Conspiracy Theories 10/?
Jack had never felt so useless or as frustrated as he had staying inside of the house while the police, Gwen and Ianto dealt with the scene of the crime. Glancing over at Owen, he could tell their medic was much the same way. Though Gwen had made it clear over the comms that Ianto wasn’t hurt, Jack wanted to see for himself.
The only thing that kept him grounded was the hand he held on the shoulder of little boy standing in front of him.
A PC came into the house and didn’t seem capable of fighting back the smirk as he looked at Jack-he vaguely remembered having some unpleasant dealings with the man, but he’d been in a position of power then. “It’s safe to go outside now. The police have managed to handle everything.” And the smirk remained.
Jack wanted to glare at the man, maybe even point out that the police were doing clean-up now, but that it had been Ianto, on his own, that had taken down that weevil and saved the life of a PC. But he knew he couldn’t. He had to keep up appearances for his lover’s family. For the first time since he was a boy, he had to pretend he was a normal person who didn’t fight back against the darker sides of this world. He had to let his lover out there to fight while he stayed behind.
He wondered if this was how Ianto felt.
Even more frustrating was the fact that Rhiannon got to the door before him. Admittedly, Jack knew she was family, knew that she would be worried about Ianto, but he wasn’t used to having to take a back seat to anyone else when it came to a member of his team. It was part of what rubbed him the wrong way about Rhys, the way he had rights to be with Gwen first if something happened to her, the way he claimed that right so fiercely.
Outside, he saw Ianto, his suit covered in blood, but looking unscathed despite it.
Rhiannon ran up to him and cupped his cheeks, forcing his head down to look her in the eyes.
“Are you okay? What happened?”
“Robber,” Ianto said, still breathing heavily from the chase. “He tried to break into a store, injured a police officer.” He gestured to Andy whose arm was being treated for the claw wounds. “I took the arse to the ground. He’d been hurt and was bleeding.” He looked down at his suit in disgust. “I guess this is ruined.”
Jack knew better, knew that if they got back to the Hub quickly enough, they could spray a solution over the still-wet blood that would make it easier for the dry cleaning. Ianto had been very grateful to discover the substance in the lab, and even happier when Tosh and Owen had figured out a way to duplicate it.
“You sure you’re okay?” Rhiannon asked him.
“Absolutely certain,” Ianto said, still looking as though he wanted to keep something away from her. Jack could guess what it was, so he handed Daffyd back over to his father while he went over to Ianto, rubbing down the man’s back and discreetly removing the gun from the waistband of the man’s pants. He easily stuck it in his coat, on the opposite side of where he kept his own.
“We need to get you cleaned up, and I want to personally check that you aren’t hurt.”
“Nothing more than maybe a few scrapes or bruises,” Ianto said. “I swear. But I could do without the blood, or the smell. That man reeked.”
Jack nodded and gave Ianto a quick kiss before turning him over to his family. Rhiannon fussed about, Johnny asked Ianto details of what happened, and Daffyd just stared up at him with something akin to hero worship.
“I’m going to guess the rest of the home tour is canceled,” Owen said with a smile. Jack and Ianto both nodded. “Enjoy your evening then. You deserve it. Give me a call as soon as you’re ready to look through a few more homes. Mr. and Mrs. Caldicott, please give me a call if you are considering the home. I would love to see you have it.”
Rhiannon and Johnny nodded as Owen left to get into the convertible. Jack knew he wasn’t headed home, but would be going to A&E to check on Andy Davidson, who had already en route, then back to the hub to investigate the weevil.
Ianto looked somewhat pleased at Owen’s small way of telling Ianto he’d done well.
“He left in a hurry,” Johnny said.
“He doesn’t like blood,” Jack said, quite proud of his improvisation and the irony of the truth. “We’re just lucky he didn’t pass out before he got to the car.”
After a few moments of letting his family fuss over him, Ianto pulled away. He smiled and accepted the kiss on the cheek from his sister, which was followed by a quick slap to the back of his head. Ianto let out a noise of pain and protest.
“What on earth were you thinking?” she asked. “He was armed. Look at what he did to the man who actually works for the police. The one who actually has training in taking down a dangerous criminal.”
“It was fine, Rhiannon, really,” Ianto said. Oh, the irony of it.
“I don’t want you taking those kinds of risks,” she said before turning to Jack. “Jack, if you find anything, anywhere that is hurt, I want you to make him get to a doctor, or I’ll hurt you both.” Her tone was nearly threatening enough to make Jack shudder.
“Yes, ma’am,” Jack said with a salute.
“None of this ma’am business from you,” Rhiannon said. “You’re older than me.”
