Beta thanks to Iulia Mentis, Darth Fox, and Fairest Cat!

Owen's voice sounded perfectly normal over Ianto's comm, with that hint of bored impatience that marked half the things Owen ever said. "Ianto, would you come down to autopsy? I need another pair of hands on this thing."

Ianto had no idea what "this thing" was, but he suspected it was going to turn out to be messy. Still, likely more interesting than door duty. "On my way."

Ianto locked up and headed down into the Hub, glancing over at Jack's office, and then up at the conference room. Jack was nowhere to be seen, nor was Gwen. Tosh was at her workstation, tapping away at something, and Ianto walked on without disturbing her.

Ianto was halfway down the steps into the autopsy room before he realized there was nothing on the gleaming steel table. "Owen? You said you needed--"

"Yeah," Owen said, turning to face him with an ugly-looking hypodermic in his hand. "Not your hands so much as the rest of you. Lie down on the table, please, Ianto."

Ianto backed up a step without taking his eyes off Owen, then froze at the unmistakable sound of Jack's revolver cocking behind him.

"Ianto, do as Owen says."

Ianto slowly raised both hands, fingers spread wide, and just as slowly turned his head to look up at Jack. He was standing at the top of the steps, his gun trained steadily on Ianto. Gwen stood six feet beyond him, her automatic raised in a two-hand grip.

"Jack," Ianto said as evenly as he could, panic starting to speed his heart, sweat breaking out down his back. "What..."

What did I do, what's got into all of you--

"We're not going to hurt you," Jack said, and Ianto had a sudden, complete understanding of why that sentence was never, ever actually reassuring. "Owen just needs to have a look at you. Lie down on the table."

Ianto tried to work out his options. He couldn't resist. He recognized that look on Jack's face, the grim set of Gwen's mouth, the lazy way Owen held that hypodermic. They were all ready to force him to do whatever it was they wanted him to do. If they'd been taken over by something that wanted to take him over, too...

If it had already got Owen, and Gwen, and Jack, then it had already won. Ianto wasn't going to be able to save all three of them from it. He wouldn't even be able to save himself.

"Come on, mate, just have a lie down and let me look at you," Owen said, a good attempt at his ordinary briskness. "You're showing up funny on the scanners, and we need to figure out what's going on before it takes you over or kills you."

Ianto looked up at Jack again, and Jack gave him a small nod. The gun didn't waver.

"And Tosh is monitoring remotely and providing backup in case I manage to overpower all three of you, I suppose," Ianto said. "Well planned, very tidy."

"Ianto," Jack said firmly.

"I'm sorry," Ianto said, turning to look at the table again, taking a slow step toward it. "It's been some time since you pointed a gun at me. I'm finding it a bit distracting."

No one said anything, and Ianto looked around at them all. They watched him steadily, showing nothing. Jack's gun and Gwen's loomed large in his sight, a stark black contrast to the sterile whiteness of autopsy.

"You'll know I'm not armed just now," he said slowly, his hands still raised. "Do you mind if I take my jacket off before I lie down?"

Jack's lips thinned down to a line, angry or impatient or just tightly controlled, Ianto was never entirely sure. "Face me, move slowly, hang it over the chain there."

Ianto nodded and lowered his hands, shrugging out of his suit jacket while keeping his hands away from his pockets. He couldn't take his eyes off Jack, though his face was just a blur beyond the gun. Pointed at Ianto, again.

Some detached part of his mind noted that he was more frightened of it this time--less distracted by other events. Just as certain Jack would pull the trigger if he thought he had to.

For some reason all he could think of was the spate of nightmares he'd had in the weeks after those two days they'd all lost. He'd woken up over and over in the night, sick with guilt and terror, convinced he'd done something horrible but unable to remember what. After a while, when the sleep deprivation began to get to him, he'd been nearly overcome by the paranoid fantasy that he really had done something horrible, that Jack had made all of them--even himself--forget, just to protect Ianto.

But that was ridiculous. Whatever else they were to each other, Jack was Torchwood. He'd never let Ianto get away with hurting anyone, and this only proved it. Not six hours ago they'd been as unprofessional together as one could imagine; now Jack was holding a gun on him, watching with hard eyes as Ianto laid his coat over the chain along the stairs, scowling suspiciously as he reached up to loosen his tie and slip it off.

It was somehow not as comforting as Ianto had imagined it would be, to be sure Jack would stop him (if he was still Jack at all, if this was not the next step in some hostile takeover of Torchwood which had already succeeded while Ianto was upstairs sorting maps).

"All right, lie down," Owen said, beckoning with one hand, still holding the hypodermic with the other. "Just a nice little scan, won't hurt a bit."

Owen wasn't talking to him, Ianto realized as he walked obediently to the table, gun barrels pivoting to follow his stride. Owen was talking to whatever he thought was in Ianto--or else that wasn't Owen talking at all. Ianto sat down on the table and then lay back, trying not to shiver at the coldness of steel through his shirt, and on the bare skin at the back of his neck.

"Sorry about this," Owen murmured, tightening restraints across Ianto's chest, hips, legs, pinning his arms at his sides. Ianto closed his eyes and waited--was it him, was it them, was Owen going to jab him with whatever was in that needle...

Ianto opened his eyes again as footsteps closed in, to see Jack and Gwen both coming down to stand across the table from Owen. They'd put their guns away, but now they were looming over him as he lay bound flat on the table, so it wasn't much comfort.

"Owen," Jack said through gritted teeth.

"Right, got it," Owen said, and pointed a hand-held scanner at Ianto's chest, sweeping it slowly downward.

So they really weren't trying to hurt him, then. It really was him who was wrong.

Jack's hand settled onto Ianto's head like he'd heard that, and Ianto closed his eyes again. He didn't realize his hands were clenched in fists until Gwen's hand closed around one of them, but even then he couldn't force himself to relax.

"Damn," Owen murmured. "Definitely something alive in there--pretty small, though. Get it with the singularity scalpel, no trouble."

Ianto's eyes flew open, and he looked up at Owen's frown of concentration, then Gwen's suppressed horror, then Jack, looking back at him with every appearance of calm. Jack's hand moved over his hair, petting him, though Ianto wasn't feeling especially like being soothed just now.

"Can you identify the species?" Jack asked. The question was for Owen, but his eyes were on Ianto's, unwavering. "Ianto, can you remember any time you might have picked this up, any recent exposure to an alien?"

Ianto shook his head slowly, carefully not dislodging Jack's hand.

"Nothing's bitten me," he said, with a quick glance at Gwen, who was eyeing Ianto's stomach a little nervously.

"I don't think anything's even got close to me lately but Weev--" Ianto cut himself off, horrified by the very thought. There was something inside him. It could be anything, it could be a Weevil.

Owen looked at him over the scanner, eyebrows rising. "How close have the Weevils got, then?"

Ianto felt his eyes go very wide, the lights seeming suddenly much too bright. "Not that close--do we know how they--"

He could feel his voice pitching upward and cut himself off. Oh, God, Weevils.

Jack's hand dropped to his shoulder, squeezing tight. "We have no reason to think it's anything exotic--they're on a fairly straightforward biological model."

Owen let out a strange noise then, staring at the scanner. Ianto couldn't read the look on his face, but Gwen dropped Ianto's hand and bolted around to the other side of the table to look over his shoulder. When she looked at the readout she clapped a hand over her mouth, a giggle escaping. Nerves. It must be bad.

"Owen," Jack snapped. "Can you identify it?"

"Think so," Owen said, fiddling with the scanner. "Haven't seen one at this stage of development in a long while, but I believe you're going to have to rethink that question about what Ianto's been exposed to."

Owen flipped the readout so that Ianto could see the tiny, hideous thing, at least one internal organ visibly pulsating. Jack bent closer to him, peering at it.

"Homo sap, I reckon."

Ianto blinked at it. "It's human?"

"It's a baby," Gwen said brightly, still behind her hand though her fingers hardly hid her smile.

Jack's hand jerked away from Ianto's shoulder as he straightened up, and he turned abruptly, putting his back to Ianto. "That's impossible."

Owen frowned. "Yeah, because this is the place to make definitive statements about what is and is not possible, Jack."

Jack's shoulders tightened, and in the bright light of the autopsy room Ianto could see the furious flush bloom on the tips of his ears and the back of his neck. "Just take a sample, find out what's going on in there."

Owen's frown descended into a glare, and then he looked down at Ianto with a grimly polite expression. "Ianto, mate, looks like you've somehow got pregnant. May I have your consent to stick a great big needle into your stomach and take a biopsy to check how it's going?"

Ianto looked helplessly from Owen to the back of Jack's head to Gwen, who seemed to be passing through confused and/or crestfallen on her way to angry, all her attention fixed on Jack.

Ianto focused on Owen. "Yes, of course, whatever you--"

"Let me know what you find out," Jack snapped. With that he was gone, up the steps and out the door without ever looking back at Ianto, still lying strapped to the table.

Distantly, Ianto heard Tosh say Jack's name, but he didn't reply, and the sound of his footsteps on the stairs got lost as Owen loosened the restraints, Gwen helping even as she looked to the door. From the expression on her face she'd settled into anger, now. Ianto looked away, not wanting her anger to settle on him.

Her voice was strained but quiet as she spoke. "I should go and--"

"No," Owen said firmly. "Gwen, I need your help on this. Amnio's a delicate procedure."

Ianto pushed up onto his elbows--anything to let Gwen go and be angry somewhere else, at someone else. Owen at least was mercifully blank. "I could--"

"Oh, no you don't," Owen said, setting down the scanner and turning away. "You make a fine coffee, Ianto, but I am not letting you jab needles into your own abdominal cavity. Now open your trousers for me, there's a lad."

Ianto thought, distantly, that he must be in quite a bad way. Owen had dredged up a bit of bedside manner from somewhere, and made him lie under a blanket for fifteen minutes after the procedure. It hadn't taken long and really didn't hurt very much at all, but Owen said he should just keep still and let things settle.

Ianto curled on his side--fetal--and stared at the tiles, listening to Owen moving around behind him. He'd switched on some music, but it was turned down low. Ianto couldn't make out anything but anger and drums. Gwen had disappeared while Owen was giving him his choice of brightly colored plasters for the tiny puncture on his stomach. Ianto couldn't hear any shouting, so he had to guess she hadn't gone after Jack.

They were all leaving it to him to do that, he thought. Because this was between him and Jack--because Ianto had this thing, this human thing, baby, inside him. Everyone knew Ianto and Jack were shagging, and that had to mean this was all between him and Jack.

Ianto squeezed his eyes shut and thought he'd rather be at gunpoint again, rather be strapped down to this table, than have to go and face Jack now. He knew he should get up, go and get it over with. He had to find out why Jack was angry at him, what he'd done to make this his fault--because Jack hadn't blamed him when it was an alien thing, hadn't turned away from him until Gwen called it a baby. Ianto found himself morbidly reviewing everything they'd done together for weeks. Which time, where--what had he asked for that he shouldn't? What had he wanted that had led to this? To say nothing of why, and how...

"Ianto?"

Gwen's voice came just before the touch on his cheek. Gwen's fingertips felt wet against his skin, and Ianto jerked back a second too late, realizing what that meant. He tried to look anywhere but at her, pushing himself up to sit and getting tangled in the damned blanket.

"Shh, easy, it's all right," Gwen said, in the voice she might use to soothe a civilian or a child or a stray dog. "I just wanted to know if you needed anything."

Ianto made himself sit still, staring at his knees with the blanket half wrapped around him. He had his shoes on, though the tails of his unbuttoned shirt draped over his trousers, still unzipped. He gave in and ran the back of his hand across his cheeks, and then gripped the edge of the table.

"A time machine, maybe. Would you have one handy?" Let him just undo this, go back to before, or else skip past, until it was all over--just one more bloody weird day at work, nothing for anyone to be angry about at all, nothing inside him making his stomach turn every time he thought of it there.

"Ah," Gwen said, and when he glanced up she was smiling a little sadly--but not pityingly, he thought. That was something. "I'm afraid I could just manage a cup of tea or someone to talk to. Anything more complicated would require..."

Ianto glanced through the door, in the direction of Jack's office though he couldn't see it from here. "Yes. Indeed. Is he...?"

Gwen nodded. "Owen says the results of the tests should be ready soon. He'll bring them up."

So Ianto had better be up there, if he wanted to hear them. "Right. Right."

Ianto pushed off the table, set himself to rights and folded the blanket, laying it neatly on the table before he followed Gwen back into the center of the Hub. He stood still for a moment, at a loss--Tosh and Owen were both watching him, silent, not bothering to pretend they were working. Jack wasn't visible through the windows of his office.

Ianto squared his shoulders and went to the coffee machine. Ridiculous to devise a pretext for going to Jack's office now--even more ridiculous to imagine coffee as a suitable propitiation--but he wanted something to do with his hands, and the routine soothed him just a little. Once he'd got Jack's coffee, it was practically automatic to walk to Jack's office and step inside.

Ianto stopped just over the threshold. Jack was standing at his desk with his hands braced on the surface and his head down, his back to the door. Ianto swallowed, trying to make himself speak, say anything, but words wouldn't come.

"You'll have to leave," Jack said without looking at him.

