Big thanks to: Isis the Sphinx, Shadowess 88, starwefter, and Coelectichi for leaving reviews :)
Chapter Twenty
"That, is one of the most disgusting things I've ever tasted." Gwen stated with her face wrinkled up as she placed the cup down on the desktop. She glanced over towards Ianto sat at the workstation next to her; his right arm was bandaged up from the weevil attack he had encountered the previous night. "Why is Seto making the coffee now anyway?"
"Punishment from Jack." The Welshman sighed, trying not to think about his espresso machine, as he scrolled through the police data systems looking for possible links to the case that their leader was currently out investigating.
"Punishment for what?"
"For being an arrogant ass and failure to follow commands; resulting in a team member being attacked by a weevil." Ianto explained in a deadpan tone. His lover had not been happy at all when the two of them arrived back at the hub during the twilight hours. The discoveries of his injury lead Jack to stick to the threat of making Seto 'pay' for allowing harm to befall him. After talking his outraged partner out of placing the rookie inside the weevil's cell for the night, it was decided that the newcomer should be demoted to 'general support' duties and chores until the captain felt that lessons had been learnt.
"Feels like we're the ones being punished." Gwen laughed before she forced herself to take another sip from her cup, but still the hot beverage was just as horrid as the first mouthful. "No one makes coffee quite like you do."
The Welshman gave a warm smile in return to his friend's compliment. He'd never be able to escape the role of 'coffee-boy', - not that he minded, - and his thoughts wandered back to the espresso machine that he hoped Seto was taking good care of, despite the horrid brews that had been churned out so far during that day. How much longer would it be before they got a decent drink? "I'll text Jack to swing by Starbucks on his way back." Ianto pulled out his cell phone and began to type the message only to stop as the huge circular door opened and in stepped the captain.
"Too late." Gwen sighed as she raised her cup before deciding against trying to finish the drink and placed it back down on her desktop.
"Hey kiddies!" Jack came bouncing up the steps and stopped between his two companions, in his hand he held a white and green foam cup which he handed over to the younger man. "Where's Seto?"
"Cleaning the boardroom." The Welshwoman replied as she watched Ianto gulp back the contents of the disposable cup. "How come he gets coffee and I don't?"
"Sympathy gift for the wounded." Jack laughed and affectionately ran his hand over the Welshman's short brown hair.
"And here I am thinking it was because you love me." Ianto took a brief pause from his warm drink to spurt out the remark.
Jack's laughing stopped which failed to leave behind a smile on his face as he now focused all his attention towards Gwen. "The boardroom you say?" He saw her nod and then glanced upwards towards the room on the next open-level yelling out the other man's name. "Seto!"
The door to their meeting room opened and Seto stepped out hatefully glaring down at the captain below. "What?" He snapped impatiently.
"Have you learnt your lesson yet?" Jack fought hard, and almost succeeded, to contain the laughter that erupted from within at seeing that the younger man still wore the maid's apron and hat he had made him wear also. He had thought that the outfit would have been discarded instantly so was amusingly surprised to see otherwise.
Seto continued to stare loathingly at the grinning captain. "What do you think?" He hissed scornfully and vowed to himself that he'd have his revenge against Jack for the humiliating stunt.
"Well you see, I don't think that you have yet…"
"Oh, he has." Ianto wanted his espresso machine back before it suffered serious damage from all the bad tempered handling it was undergoing from the other man's usage.
"I completely agree." Gwen nodded as she kept hold of her giggles.
"Okay then." Jack sighed, giving in to the disguised pleads for decent coffee from his two friends. He raised his finger and mockingly threatened the narrowed blue eyes glaring at him. "But next time you disobey, you will find yourself locked up with Janet."
"I look forward to it." Seto sneered in response to the other's bluff, as he pulled off the frilly maid's hat and apron before making his way down the stairs to join the others. He made his way over towards the workstation he'd claimed as his own and began to access all of the files related to the rift which Toshiko had kept track of. There'd been some activity from the time fracture, but not enough to allow anything to slip through or even drag the TARDIS back for refuelling.
"Been working hard have you?" Jack asked his lover as he watched him type away on his keyboard before stopping to take another sip from the foam cup.
"Extremely hard." Ianto's voice lacked the sarcasm that he had intended.
"So I guess you want to be relieved then?" A mischievous and seductive grin grew on the older man's face.
Gwen froze from typing her case report at overhearing Jack's words.
"That's not what I meant." Ianto coughed and spluttered after having nearly choked on his beverage from the unexpected proposal.
"Are you sure?"