The captain smiled, and instead, gave her a quick kiss on the cheek as would be expected from family and smiled. “Better then?” he asked.
“Much,” she said, and he wondered if she realized her cheeks had become just the slightest bit pink.
Daffyd grinned up at Ianto in a way Jack recognized would take a long time to shake. For now, the boy obviously saw his uncle as a hero because he had taken down a “bad guy.” He kept asking the young Welshman how he tackled him, how far he had to chase him, was he scared, and any other number of things about the chase. It amused Jack, but Ianto looked a bit flustered to suddenly get this attention from the boy, attention previously reserved for Jack. The captain suspected that secretly, Ianto was eating it up, but he was so unaccustomed to it that he didn’t know how to react. Jack was also well aware that he was at fault for the fact that Ianto was so unfamiliar with this much praise.
Ianto smiled down at his nephew, and he and Jack both promised that he could come over and spend the night some time. The exact timing of the sleepover might have been a bit difficult to predict, but Jack genuinely believed that it would happen. Of course, there were countless reasons why they shouldn’t let the boy, but if he wanted Gwen to have a normal life as much as he told her, then why not the rest of his team? Why not Ianto and even himself?
“Be good,” Rhiannon told her brother as Daffyd and Johnny were finally heading to the car after saying their goodbyes, “and no more trying to play the hero.”
“I’ll try to refrain from it for at least the rest of the night,” he told herd. If only the older sister knew how difficult even that promise would be to keep. “And please, consider the house.”
“I’ll think about it,” she said. Ianto gave her a stern yet doubtful look. “I really will.”
“I suppose that will have to do,” he replied.
As Ianto gave his sister a distant hug to prevent her getting weevil blood on her clothing, Jack stole the Welshman’s keys from his pocket. When Rhiannon reluctantly got to her car, Ianto patted his pockets and looked around searchingly. Jack grinned and jingled the keys, forcing the younger man to look up in slight surprise.
“How did you-”
“Former conman,” Jack replied as answer. “Go ahead and get in. I promise to be very careful with your precious car.”
“You’d better. If I have to replace another vehicle due to you or Torchwood, I’m getting an Aston Martin on the company tab.” Ianto didn’t immediately get in the car, but grabbed an old blanket Jack knew the man kept in the back-after the last time he and Jack had shagged in the back seat to the point of exhaustion and woke up an hour later frozen half to death. He draped the blanket over the passenger seat before sitting down.
“You aren’t so careful with the upholstery in the SUV,” Jack commented.
“It’s black, as opposed to tan, and I have to clean it regularly anyway.”
“So… an Aston Martin,” Jack said, avoiding the parts of the comment from earlier that would remind him of John Ellis’s suicide to focus on the choice of replacement vehicle. “Fancy yourself as James Bond?” he climbed into the driver’s side of the Audi and started the engine.
“Maybe just a bit.” Ianto fastened his safety belt. “After all, I have the secret life, the fancy tech and I spend my days and nights with beautiful women.” Jack raised an eyebrow at his lover, earning a chuckle. “I can appreciate that Gwen and Tosh are incredibly attractive, even if you’re the only one I’m actually shagging.” He followed that with a cheeky grin.
Jack pulled out of the parking spot and did his best not to fly through Cardiff’s streets as though he was in the SUV.
“So, how bad was it today? I saw Andy was injured and heard some of it over the comms.”
“Andy had some claw marks on his shoulder. They’ll bleed a lot, but I’ve had deeper.”
Jack frowned at the reminder. Ianto had his share of scars from his work with Torchwood, but the claw scars on his thigh were from an otherwise normal round of weevil hunting when Jack had been gone; that had made it a somewhat less than normal because Jack had always gone with Ianto on weevil hunts, still did. According to Owen, of all people, the incident hadn’t been due to any mistake the young man had made, but the slash marks from the abnormally sharp claws had been unpreventable.
“Jack?” Ianto’s voice broke through the older man’s thoughts.
“Hmm?” Jack asked with a quick glance at Ianto, a smile thrown in with the fleeting look. “Sorry. Was thinking about something that has been nagging me for a while. That weevil… it had you pinned, didn’t it?”
“You could tell that?”
“You make a noise when you find yourself startled. I’ve managed to get it out of you on happier occasions,” That earned a faint coloring of the Welshman’s cheeks. “but I heard it over the comms, followed by a thud.”
“It was just for a moment. Then Andy hit it with a board, which was rather impressive single-handedly.”
“He’s stealing your moves,” Jack said. “I suppose that’s okay as long as he doesn’t start complimenting you on your suit.”
“I doubt he’s interested,” Ianto said. “Despite appearances, I think Andy is remarkably straight, so I doubt he’d go to the same lengths I did to get into Torchwood.”
