Written for Torchwood Fest Day 4: The Doctor's Hand. I would apologize for putting the most time and effort for Torchwood Fest into a crack fic of the highest order, but I'm not sorry. At all.

Crap.

The basketball hit the hand. Hit the hand and it damn near broke that damn jar thing. The jar was still in one piece, but the hand flopped on the cold concrete.

Gwen was still learning the ropes, but she had very quickly cottoned on to one thing. Don't mess with Jack's hand. Jack's hand in the jar, that was. Not Jack's actual hand still attached to him. Although maybe the hand in the jar was Jack's hand. Did his hands grow back when he…came back? She wasn't quite sure how that worked yet. She'd already caught him in a half lie about not sleeping so maybe his…not dying thing wasn't as foolproof as she'd assumed.

But she had more pressing matters. Get the damn hand back in the jar.

"Gwen hurry the fuck up," said a voice that very much sounded like it belonged to someone she very much should not be shagging. But she was. For some reason. Best not to think about that either. Too complicated.

"Don't tell me you broke one of Tosh's toys."

"Just a minute, Owen" she chirped in false sugary sweetness.

She felt Owen cringe at her tone of voice from over at the basketball hoop. Small victories. He was looking at the wall and not at her, allowing her to quickly finish her damage control mission. She put the hand in her own hands.

The hand felt slimy from the goop. But also inhuman. Unearthly. And god, she was casually putting a disembodied hand back in a jar. What even was her life? In even more of a panic because she didn't want to admit to freaking Owen of all people she'd accidently nearly broken something possibly alien again she shoved the godforsaken thing back in its gooey, unearthly fish bowl.

That night Jack discovered the hand was upside down from his its usual position. How the heck had that happened? He slowly caressed his precious hand before placing it in the correct position. Ianto pretended he hadn't seen the hand petting through the glass of Jack's office (he totally did).

Ianto hated that hand. It was staring at him. It had no physical eyes, no physical presence and yet it seemed to stare at him. Stare at him and his lover in the middle of the act. It was bad enough when his coworkers kept walking in on them (for a former police woman and a certifiable genius both of the girls in particular seemed a bit oblivious to situations in which they should mind their locations). But the hand just seemed like an impossible ever present interference and interloper when they were near it.

What was worse was when he wasn't the only one hyper aware of it. Jack (when he broke his focus to take in the environment that was) would try to steer away from it. It was subtle, but a conscious enough reflex for Ianto to pick up on. Jack's eyes would go slightly to the side, he'd frown a bit, and they'd begin to move out of the site view of the hand. Well, the theatrical sight view. It was a hand, after all. But the fact remained that in the presence of the hand Jack showed he was capable of modesty of all things. And if that wasn't frighteningly and unsettlingly out of character for his lover, Ianto didn't know what was. So Ianto tried a simple solution. There was towel he just happened to have finished laundering. He just happened to have put the towel over the hand where it was sitting in Jack's office. He just so happened to have planned on propositioning Jack in that very spot. Jack just so happened to have gleefully accepted. And if hours later Ianto had witnessed Jack trying to hide his (increasingly desperate attempts) to locate the hand amongst the many oddities unnecessarily logoed with the Torchwood emblem in his office, and failing to look under a rather large, freshly laundered towel, then so be it.

Alright, so he was fucking curious. So sue him. As much as he wanted to claim he didn't give a rat's ass about the sodding hand, the bloddy thing intrigued him. Jack was out either shagging the tea boy into oblivion or brooding on a rooftop like he was the goddamn Batman, and Owen had a state of the art alien medical lab at his disposal. And no one else was in the hub to look at the bloody hand. He picked the thing up, first testing the weird goop, and that was the scientific fucking term for it, goop, as far as he was concerned. It tested as…and wasn't his life sodding brilliant, time energy. Well okay, artron energy particles. But that was literally just the fancy techno babble word for time shit that came from the rift. So the hand was sitting in time gook. And yet was really, not the weirdest thing at Torchwood.

He took a sample of the hand's DNA. The scanner identified it immediately. Now wasn't that perfect.

Species: Time Lord. Planet of Origin: Gallifry. Life form:

The scanner broke. Fuck. Fuckity. Fuck.

Time to go to Tosh with his tail between his legs.

Tosh was not having a good day. Owen had practically begged her to take a look at his medical scanner-his irreplaceable alien medical scanner. Thankfully she'd managed to get it back in working function with the high tech equivalent of turning it off and on again, but the fact she had to in the first place was just annoying. He of all people should have known better than to mess it with it. And what was worse, she would have fixed for him even if he hadn't been so desperate. And the middle of the hub was not the place to start going down that road of pining again.

And then she spotted it. Jack. Jack taking his hand in a jar and just staring at it. Staring it the way he did when he was going on in one of stories from eras go. The ones she never knew whether to take completely at face value. And then all of a sudden Jack was…well. He was caressing it. He was gently caressing a hand in the jar. Or well, more accurately, the outside of the jar the hand was in. And then he placed a gentle kiss to the top of the jar. A chaste kiss. But still. A kiss. She just saw her boss kiss his hand in a jar.

She pointed glued her eyes to her computer. There was no good that come out of Jack ever discovering she'd just witnessed that.

"So," Gwen said to Ianto as they cleaned up the Hub following the Earth moving incident. "Just so we're clear, Jack's hand in the jar belonged to the Doctor."

"That seems to be the case," said Ianto as he put some Dalek trashed debris in a trash bag.

"And it became a sort of clone of the Doctor that's now in another dimension."

"That is what Martha and Jack seemed to have said."

"With all of his memories. And that Donna woman's memories?"

"As I understand it,"

"Well, it's just do you think…he can maybe remember being a hand? In the jar I mean."

Ianto dropped the trash bag.

"I really, really hope he never leaves that other dimension if that's the case," said Ianto.