Chapter two

A huge thank you to my reviewers TheWeddingFairy, darkdranzer, Raising cain, the darkness revealed, doctor-who-fangirl, Dowisetrepla, L.A.H.H, , cjh4ever, Lilith Skywalker and WickedWitchoftheSE. I never expected that this would go down so well!

Did I mention character-bashing at the start? If I didn't I meant to.

Jack was surprised how early his team turned up the following morning. Owen was certainly in a good hour before his normal time and the look on his face quite clearly said he was planning something. Tosh, however, seemed far more preoccupied with whatever new computer programme it was that she was currently working with. Ianto looked like… well, he looked just like Ianto normally did, but that was what Jack had expected. He was suddenly very glad that he hadn't put coffee, or coffee mugs, on the list of objects. Not that he'd told the team that. He'd let them work it out for themselves.

He grinned quietly to himself from the balcony as he watched Gwen enter and head straight for her desk. The way she glanced around to check where the others were told him that she had remembered what was happening today, but that only made the game more fun. He decided to leave her to stew for a bit and went down to greet them all.

Ianto was already handing out the first coffee batch of the morning as Jack appeared.

"Morning sir. Yours is on the desk in your office."

Jack went and collected it then watched in amusement as Ianto tried to give the rest of the team their drinks.

"On the table." Gwen snapped as Ianto held out a cup for her to take.

"God, you're tetchy this morning!" Owen commented from where he was leaning against the wall.

Ianto rolled his eyes as he approached Tosh, still typing away and staring at her screen with fixed concentration. She started a little as Ianto said her name and looked up from her work. "Oh, thank you Ianto." she smiled as she sipped from the steaming mug. Then she frowned slightly. "What are you all staring at?"

"Well." said Jack carefully. "Let's just say that if that was Ianto's 'kill' then you've just won a world record for shortest game duration."

"It wasn't." Ianto added hurriedly, seeing Tosh's blush.

"Well, at least I know coffee's safe." Tosh replied brightly.

"Only at your work station." Owen pointed out.

"It's better than nothing."

Jack suddenly remembered something he'd forgotten to mention earlier. "When you do kill someone, or are killed, make sure you don't tell anyone else."

"Why?" asked Gwen, looking confused.

"Because then they'll know who's out of the game and who they don't have to watch out for any longer."

"Which would obviously make it far less fun." said Owen, grinning.

Jack glanced at him. "You're enjoying this far too much, you know that?"

"You don't seem to be coping too badly yourself." Ianto remarked.

Jack grinned too.

Gwen was furiously searching the Hub database for any information on her mystery object. Nothing came up. She swore under her breath, willing to bet that Jack had removed the records just to be annoying. And she couldn't ask Ianto, she just couldn't. There was no way he wouldn't see through her asking about the object….

She looked up from her musings to see Jack standing over her.

"Busy?" he asked.

She shrugged. "Not really."

"Then will you write up a report on this for me? It fell through the Rift last night."

Gwen glanced at the book he was holding out to her. "'Pride and Prejudice'?"

"Yeah, 35th century edition from what I can tell." He looked at her raised eyebrows. "It's not dangerous."

Gwen was still eyeing the book he was holding. "Did you seriously think I'd fall for that Jack?"

Jack laughed. "Just testing!"

She smiled back. "Did I score well?"

"Better than Tosh."

Jack frowned to himself as he sat down in his office. That really hadn't gone as well as he'd hoped. Now he'd have to approach the others in the same way to try and convince her that it wasn't her he was out to get. And there was no way she'd be touching anything book-shaped for a while. He drummed his fingers on the desk, considering ways of disguising it. Maybe Gwen was going to be a bit more tricky than he thought.

Meanwhile, Owen was busy making a thorough search of all the kitchen cupboards in which Ianto could possibly hide his stash of biscuits. He'd been through most of the lower cupboards already but he hadn't found so much as a crumb. This wasn't the first time he'd searched for the biscuit supplies either, and he'd never had any luck in the past. Ianto must hide them somewhere really bizarre... He stepped back and tried to think like the secretive Welshman.

He'd just finished extracting the biscuit tin from the remains of the coffee machine packaging when Ianto entered behind him.

"Any reason you would be rooting around behind the coffee machine…?"

"If there was a reason, I wouldn't tell you. What's that you're holding?" Owen had just noticed the notebook Ianto was clutching in his hands, and was remembering all the vague references that had been made to his keeping a diary.