Jack just smiled, using the same selective hearing that had let him see the lighter part of the comment on the car, and remembered the moment in the warehouse, Ianto’s body atop his own. Suzie’s accusations that he’d thought with his penis rather than his brain had been partially true because his brain had been telling him that there was no doubt that Ianto would be damaged from his time at Torchwood London and that they didn’t have the capability to deal with that. But Ianto had captured a pteradon and had flirted and had looked just so damned good in that suit that Jack gave him the job anyway.
“Jack, do you think that the attack was targeted?” Ianto asked, turning the conversation suddenly more serious. “After all, it looked before like someone was trying to lure the things out, but doing it in deserted areas. This time, it wasn’t deserted, and we just happened to be in the vicinity.”
“Could be a coincidence,” Jack said. “But coincidences don’t happen often in Torchwood.”
“Do you know of anyone who might have studied the weevils enough to know how to do this?”
“No one anymore,” Jack said as he turned toward the MillenniumCenter.
“There was someone?” Ianto asked, turning toward him.
Jack really didn’t want to answer that. He didn’t want to get into this conversation until Rhiannon and the family were in their new home… but if the attack had been premeditated, then the new home could already be at risk, and that could mean a lot of things Jack didn’t want to think about, let alone voice aloud. “There was, before Alex Hopkins.”
“Oh,” Ianto said, putting his hand on Jack’s knee, patting it. It was a small gesture, one of sympathy, and it killed Jack that he was leading his lover to believe something that wasn’t quite true, despite the fact he hadn’t lied.
The captain pulled the car into the parking garage at Torchwood and parked it near the SUV. “We’ll figure this out,” Jack said. “Somewhere between finding out how that man died and normal Torchwood operations, we’ll find out if this is a targeted attack.” He looked at his lover. “I want your family safe as much as you do.”
And Ianto gave him a small, trusting smile. “All right then,” he said. “I need to get back to the Hub and changed. I’m filthy and I stink.”
“Use my quarters to change and shower. You’ve already got a few suits there anyway.”
Jack looked at Ianto as the younger man exited the car. Ianto really did trust him in a way that others in the team didn’t seem to be able to. Jack knew he didn’t deserve it.
Climbing out of the hatch that led to Jack’s quarters, Ianto felt a few thousand times better now that he was in a clean suit, or very nearly in it. He could hear the sounds of the sirens signaling Owen’s return. The Welshman straightened his tie and smoothed it down as he saw the doctor below removing his as though he couldn’t be rid of it fast enough. Suit jackets followed-Ianto’s on, Owen’s off. While the Welshman had grown comfortable in what had once been armor for him against the rest of the team, his suits, ties and waistcoats, it was obvious that Owen was immensely grateful to have his gone.
Ianto stepped out of Jack’s office and immediately went to the coffee machine, seeing that Owen was busy rolling up the sleeves of his white dress shirt. In getting to their destinations, they passed one another, but said nothing. Ianto proceeded to get out the various coffee mugs, watching the other man disappear to the autopsy bay. Looking back at his task at hand, Ianto knew there were times that he resented his self-appointed role as the Torchwood butler. Today wasn’t one of those days. Having taken down the weevil, Ianto couldn’t find it within himself to be jealous of the rest of the team who fought the aliens on a much more regular basis. He really couldn’t care that while he was decent at first aid, he was no doctor and though he was good with computers, his skill couldn’t come close to rivaling Tosh’s.
He knew what he did best. He made orgasmic coffee-according to Jack-and he had the common sense that sometimes the other members of the team were lacking. Jack also argued that once Ianto stopped hiding himself, he’d brought back a heart to the team that even Gwen hadn’t managed, but Ianto felt his lover had been trying to flatter him and get him into bed, which it had done rather successfully.
“You look much better,” Tosh said as she passed the kitchenette area.
“Red may be my color, but I prefer it not to be blood,” Ianto said to the woman with a smile.
“Purple suits you quite well,” she said, patting the collar of his shirt. “So how did the house hunting go, beyond the weevil hunting?”
Ianto continued making the coffee, hands making the various concoctions for his team with little effort. “It went fine. I think we can convince my sister to move without much difficulty. And Johnny was absolutely drooling over the set-up you did in the office upstairs. You are brilliant when it comes to all of that.”
“And yet, I can’t make a decent cup of coffee to save myself,” she said as he handed her the cappuccino she loved so much.
“No, that you can’t,” he said, pulling a face at the reminder. It earned him a light-hearted smack from the woman, but he just smiled at her in return.
“You are lucky that I like you so much, Ianto Jones. You’ve seen what I can do to a military database. What do you think I could do to you if I decided I didn’t like you?”
