TW Fic: That Awkward Feeling You Get (When You Wake Up Wearing Someone Else's Underwear)
Title: That Awkward Feeling You Get (When You Wake Up Wearing Someone Else's Underwear)
Author: nancybrown
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters/Pairings: Jack/Ianto, Gwen, OC (implied Jack/wants everyone he ever met)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: discussion of non-con, not even remotely accurate portrayal of subject matter
Words: 5400
Beta: fide_et_spe, with greatest thanks
Summary: "We deal with this sort of thing all the time. I'm temporarily bereft in the penis department but gifted with an excess of tits."
AN: Written for Trope Bingo square: free space!
***
As he sat in the cell, Jack attempted to look on the bright side and catalogue his assets. To begin with, none of the several bad situations he currently found himself in were unique. He'd been locked in these cells before, had been locked in this one in particular. The last time, he'd even drawn some graffiti out of boredom, and for his own reasons, Ianto had never bothered to clean it up. Jack looked with admiration now on his own priapic doodle, testament to testicles.
This led to his second problem. Not for the first time, Jack had woken up in a distinctly female body. He'd caught a quick reflection in a window on his mad dash back to the base, but the view had only confused him further. Normally, when he was affected in this way, he was taller, and his hair stayed short. Today he was tiny, not any taller than Gwen if he could guess, and his hair bounced in limp curls at his shoulders. The rest of him was soft, padded lightly like a comfortable old blanket, rather than the sporty build he typically wore.
The door at the far end opened. Jack slapped on a smile, figuring surely he still had the charming grin. He stood up from where he'd sat uncomfortably on the bench.
"Gwen Cooper," he said as jovially as he could. Of course it was Gwen; she was better at getting to know new people, plus they had a strict policy that only female employees could be alone with female human prisoners. Owen had ruined that one for everybody. "Come to let me out, or are you here to finally give in to your secret interest in hot women?"
Gwen sighed, then placed on her number three smile, the one she used to interrogate witnesses who probably weren't directly involved with the case. The smile chirped, 'Trust me, I understand what you're going through, and be sure to drink up that nice tea sitting in front of you.'
"Hello," she said. "I've come to ask you a few questions."
"Ask away." He folded his arms, a familiar motion made uncomfortable by the overlarge boobs he currently possessed. These were probably responsible for the shift in his centre of gravity. His mad dash home had been interrupted frequently by falling.
"Do you happen to remember your name? Your real name?"
Dammit. "Captain Jack Harkness. We've met. I've saved your life dozens of times, and danced at your wedding."
The smile again. "Of course," she said in a soothing tone. "I'll record that as a 'sort of,' shall I?"
"Gwen, I know what this looks like, but we deal with this sort of thing all the time. I got hit by some beam or switched by some artefact. I'm temporarily bereft in the penis department but gifted with an excess of tits. This happens to me more often than you'd think." Okay, three times before now, and the last time in 1987 had given him a new appreciation of what Vanessa had gone through.
"I'm sure it seems that way." She stepped closer to the cell, casting a glance around it and clearly unhappy that they'd locked Jack away. He could work with that displeasure.
"Why don't you let me out, and we'll go upstairs. I'll show you the records from the last time. And you can ask Ianto not to taser me again."
"He apologised, but you were still semi-conscious. You surprised him."
True, and perhaps grabbing his crotch with a hearty "Hey, honey, I'm home!" hadn't been Jack's greatest plan in terms of identifying himself to his boyfriend. "As long as he refrains from doing it again, I forgive him. Unless we're back at the flat," Jack added thoughtfully. Electrostim wasn't his thing, but he was always open to new experiences.
Gwen said, "I could almost believe it is you in there."
"See? Let's go upstairs."
Just then, the door at the end of the corridor opened again. Jack expected a tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed and gorgeous bloke. Unfortunately, the one who came in wasn't Ianto.
It was himself.
"Any joy?" asked the other Jack, as Jack sat down suddenly on the bench in the cell.
"No," Gwen said, turning to the other Jack with that little look she always reserved for just him. "She still thinks she's you."
It turned out today did have a unique component to it after all.
***
"Mary Twelftree," Ianto said, showing her photograph on the Boardroom screen. The nervous smile on her license didn't match up to the cocky expression she wore in their cell, but otherwise, it was clearly the same woman.
Gwen shrugged and turned to Jack. "Why does she think she's you?"
Jack tapped his fingers against his front teeth for a moment. "I've run into this before. In the Lopel Nebula, they have a device that can scan and copy an entire neural array, putting it into place in another brain. It makes for the perfect spies: they really are the person they look like, down to the cellular level. But they think they're the person they've copied."
He looked at Mary in the cells on the smaller screen. "Looks like she's got a head full of me."
"Does she know everything you do?" Ianto asked coolly. Gwen wasn't fooled, and didn't blame him. He hardly wanted two people running around being inappropriate about his sex life. Jack was bad enough.
"Probably. Which means she's a security issue. She'll have to remain our guest until we dislodge the memories."
"What about Retcon?" Gwen asked. "I don't like how often we've been using it lately." Since Owen and Tosh, she didn't say. They were run off their feet these days. "But if there's ever been a good use, I think it's now."
Ianto shook his head. "No good. If she's a perfect copy of Jack, we'd have to wipe her completely. It'd leave her a vegetable."
Gwen shivered. "Forget I mentioned it, then."
Jack was looking away from them, fiddling with something on that wrist strap of his. Gwen wondered what he was going through just now, if he was worried what bad memories Mary might dig up for him.
An alarm went off.
Smoothly, Ianto and Gwen hurried to their stations. "Weevil in Cathays Park," Gwen said.
"You two handle it," said Jack firmly. "I want to talk to our guest."
Gwen glanced at Ianto, who shrugged. He'd probably been thinking the same: Jack had secrets he didn't like to share.
***
He heard the door open at the end of the corridor, and sat up. Maybe the situation had sorted itself without him, and his team was headed in to tell him everything was going back to normal.
His own face came into view, just as Jack noticed the light of the CCTV camera had winked out. His hopes sank. They sank more as he read the predatory gleam in what ought to have been his eyes.
"They're adorably dense," said the other Jack without preamble. "No wonder you like them. Not so good to surround yourself with underlings who are too intelligent. Those start asking questions, like why the alarm sounded when I told it to."
The other Jack stood outside the Perspex door of the cell. He was from head to toe a perfect copy. "How did you do it?" Jack asked. "You almost fooled me, and I am me."
