Hello there! I just wanted to apologise for the outrageously long time I've been missing from the scene... I've gone from horrific writer's block to an A2 art exam to my computer dying and a mad scramble to get all my files transferredto my new laptop! So here I am, updating...
Thank-you again to all you dedicated people out there and thank-you for baring with me!
CHAPTER 4
As soon as Owen was out of the bunker and his footsteps were receding, Jack found himself unable to hold back the spasms of silent sobbing. Ianto stroked his cheek gently and held him as his breathing evened out and he gained control of himself again.
"I'm so sorry, Ianto, I really am." Jack's voice was gentle and more than a little choked. Ianto just pressed a kiss to his lips and held his face, dismissing the apology.
"You had to do it… I just got scared but I'm fine. I promise." Ianto kissed the corner of his mouth again and Jack turned into the touch as Ianto's thumbs wiped the lingering tears from his cheeks.
"You have to believe how much I hated doing that. I'll never physically restrain you like that again, not unless it's the only way." Jack stared at him, his eyes and his voice completely earnest. The clarity of his vision and the different timbre to Jack's voice were a little unnerving, but there was the underlying truth that he was still the man he'd been the day before and that whatever had happened was just inside Ianto.
"I know, I just… I know. I trust you, Jack. I just want to be better." Ianto sighed and slumped against his lover's chest, closing his eyes again drinking in the sound and feel of Jack's heartbeat. He lost count of how many times the organ thump-thumped the blood round his lover's body, but all too soon, he could hear Owen pacing upstairs, obviously needing Jack's attention. "Go on, get back to work…"
"Ianto…" Jack's voice was as reluctant as his own had been, neither wanting to lose contact with the other. Jack wanted to comfort Ianto and help deal with what was happening and Ianto needed Jack as an anchor, the whole world around him suddenly shifted and distorted with his lover as the only constant he could grasp onto. Ianto felt Jack's lips firmly against his own, sad and bittersweet as they pulled away from each other and Jack stood up.
He took a moment to tuck Ianto back under the covers and put a plaster across the puncture mark on his right arm before lingering a moment longer and hurrying back up to his office. Carefully, he lifted the cover back in place before turning to Owen.
"Is there anything you can see straight away?" Jack looked over at Owen, who was standing grimly in the middle of the room, arms folded. Jack felt his heart in his throat and gestured Owen to show him what he'd found.
They moved round and down into the autopsy bay, Owen bringing up the data he'd collected with his scanner.
"The ears, skin, mouth and lungs are all exactly as expected, which is more than encouraging. The things that worried me were the eyes." Owen projected the chemical analysis graphs onto the wall above the computer and on the screen itself brought up a freeze frame of the video the scanner automatically took.
"Fuck…" Jack stared disbelievingly at the video, completely unwilling to acknowledge it. Ianto's eyes – the beautiful, sarcastic, intelligent eyes that he saw right into the depths of – were different. They were wrong. The blue-grey iris' were discoloured, a ring of violet surrounding the outside. The colour was thin, but nevertheless present. "Is there anything you can do?"
"I need to analyse the blood properly, but I'm hoping that what's happened is like the Kayser-Fleischer Ring." Owen sensed Jack's look that clearly said 'what the hell are you talking about?' and carried on, gesticulating slightly as he tried to explain what he meant. "One of the signs of Wilson's disease – an inability for the liver to handle and process copper properly – is a ring of copper deposit around the iris. It's a discoloured ring around the eyes like Ianto has here… only this compound, obviously, is bloody purple, not copper."
"Is it treatable?" Jack was slightly disturbed by the change in his lover's eyes. It felt selfish to ask, but he desperately wanted them to go back to normal.
"Yeah, if it's that and not a physiological change, it should be. I just need to analyse his blood and work out what the hell got into his system to do this – but no promises" Owen shrugged and glanced up at the readings on the wall. Jack nodded and sighed, leaving him to it.
*
The following few hours had been tense and stressful with Owen working feverishly on Ianto's scans and blood samples. He was obviously determined to work out what had happened and everyone knew that once the medic found a project, he bit into it and refused to let go until he'd beaten it into submission.
Gwen hadn't received any alerts of other people who might have been affected in the same way, but on reflection, Jack realised that the creature was a hunter and a particularly efficient one at that. He'd not left anyone alive to identify him. The only reason they'd found him when they did was that the girl he was attacking was in the middle of a 999 call saying she thought she was being stalked. They'd all heard the blood curdling scream as she'd been attacked and the frantic calls from the helpless desk clerk at the Police call board.
