[Many thanks to my beta, tardis-mole :) ]

[Setting: This takes place before the events of Everything Changes, and will follow the series up until Adrift]

Lisa had always said Ianto was sexy and he rather thought she meant it. Not at first, of course. It took him a long while to realise that a pasty, Welsh boy was not the horrid ghost-like thing he had previously thought. That people actually found it attractive. That Lisa, beautiful Lisa, would share his bed willingly. That she would stroke his face and look into his eyes with a longing he knew he returned. She always knew what to say, and how to say it. No matter how out of place he felt on the London streets, Lisa could always make him feel like himself, make him feel at home.

Even in the dump they called Torchwood Three, knowing Lisa was there sometimes made him feel safe, almost as if the Battle of Canary Wharf had never happened. The feeling would pass though when he remembered where he was. It was impossible to feel safe in Torchwood. He watched everyone he knew die at the place he thought was impenetrable. Torchwood was supposed to save humanity, not be the first helpless victims.

He didn't know how he survived. He should have died right there in the thick of it as he tried to find Lisa amongst the rubble. Humanity, except for his own, didn't seem to matter then. Without Lisa, he didn't have any.

But Lisa…

She was down in the most secretive and disused places of Torchwood Three, reminding him that no one was safe.

"That's why you like it," Lisa had said, though he wasn't ready to believe that then, just as he wasn't ready to believe that she thought he was sexy. But she was right. There was no doubt in his mind that he wouldn't have gotten where he was if Captain Jack Harkness wasn't more than a little bit seduced by his looks.

He's seduced by everyone's looks, he thought miserably.

He remembered the day he had been hired, and quickly clenched his fist as he tried to block out the memory. He didn't let Jack see his abhorrence as he left the warehouse. He should have been elated. He had found a way to help Lisa. Instead, he was disgusted at the tension that surged across his body as he came in close contact with his soon-to-be boss while they rolled away from a plummeting pterodactyl. Trust Jack to turn a routine dinosaur retrieval into some sort of messed up love triangle.

As if it knew he was thinking of her, Myfanwy screeched from somewhere high above.

Ianto wondered how he summoned up the courage to even chase the pterodactyl. Desperation, he supposed. Lisa used to be one that did the dangerous stuff. Ianto was an office boy, a nobody. Ianto exhaled a long breath of air that he didn't even know he was holding. These were not the thoughts he wanted to be having, but the Torchwood Three team had been holed up in the Hub for days now and they wouldn't leave. It meant that he was stuck inside his head for the time being, and his head wasn't the most pleasant of places to be. The last rift activity had registered a week ago, and it had only been one stray Weevil, which he named Posh. He only had Sporty left, and he would have all the Spice Girls.

He wished that that thought entertained him even a little. He found himself thinking in the ways he would always think, and saying the things he would usually say, but not as often. Worse yet, his little jokes stopped amusing him. That used to be his one solace in life. Even if no one got it, at least he made himself laugh. Lisa used to tease him about it too. He liked that.

"You're not even laughing," she would say, "but I can tell you think you're hilarious."

"I am," he would reply seriously.

She would laugh, and squeeze his arm fondly. Lisa loved him. He loved Lisa.

Ianto rubbed his arm, wishing that the team would go away.

"Ianto?" The unmistakable American accent of Jack came over his comm. "Coffee in the board room?"

"Yes, sir." Ianto smiled. This meant something was up. This meant he could be left alone.

Ianto wasn't really sure how much Jack knew about his previous position, aside from the fact he was a junior researcher. The things he was asked to do now were never in his purview before. He was never asked to make coffee before, and he was certainly never asked to dispose of bodies. His old job consisted of sitting at a computer, and monitoring temporal and spatial anomalies.

That job had been demanding enough, but now it felt like he never left the Hub. Though, he felt hardly in a position to complain. At least there he could feel Lisa's presence humming through the electricity, which was better than going home to his empty apartment to mindlessly watch television. The only time he ever truly felt alone was when someone would speak to him, and he supposed this was because they rarely did. He never knew what to say, and it reminded him of how isolated he really was.

Entering the boardroom with a tray of steaming hot coffees, he listened to Jack give a speech about Roman legionnaires roaming about the countryside. There was no acknowledgement as he set each cup down, aside from Jack, who usually took this opportunity to leer his thanks by either a winking or giving him a long, lingering look that started from the tips of his wing-tipped shoes and ended at his mouth.

Ianto's stomach knotted every time this happened, and he could remember the warmth of Jack's body cruelly tangled together with Lisa's screams. He saw the flashes of explosion from Torchwood One in the back of his eyes.

"Ianto."

He closed his eyes, and forced himself to return to the dim glow of the monitors of Torchwood Three. "Yes, sir."