He smiled. “I think you’d right your wrongs after a few weeks on decaf, or worse yet, Gwen’s coffee.”
The two shared a chuckle, remembering when Gwen had been trying to find her place at the hub, during those first two weeks, and she had actually dared to touch the coffee machine. Though she had managed to get it to produce something-which was more than anyone else on the team had done-it was hardly a product worth calling coffee.
“Tosh, can you go over the CCTV records for anyone suspicious? I know you did it before, but I just feel like we’re missing something,” Jack said as he stood behind Ianto. He was worried about Ianto’s well-being, that the Welshman hadn’t been attacked. There had been nothing different in his voice or even in those damned pheromones, but Ianto knew it somehow.
“Will do,” Tosh said, taking her coffee with her to her station.
“Are you okay? No cuts, wounds, anything?” Jack asked.
“Nothing really, though I might have a few bruises on my back and backside from being slammed to the ground,” Ianto said as he finished Jack’s coffee and handed it over. “Do we have any idea what might be setting the things off?”
“Gwen had a suggestion, and she has unfortunately voiced it to Owen. I think we only have a few moments before he-”
As though on cue, a rather smug-faced Owen came over to the kitchenette and snatched his coffee. “Apparently, teaboy attracts perverted captains and hormonal weevils.” Ianto looked at him, struggling not to say anything, not to rise to the bait. “Gwen said the thing had a visible hard-on when she got it into the SUV.”
Ianto then tried not to let the flush show on his cheeks. If the thing had been turned on, then what might it have done… no, best not to think of it.
“It was sniffing the air,” Ianto said. “So there might have been a female in heat.” Did weevils even go into heat? He didn’t know, but it sounded logical enough.
“Either that or it was picking up on the two of you in heat,” Owen said with a smirk. “Did you really have to be so lovey-dovey with one another?” Neither the captain or archivist offered a response to that. “Whatever it was, I think we have a good clue of why they are coming up from the sewers. The question now is how to we predict the next time it happens?”
“We’ll need to find the exact cause,” Jack said, “and no, Owen, it wasn’t Ianto, or me, or a combination of the two of us. After all, we weren’t in the area of the other ones who were discovered in deserted areas.”
The two men quickly got to work, Ianto going to the archives to research anything on pubescent weevils, pheromones, something that would give him a clue what was going on. He added to his search the recent unexplained deaths that had landed on Torchwood’s collective laps. No definite site of entry, but mysterious deaths that Ianto knew Dr. Martha Jones would be coming to help investigate.
And then, there came another weevil, and another murder. This weevil had been adult, thank God. Gwen never thought she’d be grateful for an adult weevil and a dead body, but at least they knew how to deal with those, what drove the adults on. It didn’t help that there was something about the adolescent attacks that made her feel that Jack was once again hiding something.
Gwen couldn’t say exactly what it was, but her years on the police force had told her that he was searching for something in particular in the CCTV footage of Ianto’s weevil capture. When Tosh or Ianto looked at the crowd, it was in broad sweeps for anything suspicious, but Jack seemed to be looking for something specific, eyes stopping whenever he saw something or someone that he was looking for. He also made it through the tapes considerably faster than anyone else, which he shouldn’t have if he was as clueless about what he was looking for as the rest of them were.
Ianto had been stationed up in the tourist office, reading through documents he’d brought up from the archives cleverly disguised as magazines. Gwen didn’t understand why the captain had insisted that Ianto go up there when he seemed to be needed down with the rest of the team. With two cases going on simultaneously, they could have used the extra man power.
At some point in the night, Owen had managed to change out of his suit all together, looking much more Owen-like, and his attitude had lightened to that of a doctor’s fascination. When he got like this, it made it difficult for Gwen to follow. They had a man that a weevil obviously got to, and yet, Owen swore that wasn’t what killed him.
“No obvious signs of violence,” Owen said.
“Are we saying it wasn’t the weevil?” she asked, because when a dead body and a weevil appear at the same time, they are usually related in some way.
“Give me a chance, Miss Cooper. I’ve only just started.” The doctor looked positively in his element. It was something fascinating to see, actually one of the man’s more attractive qualities. He became passionate about his work at moments like these, and that little fire sparked in him that reminded Gwen why he was so attractive to her those months before.
Gwen had to admit she was surprised to hear Ianto announce a VIP visitor, and expressed her surprise, not to mention a slight disapproval that she and the rest hadn’t been told someone would be coming to the Hub. It had to be someone fairly important. After all, who was allowed to visit Torchwood? Who actually had that level of security clearance?
Apparently, it was a rather attractive woman named Martha Jones.