CHAPTER 6: BUCIO

After I'd taken my laundry out of the dryer, I realized I had nothing better to do. I headed to the hub. I took the bus to the millennium centre. It was a nice day out, but I didn't want to spend too much time engrossed in my thoughts. My thoughts were pretty depressing. I knew Ianto and Gwen wouldn't expect me at the hub, but I knew they were the only two that might understand where I sat.

Jack was dead. It was my fault. I had no one to tell besides Ianto and Gwen, but they saw the whole ordeal with their own eyes.

I stepped through the front door to the hub. I'd always thought it funny how the reception room was decorated compared to what really went on here. I reached over the desk and hit the button that opened the hidden door that lead to the hub.

I stepped into the hub and looked up. Jack's guard dog squawked from up above. I hoped Ianto knew how to feed it. I sure had no clue.

I was going to futz with things at my desk when I looked down the hallway that led to the vaults. One vault was open and Jack lay on what looked like a human-sized tray for cadavers. Someone had taken his bloody clothes and switched them with clean white scrubs that contrasted with the gaping hole in the remains of his skull.

Ianto had pulled up a stool and was looking at his captain. From the distance I was at, it didn't even look like he was fazed by seeing his boss's brains splattered before his eyes. He just sat there as if he was waiting for something to happen.

I approached him, trying to not look at the remains of what was once my boss. "You know you can't keep him out here for long. He'll start to smell after a few days."

"Yeah," He didn't lift his gaze from Jack.

"Did you log him out of the system yet?" I asked, knowing protocol for when a Torchwood member dies.

"Not yet," he said solemnly, though when he looked up, his eyes weren't full of despair as mine were.

"Did you want me to do it?" I asked innocently, thinking maybe he wanted me to do it because this whole mess was my fault.

"No. I'll do it. I just haven't gotten around to doing it yet."

I shrugged, "Okay. Well, I'll just be at my desk then," I trailed off.

His gaze returned to the corpse before us.

Against my will, my eyes followed his and I peered at Jack's corpse. I narrowed my gaze. Was it just me, or did it look like his skull was a bit more intact than it was last night? It was still massively deformed, but it didn't look as fragmented as I thought it had been last night.

I turned and walked back to my desk. Staring at a corpse was kind of creepy. I shrugged mentally. Maybe his skull just seemed less fragmented because I was so out of it last night. I probably hadn't seen that it wasn't as bad as I thought. That didn't change the fact he was dead.

My desk had the alien's gun on it. I took it as a sign Ianto wanted me to figure out all I could about the gun. I flopped into my chair and turned my computer on. I picked up the handgun. It seemed to weigh as much as the 1911 handgun I'd been assigned by Jack. It looked like a cross between a Ruger Crimson Trace and a 460 Smith and Wesson Magnum 10.5". I turned it over. There were some strange etchings on the side.

My computer had booted up. I signed into the system. While Windows was loading, I pulled a sketch pad closer to me and checked to see that the USB cable was plugged into the computer.

I opened the translation program on my computer and sketched in the symbols. It began searching quickly for my request. A few long minutes passed but it eventually began blinking in bright red all caps letters "BUCIO".

I raised an eyebrow at my computer. I moved my cursor to the search box and typed in "BUCIO" there. I watched the pterodactyl flying above me while I was waiting for the results to come.

The list came up and I looked down at the languages that had come up. Varvi was the one I figured went along with the Varvara. I looked across the line looking for what BUCIO was. The line read "Basifactos United Orbital Intelligence Clan". I furrowed my brow, that couldn't be right; the letters weren't in the right order. But then I remembered taking a foreign language in high school. The words in sentences were jumbled when you directly translated them. Perhaps some words were jumbled in our English, but in Varvi were completely in order.

I knew we'd probably never find out what all that mumbo jumbo meant, but we had a name for the gun. I spent the next few hours cataloguing the weapon in our alien weaponry database for easy look-up if we ever needed the information later.

When I finished it still wasn't late. I didn't want to head home yet. I didn't want to see the scene play over in my mind when I walked in my apartment. I walked down the hall back to the vaults. Ianto hadn't moved. If I didn't know better, I would have thought he were a statue. He still just sat there and waited. Gwen must have brought him a coffee earlier. The mug in his hands was half filled with coffee gone cold from sitting for a while.

"If you need a break, you can leave for a bit. I'll stay here in your spot." I paused, unsure if I wanted to go on, but I wanted to know, I phrased it as more as a statement, "I'm not sure why you feel obligated to watch over him, it's not like he's going anywhere," I shrugged, "but I'll sit here while you go take a nap or get hot coffee or something."

He looked up and seemed to consider it for a while. I felt strange under his gaze, he seemed to be looking through me. Eventually he nodded, "I should get up for a bit, my back's killin' me." He attempted a smile, but it fizzled short. He stood awkwardly and walked down the hall to the main hub. Before he turned the corner, he turned to look back at Jack.

I'd sat down on the seat Ianto had just vacated, I saw him turn. I waved my hand in a gesture encouraging him to continue, "Go on, he'll be fine." I said, knowing he was worried for some reason for his captain. Jack was dead, and I guess we were all dealing with it differently.

I thought about it for a while though. Even in the heat of all the action last night at my apartment, I vaguely remembered Ianto and Gwen hardly flinching when Jack's head was blown to pieces. I shrugged mentally, I knew Ianto and Gwen had been with the team for much longer than I had. I wondered if we ever got used to the death around us. I never seemed to be quite so bothered when we had to dispose of aliens, but I'd never been through the death of a team member before.