The other Jack tutted. "Not so bright yourself sometimes, are you? You're close. I can read the ideas in your head revolving. Pick the right one."
So he was psychic. Good to know. Jack filed away the info, and the smirk that said the other Jack knew exactly what he did. Jack thought about giving him the two-fingered salute.
"You're really not the first person to think of that, either."
"It's bodyswapping," Jack said, surety filling his voice. "You got my body, I got yours. So, what do you want, Mary?"
The other Jack laughed. "Mary? Mary was a silly cow who thought the good-looking man who asked her out was actually interested in a tumble. I needed a new body, hers worked." He looked down admiringly. "But yours, now, this is a real pleasure. Fit, great smile," he demonstrated, "and with a nice dose of immortality thrown in. You've got the whole package."
"Never had a single complaint about the package," Jack said, covering his worry. From the raised eyebrows his double gave him, the cover was less than effective. "What do you want?"
"I've got what I want. I needed a new body, and I struck lucky."
"No," Jack said, watching himself. "That's not it. That's not all. If all you wanted was my body," he let the joke go, "you already have it. But you're here chatting me up and I'm not dead yet. You need something else."
As soon as he thought it, he clamped down on his mental processes hard. Soup, soup, lots of soup, soup cans lined up in a row, look at the boring labels. It was a trick an old friend had taught him, back before he'd finished training his mental shields. The repetition of inane nonsense wouldn't hold back a full-blown psychic attack, but would pause the usual scan.
Soup. Soup. Soup soup soup in a bright blue can. Oh damn.
"For your next trick, don't think about the elephant," his own voice mocked. "What are you going to do, show me soup cans for the rest of your life? How long do you think you can not think about the bright blue spaceship you're trying to block out?"
"Get the fuck out of my mind." Soup couldn't hold him, not with the name slipping treacherously free.
"The Doctor, is he? Perfect transport off this rock. How do I signal him?"
SOUP!
"Oh, she's lovely, isn't she? You can't hold her name back forever, and all I really have to do is ask your dear stupid colleagues."
"Why do you want to leave Earth?" Jack asked, desperate to change the subject.
"I don't. But I need options."
"And you need me alive until you've got your options." It occurred to Jack that his captor wasn't planning on letting him live long enough for the others to return. Fear, new and thick, filled his mouth, not for his own life, not after all this time, but for what the imposter would do to them in Jack's name.
"Oh, I don't have to stray far from your own thoughts for that. You've got quite the imaginative array of things you'd like to do to them both, separately and together. Not all of them are nice." His grin widened like a shark's. "And there's more in here, loads more, mentally filed in the cupboard of things you'd like to do. Her name is Martha," he ended with a delighted purr. "Quite a long list of plans for her as well. Though I believe you're correct that you won't be able to talk her into bed with her sister. More's the pity. I could get into that."
"Leave them alone. This is all you and me. The others have nothing to do with it."
"But they could. Cooperate, and perhaps I won't hurt them. Or should I wait until your pair of trained dogs get back, and greet your favourite puppy with a surprise mid-afternoon quickie in the office? Think he'll even notice the difference?"
Jack didn't respond. He left his anger and his threats in his thoughts, gilded with too many years of experience on how best his own body had been tortured. His double took a half-step back from the door before he regained his smile.
"Not so smart, Jack, not at all. You've plenty of incentive not to be troublesome. You're not going to survive this experience. They might, and if you're good, I won't hurt them much. A little perhaps, because you've already imagined what would happen while we're mid-clinch and I tell him the truth, the confusion on his face, the way it'll turn to horror as he finds out he won't be getting free until I'm properly done. I have to say, I want to see that. I'll let him forget after, with your magic pills. Her too, when I go for her next. But only if you're good."
The other him didn't blink. Jack tried not to as well, but he could feel the presence inside his head. None of his secrets were safe, not in this new body, not from someone plucking out every dark fantasy he'd ever entertained on a long night. Jack was a fighter, always had been, but right now, the only path he saw was surrender, however temporary. He could find an opening, perhaps.
"Perhaps," conceded the other Jack. "Now, tell me everything. You don't even have to speak. Just remember. Your passcodes, your memories. I can pull them out, but your life is long and our time together isn't."
Reluctantly, going over any possible chance of escape and coming up with nothing, Jack began to think about his time on the TARDIS, out in the stars. He reasoned that the creature, whatever it was living in his body, would rather be out there than here, and the Doctor was better suited to handle this kind of threat.
"Is it too cliché to say you'll never get away with this?"
"Do you ever worry about clichés?" the creature retorted.
"You can email Martha, or call her. You don't need to see her to ask her to make the call."
"But she's too tasty a morsel to pass up. I really ought to invite her here with her sister, shouldn't I?"
"I really hate you." Jack remembered the taste of thin gruel on the Valiant, offered on a spoon by a beautiful woman. He closed his eyes, letting the creature get a good, thick memory of the bland soup, punctuated by a stolen kiss from Tish. That was one good memory, one he wasn't keen on sharing, but he remembered the way she tasted, like her own soup, and a bit like the lipstick she had to wear as part of her uniform.
"No doubt there. In fact, you ... "
Jack's eyes snapped open to watch the other contort in pain, electricity shooting through his body before he collapsed.
Gwen and Ianto stood in the doorway. Jack stopped thinking about soup.
As soon as the imposter was down, Gwen covered him with her gun while Ianto went to the door controls. He paused, glancing inside at Jack.
"I swear on Tosh's grave I'm me," Jack said.
"You would," Ianto replied, but he opened the cell door.
"How did you know?" Jack asked, stepping outside in case he changed his mind. "I mean, not that I'm ungrateful, but he was a perfect copy."
Gwen said, "The weevil sighting was a false alarm. We got a ping on our search for Mary Twelftree when we were in the car."
"I left the search running," Ianto explained, frowning, then dragging Jack's body into the vacated cell. Gwen kept her gun on him just in case.
"A bloke named Ahmad Bibi was admitted to Providence Park a week ago, raving that he was really Mary Twelftree. The staff obviously thought he'd had a breakdown, especially with the real Mary standing right there. But I ran a search on Ahmad's name, and it came up under a police file from five months ago. A homeless man whose identification said he was William Stewart claimed to be Ahmad Bibi."
There was clearly something else, from the expressions on both their faces. "What happened to them?"
"William died in custody of a massive brain embolism."
