Chapter 3: A Change of Image

Bloody Torchwood! Ianto Jones had taken a nap this afternoon and woken up to find that he had been turned into a woman and had his friends pointing guns in his face. As if that wasn't bad enough he couldn't even control this new body of his: After an hour of sitting on a cold autopsy table in nothing but an ill fitting shirt Owen had finally allowed Ianto to get up only to laugh at him when he fell flat on his face. It seemed that whatever had changed him had made him a few inches shorter and hadn't informed his brain, Gwen practically had to carry him up to the boardroom so that she could make notes on the last few days of his life because when he tried to climb the stair on his own he stumbled on every step.

For this reason he was now sat on the floor of the gym in the white scrubs which Owen had found for him, taking a break after the three hours of physio he had just endured under the medic's direction but feeling much better now he had his coordination back. Laying back on the mats he pulled his legs up straight in the air then rolled over his shoulder and into a kneeling position. The things this body could do astounded him, he was incredibly flexible and for the first time since he had dislocated it in the battle at canary wharf he was able to rotate his left shoulder fully without it twinging.

A look of mischief passed over his features and once he had looked around to make sure that Owen had gone into the locker room and was out of earshot he jumped up and stood in the middle of the gymnastic equipment. The question was what to try first? If he was going to be stuck like this until Tosh was able to figure out those little machines and reverse their effects then he should at least figure out what else he was capable of in this form. He decided on the beam, as that was the piece of equipment he was the most familiar with. He took a few minutes to walk along the length of the beam and back, making sure that he wasn't going to lose his balance, then went through the same routine he had done that morning but marvelling at how different it felt. Tosh would probably shout at him for it later but right now he was like a child at Christmas, high on excitement and having too much fun to realise that he could still injure himself.

"Oi, stop showing off and get down before you break your neck" Ianto hadn't heard Owen walk in, he was stood in the doorway, his hair damp from his shower and dressed in a fresh pair of jeans and a t shirt. Ianto pulled a face but jumped down without argument.

Ianto prepared himself for a lecture on gym safety from Owen – honestly, just because the medic had lost his balance on the beam and managed to land right on his...well it hurt. Thankfully as Owen walked towards Ianto with a look that your dad gave you when you were in trouble Tosh's voice came over the comms.

"Guys I need you upstairs please, I think I've got this figured out"

At midnight: an hour after she had called them up to the boardroom, Tosh had finally finished explaining what had caused Ianto's transformation. Ianto paled at her the description of the "nano-bots" as she called them, Tiny machines which had for some reason altered his body, she had located a signal from the blood sample Owen took this afternoon and went from there.

"I'm sorry Ianto, I don't know how to reverse it yet but they're machines so they can be reprogrammed." Ianto looked up at her hopefully and she smiled at his confidence in her.

"For now all I can do is deactivate them, that should stop them from making any more changes until I can reverse their effects."

Around the boardroom table the team looked at each other and shared smiles, their latest crisis was far from over but there was light at the end of the tunnel. Ianto couldn't contain himself and practically threw himself into a hug with Tosh which surprised her a little, the friend who usually towered over her was now only an inch or two taller.

"Can you do it now?"

"What?"

"Deactivate them, I can't sleep if I'm going to wake up different again" Ianto was a little embarrassed by his fear. Could another transformation really be any worse than this?

"One second" Tosh picked up her PDA and tapped at it for a minute. "There, if they receive that signal then they should become dormant."

Ianto grinned at his friend and hugged her again, then yawned "Thanks Tosh" He turned around to face everyone "Thanks all of you, I don't know what I would have done if I'd had to deal with this on my own"

"I am too tired to deal with you if you're going to get sappy Jones" Owen was leaning back in his chair to look at the ceiling "Now I think it might be a good idea to get some kip before the world decides to end or Gwen grows a beard or something."

"Oi" Gwen threw her pen at Owen who ducked under the table just in time.

