Written for Torchwood Fest: Day 9
Prompt: False Alarm

(More notes after the story.)

"WARNING," boomed the impersonal female voice of the computer over the Hub loudspeaker. "INTRUDER DETECTED. WARNING."

Jack slapped his hands over his ears to block the piercing squeal of the alarms as he dashed out of his office. "Tosh! What've we got?"

Toshiko's figure was backlit by flashing yellow alert lights as she crossed to her station and accessed the system. "The scanners have picked up a Weevil," she shouted back. "It seems to be loose somewhere in the Hub."

Jack moved closer to her workstation, wincing as he removed one hand from his ear to draw his Webley. "Okay. First, someone kill that alarm." Toshiko keyed a code, and the wailing stopped. Jack sighed with relief, though his ears would be ringing for several minutes. "Owen, get the Weevil spray. Everyone fan out. Tosh, see if you can pinpoint its specific location."

Toshiko shook her head. "I'm trying, but it keeps moving around. The scanners must be malfunctioning. According to these readings, it's…"

She looked up at the same moment that Jack caught the swiftly-moving shadow at the edge of his vision. He leaped forward, dragging Toshiko out of the way as something heavy landed with a wet smack just where they had been standing.

"You okay?" Owen jogged up next to them, spray can at the ready, then froze as he looked at what had fallen. "What… the…"

Toshiko followed his gaze, gave a squeak of horror and covered her mouth.

Jack could only gape at the mess at their feet. It had once been a Weevil, but judging by its condition it had been bounced off of several hard surfaces before landing on the Hub walkway. Beneath the misshapen body, something dripped sluggishly through the grating into the pool at the base of the water tower, and Jack tried not to think about the contamination risk posed by alien body fluids being recycled into a popular public attraction.

Far above, there was a cry from Torchwood's resident pteranodon as she circled the top of the water tower, probably disturbed from her nest by the alarms. The sound shook Jack back into action. "Well, I think we found the Weevil," he said, holstering his sidearm. "Any ideas how it got here?"

"Or what could have done that to it?" added Gwen, who was easing back to put Owen between her and the mangled corpse.

There was another noise then, one Jack would have missed beneath the ringing in his ears had he not become so attuned to it over the past few months. It was the faint, brush-like sound of Ianto Jones clearing his throat.

Jack glanced back to see his General Support Officer standing a few paces behind him – prim, proper, and pinstriped, as usual. It wasn't until he noticed Ianto's lips pressed together in a tight line that Jack rotated to face him fully. "Ianto?" He drew the name out. "Do you know something about this?"

"Um," said Ianto.

Jack's eyes narrowed. Coming from Ianto, that was as good as a confession. "What's going on?" he demanded.

"I... don't know for certain, but I have a reasonable guess." Ianto's eyes flicked upward, and he added, "But you should probably move out of the way." He reached forward and tugged Toshiko farther away from the workstation. "Uh, quickly..."

The team members scattered only seconds before Myfanwy landed hard on the grating, screeching enthusiastically. She prodded the dead Weevil with her long beak, turning it over in a boneless flop. The sound of gagging came from the direction Owen and Gwen had fled. The Weevil wasn't any prettier on the other side.

"Ianto?" Jack prompted, moving slowly away from the pteranodon. They had discovered early on that she didn't like to be interrupted while feeding. Then again, Jack could have sworn Ianto had told him she didn't like Weevil meat, so what was she doing with this one?

"So," Ianto said. He drew a long breath before continuing. "You know we've been stretched pretty thin of late. Lots of rift activity, lots of space junk washing up. It takes a lot of man-hours to hunt it down and retrieve it all."

Myfanwy screeched again and hopped toward Jack, jabbing her bony beak in his direction. "Get to the point," he called, backing up another step.

Ianto continued in a rush. "So I thought, we've got a pterodactyl we're feeding, we have to let her out to fly around from time to time, why not have her earn her keep? I thought she could collect some of the stuff for us."

"What?" Jack turned to stare at him. Ianto's ears flushed pink, which Jack might have found endearing had he not been tempted to throttle him in that moment. "You taught the pterodactyl to hunt aliens?"

"No! Just simple retrievals. I trained her to bring me objects of alien origin. Bits of metal, space rock, that sort of thing." He bit his lip. "At least, that's what I thought I'd trained her to find…"

"She can detect alien objects?" Toshiko cut in.

Ianto shrugged. "She seems to. I'm guessing it has something to do with her having come through the rift. We're still working on discriminating between terrestrial and alien, but she gets it right about eighty percent of the time."

"How did you train her?" Toshiko sounded fascinated, and Jack added her to the list of employees to consider throttling.

