Unbearable [fic]
Title:Unbearable
Author:
shadowbyrd
Rating(s): PG
Warning(s): Fluff. Literally.
Word Count: 6148
Summary: Jack has been turned into a teddy bear. The team despairs.
A/N: Dedicated to Torchwoodbears across the net, but especially
laligin's Ianto and Jack bears,
atraphoenix's Four bear,
sasha_lilyrat's Tosh bear and all of
joulez217's bears.
Tosh stifled her seventeenth yawn and she fiddled with the keys for the TIC. Ianto had insisted that the situation was all very urgent and couldn’t be explained over the phone. If this was all over an unusual unidentified energy signal she was going to have to get violent, she decided, as she shoved the door open and then shut it behind her. Or perhaps let those big yellow slugs Owen had loose, the ones that left all that thick slime -
She stopped short in plotting her revenge upon entering the Hub and spotting the teddy bear that Ianto had under his arm. The teddy bear in a little grey military coat, even with braces. She took a moment to re-consider her surroundings, reasoning if this were a dream then the specifics wouldn’t be quite right, but on finding everything as it should be she proceeded to Jack’s office.
“What’s going on?” she asked, biting back another yawn.
“We can’t find Jack,” said Ianto. He looked worried, but it was difficult to take him seriously with the bear wedged under one arm.
“He’s not anywhere in the Hub,” Owen added, rubbing his eyes. “We looked, top to bottom.”
“Have you tried tracing his comm?” Tosh asked, making a valiant attempt not to stare at the bear.
“Wouldn’t do a lot of good.” Ianto pulled it out of his pocket. “It was just lying on the floor in here. Something must have happened to him, he takes better care than that.”
“When did you realise he was missing?”
“Who’s missing?” Gwen asked around a wide yawn, shrugging her jacket off as she entered. She stopped dead upon seeing the bear under Ianto’s arm. “And what the hell is that?”
“It’s Jack -”
Gwen stared. “The bear?”
“No,” said Owen impatiently “He’s the one who’s gone missing.”
“Without his comm,” Toshiko added. “We were just trying to establish what time he might have disappeared.”
“Who was the last to see or hear from him?” asked Gwen.
“I had a call from him at around two,” said Ianto, fingering the earpiece. “He’d hung up by the time I’d picked up the phone. I tried calling him back a couple of times, but he didn’t answer, so I came by here to see if anything was wrong. I found this sat in his chair,” he indicated the teddy bear, “but I couldn’t find Jack.”
“You’re sure?” asked Gwen slowly.
“Yes!” said Owen and Ianto.
“I’ll go and check the CCTV,” said Tosh. “See if there were any visitors this morning.”
“We already tried checking for unusual energy surges, but I don’t know; you might find something we missed,” Ianto told her.
Tosh nodded and took up her workstation to set to work.
“Is there anything else missing?” asked Gwen. “Any of the Weevils or -”
“All non-human boarders are present and correct,” said Owen, folding his arms. “It’s interesting though, they seemed perfectly normal until we went past - then they started to get all fidgety, y’know the way dogs get sometimes, and people say it’s ‘cause they can twig something’s going on -”
“Owen!” Gwen snapped.
“I’m just saying - interesting.” Owen smirked. “Maybe we could try putting Janet on a chain, give her the scent, see if she can’t track him down.”
Ianto rolled his eyes. “Let’s try a few other options first.”
Gwen wrapped her arms around herself, looking uncomfortable. “You don’t think this is like the last time, do you?”
Owen and Ianto exchanged glances. “Last time he had all his stuff with him; comm, gun - I mean I can see him maybe going somewhere without the comm, but he doesn’t go anywhere without the gun,” said Owen.
“His gun’s still here?” Gwen asked, hopeful and worried.
“On the desk. With this thing.” Ianto pulled the bear from under his arm and looked it over. “You think it could be some kind message or -”
The bear’s arms clamped down suddenly over Ianto’s hands. Ianto jumped and nearly dropped it.
“Its arms move? They looked like they were just stuffed.”
“They are,” said Ianto, sounding faintly horrified. “There’s nothing but stuffing in it.”
Owen reached out and squeezed one of its arms, then a leg and then the top of its head. The moment he took his hand away the bear’s head turned, eerily slow, toward Owen, who took a step back, swearing.
“It’s alive. It’s full of cotton wool and the fucking thing’s alive.”
Gwen looked from the bear to Ianto to Owen. “What do we do with it?”
Owen narrowed his eyes at it. “Take it through to the autopsy room.”
Ianto hugged the bear to his chest to try and pin its wildly flailing arms. “You’re going to cut it up?” He sounded scandalised.
Owen grabbed Ianto’s arm and tried to steer him out of the office. “There could be some kind of alien power source in it. We should remove it.”
“It’s a teddy bear, Owen,” said Ianto, dangling it by one arm in Owen’s face. “A stuffed animal, it’s not like it’s going to -”
The bear gripped Ianto’s hand with its other paw and swung, kicking Owen in the face with both feet. Owen stepped back, raising his hands, while the bear swung again on Ianto’s hand and jumped onto Owen, grabbing his hair and pressing itself against his face.
Owen staggered forward, bouncing off Ianto and hitting the door frame.
“Get it off me, get it off me!” he howled, clawing at it. Gwen and Ianto went to grab it at the same time, Gwen ending up with a fistful of Owen’s hair while Ianto managed to somehow shove his hand in Owen’s face, doing a better job of smothering Owen than the bear had been. Working together - Ianto pulling on Owen, Gwen pulling on the bear - they managed to separate them.
Gwen held it away from her, holding on to it tightly by the arms. Unable to move its arms it began to squirm and kick its legs in a frantic yet futile manner.
Owen glared at it. “Bring that thing down to the autopsy room.”
Toshiko stared at them as they trooped past her. “What are you -”
“Just keep working on the CCTV, yeah, Tosh?” Owen snapped.
“You don’t think we’re going a bit far here, do you?” Gwen asked as she descended the steps into the autopsy room. “I mean, I know it attacked you, but you were squeezing it - I’d take a swing at you if you tried squeezing my head -”
She had released one of the bear’s arms to gesture. Seizing this opportunity the bear latched on to her other arm and tried to climb up it. Gwen screamed and staggered forward, nearly falling down the steps as she shook her arm, smacking at the bear as it hung on for dear life. Ianto managed to stop her falling and Owen reached over, grabbed its ankles and yanked until it came free. The bear tried to swing forward, paws clawing at the air, obviously with plans for Owen’s crotch.
With no small amount of grim satisfaction Owen carried it over to the table and pinned it down. Ianto took its legs and Owen jerked his head at Gwen.
“C’mon, try not to let the bloody thing go this time.”
Gwen scowled but took over from him, this time using a white-knuckled grip. The bear squirmed and fought, renewing its efforts when Owen began pulling out scalpels. It was a faintly distressing sight to say the least.
“Are you sure we should be doing this?” Gwen asked, as Owen approached. The bear had swivelled its head to look at Owen and though its stitched expression remained the same there was something about its eyes - the way it was shaking, for God’s sake.
Ianto too looked as though he was having doubts.
“What, you think it’s an alien life form that happens to look exactly like a teddy? It’s probably been left by that bastard Captain John, or whatever he calls himself. Do we really want something of his swanning around here, something that can choke us and will be able to squeeze through small gaps? Just hold it still.”
Ianto averted his gaze. Gwen screwed her eyes shut. A moment later the fluff flew into the air as Owen hacked his way into the bear’s chest. After a few moments of twitching it stilled completely.
Owen paused, then tried stabbing with the scalpel he was holding. “Must have hit something,” he muttered. “Keep hold of it anyway, just in case,” he added to Gwen and Ianto.
“What, you think it’s trying to bluff us?” asked Ianto, wincing slightly as Owen began to pull out of the stuffing chunk by chunk. Owen emptied the bear out but the stuffing was completely ordinary and devoid of any alien nanotechnology.
