on the screen in front of them. Something about waking up in the dark hours of the morning and watching that dark head snuffle into his chest had made the transfer complete, which was sad, because it was the old adage-just when he'd got used to one it would switch back.
As he told Jack over breakfast this morning, though, he was still not having sex with him under the current circumstances. Though that had been hard to turn down when Jack had knocked on the door and offered a hand job. Also strange? Pulling back the shower curtain to see Gwen peeing. Probably best if they just kept their routines separate till Tuesday.
But now, it was easier to see Jack inside the body he inhabited. He'd changed some of the movements successfully, and others were new, but the way he carried himself in her slimmer shoulders was there. It had taken Ianto four days to see it.
"Well," Tosh said, as they braced themselves. Ianto grabbed for the leash that they'd fastened to the Xarxian's collar (Tosh had buckled it on while it had pinned Ianto to the grass in Cooper's Field and thoroughly examined his face with its tongue) before it could leap at him, and it barely had to step down from the boot. Everything smelt a little bit like garbage and he was fairly sure it was all the rancid spit that he wouldn't be able to wash from his face without Lava soap.
Tosh held the leash while Ianto closed the boot, and the thing lunged for Jack, who skirted wide of it in a little dance. "Wow there, that's the last of them." He pumped his fist a little. "Go team?"
Tosh rolled her eyes, and Ianto figured she deserved a little bit of sarcasm after the morning excursion they'd had. Torchwood officially owed her a manicure and a pair of dress slacks. "So do you need me to come with you?" she asked, her eyes wide and looking suspiciously puppy-like. Suspicious that she would know the puppy-look, since she was allergic and all. Ianto rolled his eyes at his own inner paranoia and irritation. Tosh was the least irritating person in the Hub, actually, and he loved her for that. On the other hand, for the last three months he'd been getting shagged at least every other night, and in the long and short of things, this was the longest he'd gone in…huh. Did not getting your gear…greased make one irritable? He'd ask Jack, but Jack probably didn't have a reference frame.
"Nope, Gwen and I will handle it." Jack prised open Ianto's surprised hand and palmed the keys. "Dad, I need to borrow the car."
Gwen caught the keys as Jack tossed them to her. "We'll fill up the tank and everything."
Ianto turned to watch Tosh struggle with the Xarxian, who was pulling on her industrial leash and sniffing the ground, a tell-tale sign that it had to-
The Xarxian squatted and pissed all over the car park floor. Tosh gave him a horrified look. Well. At least it wasn't on the carpet or something.
"You kids have fun now," he mumbled as he turned away from the SUV to join Tosh, and they walked wide around the flood of alien piss on the cement and towards the other side of the carpark as the Xarxian dragged them by the leash. Even with both their hands on it, it was doing a good job of corralling them. Ianto half wished he had a skateboard to ride so the thing could pull him along. The Xarxian's tongue hung out of its mouth, and it pulled so hard on the collar that even over the roar of the SUV's engine, Ianto could hear the ragged breathing noises that dogs made when they were choking themselves with their own collars.
Tosh sneezed.
"You can't be allergic to dogs in an alien body. There's no hair or dander." Ianto rolled his eyes at her and she looked sheepish.
"I'm sorry," she offered. "Maybe it's psychosomatic. Maybe you should--" Ianto grinned and let go of the leash so that Tosh could stumble forward with the Xarxian's lunge. "Ooof!"
The SUV pulled out of the underground carpark, and Ianto vaguely realised that he had no idea where they were going. Ah, joyriders.
***
They were halfway there when Owen called again. "Okay," he said, his voice that measure of calm that meant hw was stressed. "There's something scaling the outside of the building."
Jack clicked his tongue. Gwen was surprisingly well-equipped for that maneuver. Right now, though, his usual body was busy taking the SUV in an acute turn that apparently required both hands on the wheel. Gwen was doing the old ten and two thing, and he knew that he could take it one-handed. Hell, this thing had power-steering, not rack-and-pinion. Once he'd driven with his pinky finger for fifteen minutes because he'd got concussive glue on his fingers and he hadn't wanted to a) stick to the steering wheel or b) have the car blow up while he was still in it. He might have claimed that he didn't want to explode, but the fact remained that it was easier to regrow a body than it was to requisition another SUV from the Crown. They always asked for good reasons.
But Gwen, Gwen was a responsible driver. She'd probably taken a course in school. Hell, she'd probably taken one when she trained for-
"Climbing up the side of the building?" he said suddenly, realising that Gwen's driving skills, no matter how safe, were not the issue. Rather, the creature pulling a Spiderman up the side of the safehouse, unless it was Batman or-"Climbing with rope?"