Ianto did not drop the coffee. He was not going to drop the coffee. It was hot; it would make a mess and Ianto would have to clean it up. Jack liked this mug and it would break.

Jack looked over his shoulder at Ianto, expressionless. "There are regulations, right back to Queen Victoria. Torchwood operatives can't have living children. Parents of living children can't be recruited, and operatives who engender children must resign. You'll have to be retconned. You'll have to leave."

Ianto understood, at once and completely. Jack never let anyone leave the team if he could help it, kept them all in drawers when death took them away from him at last. He'd come close to destroying the world to bring Owen back, just because he couldn't bear to let go.

Jack thought this meant losing Ianto. Jack was at least as possessive of Ianto as he was of anyone else on the team, and now Jack thought he'd come up against a rival he couldn't fight.

Ianto couldn't help it. He laughed, a little hysterically (and wasn't that a precise term, this once), and kept a firm grip on the coffee as Jack finally turned to face him properly. Jack looked baffled, and Ianto wondered, not for the first time, what they taught people in the future, anyway.

"Jack, that isn't happening. I don't have a living child. I have one of those exotic STIs from the future that you swore I couldn't catch from you. Owen will get out the singularity scalpel, and I'll be fine by the end of the day. I'm not going anywhere."

Jack gave him a full three seconds of silent stare, long enough for Ianto's laughter to die away completely. "Ianto, this isn't an alien parasite--"

"No," Ianto said, and Jack fell silent like he couldn't remember the last time Ianto had interrupted him, either. "It's a human parasite, Jack. Just because it's my species doesn't mean it belongs inside my body."

Ianto forced himself to stop there--partly still choking on the idea of this thing inside him, alive and pulsing, when he'd had no idea that it existed, that it possibly could exist, an hour before. Partly he realized, even through the furious frustration, that he didn't need to finish with, Even if that's your standard.

"And this is probably a good time to interrupt," Owen announced from just outside the door--the open door, Ianto realized. So no one had even had to crack into the CCTV in Jack's office to hear that. Brilliant. "Or at least better than after you start throwing crockery."

Jack turned his face away. "What have you got, Owen?"

"I have got test results. Ianto has got a human fetus around thirty-eight days gestation, and the fetus has got DNA which matches fifty percent each to two samples on file. Ianto Jones, Jack Harkness."

Jack actually flinched when Owen said his name, and when he looked up he seemed nothing but baffled all over again.

"That really shouldn't be possible," Jack said, in nearly a normal tone of voice, and he turned almost smoothly to sit on the edge of his desk; only the way he was gripping his biceps betrayed him. He was genuinely shocked, somehow. Like he'd actually believed that someone else had--as if Ianto would have had the free time.

Jack shook his head, staring at the far wall. "Time Agents aren't allowed to have children, not ever--we wreak enough havoc in the timestream anyway, without throwing our descendants all over the place."

Jack rubbed his face. "The procedure was unspeakable--about a third of the potential agents who washed out, it was because they refused the procedure after it had been explained. It's nothing you even notice, afterward, but it hurts, and it's terrifying, and it's permanent."

Ianto turned and handed Owen the coffee and Owen, thankfully, accepted it. Hands empty, Ianto sank down where he stood and sat on the floor.

Jack had honestly believed he could never have children. Jack had been looking at an eternity of life without ever being able to have children. Only now...

"Permanent," Owen said. "Would that be like death is permanent? You've said it yourself, Jack, you're a bit overflowing with life these days."

"Can't give it away," Ianto said, his voice shaking a bit, and Jack finally looked at him again. Ianto couldn't meet his gaze, propping his elbows on his knees and lowering his face into his hands. "But you did."

There was a silence; Ianto could hear his own blood racing in his ears. It was a sign of high blood pressure, he'd read that somewhere. Perhaps he should try to cut down on stress.

"But why Ianto?" Jack asked.

Ianto was relieved to place him by the sound of his voice, still near his desk. Ianto couldn't bear him coming any closer just now. There was this thing inside him--this human thing--this thing that was half Jack, this thing Jack thought he could never have. Owen said it was barely an inch long yet, weighed hardly anything, but Ianto could swear it was crushing him already.

"I mean, I've been like this a hundred and forty years and it's never happened, and Ianto's not actually equipped for it."

"I guess maybe you should start ringing your exes and check," Owen said. "Or maybe you've been lucky. Or maybe you just haven't been shagging people who get exposed to as much Rift radiation and other weird alien shit as any given employee of Torchwood. I haven't seen anything like all the reports, but when we don't die young and violently, we die weird. Well, or all three, case in point."

Ianto looked up at Owen, who gave him an apologetic grimace.

"I don't know, you must have had contact with something that altered you a bit, because you are equipped now, internally at least. Maybe it was just something that reacted with Jack..."

Ianto couldn't help stealing a glance at Jack. He had his hand over his mouth, and he wasn't asking any more questions.

"The trouble is, I can't take it out with the singularity scalpel."

Ianto saw the expression on Jack's face change--not to triumph, but to hope. Ianto looked back to Owen, trying not to think of what that meant. "What--why can't you..."

Owen shook his head. "When I used it on Martha and Gwen, it was to remove a discrete entity that just happened to be located inside their bodies. Your parasite," Ianto winced, and didn't look over at Jack, "is actually growing out of your own body. If I zap it out of you it'll be taking the ends of a lot of blood vessels with it. You'd risk bleeding out into the space it left before I could get you opened up to try to stop it." Owen raised his bandaged hand. "And I'd be a right mess at that anyway."

Ianto opened and closed his mouth a few times. Jack was resoundingly silent.

"It'll have to be surgical, that's all," Owen said. "Look, I'll get in touch with Martha, explain the situation and see when she can spare us a few hours of her time. It's early yet--you haven't been having any symptoms. There's no rush to do anything."

Ianto nodded. There was no rush except that this thing was in him, no rush except that it was grotesque and inescapable. But it most likely wouldn't kill him or make him dangerous, so that was all right then, by Torchwood standards.

Owen made a small--aborted--gesture; Ianto thought Owen would have touched his shoulder, except that it was down so low, and stopped short of patting Ianto on the head.

Jack had, though. Jack's hand had been on his hair while he was lying on the table, when they thought it was some horrible thing in him, something alien and enemy, something they could fight, kill, defeat. Not this.

Owen nodded in Jack's direction and walked out, closing the door behind him, and Ianto finally forced himself to look over. Jack was still perched on the edge of his desk, hands gripping the edge. Ianto could see the fingernails of his near hand going white, muscles standing out in his forearm.

His voice was calm when he spoke. "It's up to you, obviously. Your body, your choice, that's the deal."

He was staring across the room as he said it, not looking anywhere near Ianto still sitting beside the door.

"Jack."

"Your body," Jack repeated flatly. "Your parasite."

Ianto's eyes squeezed shut involuntarily, flinching from the word like a blow.

"Your choice," Jack finished. "Stand down until this is sorted out. I'm sure Owen will let you know when he's heard from Martha."

Ianto pushed himself up to his feet. "Jack, what do you--"

"Don't ask me that," Jack snapped. He still wasn't looking at Ianto. "Don't ask me what I think unless you want to hear it. The weight of this falls on you, and that means it's your right to refuse it. Now go."

Ianto stood there a long time, wanting to go to Jack, wanting to touch him, wanting to ask him what he thought, what to do. More than anything, he wanted to have the courage to ask whether Jack would ever forgive him for this.

But he couldn't ask the question, and couldn't imagine an answer that wouldn't be more terrible than this silence.

Ianto had been home for six hours and was nearly out of things to clean, sort, or fiddle with when he realized exactly what Jack had said. He blinked at the swathe of half-cleared dust on top of the bookshelf.

"Regulations. Queen Victoria."

His breath stirred up the dust. Ianto pressed his lips together and attacked it again, his dazed brain finally clicking into motion.

Queen Victoria had laid down plenty of regulations--Torchwood One had had stacks of them, and the one about no living children certainly rang true. Ianto hadn't thought to question it. Jack would have been banking on that, on Ianto remembering the old regulations and obeying them without a thought when they were brandished. Like a dog cowering before a raised hand.

But Queen Victoria would have had a few things to say about keeping the walking dead on as Torchwood operatives, too--which was to say nothing of immortals from the 51st century, no matter how good they smelled even before a shower.

Ianto got down off the stepstool and carried the filthy rag to the sink, his teeth grinding together so hard that his temples pounded with pressure as he rinsed the cloth. Jack didn't quote any law higher than himself, not ever--not unless he wanted to shut someone up with his appeal to irrelevant authority. Not unless it suited his own purpose.

Sod Queen Victoria, Jack wanted him out because of this. Jack wanted to send him away, wipe his memory and turn him loose, all because of this--this thing in him, this thing that mattered to Jack more than keeping Ianto on the team did. Jack never let anybody leave the team, not even when they died.

Jack was ready to just hand Ianto over, for this. And he expected Ianto to fall in line. He wanted Ianto to fall in line.

"My choice," Ianto breathed.

Some choice, between the end of his life as he knew it and knowing Jack wanted him gone, knowing Jack would regard him as nothing short of insubordinate if he stayed. He remembered the sound of Jack's revolver behind him--remembered still the feeling of the cold barrel pressed to his skull, Jack ordering him to his knees, ordering him to kill Lisa. Insubordination was betrayal, to Jack. He had chosen to forgive Ianto once, but no one Jack loved had died that night.

Ianto shut the water off. He reached for the kettle, turned it on. Turned it off again. The kettle was not quite what was called for, just now.

Ianto had started out standing in the kitchen, drinking directly from the bottle. This had turned, gradually, to lying on the kitchen floor, and then when he noticed how much the (sparkling bloody clean) lino reminded him both of the table in autopsy and of the floor of Jack's office, he'd migrated to the lounge. He was lying between the settee and the coffee table, a narrow space like a morgue drawer, but warmer, and carpeted.

The glass of the bottle felt nice against his flushed cheek, like a mother's hand for a fevered child. Ianto scowled at his belly. "Is that to be me, now? Your mum? You'd do better with the bottle."

He'd been talking to it, on and off, since sometime after he'd started drinking; he figured if it started talking back he'd know it was time to stop. So far all was quiet. He seemed more in danger of running out of vodka than of conjuring up any really horrifying hallucinations.

On the other hand, the night was young, and he was reasonably certain he'd left an emergency bottle in a cupboard somewhere, for medicinal purposes in extremis. Torchwood One had taught him that much: always be prepared. Always be more prepared than that.

When someone knocked at his door, he emitted a sound very like a growl and hauled himself to his feet. Doors were always his bloody job, stood down or not. That Ianto, he certainly can answer a door. Jack would wipe his memory and pat him on the head and send him off to be a receptionist, an actual receptionist somewhere, where he could rock a cradle and open doors and rot...

Ianto leaned against the door when he'd got there and didn't look through to see who it was. It was more fun to guess.

"I'm utterly pissed," he announced, loudly enough to carry. "So if it's tea and sympathy it's a bit late. And if that's Jack," he added, suddenly inspired by the certain knowledge that there was no possibility of its being Jack, "you can bugger off and take Queen Victoria with you."

There was no more sound from outside, and Ianto twisted, still bracing himself against the door, to see where he'd left the bottle. It might be worth finding the other, while he was standing. If he could remember where he'd left it.

"Beer and curry," Tosh said, and Ianto jumped. He'd forgotten anyone was there.

"Curry," Ianto repeated, and he could almost smell it--maybe he could smell it. Tosh was right outside the door. "Curry, Tosh, come in! You're hired, you can start immediately."

It took another moment of work to get the locks off, and then to get himself off the door enough to open it for Tosh, but she did in fact have lots of curry and quite a respectable quantity of beer. If she made any sort of remark about him eating for two, Ianto decided, he was going to eat hers as well.

But all she said was, "Gwen thought you probably hadn't eaten all day, so I..."

She'd got round the settee, and she set the bag of food on the coffee table and then bent and picked up the open bottle from the floor, setting it down beside the beer. Ianto homed in on it like a beacon, falling onto the settee when he stumbled over it along the way. By the time he'd sorted out his arms and legs--and up and down--Tosh was offering him a container of takeaway. Ianto realized he was starving, like stopping by the chip shop after the pub closed.

He ate quickly, without speaking or even looking up, till he abruptly remembered the part about vomiting in the street in front of the chip shop. He set the rest of his food down carefully and leaned back against the cushions. When he finally looked over, he found Tosh watching him, well into her beer though she'd scarcely touched her curry.

"Ianto," she said hesitantly, "I wanted to talk to you--this is probably not the best time, but I wanted you to know..."

Right. Of course it had been Tosh to come after him. Tea and sympathy indeed. Ianto eyed the beer, wondering if he could move enough to get himself one without regretting it.

"Ianto, I--"

"When you were nineteen," Ianto said, and then thought that maybe he should have let her finish that sentence herself. He glanced over at her, but she didn't look altogether shocked. He supposed there was no need to explain having read anyone else's file, when you were the sort of person who wound up working for Torchwood.

Tosh leaned over and picked up a beer, took the top off and passed it to him. He tipped the bottle toward her in a clumsy salute by way of thanks, and took a sip, wondering if she'd any more to say about it than that, or if it was just solidarity on principle.