Owen sighed. “Nothing.” Ianto and Gwen let go, craning in for a better look.
“Maybe if you tried taking apart his head -” Gwen suggested.
“Don’t do anything to the bear!” Toshiko appeared at the top of the steps, all but falling over the banister as she leaned over. “Don’t do anything to… the…” Her eyes widened at the fluffy carnage beneath her. “What did you cut him open for?”
“Him?” said Gwen.
“That’s Jack!” said Tosh pointing at the prone, emptied bear. “I was checking back through the CCTV and he was sorting through some of the artefacts and one of them turned him into a teddy bear!”
“What?” said Ianto.
“What are you saying, we’ve just killed Jack? Again?” asked Owen looking from Toshiko back to the bear.
“He’ll come back again, though, won’t he?” asked Gwen anxiously.
Ianto began shoving the stuffing back in, pulling the lips of the wound together. Tosh clambered down to join them as they all watched nervously.
After a moment the wisps of stuffing curled in on themselves and sucked back into the wound. The stuffing re-distributed itself through the bear’s body, returning it to its proper shape. The wound itself seemed to zip shut, the threading snapping back together. A moment later the bear jumped up, one of its shoes in hand, and hurled it at Owen. It then turned, paws on hips to stare at the rest of them.
Gwen leant forward hesitantly. “…Jack?”
The bear covered its eyes with its paws and then raised his arms up as though saying finally.
Tosh mimicked Gwen. “Can you say anything or…”
Jack shook his head, though his bear body apparently lacked a point of articulation in the neck, and so he had to shake his whole body from side to side.
Owen cursed, rubbing his forehead. Ianto took the shoe off him and handed it back to Jack. “Be rather difficult for him to talk with his mouth sewn shut.”
Owen smirked. “Why didn’t we think of it before?” The bear raised the shoe threateningly.
Tosh pushed his paw down. “I need you to look through some pictures, see if we can find what it was that turned you into… this.”
Jack pulled his paw back from her hand, nodding. Then he paused, looking around, and looked up at Tosh, raising his paws up to her.
Exchanging uncomfortable glances with Ianto and Gwen, Tosh reached down and picked him up, resting him on her hip like a baby. “This is weird,” she muttered.
They sat around Toshiko’s work station, Jack now in both shoes, with enough balance to stand straight. Most of his efforts to walk normally, however, saw him fall flat on his nose.
“Okay, I can’t zoom in close enough to identify which one it was you were holding but maybe of you could - oh. What are you doing?”
Jack had clamped a pen between his paws and was trying to drag it over a bit of paper.
“No, no, not on that,” said Tosh, picking him up and off the table. The pen slid through his paws and clattered on to the desk. “Ianto, get some paper or something would you, those are police documents.”
Gwen snatched up the documents and went to file them away while Ianto went off in search of paper.
Owen tilted his head. “Huh. That’s the kind of treatment I can expect I’ll have to try this morpher thing out some time.”
Tosh frowned. “What are you - hey!” She felt a paw move. Looking down she realised how she was holding Jack, face squashed into her cleavage and Jack, being Jack, wasn’t letting the situation go to waste.
“You pervert!” Tosh yelled, flushing violently, hurling the bear away while Owen fell around laughing.
Gwen rushed forward and caught him, cradling him to her. “Tosh, what did you do that for?”
“He was feeling her up,” Owen laughed, clapping his hands. Tosh leant across and punched him on the arm.
Gwen sniggered. “It’s Jack, Tosh, what do you expect?” Then she looked down, realised how she was holding him and how Jack was taking advantage of that situation and with a scream hurled him at Owen.
“What?” asked Owen, just catching hold of Jack by an ear. “It’s Jack, Gwen, what you expect?”
“Owen, don’t hold him like that,” said Ianto, re-appearing with a pad of paper.
“Hey, you want to cuddle up to him, go for it,” said Owen holding him out by his ear to Ianto. “He’s been getting a little bit too friendly.”
Ianto took him and placed him feet first on the floor, putting the pad in front of him and handing him a pen. “Draw what you were going to draw,” he told Jack, crouching next to him.
It was with some difficulty that Jack took up the pen between his paws and produced a very wobbly sketch of a device, covered in scribbles that were probably meant to be wires. In the corner he had provided a smaller sketch of it with a stick person to show the scale.
“What do you think?” Ianto asked Tosh, Jack squirming under his arm.
Tosh frowned at the drawing. “I’m not sure. Is this line meant to be here or was it an accident?”
Ianto held Jack up so he could see. The bear nodded frantically.
“And this one?” Tosh asked doubtfully.
Jack nodded again.
“Huh. Well, if this some kind of handle -”
Jack began to flail.
“So, that line’s not to be there? Okay, how about I just try this up against the images I was going to show you in first place?”
Jack seemed to consider this for a moment and finally nodded.
“Okay.” Tosh nodded back and turned back to her computer quickly. There was something just a little bit creepy about playing “yes/no” with a teddy bear.
“Just imagine if we were able to harness its power somehow,” said Owen.
Gwen scoffed. “Yeah, a device that can turn humans in teddy bears. That’s really going to forward humankind.”
Owen shrugged. “It would have its advantages.”
“Such as?” Gwen asked dubiously.
Owen didn’t answer, apparently too lost in his own thoughts. As a slow, wide smile spread across his face Gwen backed away, muttering something about tea.
“It would be useful for spying on people, I suppose. Provided that anyone turned into a bear could see and hear - I’m still not quite sure how that works by the way,” Ianto added to Jack. “I mean, you have glass eyes, but that doesn’t stop you seeing the same way that the stitched up mouth stops you speaking?” Jack shrugged and tucked his hands behind his back, head high in a “whistling inconspicuously” pose. Ianto and Owen, now snapped out of his day dream, exchanged glances and rolled their eyes.
“Is that your cute way of saying that you actually can talk, you’re just choosing not to?” asked Owen. “Have you got a stupid voice, or something? I got a stuffed dog that could talk off my aunt once. Terrified me. Had these mad eyes and a really high-pitched voice, used to go off in the dead of night. Then when I was nine the neighbour’s dog chewed it up and its head came off. Still talked, too.”
Ianto now exchanged looks with Jack. “Sounds like we have that dog to blame for you turning out like you did.”
“But if you can talk, how come you didn’t say anything earlier when we were cutting you - fine, when I was cutting you up?” Owen amended after Ianto elbowed him. “Did you know that the immortality had transferred over or was it just a pride thing?”
“Ianto, bring Jack here for a minute!” Tosh called, before Jack could mime an answer. Gwen and Tosh were examining the stats of a device with so much external wiring it looked like a cat’s cradle, spinning slowly in a circle on her monitors.
“Here,” said Tosh, pointing at one of her screens. “Was it this one?” She had taped Jack’s drawing next to it, allowing them all to appreciate just how poor a rendition it was.
Ianto stared. “That was deemed dangerous by the London branch, no one was supposed to touch it!”
“Sounds like the kind of thing that Jack would start messing around with,” muttered Gwen.
In Ianto’s arms Jack was waving his paws.
“What, it was that one?” asked Ianto, setting Jack on the desktop. Jack nodded, jabbing at the screen with one paw.
“Ah.” Tosh bit her lip.
“Ah?” Owen repeated. “What’s “ah”?”
Tosh covered her mouth. “Oh dear.”
“What is it, what?” asked Gwen, looking from Toshiko to the screen. Jack jumped up and down impatiently, grabbing hold of Toshiko’s shoulder.
Tosh pointed at the morpher. “Watch it.” She hit a few keys and the film rewound, Jack walking backward and out of frame. She paused it and then played it. They watched Jack walk on screen and pick up the device. There was a flash of light, and a moment later Jack bear and the morpher fell out of midair, the device hit another stray piece of alien tech on Toshiko’s desk, and both vanished.