"Tea boy, you and me are staying here, not that I don't trust Tosh but if something goes wrong with those little robots I want to be close enough to my equipment"

"Fine" Owen had his doctor face on so there was no point in arguing "But if you try to climb into bed with me again I will set Myfanwy on you"

"That was one time, and I was drunk and..."he looked confused "where is there a bed in this place? I was planing on the couch and..." then it clicked "Jack's"

Tosh looked concerned, they didn't mention Jack, Ianto tended to get eerily quiet when they did so it had become an unwritten rule that the team never mentioned their absent leader. "Are you sure? You haven't been in there since..."

"It's fine, I've slept there enough times before"

The team didn't quite believe that Ianto was fine but accepted that they weren't going to win the argument and watched as he made his way through Jack's office and listened as he climbed down the metal ladder to the bedroom below. Owen settled himself on the uncomfortable sofa with some blankets, Gwen went home to Rhys, hoping that he wouldn't get on her case abut being so late. She couldn't deal with an argument tonight. And Tosh couldn't sleep, instead she sat down at her desk and carried on working with the nano bots, trying to figure out how to reprogram something subatomic, something she couldn't even conceive of. Blocking their signals had been one thing but she had a lot of work to do until she could reverse what they had done to Ianto. From the bottom drawer of her desk she pulled out a box of tools she never used unless she absolutely had to, her sonic tools, built in secret from what she could remember of the plans she saw years ago. Nobody honestly thought that they were getting much sleep tonight.

Ianto stood at the base of the ladder for ten minutes before he gathered the courage to move into the room. Though he had spent so much time in here he had never entered this room alone, it seemed so much bigger and colder without Jack. He went over to the bed and smiled at the crumpled sheets; Jack never did make the bed. Exhausted and safe in the knowledge that he would not wake up changed again Ianto lay down on the bed that still smelled of Jack. Nobody had been down here in a month, it was just as Jack left it, Ianto almost felt that at any moment Jack would come walking out of the bathroom with a dirty joke about toothpaste. This was too much, for the first time since Jack had left Ianto Jones wept. The stress of the day added to the feeling of being completely alone had him curled into the covers of Jack's bed holding onto a cold pillow which smelt like him. It was a poor substitute but here in the place where he always felt safe he was able to drift off into a dreamless sleep.

He was woken at 7am by his phone buzzing on the night stand, he didn't recognise the number so ignored it but three minutes later he was woken from the half sleep he had drifted into by a text message telling him that he had a new voice mail. The voice on the other end of the phone snapped Ianto back into full consciousness, made him remember exactly what had happened to him and had him running scared right up the ladder and over to a sleeping Owen on the couch. Ianto poked his colleague in the arm but got no response, Ianto shook his shoulder but he didn't move. Sighing he sat down on Owen's legs and slapped him in the face. Owen was still half asleep but conscious enough to pull a gun from under the blanket and point it at Ianto.

"Hey, I was just waking you up! Don't shoot me!"

Owen groaned then raised a hand to his cheek, lowering the gun "You hit me?"

"You wouldn't wake up"

"It's stupid o'clock in the fucking morning why do I want to be awake?

"I got a phone call"

"and I care because"

"It was from Sven."

The team of Torchwood three sat around the boardroom table. At the head of the table Ianto, who had already heard the message was holding himself, as if his slim female arms were the only thing holding him together. He didn't exactly fill the team with confidence. Next to him was Toshiko, she hadn't slept last night but despite her hard work was no closer to understanding the technology responsible for turning Ianto into a woman. She cradled her third cup of coffee and longed to go downstairs and change into a fresh pair of clothes. Owen was fidgeting in his chair, he hadn't slept very well on the forty year old couch in the common area and now had a kink in his back that he was trying to work out. Gwen was as usual the last one to arrive, but nobody dared question her tardiness as it looked like she had been crying. Ianto hoped that he hadn't caused an argument between her and Rhys by making her late home again.

