Mickey hadn't really expected to get along with Ianto Jones. He was uncomfortable to be around; unabashedly emotional, prone to fits of crying, slightly snide and aloof, and, yeah, there was that small matter of his sleeping with their very male boss.

Then he found out about the Cybermen; about Canary Warf and Lisa. And if there was one thing Mickey had truly mastered from his time in the other universe, it was the art of creating a stable partnership based on mutual hatred of the Cybers.

"So, you really didn't know what this is all about then?" he asked. The Welshman shrugged.

"You were right there with me the entire time," he pointed out.

"Yeah, but… you and the boss, you're close, yeah? Did he ever mention-"

"Jack and I don't really talk. Well, not about anything in the past, at any rate. Ours is a very in the moment sort of relationship," Ianto explained.

"Say no more," Mickey said hurriedly, bringing up the files from other self-corrected timelines. "Please."

The corners of Ianto's mouth twitched upwards, but other than that he gave no indication that he had picked up on the other man's discomfort. "Where do you want to start?"

"Well, what's the biggest causality event you've had?"

"Invasion of the Cybermen, no doubt about it," Ianto answered promptly. "Beyond that, we also have that whole big mess with Abaddon, and there was this one time in London when…"

As he listed off the events, Mickey began to pull up different maps, overlaying them with one another.

"…and so, for the rest of us it seemed like they'd been missing for three hours, but for them, they'd all paired up and had grandchildren before they could figure out how to turn the machine off." Ianto finished. "So, what do we have to work with?"

"This is a map of all the week points in the time-space continuum on Earth," Mickey began.

"The darker the color is, the weaker the fabric?" Ianto asked.

"Yep."

There was a small pause as both men considered the map for a moment.

"Cardiff's pretty oblique, isn't it?" Ianto observed.

"Yeah," Mickey said. "Hence the dead people hanging around being useless."

He turned around to where Owen and Tosh had been standing a moment ago, just in time to watch their mugs crash onto the ground.

"Right," Ianto sighed. "You figure out how to relock the quantum lock, and I'll get a broom."


"And I'm not expecting you to call me every hour on the hour or anything, but if you could check a few times a day until this is through, that would be great. Also, my family might stop by if this lasts longer than a week, and I've told my parents not to fuss about but you know what they're like. Tish has promised to run interference if things get too much, and, and-"

Tom pulled Martha back down onto to the bed next to him.

"Martha, breath. This'll all pass and pretty soon we'll be listening to an explanation as to how strange the water supply and weather balloons are," he soothed.

Martha laughed. "You aren't supposed to know about that, you know?"

"I don't know anything. I'm just saying, whoever is in charge of your PR department is either in desperate need of a vacation, or of replacing. Drugs in the water supply, my foot," he grumbled. There was the tiniest trace of resentment in his voice, at the fact that Martha was a part of something that was beyond his ken, but it was only the tiniest hint. He was okay with things as they were, really. After all, how many people had fiancés who saved the world?

"I'll be sure to log a complaint," Martha replied, burying her face in the crook of his shoulder. "But, seriously Tom, you'll call regularly and let me know everything's alright, yeah?"

"Of course I will," he assured her. "Even if the world ends."

Martha stiffened.

"Which is likely what's going to happen, isn't it?" he sighed.

"In the worst case scenario," Martha confirmed reluctantly. "But we're hoping it won't get that far. We've this specialist who'll be able to help, yeah? But she's kind of in a bad way. I've got to go see if I can get her back up to snuff."

"Well, you better get to it, then," Tom said reluctantly. Martha turned her face up towards his, and they kissed slowly. "Go on dear, save the world."

"I love you," she said, standing up.

"I love you, too," he replied. Then a thought occurred to him. "Martha?"

She stuck her head around the doorframe. "Yeah?"

"What should I be on the lookout for?" he asked. "I'm at the clinic tomorrow, I can keep an eye out for oddly-behaving patients."

Martha smiled. "It'll mostly be psychological, not physical. People who come talking about either Japan or the Amazon rainforests burning, anyone who mentions the word Toclafane, and if you get the urge to vote Saxon, that'd be a sign as well."

"Saxon? That idiot?" he asked incredulously. "What, was he an alien or something?"

Martha's smile froze. "I've got to go Tom," she said, sounding strange.

"I'll call you," he replied. She disappeared from view, and he tilted his head up to look wonderingly up at the ceiling. "We voted an alien Prime Minister. Good lord, the times really are changing."


"Come in," Jack called just before Ianto's knuckled made contact with the door. Raising an eyebrow, the younger man walked inside.

"We need more information, sir," he stated bluntly.

Jack didn't look up from his paperwork. "If you and Mick are having trouble getting into the files-"

"The files we need don't exist, because they were never recorded in this reality," Ianto explained.

Jack looked up this time, sparing a moment to study him. Hands clasped behind his back, polite mask firmly in place, his eyes…

Just for a moment, his suit became ruffled and blood trickled down from a wound on his head and he looked back at Jack from the other side of a barred door.

