Chapter 4: Revelations

Ianto didn't know what he was doing. Stood in the locker room dressed in the black skinny jeans he had sworn he'd never wear, the black leather boots with a heel and a pointed toe and the red fitted shirt he had worn to work he was beginning to wish that he hadn't agreed to go out with Tosh tonight. He hadn't been happy with how he looked for weeks and while he was more comfortable at work now he had his professional clothing to hide behind at home he still stuck to the loose fitting jeans and t-shirts he had picked out himself, ignoring Gwen's more adventurous clothing selections. He had tried them on but they didn't look right, nothing looked right on him any more which the smashed mirror in his bathroom was a testament to. He'd woken up a week ago and had half forgotten that he wasn't himself only to be faced with an image of a stranger in tiny red shorts and a vest top in the mirror as he entered the bathroom. Smashing the glass didn't get rid of the feeling that he wasn't right but it let him forget for a minute, he hadn't gone to work that day. He'd called in sick and gone back to bed hoping that if he hid under the covers for long enough then the world would right itself and the last eight weeks will have all been a bad dream.

"Ianto?" Tosh had finished changing into the clothes she wanted to go out in. She dabbed a little colour onto her lips, fluffed her hair and was ready to go. As always Ianto refused her offer to lend him some cosmetics, he'd deal with the shoes and the clothes but no matter how unhappy he was with how he looked he wasn't going to use make up, Owen would have a field day. They headed out and started going from bar to bar, Studiously avoiding Charles street and Ianto's bad memories of the club there, even with Sven locked up under the HUB he wasn't ready to go back there yet. All of the problems he had been faced with in the last three weeks hardly seemed worth the cheap one night stand he had gone searching for that night.

In an overpriced bar on the bay a group of businessmen in suits looking suave sent some drinks to the pair of women sat at the bar. Tosh accepted them with a wave and they went to sit with the group for a while. The drink took the edge off Ianto's nerves but when one of the men leaned in to say something into Ianto's ear he found himself nursing what felt like a broken arm and looking at the deceptively strong woman with his vision unfocussed by pain and alcohol. Tosh led Ianto out of the club before security asked them to leave and they walked the half mile back to Ianto's flat. They were inside and in their pyjamas before either of them spoke.

"So what are we watching?" Ianto had just come out of the bathroom where he was brushing his teeth to find Tosh in bed setting up the DVD player , she held up the case for legally blonde and patted the space next to her. They settled into the warm bed, honestly having a better time here than they had been having in town. Ianto looked down at his pyjama clad body and sat cross legged on the bed with his knees covered with the duvet, mirroring Tosh's position next to him. They passed the next few hours watching the film and around 0100 Tosh noticed that her friend had fallen asleep next to her. She turned off the TV and put the DVD back in it's case then sat back down on the bed and looked at Ianto's sleeping form, when it was obvious that he wasn't waking up any time soon she made her way silently out of the room.

Ianto had been insistent that they slept in the spare room tonight even though every time she had stayed before they had slept in Ianto's bed, it was bigger and the en suite bathroom had a double sink so they didn't bother each other while brushing their teeth in the morning. At first glance there was nothing wrong with Ianto's bedroom and she was no closer to understanding why he didn't want to stay there but then she saw the hundreds of photographs scattered across the bed, they were of Ianto with countless different people spanning his entire life, from pictures of him and his sister at Christmas when they were children to photos of him at university and pictures of him and Lisa from then they were together. She had no idea why Ianto suddenly felt the need to look through photographs, he hated looking through them usually, they were reminders of the people he had lost and left behind because of work and he refused to keep photo albums. Tosh took a step backwards in the dark bedroom and winced as she stood on something sharp, groping for the light pull she made her way into the bathroom and hopped over to sit on the edge of the bath and pull whatever it was out of her foot. She pulled out the shard of glass and was confused as to why it was on Ianto's bathroom floor until she looked up and saw the shattered mirror above the sink. The damage seemed to be focussed around two points and there was blood on the glass in these places. Then it made sense, when Ianto had pulled Owen aside on Monday and the men had disappeared down to the med bay for a few minutes she had been confused to see and Ianto come back upstairs with a dressing across his knuckles. Now Tosh knew that he had injured himself by punching his mirror but she had no idea why he would do something like that. Knowing that she wouldn't get any answers till Ianto woke up in the morning Tosh walked carefully across the bathroom floor to avoid standing on any more glass and went back to bed.

When he woke up on Saturday morning Ianto found a concerned looking Toshiko holding his hand and looking at his knuckles, he realised that she must have been in the other bathroom and tried to think of a reason he could give her for why he did it. It wasn't like he could tell her that he hated this body so much that the pain he felt breaking the mirror was worth it to destroy image of the person he saw there. But Tosh wasn't the kind of person to confront him and demand an explanation, she just helped him to clean up the glass he'd been putting off picking up for days and while he made breakfast she had put the photographs which were scattered around his bedroom back into the large cardboard box they lived in. he had got the photos out days ago but had been unable to pack them back up again, seeing a thousand images of himself looking like he should and having the time of his life just reminded him of the situation he was in and sacrificing an entire room of his flat had been easier than going through that twice in a week.

Ianto made scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast and they ate at the table in their pyjamas. Tosh finished first and sat back in her chair with one knee up against her chest as she studied her best friend. Ianto seemed to pick at his food more than eat it lately and this morning he had eaten even less than usual.

"Everything okay?" He looked a bit pale and didn't look very comfortable. He hadn't respond to her question and had a hand on his stomach

"Ianto?" she walked around the table and put a hand on his forehead, he didn't have a temperature and as soon as she made contact with his skin his head snapped up.

