Author's Note: Happy Thursday folks! Hope you're all having lovely weather this week too. (I got sunburnt last Saturday sitting out in the garden! I live in freakin' Manchester! We don't get sun, certainly not in April.) I hope it keeps up. I'm doing a carboot a week on Sunday. The last one was a washout so *fingers crossed* But enough about me. Thank you all for your beautiful comments and for adding me to your alerts. It adds to my sunny week :) Enjoy the next chapter! Kal x

A Chance in a Million

Chapter Six

The days turned into weeks. Torchwood continued to function as best it could and Ianto settled back into his life. He tried not to think about Jack because it only hurt. He took to spending most of the nights in a week in local bars and clubs, soaking up the atmosphere and the company of others. The drink and loud music drowned out his thoughts. He always went with the intention of leaving with someone, a stranger, someone to take away the pain of abandonment. But when a cute young man walked his way and offered to buy him a drink, eyeing up Ianto's ass in his tight jeans, Ianto found he couldn't do it and always shook his head with a sorry smile. That was when he would finish up his drink and leave, stumbling drunkenly home. Until the next time. Maybe one night he would be so far gone he would stop caring.

He visited Rhiannon and the kids occasionally but even those visits were already becoming further and further apart. But he was rescued from having to come up with excuses now. Instead he could out-right lie and tell her that he was busy with Torchwood and Rhi would accept that without question. He knew that she didn't want to know anymore about what Torchwood dealt with than she already did. And it suited him just fine. The truth was that he was given two days off a week to "recover" from his "ordeal." And he spent those two days incredibly hung over, dragging himself out of bed and into a cold shower somewhere in the late afternoon before spending the rest of the day in front of the TV with a take-out. His kitchen hadn't had food in it for weeks. Ianto knew, somewhere deep down, that he was on a self-destructive course and he should seek help, or at the very least make the effort to use his days off doing something other than sleeping off the alcohol from the night before. But it was too easy not to bother, too easy to slide into the bottle and too easy to blame Jack for his predicament.

So he let himself slide, hiding it behind a mask of a well ironed suit and excellent coffee making skills. But inside he was screaming.

* * * * *

The shop in the unit next to Torchwood had closed down and Torchwood had instantly snapped it up, knocking down the wall between the two units and turning the back half of the new one into a sort of autopsy area. Martha Jones from U.N.I.T. had come to help them out with setting it up all and promised to find them a good medic who wouldn't be too awed and scared by the strange world in which Torchwood existed. Gwen trusted her judgment and left Martha to sort them out with someone good.

The sun shone brightly through the frosted glass of the front door to the Torchwood office. It was a Monday; still the most hated day of the week even though she didn't always get a weekend anymore. Gwen yawned as she sipped at the cup of tea on her desk. She craved coffee and silently cursed the child inside her which stopped her from drinking it, and then she apologised to it and stretched, tilting her head to glance at her watch as she did. It was almost eight thirty. She wondered where Ianto was. He was usually in not long after she was. Jamie tended to roll in later in the morning and stayed after Gwen had gone home to rest and assure her husband that she was fine and could handle the job and being pregnant. Andy drifted in and out as he was needed, preferring to hang around the streets in case he was needed in a hurry to check something out. The office was quiet without her co-workers. She shrugged it off and began on the paperwork which seemed to mount up at the start of every week without fail. She was sure it spawned during the night.

Alien paperwork. It could happen.

When the door opened with a soft click Gwen jumped. She caught sight of the clock on her computer screen before her eyes went to the door to see who had entered. Ianto pushed it shut carefully, not letting it make more noise than possible. Gwen frowned. Ianto turned to face into the room and offered her a poor excuse for a smile.

"Gwen," he said by way of a greeting and made his way towards the back where his beloved coffee machine lived.

"Ianto," Gwen stopped him on his way past, "is everything okay?"

"Yes," Ianto avoid her gaze but she could still see the bags under his eyes.

"Then why are you three hours late for work?" she asked bluntly.

"I overslept," he explained as though that answered everything.