"Right" Gwen took up her position as leader, standing behind Ianto's chair

Ianto It's me, You didn't go home last night and I just want to make sure you're okay. The change can be a bit of a shock for humans. I know you're probably scared but that's why I need to see you. You don't need to be afraid. You don't need to worry about anything any more, I'm going to look after you. I love you. See you soon.

"end of messages"

The team was stunned, Gwen put her hand on Ianto's shoulder and he covered it with his own, needing something to feel safe.

"That was..." Owen found his voice

"Creepy"

Ianto scowled up at Gwen, the look didn't suit his new delicate face. "It's not you he's stalking, it's not you he says he's in love with. I think this goes way beyond creepy" Gwen looked down at her colleague apologetically, she hadn't thought of how Ianto must feel, being targeted by someone: stalked and altered. There was nothing she could say to make him feel better so she decided to let her actions do the talking.

"Right, whoever this Sven bastard is I want him found. Tosh we have his phone number I want you to get to work on tracing it, once you've got a location you take Owen and bring the bugger in."Ianto looked up at Gwen with a frail smile, she had really come into her own as the team's leader: she was the most emotional member of the team but when the need arose she just switched it off. Torchwood didn't need it's heart today, it needed a leader. Gwen coordinated the team, keeping Ianto busy with a pile of paperwork she accidentally dropped over the railings as she made her way along the metal walkway connecting the boardroom to the stairs. Ianto spent an hour picking up, drying out and sorting paperwork while Tosh and Owen went to to pick up Sven and Gwen spoke to them over the comms, swearing a lot like she always seemed to do when she was in charge

Tosh had very little information to work with, according to her facial recognition program and a photo from ClubX's CCTV camera there was no such man in existence, which was ridiculous, she had images from every social networking site, passport agency, driving licence and arrest. Sven was a technological ghost, according to the computer he didn't exist. Other than his obsession with Ianto they knew nothing about him so once she had a trace on his location they would be going in blind. Tosh didn't like that, those were the times when people got shot, and without Jack and his hundred years experience with shooting things it happened more and more often. Still when her PDA beeped, displaying the location of the phone Sven had called from she pushed away her fear and picked up a gun at the weapons locker and shouted to Owen who met her at the Cog door. They were bringing Ianto's stalker in no matter what, nobody got away with messing with one of their own.

The man Tosh and Ianto brought back was unlike anybody they had brought in before: usually humans gazed about the HUB at the strange equipment found there and at Myfanwy if she was flying around the HUB and aliens fought them, struggling at their handcuffs as they knew Torchwood's reputation as the captors and murderers of anything alien. Sven didn't do either, they had found him sat on a park bench waiting for Ianto to call him. He had fought them at first, demanding to know where Ianto was and punching Owen in the face as the medic tried to put on the handcuffs. If it wasn't so important that they get him to cooperate for Ianto's sake then Tosh would have gladly shot him, as it was all they could do was bundle him into the back of the SUV and keep him quiet by telling him that if he cooperates that he'll get to see Ianto. There was no way they were letting Sven anywhere near their friend but it seemed to calm their prisoner down.

Ianto wasn't aware that Tosh and Owen had found Sven until they were five minutes away from the HUB. He didn't want Sven to see him so he let Gwen know that he'd be in the tourist office, Tosh and Owen would be bringing Sven in through the lower levels from the garage so he was safe in the office for now. Behind his familiar desk he breathed a sigh of relief, then just a sigh as he took in the mess. Owen was never working up here again. The place was a tip, there were leaflets out of their piles, crisp packets behind the counter and pornographic blu-tack statues on top of the computer monitor. He had just got the office clean when a customer walked in, Ianto's eyes widened with shock when he saw his sister in the doorway.

"You alright love, you look like you've seen a ghost" Rhiannon had never seen the pale woman who looked like she had stepped off the set of Grey's Anatomy with that hair and the white scrubs before, she was surprised that her brother hadn't mentioned her though, the boy had to be crazy to be single with this woman in the office everyday – even if her fashion sense was a little eccentric.

"I...erm" Ianto didn't know what to do. What if Rhiannon recognised him? It wasn't likely but he could really do without this extra stress today.

