Finally I've caught up with m own life!! Hope the wait was worth it, I hope I'll be quicker next time.

About halfway down the first flight of stairs Ianto finally caught up with Gwen and grabbed her arm,

"What are you doing?" he asked urgently

"Jack said I could question her." She said omitting the rest of the details, actually she was surprised Jack hadn't been in touch already to remind her, driving through the Cardiff traffic must be taking all his concentration. Ianto gave her one of his inscrutable looks and she felt particularly robust in her argument, obviously he felt the same because after a few moments he let go of her arm and she stepped back slightly.

"Do you need a hand?" he asked quietly

"You can give me a hand getting her to the interview room if you have a moment." She said then added quickly "But I think I'll do the questioning alone, woman to woman like."

Ianto nodded and followed quietly behind her, Gwen knew what she was doing and he could learn a lot from her – he had to hand it to Jack even though his recruitment decisions seemed wacky at the time each one of them had brought something to the team.

Just outside the cell area Ianto stopped Gwen again.

"Are you sure this is ok, Jack seemed fairly unhappy this morning."

"We talked it through Ianto, he agreed he was being irrational, well more irrational than normal anyway." She took his arm and stroked it in her motherly way. "Ianto I'll be fine, you can keep in ear shot if you're worried."

She walked past Janet, who eyed her with the normal distain and gave only a small growl, and upto the plastic partition to look in on the woman. She was laid on her back the shelf the blanket slipping to the floor. Gwen took a deep breath and tapped on the plastic with the over happy face she reserved for the days when she had had an argument with Rhys and she thought no one would notice. Jenny woke with a start and in what could only be described as a primal move slipped off the shelf and crouched in a small ball in the corner. Gwen was appalled and ran over to comfort her, Ianto was slightly more weary and checked his pistol was in his waist band but he was relieved to see he didn't need it.

Gwen was doing what Gwen did best, the human and emotional part of the job that the rest of them seemed to have left behind. I mean think about what they had all done in the past year, Suzie had started killing people to test theories, he had hidden a cyber woman and shot Owen who had then shot and killed Jack. There was only Tosh who hadn't actually been overly handy with a gun, but then again she had the empathy of a toaster unless you were a sick hard drive. Gwen was motioning him over with a flick of her arm and he helped her get the woman to her feet and back on the ledge. She was shivering despite the blanket that was now wrapped round her shoulders; they really had to do something about the damp down here.

After helping Gwen get Jenny upto the interview room just off the Hub Ianto had pulled one of the very 21st century fan heaters from the store set it to full heat under the table. All the Gucci bits of kit the rift could throw up and there was nothing so far that could turn a drafty damp underground Victorian bunker into a tropical beach, now that would be useful. Another blanket and a hot chocolate later Jenny was just about able to stop her teeth chattering enough to talk, Gwen had her jotter pad in front of her but she never used it anymore, the whole interview was recorded and transcribed by the mainframe in the time it took to get back to the main floor.

"So where do we start then?" asked Jenny

"I always find the beginning as good a place as any." Said Gwen with what she hoped was an 'I'm on your side' type of grin.

There were a few moments silence while Jenny gathered her thoughts and then she started.

"The first question always used to be what are you and what do you want with earth?" She snorted at the thought, "Very 1960's scifi"

Gwen said nothing, tactic number one if you leave a big enough hole someone will try and fill it. It had taken Jack a while to grasp that fact.

"I just want to live my life, I didn't choose to come here. I come in peace." She made the Vulcan peace sign Gwen looked up and was struck by the pleading in her eyes, she was scared and Gwen didn't know why.

"You said you didn't come through the rift, so where'd you leave your spaceship?" She asked trying to lighten the mood.

"I was brought here by the Doctor, snatched from a planet that disintegrated seconds later when a meteorite the size of an oil tanker smashed into it. We talked about where it would be best for me to go to and he mentioned this lovely little planet called earth, the main species looked the same, said they were nice in a funny sort of way and that I would get on very nicely if he could find the right time and place to set me down. I say talked about, more talked at but that seems to be his way, anyway he decided that the middle of a war zone would explain the fact I had no parents and was a bit quiet so London in the Blitz 1942 was mentioned. Unfortunately, as I found out to my cost, the Doctor has a little problem with transposing numbers and we ended up in 1492, I stepped out to have a look and his little blue box suddenly swished and zap disappeared."

Gwen sat slightly open mouthed as she did a quick calculation on the pad.

"That means you are over 500 years old, I do have a question for you, what moisturiser do you use I need me some of that."

"I know I don't understand it myself, I know I heal very fast and age very slowly though that seems to be speeding up, I think it must be to do with the excess of radiation that you unleashed during the last century."