“What was that? The thing that it hit -?” asked Gwen.
“A teleportation device,” said Tosh, her hand coming up to cover her eyes. “I thought it was broken.”
“Obviously not,” Owen muttered. “What now? Tosh, can you find out where they went somehow?”
“I can try, give me a minute. And someone, take Jack out of the way,” she added, batting at Jack who, in an attempt to better see the screens was standing on Toshiko’s keyboard. Ianto picked him up and held him up. “Out of the way,” Toshiko repeated in annoyance, as one of Jack’s feet kicked her in the back of the head. Ianto stepped to the side, raising Jack a little higher up.
Toshiko paused, watching the results roll across the screen, sighed heavily and then began typing furiously.
“You can’t track them, then,” said Owen, doing little to hide his disappointment.
“Just give me a minute, let me try this,” Toshiko muttered, eyes fixed on the screen. She stopped again, hands hovering over the keyboard. A small window popped up and she banged a fist against the desktop in frustration.
“Well?” asked Owen.
Toshiko pursed her lips. “No, I can’t track them. However,” she added, before Owen could say anything, “I can make an educated guess where they went. I’ve been fiddling around with the teleporter for a bit, now. I would have been doing trials on it tomorrow.” She glared at Jack out of the corner of her eye. Jack twisted his head away as though whistling. She turned back to Owen.
“Given that I’ve set the co-ordinates right, it should have teleported back to my flat.”
“And if you haven’t set them right?” asked Gwen.
Toshiko bit her lip, grabbing a pad up off the desk and flipping through the pages. “If I’ve got them wrong then they’ve probably ended up somewhere around…” She frowned. “Ah.”
“Oh dear,” Ianto murmured.
“Where?” asked Owen.
“You know that place in the arcade, the one that sells the buttons and bracelets and stuff?”
“There?”
“No, there’s an empty space next to it. Used to be a junk shop. Provided that my calculations are correct they could have gone there instead.”
“Right.” Owen clapped his hands. “Let’s split up. Tosh, you check out your apartment, Gwen, you take the old junk shop -”
“Oh, and just what will you be doing?” Gwen demanded.
“You can’t send Gwen there by herself,” said Tosh, pulling on her coat. “The place is still full of old stock. It’ll take her forever to sort through all that lot on her own.”
Owen shrugged, trying not to look smug. “Someone needs to hang around in case we’re needed somewhere else.”
Ianto snorted while Gwen grabbed Owen’s arm and started dragging him toward the door. “Nice try.”
Tosh swung her handbag onto her shoulder and followed, smiling sympathetically at Ianto. “Good luck with it.”
Ianto glanced down at Jack. “Look like all we can do is wait.”
Jack nodded and sat down heavily, covering his eyes with his paws.
“Oh, come on, it’s not going to be that bad. Look, I know we didn’t get off to a flying start today, but you don’t have to worry. They’ll find it.” He patted Jack encouragingly on the back, which knocked Jack over, flat on his face.
Over the next half hour Jack managed to pace the length of Toshiko’s desk, turn around and pace back again without falling over, and Ianto managed not to laugh at it, which he felt was quite an accomplishment.
“Is it that you can only say a certain phrase? The voice thing,” Ianto clarified when Jack cocked his head. He looked strangely cute like that, if you could forget for a moment that he was an actual person turned into a teddy bear.
Jack put a paw to his cheek, as though he were blushing.
“Ah. Right.”
Jack shook his head, and straightened, drawing himself up to his full height - presently about forty centimetres.
“Hug me!”
Ianto couldn’t help but burst out laughing, imaging the real, human Jack wandering around in his big boots and sweeping military coat saying nothing but “Hug me!” in that silly bouncy voice that adults seemed convinced children would respond to. That Jack was trying to shut him up by slapping him with his fluffy, useless little fists didn’t help things much.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Ianto choked finally, when Jack had stomped away a short distance and dropped down with his back to Ianto, folding his arms and crossing his legs. “I’m sorry,” he said again, after clearing his throat.
The bear remained unmoved.
“Jack -”
The bear shook its head, apparently having regressed into a four year old at the same time as being turned into a bear. Ianto sighed and picked him up, despite his protestations.
“I said sorry,” he said.
The bear shook its head and looked away. Ianto sighed. Jack turned his head back around again, tilting it to one side again.
“I mean it,” Ianto insisted, though he was only starting to appreciate just how odd the situation was. “I’m sorry. It’s not fair us having a laugh at you while you’re like this.”
Jack gave him a curt nod.
“It must have been pretty scary those first few minutes.” Jack raised a paw and waved it, which Ianto took to mean “a little”.
“And when Owen - when we cut you open and ripped the stuffing out.”
Jack nodded again enthusiastically.
Ianto, unable to think of anything else to say, did the only sensible to do with a teddy bear. He pulled him into a hug. Not the crushing one which would have squashed Jack’s stuffing that Ianto’s inner child was having the urge to give, but a gentler one, which gave Jack room to move. Jack reciprocated as mush as his short arms allowed, propping his head against Ianto’s shoulder.
“So sorry, am I interrupting?” Owen stood in the doorway looking on in amusement which was only half malicious.
Ianto tucked Jack back under his arm, then turned him over when he realised that Jack was the wrong way up. “Did you find it?”
“Found something,” Owen said, holding up what looked like an old fashioned birdcage. “See the symbols around the top here? They match that resonator thing that Tosh found in the stockroom of Forbidden Planet the other week. We reckoned we should bring it back, just in case.”
“No teleporter, no morpher?”
Owen shook his head. “Sorry, Harkness,” he added to the bear. “You could be a teddy for a bit longer yet.”
Jack’s shoulders heaved and his head drooped.
Owen patted his head. “Don’t worry about it too much. I’m sure Ianto will still take you to bed with him.” He managed to jump back and out of punching range and Ianto habitually moved to throw whatever was to hand. In this case, Jack. Owen, unable to dodge him in time and also acting on instinct swung the birdcage and sent Jack flying into the wall.
Ianto snatched him back up and gave him a tight hug. “Sorry.”
Owen gave the abused bear an awkward pat on the back. “Er, yeah. Sorry about that.”
“What’s going on?” They turned as one to see Gwen peering at them from the doorway.
“Nothing,” said Owen and Ianto as one. Jack corroborated the lie with a shake of his head.
Gwen’s frown deepened, but she shrugged and said, “I rang Tosh to let her know we came up empty - she’s curious about the birdcage. She hasn’t found it yet but she says there are still plenty of places it could be,” she added to Jack. The bear nodded sadly.
Another half hour passed. Despite Gwen’s efforts to cheer him up Jack’s pacing continued to improve.
Finally, the phone rang. Gwen and Owen almost banged heads reaching to answer it. Owen shoved her out of the way and picked it up.
“About bloody time, woman! Okay, I’ll put you on speaker phone.” He pressed a button and they gathered around the speaker, Gwen holding Jack up so he could listen.
“Okay, I’ve got some good news and some not so great news.”
“The good news?” asked Gwen.
“I’ve found the teleporter. And whatever it is that turned Jack into a teddy bear.”
Everyone exchanged glances. “But…?” Ianto prompted.
“They’re both a little out of my reach.”
“Tosh, where are they?” asked Gwen, losing patience.
Tosh cleared her throat nervously. “You know that ledge outside my window, Owen, the one you dared Jack to walk on that time?”
“The one with the four floor drop?” said Owen, heart sinking.
“That’s the one,” said Tosh.
“Shit.”
“Oh, yes.”
“You haven’t tried to get it, have you?” Owen asked.
“With that drop? God, no. I think we’re going to need some climbing ropes.”
Jack bear raised one foot and stamped it on the desktop to get everyone’s attention.
“What is it?” asked Ianto.
“Jack’s trying to tell us something,” Owen explained to Tosh.
Jack gestured to himself and then mimed climbing.
“You - you want to go and get it?” said Gwen doubtfully.