Owen snorted and Jack barely heard it over the wind and what sounded like dogs barking from far away. "Hardly. The old fashioned way. With its hands." He'd probably wiggled his fingers for emphasis.
"Are those our dogs? Xogs?" Jack had no fear of Ianto and his naming quirks. Gwen signalled and paused before tuning left. They needed a 'LEARNER DRIVER' sign on the top of their vehicle sometimes.
"That would be the very ones," Owen said. "They've been very helpful in signalling trouble and blowing out my eardrums. Do we have workman's compensation?"
Jack snorted. "How fast is it climbing?"
There was a pause. "Not very, but it's sticking. There's another one in the lift, I think."
"Then freeze the lift," Jack said. "That's why we pay for that sinkhole of a building." There was a curse on the other end of the line and Jack realised that he was talking to Owen, who was by no definition stupid. "Okay, so you froze the lift. We're about-"
"Ten minutes," Gwen cut in.
"Ten minutes away."
Owen said something noncommittal. Gwen had sped up the SUV, but traffic remained heavy the closer they got to the plant, and there were no medians to drive on. Jack was going to cheerfully suggest the runner lights and the pavement, maybe leaning out the window to make a siren with his hands when she whipped around a turn and he caught sight of a billboard to his left featuring one of Cardiff's new trendy gyms for the wealthy, single and fabulous (believe it or not, Cardiff was starting to get some of those, and Jack liked them. They were shiny and well-muscled and often had flexible sexual tastes).
The billboard showed a rather buff pair of gentlemen who he wouldn't mind throwing down with, in this body or his own. Their white teeth gleamed and their shirtless chests shone and they held the freeweights that one could supposedly use at said gym.
Jack stared at the weights in the one model's hand and something clicked in his skull. Oh like he couldn't have seen it coming. He could only think that his holiday in Gwen's skull was crushing his good sense. It was science, right? His skull was normally bigger and so he was squished into this smaller brain.
This was, as Alex would have said, 'crazy noodles'.
"Oh," he groaned into the bluetooth, "Owen, lock the door and just…I dunno. Get a gun and some pots or something. Boil water." To Gwen he added, "Go illegally faster."
"Boil water?"
"Isn't that what doctors do in emergencies?"
There was a pause. "I suppose we could throw the boiling water over the side of the building," Owen said thoughtfully.
"Attaboy."
***
Tosh was mainlining Claritin, Ianto was sure, when he came back from washing up and found her reading the box of instructions to the redi-tabs and peeling the backs from three of them. "They say I only have to take one," she told him. "Sceptical Tosh is sceptical."
He laughed. "You know how Owen feels about people deciding they know better than the recommended dosage," he told her, picking up the blister pack and eyeing it. It was true-they looked like candy buttons or foam. How was that even remotely effective? Rather like those breath strips that were tiny squares of melting paper, and which, when laid on the tongue five at a time made a very effective tool for-
Well. Tosh shrugged. "Owen also thinks that an appropriate gift for my birthday is a male stripper."
Ianto didn't know what that had to do with redi-tabs, but he was fairly sure that she was questioning Owen's judgement. It wasn’t a bad call-he liked questioning Owen's judgement, just not on medical things.
"Is this going to make you drowsy?" he asked when Tosh put one of the tabs under her tongue and brushed the rest of them into the bin under her desk; Tosh liked to give Owen grief, but she was a professional too, and that meant a lot of things in their little underworld gang.
"I don't think so," she replied, taking the box and pointing to the front. "It says 'Non-Drowsy formula'."
Ianto pivoted and walked towards the kitchenette. "I'll make you an espresso, then."
Tosh threw the box back onto the recesses of her desk. "Thanks."
Ianto busied himself with coffees, and Tosh was doing…whatever she was doing, when the comms went off and they both looked up. Ianto touched the comm in his ear. "Torchwood Café, fresh brewed on the hour every hour."
"No time for coffee, Mister Jones," Jack said, "my memory has been jogged." A pause. "Run, actually. Maybe a light form of exercise. Freeweights-oh yeah, Belbels." Ianto glanced at Tosh.
"Barbells?" she asked. He shrugged at her.
"No," Jack insisted. "Belbels. They're bounty hunters."
Tosh smirked. "Like Boba Fett."
There was a click and then Jack swore over the comm. "Jesus, Gwen, you can't pop a wheelie in this thing. I tried already." There was a vague curse in a male voice and Ianto realised that Gwen hadn't her comm in her ear. "Those cuts along the abdomen," Jack said. "They made them. I haven't seen them since-well, never mind that. The Belbels have a way they like to do things. Yeah, they were looking for something, but there's nothing remotely interesting about anything we've discovered in six of the pouches except the one they took and-"
"What might be in ours," Ianto finished.