"Is Ianto in, I went by his house but he wasn't in so I thought I'd check here."

"He's ...away" Rhiannon looked surprised, they had been a lot closer lately and she was sure that he'd tell her before he disappeared off again "He was needed in London for a few days, had to leave last night, he shouldn't be more than a few days"

"Oh, well if you hear from him then you get him to call me okay" She smiled and turned to leave, alone in the office again Ianto slumped into his chair and let out a breath he didn't know that he was holding. His calm lasted about thirty seconds before the false wall slid back and Gwen strode out of the secret corridor.

"Was that your sister?" Ianto nodded mutely "We need you downstairs, he says he won't talk to anyone but you"

"I" Ianto didn't particularly want to face the man who had violated and changed him but he also knew that as brilliant as Tosh was she didn't understand the technology needed to change him back. If he was ever going to get back to normal then he needed Sven's help.

They made their way back though the HUB to the interrogation room which hadn't been used since Suzie came back to life, Ianto walked reluctantly down the metal staircase while his team watched from the observation platform hidden by mirrored glass. Sven sat handcuffed to the table and the team watched as Ianto took a seat opposite him, they didn't say anything but after a minute of silence Ianto jumped up shouting "Stop it"

"Ianto?" Gwen's voice came over the comms

Ianto waved his hand to signal that he was fine and turned back to Sven. "I've agreed to talk to you but stay out of my head. Minds are supposed to be private and I don't want you digging around in there"

"But your mind is why I chose you. I watched this city but couldn't find a single person that interested me until I felt your pain. It sang to me of your loss, the man who came and went from life as we enter and exit a room, he left so many times but you felt it every time. I didn't understand it but I needed to find you. It couldn't be anyone else"

Behind the glass screen Tosh covered her mouth in shock, had Sven really been watching Ianto for months? Ianto was facing away from her but she could see from the set of his shoulders that he was barely controlling the anger that hid under his stoic exterior. As Sven continued, answering the Welshman's questions about why he had to change him into a woman Owen started to mirror Ianto's behaviour. Sven had come to this world to look for a bride but had instead fallen in love with Ianto, or at least he thought he was in love with the first mind he had sensed after his ship crash landed in the bay nine weeks ago. When he realised that the bride he had chosen was a male he had to adapt his peoples technology so that he and Ianto would be able to return to his planet and produce the heirs his culture required of him.

"And what if I don't want to be your space concubine?"

Sven frowned, he hadn't expected that "You...But...the change, you haven't completed the change." Sven actually looked afraid now, far from the compliant bride he had wanted he now had an angry Welshman who felt violated by his technology on his hands.

"Really because look at me" Ianto indicated the soft curves of his altered body "I'd say that was complete wouldn't you"

"The change isn't just physical. With off world brides it is necessary to make some alterations to their minds also, they forget their own planet's customs and absorb mine. It makes integration into our society easier and means that the children won't be contaminated with human ideals"

Ianto turned to face the window and Tosh smiled, in halting the nano-bots progress she had saved Ianto's mind from being altered, and by the sound of it had spared him from becoming a mother against his will as well. Even if she had failed in changing him back, she had spared him that.

Sven hadn't been much more help after that. He refused to help them to restore Ianto to his proper appearance and wouldn't speak to Tosh about the technology because she had halted the change. Sven was moved down to the cells. From a piece of tech Tosh had found in Sven's jacket pocket when she searched him she ran a scan for nearby ships and located Sven's in Splott. It seemed that he has transported it there from the bay and made his repairs, they moved it to the garage before UNIT could pick it up and claim it as their own. By 2100 Tosh had a good idea of how the ship worked but still didn't know how to reprogram the nanobots, they seemed to be totally unrelated technologies and she was still no closer to understanding them. At 11pm she gave up and drove home, for once in her life feeling totally defeated by a piece of technology, Ianto had thanked her for her hard work but as she fell into a restless sleep at home she dreamed of what would happen to Ianto if she couldn't figure out how to change him back.