“Jack, that’s not a good idea,” said Tosh. “It’s too windy. Even if you didn’t fall you’d end up dropping them and if the device that turned you into a bear got damaged…”
There was a short silence. Jack bear just nodded and folded his arms.
“Jack, I don’t care if you’re the leader, you’re a fucking teddy bear,” said Owen. “You’re not doing it!”
Jack’s paws shook and he looked around. He scooped up a pen and beckoned to Ianto who laid a sheet of paper in front of him and uncapped the pen for him. Jack scribbled quickly and messily and pushed the paper towards Gwen.
She picked it up and read it.
“Even if I’m a teddy bear, I am still the leader. This is my concern and mine alone. No one else is going to risk their life so I can be turned back into a human.” She put the paper back down in front of him. “Are you sure? Tosh has got a point, if you break it somehow we probably won’t be able to turn you back.”
“Ever,” Owen added.
Jack simply folded his arms and stood straight.
“You still want to do it, then?” Ianto guessed.
Jack gave a single nod.
“I suppose one of us could stand at the bottom of the building. In case he falls,” said Ianto doubtfully.
Owen nodded, looking equally unconvinced. “He has got a point, though - it’s not worth losing anyone over. And even if he fell it wouldn’t kill him. Even if he didn’t bounce and died on impact we’ve seen that he’ll come back to life. We just need to make sure some kid doesn’t pick him up.”
Jack nodded enthusiastically.
Owen shrugged at Gwen and Ianto. “He is still the leader.”
It was really quite incredible how smug a teddy bear with a face stitched in place could manage to look.
By the time they got to Toshiko’s flat she had managed to clear her furniture away from the window.
“Are we still using the climbing ropes?” she asked Jack, currently being held by Ianto.
The bear shook his head and struggled free, leaping down to the floor, causing Toshiko to take a step back. He scuttled across the floor to the window, though despite his jumps he couldn’t reach the sill. Toshiko stooped down, though hesitated before setting him down on the window sill. “Have we got anyone waiting at the bottom?”
Ianto nodded. “Both Owen and Gwen. They’ve got a sheet to catch him in case he loses his balance while he transforms back into a human.”
“Good to know someone’s put some thought into this,” said Tosh, giving Jack a pointed look. Jack simply pointed at the sill with his paw.
“Have you got a cover story?” Ianto asked.
“I’m babysitting one of my nephews who has a tendency to mistreat his toys. Including this very nice teddy that his Granddad bought him for his birthday,” she said, stroking the top of Jack’s head.
“Okay. Gwen, Owen, we’re good to go,” Ianto told the others over the comms.
Tosh picked Jack up again and set him carefully on the small ledge outside the window. She could see their point; if Jack managed to get hold of it and change back there was no way he would be able to keep his balance. “Okay, there you go. You better see what you can do while the wind’s down.”
Jack, pressing his back against the wall, nodded to her and began to edge along the ledge, pausing every now and again, leaning hard against the wall to keep his balance. He managed to reach the devices, stacked precariously one on top of the other, without incident. However, to even try and pick them up he needed to come away from the side. On his first try the wind picked up and he had to back up against the wall again. From the window Ianto and Tosh tensed, while below Owen and Gwen unfolded the sheet between them, getting ready.
The wind died down again and Jack turned quickly and tried to snatch up them up, but they slipped through his paws. Mentally cursing his lack of thumbs he snatched them up again, trying to hug them to his chest. The two devices knocked against one another and quite suddenly, there wasn’t enough ledge. In a flurry of coat Jack lost all balance and tumbled over the edge. Beneath him Owen and Gwen snapped the blanket taught between them, ready to catch him, but then, two feet above them, he vanished.
He re-appeared in midair above Toshiko’s kitchen worktop, braining himself on the edge, scaring Toshiko and Ianto who had been watching out of the living room window. By the time they had joined him he was sitting up, rubbing the back of his neck and looking sheepishly at the bloodstains on the floor.
“It’s okay, Gwen,” said Ianto into his comm. “We’ve got him.”
“Sorry about that,” Jack said to Toshiko. He put a hand on the edge of the worktop, but it slipped in a puddle of what appeared to be a mix of blood and brain fluid and he landed on his backside again.
Toshiko had picked up the morpher using a pair of salad tongs and placed it carefully in a sandwich bag. Jack managed to get to his feet, the teleporter in hand.
“We’re locking that in the archives the minute we get back,” said Jack, nodding at the sandwich bag.
“Along with all the other alien tech that London classified as dangerous,” said Ianto, giving Jack a pointed look. “I’m sure there was one in there that drains certain body fluids.”
When they got back to the Hub Toshiko’s computers had detected surges in Rift energy. Toshiko took up position at her workstation, while Owen, Gwen and Jack returned to the SUV. Ianto seized the opportunity to clear away the more dangerous pieces of alien tech that London had sent them into the archives. Some two hours later he and Toshiko had packed away the potentially most dangerous devices and the others returned with a fresh Weevil in tow.
“Well,” said Owen, making a show of yawning and stretching. “I think I’m going to call it a night.”
“Sounds like a good idea.” Gwen agreed, checking the time. “Rhys should be back by now. It’s movie night, tonight.”
“Think I might toddle off too,” said Toshiko, rubbing her eyes. “I’ve got a bloody kitchen to clean up.” She shot Jack a dirty look.
“I’ll clean it!” he protested. “I said I would, I meant it.”
Toshiko, pulling on her coat, didn’t look convinced. “You all have a good night,” she said, picking up her bag and making for the door.
“Night!” called Ianto.
“Hold on, Tosh, I’ll give you a lift!” said Gwen, snatching up her coat and waving quickly at the others before dashing after her.
Owen rolled his eyes. “Make sure he doesn’t turn himself into anything, yeah?” he said to Ianto, jerking his head at Jack before proceeding to the invisible lift. “See you tomorrow!” he called from halfway up.
Jack retreated back to his office, Ianto reappearing with a cup of tea in each hand. “Been a weird day, hasn’t it?” he remarked, holding out a cup to Jack. “Even by our standards.”
Jack nodded distractedly, taking the tea and balancing it precariously on the edge of a large pile of files. Ianto rolled his eyes and replaced it beside the desk lamp.
“I’m sure there was more of it than this,” Jack muttered, rummaging around in the crate.
“Leave it for now,” Ianto suggested, loosening his tie. “Come on, have a drink. Enjoy being human again.”
Jack didn’t look up, but smirked. “I had other plans to celebrate. When you’re a bear, people expect things of you, you know. Got to keep it clean.”
Ianto snorted. “Yes, feeling up both female members of staff -”
Jack laid a placating hand on Ianto’s shoulder. “I’d have felt you and Owen up too if you’d given me the opportunity,” he said, picking up his cup and taking a sip of tea.
“One of the reasons, I think, Owen left most of the bear handling to me,” said Ianto. Jack handed his cup back to Ianto and shoved the files roughly off his desk, turning around to raise an eyebrow suggestively at him.
Ianto looked down at the mess of folders. “I really hope this isn’t your idea of foreplay.”
Jack sat back on the desk, pretending to strike a sexy pose. Ianto put the mugs down on the floor, rolling his eyes but unable to hide his smile. “What am I supposed to do with you?”
“I can think of a few things,” said Jack, grabbing Ianto’s tie and pulling him forward as he lay back -
- and stared up at his paws in disbelief. He pulled himself up and turned around, rubbing his lower back. On his desk one of the morpher’s stray wires had pierced the sandwich bag and jabbed him in the back. It was probably things like this that gave sex at work a bad name in this day and age. Turning around he saw Ianto hunched over with his paws over his eyes. Jack patted him on the back, sensing anything more intimate would not be appreciated. If they could cut the sandwich bag open somehow they’d be able to change back before the others turned up the next day.
If Toshiko got in first, especially after having spent an evening scrubbing his bloodstains, they could be in real trouble.
