"Oi Ianto, fancy coming to the pub with us?"

Owen had yelled over from his place by the door where the group was shrugging on their coats. Ianto himself was standing up on the balcony that led into Myfanwy's lair, a rubbish bag and bucket of cleaning products in his hand.

"Maybe next week," Ianto replied – the same answer he always gave – and he turned and walked away before the others could attempt to persuade him. He heard them leave and gave a deep sigh as he was left alone in the hub. But, nowadays, Ianto never felt alone, not truly. How could he? Down in the depths of the hub, a place which was a safe haven from the majority of the group, he was hiding a monster.

When Ianto had first started at Torchwood Three the only thing he had been able to think about had been Lisa; beautiful, wonderful, dying Lisa, who lay in his flat, hooked up to a life machine that had been causing power cuts for months. But now, the fog of secrecy and adrenaline faded, Ianto could no longer see his girlfriend in that grey, concrete room: her moments of humanity had long run out and had left a creature that breathed threats and terrified him.

Ianto felt like a child left alone with the monster in the closet; he could hear her breathing like the tell-tale heart buried under the floor, and he felt sick thinking of her once harmonious voice now emotionless. He had promised her life and in return she taunted him with memories and the promise of conversion.

Part of Ianto didn't mind: despite the threads of fear that he felt tighten around him at the idea of becoming one of those things, he knew – no matter what happened now – he was going to die. Whether by Jack or Lisa's hands, or even his own, Ianto knew by the end of this nightmare he would be dead.

But Joneses were undeniably proud. Ianto found himself as unable to tell Jack about the monster in the basement as he had been to tell his father about the monster in the cupboard. So he solved it the same way he had when he was five: he took a baseball bat and destroyed everything in that cupboard. Unclipping his gun, he made his way down the basement to meet his fate, taking a few seconds to straighten his tie and suit jacket out of compulsion and habit. As the door to the large basement compartment loomed in front of him, Ianto gave up trying to stop his gun hand from shaking, allowing it instead to tap out an unsteady rhythm against his thigh.

She was not waiting around the corner for him, as a small part of him had feared, nor was she hiding in the shadows. After he flipped the light switch, he let out a sigh of the relief when he saw her illuminated in the centre of the room where she had always been, trapped in a metal cage-like bed. She was awake, as she always was, her eyes opening to meet his in a gaze that was glazed yet filled with authority – or superiority.

"You have returned." Her eyes fell from his face to focus on the shaking gun. "You wish to kill me?"

"No...God, no, Lisa... But there's... I've run out of ideas... " His throat tightened and he gave up on talking momentarily. He swallowed heavily and tried to compose himself. "I just... there's no other way now."

"You'll kill me? What about the doctor?"

"He refuses to come." He had never phoned him, in fact.

"But I am healing."

"No, you're not. You're not healing, Lis... You're not... Lisa." His brain mocked him with the double meaning behind his sentence. But despite her determined desire to survive, he could no longer see anything of Lisa in that metal contraption. "I'll... I'll get you some pain medication." The only thing human about her. Pain.

He cursed as his nerves caused him to drop a vial of morphine, the fragile class shattering against the concrete. He grabbed a needle and filled it quickly with the clear substance from a fresh vial. He entered it into one of not-Lisa's many I.V. lines before he could rethink, injecting the fluid and then throwing the needle haphazardly over his shoulder. He backed away from the bed.

"I am...failing." Lisa intoned as the life monitors around her began to bleep in alarm.

"I know." He choked on his words.

He had backed into the wall and allowed himself to slide down the concrete to sit against the medical trolley that he had set up. She – it – looked like it wanted to respond, but as the eyes of Lisa closed and the life support machine gave a piercing shriek – the final burst of outrage – Ianto stood and walked from the room, his shoulders slumped and body aching in grief. He passed a solitary shadow outside of the room and placed his gun in the awaiting hand before leaving the hub. His only comfort was the remaining vials and needle in his inner pocket.