"I was at school," she said, staring down at her beer bottle. "I thought I had to choose--no. I did have to choose. That child I might have had, or the career I'd been working toward all my life. The life I'd been working toward all my life."

Ianto didn't bother asking if the father had been her boss, had held her life in his hand. He'd had enough girlfriends to have learnt that it was poor form to try to top the story on offer.

Tosh looked up and met his eyes with a smile. "By the time I got to Torchwood, I'd realized that that had been my only chance. There's no later for us."

She took another sip, and Ianto followed suit, years' worth of work on the Torchwood Statistical Survey bubbling up in his brain. Mean and median life-spans of operatives. Cardiff's had always been lowest, but none of them topped thirty years, not even junior researchers in London. He hadn't had time to get drunk over that; he'd had to be up early and back to work.

"But we only get one chance at this, too," Tosh said. "And I wouldn't have missed Torchwood for anything."

Ianto couldn't think of a word to say to that. He wouldn't, either--this grand adventure, the first time he'd ever thought he was contributing to anything but the generic bustle of a city that needed coffees and mobiles and shoes sold to it. And then there was Jack, of course, because Jack and Torchwood Cardiff were practically the same thing--and Tosh, and Owen, and Gwen, and all the wonder of the infinite fucking universe.

He wouldn't trade any of it for anything--not the doing of it, not the remembering of it--not for any other life, and not for anyone else's life either. Only it might not be up to him; he might be on the verge of having it taken away whether he'd choose to or not. If he did stay he might still lose everything that Torchwood had come to mean to him. Jack.

Still, for now he'd got Tosh, and beer and curry, and knowing what he knew. He extended his bottle toward hers again, and murmured, "Cheers."

Tosh clinked and drained the last of her drink. When she came up for air it was with a bright smile firmly in place. "Cheers."

Ianto woke up to the immediate awareness that he must keep very, very still or something terrible would happen. It was not an unfamiliar sensation. He kept his eyes shut tight, and tried to remember where he was, or, failing that, who he'd been with, or, failing that, whether he might have to go to work in the immediate future. He had a vague sense that this job was not one he could just quit due to hangover, though he couldn't quite remember why. Possibly remembering was the terrible thing that would happen if he moved.

"Tosh is sleeping on your couch," Jack said, much too loudly.

Ianto's eyes flew open and then shut again, but he still managed to perceive that Jack was sitting on the edge of his bed, facing away from him. The complete events of the past twenty-four hours came crashing in upon Ianto's consciousness, dragging the headache and the pitiful urge to crawl under the bed and die in their wake. Torchwood was bloody amazing for putting your hangover into perspective, not that perspective helped at all--not when perspective left him still inside his body with this thing, and Jack...

Jack was facing away from him again.

"There's water and painkillers on the table," Jack said, still much too loud. Ianto cracked one cautious eyelid, and there was indeed an uncapped bottle of water within his reach, and, beside it, two suspiciously innocuous-looking white tablets.

"Painkillers, sir?" Ianto croaked. He'd figured--when he tried to think it out at all--that Jack couldn't actually retcon him until after he'd had the child. Then again, he hadn't thought Jack would try to trick him into taking it, either.

"Yes, Jones," Jack said, sounding tired, and Ianto was opening his mouth to ask what Jones was supposed to mean when he realized he'd let out a sir there. "Panadol from the bottle in the bathroom. I just came by to get Tosh. She was late and not answering her mobile. I'll let myself out when I've got her moving."

Ianto was half-tempted to throw the bottle of water at Jack's head, but then he'd have nothing to wash the pills down with, and he wasn't sure he even cared if it was retcon, as long as it made the headache go away. He lifted his head far enough to drink and swallow, and kept swallowing water until his stomach ached. Then he pressed his face back into the pillow, one hand still holding the bottle of water upright beside it. He was nearly asleep when it was tugged free of his slackening grip.

It wasn't until the soft footfalls had reached the door that he realized if he'd turned his head just then, he might have managed to meet Jack's eyes.

Ianto woke up to the desperate need to piss and the wonderful smell of coffee he hadn't had to make himself. Flatmates who made coffee in the morning were brilliant and could be forgiven any number of damp towels, annoying girlfriend dramas, and late rent cheques. Ianto smiled into his pillow, pleased with his good fortune.

The first thing he saw when he lifted his head was the open bottle of water on the table beside his bed, in the peculiar grey light of a rainy afternoon in Cardiff. He didn't have flatmates, and it had been just Panadol. His head felt quite bearable, even as his stomach twisted itself into knots.

No point facing this with a full bladder, anyway. Ianto considered, as he tended to his immediate needs, that it was in some sense a measure of his life: there were precisely four people in the world who might have made coffee in his flat. None of them would have been deterred by the fact that he hadn't given them a key. One of them was undead and couldn't drink coffee, one was at least as hungover as he was and had likely been rousted by their boss, and of the other two he couldn't honestly say which he'd rather it was, though each would be excruciating in their own way.

Jack was standing at the kitchen counter, staring out the window with a coffee mug in one hand. He looked up as Ianto came in, and Ianto realized he'd known it would be Jack. If he'd been expecting Gwen he'd have put on a shirt, as well as trousers. He also realized that Jack was wearing the same clothes he'd had on the day before, and was clutching that coffee mug like a lifeline.

"I sent Tosh home," Jack said, and his voice was soft enough now that Ianto's brain wasn't trying to escape his skull via his eardrums. He probably hadn't been actually shouting, before.

Jack was meeting Ianto's eyes, finally, and looking nowhere else. For all the time he'd spent undressing Ianto with his gaze in the last year and a half, now that Ianto was standing in front of him shirtless and barefoot, he wasn't stealing a glance. Ianto resisted the urge to cover himself anyway.

"I handled yesterday badly," Jack said slowly--formally, or like he'd memorized the words. "I apologize."

Ianto looked away, wondering what to make of that. Finally he pushed off the wall and went to the coffee maker, leaving a few feet of empty space between himself and Jack as he poured his own cup. It would be childish, he supposed, to demand to know whether it had been Gwen or Tosh who coached him on those phrases. Jack was making an effort.

The coffee wasn't actually bad, either.

Ianto went and sat down at the kitchen table. He wrapped his hands around his coffee cup and did not look at Jack, did not speak. He still hadn't worked out what to say. Obviously Jack was here to talk, which rather flew in the face of yesterday's declaration that it was Ianto's choice and he should stay out of Jack's sight until it was done.

Jack came and sat down across from him. When Jack opened his mouth, Ianto spoke first, the words ill-considered but necessary as his next breath.

"Please don't."

Jack stayed silent, watching him, leaving more silence for Ianto to fill.

Ianto looked down again, clutching his mug.

"Jack, please, don't ask me to do it." His shoulders hunched protectively, and he wished he had a shirt on; the chair back was cold, making him break out in gooseflesh. "Because I will, if you ask me to. I won't even remember to hate you for it afterward."

A shirt might have been warmer, but the shield of it would have been an illusion. This was as naked as he could possibly be before Jack, admitting aloud what they both knew. Of course he would do as Jack asked, even this, even the end of his life as he knew it, this thing inside him that his whole body wanted to pull away from and could not escape. There might even be some relief in bowing to Jack's wishes, an end to the crushing weight of responsibility for the choice.

"If you ask me to, I will." Ianto repeated. And still some mad piece of him--the fierce, stupid will to live, to hold to his own life as it slipped from his grasp--kept him talking. "But please, Jack, please don't ask."

Ianto had been ready to die for years now, young and violently and weirdly. He wouldn't mind it at all, if he could just take with him the knowledge that Jack Harkness had loved him and relied upon him, once. He hadn't been ready for anything like this, an unthinkable biological accident as senseless as a car crash.

"Ianto," Jack said quietly, but Ianto couldn't look up. He flinched automatically from the motion in his peripheral vision, and watched Jack's hand fall slowly to rest on the table between them.

"I really, really intended not to be lying, when I said we weren't going to hurt you." Jack sounded horribly sorry, not just stiffly and formally apologetic.

Ianto closed his eyes and waited for the blow to fall.

"I'm not going to ask you to do anything, or order you to," Jack continued gently.

Ianto felt as if the floor had opened up under him, dropping him to a whole new depth of impossible choices. Jack wouldn't be angry at him, now. Jack would be hurt by him, and this would always be between them, always this ache, always the fact that Ianto had flinched from Jack's touch. Always the fact that Jack had left it up to Ianto, and whatever Ianto chose would be wrong.

"If you did have a living child," Jack said slowly, startling Ianto into looking up at him.

Was he bargaining, now? But it was Jack's turn to stare into his coffee, and he'd withdrawn his hand from the middle of the table.

"If you could just skip over everything else and there was a child in the world independent of your actual body, a child who was ours, would that be the problem? Is it the fact that it exists at all, or just where and when?"

Just where and when--but perhaps those were disposable problems to an immortal former Time Agent in his second century at Torchwood, with God-knew-what secret resources to call upon. Ianto tried to imagine what heaven and earth Jack was proposing to move to extricate them from this situation--and then there would be a child, and what would either of them do with that?

"I don't understand," Ianto said finally. "Jack, what are you asking me?"

Jack took a deep breath, and looked Ianto straight in the eye as he spoke. "I've got Tosh and Owen looking into a third option."

Ianto pressed both hands flat to the table, heart racing with something like hope. Jack had come up with a third option, and didn't Jack always find some way to save the day?

"It's something we've had in the archive for years. It was shelved because its applications as a weapon are pretty limited--it'll scan the environment around a developing life form, recreate it inside the device, and then teleport the fetus inside, leaving the parent intact. It can finish growing there, or be held in stasis almost indefinitely. The device is alien, but Tosh is trying to get it talking to us in a way we can understand, and Owen is going to test its adaptability for terrestrial mammals."

So there it was: a way out. Get the thing out of him, put it in stasis, put off the question of what to do with it. Ianto could keep on as he had been, and Jack wouldn't blame him for a choice that wasn't really made yet.

But Ianto had been too well trained by his years with Torchwood, and latched on inexorably to the idea Jack had brushed by too fast. Applications as a weapon are pretty limited.

There was only one way you could do use a device like that as a weapon: kidnap an unborn child. Hold it for ransom, threaten its life and safety until its parents gave you whatever you asked for, if only you let it live. Let them stand by, helpless, knowing their child's fate was out of their hands.

Jack had Tosh and Owen working on this, as if it were another alien crisis. Jack himself was here. Negotiating with Ianto.

Ianto stared at him. "Jack, this isn't a hostage situation."

"Spoken like a man who's never had to take a hostage," Jack said easily, and Ianto found that--like most of Jack's idle half-comments on his past--all too easy to picture. Of course, it hadn't yet been twenty-four hours since the last time Jack held him at gunpoint.

"There are plenty of grey areas," Jack assured him, meeting his eyes readily, without a trace of anger or fear. "But I backed you into a corner, and now I'm offering you a way to get out again. I'm just cleaning up after myself."

Ianto looked from Jack to the coffee he hadn't had to make himself.

"Well," Ianto said, numb and bewildered, too shocked even to feel relief, "I suppose it was bound to happen eventually."

This time when Ianto came down the steps into autopsy, there was a reassuring, if peculiar, assortment of objects laid out on the table. A glass-sided cage with a screened top was at Owen's right hand, emitting a distinct odor of rodent though no actual rodent was visible in the piles of bedding. Gwen was peering inside, apparently trying to spot the creature.

At Owen's left hand was a darkly gleaming object about the same size as the cage, its edges rounded, with proportions and markings that had the distinctive not-quite-rightness of non-human alien technology. Tosh was poking at the side with a stylus of some kind, muttering to herself and looking back and forth between the alien device and a tablet computer.

Owen himself was trying to watch Gwen and Tosh both, and glanced up immediately when Ianto moved off the lowest step. He looked like nothing so much as a mother trying to corral her wandering children. Autopsy had got entirely too lively, today.

Ianto looked over at Gwen, who was tapping softly on the glass.

"When Jack said you were testing on terrestrial mammals..."

"Hamster," Owen said tersely. "Gwen, she's been bothered enough, honestly. She's still there. The machine is picking her up just fine."

Ianto looked at Tosh, whose frown was deepening. "And as for getting the machine to be intelligible..."

"I almost have it," Tosh said. "The material doesn't scan well, so it's been hard to input the characters, but the translation algorithms are almost..."

"You really don't need to be able to read it," Jack said, sounding like he'd repeated this several times. Ianto looked up to watch him come down the stairs, but Jack only met his eyes for a second, giving him a bland smile, as though this were just another piece of interesting tech to try out.

Jack brushed past Ianto, with barely any deliberate invasion of personal space. They were all the way back to the level of Ianto's third week on the job, after he'd ceased to be novel and begun really working on his invisibility. It nearly didn't come across as a reprimand, and in any case Ianto was too tense to feel either chastened or relieved.

Jack went to stand across the table from Owen, Gwen, and Tosh. Ianto stayed where he was, at a safe distance from all of them. "It's emergency medical technology, it's meant to be useable for the widest possible range of species. There aren't even that many buttons, and if you just--"

Jack reached over and slapped his hand down blindly on the opposite side of the device, presumably where the controls were; Owen and Tosh both stepped back sharply, crying out in protest. Gwen threw her arms around the hamster cage.