Author:
shadowbyrd
Rating(s): PG
Warning(s): Fluff. Literally.
Word Count: 6148
Summary: Jack has been turned into a teddy bear. The team despairs.
A/N: Dedicated to Torchwoodbears across the net, but especially
laligin's Ianto and Jack bears,
atraphoenix's Four bear,
sasha_lilyrat's Tosh bear and all of
joulez217's bears.
Tosh stifled her seventeenth yawn and she fiddled with the keys for the TIC. Ianto had insisted that the situation was all very urgent and couldn’t be explained over the phone. If this was all over an unusual unidentified energy signal she was going to have to get violent, she decided, as she shoved the door open and then shut it behind her. Or perhaps let those big yellow slugs Owen had loose, the ones that left all that thick slime -
She stopped short in plotting her revenge upon entering the Hub and spotting the teddy bear that Ianto had under his arm. The teddy bear in a little grey military coat, even with braces. She took a moment to re-consider her surroundings, reasoning if this were a dream then the specifics wouldn’t be quite right, but on finding everything as it should be she proceeded to Jack’s office.
“What’s going on?” she asked, biting back another yawn.
“We can’t find Jack,” said Ianto. He looked worried, but it was difficult to take him seriously with the bear wedged under one arm.
“He’s not anywhere in the Hub,” Owen added, rubbing his eyes. “We looked, top to bottom.”
“Have you tried tracing his comm?” Tosh asked, making a valiant attempt not to stare at the bear.
“Wouldn’t do a lot of good.” Ianto pulled it out of his pocket. “It was just lying on the floor in here. Something must have happened to him, he takes better care than that.”
“When did you realise he was missing?”
“Who’s missing?” Gwen asked around a wide yawn, shrugging her jacket off as she entered. She stopped dead upon seeing the bear under Ianto’s arm. “And what the hell is that?”
“It’s Jack -”
Gwen stared. “The bear?”
“No,” said Owen impatiently “He’s the one who’s gone missing.”
“Without his comm,” Toshiko added. “We were just trying to establish what time he might have disappeared.”
“Who was the last to see or hear from him?” asked Gwen.
“I had a call from him at around two,” said Ianto, fingering the earpiece. “He’d hung up by the time I’d picked up the phone. I tried calling him back a couple of times, but he didn’t answer, so I came by here to see if anything was wrong. I found this sat in his chair,” he indicated the teddy bear, “but I couldn’t find Jack.”
“You’re sure?” asked Gwen slowly.
“Yes!” said Owen and Ianto.
“I’ll go and check the CCTV,” said Tosh. “See if there were any visitors this morning.”
“We already tried checking for unusual energy surges, but I don’t know; you might find something we missed,” Ianto told her.
Tosh nodded and took up her workstation to set to work.
“Is there anything else missing?” asked Gwen. “Any of the Weevils or -”
“All non-human boarders are present and correct,” said Owen, folding his arms. “It’s interesting though, they seemed perfectly normal until we went past - then they started to get all fidgety, y’know the way dogs get sometimes, and people say it’s ‘cause they can twig something’s going on -”
“Owen!” Gwen snapped.
“I’m just saying - interesting.” Owen smirked. “Maybe we could try putting Janet on a chain, give her the scent, see if she can’t track him down.”
Ianto rolled his eyes. “Let’s try a few other options first.”
Gwen wrapped her arms around herself, looking uncomfortable. “You don’t think this is like the last time, do you?”
Owen and Ianto exchanged glances. “Last time he had all his stuff with him; comm, gun - I mean I can see him maybe going somewhere without the comm, but he doesn’t go anywhere without the gun,” said Owen.
“His gun’s still here?” Gwen asked, hopeful and worried.
“On the desk. With this thing.” Ianto pulled the bear from under his arm and looked it over. “You think it could be some kind message or -”
The bear’s arms clamped down suddenly over Ianto’s hands. Ianto jumped and nearly dropped it.
“Its arms move? They looked like they were just stuffed.”
“They are,” said Ianto, sounding faintly horrified. “There’s nothing but stuffing in it.”
Owen reached out and squeezed one of its arms, then a leg and then the top of its head. The moment he took his hand away the bear’s head turned, eerily slow, toward Owen, who took a step back, swearing.
“It’s alive. It’s full of cotton wool and the fucking thing’s alive.”
Gwen looked from the bear to Ianto to Owen. “What do we do with it?”
Owen narrowed his eyes at it. “Take it through to the autopsy room.”
Ianto hugged the bear to his chest to try and pin its wildly flailing arms. “You’re going to cut it up?” He sounded scandalised.
Owen grabbed Ianto’s arm and tried to steer him out of the office. “There could be some kind of alien power source in it. We should remove it.”
“It’s a teddy bear, Owen,” said Ianto, dangling it by one arm in Owen’s face. “A stuffed animal, it’s not like it’s going to -”
The bear gripped Ianto’s hand with its other paw and swung, kicking Owen in the face with both feet. Owen stepped back, raising his hands, while the bear swung again on Ianto’s hand and jumped onto Owen, grabbing his hair and pressing itself against his face.
Owen staggered forward, bouncing off Ianto and hitting the door frame.
“Get it off me, get it off me!” he howled, clawing at it. Gwen and Ianto went to grab it at the same time, Gwen ending up with a fistful of Owen’s hair while Ianto managed to somehow shove his hand in Owen’s face, doing a better job of smothering Owen than the bear had been. Working together - Ianto pulling on Owen, Gwen pulling on the bear - they managed to separate them.
Gwen held it away from her, holding on to it tightly by the arms. Unable to move its arms it began to squirm and kick its legs in a frantic yet futile manner.
Owen glared at it. “Bring that thing down to the autopsy room.”
Toshiko stared at them as they trooped past her. “What are you -”
“Just keep working on the CCTV, yeah, Tosh?” Owen snapped.
“You don’t think we’re going a bit far here, do you?” Gwen asked as she descended the steps into the autopsy room. “I mean, I know it attacked you, but you were squeezing it - I’d take a swing at you if you tried squeezing my head -”
She had released one of the bear’s arms to gesture. Seizing this opportunity the bear latched on to her other arm and tried to climb up it. Gwen screamed and staggered forward, nearly falling down the steps as she shook her arm, smacking at the bear as it hung on for dear life. Ianto managed to stop her falling and Owen reached over, grabbed its ankles and yanked until it came free. The bear tried to swing forward, paws clawing at the air, obviously with plans for Owen’s crotch.
With no small amount of grim satisfaction Owen carried it over to the table and pinned it down. Ianto took its legs and Owen jerked his head at Gwen.
“C’mon, try not to let the bloody thing go this time.”
Gwen scowled but took over from him, this time using a white-knuckled grip. The bear squirmed and fought, renewing its efforts when Owen began pulling out scalpels. It was a faintly distressing sight to say the least.
“Are you sure we should be doing this?” Gwen asked, as Owen approached. The bear had swivelled its head to look at Owen and though its stitched expression remained the same there was something about its eyes - the way it was shaking, for God’s sake.
Ianto too looked as though he was having doubts.
“What, you think it’s an alien life form that happens to look exactly like a teddy? It’s probably been left by that bastard Captain John, or whatever he calls himself. Do we really want something of his swanning around here, something that can choke us and will be able to squeeze through small gaps? Just hold it still.”
Ianto averted his gaze. Gwen screwed her eyes shut. A moment later the fluff flew into the air as Owen hacked his way into the bear’s chest. After a few moments of twitching it stilled completely.
Owen paused, then tried stabbing with the scalpel he was holding. “Must have hit something,” he muttered. “Keep hold of it anyway, just in case,” he added to Gwen and Ianto.
“What, you think it’s trying to bluff us?” asked Ianto, wincing slightly as Owen began to pull out of the stuffing chunk by chunk. Owen emptied the bear out but the stuffing was completely ordinary and devoid of any alien nanotechnology.