"Just simple operant conditioning, really," Ianto said modestly. "Positive reinforcement. She brings me an alien object; I trade her for a piece of chocolate."

"Sorry to interrupt your fling with B. F. Skinner, but can we get back to the dead Weevil now?" Jack snapped. "When did she start killing aliens?"

Ianto shook his head. "I don't know. I've never had her bring me a body before. Well," he corrected, "there was that sheep a few weeks back. But she was just hoarding that in her nest, for food."

Myfanwy nudged the Weevil closer to them again. She looked impatiently from Ianto to the mutilated body, then screeched more insistently.

"Okay, new Torchwood rule. No training any of our pets without consulting me first." Jack grimaced as one of the Weevil's limbs flopped a little too close to his shoes. "That goes for pterodactyls, Weevils, the carnivorous plants in the hothouse, or any other creatures we may acquire in the future. Got that?"

"Yes, sir," Ianto responded dutifully. Jack frowned. Was he imagining the note of disappointment in Ianto's voice?

"All right. Next problem: What do we do about-"

Before he could finish, Myfanwy let out a frustrated squeal. She picked up the Weevil in her beak and shook it savagely. The force proved too much for the Weevil's compromised structural integrity, and as the body split apart its contents showered the central atrium. The Hub was filled with screaming and profanity as the humans dove behind furniture and equipment banks in an attempt to escape the fountain of alien gore.

When she had finished worrying her prey, Myfanwy spat out the remains of the corpse with a disgusted squawk, then hopped back from it and began preening.

Jack waited until the pteranodon was clearly ignoring them before he crawled out from behind a desk chair, which had provided him with virtually no shelter from the gruesome spray. He mopped something foul-smelling from his face with the miraculously unsoiled cuff of one sleeve – the rest of the shirt was a total loss, along with everything else he was wearing – and surveyed the carnage covering his base of operations. In seconds, Myfanwy had transformed the Hub into a slaughterhouse nightmare. And the smell… Even Jack's hardened stomach lurched at the noxious odor.

"Ianto," he ground out at last, "as this was your brilliant idea, you get to deal with the consequences. Everyone else, showers, and then take the rest of the night off. Not you," he jabbed a finger at Ianto. "You're staying to clean this up. All of this."

Ianto's shoulders sagged. "Yes, sir."

The others lost no time in vacating the area, and Jack retreated to his bunker, trying to conceive a suitable punishment for the man responsible. Suspension? No; that merely deprived the team of Ianto's coffee. The vaults? Not foul enough. Cleaning the aquarium? Wait, Ianto did that anyway. What was the most vile, revolting, disgusting task he could assign?

Jack grimaced as he ducked his head under the spray. He wasn't above entertaining filthy thoughts about Ianto Jones while in the shower, but it was rare that his fantasies involved actual filth. Then again, he usually wasn't scrubbing unidentified bits of Weevil anatomy out of his hair. That sort of thing tended to change one's focus.

When he emerged from a lengthy and blessedly scalding shower, Jack felt refreshed and a good deal less vindictive. He dressed in clean clothing, then frowned at the pile of soiled garments he'd discarded on the floor of his bathroom. He considered burying them in the laundry hamper, but he feared the horrible smell might suffuse his tiny quarters. No, better to get them out of his space entirely. He'd send the clothes out with Ianto and have them cleaned straightaway. Or, failing that, incinerated.

Jack bagged the reeking garments in a bin liner and carried them up the ladder to his office. The others were long gone; only Ianto remained, resolutely scrubbing the grating near Toshiko's workstation on his hands and knees. From the window in his office Jack watched him work, noting that he hadn't even bothered to remove his pinstriped jacket – though if it had suffered anything like Jack's clothes, the suit was a lost cause that no amount of professional cleaning would make presentable again.

Knowing how much Ianto prized his suits, Jack almost felt bad for him. Almost.

Ianto was cleaning his scrub brush in a bucket of sudsy water when Myfanwy circled down and landed beside him on the grating. Jack fully expected him to shoo her away – after all, she was the cause of all this trouble – but to his surprise, Ianto turned and rubbed her beak fondly. Myfanwy keened softly and lowered her head, nudging him in the midsection. Ianto's lips moved, and somehow Jack found himself in the doorway of his office, straining his ears to hear.

"It's not your fault, girl," Ianto was murmuring. He managed a wan smile. "You're not in trouble. Just me." He tipped his forehead against the pteranodon's bony crest, absently scratching her neck. "It wasn't your fault. You only did what I taught you."

At those words a familiar, unsettling sensation radiated through Jack's core. He knew that feeling for what it was, knew what it would have him do, and he resisted it. He tried to resuscitate the anger he'd felt down in his bunker, but the feeble effort only made him feel worse.