I knew there were two empty desks. When Jack first showed me around, he'd mentioned that I would get my own desk, I had noticed that there were two open desks. But the next time I'd walked into the hub, he'd had another desk brought in. I'm no psychologist, but I had a feeling that whoever that desk had belonged to wasn't long gone. Knowing two desks were empty made things even different, because I figured two members had died recently. When I'd first made that realization, it was a slap in the face. I was twenty, still in college, I couldn't die. I was too young to die.

Life's different in Torchwood.

There are monsters in this world that everyone wants to deny. You talk about your job to anyone, they lock you in the cuckoo's nest. That was lesson one. Don't talk about your job to anyone.

I remember being given my gun for the first time. I was studying ballistics so I'd studied my handguns. I was handed a 1911. I almost laughed out loud at the "Torchwood" side plate. But I held my laughter in because I knew that guns weren't supposed to be funny, and neither was the job of hunting down aliens and taking their technology to arm the human race against the future.

"What's this?" I'd asked Jack, pointing to the thing attached to the equipment rail.

"GPS." Jack had said bluntly

"What for?" I had raised an eyebrow.

"Seriously? The gun says 'Torchwood' on the side and you want to know why there's GPS on it?"

I had felt my cheeks turn red in embarrassment, of course if the gun has the name of a top secret organization on it, they're going to want the gun back if it's stolen or lost.

"Why doesn't your gun have GPS on it, then?" I had asked, challenging him.

"This thing?" he had pulled out his Webley Mk IV, "Firstly, it doesn't have 'Torchwood' set into it, and secondly, it's my gun. This baby doesn't leave my sight." He'd finished with a wide grin of amusement.

The light chink of metal on metal tore me out of my thoughts and back to the present. I looked down at the corpse in front of me. I knew the noise had to have come from here. It was a light clink that wouldn't have traveled to my ears if it hadn't been close.

I ducked my head under the metal tray holding up Jack's body looking for something that may have come loose. I scanned the floor looking for a loose pin that had fallen.

Nothing.

The only thing that was left was the actual tray Jack was set on. I knew I needed a closer look. I swallowed hard and took a deep breath before pressing my face close to the remains of Jack's head. I let my breath go quicker than I'd wanted to; it all came out in a rush. I furrowed my brow again and narrowed my gaze. It'd been only a handful of hours since I'd last gazed at his skull, but it seemed to be less fragmented every time I looked at it.

I looked just below the major exit wound that had left a gaping hole in Jack's skull. A small piece of metal lay there. Disregarding the promise I'd made myself to not let Jack out of my sight before Ianto returned, I jogged to the autopsy room and pulled a tweezers from the table. I sped back to Jack's body armed. I picked up the little piece of metal with the tweezers and looked closely at it. Its silver color matched the tray Jack was laying on, but not anything else nearby. I'd already investigated the tray and it definitely was not part of the cadaver tray. The image of the gun still sitting on my desk flashed in my mind. The silver colors matched. The silver fragment must be a chunk of the bullet the Varvara had shot at Jack.

Whenever hollow tipped bullets hit bone, they exploded, causing fragments to spatter everywhere. It was very possible that the bullet fragment had fallen out of Jack's brains. I was glad I had gone for the tweezers and not touched the fragment outright. I wanted to run screens on the fragment held between the tweezers in my hand, but I could wait until Ianto came back. I still didn't know why we couln't just put his body away in the vaults. His corpse served as a reminder that I could do without.

I set the fragment down with the tweezers. I engrossed myself in my thoughts. I was trying to put the pieces together. If we'd just placed Jack on the cadaver tray, I would understand a bullet fragment falling out of his skull. He'd been lying there for hours on end. He hadn't been moved. Unless his brain tissue was moving – unlikely – there was no reason this should have fallen out of his brain.

I was reminded of the lecture in one of my classes when we talked about grafts being rejected. I related it to the bullet fragment being rejected by Jack's brain. I almost laughed aloud as to the ludicrously of the idea. Jack was dead. His tissues were dead; they weren't going to do any more rejecting of anything anymore.

So if his tissues didn't push the fragment out, what did?

Ianto took the perfect opportunity to return from whatever errand he had left to do. He had a fresh hot mug of coffee in one hand. The aroma reached me just before Ianto did.

"I suppose you'll want your lookout post back." I attempted to make a joke. Ok, so maybe it was a lame joke, Ianto didn't even smile. I stood up and gestured that the seat was all his, "I found this," I said, picking up the fragment with the tweezers and holding it up for him to see, "I'm going to run some tests and see if it is a fragment from the bullet and not some random piece of metal falling out of his head."

It seemed Ianto did a double take, "Fell out of his head?" he raised an eyebrow, "What do you mean it fell?"

"I was just sitting here and I heard its impact on the tray thingy Jack's laying on. It must have fallen out; I certainly wouldn't go digging for fragments." I said.

Ianto's brows knitted together, I could tell he was trying to put the pieces together. I began to get a feeling he knew more than I did, but he wasn't disclosing any information, and I didn't know what he knew that I could ask a question to. I blamed it on my overtaxed brain.

I shrugged and turned, taking the tweezers and the fragment back to my desk.

I ran my screen test and the metal that had fallen out of Jack's brain wasn't man made. I compared the results with a spare bullet from the BUCIO gun's magazine cartridge. The results clearly stated that the fragment from Jack's brain was from the Varvara.

But again, how did it get rejected from his brain to begin with?