"Are you sure this will work?"

"Yes."

"More sure than the last time?"

"Yes. Now…"

"But what about…?"

"For Christ sakes let the woman speak, Ianto."

"Sorry, Tosh, go on."

"It's okay, Ianto. I know you're worried. But I promise you this will be completely fine. The experimental part isn't even the part actually involving Lisa."

The spate of Weevil attacks had finally slowed – although they had still been unable to determine its cause – and in the last few days, Owen and Suzie had been able to spend some time helping Tosh finish a project she had begun work on during her recovery from injury.

Ianto had offered his own assistance in the early stages, and had understood what she was trying to do, but now that it was finished and ready to try out, he was beginning to feel a little uneasy.

"I know that, it's just…"

Jack put a comforting hand on Ianto's forearm. "We know, but it can't hurt to try, can it?"

"But what if it doesn't work?"

"If it doesn't work, we just go back to the tried and tested method they use in hospitals today," Owen replied. "It will take longer, and we'll probably need a lot more samples to work from, but in the grand scheme of things we won't have lost anything."

"Except time." Ianto had been growing increasingly worried about the passing of time as the months went by.

"Except time," Owen had to concede. "But even that is minimal really. We'll know within a day or two if this is going to work, and if it does, we'll save a lot of the time we would have had to wait before we could use this to help her."

"Okay." Ianto closed his eyes briefly. "Okay. So what do we have to do, then?"

Owen shut his folder over. "The main thing is harvesting the samples, which we could probably even do this afternoon, if Lisa is okay with it. We have all the equipment ready for that."

"Will it be painful for her?"

Owen didn't sugar-coat the truth. "Yes, it will. And it will take some time to heal. But all of that is why we want to give Tosh's idea a chance. We'd never be able to culture enough new cells the traditional way without taking quite a lot of samples from her, but if this works we'll only need one or two."

Ianto sighed and nodded. "Let's go see if Lisa's awake."

The procedure took most of the afternoon, and as Owen had warned, even with the heavy-duty painkillers, it wasn't a painless process.

Two small sections where Lisa's bare skin could be seen instead of hard, cold metal were not carefully dressed and bandaged – Owen was crossing his fingers that the resilience she'd shown so far to infection would continue.

The harvest sites were very susceptible, and Owen knew that if even one infection took hold it would seriously damage any hopes they had for her recovery.

None of the rest of them had been allowed to be present during the procedure – they'd pushed their luck quite far enough after the last operation, Owen had told them when Ianto protested.

When he was done, Owen had given her a mild sedative to help her sleep off the worst of the pain.

That had been a couple of hours ago, so Ianto knew she'd probably be on the verge of wakening and didn't want her to be alone.

He was just crossing the Hub towards her room when a dark shape swooped through the air behind him.

"Hey!" he called towards the others as he turned around. "Who let Myf…argh!"