Ianto himself flinched, but stood his ground, and saw a holographic display appear above the device, divided into differently-colored blocks. Each block contained a simple line drawing, and, beneath it, a picture of a button.

"There. Mash the buttons and it goes into idiot mode," Jack said cheerfully. "The little pictures show you what to do next."

Tosh straightened up. "You couldn't have mentioned that sixteen hours ago?"

"If you had figured it out that would have been useful information, and we had to get the hamster and let the scan run anyway. All set now?"

Owen straightened up and touched the holographic display; one square began to flash. It was yellow, and pictured a small oval inside a larger oval, and a box to one side. After it had flashed a few seconds, the smaller oval popped into the box.

"Right," Owen said. Ianto thought he could almost see the man clinging to his dignity. "I reckon I've got this. Ready?"

Gwen belatedly let go of the hamster's cage, and Jack turned and looked at Ianto, holding out his hand palm up in silent invitation. Ianto folded his arms but stepped closer, taking his place at Jack's side. A moment later Jack's hand dropped to the small of his back, and Ianto kept carefully, perfectly still under the touch.

He had been a little too forceful, perhaps, when he'd asked Jack this morning to let him alone to do his job. Or perhaps he'd been precisely as forceful as necessary, because even this much contact was making Ianto's heart speed up unpleasantly.

Owen wasn't the only one clinging to his dignity. It would all be over soon, and once it was, Ianto could just forget it. But until he was free of this, he was still at Jack's mercy--more at Jack's mercy than usual--and he couldn't help but be aware. He could hardly be aware of anything else.

"Right," Owen said again, glancing around to make sure he had everyone's attention, and then he pressed the button. The yellow square in the display flashed brighter, the device emitted a three-toned mechanical chirp.

The hamster squealed horribly, and the bedding exploded in a flurry of motion.

Gwen snapped, "Owen!" in a tone of horrified reproach, and Jack's hand dropped from Ianto's back as he reached out to hold down the lid of the cage before Gwen could lift it.

"Don't, Gwen, she'll bite," Owen snapped, grabbing a scanner and fiddling with settings.

Jack was watching Gwen for any sudden moves; Gwen was staring at Owen as though he could fix it. Owen was cursing softly at the scanner, Tosh peering anxiously at her computer again. Ianto stood alone, and watched the hamster.

She didn't make another sound like that first startlingly loud noise of protest, though she did give small distressed chirrups at intervals, pawing at her own slack belly and breathing like a bellows. She looked like a little half-deflated football, covered in soft golden fur. The tiny creature was confused and frightened, maybe in pain, maybe just aware that something had gone horribly wrong. Ianto's stomach muscles clenched in involuntary sympathy.

"She'll do," Owen said. "Spot of bleeding, but no hemorrhage. Heart rate's elevated, I think. Tosh, what's normal for hamsters?"

Tosh huffed, but a moment later said, "Up to four hundred twenty-five beats per minute."

"Bit fast but all right, then," Owen said, and actually turned to look at Ianto, putting a note of reassurance into his voice. "She's scared, that's all. Doesn't know what's going on. And the litter was a pretty fair percentage of her body mass, so it's a bit traumatic. You'll be all right."

"There are nine of them," Tosh said, and instantly all attention was on her. She pressed the button that was highlighted in an oddly shimmery green-blue and the idiot mode display shrank, revealing what must be an internal view of the device--not the black-and-white still sonogram Ianto had somehow expected, but a live camera image, all yellow-pink squirming things, suspended in translucent balloons of fluid.

"They have paws," Tosh added, perilously near a squeak, and Ianto half-saw the abashed look she exchanged with Gwen. It was true, though; they had paws, and ridges of spines, and dark spots where their eyes would be, and transparent skin.

Ianto couldn't take his eyes off them. "They were almost finished."

"There should be a countdown, actually," Jack said, and reached past Ianto to poke a finger into the display. A grey box held something that looked like nothing so much as a computer's progress bar, shrinking by infinitesimal degrees. Jack poked it a couple of times and it expanded, until the motion was detectable. "See, it's a universal clock."

"I can calculate rate of change against total size," Tosh said, sounding herself again. Ianto stood quite still, eyes fixed on the shrinking blue bar, all his attention on Jack's presence beside him, just out of contact.

"There," Tosh said. "You're right, Ianto. Twenty-nine hours to go."

"Right," Owen said. "Not actually done testing, if you don't mind, Tosh, Jack." Owen consulted the display's remaining buttons and selected the one whose illustration showed a box with an unmoving oval inside.

Owen pressed the button, the machine chirped, and the image froze. Nine little squirmy things stopped squirming, just... stopped.

"And that's stasis," Owen said. "Or... Jack, d'you know if it's true stasis or just time dilation? We've got a clock again."

It wasn't visibly running down at all, but Tosh was already tapping at it, until the blue line stretched the length of the room and seemed, possibly, to be flickering at one end.

"That's battery life," Jack said. "You can leave 'em in stasis till they run down the battery, about--"

"Six hundred years," Tosh announced. "Give or take."

"Right," Owen said, aiming a scanner at the device. "No life signs, just the energy reading from the battery. Stasis. So, then..."

The button Owen had pressed before was now illustrated by an oval inside a box wriggling around. He punched it, and the image was instantly animated again, squirmy pink things floating in a ball of noses and paws. Any one of them was already bigger than the thing inside Ianto.

"And, nine life signs, all... probably normal, for hamsters. Same as they were, anyhow. So they're safely back out of stasis."

Owen set down the scanner and looked across at Ianto and Jack, including them both under his gaze as he said, "Test is successful. The device will support a terrestrial mammal in and out of stasis."

He reached toward the device again, his finger headed toward a mauve button illustrated by an empty box. "So I'll just flush them, then, and we can get it started scanning Ianto."

Gwen and Tosh made precisely the same high-pitched wordless noise, in stereo; Jack extended a hand toward Owen and then stopped short.

Owen kept still, finger hovering above the button, and focused on Ianto. "Or we could continue the test. Not really completely done until we actually get a terrestrial mammal out of it alive, I suppose."

Ianto glanced around at the others. Tosh wouldn't meet his eyes, while Gwen stared pleadingly. Jack met his gaze steadily, and Ianto had to look away, not wanting to know what Jack was reading on his face, not wanting to read what might be visible on Jack's.

It was only another twenty-nine hours. Owen said the thing was growing at a perfectly normal human pace; he would have weeks and weeks to go before there was any possibility of really feeling anything there. If he could just keep from thinking about it for a few days more, it would be all over. It would be out of him, put away inside the device, where it could stay for six hundred years, till Ianto was so long dead that Jack forgot his name.

Ianto took a step back from the table, away from Jack.

"I'll go and look into the care and feeding of orphan hamsters," Ianto said, and continued backing toward the steps as Tosh looked up at him with a small, sheepish smile and Gwen grinned unabashedly.

"But I am not doing all the feeding and cleaning up. They go on a rota, just like Myfanwy."

Not that anyone but Ianto ever remembered that there was an actual rota for feeding Myfanwy, and not that he imagined he would escape being solely responsible for nine blind hamsters. Still, it was good to have the idea out there, to hold over them later.

The monitor that transmitted information to the alien device turned out to be a small flexible black square. It looked like a piece of tape, though there was no adhesive on either side; when Owen pressed it to the skin just below Ianto's navel, it clung and then appeared to melt in, disappearing entirely.

Ianto looked quickly from that spot to Owen and back. There was a faint tingling sensation for a few seconds, then nothing. "That's supposed to happen, right?"

Owen shrugged. "I haven't got an animated cartoon acting it out for me, but it worked the same way on the hamster."

Ianto looked around. The litter were in a cage under a heat lamp on Tosh's desk, since the brief experiment in reintroducing them to their mother had failed. Ianto had assumed that the mother hamster had been brought back to autopsy, but the other cage was nowhere in sight. "Speaking of..."

"Gwen took her home," Owen said, busying himself with some readout on the device which couldn't possibly be that difficult to make out, given it was being acted out by moving circles and squares. "Said something about practicing on a pet before she and Rhys tried anything more complicated."

Gwen had to have heard what Jack said about the regulations--but maybe she believed they didn't apply to her. Maybe they wouldn't, when the living child in question wasn't half Jack's, when the parent in question wasn't Ianto. Or maybe Gwen would have the good sense to leave, someday. She had a life outside, she had something to leave for. She might just beat the odds.

"Right," Owen said. "Want to let that go twenty-four hours, so the machine picks up a circadian rhythm."

That made perfect sense, of course, only...

"I've got to stay in base for twenty-four hours, then?"

Owen looked briefly caught out, as though he actually hadn't thought of what it would entail. It wasn't as if Ianto hadn't spent nights in the Hub before, of course, and they all did what was necessary in a crisis. They were all treating this like the standard sort of problem to be solved by Torchwood. Owen wouldn't have thought twice about it.

"Actually," Owen said. "You should stay put for twenty-four hours after the transfer as well, for observation."

Forty-eight straight hours in the Hub. It still wasn't all that unusual. Ianto's reluctance to do it was the only thing standing out, in fact.

"If you needed to leave..." Owen said, eyeing the device. Ianto could likely take it with him--it was obviously portable--but taking tech off-base would mean asking Jack, which would mean talking to Jack, and telling him why.

Ianto quickly shook his head. "It's fine. I've got a few changes of clothes, I don't need anything else."

Ianto turned away before the look on Owen's face coalesced into words. Least said, soonest mended. He had twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes to kill.

There was something so blessedly simple about target practice. The world went away, blocked out by hearing protection and safety glasses, and his body simplified itself to a machine for aiming and firing with the occasional pause to reload. His arms hummed with recoil, and the bitter taste in his mouth was nothing but blowback.

It was just him and the gun, and when he sensed something at his back, it was automatic to swing around with the weapon up. Ianto managed to keep from squeezing the trigger, at least.

Jack didn't flinch. He was slouching against the wood stalls, six feet behind Ianto, his arms folded.

Ianto was aware that he ought to lower the gun, or put the safety on. Firing posture just felt right. Comfortable. Necessary.

They stayed like that long enough that Ianto had to put a conscious effort into keeping his arms steady, and still didn't lower the gun.

Finally, Jack reached up and tapped at his own ear. Ianto firmed his right hand grip, and used his left hand to tug the headphones down around his neck.

"Go ahead," Jack said easily, a hint of a smile in his voice that showed nowhere on his face. "If you need to take out some aggression, you might as well take it all the way, right?"

Ianto's hand clenched on the gun, and he gritted his teeth. His anger flared, but he knew that tone in Jack's voice, calculated to a nicety to obtain just that reaction. Jack was daring him to pull the trigger, but Ianto hadn't spent this long at Torchwood without learning to keep his composure under fire.

"That depends almost entirely on whether you're humoring me in my delicate condition."

Jack's gaze swept down his body and back up, and now Jack showed him a smile. "Oh, I wouldn't say delicate--"

Ianto turned on his heel and finished firing his clip into the head of the nearest Weevil target. When the chamber clicked, empty, he tugged off his safety glasses and tossed them to the floor; his ears were ringing, but they'd had worse in his misspent youth than a few gunshots in an echoing space. He tugged off the headphones, too, dropping them, and let his gun hand fall to his side before he turned back to face Jack again.

Jack had the decency to look chagrined, at least.

"Sorry," he said, almost sighing the word. "Really. I came down here to apologize." Ianto said nothing, and Jack looked away, quirking a small smile. "I can't stand you being angry with me."

It would be ludicrous, if Jack weren't so obviously in earnest. If he demanded Ianto's forgiveness, that would be the moment that all of this became actually unendurable. But Jack wouldn't, of course. He wouldn't even ask for it. He would just come down here and offer Ianto the opportunity to shoot him in the head as though that would solve anything.

"You've apologized already," Ianto said.

Jack shook his head. "You have to understand--this is my fault. More than just--" Jack made a vague but perfectly intelligible hand gesture to indicate that technically speaking, the actual conception had been a fairly mutual act. Ianto had officially been spending too much time working out how to parse Jack.

"This is my fault," Jack repeated. "I'm pretty sure I know what changed you. I didn't know it could happen, I didn't think I could--I just didn't think. That's all. It's no excuse, it's never been any excuse."

"You've done this before?"

Jack flashed him a smile and looked away. "Not exactly. But I almost wiped out the human race, once--"

It was going to be one of those explanations. "So did I, once."

Jack looked back at him then, thoughtfully. "So you did."

There was really nothing to say to that. Ianto couldn't even hold Jack's gaze. And of course Jack had never met a silence he couldn't fill.

"This was 1941, in London. During the Blitz. I was running--"

It dawned on Ianto that he didn't actually care. Explaining whatever he'd done that almost destroyed humanity before Ianto's parents had even been born--that was just one more way for Jack to get shot in the head. One more way for Jack to (fail to) apologize on his own terms. And whatever the explanation was, it wouldn't change the facts.

Ianto turned away from him again, this time to the table where he'd stacked the spare ammunition, ejecting the spent clip and sliding another home. The click rang out in the silence. He'd shut Jack up.