Jack blinked, and the vision faded. "How much do you need to know?"

"As much as you know," he replied evenly.

Jack felt his heart leap into his throat, but was relatively sure he had schooled his features well enough that it didn't show. "That might take a while. A year's a pretty long amount of time, quite a bit happened. Could you narrow it down a bit?"

Ianto looked as though he was considering pressing the point, but the relented, coming over to lean against the desk by Jack's side. "We're looking for the locations of things which would have given off a lot of energy. We already know that some part of South America was burned to the ground-"

"The Amazon rainforest. The entire forest," Jack corrected. The Master had found Ianto because of that. Pure dumb luck on his part; he'd assumed the other man had died in India. "He also burnt the whole of the Japanese archipelago, and blew up a good part of the Himalayas besides."

Ianto frowned. "What the hell did he do that for?"

His excuse for Japan had been two-fold: Martha was there, and he'd 'needed' to punish Tosh for nearly succeeding in her attempt to sabotage the Valiant. The Himalayas had been justified as revenge for Jack's continued insubordination, and yet again as another chance to capture Martha, even if they did end up with Gwen instead. The Amazon had burnt without warning, or explanation; collecting Ianto from out of the ashes had been an afterthought. All he remembered about that time was the Master's grinning face as he stared at the Doctor, watching closely for any sign of emotion on the Time Lord's deadened features.

"He was crazy," Jack answered. "It was fun for him."

"But he must have had some plan," Ianto insisted. "He wouldn't have gone through all the trouble of running for Prime Minister if all he wanted was random death and destruction."

"He wanted to create a new Time Lord Empire," Jack answered with a shrug.

"Time Lord?" Ianto questioned with a raised eyebrow. "I thought you said the Doctor was-"

"The Doctor's friendly. The Master, not so much," Jack explained. "And from what I gather, neither one of them was a typical Time Lord."

"Do they all have names like that? The Doctor, the Master…"

Jack shrugged. "I honestly don't know."

"Oh, so you're not the expert in all things Time Lord, are you?" There was a teasing lit in his voice that made his accent deepen. Jack felt a lazy grin spread across his face, despite himself.

"Nope," he answered, casually moving his hand so that it was resting lightly on top of Ianto's. A soft smile graced the other man's face, and he leaned closer.

"And why is that, Jack?"

"Well, don't get me wrong, I love the Doctor," he began. He saw a tiny, squashed-before-it-was-even-really-there flicker of jealousy in the Welshman's eyes, and allowed his smile to grow just the tiniest bit more predatory. "But I've got other things to fill my time with now than Time Lords."

"Really?" Ianto asked. He leaned in closer still, their foreheads bumping together.

"Yes. Take the Welsh for example," Jack stated. Ianto let out a small bark of laughter that sent a puff of warm air into Jack's mouth. "Confusing creatures. Very interesting use of vowels. Annoyingly efficient, too."

"Is that so?"

Jack nodded. "You have no idea. But, there is something about the way they fill out a-"

There was a pointed knock from the doorway. Both men broke apart with a hurried, practiced air, and Mickey came through the door.

"Are you finished yet?" he asked. "We're sort of on a clock here."

"Right," Ianto coughed. "Anything you forgot, Jack?"

"He built this huge fleet of spaceships. The shipyards stretched along the entire Eurasian coastline, and each vessel was outfitted with a black hole converter," he supplied.

Ianto's mouth formed a small 'O' and Mickey let out a low whistle.

"That's-how- where did he even get the material?" he demanded.

"He more or less gutted the entirety of central Europe," Jack explained. "And, also, completely destroyed the moon."

There was a long, shocked silence.

"Well," Ianto said at last. "I think that would count as a massive energy expenditure, don't you think?"

"Yeah, sounds like it to me," Mickey agreed. "Back to work?"

"Back to work," Jack ordered.

"Back to work," Ianto repeated, walking out of the office. Jack watched him leave with an appreciative eye, memories of a timeline that never happened pushed safely back in a dark corner of his mind.


Donna slept fitfully.

Actually, she wasn't sure she was sleeping. Could you be asleep and aware at the same time? Perhaps she was merely floating. Zonked out. Zonk. Weird sort of verb that. You don't get many verbs in the English language that begin with 'z'. Well, not until the 42nd century at least. To Zane, to zephyr, to zeal, to zap, to zone, to…

'What are you doing, you great daft thing?' she chided herself. 'You don't need to know about 42nd century verbs. You don't need anything from the 42nd century. Let it go, let it go…'

Donna was sitting up, concentrating, when Martha returned.

"Welcome back, Miss Noble," Martha greeted her. Donna didn't reply, choosing instead to stare fiercely ahead. "Donna?"

"Shh," the other woman admonished.

Martha gave her a strange look. "Alright," she agreed tacitly. "What for? What are you doing?"

"I'm forgetting," Donna whispered. "So that I can remember.

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