"And Ahmad?"
"The hospital reported his death this morning."
Fear grew in Jack's belly. "So this alien uses people up, living in their bodies like a hermit crab in a new shell, and jumps bodies shortly before the host dies."
Ianto said, "He's in your body now."
"And boy, does he like it," Jack said, mostly to himself, staring through the Perspex at himself again, but from the other side.
Gwen asked, "What does that mean for you? You're in Mary's body, but if Mary died in Ahmad's body, and Ahmad died in William's ... " She trailed off.
"Let's do a scan. He's safe in here for now."
They left the other Jack, hurrying to the autopsy bay. Once again, Jack noticed his own awkwardness, how his feet didn't move his legs the way they ought, the centre of gravity that zigged when he wanted to zag. His new body -- no longer Mary's because Mary was dead -- was stout, with curly hair in a mousy shade of not-quite-blonde and not-quite-brunette. A quick visit to the loo in a bit would show her eyes were hazel edging to brown, and Jack, always ready to see the gorgeous in everyone, thought they sparkled when he made practise smiles in the ageing, spotted mirror.
The brain scan appeared normal to their scrutiny, although the closest they had to a trained medic these days was Jack himself. He suspected that, given the time frame, the alien may have jumped out of Mary too soon to damage her as it had the others.
"We'll call Martha," said Gwen, when no further information could be gleaned amongst the three of them.
"No go. He was threatening her when we were alone. I want her far enough away that he can't reach her." That drew matching faces of concern and anger, Jack saw, and he chose not to volunteer his double's other threats. Jack could meditate on his own nightmare fuel well enough. "Let's focus on switching me back, okay?"
Ianto asked, "Are you sure it's reversible?"
"Positive. I haven't done bodyswitching in a good fifty years, but the settings are always reversible."
"Assuming it's a device and not some property intrinsic to the alien itself." Ah, trust Ianto to find the cloud under the silver lining.
"Okay, good point. My memories aren't perfect from the switch. Short-term stuff tends to get muddled, not written to storage in either brain. But I think I can remember a device. We'll search him, and if that doesn't work, we'll trawl through the archive records until I track down the toy we used last time." He gave Ianto what he hoped looked like a reassuring smile. "It'll be fine."
"How do we search him?" Gwen asked. "What's to stop him from switching with one of us whilst we're going through his pockets?"
Jack shrugged. "Shoot him. Then tie him down." He was rewarded with a grimace from Gwen and a quickly-hidden expression of horror from Ianto. So Gwen would be doing the shooting. Not a surprise.
***
Ianto and Gwen quietly agreed not to let Jack-in-Mary's-body loose unattended in the Hub. This could all still be a trick. Gwen accompanied her into the toilets, Ianto almost everywhere else. He was very familiar with Jack's choices in body language, from the folding arms to the catlike sprawls. If Mary was an imposter, she played her role perfectly down to the inflections of Jack's distinctive voice. (American, Ianto had once believed. Alien, he'd decided later. And now that he listened so closely to every word, he could hear the differing tones, the flat and the lilt, from Jack's upbringing and his travels. Ianto could never mistake his accent for another's, and Mary had even that.)
Back in the autopsy bay, Mary stood a metre away from Jack's prone body, eyes taking in the contorted face, frozen in pain, and the blood covering his chest. "Do I always look that way?"
"No, usually it's much worse," Ianto thought but didn't say aloud. Instead he said, "Reasonably clean death here, shot right through the heart first go." He pointed, and Gwen nodded, taking in the compliment.
She said, "I'd have gone for the head shot to spare your clothes, but you said those give you a bitch of a headache coming back."
"Yeah." The unfamiliar face kept staring at Jack's corpse. After a moment, she reached out and without looking, took Ianto's hand. Which was weird, but he didn't let himself startle. Instead, he felt the touch, the hand completely unlike Jack's but the comfort it was both taking and offering so much him that Ianto was overwhelmed. This really was Jack, stuck as he was somewhere different. God.
He squeezed Jack's hand.
The creature on the table gasped back into life, something Ianto had seen too many times. Jack's new face, watching, was torn between curiosity and something else, something sadder.
"I wondered," he said, and Ianto filled in the gaps himself. What if Jack's immortality was not bound to his physical body, but to his soul? Apparently no go on that, and Ianto put the knowledge aside.
"Ugh, does it always hurt like that?" asked not-Jack. Like Jack would, he seemed less than surprised at waking up tied down. Ianto had tied Jack down to this very table more than once and enjoyed himself thoroughly, and the sight of Jack's body in this position was bringing back pleasant if intense memories.
Not-Jack cocked his head, looking at Jack. "Oh. It does. I'll keep that in mind. Immortality will be nice but I'd like to avoid dying from now on."
"You can try," said Jack. "Where's the device?"
"Gone. I broke it as soon as the switch was complete. You're stuck." Not-Jack grinned.
"You're lying. I know my own facial tics. You're not even trying."
"Then I might be telling the truth," said not-Jack. "I can read your minds but you can't read mine. It's a good position to be in."
"Doesn't look good from here." Jack folded his arms across his new breasts, and it was such a Jack movement in such a Jack tone that Ianto almost laughed.
Not-Jack fixed him with the same flat grin. "They both think it looks pretty good. Want details?"
Ianto saw Gwen frown sharply, and he tried to rid his own thoughts of the last time Jack had been like this, trussed up (in the nude, naturally) and waiting salaciously for ... Ianto shook his head.
"Get out of our minds," Jack said in a low, threatening voice. "You're not welcome in there any more than you're welcome inside my body."
"But it's so interesting in yours. Their minds," he scoffed dismissively, "are full of the usual turmoil over not very original sins, but yours is full of experience and doubt and regret. I could help you." Even bound, Ianto could feel the thing's control. So much like Jack, and so different, the voice boring into Ianto's ears. (The accent was wrong, now that he knew, all flat Yank and nothing of the many seas and skies Jack had flown, how had he been fooled even for a moment?)
Not-Jack said, "You want freedom, and forgiveness. You want to live and grow old and die like a normal man. Here you are, but for one small difference. You're all thinking about it, how you could live now, instead of merely existing. I left Mary behind soon enough that you've probably got her whole life ahead of you. You can grow old here, or better, somewhere else now that you've given this stupid little group over a century of your blood and sweat. Travel the stars again. Or perhaps find someone in your fan club here, or take your pick from the rest of humanity, settle down and raise kids. You can look up the children you already have, not tell them what happened, be their friend instead of the signature at the bottom of the cheques, be someone they want to see instead of their shameful secret."