Ianto kept his back turned, looking down at the weapon in his hands.

"What you're saying is, it happened because you're Captain Jack Harkness, and this is Torchwood, and these things happen. I know that. You don't have to explain it to me."

Jack stayed silent long enough for Ianto to turn and sight on the next target, and then he said, "No, I do."

Ianto fired, once, twice, three times, and then paused to find out what Jack would say next.

"It happened," Jack said, from not at all far behind Ianto, "because I'm Captain Jack Harkness, and you're Ianto Jones, and I love you, and I couldn't--"

Ianto whirled to face him again, and this time his right hand dropped and held the gun aimed away toward the floor, finger safe on the trigger guard. He couldn't speak, but the look on his face was clearly more than enough.

Jack stopped short, eyes going as wide as Ianto's felt.

"Ianto," he said, his voice rough with something that sounded like pain. "For Christ's sake, tell me it doesn't come as a surprise to you that I--"

Ianto shook his head quickly, waving his left hand to cut off Jack's words though he still couldn't find his own. He didn't need to hear it twice, that was just greedy--and it didn't come as a surprise. It had been obvious to him for a very long time that Jack loved his team, and though it might have been in doubt a time or two, Ianto knew he was part of that team. He was one of Jack's, ergo Jack loved him.

But for all he was--so far as he knew, currently--the only one Jack was shagging, it wasn't as if there were anything terribly special about him. Jack made occasional spasmodic attempts to carry on something like a normal dating relationship--rather as if he'd read books about normal dating relationships--but mostly Jack was Jack, Jack was Torchwood, and Ianto was one of his people. Nothing more, nothing less. His only special skill was getting the temperamental Hub coffee machine to emit something drinkable--not nothing, but not exactly irreplaceable, unless Tosh's theory about the thing literally liking Ianto best was borne out.

Torchwood One had wanted Ianto because he was disposable, obedient, and bright, in roughly that order; Jack had accepted him because he happened to catch Jack's attention and looked good in a suit, and then kept him because Jack never let anyone go. Ianto knew his place, and he wouldn't trade it for anything.

"Because I'm..." Ianto said, fighting to keep his voice level, fighting not to make it a question.

Something softened in Jack's eyes. "Ianto Jones," he repeated. "Particularly, specifically, individually, you."

Jack's hand closed around his on the gun, and brought it up between them, tilted to keep the barrel pointed down. Jack smiled and touched his lips to Ianto's knuckles, and his breath was hot against Ianto's skin as he added, "And your reason for almost wiping out the human race was so much better than mine."

"Oh," Ianto said, which was a bit stupid. He probably ought to be saying something back, but he couldn't really think straight. He never could, when Jack focused on him like this--and still he'd never realized it was him Jack was focusing on, really him, instead of a boyfriend-shaped object, or a sex-partner-shaped one, or an interchangeably beloved member of his team.

He was looking at Ianto. He had been, all this time.

Oh.

Jack let Ianto's hand fall but kept hold of his wrist, taking a half-step closer to him.

"This is why I can't apologize to you properly," Jack said softly, his thumb rubbing over the bone of Ianto's wrist. His body was trying to be soothed and aroused all at once, and he wound up standing very still, staring into Jack's eyes and trying to remember to breathe.

"I am sorry," Jack said. "I'm sorry I didn't explain myself clearly, and I'm sorry I hurt you, and I'm sorry I backed you into a corner. I'm sorry I made unfounded assumptions about what you would want and what would be best for you. I'm sorry I sent you away just because I didn't know what else to say."

Jack's other hand landed on Ianto's chest--over his wildly thumping heart--and slid downward to stop, quite chastely, on his belly. Just there, just where it was.

"But I'm not sorry about this. I'm not sorry your child is going to exist. This is the kind of immortality people are supposed to have, Ianto Jones, and somehow I managed to give it to you. I can't even pretend to regret that, not for a second."

If Ianto tried to say anything at this point, it was just going to be oh again, so he didn't bother. He got a fistful of Jack's collar, instead, and leaned in for a kiss.

Jack's mouth was yielding under his, letting him find his own way, and Ianto sighed shakily against Jack's lips. The kiss was like the first smoke after quitting, so good it was almost too much, the touch of Jack's mouth and the smell of him on every breath, the feel of his body so close and the knowledge that they'd soon be closer still. Two days away from Jack, and Ianto was shaking for him.

Jack's hand left his stomach, settling on the small of his back and tugging him closer. Jack smiled against his mouth and whispered, "I missed you," into another kiss.

Ianto managed to release Jack's crumpled collar to curl his hand around the nape of Jack's neck, brushing a fingertip against the closer-cropped hair. Jack shivered a little, too, and that was enough to let Ianto speak.

"You know, Owen said I'm to be sure and get a full night's sleep."

"Oh?" Jack's hand slid lower, down to his arse, but he drummed his fingertips against it instead of grabbing. "Are you sleepy?"

Ianto smiled. "Not a bit, I'm afraid."

"Well." Another staccato beat of Jack's fingers against his back pocket, Jack's breath hot against the corner of his mouth. "I'm sure we can find some way to wear you out."

Ianto turned his head for another kiss, and then he tugged his wrist from Jack's grip and finally put down the gun.

Owen made him put on scrubs for the transfer, in case something went horribly and messily wrong. Ianto tried not to be too acutely aware that he was sitting just where the hamster had sat, being regarded by Owen, Tosh, and Gwen with nearly the same air of curious concern.

Given the option of sitting with his feet dangling like a child, or sitting cross-legged like a child, Ianto had chosen the option that at least left him self-contained. He rested his hands on his knees and tried to seem calm, though he knew his racing pulse betrayed him on the monitor. It would all be over soon, and they'd go back to looking at him or not in the ordinary way.

Jack stood at his side, one hand resting over one of Ianto's. Ianto had a feeling that Jack was never going to look at him in quite the same way again, but they were on the same side of this, now. Nothing mattered more than that.

"Ready?" Owen glanced from Ianto and Jack to Gwen, watching the monitors, to Tosh, beside the device. When everyone had nodded, Owen pressed the button.

"Fuck." Ianto's whole body jerked, fists clenching as he forced himself not to try to fight the sensation. Jack's arms were around him instantly, holding him tight as he gasped.

"Ianto?" Jack's voice pitched up, worried, but his grip on Ianto released. He spread one hand on Ianto's back and the other on his chest. Ianto's heart raced between Jack's palms, his chest heaving. He was listing sideways, toward the stability of Jack--not quite equal to the task of keeping himself upright, not quite willing to lean.

Ianto shook his head. "I'm all right, I'm all right--"

He could hear the frantic note in his own voice, reassuring to no one, and forced himself to stop. Jack's arms went around him again, and Ianto gave in and slumped sideways, drawing his knees toward his chest and closing his eyes as he curled down to rest his head on Jack's shoulder.

Gwen spoke, and Owen answered, but Ianto kept his eyes closed, trying to match his own breathing to the evenness of Jack's. It was an unsettling feeling, to be aware of something's absence when he hadn't been able to tell it was there in the first place.

"Does it hurt?" Jack asked softly. One of his hands moved restlessly up and down Ianto's arm. He smelled good, like always, like Jack.

Ianto shook his head. "For a second, like ripping off a plaster inside out. Startled me. It just feels... strange."

Jack kissed his temple and Ianto opened his eyes--and there, floating in holographic representation at the other end of the table, was the subject of all the excitement.

It still looked more prawn than human, but by rights it must be more or less a baby now, if horribly premature and housed in a terribly advanced and alien sort of incubator. It was out of him and on its own in the world: nobody's parasite. A baby--Jack's baby. And his, he supposed, for the time being.

"Hello there," Ianto said softly.

"He's got your prefrontal lobes," Jack whispered, "but I think definitely my eyebuds."

Ianto laughed, sharply and loudly and more than the comment warranted, straightening up as Jack let him go. He could laugh, now. It was over. It was safe.

"Right," Owen said, when Ianto had quieted. "Then we just--"

"Let me," Ianto said, catching Owen's cool hand as it reached toward the button. "I should be the one to do this."

Jack's hand rested on the small of Ianto's back as he leaned forward, and the emptiness inside him had already settled down to a twinge, a small ache. Nothing he'd notice in the general background noise of bumps and bruises, if he didn't know just what it was.

Owen dropped his hand, giving way, and Tosh took a step back, watching. Ianto let it be for another few seconds, the tiny grotesque thing with its visible heartbeat and its fluttering movements. He thought he probably ought to say something, but what was there to say? Not good-bye, not quite yet, and not good night, either. Stasis was not sleep, and Ianto would never put this baby to bed.

Jack's hand moved up and down his back, and Ianto nodded firmly and pressed the button. The fetus went still before his eyes, and that was that.

Jack's hand stopped moving on his back at the same instant, and Ianto felt a bit like he'd gone into stasis himself. He knew he should take his hand away, sit back, get up and go back to work, but he felt frozen.

It was Tosh who moved, finally, reaching out--toward his hand or toward the device, Ianto wasn't sure.

Jack was suddenly coming around the table, saying, "Don't--don't touch it, Toshiko."

Tosh jerked back, turning a startled look toward Jack.

"There's one more thing," Jack said. "At least, I think this must be how..."

Ianto started to withdraw his hand, but Jack caught it, holding it to the device's control panel and interlacing his own fingers so that they touched it between Ianto's.

The still image of the waiting child shrank, and beside it a new menu appeared. Ianto had barely glimpsed the new array of options before Jack selected one, pressing a button with his free hand. Beneath Ianto's hand, the device was suddenly, briefly warm. Jack tugged Ianto's hand away and set his own hand on the same spot. When he took it away, the device chirped once and then went dark, all displays disappearing, the controls retracting into a gleaming, solid surface.

Ianto looked up at Jack, who was staring intently at the device. "Jack?"

Jack met his eyes and smiled reassuringly. "Security. It's locked up tight now, so only you or I can access it. See?"

Jack touched the spot where the controls had been, and the buttons reappeared; he pressed one and the holographic display returned, the motionless fetus in living color. He took his hand away and it winked out, the device encased once again in an unbroken shell.

"Here," Jack said. "Tosh, you try."

Tosh touched the same spot, and nothing happened. She tried something with her computer, shook her head, and then said, "What about your wriststrap?"

"Nope," Jack said, quite confidently, but he made a show of trying it anyway; he punched a sequence of commands on his wrist, but nothing happened. The thing stayed unnervingly dark and silent.

Ianto reached out and touched it, and it sprang to life. He took his hand away and it went dark.

"Safe and sound," Jack affirmed. "You could blow it up, launch it through space, and it'd still stay locked up, waiting. Whoever made these things, they didn't mess around with the security features."

Owen reached over and rapped his knuckles against the device, then caught Ianto's wrist and checked his pulse, though that had to be redundant. Ianto turned to look at him, and Owen immediately looked away, dropping his hold and peering at his scanner.

"Looks like you're fine, but you should still stick around the Hub for a day or so, let us keep an eye on you." Owen looked up then, glancing from Ianto to Jack and back again. "That won't be a problem, will it?"

Ianto grinned. "I think I'll be all right."

"Right," Gwen said abruptly, behind him. "In that case--"

A small alarm began chirping.

"Not my turn, just been operated on," Ianto announced immediately.

"It's me, I think," Tosh said, and headed off to her workstation quickly. Ianto thought of following her--but there was no way he could apologize for being offered better choices than she had. He didn't think she'd even want him to.

"I think it was mine, actually," Gwen murmured, and headed after Tosh.

Owen yanked the wireless lead for the monitor off Ianto's arm. "If you could clear off my autopsy table, I believe I have some dead aliens I need to be working on. You've put me days behind with this stunt."

Ianto looked over at Jack, who was grinning, and couldn't help grinning back. It was over. They'd won. They'd all won, everyone had, just this once.

"My fault, Owen," Jack said. "You can file a complaint if you like."

Owen rolled his eyes, and Ianto slid down from the table, standing across the device from Jack.

"Help me with this?" Jack asked, and Ianto reached for the near end. At his touch, a section slid out, making a handhold, and he and Jack lifted it between them and carried it easily up the stairs. It wasn't so large or heavy that it would have been harder for one person to carry than two, but the symbolism was obvious, and Ianto couldn't refuse Jack this.

Jack led the way to his office, past Tosh and Gwen entirely absorbed in feeding the litter of hamsters their hourly eyedropperfuls of kitten formula. Neither of them looked up as Jack and Ianto passed, busy coaxing their tiny charges to drink.

Once in Jack's office, they came to a stop in the middle of the cluttered room, Ianto waiting as Jack looked around for a spot to set the thing down. Finally he headed for the corner behind his desk, and Ianto followed, lowering the device carefully to the floor. It might be indestructible, but that was no reason to be careless with the baby.

Jack knelt, clearing away boxes and papers to make a space for the device. There wasn't room for another body in that corner, so Ianto stayed where he was, watching Jack.

"You ought to name it," Jack remarked to a stack of dusty files which Ianto had not yet mustered either the courage or the patience to organize.

Ianto blinked, looking down at the device. The fetus was still too early in its development to even have differentiated sex organs, and there was no knowing when or where it might grow up; the choice of a name was surely premature.

Jack looked back at him.