"Sorry Tosh, Spaced out for a minute there"

"Are you okay?"

"It's nothing, just a bit of a stomach ache"

"Hmm"

Ianto hated it when Toshiko hmm'd it usually meant that she wasn't going to let something go and he was right, within five minutes of Owen arriving at the HUB Ianto was dragged down to the med bay and had just been ordered to get his kit off despite the fact that he told them he was fine. Still, being a doctor and a nosy git Owen wanted to see what the problem was. When the rift alarm went off Ianto thought that he'd never been so happy to hear about a potential alien threat in his life.

"Hey, saved by the bell" Ianto jumped down from the autopsy table and took the stairs back to the main level of the HUB two at a time, glad that he hadn't given in and got undressed when Owen ordered him to because it would have only slowed him down.

"This isn't over Jones, as soon as we get back I want you back down there so I can see what's up. Honestly if you're going to bitch why bother coming to me in the first place"

"When did I come to you? You fucking dragged me down there because you're a perv and a..."

"Guys!" Gwen interrupted the men before they could get into a serious argument and the team armed themselves and set off in the SUV to the coordinates of the rift spike.

Owen screeched the SUV to a halt outside a warehouse on the docks, the medic was constantly making handbrake turns and wearing down the brake pads to make a more dramatic entrance. Ianto and Tosh covered the back of the warehouse while Owen and Gwen took the front. There had been small rift spikes in this area for about a week culminating in the large spike which had brought them here today but other than the fact that something came through they were going in blind, they could be facing anything from a dangerous group of aliens to an extra terrestrial toaster.

Ianto's first impression of the inside of the warehouse was that it looked like any other squat. There were burned out fires and lawn furniture scattered about but there were some atypical items as well, Tosh stooped to examine what looked like an alien computer and a large pile of technology when they were fired upon by some kind of energy weapon. Staying down so that they had cover behind the machinery they listened as a minute later they heard six shots ring out before Owen yelled to them from his position about 100m away. He and Gwen had shot the aliens who by the looks of it had been holding a number of teenagers here. Tosh scanned them then nodded to Owen who, satisfied that the kids were human started bagging the alien corpses to transport them back to the HUB.

"Right" Gwen was coordinating the team as usual "Owen you get those back to the HUB, Tosh I need you to pack up the tech you found over there and me and Ianto are going to interview this lot and retcon them okay?" a chorus of "Okay"came from the rest of the team and they split up to go about their assigned tasks.

Gwen stood in front of the group of teenagers huddled on the warehouse floor and sighed. Usually in a situation like this the aliens had either killed their captives before Torchwood arrived or attempted to use them as hostages or shields once the shooting started. So most of the time Torchwood Three's involvement with human captives of hostile aliens was packing them into body bags, she was happy that this wasn't the case today due to the age of the children in front of her. but it did make the job more difficult, they now had a few hours of interviewing and retconning these witnesses before they could return them to their parents. She decided to talk to the girls while Ianto dealt with the boys and within two hours, they had taken statements from most of the kids, had fed them juice laced with Retcon and sent them home on buses of trains where they would arrive thinking that they'd had a day out in town and nothing more. The last of the girls came to sit next to Gwen, having seen the last girl leave and guessing that it was her turn.

"Hi I'm Gwen What's your name?" Gwen found herself falling back on her police training and wondered how Ianto was doing, he still had four boys to interview so she would go and help him once this girl's report had been logged.

"Jones, Anwen Jones" Her accent was softer than those of the other kids Gwen had spoken to and she sounded like she must have lived in north Wales originally. She seemed nervous and as she sat opposite Gwen she was scratching the back of her hand absently.

"Okay Anwen and what can you tell me about what's been happening here" The girl looked reluctant to tell her and a little scared "You can tell me love. I work with this kind of thing all the time and all I want to do is help you."

The girl explained how she had met a group of people in town after school this week, they seemed cool and one of them was really nice to her. When they brought her back here their faces changed and she got scared but she couldn't get away, in the next two days they brought eleven more teenagers to the warehouse.

"Wait, there were twelve of you?"

"Yes" Anwen didn't know why that was important "four girls and eight boys"

"I've only counted eleven, is there any way that one could have got away" Gwen was now facing the possibility that one of the bodies Owen took back to the HUB could well be a teenage boy.

"No they kept us together in the middle of the room, but there was one boy, they took him away this morning. I don't know where" Anwen didn't know how she could have forgotten about that boy, he was the last to arrive but the person in charge had spent a lot more time with him than with any of the others, She was handed a glass of juice and told to drink it all before she went home. Confused and still slightly stunned Anwen had done as she was told and watched as Gwen made her way around the warehouse with a strange device held out in front of her.

According to her scans there was indeed another person in this warehouse and as far as she could tell it was a human. She made her way around the large building until the beeping on her scanner got faster and faster telling her that she was close. As she got to within ten metres of where the boy was supposed to be she switched the device to silent – as helpful as Tosh's little invention was the beeping got really irritating after a while

"Hello?"

"Help!" the voice came from behind a door, she tried the handle but it was locked

"Stand back" she aimed and fired, the door swung inwards and Gwen was faced with the last teenager she would have expected to get kidnapped by a group of crazy aliens

"No fucking way"

AN/ Ooh! Who could it be...actually I think you're all going to guess it anyway but I loves me a cliffhanger. The next chapter is going to be up on Thursday, and there are a few little shocks instore for Ianto

Thanks to everyone who has read and reviewed, I apologise to anyone I didn't reply to last week but i've been away.