Children? That brought Ianto out of the near-hypnotic state he'd reached. Even as he turned to Jack, not-Jack chuckled. "There's so much you haven't told them, and more than a bit they've never told you. But you don't have to keep those secrets any longer, Jack. You can be a normal human, live and love and grow old and die. Isn't that worth a slight change in circumstance?"
Jack watched himself on the slab. "And what about you? Giving you a body that can never die, giving you the contacts I've made? You're dangerous, whatever you are. I don't know if you're a human who took the wrong piece of tech, or an alien that's eating your way through my city, but either way, you've killed people, and that's going to stop."
"But that's the beauty. I left their shells before I died, that's all. In your body, I'll go on forever, and good old Mary can do the same. We both win."
"You murdered Mary, and at least two men. Once you're back in this body, you'll burn it up and you with it, and you're finished."
"But since you can't put me back, it's a moot point, I think." And not-Jack lay his head back on the slab as though it was the most comfortable pillow in the room.
"We'll find the device," said Gwen confidently. Ianto was less certain. "We'll go easier on you if you tell us."
"What are you going to do, torture me? You've already told me if you find it, you'll leave me to die."
Jack nodded to Gwen. "So he didn't destroy it."
Not-Jack frowned, the first crack in his display of bravado. "I did."
"I'm searching my office," Jack announced, "and then the rest of the Hub. He'll have kept it close."
Jack -- or Mary, but probably Jack -- hurried off in the direction of Jack's office. Ianto glanced at Gwen, who pointed. Right. Just because they were sure didn't mean they were sure-sure. Ianto followed.
Jack shut the door as Ianto entered the room, and for a moment, Ianto slammed into panic mode. This had all been a trick. Mary was the alien and was mind-controlling the real Jack down there. Or worse, though he was scrambling to think of worse.
Then Jack-in-Mary's-body leant back against the gun cabinet with that sardonic half-smile that spoke of too many years, too many dead lovers, and too much grief that nonetheless was set aside because Captain Jack Harkness couldn't help but feel tenderness towards the people he loved. And like the hand-grab of before, it was enough to steady Ianto's worries.
"Hi," Jack said. "Tell me you're with me on this."
"We shouldn't leave him alone with Gwen. God knows what he's telling her."
"She's a big girl. She'll just shoot him again if he pisses her off." In uncharacteristic nervousness, Jack bit the edge of one glossed lip. "I can't read minds, not without extra help anyway. Tell me what you're thinking. Please."
"That this is weird. That it's clearly you in there, but it's hard to tell myself that when you look so different."
Jack nodded, as if taking notes. "Do you like this me?"
"What do you mean?"
"I'm trying hard not to fall apart inside here," Jack admitted, casting his eyes out and over towards the autopsy bay. Don't tell Gwen, said the glance, this is just us.
"I can imagine," said Ianto, and awkwardly, he stepped closer and pulled Jack into an embrace. Mary's body was soft where Jack had firm lines and muscles. Mary was plump and yielding like a comfortable duvet, and she was a full head shorter than Ianto. Yet this was Jack, and however tangled his emotions were on the subject of his boss and lover, Ianto had known for a while that one particular emotion ran ahead of the rest. If this really was Jack, body gone missing and all, then Ianto still loved him.
Resting against Ianto's chest, Jack said, "He's right. This could be my one chance to be free. The Doctor can't fix me. I never even considered just switching."
"You'd have condemned someone else," said Ianto. "Not your style."
"Yeah. Now this guy, I don't know if even he's bad enough to deserve immortality, and I know for a fact he's not going to be good with it, either. I can't let him keep my body. He'll be a monster."
"So we'll switch you back."
"But ... " Jack took a deep breath. "This is my only chance. Mary's gone. She'll never get her body back. The thing, whatever it is, wants to be there. I can think of some pretty terrible ways to keep it on ice." Jack shuddered, and Ianto didn't know if he was thinking about being buried alive for centuries, or considering options that were worse. "It's a bad, weird, once-in-my-lifetime kind of situation. So, Ianto Jones, I'm asking you, do you like this me?"
The worry, the desperation, and the fear of being rejected all came together in the question. Jack Harkness, who'd never once in his long life worried about being wanted, was scared that his new appearance wouldn't appeal. Jack's age, wisdom, experiences, and his unique perspective on the human condition were as nothing when set against the behemoth that was Jack's vanity. It didn't matter who else he did or didn't appeal to, Ianto noticed, his heart speeding up. Mary was vaguely pretty in an offhand manner, something Jack surely would have noticed. Jack had asked him.
For a moment, Ianto was reminded of a time long ago. He and Lisa had agreed never to fall into the conversational trap, "Does this make me look fat?" Lisa had broken that agreement in spirit the very next time she woke up with her hair a disaster and face puffy from her massive hangover. Ianto also remembered the gist of what he'd said to her.
"It's you," he said to Jack, pecking a kiss on the top of the curly hair. "I'd like you if you swapped bodies with a Weevil, although in that particular case I reserve the right to discontinue our sex life."
"Hey, don't knock it. This one time I ... "
"Don't ever tell me," Ianto cut him off with a plea. He'd need bleach if that particular mental picture took hold.
"So if we never find the device, you're still okay. With me. With us." Jack usually avoided references to "we" and "us" and anything else that hinted the two of them might be considered as a proper pair. Ianto looked away a moment, focusing on Jack's desk instead of his face.
"It would be an adjustment. Parts of you I'd miss. New things to consider. But since the artefact is on your desk, this line of questioning is pointless."
Jack startled, and pulled away to stare at his desk. "It is?"
"By the coral. I cleaned your desk this morning. That's new." He pointed, and Jack hurried to the object on his desk.
"All right," he said, taking a deep breath. "Problem solved." Ianto couldn't quite parse the expression on Mary's face, no matter how well he knew Jack's moods. Certainly there was relief, but unless he was mistaken, the contentment was commingled with regret, even disappointment, as he hefted the little silvery artefact.
"Jack?"
"Let's take it down to Gwen."
"Or," Ianto said, careful not to touch the machine because that the was last thing they needed, "we could tell Gwen to go home, and find it in a couple of hours?" He raised his eyebrows. Jack's forehead furrowed in confusion, but it passed quickly, and he set the artefact back on his desk, covering it with a handkerchief.