"The device, I mean." He touched its surface gently. "I know Owen usually names the medical artifacts, but I'm sure he'd let you have this one."

Ianto reached out as well, tracing one of the incomprehensible symbols that remained visible on the device when sealed. "You've seen one of these before. Don't they have a name?"

"Found one that had got lost," Jack said, as if Ianto hadn't half-known that already. He hadn't sounded as though he were guessing, when he mentioned launching a device like this through space. "No idea what the people who made them called them, and the report I filed with the Time Agency just referred to it as Damaged Medical Equipment, Subtype Reproductive, Originating in the Keresla Sector. Not much of a ring to it."

"Ah," Ianto said. "I suppose Inventory Item 49-GS-K-7 isn't much improvement."

Still, given the enormity of what the thing had accomplished, Ianto could hardly imagine what to call it.

"I keep thinking of Pandora's Box," Jack said, shifting a box sideways and peering critically at the floor beneath.

"The source of all the world's trouble," Ianto said, eyeing the device dubiously. Though, if one considered the likely consequences of unleashing the next generation of Jack Harkness on the universe, the analogy did begin to recommend itself.

Jack picked it up gently, and set it in the space he'd made, spreading one hand on the surface. "All the evil escaped long ago, at the beginning of time. Then Pandora sealed it up again, with just one thing still inside."

Jack looked over at Ianto, reaching out a hand to touch his. "Hope."

Ianto looked at it again. Sealed up tight, carrying a little life just waiting to happen--and it would survive anything, just like Jack would. No matter what might happen in the intervening years, decades, centuries, this child would be waiting for Jack, and Jack would be waiting for this child.

Jack took hold of Ianto's hand, tugging him up as he stood. "Of course, in the original Greek myth, it wasn't a box. They didn't really store things in boxes back then. They used jars."

Ianto considered that for a moment.

"I see," he said finally. "Pandora's Amphora it is, then."

When the small, insistent alarm woke him, Ianto was alone in Jack's bunk. He shut off the noise and then spent a moment wanting to pull the covers over his head and hide--a rational reaction to waking up in the Hub, really, but it took him a moment to remember what exactly he wanted to hide from--what he couldn't hide from, inside him--but it was over now.

He felt the same rush of relief all over again, and hard on its heels he realized that the alarm had gone off: his turn to feed the hamsters. He spent a few selfish seconds wishing he'd slept through it, and could brush off negligence as accident. But he was awake, undeniably so, and it actually was his turn by now. And after all, the little beggars were his responsibility as much as anyone's. Probably more so--he'd been the only one with the right to veto their existence, and he hadn't. Ianto pulled on trousers and someone's undershirt and climbed up to Jack's office.

The cage was there, set up on Jack's desk with the litter's feeding supplies beside it. Clearly Ianto wasn't the only one who knew it was his turn.

Ianto mixed the formula, filled a dropper, sanitized his hands, and then reached into the cage and held his hand under the light, to be sure of being warm enough before he tried to touch. The litter were waking, squirming over and around each other, emitting barely-audible chirps. Ianto let his fingers dangle just beside them, half curled, and the boldest soon found its way into his grasp. He lifted it up, cupped carefully in his palm, holding the tiny thing nearly level with his face as he guided the eyedropper to its mouth.

Three careful drops, that was all it could hold. Ianto kept it there in his hand a moment longer, closing his fingers gently around the tiny animal. It was still blind and hairless, but it moved strongly in his grip, and he could feel the racing of its heart, the rigidity of its bones. It was warm and alive--and only one of nine, and keeping him from his sleep.

Ianto sighed and set it down, and only then glimpsed Jack standing, fully and properly dressed, leaning in the doorway. Jack smiled and came inside without saying a word, just picked up an eyedropper and filled it from the beaker of mixed formula. His fingers brushed over Ianto's palm as he reached into the cage, and he made a soft sound as he coaxed one of the hamsters into his hand. Ianto picked up his own charge, but even as he fed it he couldn't help watching Jack's hands, tender and confident all at once. It occurred to Ianto that he didn't know what time it was, how many feedings had gone by while he slept. Jack's office wasn't only convenient for Ianto, after all.

Ianto set down the hamster with the one he'd already fed, and Jack's joined them a moment later. As Jack cut another from the pack, Ianto said quietly, "You'll be a good father."

Jack looked at Ianto, his expression unreadable, and then down at the hamster in his hand. His frown, Ianto thought, was concentration.

Ianto picked up another and started feeding it; they got more difficult as they went along, because the hungriest and easiest to feed always pushed themselves forward. This one just kept trying to roll away, cheeping a little frantically. Ianto got a tighter grip, shushing it softly, and was so absorbed in what he was doing that it took him a moment to understand when Jack said, "So would you."

Ianto carefully didn't look up, and carefully squeezed a drop of formula into the hamster's mouth. "But I won't, Jack. You will."

"You could," Jack said softly, and this time when his knuckles brushed Ianto's wrist, reaching into the cage, Ianto shivered. "Not now, not anytime soon--you've made your choice for now and I respect that. But later, if you decided to. When you're ready. You could."

Ianto finished with the hamster he was holding and set it down carefully as he considered his words. He refilled the empty eyedropper, and then he lifted his chin, looked Jack in the eye, and said steadily, "Spoken like a man who's never had to do more with the Torchwood Statistical Survey than use it to prop up a wobbly table."

Jack opened his mouth, but Ianto shook his head and reached for the next hamster.

"When you're in the middle of it, it must seem like every death could have been prevented, like each one is a singular event. But they're not, Jack. Ninety-eight point two percent of Torchwood personnel die before their fifth anniversary of hire, and that figure rises to ninety-nine point four when the Cardiff office is taken separately."

Jack was frowning harder now, but his hands were as perfectly gentle as ever as he reached into the cage again. "You can't apply statistical findings to a single data point."

Ianto didn't know whether to roll his eyes, or to be pleased that at some point Jack had paid enough attention to statistical principles to know that. "That's why I don't tell you that I will be 99.4% dead in a year's time, Jack. That doesn't prevent properly applied statistics from functioning as a predictor of future outcomes."

Jack said nothing to that, and Ianto knew he should let it go--there was no harm in letting Jack have this hope as well as the other--but Ianto wanted him to understand. He wanted Jack to know that this, too, had been his choice for his body, his life.

"I was a junior researcher in London," Ianto said softly, rubbing his thumb over the tiny ear of the dozing hamster in his palm. "My third day on the job, I got the same assignment they gave every new researcher recruited from outside. I had to recompile the mortality statistics for Torchwood personnel going back thirty years, across all offices and job titles. The median lifespan after hire for a researcher is only two months longer than for a field agent, did you know that?"

Jack gave Ianto a wary look, but said nothing.

"I knew," Ianto said, setting the hamster down and reaching for another. "I knew when I got out of bed and came in for my fourth day of work. I was still in my probationary period. I could have quit and lost nothing but the memory of a week spent working with the sort of borderline sociopaths who give you that assignment as soon as they're sure you can find your desk. I didn't quit, Jack. I knew this job would kill me sooner or later, and I chose it anyway. Just like we all did."

"But you could choose again," Jack said doggedly, picking up the last unfed hamster. "The situation is different now. You could change your mind."

Ianto looked down at the creature in his hand, prodding it with his thumb to get it to open its mouth.

"And if I did?" Ianto shrugged. "The life expectancy of a former Torchwood employee is eight years from date of separation. Leading causes of death in decreasing order of prevalence are suicide, murder, violent accidents, exotic and aggressive cancers, and miscellaneous causes impossible for a civilian medical examiner to determine. The sample size is small, but well above ninety percent are dead within ten years, and the majority of those who survive are in some form of long-term care."

"Ianto--"

"I might beat the odds, yes," Ianto said, finally getting the hamster to swallow its first drop. "But how can I take that chance? Not when it's someone else's life I'm playing for, not when you're a sure thing."

"Ianto, it's not one of us or the other. There's no double standard in the regulations."

Ianto blinked down at the hamster, squeezed out another drop of formula for it, and did not, at all, consider what Jack was saying.

"If you left with our child--if our child were alive in the world... I'd lose my mind knowing you were both out there. There's no way I could continue. If you left Torchwood, I would--"

"Don't say that, please," Ianto said, quite evenly, keeping all his attention on the hamster. "I don't know if it would be worse if you believed it or if you knew you were lying, but don't say it. It would be obscene."

Jack set the eyedropper down. Ianto braced himself for argument, flat rejection or cold dismissal, but whatever he was actually thinking, Jack contrived to sound only mildly exasperated. "Tell me this, then, if you're so big on statistics--why are we bothering with this? The odds of keeping nine orphaned hamsters alive by hand-feeding can't be good."

Ianto shrugged, unbearably relieved by the half-change of the subject. He glanced in Jack's direction as he took a breath. "When I die, I won't have to worry about Gwen looking at me like it's my fault afterward."

Jack's mouth twitched a little, and he let out a sharp breath, the ghost of a laugh. Good enough, tonight. "Well, then."

Ianto nodded, and looked down to concentrate on getting the last drop of formula into his hamster, so he could go back to sleep.

The motion in his peripheral vision caught his attention, and he knew better than to look straight on. Jack had both hands cupped around the hamster, raising it to his face, to his mouth, his pursed lips. Ianto just had time to think that he was about to find out that Captain Jack Harkness was the sort of person who kissed his pets when Jack stopped. Barely audibly, he blew on the tiny creature in his hands.

Ianto's head whipped round almost involuntarily, but Jack just lowered the hamster back into the cage with the others.

"You just blew on that hamster," Ianto said, trying and failing not to sound accusing. "Because you don't want it to die."

Jack raised his eyebrows, but didn't look up. "People blow on dice for luck, why not mice? It's nothing special."

As if anything about Jack was nothing special. As if they didn't know he carried life enough for all the rodents in the world, if he could just figure out how to give it away--and there was proof in this room that he had, at least once.

But Ianto couldn't say a word of that. What would be the point?

When Jack finally did meet his eyes, Ianto just smiled, and raised the hamster he still held until it was level with Jack's lips. Jack smiled back, and blew.

Lying in Jack's bunk again a little later, this time with Jack wrapped around him tighter than a blanket and in lieu of clothes, Ianto said, "Promise me something."

Jack's arms tightened. "Depends on the something."

Ianto closed his eyes. "Promise me you won't rush into it. After I die, promise me you won't run off and have the child right away, just because it's a piece of me and you want me back. It wouldn't be fair to either of you."

Jack kissed his forehead and relaxed his grip enough to let Ianto breathe, and Ianto figured that was as much of an answer as he was going to get. At least he knew Jack had heard him. That was something.

But when Ianto was on the edge of sleep, Jack said, "Yeah."

He spoke so softly that Ianto felt the word more than heard it, Jack's breath blown out warm on the top of his head.

The next morning, one of the hamsters had died, Gwen broke a coffee cup when she found out and then cut herself trying to clean it up without Ianto's help, the Rift belched out something vile-smelling which eventually turned out to be some other planet's rubbish heap, and Ianto began to get into the habit of not thinking about the sealed Amphora in Jack's office at all.

The crisis wound down with what Ianto had come to recognize as the usual relaxing of focus. The first step was from survive survive survive to where's Jack?

Having been reunited with Jack and Gwen simultaneously, and assured that neither Hart nor Gray constituted a continuing threat, it didn't take long for his focus to widen again, to Tosh and Owen and the power station.

Ianto stood behind Jack now, watching numbly, helplessly, as Jack cradled Tosh in his arms, as Gwen kept stroking her hair and calling to her long after it was obvious that Tosh would never respond. Nor Owen, though between them they had saved the city, stopped the overload.

Ianto had done this before, though. Ianto had stood in the wreckage at Canary Wharf and kept going. The latest sharp shock was only that, only the latest. His mind ticked on inexorably, clicking over to the next concern down the line. Gwen was here--she would be worried about Rhys when it occurred to her to be--where had he been seen last? The police station? But he would go home now that the excitement had died down. Gwen would find him there, if their flat hadn't been destroyed in one of the explosions--him and the hamster, of course. Sally, she'd named it.

Sally--and Sally's little ones. The last members of the litter Ianto hadn't yet managed to give away were living in a cage upstairs in the tourist office; he'd put them away beneath the desk, under a towel, sometime before all the excitement began. They ought to be there still, safe, but he should go and check on them. They probably needed water.

He'd actually shifted his weight backward when he caught sight of Hart in his peripheral vision, and the thought crashed down on him all at once.

Jack's brother, out to destroy all Jack loved.

Jack's child, hidden not thirty meters from this spot.

Ianto gasped as if he'd been struck; he saw Hart turn toward him at the sound, but Jack was lost in his grief, and didn't look up until Ianto choked out, "Jack."

Jack looked at him over his shoulder, wide-eyed, his gaze sweeping quickly over Ianto as if checking him for injury.

Ianto shook his head, dazed. "Jack. The Amphora."

Jack frowned, as if he didn't know what Ianto meant, and then he went very still, his face going blank. He was still holding Tosh--Tosh's body--but his voice was steady, reassuring, as he said, "Gray couldn't have hurt it. He didn't even know it was there."

Ianto nodded, trying to feel reassured.

