A/N: Oh yes. It's an update!
First, I still haven't got a new beta reader, so if you find any strange mistakes, please tell me.
Sooo, I've done a bit more planning over the whole story line in these few days, and I just have to say that I'm thrilled to begin writing the second series someday in the future. It's going to be so much fun, with John Hart in it and all. I've also got some surprises up in my sleeve, so keep tuned, and don't forget to review!
Reviews keep me going. Those and cookies.
Disclaimer: Torchwood belongs to BBC.
Warnings? This is about Torchwood. There will always be slash.
Chapter 10: Day One
As he waited in the hub, silence clinging around him, Ianto felt kind of bad for not warning Gwen not to chuck tools about. But he had made his decision and was going to stick to it. He had gone over the situation many times in his head, and he remembered how bad everything had been for Carys even before the incident. Sure, in his original time line she had killed a lot of people, but Ianto knew that they had caught her soon enough. If just this time, he could stop her from escaping again. He needed to find an alternative way of getting the gas creature out of Carys.
Ianto sighed and started slowly walking towards the lower levels. The others wouldn't be back in a while, so he didn't have any excuse for not facing Lisa again. He just couldn't bear looking at her anymore, knowing that she was practically dead already. He had planned how to tell Jack about her, but he still wasn't exactly sure how well it was going to go. Jack was so unpredictable sometimes. Ianto just hoped that he wouldn't do anything stupid.
He opened the metal door and went inside.
The team returned to the Hub about an hour and a half later. Gwen was apparently feeling very guilty about what happened, since she kept apologizing to Jack and rest of the team. Ianto tried to ignore her. It was for the best. Gwen should learn how to be more careful in this job.
"I'm so sorry," Gwen pleaded.
Jack looked at her and walked up the stairs. "Seriously, stop saying that," he said starting to sound a little annoyed. Ianto stayed quiet, trying not to get noticed. He knew that Jack was probably going to blame him when he found out that Gwen's mistake has cost a human life.
Gwen followed Jack up the stairs to the office area and then turned to Owen and Toshiko. "But I am! I mean, really, I mean really, really sorry," she said and sighed. "God, I can't believe it."
Owen walked past her. "Didn't they teach you Health and Safety in the police?" he asked, sounding irked. Ianto had a bad feeling about this.
Gwen looked helpless. "You two chucked tools at each other, so I..." she started.
"We didn't miss," Owen remarked. They descended down to the autopsy bay and heaved the equipment on the metal table.
"I'll sort it. Whatever's happened, I'll deal with it," Gwen said. Then she looked a bit doubtful. ""What d'you think has happened? I mean, it was just gas, wasn't it?" she asked and walked down the stairs. "That can't be too bad, can it?"
Owen rolled his eyes. "Right, because gas never did anyone any harm."
Jack tried to stay positive. "On the plus side, we've got good evidence, relatively undamaged," he said nodding and opened the box with a sample of the space rock inside it.
Owen on the other hand, wasn't a very cheerful person. "On the downside, there's an alien on the loose, we don't know where it is, why it's here or what's it going to do," he said and glared at Gwen.
Toshiko sighed. "Give her a break!" she said.
"We all make mistakes, get over it," Jack said. "Now we find and recover whatever came out of there."
Gwen was looking devastated, so Ianto decided take the attention away from her. After all, he was partly to blame this time. He stepped to sand at the top of the steps, with a clipboard in his hands. Then he cleared his throat and everyone turned their attention to him.
"This might help," Ianto said and waved the clipboard. "Nightclub death been phoned in to 999. Circumstances sound... a little unusual."
Gwen hurried up the steps and took the clipboard from him. Ianto looked down at the rest of the team. Jack narrowed his eyes at him and Owen looked thoughtful. Apparently he hadn't entirely bought Ianto's story about time travel yet. "Might be connected," Ianto said and shrugged.
"Right," Jack said and looked around, "Everybody, prepare to leave for the club in ten. Owen, Ianto, my office, now."
Ianto had a bad feeling about this. He nervously straightened his tie and followed Jack and Owen to Jack's office. He wasn't really afraid of Jack, he was more scared about Owen, who still hadn't lectured Ianto about cutting his day off too early.
Jack closed the office door, a rare sight, and turned towards Owen and Ianto. Owen was eyeing Ianto with a weird expression on his face, as if he didn't know what to think.
Jack glanced at Owen. "Would you say Ianto's ready to work again?" he asked.
Owen didn't even look at Jack, he was too busy staring at Ianto. "Hmm," he started and took a small flashlight out of his pocked, flashing it on Ianto's eyes. Ianto tried not to blink or move. "I'd say, I'd say. He looks perfectly fine," Owen said and raised his eyebrows. "What did you do during your holiday? Sleep all day?"
Ianto was too astonished to form a clear answer. He looked that much better? He hadn't even slept that much, even though he wasn't feeling tired anymore. He just slept around four to six hours every night and now he felt perfectly fine, like he had been sleeping for nine hours instead of six. "Umm, not really," he said finally. "But I did sleep a bit more than normally." It didn't even feel like lying, since he had slept about hour or two more and now felt perfectly awake.
Owen let out a whistle. "Well, I would like to know your secrets, mate," he said and finally turned to look at Jack. "He looks like he's never been in better shape."
Jack looked thoughtful for a moment before smiling. "Now that you mention it, he looks better..." he said and grinned.
Owen put his hands over his ears. "Don't."
Jack chuckled and turned to look at Ianto. "Good to know you feel better," he said and then his smile faded. "What can you tell us about this case?"