By the time he turned around, Ianto already had the cover for Jack's bunker open and had started climbing down.
***
The End
***
Author: nancybrown
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters/Pairings: Jack/Ianto, Gwen, OC (implied Jack/wants everyone he ever met)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: discussion of non-con, not even remotely accurate portrayal of subject matter
Words: 5400
Beta: fide_et_spe, with greatest thanks
Summary: "We deal with this sort of thing all the time. I'm temporarily bereft in the penis department but gifted with an excess of tits."
AN: Written for Trope Bingo square: free space!
***
As he sat in the cell, Jack attempted to look on the bright side and catalogue his assets. To begin with, none of the several bad situations he currently found himself in were unique. He'd been locked in these cells before, had been locked in this one in particular. The last time, he'd even drawn some graffiti out of boredom, and for his own reasons, Ianto had never bothered to clean it up. Jack looked with admiration now on his own priapic doodle, testament to testicles.
This led to his second problem. Not for the first time, Jack had woken up in a distinctly female body. He'd caught a quick reflection in a window on his mad dash back to the base, but the view had only confused him further. Normally, when he was affected in this way, he was taller, and his hair stayed short. Today he was tiny, not any taller than Gwen if he could guess, and his hair bounced in limp curls at his shoulders. The rest of him was soft, padded lightly like a comfortable old blanket, rather than the sporty build he typically wore.
The door at the far end opened. Jack slapped on a smile, figuring surely he still had the charming grin. He stood up from where he'd sat uncomfortably on the bench.
"Gwen Cooper," he said as jovially as he could. Of course it was Gwen; she was better at getting to know new people, plus they had a strict policy that only female employees could be alone with female human prisoners. Owen had ruined that one for everybody. "Come to let me out, or are you here to finally give in to your secret interest in hot women?"
Gwen sighed, then placed on her number three smile, the one she used to interrogate witnesses who probably weren't directly involved with the case. The smile chirped, 'Trust me, I understand what you're going through, and be sure to drink up that nice tea sitting in front of you.'
"Hello," she said. "I've come to ask you a few questions."
"Ask away." He folded his arms, a familiar motion made uncomfortable by the overlarge boobs he currently possessed. These were probably responsible for the shift in his centre of gravity. His mad dash home had been interrupted frequently by falling.
"Do you happen to remember your name? Your real name?"
Dammit. "Captain Jack Harkness. We've met. I've saved your life dozens of times, and danced at your wedding."
The smile again. "Of course," she said in a soothing tone. "I'll record that as a 'sort of,' shall I?"
"Gwen, I know what this looks like, but we deal with this sort of thing all the time. I got hit by some beam or switched by some artefact. I'm temporarily bereft in the penis department but gifted with an excess of tits. This happens to me more often than you'd think." Okay, three times before now, and the last time in 1987 had given him a new appreciation of what Vanessa had gone through.
"I'm sure it seems that way." She stepped closer to the cell, casting a glance around it and clearly unhappy that they'd locked Jack away. He could work with that displeasure.
"Why don't you let me out, and we'll go upstairs. I'll show you the records from the last time. And you can ask Ianto not to taser me again."
"He apologised, but you were still semi-conscious. You surprised him."
True, and perhaps grabbing his crotch with a hearty "Hey, honey, I'm home!" hadn't been Jack's greatest plan in terms of identifying himself to his boyfriend. "As long as he refrains from doing it again, I forgive him. Unless we're back at the flat," Jack added thoughtfully. Electrostim wasn't his thing, but he was always open to new experiences.
Gwen said, "I could almost believe it is you in there."
"See? Let's go upstairs."
Just then, the door at the end of the corridor opened again. Jack expected a tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed and gorgeous bloke. Unfortunately, the one who came in wasn't Ianto.
It was himself.
"Any joy?" asked the other Jack, as Jack sat down suddenly on the bench in the cell.
"No," Gwen said, turning to the other Jack with that little look she always reserved for just him. "She still thinks she's you."
It turned out today did have a unique component to it after all.
***
"Mary Twelftree," Ianto said, showing her photograph on the Boardroom screen. The nervous smile on her license didn't match up to the cocky expression she wore in their cell, but otherwise, it was clearly the same woman.
Gwen shrugged and turned to Jack. "Why does she think she's you?"
Jack tapped his fingers against his front teeth for a moment. "I've run into this before. In the Lopel Nebula, they have a device that can scan and copy an entire neural array, putting it into place in another brain. It makes for the perfect spies: they really are the person they look like, down to the cellular level. But they think they're the person they've copied."
He looked at Mary in the cells on the smaller screen. "Looks like she's got a head full of me."
"Does she know everything you do?" Ianto asked coolly. Gwen wasn't fooled, and didn't blame him. He hardly wanted two people running around being inappropriate about his sex life. Jack was bad enough.
"Probably. Which means she's a security issue. She'll have to remain our guest until we dislodge the memories."
"What about Retcon?" Gwen asked. "I don't like how often we've been using it lately." Since Owen and Tosh, she didn't say. They were run off their feet these days. "But if there's ever been a good use, I think it's now."
Ianto shook his head. "No good. If she's a perfect copy of Jack, we'd have to wipe her completely. It'd leave her a vegetable."
Gwen shivered. "Forget I mentioned it, then."
Jack was looking away from them, fiddling with something on that wrist strap of his. Gwen wondered what he was going through just now, if he was worried what bad memories Mary might dig up for him.
An alarm went off.
Smoothly, Ianto and Gwen hurried to their stations. "Weevil in Cathays Park," Gwen said.
"You two handle it," said Jack firmly. "I want to talk to our guest."
Gwen glanced at Ianto, who shrugged. He'd probably been thinking the same: Jack had secrets he didn't like to share.
***
He heard the door open at the end of the corridor, and sat up. Maybe the situation had sorted itself without him, and his team was headed in to tell him everything was going back to normal.
His own face came into view, just as Jack noticed the light of the CCTV camera had winked out. His hopes sank. They sank more as he read the predatory gleam in what ought to have been his eyes.
"They're adorably dense," said the other Jack without preamble. "No wonder you like them. Not so good to surround yourself with underlings who are too intelligent. Those start asking questions, like why the alarm sounded when I told it to."
The other Jack stood outside the Perspex door of the cell. He was from head to toe a perfect copy. "How did you do it?" Jack asked. "You almost fooled me, and I am me."