"Go check," Jack said gently, and Ianto broke and turned, nearly running to Jack's office, only half-aware of being followed.

Ianto was already past Jack's desk when he spotted Hart. Ianto froze, and Hart stopped inside the doorway and put his hands on his hips. "What is it? What are we looking for?"

"You're not looking for anything," Ianto said.

"Something precious to Jack, something Jack thinks Gray couldn't hurt, something you call an amphora but obviously isn't an actual amphora because there isn't one here," Hart recited, looking around and walking closer. "Something Jack's sure Gray didn't know about, which means it's probably new since I was here last, isn't it? And you're worried about it, so check on it."

Ianto stood his ground, and Hart sighed hugely, spreading his hands. "Look, it's either follow you, or stand out there while they..."

He waved one arm back through the doorway, and Ianto flinched at the thought. Sooner or later, practicality would take over, and Jack and Gwen would move, would clean up Tosh's body and put her--it--her away. Maybe it was just as well to keep Hart clear of that, for all their sakes.

"Fine," Ianto said--Hart couldn't actually harm the Amphora any more than Gray could--and knelt down behind Jack's desk. There were files stacked precariously atop the Amphora, and it had acquired a blanket wrapping at some point; Ianto had no idea when. Typical of Jack, somehow, whether he was being protective or hiding it from himself, or both at once in the same economical gesture.

Ianto unwrapped the covering, and from above him came a low, admiring whistle. Hart was leaning all the way across the desk, but when Ianto looked up at him he swung himself over to perch on top. Ianto jerked back, but Hart's booted feet never quite passed through the spot where his head had been.

Hart leaned forward further and said, "Sprog pod. Years since I've seen one of those."

Ianto gritted his teeth and touched the control area, bringing the display to life.

"A sprog pod that knows its daddy," Hart added, sounding faintly impressed. "Brought Jack a cuckoo's egg to sit on, have you? I'll bet he loves that."

Ianto couldn't resist turning to glare at him again, and Hart's eyebrows went up. "No, I mean that, he's mad about babies--hasn't he told you about his little girl, then?"

Ianto looked down, something going tight and painful in his chest. Jack had lied to him--or Hart was lying, looking to stir up trouble, now of all times. Either way it was up to Ianto to sort it out, to keep Hart occupied and away from the others. He took his hand away from the control panel, running his knuckles across the sealed-smooth surface of the Amphora.

"He said Time Agents can't have children."

"Not our own, genetically, no," Hart said blithely, as though it were self-evident. "And that'd be the end of it for you or me, but Jack's from the Boeshane Peninsula--started out as a human colony, you know, and the colonies are all obsessed with getting their numbers up. Boeshane did it by making everybody capable of bearing children. Jack's a walking sprog pod and he's got the maternal instincts to go with it--they all do, they're all certifiable when it comes to kids. Theirs, anybody's, makes no difference. If Jack's parents had had about eight like proper colonials, maybe Gray--"

Ianto flinched, and Hart stopped short.

"Anyhow," Hart redirected, "last time I saw a sprog pod was when Jack and I were working together--ran across a distress signal out in the middle of utterly bloody nowhere, reeled it in and it turned out to be one of these. Battery had almost run out and the baby wasn't done cooking, so it'd gone into an emergency protocol--it's set to reverse the process, get the sprog into the nearest suitable bit of real estate, mechanical or otherwise. Happened to be a human in there, and the pod decided Jack was suitable."

Ianto looked up, drawn into the story despite himself. "Did Jack get any say in the matter?"

Hart rolled his eyes theatrically. "We figured out what it was doing, yeah, and I was all for putting the thing straight back out the airlock, but Jack's Boeshane, like I said. Maternal instincts. He all but threatened to--well, no. He did threaten to put me out the airlock instead if I didn't let it go. And then there he was, Jack Harkness with a baby on board for the next hundred and seven days, and he spent seventy-nine of them moaning about his sore back and swollen ankles while I manfully restrained the urge to strangle him."

"Well done you," Ianto said, very nearly sincerely, trying desperately not to picture it. And then, because he couldn't help wondering, "What about the other twenty-eight days?"

Hart grinned wolfishly. "Libido surge."

Ianto's eyes went wide; he couldn't help picturing it, and it was...

"Terrifying, honestly." Hart shook his head. "Couldn't stop him, just had to hold on and hope to survive the experience."

Ianto looked back down at the pod--the Amphora--and touched the controls again. "What happened to her? His little girl?"

"Oh, well, once she was born we had a pretty good idea where she came from--not many places out that way where purple hair and spinal data ports come standard--so we got her back to her own world, handed her over to the authorities to find her a family, and went on our way. I think Jack checked up on her after, I don't--"

Ianto had called up the image of the child, and Hart fell sharply silent when it appeared. Ianto glanced up again, just in time to see Hart sliding down to crouch on the floor beside him, scowling.

"Are you running this thing in idiot mode?"

"Jack set it that way," Ianto said, bristling at Hart's unspoken--unknowing--criticism of Tosh--Tosh, who was dead outside.

Hart, heedless, shook his head and rolled his eyes again. "And that, boys and girls, is why we study actually alien alien languages instead of passing our comps with Earth Neo-Revived Classical Latin and then getting by on the gloss. Here."

Hart caught Ianto's hand, and Ianto jerked away automatically. Hart gave him a mildly irritated look and caught his hand again in a harder grip.

"Just fixing the interface, eye candy," he muttered. "Honestly, I'm not sociopath enough to hurt your baby just for kicks, and I'm not stupid enough to think Jack wouldn't kill me slowly and painfully for doing it--I know exactly what he can do, believe me."

It was Hart's matter-of-fact tone that Ianto found convincing, more than what he said; he relaxed and let Hart manipulate his fingers over the keys. It took a few moments, long enough for Ianto to watch the way Hart frowned in concentration and then smiled, open-mouthed, when he'd worked it out. Long enough to become acutely conscious of the warmth and pressure of Hart's fingers over his.

The display snapped into English, and strings of incomprehensible symbols resolved into STASIS MODE and BATTERY LIFE: 621 YEARS and SEX CHROMOSOMES: XY.

Ianto kept staring until Hart jerked his hand away, clearing his throat. "There you go, then. I expect to be named godfather for that, when you get round to thawing him out."

Ianto got to his feet, and the Amphora went dark and still, keeping its secrets again. Him. "Not likely, Hart."

But Hart just raised his eyebrows and smiled, as if he knew Ianto's opinion had nothing to do with it.

A couple of days later, when it didn't seem too much like kicking Jack when both of them were down, Ianto leaned against his desk and said in his best absent tone of inquiry, "Were you planning on ever telling me that I'd got your internal organs?"

Jack looked up from his report to Ianto, and then made a show of patting himself down. "Mine are still right here. I'm pretty sure you have your internal organs."

Ianto waited, and Jack looked back down, putting on his frown of pretending-to-read-this. "Which are now modeled on mine, yes. I was going to tell you, but you said you didn't need me to explain it to you."

Ianto tried to work out how Jack might have almost wiped out humanity by making them all like himself--the answers to that question started out uncomfortable and went rapidly downhill--and finally gave up and asked. "Apart from being a walking sprog pod, is there anything else I should know about?"

Jack winced a little at the term, but he must have known Ianto had got the information from Hart, even if he hadn't bothered to just watch the CCTV footage of their conversation.

Jack reached out and touched Ianto's right hip. "You know how you had your appendix out when you were a kid?"

Ianto nodded. The memory was fairly vivid, one of the most terrifying of his life before Torchwood.

"You should have a new one now. An Appendix B, actually. Time Agency standard issue, allows you to digest the fourteen most common types of non-Earth-descended proteins and three classes of processed hydrocarbons."

Ianto stared at him. "I can eat petrol?"

Jack wrinkled his nose. "I don't recommend it unless you're starving. There's not a condiment selection in the galaxy that makes it taste like anything but petrol. Polystyrene's not bad, though, as long as you have a toothpick."

Ianto shook his head.

"And you're really well equipped for a future career in smuggling," Jack added. "But you should let me show you how to use that, if you intend to. There's a trick to it, and it's pretty easy to hurt yourself if you do it wrong."

Ianto covered his eyes with one hand.

"I spent a few years living on this ship that was equipped with nanogenes," Jack said quickly, and Ianto warily lowered his hand.

Jack was looking at the surface of his desk, speaking matter-of-factly, but fast enough to betray his unease.

"They're atom-sized machines, designed for medical repair and maintenance, and species-adaptable, just like the Amphora. There were millions of them on the ship, uncountable, and I was there long enough that they got pretty used to me. I never realized it, but when I had to jump ship, some of them must have come with me--stowed away inside my body. It's probably why I heal so quickly and age so slowly, in between not dying."

Ianto nodded slowly. "So that's--that's something else, then. I'm not like you that way. I can still die."

Jack suddenly looked every day of his age, two thousand looped years and all, and he met Ianto's eyes like it was an effort just to look up. "Yes. I managed to pass them to you once, and they repaired you wrong, using me as a template. That's all. They're not why I survive."

Ianto thought back--he hadn't, actually, been genuinely badly hurt many times since coming to Cardiff. "Lisa?"

Jack looked down.

"I woke up and you'd been kissing me. That whole night is just flashes, in my head, but I know I tried to talk to her, and I know you were kissing me when you'd just been threatening to shoot me, and I didn't know what had been happening. She hurt me. Badly. And you saved me, even if it did go a bit... unexpectedly."

"She killed you," Jack said, and then looked up and met Ianto's eyes.

Ianto stared back. It was hardly a shock at all, by now. Maybe he'd always known that that blank spot was blanker than the others; maybe this wasn't even a surprise.

It didn't change anything, knowing she'd killed him, not really; it only reiterated what he'd realized when he saw what she'd done to Annie. She was so lost by then that it was a mercy to kill her--a harsh and angry mercy, coming from Jack, but one Ianto hadn't been able to dispense at all, in the end. He didn't even think knowing she'd killed him would have made a difference. He still couldn't have pulled the trigger.

"She killed me a couple of times, too," Jack added off-handedly. "Electrocuted, more or less, which hasn't happened to me often."

That would have done it. Ianto clenched a fist and released it. It hurt to know it, scared him a little to think of what he'd do for Jack, but--he was no different to Jack, maybe, for all he'd had less practice at it. Ianto was pretty sure he'd threatened to kill Jack that night, just as Jack had threatened to kill Ianto, but if someone else had done it for him... he'd have done just what Jack did, or at least he bloody hoped so. He would now, for certain, though Gwen was about the only person left he'd have to be persuaded to pull the trigger on. A measure of his life: there were two people in the world he'd think twice about killing if they threatened him or his.

Jack was still talking, his voice almost calm. "I think energy weapons must drive the nanogenes a little crazy, because I felt different to what I usually do when I wake up--I could feel them working. I felt so alive, fizzing with life. I thought it was just a feeling. But you were lying there, and it must have been at least six minutes since she... you hadn't moved at all. You weren't breathing. I knew you were dead, and I just--I couldn't let you go, not like that."

You're Ianto Jones and I love you and I couldn't, that was what Jack had said the first time he tried to explain why. Couldn't let Ianto go. Hadn't, the first time he died.

He hadn't lasted six months in Cardiff without dying, Ianto realized. He just hadn't known it. He was going to have to put an asterisk in the mortality figures for that year.

"I didn't tell you at the time because I thought it would only make things harder for you, knowing I'd saved your life like that." Jack smiled a little and leaned back into an elaborately casual slouch that just happened to put him out of Ianto's reach. "Well, and I was angry with you."

Ianto snorted. Understatements all round, there. "Raised me from the dead, you mean. And you were homicidal. Literally. I was there, I do remember that."

Jack shrugged, obviously ill at ease. If Ianto hadn't questioned him on it--if Ianto hadn't questioned him already knowing--Jack would never have told him. Even when Ianto had only owed Jack for the lack of a summary execution and the continuance of his employment, he'd known Jack didn't want to see him try to be grateful enough to cover it all. Thanking him at this point would be somewhere between pointless and excruciating for both of them, to say nothing of a year and a half out of time. What Jack wanted from him now, Ianto knew, was a sharp change of subject.

It was lucky for both of them that he had one more difficult question to ask, then.

Ianto reached out the easiest way he could, settling one booted toe on the edge of Jack's chair, beside his thigh. Looking down at his own hand gripping the edge of Jack's desk, Ianto said, "Hart told me about your little girl, but he said he didn't know what happened to her, after."

"Oh!"

Ianto looked up sharply, his foot dislodged as Jack popped up to stand, nothing but delight in his voice and on his face. He tapped something on his wriststrap, aiming it at the open space on the other side of his desk, and suddenly there was a group of people standing there, frozen--hologram, of course, but full color and depth, nothing like Hart's flickering blue Princess Leia recording.

Several of them had purple hair, from the little girl leaning against someone's knee with her finger in her mouth and her hair in bunches, right up to the beautiful woman of indeterminate age around whom the rest seemed to be arranged. They were a family, obviously. Hart had said they'd sent the baby girl to people who would find her a family.

"I can't actually pronounce her name--I just butcher it when I try--so I always called her Circuit," Jack said. "It's something my dad called me when I was little, even before I was born--I don't know why, I never asked him, but the first time I felt her move it just popped out of my mouth. Hello, Circuit."