Owen sighed. “Nothing.” Ianto and Gwen let go, craning in for a better look.
“Maybe if you tried taking apart his head -” Gwen suggested.
“Don’t do anything to the bear!” Toshiko appeared at the top of the steps, all but falling over the banister as she leaned over. “Don’t do anything to… the…” Her eyes widened at the fluffy carnage beneath her. “What did you cut him open for?”
“Him?” said Gwen.
“That’s Jack!” said Tosh pointing at the prone, emptied bear. “I was checking back through the CCTV and he was sorting through some of the artefacts and one of them turned him into a teddy bear!”
“What?” said Ianto.
“What are you saying, we’ve just killed Jack? Again?” asked Owen looking from Toshiko back to the bear.
“He’ll come back again, though, won’t he?” asked Gwen anxiously.
Ianto began shoving the stuffing back in, pulling the lips of the wound together. Tosh clambered down to join them as they all watched nervously.
After a moment the wisps of stuffing curled in on themselves and sucked back into the wound. The stuffing re-distributed itself through the bear’s body, returning it to its proper shape. The wound itself seemed to zip shut, the threading snapping back together. A moment later the bear jumped up, one of its shoes in hand, and hurled it at Owen. It then turned, paws on hips to stare at the rest of them.
Gwen leant forward hesitantly. “…Jack?”
The bear covered its eyes with its paws and then raised his arms up as though saying finally.
Tosh mimicked Gwen. “Can you say anything or…”
Jack shook his head, though his bear body apparently lacked a point of articulation in the neck, and so he had to shake his whole body from side to side.
Owen cursed, rubbing his forehead. Ianto took the shoe off him and handed it back to Jack. “Be rather difficult for him to talk with his mouth sewn shut.”
Owen smirked. “Why didn’t we think of it before?” The bear raised the shoe threateningly.
Tosh pushed his paw down. “I need you to look through some pictures, see if we can find what it was that turned you into… this.”
Jack pulled his paw back from her hand, nodding. Then he paused, looking around, and looked up at Tosh, raising his paws up to her.
Exchanging uncomfortable glances with Ianto and Gwen, Tosh reached down and picked him up, resting him on her hip like a baby. “This is weird,” she muttered.
They sat around Toshiko’s work station, Jack now in both shoes, with enough balance to stand straight. Most of his efforts to walk normally, however, saw him fall flat on his nose.
“Okay, I can’t zoom in close enough to identify which one it was you were holding but maybe of you could - oh. What are you doing?”
Jack had clamped a pen between his paws and was trying to drag it over a bit of paper.
“No, no, not on that,” said Tosh, picking him up and off the table. The pen slid through his paws and clattered on to the desk. “Ianto, get some paper or something would you, those are police documents.”
Gwen snatched up the documents and went to file them away while Ianto went off in search of paper.
Owen tilted his head. “Huh. That’s the kind of treatment I can expect I’ll have to try this morpher thing out some time.”
Tosh frowned. “What are you - hey!” She felt a paw move. Looking down she realised how she was holding Jack, face squashed into her cleavage and Jack, being Jack, wasn’t letting the situation go to waste.
“You pervert!” Tosh yelled, flushing violently, hurling the bear away while Owen fell around laughing.
Gwen rushed forward and caught him, cradling him to her. “Tosh, what did you do that for?”
“He was feeling her up,” Owen laughed, clapping his hands. Tosh leant across and punched him on the arm.
Gwen sniggered. “It’s Jack, Tosh, what do you expect?” Then she looked down, realised how she was holding him and how Jack was taking advantage of that situation and with a scream hurled him at Owen.
“What?” asked Owen, just catching hold of Jack by an ear. “It’s Jack, Gwen, what you expect?”
“Owen, don’t hold him like that,” said Ianto, re-appearing with a pad of paper.
“Hey, you want to cuddle up to him, go for it,” said Owen holding him out by his ear to Ianto. “He’s been getting a little bit too friendly.”
Ianto took him and placed him feet first on the floor, putting the pad in front of him and handing him a pen. “Draw what you were going to draw,” he told Jack, crouching next to him.
It was with some difficulty that Jack took up the pen between his paws and produced a very wobbly sketch of a device, covered in scribbles that were probably meant to be wires. In the corner he had provided a smaller sketch of it with a stick person to show the scale.
“What do you think?” Ianto asked Tosh, Jack squirming under his arm.
Tosh frowned at the drawing. “I’m not sure. Is this line meant to be here or was it an accident?”
Ianto held Jack up so he could see. The bear nodded frantically.
“And this one?” Tosh asked doubtfully.
Jack nodded again.
“Huh. Well, if this some kind of handle -”
Jack began to flail.
“So, that line’s not to be there? Okay, how about I just try this up against the images I was going to show you in first place?”
Jack seemed to consider this for a moment and finally nodded.
“Okay.” Tosh nodded back and turned back to her computer quickly. There was something just a little bit creepy about playing “yes/no” with a teddy bear.
“Just imagine if we were able to harness its power somehow,” said Owen.
Gwen scoffed. “Yeah, a device that can turn humans in teddy bears. That’s really going to forward humankind.”
Owen shrugged. “It would have its advantages.”
“Such as?” Gwen asked dubiously.
Owen didn’t answer, apparently too lost in his own thoughts. As a slow, wide smile spread across his face Gwen backed away, muttering something about tea.
“It would be useful for spying on people, I suppose. Provided that anyone turned into a bear could see and hear - I’m still not quite sure how that works by the way,” Ianto added to Jack. “I mean, you have glass eyes, but that doesn’t stop you seeing the same way that the stitched up mouth stops you speaking?” Jack shrugged and tucked his hands behind his back, head high in a “whistling inconspicuously” pose. Ianto and Owen, now snapped out of his day dream, exchanged glances and rolled their eyes.
“Is that your cute way of saying that you actually can talk, you’re just choosing not to?” asked Owen. “Have you got a stupid voice, or something? I got a stuffed dog that could talk off my aunt once. Terrified me. Had these mad eyes and a really high-pitched voice, used to go off in the dead of night. Then when I was nine the neighbour’s dog chewed it up and its head came off. Still talked, too.”
Ianto now exchanged looks with Jack. “Sounds like we have that dog to blame for you turning out like you did.”
“But if you can talk, how come you didn’t say anything earlier when we were cutting you - fine, when I was cutting you up?” Owen amended after Ianto elbowed him. “Did you know that the immortality had transferred over or was it just a pride thing?”
“Ianto, bring Jack here for a minute!” Tosh called, before Jack could mime an answer. Gwen and Tosh were examining the stats of a device with so much external wiring it looked like a cat’s cradle, spinning slowly in a circle on her monitors.
“Here,” said Tosh, pointing at one of her screens. “Was it this one?” She had taped Jack’s drawing next to it, allowing them all to appreciate just how poor a rendition it was.
Ianto stared. “That was deemed dangerous by the London branch, no one was supposed to touch it!”
“Sounds like the kind of thing that Jack would start messing around with,” muttered Gwen.
In Ianto’s arms Jack was waving his paws.
“What, it was that one?” asked Ianto, setting Jack on the desktop. Jack nodded, jabbing at the screen with one paw.
“Ah.” Tosh bit her lip.
“Ah?” Owen repeated. “What’s “ah”?”
Tosh covered her mouth. “Oh dear.”
“What is it, what?” asked Gwen, looking from Toshiko to the screen. Jack jumped up and down impatiently, grabbing hold of Toshiko’s shoulder.
Tosh pointed at the morpher. “Watch it.” She hit a few keys and the film rewound, Jack walking backward and out of frame. She paused it and then played it. They watched Jack walk on screen and pick up the device. There was a flash of light, and a moment later Jack bear and the morpher fell out of midair, the device hit another stray piece of alien tech on Toshiko’s desk, and both vanished.
“What was that? The thing that it hit -?” asked Gwen.