The other Jack tutted. "Not so bright yourself sometimes, are you? You're close. I can read the ideas in your head revolving. Pick the right one."
So he was psychic. Good to know. Jack filed away the info, and the smirk that said the other Jack knew exactly what he did. Jack thought about giving him the two-fingered salute.
"You're really not the first person to think of that, either."
"It's bodyswapping," Jack said, surety filling his voice. "You got my body, I got yours. So, what do you want, Mary?"
The other Jack laughed. "Mary? Mary was a silly cow who thought the good-looking man who asked her out was actually interested in a tumble. I needed a new body, hers worked." He looked down admiringly. "But yours, now, this is a real pleasure. Fit, great smile," he demonstrated, "and with a nice dose of immortality thrown in. You've got the whole package."
"Never had a single complaint about the package," Jack said, covering his worry. From the raised eyebrows his double gave him, the cover was less than effective. "What do you want?"
"I've got what I want. I needed a new body, and I struck lucky."
"No," Jack said, watching himself. "That's not it. That's not all. If all you wanted was my body," he let the joke go, "you already have it. But you're here chatting me up and I'm not dead yet. You need something else."
As soon as he thought it, he clamped down on his mental processes hard. Soup, soup, lots of soup, soup cans lined up in a row, look at the boring labels. It was a trick an old friend had taught him, back before he'd finished training his mental shields. The repetition of inane nonsense wouldn't hold back a full-blown psychic attack, but would pause the usual scan.
Soup. Soup. Soup soup soup in a bright blue can. Oh damn.
"For your next trick, don't think about the elephant," his own voice mocked. "What are you going to do, show me soup cans for the rest of your life? How long do you think you can not think about the bright blue spaceship you're trying to block out?"
"Get the fuck out of my mind." Soup couldn't hold him, not with the name slipping treacherously free.
"The Doctor, is he? Perfect transport off this rock. How do I signal him?"
SOUP!
"Oh, she's lovely, isn't she? You can't hold her name back forever, and all I really have to do is ask your dear stupid colleagues."
"Why do you want to leave Earth?" Jack asked, desperate to change the subject.
"I don't. But I need options."
"And you need me alive until you've got your options." It occurred to Jack that his captor wasn't planning on letting him live long enough for the others to return. Fear, new and thick, filled his mouth, not for his own life, not after all this time, but for what the imposter would do to them in Jack's name.
"Oh, I don't have to stray far from your own thoughts for that. You've got quite the imaginative array of things you'd like to do to them both, separately and together. Not all of them are nice." His grin widened like a shark's. "And there's more in here, loads more, mentally filed in the cupboard of things you'd like to do. Her name is Martha," he ended with a delighted purr. "Quite a long list of plans for her as well. Though I believe you're correct that you won't be able to talk her into bed with her sister. More's the pity. I could get into that."
"Leave them alone. This is all you and me. The others have nothing to do with it."
"But they could. Cooperate, and perhaps I won't hurt them. Or should I wait until your pair of trained dogs get back, and greet your favourite puppy with a surprise mid-afternoon quickie in the office? Think he'll even notice the difference?"
Jack didn't respond. He left his anger and his threats in his thoughts, gilded with too many years of experience on how best his own body had been tortured. His double took a half-step back from the door before he regained his smile.
"Not so smart, Jack, not at all. You've plenty of incentive not to be troublesome. You're not going to survive this experience. They might, and if you're good, I won't hurt them much. A little perhaps, because you've already imagined what would happen while we're mid-clinch and I tell him the truth, the confusion on his face, the way it'll turn to horror as he finds out he won't be getting free until I'm properly done. I have to say, I want to see that. I'll let him forget after, with your magic pills. Her too, when I go for her next. But only if you're good."
The other him didn't blink. Jack tried not to as well, but he could feel the presence inside his head. None of his secrets were safe, not in this new body, not from someone plucking out every dark fantasy he'd ever entertained on a long night. Jack was a fighter, always had been, but right now, the only path he saw was surrender, however temporary. He could find an opening, perhaps.
"Perhaps," conceded the other Jack. "Now, tell me everything. You don't even have to speak. Just remember. Your passcodes, your memories. I can pull them out, but your life is long and our time together isn't."
Reluctantly, going over any possible chance of escape and coming up with nothing, Jack began to think about his time on the TARDIS, out in the stars. He reasoned that the creature, whatever it was living in his body, would rather be out there than here, and the Doctor was better suited to handle this kind of threat.
"Is it too cliché to say you'll never get away with this?"
"Do you ever worry about clichés?" the creature retorted.
"You can email Martha, or call her. You don't need to see her to ask her to make the call."
"But she's too tasty a morsel to pass up. I really ought to invite her here with her sister, shouldn't I?"
"I really hate you." Jack remembered the taste of thin gruel on the Valiant, offered on a spoon by a beautiful woman. He closed his eyes, letting the creature get a good, thick memory of the bland soup, punctuated by a stolen kiss from Tish. That was one good memory, one he wasn't keen on sharing, but he remembered the way she tasted, like her own soup, and a bit like the lipstick she had to wear as part of her uniform.
"No doubt there. In fact, you ... "
Jack's eyes snapped open to watch the other contort in pain, electricity shooting through his body before he collapsed.
Gwen and Ianto stood in the doorway. Jack stopped thinking about soup.
As soon as the imposter was down, Gwen covered him with her gun while Ianto went to the door controls. He paused, glancing inside at Jack.
"I swear on Tosh's grave I'm me," Jack said.
"You would," Ianto replied, but he opened the cell door.
"How did you know?" Jack asked, stepping outside in case he changed his mind. "I mean, not that I'm ungrateful, but he was a perfect copy."
Gwen said, "The weevil sighting was a false alarm. We got a ping on our search for Mary Twelftree when we were in the car."
"I left the search running," Ianto explained, frowning, then dragging Jack's body into the vacated cell. Gwen kept her gun on him just in case.
"A bloke named Ahmad Bibi was admitted to Providence Park a week ago, raving that he was really Mary Twelftree. The staff obviously thought he'd had a breakdown, especially with the real Mary standing right there. But I ran a search on Ahmad's name, and it came up under a police file from five months ago. A homeless man whose identification said he was William Stewart claimed to be Ahmad Bibi."
There was clearly something else, from the expressions on both their faces. "What happened to them?"
"William died in custody of a massive brain embolism."
"And Ahmad?"
"The hospital reported his death this morning."