After a moment, the bag of clothes slipped from his fingers. He knew it was futile to fight conviction. Guilt always defeated self-righteousness, in the end. Muttering imprecations against Weevils and pterosaurs and his own ego, Jack rolled up his sleeves and headed out into the central Hub.

As Jack emerged from his office, Myfanwy launched into the air and flapped back up to her nest. He suspected she'd never quite forgiven him for their first encounter, when he'd tackled her and stabbed her with a syringe full of sedative, downing her in mid-flight. He couldn't really blame her for being suspicious.

Ianto remained where he was, tensed and watching Jack approach with something like trepidation. Jack couldn't really blame him, either.

Before Jack could speak, the younger man plunged into a report. "I've sprayed down the walls, and I'm working on the walkway now. I'll do the lower level last. I thought it best to work from the top down, in case anything dripped."

Jack nodded. "Good thinking. Got another brush? I'll start on the chairs."

Ianto stared at him. "I don't understand."

"Scrub brush. Has bristles? Removes dirt?" Jack grinned and made a scrubbing motion with his hand, but Ianto didn't return the smile.

"No, I mean… I'm meant to clean this up myself. You said."

Jack expelled a long sigh. He had hoped to skirt around a full confession, but Ianto certainly deserved one, after the way Jack had spoken to him earlier. "Ianto… I'm supposed to be the leader here. It's my responsibility to prepare you for this crazy job and give you the tools to do it, and I'm not always good at that. We're understaffed and overworked, like you said, and we're all just hanging on by our fingernails – me as much as anyone. And that has made me put more pressure on all of you. I've encouraged you to be innovative, to think creatively, to repurpose the things we scavenge into something we can use, because that's the only way we're ever going to keep up with what the universe throws at us." He nodded up toward Myfanwy's nest, six floors above them. "You did exactly that, and I came down hard on you because something went wrong. But things always go wrong in Torchwood, and I shouldn't have put that on you. In the end, I'm just as responsible for this mess as you are."

Ianto's lips were pressed once again into that thin, culpable line. "But you were right; I didn't think it through. I started training Myfanwy without considering the consequences."

Jack nodded. "True. But it wasn't a bad idea. Kind of brilliant, really. Though I do think it needs some refining."

Ianto's shoulders relaxed a little, and he nodded toward Jack's wrist strap. "I got the idea from you, actually," he said haltingly. "When you trained her to come back to the Hub on that signal. And Suzie, with the food sauce. I thought she must be fairly intelligent, to learn all those things."

"So she is," Jack agreed, and tossed a grin at him. "Now we just need to teach her not to explode aliens all over the Hub."

Ianto nodded, but his face was still tight with anxiety; clearly, Jack's little pep talk hadn't entirely worked. Jack needed to lighten the mood, get Ianto to loosen up. "Maybe we can discuss a new training plan over dinner, once we've gotten this place presentable again," he suggested.

"I'm not sure I'm dressed for dinner." Ianto plucked at his ruined suit.

"So we'll order in. Tell you what, I'll even get 'em to throw in something extra for the pterodactyl. But first, cleaning." Jack grinned again and nodded toward the bucket. "Come on, give me a brush."

The shadow of a smile finally returned to Ianto's face, and he stepped closer to hand over a cleaning brush. "Is that an invitation?"

Jack wrinkled his nose at the unpleasant odor emanating from Ianto's clothing. "Not until you've had a shower. You smell like dead Weevil."

Ianto cocked one eyebrow. "Your pick-up lines could use some work, Jack."

"Okay, how about I think up some more while we're cleaning. Then I'll try them out on you and see which ones work."

"I dread to think what inspiration you might find in picking alien viscera off the furniture."

"Oh! Speaking of viscera, did I ever tell you about the time…"

"No - and given our current surroundings I really don't want to know."

The echoes of their easy banter traveled high into the eaves, where a pteranodon tilted her head, listening. Assured by the familiar sounds that all was well once again, Myfanwy curled contentedly into her nest.

Author's Notes:

While trying to think of something for the False Alarm prompt, my sleep-deprived brain decided it would be fun if Ianto trained Myfanwy - and maybe more fun if he failed to have her behaviors under good stimulus control. (Hey, behavior is my day job; I find these things amusing.) Somehow the funny single scene I was envisioning grew into a rather more introspective and Jack-centric short story, but the title remains a silly pun: "Extinction burst" refers to the frustrated behavior Myfanwy exhibits when she isn't rewarded with chocolate as she expects, as well as to the more literal "burst" that happens as a result. (Not claiming it's particularly clever, but considering I was writing this thing at 3AM, I'm just happy I remembered to title it at all.) :)