Tosh had long since moved on to running through the cover up for the cases and the deaths and Jack had been left to wander the archive and the firing range. He'd thought about maybe going down for some practice when he realised that the gun shots might be audible to his young lover. It was paranoia really, but even the faintest chance of causing him any more discomfort made his stomach turn.
He'd also toyed with the idea of going back down to the bunker, but he knew that if something came up and he had to jump up and rush off, the disturbance to Ianto would be unnecessary and uncomfortable. It was with a heavy sigh of resignation that he fed and cleaned out the weevils and Myfanwy. It was practical and necessary labour and it forced him to think about something other than Ianto.
By the time he'd finished and grabbed a shower and a clean set of clothes from his locker in the team changing rooms, Owen was herding them all up and directing them to the autopsy bay.
Jack snapped his braces over his shoulders and moved across the hub quietly. The other three had taken their shoes off almost as soon as the order to keep the noise down had been issued, but Jack had needed to wear his boots for the weevil cleaning. Now though, he was in a thick pair of socks, padding almost silently through the base to the autopsy bay, his heart in his throat once more.
"How do you know it's not a type of poison?" Tosh asked with a slight furrow to her forehead. Jack glanced at her – they'd obviously started whilst he was heading over.
"If it was a poison, there would be some form of damage or altered body function, but the scans show that everything is working normally, apart from his sensory receptors. He hasn't got worse over time and there hasn't necessarily been a negative impact on him." Owen rolled his eyes and the scathing look Tosh sent him. "A negative impact on his health I mean. All his organs are working and there's no sign of brain damage at all."
"Okay, so what is it?" Jack asked, Owen glancing over at him.
"Well, from what I can see of the alien's anatomy, the substance that causes the violet colour of the eyes is present in the blood stream." Owen tapped a few keys and the projection changed to show the chemical analysis for Tosh to follow along with. "I don't know whether the compound is created naturally or through something it ingests, but it seems to be excreted by glands under the fingernails."
"So when Ianto got scratched, the substance was transferred into his blood stream?" Jack rubbed his chin thoughtfully, watching Owen nod and pull up a couple more graphs and chemical representations.
"Could it have been a deliberate thing?" Gwen asked. They all looked over at her and she shrugged. "It seems to me this thing is supposed to be pretty efficient at what it does, so could putting this compound into its prey be a way of disabling or marking it?"
"It makes sense." Tosh spoke this time, the two men nodding their agreement.
"The compound gets into the system of the prey, amplifies all its senses and drives it to distraction." Jack mused out loud and Owen followed up.
"The heart rate would be sky high and it'd get through the body quickly, affecting them almost instantly. They wouldn't be able to run away what with their sight effectively blinding them and sounds bombarding them." Owen nodded, turning back to look at the levels of the compound in Ianto's blood. "Ianto only had a small dose and he wasn't particularly scared when he was grabbed. Maybe it's designed to be most potent with a deeper wound and on weaker prey."
"The sounds more than likely… but still, how do we reverse this?" Jack asked, Owen glancing back at him.
"The compound is something organic, but it doesn't seem to be reacting chemically with Ianto's cells. I'm pretty confident that it could be dissolved – it's similar to human enzymes – and broken down into chunks small enough to be ineffective and washed back into the blood stream." Owen cocked his head to one side as he thought out loud. Tosh nodded, Gwen tried her best to look like she understood but Jack frowned.
"Would he be completely cleared of it?" Jack tapped his fingers on the metal railing in agitation.
"Eventually, yeah, but it wouldn't be an instant reversal." Owen turned round then and faced him, fixing Jack with his best 'I'm the medic here, deal with it' look. "Depending on his metabolism, it could take anywhere between a few hours and a few days for the compound to completely leave his system. From what I know of his diet and subsequent figure, I would say his metabolism is pretty damn fast, yeah?"
"Okay, okay, I get it. Start working on the blocker." Jack nodded and Owen turned back to his computer, knowing that the meeting was effectively finished now.
"Jack, Tosh and I are going to go get some pizzas for lunch, we'll be back in a bit." Gwen rubbed his arm gently, knowing how worried he was for Ianto.
"Me and Gwen will stay on alert for the Rift this afternoon… Why don't you go spend some more time with Ianto?" Tosh asked gently, knowing that he'd already come to the end of his tether. Jack sighed and looked over at her. He pulled her into a hug and murmured and 'thank-you' before following her out of the room and heading into his office.