"Until you just asked me, yes, but now..." The Welshman began to flush and shifted in his seat as he tried to sit comfortably once more but failed to do so. "Damn you Jack Harkness!" He whispered light-heartedly.
"That's it; I'm going up top in search of a decent cup of coffee!" Gwen rose from her seat as she pushed up from her desktop. She glanced over towards Seto. "Are you joining me Cariad?"
"No thanks." He had given up trying to confront the woman about the welsh word she had labelled him. Every time Seto had attempted to ask her, something always interrupted them, so he reluctantly and gradually just accepted the pet name.
"Okay." Gwen breathed out deeply as she hurried away towards the circular door.
Jack watched her leave before he turned his attention towards the younger man eagerly typing away as he worked on researching the rift's activity. "You staying for the show Seto?"
Narrowed blue eyes glanced suspiciously at the two men to see Ianto turning a brighter shade of pink than the shirt he wore and Jack grinning in that Cheshire cat way. Oh god, they're at it again!
"You could join in too."
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The rain slowly drizzled down as the two of them walked along the path behind Cardiff castle and beside the river. It had been stop-starting all morning and Gwen made sure to have her umbrella handy to shield her from the falling droplets. Right now she walked nursing a warm, insulated, foam cup of coffee with both hands as Seto, - who she'd waited for, knowing that he would be right behind her once he was aware of the other men's intentions, - held the multicoloured umbrella above them both with one hand and his drink in the other.
"Sounds scary." Seto admitted in a rather bored manner at having heard the Welshwoman ramble on about her most terrifying experiences since she had joined Torchwood. He had taken to holding the umbrella over them both purely to stop the shorter woman from jabbing him in the eye with the damn thing.
"Believe me, it was beyond scary." Gwen assured as she had just finished recalling the time she had been strapped down on the cyber-conversion unit. She still got shivers going down her spine every time that she thought the torturous blades and spikes lowering down towards her head which had been clamped firmly in place. "But I would have to say that the most terrifying moment was finding Rhys dead." Her thoughts wandered as she began to twist the wedding band on her finger…
The rift had been breached, causing many things to seep through the barrier, when she had been shown a vision of the future, by a 'wanderer of time' called Bilis Manger. In that vision Gwen had witnessed her then-boyfriend, die from a brutal attack and so to prevent it from happening, had locked him up in the safety of the hub's holding cells until the threat past by. As the Torchwood team worked to find out a way to stop all of the creatures and illnesses from multiple periods in time coming through into the modern day, Rhys had been murdered by Manger during a temporary power loss in the underground base.
Sensing that something was wrong, she and Jack attempted to get to her husband-to-be only to arrive too late and find him in a pool of his own blood. Gwen would never forget the gut wrenching feeling as they discovered Rhys' cold body which she then cradled and screamed out her anguish, hitting and blaming the captain as he tried to comfort her with his sincere apologises.
After that she and the others were quick to form a mutiny against Jack as he stood in their way of re-correcting the temporal displacements that had been caused, and shot their captain dead. Under Manger's manipulation of making them believe that opening the rift even more would rectify everything, they opened it further which allowed the huge beast, - Abaddon - to descend on the city, killing everything that had the misfortune of finding itself in his shadow. This had been the time wanderer's true intention of destruction and had it not been for Jack's immortality which overloaded the monstrous being's hunger for life essence, then things would not have returned back to the way they had been before the rift's breach and Rhys would have remained dead.
As a result from Jack's stand-off against Abaddon, he stayed dead for several days. The others' gave up hope as they doubted that the captain could recover from the death experience, but not Gwen; she stayed by his side the whole time refusing to let him go. But eventually she too began losing hope and kissed him goodbye, full on the icy blue cold lips, which revived him by doing so. That's when things became even more confusing for her as she struggled to make sense of the feelings she held towards him.
Feelings that turned to jealously just a few minutes after his long awaited revival, when Jack openly kissed Ianto for the first time in front of them, - jealously that still flared from time to time whenever she saw her captain and friend together. Barely a couple of hours later he had disappeared, leaving the whole team to whirl in confused states of mind, drawing them closer together as they supported each other and continued without 'Captain Jack Harkness'.
When Rhys had proposed to her a few months later, she was quick to say yes, much to her captain's displeasure of finding out once he had returned. The two had been married for some months now, though hardly anyone remembered what was supposed to be her happy day as all the guests had to be Retconned due to alien activity; her husband being the only non-Torchwood person not to undergo this fate. She loved Rhys with all her heart, but what if Jack hadn't disappeared chasing after the Doctor on that one time? Would she have still married her long term sweetheart or thrown it away in favour of the indecisive feelings felt towards her captain?...