Fear grew in Jack's belly. "So this alien uses people up, living in their bodies like a hermit crab in a new shell, and jumps bodies shortly before the host dies."
Ianto said, "He's in your body now."
"And boy, does he like it," Jack said, mostly to himself, staring through the Perspex at himself again, but from the other side.
Gwen asked, "What does that mean for you? You're in Mary's body, but if Mary died in Ahmad's body, and Ahmad died in William's ... " She trailed off.
"Let's do a scan. He's safe in here for now."
They left the other Jack, hurrying to the autopsy bay. Once again, Jack noticed his own awkwardness, how his feet didn't move his legs the way they ought, the centre of gravity that zigged when he wanted to zag. His new body -- no longer Mary's because Mary was dead -- was stout, with curly hair in a mousy shade of not-quite-blonde and not-quite-brunette. A quick visit to the loo in a bit would show her eyes were hazel edging to brown, and Jack, always ready to see the gorgeous in everyone, thought they sparkled when he made practise smiles in the ageing, spotted mirror.
The brain scan appeared normal to their scrutiny, although the closest they had to a trained medic these days was Jack himself. He suspected that, given the time frame, the alien may have jumped out of Mary too soon to damage her as it had the others.
"We'll call Martha," said Gwen, when no further information could be gleaned amongst the three of them.
"No go. He was threatening her when we were alone. I want her far enough away that he can't reach her." That drew matching faces of concern and anger, Jack saw, and he chose not to volunteer his double's other threats. Jack could meditate on his own nightmare fuel well enough. "Let's focus on switching me back, okay?"
Ianto asked, "Are you sure it's reversible?"
"Positive. I haven't done bodyswitching in a good fifty years, but the settings are always reversible."
"Assuming it's a device and not some property intrinsic to the alien itself." Ah, trust Ianto to find the cloud under the silver lining.
"Okay, good point. My memories aren't perfect from the switch. Short-term stuff tends to get muddled, not written to storage in either brain. But I think I can remember a device. We'll search him, and if that doesn't work, we'll trawl through the archive records until I track down the toy we used last time." He gave Ianto what he hoped looked like a reassuring smile. "It'll be fine."
"How do we search him?" Gwen asked. "What's to stop him from switching with one of us whilst we're going through his pockets?"
Jack shrugged. "Shoot him. Then tie him down." He was rewarded with a grimace from Gwen and a quickly-hidden expression of horror from Ianto. So Gwen would be doing the shooting. Not a surprise.
***
Ianto and Gwen quietly agreed not to let Jack-in-Mary's-body loose unattended in the Hub. This could all still be a trick. Gwen accompanied her into the toilets, Ianto almost everywhere else. He was very familiar with Jack's choices in body language, from the folding arms to the catlike sprawls. If Mary was an imposter, she played her role perfectly down to the inflections of Jack's distinctive voice. (American, Ianto had once believed. Alien, he'd decided later. And now that he listened so closely to every word, he could hear the differing tones, the flat and the lilt, from Jack's upbringing and his travels. Ianto could never mistake his accent for another's, and Mary had even that.)
Back in the autopsy bay, Mary stood a metre away from Jack's prone body, eyes taking in the contorted face, frozen in pain, and the blood covering his chest. "Do I always look that way?"
"No, usually it's much worse," Ianto thought but didn't say aloud. Instead he said, "Reasonably clean death here, shot right through the heart first go." He pointed, and Gwen nodded, taking in the compliment.
She said, "I'd have gone for the head shot to spare your clothes, but you said those give you a bitch of a headache coming back."
"Yeah." The unfamiliar face kept staring at Jack's corpse. After a moment, she reached out and without looking, took Ianto's hand. Which was weird, but he didn't let himself startle. Instead, he felt the touch, the hand completely unlike Jack's but the comfort it was both taking and offering so much him that Ianto was overwhelmed. This really was Jack, stuck as he was somewhere different. God.
He squeezed Jack's hand.
The creature on the table gasped back into life, something Ianto had seen too many times. Jack's new face, watching, was torn between curiosity and something else, something sadder.
"I wondered," he said, and Ianto filled in the gaps himself. What if Jack's immortality was not bound to his physical body, but to his soul? Apparently no go on that, and Ianto put the knowledge aside.
"Ugh, does it always hurt like that?" asked not-Jack. Like Jack would, he seemed less than surprised at waking up tied down. Ianto had tied Jack down to this very table more than once and enjoyed himself thoroughly, and the sight of Jack's body in this position was bringing back pleasant if intense memories.
Not-Jack cocked his head, looking at Jack. "Oh. It does. I'll keep that in mind. Immortality will be nice but I'd like to avoid dying from now on."
"You can try," said Jack. "Where's the device?"
"Gone. I broke it as soon as the switch was complete. You're stuck." Not-Jack grinned.
"You're lying. I know my own facial tics. You're not even trying."
"Then I might be telling the truth," said not-Jack. "I can read your minds but you can't read mine. It's a good position to be in."
"Doesn't look good from here." Jack folded his arms across his new breasts, and it was such a Jack movement in such a Jack tone that Ianto almost laughed.
Not-Jack fixed him with the same flat grin. "They both think it looks pretty good. Want details?"
Ianto saw Gwen frown sharply, and he tried to rid his own thoughts of the last time Jack had been like this, trussed up (in the nude, naturally) and waiting salaciously for ... Ianto shook his head.
"Get out of our minds," Jack said in a low, threatening voice. "You're not welcome in there any more than you're welcome inside my body."
"But it's so interesting in yours. Their minds," he scoffed dismissively, "are full of the usual turmoil over not very original sins, but yours is full of experience and doubt and regret. I could help you." Even bound, Ianto could feel the thing's control. So much like Jack, and so different, the voice boring into Ianto's ears. (The accent was wrong, now that he knew, all flat Yank and nothing of the many seas and skies Jack had flown, how had he been fooled even for a moment?)
Not-Jack said, "You want freedom, and forgiveness. You want to live and grow old and die like a normal man. Here you are, but for one small difference. You're all thinking about it, how you could live now, instead of merely existing. I left Mary behind soon enough that you've probably got her whole life ahead of you. You can grow old here, or better, somewhere else now that you've given this stupid little group over a century of your blood and sweat. Travel the stars again. Or perhaps find someone in your fan club here, or take your pick from the rest of humanity, settle down and raise kids. You can look up the children you already have, not tell them what happened, be their friend instead of the signature at the bottom of the cheques, be someone they want to see instead of their shameful secret."