He addressed the floating image as much as quoted himself, Ianto thought. "That's her, there, with her wife--third spouse, but she married every time for love, she wouldn't have traded any of 'em--and the ones behind her are her older kids, and the one between them with the green hair is her youngest, and the rest are grandkids. The littlest one there, with the pigtails, they named her Jack. I was something of a family legend by then, I guess."

Ianto looked from Jack to the family portrait and back. Of course it had been ages for Jack by now, but not nearly enough years for Hart since this happened. "She grew up."

Jack nodded, looked down and punched another button, calling up a picture of a younger woman grinning and about to do something terribly dangerous, judging by the protective gear. A little purple hair escaped the helmet, and below the goggles her smile looked familiar.

"Yeah," Jack said. "Kids mostly do, unless something goes really wrong. I just visited her every five years or so. Took me three or four days, but I wanted to see how everything turned out for her, help her out if she needed me for anything big. She never did. She grew up smart and beautiful and totally fearless, lived a good long life. I wasn't much of a fairy godmother, but she liked me anyway."

Well, of course; he'd been an active Time Agent then, so why should the linear progression of time have anything to do with it? Ianto raised his eyebrows. "Do you read the last pages of books first, too?"

"No! I went in order. This was more like... staying up all night so I wouldn't have to put the book down."

"For three or four days." Ianto looked again, and it was a little girl now, doing a headstand, bare feet in the air and tongue sticking out, her purple hair hanging nearly to the ground.

"Well, it was a good long book," Jack said fondly, and Ianto had to kiss him or the slide show of family photos was going to last all night. It was nothing at all to do with his easy smile, or the fact that this was the first time since Gray that Ianto had seen him so purely happy about anything.

It was the pictures that Ianto kept thinking of, afterward--the delight Jack took in those pieces of his little girl's life, even though he'd missed nearly all of it. At quiet moments, Ianto would slip into Jack's office and look at the Amphora. He'd noticed that the stack of files had found another home, though the Amphora kept its blanket. Ianto would sit on the floor sometimes--sometimes with the static hologram for company, more often not.

He would never see the child grow any older than this, and that was all right. It didn't mean terribly much to him, honestly, except when he forced himself to try to think about it. But he couldn't fathom himself as a father, raising a child. It didn't trouble him much to know he wouldn't.

But the child--his son, their son--he would grow up missing one of his parents, and that, Ianto knew something about. His father had kept plenty of pictures of his mother, even a few home movies, but those had all been his father's things, his father's memories, his father's wife. She hadn't belonged to Ianto, not really. Ianto had been all that was left of her, a piece of her, but she'd never been his, not that he could ever remember.

Maybe it wouldn't be like that for Jack's son--Jack was surely presence enough for two parents. Maybe he wouldn't raise the child alone; maybe he'd wait until he had someone else, maybe a whole harem of someones, to help out.

Ianto knew Jack, though, at least a little bit. He knew enough to know that there were pieces of Jack that stayed solitary, no matter how much Jack shared his body and his time and his work. He might keep this to himself, too, his child. He hadn't told Hart about going to see Circuit; they'd been partners, together all through the pregnancy, and Hart had had no idea what happened to her.

So maybe Jack's son would grow up knowing something--someone--was missing. Jack would probably tell him as much as he could, but that Ianto who Jack talked about would always be the one who belonged to Jack, sometime in a distant past. There wasn't any Ianto who had ever belonged to his child, even when the thing was still inside him. He didn't even want to, not properly. But maybe--maybe for the sake of a child like he'd been, his child growing up somewhere down through time, maybe he could leave something that would belong just to the boy.

Pictures were too easy--Jack would find all the pictures of Ianto anyone could possibly have any use for, between going through his physical possessions and clearing out his files after he died. Ianto owed his child something more, something specific.

Ianto chose his materials carefully. It would have to last a long time--there was no way of knowing how long, but six hundred years was a distinct possibility, for starters, and there was no particular reason to think that by the end of six hundred years Jack wouldn't have found a battery recharger or a wall outlet where he could plug in the Amphora.

So: archival quality anti-acidic paper, and non-degrading ink. Sturdy, protective covers. By the time he'd assembled all that, it was easier to hand-write it than to work out any method of getting it all safely through a printer, but Ianto didn't mind. There was a certain perversely anachronistic delight in working like a mediaeval monk, writing out a chronicle that would survive centuries after he died if the place weren't sacked by Visigoths from another dimension first.

Of course there was a distinct possibility of Visigoths from another dimension, so Ianto also bought a small, sturdy fireproof box to keep it in.

When he had everything ready, and the prospect of a few quiet hours minding the tourist office, Ianto sat down with the blank book and a couple of his old diaries, and considered the first page.

Then, carefully, deliberately, he began to write.

Ianto had filled up half the book with stories about his work, sprinkled with asides about his own childhood with his father, helping out in the tailor shop. He included some bits about Cardiff, too, because it would probably be a bit of a curiosity by then.

Most of his Torchwood stories wound up being more about Jack than about himself, but he supposed there was no harm in that. Jack was the only thing he and his child would have in common, the touchstone through which they might communicate.

Without quite planning it--the relevant entries in his own diary were elliptical nearly to the point of incoherence--he found himself writing about the recent past. He navigated carefully through the story of how they'd found out Ianto was pregnant, about the transfer and after, and inevitably, about Owen and Toshiko's deaths. He stayed silent about Gray, only vaguely alluding to the man who had caused all the trouble--that was Jack's story to tell or not, and Ianto still had no idea what the end of the story might eventually be.

After the first few sessions, when he'd insisted upon sitting at a proper desk, the tourist office his scriptorium, Ianto had got used to working on the book whenever he had a little time alone. He could sit anywhere, balancing the book on his knees. He often worked on it while sitting with the Amphora, hidden like a child on the floor behind Jack's desk.

This morning, while Jack was up on the roof watching the sun rise and letting Myfanwy stretch her wings before the morning rush of tourists in the Plass, Ianto was trying his hand at a bit of illustration. He was sketching what he could see from that spot, the Amphora's-eye-view. It was the first place the child had lived, in a way, a home he'd never remember. He ought to have a picture.

There wasn't much to see from this angle, of course--mostly Jack's desk--but Ianto was taking his time with that, trying to get down the little details--the stacks of files and odd random objects, the 3-D glasses hanging from the lamp. If he cheated the angle a little, he could include the coat rack, and Jack's greatcoat hanging there...

Ianto froze, and then turned his head very, very slowly toward the door. Where Jack was standing, watching him, having quietly come in and hung up his coat sometime in the ten minutes since Ianto last looked up that far.

Ianto did not slam the book shut. He wasn't entirely sure the ink was dry. "Jack. Good morning."

"You're going to ruin your eyes, writing in the dark," Jack replied, and switched on the overhead light. The lamp had been quite adequate, really, and Ianto liked the private, nighttime feel it gave Jack's office.

"Well, I haven't yet," Ianto said, and gently but firmly closed the book as he got to his feet. "Just lost track of time. Do you want coffee?"

He came round the desk as he spoke, and had nearly managed to brush past Jack and through the doorway when Jack reached out and stopped him with two fingers on the back of the hand holding the book. "Diary?"

"Yes," Ianto said, without pause for thought. "Private."

Jack dropped his hand, shifting his weight backward. "Of course."

Ianto stood a second longer, looking at Jack and scarcely seeing him, because that was a ridiculous reaction--of course it wasn't private. He was writing the whole thing to be read, and obviously Jack would see it, would be the one to hold on to it for their child, perhaps read it to him when he was small, choosing the stories he could understand.

Still, Ianto realized as he stood there, he couldn't bear the thought of Jack actually seeing what he'd written. He wasn't ready for that, might never be--Jack was supposed to see this after Ianto was safely dead, and not before.

Ianto didn't bother trying to force a smile, only said, "Don't worry. I think you're coming off pretty well on paper."

Jack's eyebrows rose, but so did the corners of his mouth--he was permitting himself to be teased, and that would be enough to get them past the awkward moment. "On paper?"

"Well," Ianto said, and looked Jack up and down--someday, someday he'd manage to do that without giving away how much he enjoyed the view, but today was likely not that day. Still, he did keep a straight face as he said, "One allows oneself a little poetic license."

They thought it was fog, at first. For a stupidly long time, actually--but then Jack called up to say that it looked like people were starting to gather in the Plass for some reason, and would Ianto just step outside the tourist office and see what was going on?

Before he'd even got to the door it opened, and a handful of people fell inside, bringing the fog with them, choking on it--and then Ianto was choking too, because it wasn't fog, it was gas.

Jack was there, faster than Ianto thought he could possibly have got there from the Hub. Ianto helped him herd their handful of refugees downstairs to safety, and stayed with them at the bottom of the emergency stairs, outside the Hub proper, while Jack went inside.

They tried to explain what was going on to Ianto--something about cars, exhaust going mad, those bloody ATMOS systems that talked to you while you were trying to drive. It was a bit hard to make out, because they all kept coughing and coughing, and so did Ianto.

Jack came back with Gwen and three gas masks. Gwen was on the phone with somebody--Cardiff police, likely, as she was snapping out questions about positions and evacuation routes. Jack was failing to be on the phone with anyone, and looking so irritated that it had to mean he was really, really worried.

"UNIT's not answering their phones," he said, the words clipped, his gaze directed at the civilians. He wasn't meeting Ianto's eyes, nor Gwen's; there was more to it than that, but Jack clearly wasn't going to say what. "We're on our own. Come on."

Ianto nodded, getting to his feet and reaching for the mask. Jack jerked it back a couple of inches from his fingers, and Ianto held his breath to keep from coughing as he met Jack's eyes.

"First rule of gas mask drill," Jack said firmly. "You don't take your mask off once it's on, and you don't give it away, not for babies or puppies, not for your own grandmother, not for any reason. Got it?"

Ianto thought of pointing out that his gran wouldn't actually have much use for a gas mask at this late date, but he didn't know if he could get that all out without starting to cough again.

He shrugged, instead. "Doesn't seem like a drill, does it?"

"All right," Gwen announced, pocketing her phone. "People are walking toward the water to get away from the gas. We're going to evacuate as many as we can to Flat Holm Island--Jack, do not argue with me, the facility is underground, they won't see anything--there aren't any cars on the island and the prevailing winds come in off the sea, so it should be clearer there. We've got to try for crowd control and triage. It's vital to prevent a panic."

"Not a drill," Jack agreed, and let Ianto take the mask from his hand.

It seemed to go on for hours; they couldn't see the sun through the gas, and Ianto couldn't spare the seconds to consult his watch. It was just lines of frantic people, screaming when they had the breath for it, appearing and disappearing in the deadly fog. Ianto wouldn't have taken his mask off for anything--he could still feel the residual burn in his lungs as he carried children down the docks to the boats, shouting reassurances to their frantic parents from behind glass and rubber.

He saw Jack and Gwen at times, heard their muffled voices. There were others in masks too--he thought he recognized Gwen's Andy and his fluorescent PC's jacket, and there were other police around as well. The boats kept going away full and coming back empty, their captains coughing over the controls as they waited at the docks. It was getting darker, and shafts of torchlight turned the fog more confusing, not less.

Ianto stopped dead in the middle of a trip between the dock and triage line, when he realized he didn't remember whether he was coming or going--there wasn't an evacuee with him, which suggested that he was going back for another one, but which way was the end of the line?

There was a sudden, blinding light in the sky, and Jack's voice cutting across the furor, yelling, "DOWN."

Ianto dropped flat, and felt everyone around him doing the same, to escape the sudden blazing heat and light, or in response to the inescapable command of that voice.

When he lifted his head, the sky was clear and blue, and Jack was not two yards away, holding his mask in one hand and smiling.

Ianto struggled up to his knees and pulled his own mask off, as all around him people began getting to their feet, looking around dazed, like they'd just woken from a nightmare. It was all over, suddenly, just like that. He could hear Gwen shouting at people to please return to their homes unless they were responsible for people already evacuated to the island. He could hear other police taking up the call. He knew he should himself, but his breath hitched on the inhale and caught in his chest.

Jack was just standing there, looking up at the sky and smiling. Ianto joined him just in time to see another bright flare of light--smaller, further off, like...

Well, in his not wholly uninformed opinion, it looked like a pretty sizeable ship exploding in orbit.

"Ha!" Jack vented a single syllable of vicious satisfaction. "I think somebody just got a taste of their own medicine."

Medicine. It wasn't a phrase Jack used often, and it hadn't any obvious connection to the events they'd just witnessed, except...

Ianto mentally filed another of Jack's not-as-oblique-as-he-thought references to the Doctor, and then a woman was tugging at his sleeve, asking where he'd taken her daughter, and it was time to get back to work.

It was a day and a half later that Jack walked up behind Ianto, twisted one of his arms up behind his back, and said, "Okay, the A&E departments are pretty much back to normal operation now, so either you're going under your own power or I'm frog-marching you."

"I don't--"

Jack's other hand landed in the middle of his chest and pushed, and Ianto started coughing again. Jack let go of his wrist immediately, wrapping his arms around Ianto's ribs, which made the coughing hurt less but did