I didn't give this a specific time frame, but I think this takes place some time during series 1 after "Cyberwoman."

Disclaimer: Torchwood and its characters belong to the BBC.

Author's note: I don't think I could have written this if I hadn't read Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. In it, Roach speaks to medical students and scientists about why the use of cadavers is important to their work and how they deal with the unpleasant aspects. In spite of the morbid fic that it inspired, I do recommend Roach's book if you have a strong stomach. It's informative, funny, but respectful to its subjects, both living and dead.

Setting the Scene

When Ianto Jones first started working for Torchwood Three, Jack never allowed him plant a cadaver alone in order to give the young man hands-on instruction. Because Ianto needed to curry favor with his boss, he did what he was asked with the professionalism of a mortician while masking his queasiness and guilt, and soon, Jack was convinced that Ianto was mentally fit to carry out this task.

Eventually, Jack quit tagging along unless the victim was too heavy for Ianto to manage alone, and they rarely spoke about it at length anymore. Ianto quickly learned not to identify with the victims too much. He became accustomed to the process. In this way, he no longer felt disgust. He also continued his education on his own by keeping an eye on the police department's most wanted list, studying crime scene photos, and reading forensic reports which he kept organized in a database -- one of his special projects. When needed to cover up a Torchwood death, he looked through the database for the right case and the right photograph as if he was a homeowner looking to redo his kitchen.

This time, disposing of the body would be easy, logistically speaking. The victim was an nineteen year-old woman named Jenny Miller who was strangled by a humanoid creature. Jack and Gwen arrived at the scene too late and could not save her, but Jack shot and killed the alien before it hurt anyone else. Ianto decided that if he staged a crime scene and left a forged calling card, the victim of the alien attack would be linked to the case of a wanted serial killer. Of course, he would have to wipe the residue of alien slime off her neck first.

"Ianto?" Tosh said as she entered the autopsy bay. For a moment, she was startled by the old jeans, the black turtleneck, and the combat boots he wore.

He smiled briefly when he saw the piece of the paper in her gloved hands. Tosh relaxed and smiled back. She had used Torchwood's handwriting simulator to forge a message written in code and looked rather pleased at herself for her efforts.

Ianto quickly decoded the cipher -- an easy task once Tosh taught him how. "This is cryptic."

"It's meant to be," Tosh replied as she sat in a chair. She appeared oblivious to the cadaver, as if it was just another piece of furniture in the room. With a placid expression on her face, Tosh cut the finger off a latex glove. "I wonder who killed those girls."

"That's police business. We only read those files for research purposes," Ianto retorted.

"My money is on the university student the police interrogated a month ago," Tosh replied as she folded up the message a couple of times and rolled it up into a tight little scroll.

"Really?"

"I read his profile when I was trying to come up with a good message. Even though the police didn't have enough evidence to detain him, he didn't have a very good alibi. We know this killer is well-read from the messages he leaves on the bodies. And the university student doesn't seem to have much of a life outside of his studies. He lives alone, keeps to himself," she reasoned. She placed the message in the latex fingertip and tied off the end. "You know what they say. It's always the quiet ones that you have to worry about."

A sharp current of guilt ran through, Ianto's spine. He nodded grimly, "Yep."

She must have noticed his change in demeanor. "I didn't mean --"

"I know you didn't."

She handed him the neatly-wrapped message. She looked at the cadaver and said, "She's pretty."

"I didn't notice," Ianto mumbled.

Ianto gently opened the cadaver's mouth and placed the message inside, pushing it as far into her throat as he could. Then, he closed her mouth and looked at the face. The cadaver was pretty. Her soft, blonde hair framed a round face with Cupid's bow lips, which must have been very fetching when she was alive.

"If you need anything else…" Tosh offered.

"No, but thank you," he said with actual warmth in his words.

"Then, I'm off," she said cheerfully. "I'll see you tomorrow."

"Have a good evening." he replied, slightly upset to see her go. Ianto felt that her scientific detachment rubbed off on him when she was in the room. As he worked on this particular cadaver, he was having problems finding that sense of detachment on his own.