He quickly removed his belt and braces, leaving them on the floor of his office as he moved aside the cover to the bunker and lowered himself down. He felt his way to the bed and found that Ianto had already shifted over, making space for him to slip under the covers next to him. Ianto cuddled closer to him and Jack's arms came instinctively around him, tucking his lover's head beneath his chin with a small sigh of relief. The physical contact felt good.
Ianto's hands ran absent patterns across his chest and stomach, one of his feet running across the back of his thigh as he shifted closer.
"Have you worked out how to fix me yet?" He asked gently, Jack squeezing him slightly.
"Almost. Owen's working on something at the moment. He thinks some chemical got into you through the scratch, designed to incapacitate you to make the attack easier." Jack tensed and Ianto's fingers moved up to stroke the back of his neck gently.
"It's a good job I didn't go home on my own then." Ianto mused.
"God, don't say that, Ianto… please, don't." Jack shook slightly and Ianto pulled back to watch him briefly.
"Jack, I'm not going anywhere, not now." He moved his head back to rest of Jack's chest, listening intently to the sound of his lover's heart and breathing. They were loud and comforting, wrapping around everything else and drowning out any other noise that tried to intrude.
He'd been lying in bed all day, listening to the comings and goings of the team. It had become something of a challenge for him to identify each person as they'd moved around. Jack had been easy – so had Owen – but Gwen had been a little harder and Tosh harder still. It wasn't until Tosh had come to sit by the manhole cover with her comm. device and chatted to him for a while that he managed to catalogue the sound of her for future reference.
"I know I'm still sick but… I feel like I'm falling apart, Jack, and I don't want to feel like that." Ianto ran his fingers across Jack's chest, knowingly brushing his thumb across one of Jack's nipples, suddenly desperate to be shown that he wasn't about to scatter like dust in the wind. He felt Jack's breath shudder and heard the hitch.
"I don't want to hurt you, not after last time." Jack wanted to turn him away, but somehow, he knew he couldn't.
"Please, Jack – I don't want to feel like glass every time you touch me." Ianto's voice broke as he whispered the one thing that had been eating away at him unconsciously. He wasn't even aware it had been until he said it but now he felt guilty. He was manipulating Jack to achieve purely selfish ends and he didn't want that. "God, I'm sorry… I don't know where that came from."
"I get that you're frustrated and you're scared, but you're always made of glass to me, Ianto. Always. One wrong move and you shatter, I've lost you for good." Jack's words were unexpected and Ianto looked up, seeing pain and bitterness in his lover's eyes as he stared upwards. Ianto pulled his face down and kissed him, harder than he'd meant to.
He felt Jack hesitate and slid his tongue along the older man's lips, making Jack moan gently, responding and suddenly desperate for Ianto to be closer. He held him tightly, constantly aware that one wrong move – one moment where he didn't pay attention – and he'd hurt him. Ianto wanted Jack completely, but he could feel the hesitation in his lover's touch, could sense the apprehension and the nerves and knew it wasn't fair to keep going. He would rather just be with Jack and enjoy the company and the security. With a sigh, he pulled away and curled closer to Jack's chest and the loud, comforting rhythm of his heart.
Jack kept his arms round Ianto and the younger man just closed his eyes. Jack ran his fingers absently across his lover's back. It was then that he realised Ianto hadn't eaten or drunk anything since the night before.
"You thirsty?" He felt the nod against his sternum.
"I had some tap water but it tasted like chemicals." Ianto shrugged and Jack couldn't help but smile a little.
"You really need to have something…" He thought for a moment, tracing absent, feather-light patterns with his finger tips. Ianto sighed and let his mind drift a little with the silence and Jack's throbbing heart beat. He felt his eyes drooping closed and his limbs growing heavy and just as he thought he might drift to sleep, Jack patted his arm and shifted beneath him. "Come on, let me up."
"Jack, no… just stay a little longer." Ianto glanced up at him and saw a smile on his lover's face which made him flinch inwardly.
"I'm going to go get us some food and the sooner I do it, the sooner I can be back down here and not have to leave again." He leaned down and kissed Ianto softly, a promise lingering on the younger man's lips as he sighed in resignation. "I'll be back in half an hour."
Ianto nodded mutely, more for himself than for Jack, and he listened to the sounds of Jack moving up the ladder and away from the office. For what felt like the hundredth time that day, he pulled Jack's pillow towards himself and curled around it.