Of all the dangerous situations Ianto Jones had found himself in since joining Torchwood none of them had scared him as much as what he was currently facing. Stood in the entrance of the Cardiff branch of Next he found himself taking an involuntary step back to get a away from the hundreds of bargain crazed women pushing and shoving each other trying to get the best of the sale items. Holding his hand and pulling him deeper into the riot of customers was Gwen cooper, she was on a mission to get him some clothes that fit, being sick of seeing him in the white scrubs he borrowed from the HUB every time he needed a new outfit.

"What about this one" She held up a red sun dress only to have it met by a glare. Pouting she put the dress back on the rack and started looking at the next rail. Ianto was even less fun to shop with than Rhys, and so far all he had in his basket was four pairs of smart black trousers for work and a dozen fitted shirts in various different colours. She had almost asked why he needed so many shirts until she remembered that it was Ianto who took responsibility for clean-up of alien goop and she had seen too many of his suits fall victim to the slime.

"Okay, so you still need pyjamas and clothes for home"

Ianto groaned but dutifully followed her up the escalator to the next floor which according to the map on the wall offered pyjamas and shoes.

"There's one thing I've never understood, why is there an entire floor devoted to women's shoes when the men's clothes get crammed into the basement?" Ianto was stood on the step above her with the basket resting on the escalator at his feet.

"Would you walk around three floors of clothes to find what you want? If you're anything like Rhys then you go into a shop already knowing what you want"

"exactly"

"Right, well for most women that's not how we shop, you walk around the shop until you see something that you like, you can even find things that you didn't know you needed"

Ianto stepped off the escalator ahead of her and paled at the endless rails of pyjama choices he was faced with. Gwen Just laughed and pulled him over to the first block

"You sound like Jack, I sent him out for milk once and he came back with a puppy"

"He didn't!"

Ianto laughed along with Gwen as he explained, he had sent Jack out for a pint of milk because the man had drunk all the milk in the fridge then put an empty carton back in the door, Ianto had sent him out to buy more and an hour later he had come back with a westie puppy and no milk. There was apparently a pet shop Ianto had never seen a few streets away and Jack decided that Ianto needed a dog. He had tried to convince Ianto to keep the creature, probably traumatising the poor dog in the process with his methods but Ianto had not given in and puppy the puppy now lived at his sister's house.

"He called it puppy?"

"No he called him petunia , Mica calls him puppy"

"Him?"

"Yep, male dog, I almost went to check if Janet was a boy too"

Gwen laughed so hard that she knocked half a dozen pairs of red pyjama shorts with "Baywatch" on the back off the shelf. Ianto picked up a pair and put them into his basket along with the matching T-shirt. Gwen raised her eyebrows at his choice but was just happy he had chosen something less boring than the rest of the clothes. He seemed to relax after that, even if the smiles he gave her didn't quite reach his sad blue eyes. By the time they reached the tills Ianto's basket was full; he had enough work clothes to last him a month if there weren't too many exploding goop aliens, three pairs of jeans, a loose fitting boyfriend cut pair that Ianto had chosen, a pair of dark boot-cut jeans that would go well with one of the tops she had put in the basket earlier and a pair of black skinny jeans that Gwen had insisted on even though Ianto was sure that he'd never wear them. On top of that he had four pairs of short pyjamas and one pair of long pyjama bottoms, a few T-shirts to wear with his jeans, some trainers, flat pumps and a pair of boots with a heel that Ianto felt certain he'd never be able to walk in. The cashier was only too happy to help the customers spending over £600 at her till and dutifully left out a pair of jeans, a shirt and trainers for the strange woman in white scrubs to change into.