Gwen insisted that the team learn something about the victim so that she wouldn't remain just another Torchwood statistic. They learned that Jenny Miller was new to the city and just started working as a waitress. Jenny's cell phone listed the numbers of four friends -- three of them in Swansea. In her messy purse, Jenny kept receipts that dated back two years. Jenny carried a sketch pad in which she drew the buildings she visited and people she met. Jenny wore jeans decorated with a hand-painted star pattern; Ianto wondered if Jenny painted them herself. Jenny had a mother in Swansea who would be devastated by the loss of her only daughter.

At least this time he didn't have to disfigure Jenny in any way. In one of his first solo assignments, Ianto staged a fireworks accident which partially blew the face off a male cadaver -- one of the replacement bodies he used when the actual victim's body could not be used. The crematorium worker who sold him the cadavers never gave Ianto any personal details about the people they once were. Ianto never asked. Did he really need to know that the poor soul had a sister in London or that he went to church regularly or that he was learning to speak German? Of course, not. It was easier to think of the cadavers as wax figures in an elaborate set design if he planned on sleeping at night.

But Ianto could never fault Gwen for her ideals; it's not as if she ever had to drop a body into an empty elevator shaft and listen to the thud when it hit the bottom. Ianto knew that she would never have to. Jack would see to that. He would see to that.

He slipped the cadaver into a body bag and slung it over his shoulder. As Ianto walked across the main room of the hub, Jack made an effort not to look at him.

Owen was about to leave, too. He took one look at Ianto and said as he pointed to the invisible lift, "I'll take the visitor's exit."

Gwen couldn't keep her eyes off the black bag. She stood at her station and appeared to be hugging herself. Her lips were twisting and contorting with grief. The cog door could not open fast enough.

--

It rained as Ianto stationed the SUV in the alley. As if dumping a body wasn't unpleasant enough…

"The sooner this gets done, the sooner I can go home and sit with a nice cup of coffee," he muttered to himself. Unless Jack had some other task for him… but Jack wouldn't be that cruel.

He got out of the SUV and paced the length of the alley, looking for any potential witnesses. He looked up at the windows. Some of them were boarded up. All of them were dark. The building to his right used to be a drug den until earlier that week when the police raided it. The alley was still littered with a few of the squatters' possessions -- a couple of soiled mattresses, a few crates used as furniture, a table, a pair of chairs, an old CD player. Ianto tossed the cadaver's purse into one of the crates and covered it up with an old sweatshirt. Although he confirmed the solitude of the alley, he still felt better knowing that he was armed.

He opened up the back hatch of the SUV and put on his black gloves. With one last quick glance at his surroundings, he unzipped the bag.

Then, he asked himself, what would Jenny's killer do?

Perhaps, the murderer dragged her kicking and screaming into the deserted alley. So he grabbed her from behind and pulled her out of the SUV. The cadaver's shoes gathered grime from the dirty pavement as Ianto slid her next to an overflowing dumpster.

He hated the next part, but he wanted the scene to look as realistic as possible so he gathered up his courage and threw the body forcibly on the ground, just like he imagined the murderer would do. He appraised the tableau in a detached manner and sighed in frustration. She looked wrong. Her clothes were too neat. One of her arms stretched out the side, and the other was over her body. She didn't look like a woman who died fighting for her life, and he couldn't just pose her like a Barbie doll. It had to look convincing.

He straddled her body and placed his right hand over her throat. Using her like a puppet, he placed her left hand on his right shoulder and acted out a struggle. He kept his eyes on the graffiti on the wall in an attempt to let his mind drift and began to shake her in between his thighs. As he thought about what sort of effort it must take to clean graffiti, her wet clothes shifted underneath his body, soaking up the stench of beer and urine. He let her arm fall to the ground the way it was supposed to in these scenarios.