Children? That brought Ianto out of the near-hypnotic state he'd reached. Even as he turned to Jack, not-Jack chuckled. "There's so much you haven't told them, and more than a bit they've never told you. But you don't have to keep those secrets any longer, Jack. You can be a normal human, live and love and grow old and die. Isn't that worth a slight change in circumstance?"
Jack watched himself on the slab. "And what about you? Giving you a body that can never die, giving you the contacts I've made? You're dangerous, whatever you are. I don't know if you're a human who took the wrong piece of tech, or an alien that's eating your way through my city, but either way, you've killed people, and that's going to stop."
"But that's the beauty. I left their shells before I died, that's all. In your body, I'll go on forever, and good old Mary can do the same. We both win."
"You murdered Mary, and at least two men. Once you're back in this body, you'll burn it up and you with it, and you're finished."
"But since you can't put me back, it's a moot point, I think." And not-Jack lay his head back on the slab as though it was the most comfortable pillow in the room.
"We'll find the device," said Gwen confidently. Ianto was less certain. "We'll go easier on you if you tell us."
"What are you going to do, torture me? You've already told me if you find it, you'll leave me to die."
Jack nodded to Gwen. "So he didn't destroy it."
Not-Jack frowned, the first crack in his display of bravado. "I did."
"I'm searching my office," Jack announced, "and then the rest of the Hub. He'll have kept it close."
Jack -- or Mary, but probably Jack -- hurried off in the direction of Jack's office. Ianto glanced at Gwen, who pointed. Right. Just because they were sure didn't mean they were sure-sure. Ianto followed.
Jack shut the door as Ianto entered the room, and for a moment, Ianto slammed into panic mode. This had all been a trick. Mary was the alien and was mind-controlling the real Jack down there. Or worse, though he was scrambling to think of worse.
Then Jack-in-Mary's-body leant back against the gun cabinet with that sardonic half-smile that spoke of too many years, too many dead lovers, and too much grief that nonetheless was set aside because Captain Jack Harkness couldn't help but feel tenderness towards the people he loved. And like the hand-grab of before, it was enough to steady Ianto's worries.
"Hi," Jack said. "Tell me you're with me on this."
"We shouldn't leave him alone with Gwen. God knows what he's telling her."
"She's a big girl. She'll just shoot him again if he pisses her off." In uncharacteristic nervousness, Jack bit the edge of one glossed lip. "I can't read minds, not without extra help anyway. Tell me what you're thinking. Please."
"That this is weird. That it's clearly you in there, but it's hard to tell myself that when you look so different."
Jack nodded, as if taking notes. "Do you like this me?"
"What do you mean?"
"I'm trying hard not to fall apart inside here," Jack admitted, casting his eyes out and over towards the autopsy bay. Don't tell Gwen, said the glance, this is just us.
"I can imagine," said Ianto, and awkwardly, he stepped closer and pulled Jack into an embrace. Mary's body was soft where Jack had firm lines and muscles. Mary was plump and yielding like a comfortable duvet, and she was a full head shorter than Ianto. Yet this was Jack, and however tangled his emotions were on the subject of his boss and lover, Ianto had known for a while that one particular emotion ran ahead of the rest. If this really was Jack, body gone missing and all, then Ianto still loved him.
Resting against Ianto's chest, Jack said, "He's right. This could be my one chance to be free. The Doctor can't fix me. I never even considered just switching."
"You'd have condemned someone else," said Ianto. "Not your style."
"Yeah. Now this guy, I don't know if even he's bad enough to deserve immortality, and I know for a fact he's not going to be good with it, either. I can't let him keep my body. He'll be a monster."
"So we'll switch you back."
"But ... " Jack took a deep breath. "This is my only chance. Mary's gone. She'll never get her body back. The thing, whatever it is, wants to be there. I can think of some pretty terrible ways to keep it on ice." Jack shuddered, and Ianto didn't know if he was thinking about being buried alive for centuries, or considering options that were worse. "It's a bad, weird, once-in-my-lifetime kind of situation. So, Ianto Jones, I'm asking you, do you like this me?"
The worry, the desperation, and the fear of being rejected all came together in the question. Jack Harkness, who'd never once in his long life worried about being wanted, was scared that his new appearance wouldn't appeal. Jack's age, wisdom, experiences, and his unique perspective on the human condition were as nothing when set against the behemoth that was Jack's vanity. It didn't matter who else he did or didn't appeal to, Ianto noticed, his heart speeding up. Mary was vaguely pretty in an offhand manner, something Jack surely would have noticed. Jack had asked him.
For a moment, Ianto was reminded of a time long ago. He and Lisa had agreed never to fall into the conversational trap, "Does this make me look fat?" Lisa had broken that agreement in spirit the very next time she woke up with her hair a disaster and face puffy from her massive hangover. Ianto also remembered the gist of what he'd said to her.
"It's you," he said to Jack, pecking a kiss on the top of the curly hair. "I'd like you if you swapped bodies with a Weevil, although in that particular case I reserve the right to discontinue our sex life."
"Hey, don't knock it. This one time I ... "
"Don't ever tell me," Ianto cut him off with a plea. He'd need bleach if that particular mental picture took hold.
"So if we never find the device, you're still okay. With me. With us." Jack usually avoided references to "we" and "us" and anything else that hinted the two of them might be considered as a proper pair. Ianto looked away a moment, focusing on Jack's desk instead of his face.
"It would be an adjustment. Parts of you I'd miss. New things to consider. But since the artefact is on your desk, this line of questioning is pointless."
Jack startled, and pulled away to stare at his desk. "It is?"
"By the coral. I cleaned your desk this morning. That's new." He pointed, and Jack hurried to the object on his desk.
"All right," he said, taking a deep breath. "Problem solved." Ianto couldn't quite parse the expression on Mary's face, no matter how well he knew Jack's moods. Certainly there was relief, but unless he was mistaken, the contentment was commingled with regret, even disappointment, as he hefted the little silvery artefact.
"Jack?"
"Let's take it down to Gwen."
"Or," Ianto said, careful not to touch the machine because that the was last thing they needed, "we could tell Gwen to go home, and find it in a couple of hours?" He raised his eyebrows. Jack's forehead furrowed in confusion, but it passed quickly, and he set the artefact back on his desk, covering it with a handkerchief.
By the time he turned around, Ianto already had the cover for Jack's bunker open and had started climbing down.
***
The End
***