Seto watched as Gwen's eyes glazed over. He'd heard Jack complaining about the woman's husband on a number of occasions, but hadn't paid much attention since he'd been caught up in his own troubles and thoughts, and never released that the man had past away.
"Bad Woof!" Both Seto and Gwen stopped in their tracks as a toddler suddenly leapt out in front of them to shout at a stray dog that urinated up the side of a bench.
"It's not a wolf, it's a dog, now hurry up!" The mother of the little boy exclaimed.
"Cute." Gwen sighed as she watched the mother lead her child away down the path that she and Seto had just walked. She and Rhys were trying for a baby, though she kept this secret from the team as she was certain that her captain wouldn't approve. "I'd love to have kids one day, what about you?"
"Never going to happen." Seto snorted bitterly as he threw his empty cup into the rubbish bin. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a brief glimpse of long silvery-blue flowing hair that was coming closer towards them. "Gwen?"
"Yes?"
"Cwtch."
"Pardon?"
Not explaining his actions Seto pulled his colleague closer to him, lowering his face down into her long dark hair and tilted the umbrella to shield himself from view. She followed me all this way?! What was he going to do if his 'wife' noticed him? He couldn't go back no matter how much he wanted her, not at his brother's expense. But she didn't notice him as the approaching woman, who he could now tell was not Kisara, continued straight by them.
"What's going on?" Gwen asked gently as she raised her arms around Seto like he had asked.
"For a moment I thought that woman was my wife, and had followed me after I left her to find Jack." Seto explained quietly to the Welshwoman who he still held close. He'd been doing so well not thinking about the family he'd left behind until the Kisara look-a-like had startled him, undoing all the hard work of overcoming the heartache he felt.
"I didn't know you were married."
"I'm not."
"Then why were you scared thinking that woman was your 'wife'?"
"It's complicated." Seto croaked as he failed to keep the sorrow at bay, his grip on the woman tightened as he sought comfort from her warm and gentle embrace.
Gwen remained calm where she was as Seto's hold became firmer. "I'm right here if you need to talk Cariad." Though she didn't have high hopes for the man to reveal whatever it was that had made him seek Jack out, and began to feel the rain, - possibly teardrops - softly fall down into the crease of her neck. She was all too aware that this was what Torchwood did. It dragged you in; turned the world upside down and inside out, before leaving you feeling confused and alone.
Or perhaps she'd gotten it wrong. Perhaps Jack simply rescued and harboured lonely, broken people who he tried to fix by loving them in only ways that he could. If that was the case, then it clearly wasn't working on this man.
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Ianto: You not responding to your wonderful reviewers today?
KG: Unfortunately not, as my mind's blank for things to say.
Ianto: Well you could tell Coelectichi that the name of the episode is 'Countrycide', or Shadowess 88 that the theories mentioned are interesting but incorrect ....
KG: Thankies for doing that for me. (sees Ianto roll eyes) Why aren't you with Jack anyway?
Ianto: He's busy chasing around after Seto, with my stopwatch and trying to make him groan.
KG: ...(gobsmacked).... And you're okay with that?
Ianto: Of course, it's purely innocent.
KG: (mutters sarcastically) Yeah right.
Ianto: It is! Jack gets bored easily and .......
KG: Say no more, I gotta get back to working on my fic.
Ianto: Is that 'actual' typing of the fic, or 'messing around with movie maker' that you seem to have been distracted by recently?
KG: Typing, otherwise I'll be catching up on myself soon.
Ianto: It does help when you don't spend time making cinematic trailers for the next fic before you've even finished typing this one.
KG: Oh, but you've got to agree it's a good trailer though.
Ianto: (head-palm)You do realise that you're being either very brave or very stupid with the next fic?
KG: (shrugs) Meh!
Jack: (comes running in room) Yay, I made him groan in just twelve seconds!
Ianto: (deadpan tone)I'm so pleased for you. (evil grin) KG's not busy, so why not do her next?
KG: What?!!! (looks horrified)
Jack: (big grin) Great idea!
(KG runs away with Jack chasing behind)
Ianto: (sees Seto enter room) So twelve seconds eh?
Seto: Is he always this childish?
Ianto: Only sometimes.
(Both stand watching as Jack waves a jar of Marmite under KG's nose who shows her disgust at the smell with a rather loud groan)
Gwen: (pokes head in room) Am I the only one doing any work around here?