Owen swirled around to stare at Jack. "You mean...?" he started, and glanced at Ianto with wide eyes. Ianto cringed. Of course Owen believed him the second Jack backed him up. Great.
Jack chuckled dryly. "Yes, Owen," he said. "Ianto's really from the future."
Ianto cleared his throat to change the subject. "So about this case..."
Sometimes Ianto didn't feel like he was being fully appreciated. Owen had already given him a new nickname, future boy, instead of simply calling him Ianto. But at least he realized that he couldn't call him that in presence of Toshiko and Gwen. That's when he preferred tea boy. Owen was always so hilarious.
Ianto was making coffee in the kitchen when he heard Gwen start talking about Rhys. A wave of guilt came over him as he realized that if he didn't stop Gwen, she would cheat Rhys with Owen. He decided that it was one thing he should try to change. At least then Tosh wouldn't be so unhappy either.
"You have a boyfriend?" Ianto heard Tosh ask.
"Yeah," Gwen said. "Have you?"
Ianto imagined Toshiko shaking her head. "Don't have time with this job," she said, sounding a bit apologetic, as if she was thinking how Gwen would see it herself.
Gwen turned to Owen. "What about you? You seeing anyone?"
Owen snorted. "You gotta be joking," he said. "I can get all the grief I need here."
Ianto chose that moment to appear with the coffee. "Coffee anyone?" he asked, hoping to change the subject as quickly as possible. They all took their mugs silently. That's when Gwen glanced back at Ianto, who had just turned around to leave.
"What about you, Ianto?" she asked.
Ianto stopped in his tracks, frozen in place. Jack looked around awkwardly while Toshiko and Owen turned their curious gazes upon Ianto, who was feeling kind of nauseous. He didn't want to talk about it. Especially not with Gwen there. Ianto turned around to face her, his expression blank.
"There was someone," he said, "But I lost her at Carary Wharf." He felt a twinge of pleasure as he saw the realization on Gwen's face.
"Terrorists?" Gwen asked frowning, "I'm so sorry Ianto."
Ianto smiled dryly and shook his head. Jack coughed before he could say anything. "Gwen, Carary Wharf was the base of Torchwood London," he said, and Gwen's eyes widened. "It wasn't terrorists. It was aliens."
Toshiko looked sad but not entirely surprised, and Ianto had a feeling that she already knew. But Owen looked even more surprised than Gwen. Apparently he hadn't imagined that there could be someone sharing the same fate with him in the team. After all, his fiancee's death had been caused by aliens too.
Gwen saw the somber faces of the team. "I'm sorry I brought it up," she whispered and then looked at Owen. "But what do you guys do to relax?"
Jack looked at Owen, who immediately turned back to his snarky self. "I torture people in happy relationships."
Two minutes later Toshiko was running the video image of Carys on her computer screen. The computer beeped. "Gas traces confirmed as Vorax and Suranium."
"Great, my two favourite gases," Jack said. "Can we do a check and find out what we know about them?"
Owen started working on his computer. "I'm all over it."
Gwen looked curiously at Toshiko's computer monitor. "What's this doing?" she asked.
"I've taken the image of the girl from the CCTV. This cross-checks her face with the UK population," she said like it was an entirely normal thing to say.
Gwen's eyes widened. "You can't have every face in the UK on there," she stuttered. "That would be against civil liberties, data protection, all that stuff..."
Toshiko glanced at Jack, who sighed. "Still doing that 'you', instead of 'we' thing," he remarked and sipped from his cup.
Owen's computer finished the scan. "A hundred and nineteen suspects," he groaned. "This thing's supposed to give us a single match!"
Toshiko shook her head. "The CCTV was too low res," she said. "I've tried magnifying and augmenting but it just breaks up." She glanced at Gwen. "Which means that the software can't function properly."
Ianto looked at the computer screen and made a thoughtful noise. "It's narrowed the numbers down," he mentioned and the team turned their attention to him. "I could check through the rest. You know, the old fashioned way, – " Ianto pointed to his head, "– with my eyes."
Jack grinned at him and Ianto smiled back, and then sat down before one of the computer screens, starting his work. He really didn't have time to loose.
Gwen looked a bit desperate. "What about the fingerprints I took off the alley wall?" she asked.
Toshiko ran them through the computer and there was no matches found. Gwen visibly sagged. "It was a long shot, anyway," she said.
"Just a bit," Owen remarked.
Gwen glared at him. "Least I'm trying to do something," she said.
Owen rolled his eyes. "No," he said, "you're trying to do anything." Ianto idly wondered if Owen was ever going run out of comebacks. Then he decided that the answer was no, and continued searching for Carys's picture.
Jack ignored them. "The CCTV must have picked up her arrival at the club," he said thoughtfully and turned to Toshiko, "Tosh, can you reformat the image recognition software to trace her journey backwards via the street camera network?"
Toshiko looked doubtfully. "It'll take a while to process," she said. "Every possible turn on every street means hundreds of thousands of probabilities."
Jack sighed. "Have a go," he said and turned around to watch Ianto work. "At least we'll know where she started the evening."
"We could..." Gwen started, "maybe cross reference that with the addresses on the remaining face matches?"
Owen snapped his fingers. "Good one, newbie! That's a bit more like it!"
That's when Ianto grinned and turned around. "Got it," he announced. It really helped to know what to look for. Good thing he had such a good face memory.
Gwen's eyes widened. "That was quick."
Jack grinned. "A little Ianto works miracles on any case," he said.