Captain Jack Harkness groaned, got out of bed and took a rather impressively long piss. He then turned back to the bed and attempted to fall asleep. Having never been the particularly patient sort he managed to stay in bed for much less time than it took him to piss.
Harkness grunted scratched himself and proceeded to walk out of the master bedroom through the main room avoiding bottles, whores, needles and other evidence of last night's orgy. He opened his fridge for no apparent reason seeing as he never bought anything remotely resembling groceries. He picked up the solitary bottle of ketchup and spent a few seconds wondering about its mysterious origins. Then y placed the bottle back into the fridge, took his coat from its customary place by the door and went to get a drink. It was eleven AM and he was far too sober.
He walked outside and took the antagonizing time to find not just a bar, that much was easy on the Vegas pleasure planet, but a bar with a seat that was entirely clean of vomit, a slightly more daunting task. As he did every morning, he told himself that this task made it clear that he was not an addict because he took the time to take care of his coat. What kind of addict would delay satisfaction long enough to do that?
Just like every morning he had only barely drunk enough to kill a lesser man when his heart missed a beat because he thought he saw someone he knew. Most mornings it was Ianto or Gwen though sometimes it was Owen or Tashiko. Once he had even hallucinated Rhys, god help him.
Today he saw the Doctor, his Doctor. He was raising a drink to him across the bar. Jack returned the gesture, sure it was just an illusion brought on by the drink. That was until the bartender indicated that he saw them man too. The Doctor was helping him get to know the man beside him. His name was... Well honestly Jack forgot his name before he even got out of the bar. A rather impressive feat, as he remained in the bar for only long enough to confirm the information, locate more than enough money to buy all of the liquor on the block and shout "keep the change" over his left shoulder.
He ran into the street and stood there for a second looking up. Was there anything he needed from his apartment? Not really, not anything he wanted. For one brief and admittedly insane moment, he debated going back for the magic ketchup but no if he needed the ketchup it would be there and if it wasn't then it wasn't really magic was it?
Smiling like a man possessed he ran to the docks to call in a favor with the Admiral whom he had talked out of infidelity that one time. He'd be in Cardiff by morning. Though he had no idea why he was going back there now, he had never been so sure of himself in his life and if you knew Captain Jack Harkness, you would know that's saying something.
Gwen Santo Harper Jones Cooper was finishing compiling the list for Torchwood 3 Mark 5. She already had a doctor, a tech, an administrative assistant and of course herself as director. All she needed now was a heart.
Gwen let out a hollow snort at the thought. She would never have a heart of her own again of course. Her soul was long gone trampled to death by this job, this life and all the sheer unrelenting tragedy there in. That particular asset had been "exterminated" from her with a prejudice that would make a Dalek drool.
What she needed was a person that had not seen true horror but had seen enough to prove that their idealism had staying power. Much like she had been in her early days at Torchwood, the heart of the group was the lynch-pin that held it all together.
Of course it was also the soul that eventually caused the group to leave and call her nasty names all while consenting that her methods were the only way. Sure she was "The Heartless Bitch of the Rift" but she was effective and they all knew that the town and probably the planet would have fallen without her. Even now when one of the other Torchwoods or UNIT had an unsolvable problem they called Torchwood 3.
She had tried at first to do it by herself. Then with the help of a few others but they would quit after days. She ret-coned 35 employees before she stumbled on Maria. God, poor Maria bless her soul, held the team together for eight months before she ate her gun.
After that she tried to look for hearts. It wasn't as hard as she had hoped. The heart of Torchwood 3 Mach 3 had survived her attempted suicide and left with that team and a few remnants of Torchwood 3 Mach 2 and created Torchwood 4 in Brazil. By Mach 4, she had managed to stop the Heart's attempt by calling her on it before she tried. The ensuing fight had created Torchwood 5 in Beijing. She looked down at the three candidates before her and smiled cruelly.
"Eniee minee mine-E Mo, The devils says you've got to go." she picked up a docket with a smiling redhead's CV clipped on top. "Alright Miss Katrina Lee you are our next lamb to the slaughter."
"Are you happy now?" She yelled at the rift manipulator, "I've picked out another nice innocent girl for you to break, you infernal thing."
"Are your happy now?" she whispered to herself.
"Argh," she exclaimed, "got to get out of here before I start sounding more like a nutter than I am."
She put on her running shoes and headed out to run laps around Cardiff center. Once she was two laps past exhausted she'd shower and lay in bed. Looking though the skylight the bunker's bunk allowed her, she'd fall asleep. The last memory of the day would be counting the stars and cursing each one for what she'd become.
Ianto Jones was stretched out on a hill just outside the boarders of Austin, Texas. He'd always heard that Americans were awful and Texans the worst of them. It was odd but his time in Austin had him thinking that belief may be unfounded. The locals had been nice and he was uncomfortable with the idea of going back to Rio in the morning.
He wore a black t-shirt and cargo shorts and knew that no matter what he did he would never feel comfortable in cargo shorts. It was odd really. He felt perfectly at home in a full suit or completely naked but any state of dress in between left him feeling more exposed than no dress at all.
It was one of those idiosyncrasies that human's just had he supposed. It was one of those weird mental patterns like how he completely lost his accent a week after he came here except when he was talking to any member of Torchwood. As if the fact they knew he was Welsh suddenly called his Welshness forth. Or, he supposed, the fact that he wasn't really all that freaked out by the fact that he was kind of dead and somewhere half a world away the body he had spent his first thirty years of life in was a big meat popsicle.
He wasn't bothered by that at all. It took him mere minutes to come to terms with these facts when the members of Torchwood 4 had told him of his supposed fate. It had taken much longer to come to terms with the fact that HE, that is to say his ex-lover whom he was totally not thinking about right now, had left the country of his death immediately following and six months later the planet. Ianto shook his head. Not really the thoughts he wanted to be having right now. He had a nice new body, which looked the exactly same as his last one, and a nice new lover, the third in as many months and also shockingly similar to the two before, and was not, definitely not, thinking about HIM.
Ianto sighed, he was totally thinking about HIM. Why else would he have stayed with Torchwood, when the job had already killed him once? Why else was he sitting out here in the middle of nowhere looking at stars, if not to guess witch one HE was on? And why else had he called Andrew, who had been nothing but nice to him "too campy", if he wasn't comparing every lover to HIM?
There were no two ways about it. It was time to head back to Cardiff, get some Welsh air in his lungs and face the music. It was time to face the depressing, but somehow also comfortable, bloody music.