"Oh, it's nothing you'll find important…" Ianto broke off as the notebook was snatched from his fingers. "Owen," he announced calmly. "You're dead."

Owen was flicking through the pages. "Sorry teaboy? I wasn't really listening just then."

"I said 'you're dead'." Ianto watched with pleasure as Owen froze halfway through perusing his notebook.

"What do you mean?" Owen asked suspiciously, scanning the Welshman's face and glancing back down at the notebook in his hands.

Ianto sighed melodramatically. "I mean, Dr Harper, that it seems odd for a dead person to be quite so interested in the kitchen accounts."

Owen slammed the book down in front of the grinning Ianto and stormed out of the room. He hated the Welshman and his stupid jokes.

Five minutes later and Owen was taking out his anger on the autopsy room computer system. Or at least, he was about to when he reconsidered and decided that smashing the screen or cutting the wires was probably going a bit too far and was also so obvious that Tosh would definitely see through it. So he opted for switching some of the wires around instead. He wasn't entirely certain what most of them did so he just waited until the screen started to flicker violently, hoping fervently that he hadn't unintentionally managed to trash the system totally.

"Err, Tosh?"

"Yes Owen?"

"I've got a problem with the computer."

Owen heard Tosh sigh and then the sound of her footsteps crossing the Hub. "What happened?" she asked in a resigned voice.

"Well, I was just sort of, you know, trying to rejig the settings a bit." Owen replied, glancing at the tangle of wires in front of him. "Only it seems I moved some of the wrong wires. Stupid bloody system. Can you sort it?"

Tosh sighed quietly to herself. That was just typical of Owen; making a mess of something and then getting someone else to deal with it. But even as she thought it her mind was turning instinctively to calculating what Owen had done and what was needed to fix the damage. She crouched down to look at the back of the computer, reaching for her glasses as she did so. Owen reached for the biscuit packet concealed in his pocket, smiling as he watched her become more and more absorbed in her task.

"It looks like you've swopped the moniter cable with one of the external feeds, but some of the others are in the wrong places too…" She deftly changed some of the wires round and the machine's insistent groaning quietened. "There, that's fixed it. Simple really. Why is there chewing gum in this port?" Tosh's tone had just darkened.

"Er, oh…" Owen had forgotten about that, and right now he did not need a lecture from a pissed-off technician. He decided to play his trump card: "It's just one of those stupid habits I used to have back when…" he tailed off deliberately.

"I'm sorry." Said Tosh in a much softer voice.

"Not your fault." The conversation was going better than Owen had ever hoped. "I don't miss it that much." Liar. "I might still be able to eat it anyway, so long as I don't swallow it. But I definitely can't have these any more." He opened one of the desk drawers and pretended to pull out the pack of biscuits. "I'd forgotten 'til you mentioned it. You want them? I'd share them out but Ianto's probably got his own stock and, well, you're nicer than Gwen anyway."

Tosh beamed shyly, turning her gaze back to the computer screen in embarrassment. "I'll just have one, thanks." she said brightly as she opened the packet.

Partway through crunching her second, unintended, biscuit Tosh turned from prising out the chewing gum to address the smugly grinning Owen. "Why are you looking at me like that? Are they out of date? Oh!"

Owen looked down at her triumphantly. "Toshiko Sato, autopsy bay, chocolate-chip biscuit."

Tosh allowed herself a slight sigh as she placed her pieces of paper in Owen's outstretched hand.

Later on, sat back down at her computer, she considered that it hadn't really been so bad. She was a trifle annoyed with herself that she'd been fooled so easily, but at least she'd got it over with. She was well aware that she wasn't taking the game as seriously as the rest of the team, and on one level she didn't honestly care that she was out of it; it was one less thing to worry about and meant she could get back to the project it had distracted her from. On another level she was secretly quite pleased that it had been Owen who was her killer – although he'd never let her forget it. But he had given her biscuits and said she was nicer than Gwen - admittedly only so he could trick her into falling for his trap, but it had to mean something, didn't it? She rubbed her hands across her eyes and turned back to her computer, which was busy running her latest translation program. Computers made sense.

After a short while, when she'd finished decoding what turned out to be the alien equivalent of a birthday card, she checked the CCTV footage for the autopsy bay. Owen was playing with a scalpel as he stood over their latest arrival, alternatively frowning as though in deep thought and grinning like a child at Christmas.

Tosh smiled and turned back to her work.