“A teleportation device,” said Tosh, her hand coming up to cover her eyes. “I thought it was broken.”
“Obviously not,” Owen muttered. “What now? Tosh, can you find out where they went somehow?”
“I can try, give me a minute. And someone, take Jack out of the way,” she added, batting at Jack who, in an attempt to better see the screens was standing on Toshiko’s keyboard. Ianto picked him up and held him up. “Out of the way,” Toshiko repeated in annoyance, as one of Jack’s feet kicked her in the back of the head. Ianto stepped to the side, raising Jack a little higher up.
Toshiko paused, watching the results roll across the screen, sighed heavily and then began typing furiously.
“You can’t track them, then,” said Owen, doing little to hide his disappointment.
“Just give me a minute, let me try this,” Toshiko muttered, eyes fixed on the screen. She stopped again, hands hovering over the keyboard. A small window popped up and she banged a fist against the desktop in frustration.
“Well?” asked Owen.
Toshiko pursed her lips. “No, I can’t track them. However,” she added, before Owen could say anything, “I can make an educated guess where they went. I’ve been fiddling around with the teleporter for a bit, now. I would have been doing trials on it tomorrow.” She glared at Jack out of the corner of her eye. Jack twisted his head away as though whistling. She turned back to Owen.
“Given that I’ve set the co-ordinates right, it should have teleported back to my flat.”
“And if you haven’t set them right?” asked Gwen.
Toshiko bit her lip, grabbing a pad up off the desk and flipping through the pages. “If I’ve got them wrong then they’ve probably ended up somewhere around…” She frowned. “Ah.”
“Oh dear,” Ianto murmured.
“Where?” asked Owen.
“You know that place in the arcade, the one that sells the buttons and bracelets and stuff?”
“There?”
“No, there’s an empty space next to it. Used to be a junk shop. Provided that my calculations are correct they could have gone there instead.”
“Right.” Owen clapped his hands. “Let’s split up. Tosh, you check out your apartment, Gwen, you take the old junk shop -”
“Oh, and just what will you be doing?” Gwen demanded.
“You can’t send Gwen there by herself,” said Tosh, pulling on her coat. “The place is still full of old stock. It’ll take her forever to sort through all that lot on her own.”
Owen shrugged, trying not to look smug. “Someone needs to hang around in case we’re needed somewhere else.”
Ianto snorted while Gwen grabbed Owen’s arm and started dragging him toward the door. “Nice try.”
Tosh swung her handbag onto her shoulder and followed, smiling sympathetically at Ianto. “Good luck with it.”
Ianto glanced down at Jack. “Look like all we can do is wait.”
Jack nodded and sat down heavily, covering his eyes with his paws.
“Oh, come on, it’s not going to be that bad. Look, I know we didn’t get off to a flying start today, but you don’t have to worry. They’ll find it.” He patted Jack encouragingly on the back, which knocked Jack over, flat on his face.
Over the next half hour Jack managed to pace the length of Toshiko’s desk, turn around and pace back again without falling over, and Ianto managed not to laugh at it, which he felt was quite an accomplishment.
“Is it that you can only say a certain phrase? The voice thing,” Ianto clarified when Jack cocked his head. He looked strangely cute like that, if you could forget for a moment that he was an actual person turned into a teddy bear.
Jack put a paw to his cheek, as though he were blushing.
“Ah. Right.”
Jack shook his head, and straightened, drawing himself up to his full height - presently about forty centimetres.
“Hug me!”
Ianto couldn’t help but burst out laughing, imaging the real, human Jack wandering around in his big boots and sweeping military coat saying nothing but “Hug me!” in that silly bouncy voice that adults seemed convinced children would respond to. That Jack was trying to shut him up by slapping him with his fluffy, useless little fists didn’t help things much.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Ianto choked finally, when Jack had stomped away a short distance and dropped down with his back to Ianto, folding his arms and crossing his legs. “I’m sorry,” he said again, after clearing his throat.
The bear remained unmoved.
“Jack -”
The bear shook its head, apparently having regressed into a four year old at the same time as being turned into a bear. Ianto sighed and picked him up, despite his protestations.
“I said sorry,” he said.
The bear shook its head and looked away. Ianto sighed. Jack turned his head back around again, tilting it to one side again.
“I mean it,” Ianto insisted, though he was only starting to appreciate just how odd the situation was. “I’m sorry. It’s not fair us having a laugh at you while you’re like this.”
Jack gave him a curt nod.
“It must have been pretty scary those first few minutes.” Jack raised a paw and waved it, which Ianto took to mean “a little”.
“And when Owen - when we cut you open and ripped the stuffing out.”
Jack nodded again enthusiastically.
Ianto, unable to think of anything else to say, did the only sensible to do with a teddy bear. He pulled him into a hug. Not the crushing one which would have squashed Jack’s stuffing that Ianto’s inner child was having the urge to give, but a gentler one, which gave Jack room to move. Jack reciprocated as mush as his short arms allowed, propping his head against Ianto’s shoulder.
“So sorry, am I interrupting?” Owen stood in the doorway looking on in amusement which was only half malicious.
Ianto tucked Jack back under his arm, then turned him over when he realised that Jack was the wrong way up. “Did you find it?”
“Found something,” Owen said, holding up what looked like an old fashioned birdcage. “See the symbols around the top here? They match that resonator thing that Tosh found in the stockroom of Forbidden Planet the other week. We reckoned we should bring it back, just in case.”
“No teleporter, no morpher?”
Owen shook his head. “Sorry, Harkness,” he added to the bear. “You could be a teddy for a bit longer yet.”
Jack’s shoulders heaved and his head drooped.
Owen patted his head. “Don’t worry about it too much. I’m sure Ianto will still take you to bed with him.” He managed to jump back and out of punching range and Ianto habitually moved to throw whatever was to hand. In this case, Jack. Owen, unable to dodge him in time and also acting on instinct swung the birdcage and sent Jack flying into the wall.
Ianto snatched him back up and gave him a tight hug. “Sorry.”
Owen gave the abused bear an awkward pat on the back. “Er, yeah. Sorry about that.”
“What’s going on?” They turned as one to see Gwen peering at them from the doorway.
“Nothing,” said Owen and Ianto as one. Jack corroborated the lie with a shake of his head.
Gwen’s frown deepened, but she shrugged and said, “I rang Tosh to let her know we came up empty - she’s curious about the birdcage. She hasn’t found it yet but she says there are still plenty of places it could be,” she added to Jack. The bear nodded sadly.
Another half hour passed. Despite Gwen’s efforts to cheer him up Jack’s pacing continued to improve.
Finally, the phone rang. Gwen and Owen almost banged heads reaching to answer it. Owen shoved her out of the way and picked it up.
“About bloody time, woman! Okay, I’ll put you on speaker phone.” He pressed a button and they gathered around the speaker, Gwen holding Jack up so he could listen.
“Okay, I’ve got some good news and some not so great news.”
“The good news?” asked Gwen.
“I’ve found the teleporter. And whatever it is that turned Jack into a teddy bear.”
Everyone exchanged glances. “But…?” Ianto prompted.
“They’re both a little out of my reach.”
“Tosh, where are they?” asked Gwen, losing patience.
Tosh cleared her throat nervously. “You know that ledge outside my window, Owen, the one you dared Jack to walk on that time?”
“The one with the four floor drop?” said Owen, heart sinking.
“That’s the one,” said Tosh.
“Shit.”
“Oh, yes.”
“You haven’t tried to get it, have you?” Owen asked.
“With that drop? God, no. I think we’re going to need some climbing ropes.”
Jack bear raised one foot and stamped it on the desktop to get everyone’s attention.
“What is it?” asked Ianto.
“Jack’s trying to tell us something,” Owen explained to Tosh.
Jack gestured to himself and then mimed climbing.
“You - you want to go and get it?” said Gwen doubtfully.