"Or the box," Tosh offered. "The Bender. It still works." She touched her ear, and Ianto was reminded for a minute of watching Star Trek reruns when he was a boy. Why did Uhura touch her ear? The earpiece was in place. Was it easier to hear? Did the earpiece have volume control he didn't know about? Did-
"Yeah, okay then," Jack said suddenly. "I'm not filled with a whole lot of confidence about our assessing skills at this point." Ianto was about to huff something rude when Jack tsked over the phone. "Look, Ianto, two out of three ain't bad."
Tosh rolled her eyes. That was one of Jack's favourite nonsense phrases, possibly fuelled by a minor Meatloaf infatuation in previous years. Translated loosely in Jack-speak, Ianto knew it meant 'Ianto, you've done a bang up job, considering the circumstances.' Ianto was hoping that someday Jack would find a way to convey something breathlessly naughty using lyrics to Paradise By the Dashboard Light.
"Why would they bother going to the safehouse, then?" Tosh mumbled. She had a point. How did they even know about the safehouse? "We have all the artefacts here, and all the Xarxians," she added. Ianto called up the video on the cells just to check, and yup, there they were, all four of them, pacing and, in the case of their most recent acquisition, eating its own shit. Nice.
"They're probably following a trace signature, and they found the X…dogs." Ianto congratulated Jack on his save there.
"But if they've followed a signature to the safe house," Tosh said slowly, as if she was still working out the equation in her head. Any second now she'd solve for X. "Then they should be showing up here."
The alarms went off just as Jack said, "Well, at least the alarms aren't going off," and Tosh and Ianto glued themselves to their monitors long enough to pinpoint the location.
Tosh snorted, though whether it was with relief or amusement, Ianto couldn't tell. "It's in the tourist office."
Ianto swiveled his monitor. "And on the Plass. How are people not seeing that thing?" Tosh joined him to watch the lizard biped, about six feet tall and wearing what looked like a leather waistcoat, stalk across the Plass, right down the middle. It wasn't standing on the invisible lift, so it couldn't be using that as cover. People continued to walk by it without even noticing. Even if they had thought it was a costume, they would at least be glancing at it as they passed it. It's massive tail twitched and almost hit a pedestrian.
"Visual dampener?" Tosh suggested. "Probably on his wrist. Its wrist. We can see it through the filter of the CCTV, but if we go out there…" Her eyes tracked the Belbel doing a pretty good job of trashing the Snowdonia display. Ianto bit down a groan. They always went for the Snowdon display.
Jack's voice was urgent. "Look I can't stay on. Don't let them in, and for god's sake don't give them a reason to think you're hiding anything on your person. I'm--oh look at that. Good on you, Doctor Harper!" The line cut out and Ianto turned it off on their end before looking at Tosh.
She shrugged. "I have this thing, I've been working on," she said as they watched the Belbel stalk across the Plass and lick one of the pillars. It managed to barely avoid being run into by a pair of little girls playing with a kite. "It's like a dog whistle. Sort of." She called up the program on her computer. "Like the opposite. For humans. Wanna see?"
Ianto peered over her shoulder. "Have you tested it?"
"On Owen."
"So not on humans, then."
Tosh headbutted him in the chest with the back of her skull and she entered a keycode as they watched through the monitors. "And, now," she began, as the humans on the Plass looked up and around them, as if they has heard someone call their names. "They're hearing it, and they don't know what it is. And they're going to feel the urge to leave…" One man sitting on the steps eating his lunch simply stood up and walked away briskly, leaving behind what looked like a steaming styro of takeaway biryani. Waste of biryani, that.
Ianto watched the Belbel lift its head and look around alarmedly as all the people left the Plass., but it didn't seem inclined to leave, either because it didn't hear the signal, or it knew that what it wanted was on the Plass (or under it) and nothing was going to deter it. The one in the tourist office was much the same, but it seemed to think that a great way to express itself was by licking all the Skeet shooting brochures. Ianto made a mental note to replace them all forthwith.
"So, what do we do now?" he asked. The Belbel left the tourist office and headed down the Taff Trail back to the Plass. Its counterpart pulled a few things from its belt and waved them around. Ianto was sure they were sensors until it pointed one of them at the speaker attached to one of the pillars and the speaker blew up. "Oh, that's not on."
Tosh keyed in a few codes and the display split between two views. They got to see about three seconds of footage before the Belbel pointed the weapon at it and the screen went to snow. Tosh swore. "If they take out the next camera we're-" she sat back and took off her glasses. "Blind."
Ianto left her side and walked towards the armoury. "I don't know about you, but I've always fancied a shootout on the Plass."
Tosh followed him into the rows of firearms and picked up three magazines for her gun. "They're still invisible."
Ianto hefted the EMP rifle. "Not for long."
On to Friday (B)