"You don't oversleep," Gwen reached out a hand to take a soft grip on his arm when he tried to get past her desk. "Ianto, you look exhausted and if I'm not mistaken, you smell like whiskey." Any other boss would have been furious that one of their employee's showed up at work late and hung-over but Gwen wasn't Ianto's boss. He was her friend. And she was worried.

"Fine," Ianto finally looked at her and she was startled to see anger in his face. "I did oversleep but only because I forgot to set my alarm last night. I forgot because I was too busy trying to drink myself back into a coma. Is that what you want to hear, Gwen?"

Gwen removed her hand in shock at his blunt honesty and whilst she tried to come up with a response, Ianto turned back the way he had come and re-opened the door to the office.

"I'm not working today," he said without looking at her, "I don't feel well." And he left, letting the door close by itself.

"Shit," Gwen breathed sitting back in her chair before reaching for the phone.

* * * * *

Jack lay on his bunk with his hands behind his head. He crossed his legs at the ankles and sighed, tracing patterns on the ceiling with his eyes. For days after the success of dodging the Fryre he had very much been the celebrity of the ship. Everyone seemed to know his name and what he did and he found it hard to escape. Volta had curtly told him that the forced interaction was good for him and left him to handle the attention on his own. He never told her that he found it did help and he felt that she knew anyway and was only grateful she didn't mock him for it.

But the weeks passed and the attention died down as life returned to normal on the ship and Jack hadn't made the effort to keep interacting with his new friends. Volta hadn't so much as tutted at him when he had turned down the latest offer of a drink in the ship's bar. He wondered if she too was giving up on him.

He thought about Ianto.

But his thoughts were rudely interrupted.

"...ack? ...Ja...? Are ..ou... there?"

Jack jumped as a crackly voice suddenly erupted from his vortex manipulator, which was resting on the box-come-bedside-table next to his head. He sat up and reached for it.

"Ja... are...you...th...? Jack...you...ot to come.... ome."

"Gwen?"

"Ja... can you hear m...?"

Jack tapped his vortex manipulator in frustration. "Gwen?!" There was no answer. He tried again, on another channel and waited but there was no more sound from the piece of equipment. He sighed in frustration and collapsed on his back on his bed, holding the vortex manipulator tightly in his hand. Could he return to Earth? They survived fine without him when he'd been busy saving the world from The Master. Surely there was nothing that important that they needed him for. Not that he could have returned right now even if he wanted to. The ship was too far from Earth to try a successful transport. And as much as he was immortal, Jack didn't fancy being deposited in the middle of Earth's atmosphere and feeling his body burn up as he plunged towards the planet. He'd probably revive from the entry just in time to drown in the Pacific.

Jack released his grip on his vortex manipulator but didn't put it back. He let his rest in his half open hand and stroked the screen with his thumb. He thought about what he had left behind, and a small smile touched his lips. He would be lying if he said he didn't miss them.

* * * * *

"There's no answer. I don't even know if it connected properly," Gwen sat back in the computer chair with a groan. She reached her hands round to the base of her back and tried to give herself a massage. The baby bump was giving her spasms.

"Are you okay?" Andy asked, concern in his voice. He had come into the office as soon as he could when Gwen had called him telling him that she needed him to help her contact Jack. That Ianto was in trouble. Martha Jones had left Gwen with some old Torchwood software which had been linked to the U.N.I.T. servers. It was a poor excuse for a backup but it had been better than nothing. Included in that software had been some complicated looking communicative programmes but between the team they had figured out the basics along the way. And those basics were enough to try and link to Jack's vortex manipulator. In theory anyway.

"Fine. The sooner I give birth to this thing, the better," muttered Gwen. "I don't know what else to try. Ianto's running himself into the ground and I'm worried the only thing... the only person who can stop him from destroying himself is Jack. But we can't get hold of him." She left herself rest her head against Andy's stomach as he stood behind her chair and started massaging her shoulders. She thought of Rhys' annoyed reaction if he saw this scene but it felt good and she didn't care.

She needed the comfort her friend offered.