As he picked up her right hand to repeat the process for her other arm, he caught a glimpse of her face. Death had given her face a neutral expression. Jenny could no longer hold the tension of fear in those muscles. She could no longer protest against anything that happened to her body. She couldn't even complain about the weather. The artist within could not comment on the aesthetics of her surroundings. She did not deserve this fate.

To want to kill someone like Jenny, to stalk her for the sole purpose of murder… what manner of a man does that? It also occurred to Ianto that the brain died after six minutes of oxygen depravation -- six minutes of holding on to a woman's neck and squeezing the not-so-fragile windpipe as she clawed and scratched and kicked. A man would need an enormous amount of determination to strangle someone to death. What exactly feeds that determination? Does a killer strangle someone to death out of some type of fetish? Does he achieve some sort of high from taking her last breath? Does he feel some sort of peace when he's done having fed some sort of base instinct? Does it become an addiction like gambling or sex?

Ianto shook the idea out his head. He didn't get a rush of excitement from field work, surely that meant a lack of desire to deliberately commit an act of violence. However, if he was truly honest with himself, he could imagine taking a life in this manner if he was angry enough, but not someone like Jenny. Her life was so simple. She was so harmless, and yet, there he was doing something that his mother would find unspeakable.

He decided not to think of her as Jenny anymore. In a fit of obsessive compulsion (or was it a need to concentrate on the details so that he wouldn't think about the bigger picture), he opened her mouth and stuck a couple of fingers inside to make sure that the message was still inside, wrapped in its latex cocoon. He performed a visual sweep of the area to make sure that he left nothing related to Torchwood on the scene. Although, he disliked its presence when he began this task, the rain would sweep away the evidence he couldn't see.

He quickly closed the back hatch of the SUV and was ready to go back to the safety of the hub. However, the professional inside of Ianto forced him to take one more look at the scene. It looked like a plausible murder -- just like it was ripped from one of the photos in his database. And suddenly, he felt satisfaction of doing the job well.

He jumped in the SUV, turned the key in the ignition and drove back to the hub.

"This job is a necessary evil, but doing it well means I'm protecting Torchwood, my colleagues, my friends," Ianto told himself. He didn't like the deception, but a young woman's death was not the way for the general public to learn about aliens and the rift. He could also imagine the shit storm if the public found out about some of Torchwood's unethical practices, such as hacking into government secrets, keeping profiles of every citizen of Cardiff, running the asylum at Flat Holm Island. He was willing to do what it took to maintain Torchwood's secrets.

--

When Ianto got back to the hub, it was empty. Perhaps Jack had driven Gwen home after the day's loss. Perhaps he was on a roof somewhere, guarding the city.

Ianto stripped his clothes and tossed them in the washer. Next, he walked to the showers, where the water scalded his skin, and the loofah scratched his skin raw as he scrubbed vigorously to get the stench of the alley off his skin and out of his hair. He tried to put the night's events behind him by going over a mental list of things that he needed to bring to Jack's attention the next day. Not exciting nor interesting stuff, but stability within the tedium often brought him peace of mind. Tosh had once told him that maths did the same for her. Yet, his thoughts went back to Jenny and the sketches she'd never make. He also thought about Annie, the pizza delivery girl, who died because she was just doing her job.

After the shower, he toweled himself off and ambled to his locker for a clean set of clothes. There he found a note from Jack, scribbled on a Post-it:

Don't worry about Myfanwy and Janet. I fed them.

Ianto got dressed in a track suit and wandered around the hub until he found Jack in his office, waiting for him with a glass of whiskey. Jack only brought out the whiskey on the days that broke their hearts. As Ianto accepted it, he wished that Jack would join him in a drink so that he didn't feel so alone; however, he held his tongue.

Ianto also wanted to tell Jack that sometimes when he looked at people, he couldn't avoid thinking that they would all be corpses one day and that he could imagine quite vividly what they would look like when the blood ceased to flow through their veins. This odd habit began soon after Canary Wharf.

But he didn't say a word. Neither did Jack.

They leaned on Jack's desk side by side, staring blankly at the wall ahead.

The End