"So you are another immortal then?" Asked Gwen quietly, putting two and two together with Jacks mood.

"Are you asking if Jack and I are cut from the same cloth, I don't think so, I have some sort of symbiotic realtionship." She said cryptically.

"Now you've lost me"

"My original society was much more advanced than Earth is today, people didn't get sick anymore, but cut off your head and it classes as fairly terminal. It's all down to some symbiotic organisms in the blood stream people lived for what I guess equates to hundreds of years any disease they somehow fight it, injuries get repaired, I grew a finger back in the 18th century, didn't half hurt that though. I don't pretend to understand I wasn't destined for the medical stream at home, which is strange considering that is what I have ended up doing most of my existence. Its been a blessing and a curse but life is here to be lived and until now I have."

Gwen was mesmerised, she wanted to ask so many questions about where she had been and what she done for all those years but she had to try and focus Jenny was getting tired and Gwen decided she could only ask one more question.

"So why did you decide to come to Cardiff today?'

Ianto had stayed in the main Hub watching the video feed and wrestling with what he had decided to do. He waited a few minutes to check that Gwen was really alright, but that was just an excuse because he felt he was about to betray all the trust he had built with Jack in the past year or so. He hoped it would be worth it. He mounted the stairs with a heavy heart but somehow his feet were moving without him towards Jacks office and their final destination behind the desk. He felt in the inside pocket of his inside jacket, the secret place even Jack didn't know about and found the key to his desk that he didn't know he had. Ianto had never used it before, in some ways he was hoping it didn't work, he noticed his own hand shaking as he pushed it in the keyhole. He shut his eyes and took a breath in through his nose as he turned the key, expecting some sort of alarm or knowing Jack a variety of weapon.

There was nothing, the lock clicked and Ianto pulled at the sticky old fashioned drawer to show the old fashioned files Jack had removed from the archive earlier. He griped them with sweaty palms and lifted them reverently out of the drawer and placed them gently on the desk, he looked behind him and after a second pulled the old fashioned office chair towards him. If he was going to commit one Torchwood crime and go through secret files he might as well compound it by sitting in Jacks chair. It felt like he was putting his hand in the cookie jar and grabbing a handful of the chocolate chip delights. He cracked his knuckles and flexed his fingers before wiping his hands on his trousers and gingerly tugged the corner of the top file and started to read.

He read every word of the first five, very boring bog standard annual appraisals starting in 1947 which in itself was a little odd as it would make her in her 80s but Torchwood did odd well. He started skimming the next few pages and in year eight things started to change, there was a job change from a desk based research position, with praise for her shorthand skills, to a roving investigator moving round the world for J Section. As with all Torchwood files of the time they ran round in circles without actually telling you anything, they must have run classes for the Cabinet Office. He was about to flick the file onto the floor when he flicked to the last page, it was red, not the flimsy pink of a carbon copy but red.

The words were angry; Ianto could feel the waves of hate coming from the paper. It was the Torchwood equivalent of an arrest warrant Alien Capture Form 30693, the plan of attack for a known alien, detailing any special powers, known dangers and how they were going to imprison it. Ianto quickly grabbed the other file, he had seen a few of these in the past when the team needed to know about the ins and outs of something that fell through the rift but he hadn't catalogued this file and it wasn't like any of the others. The file was unusually scuffed but followed all the rules of Torchwood interrogation, the first dozen pages were in the strange typed font that predated computer printing. Torchwood had started using alien tech very early and that little beauty was still working down in the interrogation room today, it recorded every thing that was said and turned it into a written account. The pages said very little at first, she told them who she was and answered all the standard questions, the same thing over and over again and none of the answers were particularly out of the ordinary. He flicked through a few more pages and the tone became more sinister, instead of just questioning they had turned to torture. Ianto flicked back to check the dates of each of the reports, the early questioning had taken two weeks, then a few days with nothing then three, no four weeks of some of the worst abuses he had ever heard of.

He wanted to put the file down and wipe it all from his memory but he knew he couldn't he wanted to know why Jack didn't want to read this file. Abruptly the period of torture ended with a highly dispassionate report detailing their findings, which were precisely nothing apart from the fact that what ever they had done was gone the next day. Iantos hands had gone cold he was having trouble turning the page, perhaps it was a sign he shouldn't go on. He cursed himself because he could see what the next page was, the off white of a transfer form, from the old bunkers of Torchwood One, pre Canary Wharf, to the medical laboratories once housed in Torchwood three. He didn't want to keep reading down the page, he rubbed his eyes and looked far into the corner of the room knowing what he was going to see. The humanoid with a name and a life that had served Torchwood so diligently had been turned into an alien artefact transferred for experimentation and Jack had signed the transfer receipt.