"I'm going to need you to monitor the rift, let us know if more are coming in. Though I'm not opposed to few Roman soldiers, I'm pretty sure Cardiff is. Don't know why though…"

Ianto nodded, and ignored the rest of Jack's story, which involved some sort of three-way with a Roman soldier and an alien posing as a lady of high rank. Not surprisingly, he proclaimed it to have been fantastic.

When they left, he rushed down to check on Lisa. She didn't say anything. She didn't even look at him. Things were getting worse, and Ianto knew it. Sometimes, she would be catatonic for hours even after her sedative would wear off. He grabbed her hand, and kissed it softly. "I'll be back soon, yeah?"

Then, he sat down at the monitor.

"Shit!" A loud yell came in through his comm as he tapped his ear to see how things were doing. It was Owen. "He's got a sword!"

"Tell me about it!" chimed in Jack's voice. He sounded like he was running. "Big one too."

Ianto rolled his eyes, and stared at the monitors. He could almost hear the smirk in Jack's voice. The last rift activity had spiked approximately when the soldiers had appeared. But then he saw something curious. There was one spike that went the opposite direction.

The energy spikes, especially the unusual ones, still made him jump sometimes. He had to remind himself that these were random, and not the deliberate ones he had saw in London. Ianto closed his eyes, attempting to dispel the memories. He tried to transform the terrible, deafening sounds of the explosions that haunted his thoughts into the low hum of the Hub, and the flashes of fire into the flickering computer screens.

"Ianto," Lisa had said to him, not long after he set her up in the basement of Torchwood Three, "you need help."

"Yeah. But we'll get this sorted."

"That's not what I meant." Then she drifted away on the wave of sedative he had given her.

He realised what she meant now, just as he realised everything she had said was true. Lisa -his Lisa - was always so much smarter than he was when it came to him. But that was waning now. He could feel her floating away on a current that was much too strong to fight against.

But Ianto Jones didn't give up. That was one thing Lisa said about him that he already knew. He came from nothing, a family of nothing, and a thoroughly unimpressive record of nothing. What had Jack's file on him said? Able, but not exceptional.

Ianto knew better than anyone that the best way to succeed was to come from nothing. You never gave up then. Besides, he determined from his research that Jack had a thing for untapped potential, and he really needed to get into Torchwood Three. It worked, even if no one knew anything about him; except Jack, and what little he knew, he wasn't telling anyone.

Idly, he looked the reports for the area, wondering how the newspapers were going to explain away the Roman soldiers. Instead, the news seemed more concerned with a missing child who disappeared right before her mother's eyes. Beth Ann Taylor, it seemed, had been playing in a park when she simply vanished. Her mother claimed that there had a been a great rush of wind, and she was briefly blinded by a flash of colors. When she looked for her daughter, she was no longer there. The police were investigating it as a kidnapping though the mother swore up and down there was no one else around.

He made a mental note of it, and went back down to make sure Lisa was sleeping all right. The comm in his ear continued to chirp wildly as the members rounded up the soldiers. Owen, it seemed, had been stabbed. Ianto smiled at that.

"Thirteen Roman soldiers." Jack said, leaning back in his chair to put his feet on his desk.

Fastidious as ever, Ianto moved a pile of folders that were just a little too close to Jack's muddy shoes for Ianto's liking to the right while giving Jack a disapproving look. "It's my job, then, right?"

"Ianto Jones, you surprise me. You speak Latin?"

"No."

"Then I don't know what you're going to do."

"We can't keep them in the vault, sir. It's inhuman."

"You think we can assimilate them? This isn't decades ago, or even century. This is almost two full millennia. We'd have a better chance of getting a Weevil to function in society." Jack put his hands behind his head. "What we need is an island."

"An island, sir?"

"Yeah. Romans are horrible sailors. We get them on a nice frowning rock where they can't get off, and let them live their lives on it undisturbed."

"And what shall we call that island? The Island of Reluctant But Inevitable Homosexuality?" Ianto quipped, frowning inwardly as he realised he had just stolen a joke from Jimmy Carr.

"That's a good name." Jack laughed. "You always have good names for things. That island doesn't seem like a bad place, though, does it?"

"So… you want me to find the island that could most possibly lead to a testosterone-laden orgy?"

Jack's eyes lit up as he smirked. "Yeah."

Ianto kept his face neutral as he turned to leave Jack's office.

"Oh, Ianto." Jack called. "Any unusual rift activity I should know about?"

"Maybe. I'm not sure. There was a disappearance of a girl named Beth Ann Taylor where the Romans were. The Romans didn't even register on the news. Perhaps people thought they were apart of some fancy dress party."

Jack's voice got quiet. "Beth Ann? There is nothing to link that to the rift though, is there?"

"No," Ianto said less convincingly than he would have liked.

Jack nodded, but his eyes looked as if they were a million miles away.