It seems that in my last story Ianto got off rather lightly, being sadly neglected in terms of cliff-hangers and near-death situations. I intend to rectify this grave error in the following story. That's about all you need to know about it for now.

As for owning Torchwood – do you think I'd be surviving on a student loan if I did?

Chapter One

Torchwood is an ancient and complex institution, and the Hub is an ancient and complex building. It has often been thought to have a life of its own, and it certainly has more than a few hidden secrets. Several of these, experience has shown, are due to its creators being a rather over-imaginative bunch (apart from possibly the basic plan of designing it in the style of the London Underground), who added on a lot of features that merely seemed like a good idea at the time. Some of these have turned out to be fairly useful – the invisible lift, for example – some of them not so. These less useful systems have, on the whole, been forgotten.

Take the Hub's defence systems. Many of them are very practical, and have saved lives on numbers of occasions in making sure that no alien threat within the Hub ever escapes to the outside world. Others are less well-used. Some have been forgotten about, even by Jack. Even, in fact, by Ianto.

One of the more ancient and obscure Hub defence systems involves a very complex and convoluted series of pipes, which, quite naturally, have their main set of controls right next to the one for the hot water system, this seeming to the designers to be an eminently sensible option.

However, no one ever said Torchwood employees had to be sensible.

.

It was one of those days at the Hub where nothing much seemed to be happening. This was partly because the Rift was being particularly quiet, but mostly because Jack was away. According to Ianto this was something to do with a meeting with the Government, but the rest of the team didn't care much about the details.

"Where's the Teaboy?" Owen asked.

"You mean Ianto?" Gwen corrected him. She was beginning to get annoyed with his inability to refer to Ianto by name. "He's doing a check on the lower levels, or something."

"What, seeing if we've got any cybermen locked away down there?"

Gwen sighed and put down the report she was supposed to be reading through. "I thought we'd agreed not to mention that."

"Well, he's not here, is he?" Owen climbed up out of the autopsy room, leaving the room's newest occupant resting on the slab.

Tosh looked up as he appeared. "Owen, you've got…" she waved her hands about a little as she tried to find the word "gloop all over you."

Owen looked down. "Thanks, Tosh." He said curtly. "And you have got a coffee stain on that shirt. Not that it suits you anyway."

The two girls watched him walk away. "Well, someone got out on the wrong side of bed this morning." Gwen commented.

.

Gwen's comment is of course wrong in the respect that Owen, being dead, no longer needs to sleep, and even if he did he would claim that there is no such thing as 'the wrong side' of his double bed. In fact, he would probably have bought himself a double bed specially to prove Gwen wrong. But although Owen no longer needs to sleep, he does, as Tosh has so delicately pointed out, still need to shower, especially since a large part of his job still consists of dissecting alien bodies. That isn't actually the reason why Owen is headed to the Hub's showers right now though - he is going because he knows that a shower will help him calm down and will remove some of the stress caused by no longer being able to sleep, eat or do practically anything else he wants to do.

No one has yet worked out what was wrong with the showers that Owen felt it was necessary to try and meddle with them. Owen's original excuse ws that they were 'too cold', but this didn't go down to well coming from a man who would walk through the Welsh rain quite happily on the basis that he no longer noticed how freezing it was. This reason was soon changed to the rather ambiguous 'the water pressure wasn't right'.

Ianto believes that the answer lies in a something Owen said a long time before the incident – something along the lines of "I'm a tw*t."

But, as Gwen pointed out, it doesn't matter why he did it, more that he did.

Perhaps the largest piece of evidence to suggest that Owen only meddled with the controls on a whim is that he failed to notice that what he did had absolutely no impact at all on any aspect of his shower.

It did, however, have quite a large impact on the cellars Ianto was stood in.

Err… I'm regrettably going to cut there and make this two short chapters rather than one really long one. It's a pity, because I haven't yet produced a life-or-death cliff-hanger, just a measly little 'what the hell's going on?' cliff-hanger.

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