Half an hour later and completely exhausted Ianto sat in a booth at the back of Costa coffee surrounded by shopping bags as Gwen went to buy their lunch. He hadn't liked Gwen at first, she had arrived too soon after Suzie's death for him not to resent her a little for replacing his friend, and later her constant flirtations with Jack had annoyed him but Gwen had been good to him. After Jack had left Ianto had been running himself ragged trying to get a distraction from the pain he was feeling and Gwen had looked after him, she had made sure that he ate with the rest of the team so she knew that he'd taken a break then had driven him the half mile home at night so she was certain that even if he didn't sleep he at least left the HUB. Then she had encouraged his project of creating the gym but had still kept an eye on him and after he had been turned into a woman and she found him still working in the archives at six in the morning she had taken him home for dinner that night. Her reports of Rhys' lasagne making skills had not been exaggerated and The Welshman was only to happy to welcome a beautiful woman who ate more than he did and was happy to talk about Rugby League with him into his home. At Rhys' insistence Ianto had become a regular fixture at their kitchen table, though while he was in Gwen's flat he was known as Yan, Rhys never asked him what his full name was so he never had to come up with a lie for the Welshman's benefit.

They finished lunch and while Ianto had no idea what else he could possibly need he found himself being led along the high-street, thankfully not weighed down by the shopping from Next as they had dumped it in Gwen's car for now. He was dragged through shops he had never even noticed before and after an hour of buying things he didn't think he'd ever want or need he'd gone into a hair salon against Gwen's protests. She may like his hair as it was, tumbling down his back in dark waves but to Ianto it was a nuisance, as soon as the wind picked up it was in his face and he spent forty minutes stood in front of the mirror with a hair-dryer each morning because it was so thick. The stylist was reluctant to follow the young woman's order to chop it all off, customers looking for such a drastic change were usually in the middle of a messy breakup but this one just seemed to be sick of her hair. Gwen watched with wide eyes as over a foot of hair was chopped off and the remaining locks were styled and trimmed to perfection. When Ianto finally turned around to show her the end result she was surprised to find that she liked it. Maybe it was the nano bots and their skill at genetic manipulation but with Ianto's bone structure he could pull off the short spiky style where most women could not. Satisfied with his new look Ianto had looked at the amount of hair left on the floor and smiled, the salon was expensive but he had still left the stylist a generous tip and she went for a hard earned break smiling.

Gwen had informed him that they had one more stop to make and they made their way off the high street and into a shopping centre. They were half way up the escalator when he spotted his sister, nephew and niece coming towards them on an escalator going down, Ianto tensed and span around so fast that he almost fell.

"What the hell are you doing?"

"My sister is right there" He knew there was no way that she would recognise him but being that close to his family and not being able to talk to them was fairly unsettling. As he got off the escalator and followed Gwen towards the shops on this floor he saw David staring at him from the bottom of the escalator, Ianto tried to shake of the feeling that David had recognised him and followed Gwen who had just gone inside the first shop on this side of the building.

"No!" Gwen listened to Ianto complain from inside the dressing room "I am not wearing this it's completely ridiculous. She had saved this shop for last because she had known that it would be the one to try Ianto's patience. As far as she could gather for as long as Ianto had been living as a woman he had been wearing nothing underneath the scrubs he had lived in. Now that he had everything else he needed a trip to La Senza was most definitely required. He had been measured and informed of his size and was now blushing like crazy and refusing to pick anything. The mannequins scattered around the shop wore brightly coloured underwear but after Ianto had refused to try on anything she showed him Gwen had asked the shop girl to point out something little simpler. In the end Ianto ended up with eight sets of "boy pants" type bottoms and coordinating bras along with another set of pyjamas. Gwen had been the one carrying the basket in this shop and without Ianto's knowledge had snuck in some more adventurous sets in red, cream and black lace.

Gwen had dropped Ianto off at his flat with an evil grin on her face, she had been picking up extra items all day which she knew would get a reaction out of Ianto so as she drove home she waited for the text message promising decaf and pain. Ianto may say that he didn't want dresses...or lace underwear...or heels but she was happy to wait and see how long it took before they made an appearance in his everyday clothing. She had just unlocked the door of her flat when her phone buzzed and a message lit up her screen

You are evil Gwen Cooper! Not only are you on decaf but Janet is getting all of your favourite biscuits tomorrow!