“Jack, that’s not a good idea,” said Tosh. “It’s too windy. Even if you didn’t fall you’d end up dropping them and if the device that turned you into a bear got damaged…”
There was a short silence. Jack bear just nodded and folded his arms.
“Jack, I don’t care if you’re the leader, you’re a fucking teddy bear,” said Owen. “You’re not doing it!”
Jack’s paws shook and he looked around. He scooped up a pen and beckoned to Ianto who laid a sheet of paper in front of him and uncapped the pen for him. Jack scribbled quickly and messily and pushed the paper towards Gwen.
She picked it up and read it.
“Even if I’m a teddy bear, I am still the leader. This is my concern and mine alone. No one else is going to risk their life so I can be turned back into a human.” She put the paper back down in front of him. “Are you sure? Tosh has got a point, if you break it somehow we probably won’t be able to turn you back.”
“Ever,” Owen added.
Jack simply folded his arms and stood straight.
“You still want to do it, then?” Ianto guessed.
Jack gave a single nod.
“I suppose one of us could stand at the bottom of the building. In case he falls,” said Ianto doubtfully.
Owen nodded, looking equally unconvinced. “He has got a point, though - it’s not worth losing anyone over. And even if he fell it wouldn’t kill him. Even if he didn’t bounce and died on impact we’ve seen that he’ll come back to life. We just need to make sure some kid doesn’t pick him up.”
Jack nodded enthusiastically.
Owen shrugged at Gwen and Ianto. “He is still the leader.”
It was really quite incredible how smug a teddy bear with a face stitched in place could manage to look.
By the time they got to Toshiko’s flat she had managed to clear her furniture away from the window.
“Are we still using the climbing ropes?” she asked Jack, currently being held by Ianto.
The bear shook his head and struggled free, leaping down to the floor, causing Toshiko to take a step back. He scuttled across the floor to the window, though despite his jumps he couldn’t reach the sill. Toshiko stooped down, though hesitated before setting him down on the window sill. “Have we got anyone waiting at the bottom?”
Ianto nodded. “Both Owen and Gwen. They’ve got a sheet to catch him in case he loses his balance while he transforms back into a human.”
“Good to know someone’s put some thought into this,” said Tosh, giving Jack a pointed look. Jack simply pointed at the sill with his paw.
“Have you got a cover story?” Ianto asked.
“I’m babysitting one of my nephews who has a tendency to mistreat his toys. Including this very nice teddy that his Granddad bought him for his birthday,” she said, stroking the top of Jack’s head.
“Okay. Gwen, Owen, we’re good to go,” Ianto told the others over the comms.
Tosh picked Jack up again and set him carefully on the small ledge outside the window. She could see their point; if Jack managed to get hold of it and change back there was no way he would be able to keep his balance. “Okay, there you go. You better see what you can do while the wind’s down.”
Jack, pressing his back against the wall, nodded to her and began to edge along the ledge, pausing every now and again, leaning hard against the wall to keep his balance. He managed to reach the devices, stacked precariously one on top of the other, without incident. However, to even try and pick them up he needed to come away from the side. On his first try the wind picked up and he had to back up against the wall again. From the window Ianto and Tosh tensed, while below Owen and Gwen unfolded the sheet between them, getting ready.
The wind died down again and Jack turned quickly and tried to snatch up them up, but they slipped through his paws. Mentally cursing his lack of thumbs he snatched them up again, trying to hug them to his chest. The two devices knocked against one another and quite suddenly, there wasn’t enough ledge. In a flurry of coat Jack lost all balance and tumbled over the edge. Beneath him Owen and Gwen snapped the blanket taught between them, ready to catch him, but then, two feet above them, he vanished.
He re-appeared in midair above Toshiko’s kitchen worktop, braining himself on the edge, scaring Toshiko and Ianto who had been watching out of the living room window. By the time they had joined him he was sitting up, rubbing the back of his neck and looking sheepishly at the bloodstains on the floor.
“It’s okay, Gwen,” said Ianto into his comm. “We’ve got him.”
“Sorry about that,” Jack said to Toshiko. He put a hand on the edge of the worktop, but it slipped in a puddle of what appeared to be a mix of blood and brain fluid and he landed on his backside again.
Toshiko had picked up the morpher using a pair of salad tongs and placed it carefully in a sandwich bag. Jack managed to get to his feet, the teleporter in hand.
“We’re locking that in the archives the minute we get back,” said Jack, nodding at the sandwich bag.
“Along with all the other alien tech that London classified as dangerous,” said Ianto, giving Jack a pointed look. “I’m sure there was one in there that drains certain body fluids.”
When they got back to the Hub Toshiko’s computers had detected surges in Rift energy. Toshiko took up position at her workstation, while Owen, Gwen and Jack returned to the SUV. Ianto seized the opportunity to clear away the more dangerous pieces of alien tech that London had sent them into the archives. Some two hours later he and Toshiko had packed away the potentially most dangerous devices and the others returned with a fresh Weevil in tow.
“Well,” said Owen, making a show of yawning and stretching. “I think I’m going to call it a night.”
“Sounds like a good idea.” Gwen agreed, checking the time. “Rhys should be back by now. It’s movie night, tonight.”
“Think I might toddle off too,” said Toshiko, rubbing her eyes. “I’ve got a bloody kitchen to clean up.” She shot Jack a dirty look.
“I’ll clean it!” he protested. “I said I would, I meant it.”
Toshiko, pulling on her coat, didn’t look convinced. “You all have a good night,” she said, picking up her bag and making for the door.
“Night!” called Ianto.
“Hold on, Tosh, I’ll give you a lift!” said Gwen, snatching up her coat and waving quickly at the others before dashing after her.
Owen rolled his eyes. “Make sure he doesn’t turn himself into anything, yeah?” he said to Ianto, jerking his head at Jack before proceeding to the invisible lift. “See you tomorrow!” he called from halfway up.
Jack retreated back to his office, Ianto reappearing with a cup of tea in each hand. “Been a weird day, hasn’t it?” he remarked, holding out a cup to Jack. “Even by our standards.”
Jack nodded distractedly, taking the tea and balancing it precariously on the edge of a large pile of files. Ianto rolled his eyes and replaced it beside the desk lamp.
“I’m sure there was more of it than this,” Jack muttered, rummaging around in the crate.
“Leave it for now,” Ianto suggested, loosening his tie. “Come on, have a drink. Enjoy being human again.”
Jack didn’t look up, but smirked. “I had other plans to celebrate. When you’re a bear, people expect things of you, you know. Got to keep it clean.”
Ianto snorted. “Yes, feeling up both female members of staff -”
Jack laid a placating hand on Ianto’s shoulder. “I’d have felt you and Owen up too if you’d given me the opportunity,” he said, picking up his cup and taking a sip of tea.
“One of the reasons, I think, Owen left most of the bear handling to me,” said Ianto. Jack handed his cup back to Ianto and shoved the files roughly off his desk, turning around to raise an eyebrow suggestively at him.
Ianto looked down at the mess of folders. “I really hope this isn’t your idea of foreplay.”
Jack sat back on the desk, pretending to strike a sexy pose. Ianto put the mugs down on the floor, rolling his eyes but unable to hide his smile. “What am I supposed to do with you?”
“I can think of a few things,” said Jack, grabbing Ianto’s tie and pulling him forward as he lay back -
- and stared up at his paws in disbelief. He pulled himself up and turned around, rubbing his lower back. On his desk one of the morpher’s stray wires had pierced the sandwich bag and jabbed him in the back. It was probably things like this that gave sex at work a bad name in this day and age. Turning around he saw Ianto hunched over with his paws over his eyes. Jack patted him on the back, sensing anything more intimate would not be appreciated. If they could cut the sandwich bag open somehow they’d be able to change back before the others turned up the next day.
If Toshiko got in first, especially after having spent an evening scrubbing his bloodstains, they could be in real trouble.