Disclaimer: as usual, not mine. RTD, Happy-rea - thanks for what you do, I love you both.
Tosh studied the screens at her workstation, just as she'd been doing for the past several hours. Her eyes drifted closed and her head dipped for just a second in a micro-nap - then with a jerk she pulled her eyes back to the screen.
Ianto smiled to himself - that was his cue. He headed up towards the coffee station. He doubted the programs that were running actually NEEDED any sort of direct monitoring, but as long as there was the slightest chance, Tosh wasn't going to leave them unattended.
There wasn't anyone else in the Hub who would even notice Tosh's lapse - Lucy had decided this was the perfect opportunity to train Gwen in the fine art of napping during down time, and Owen wasn't going to pass up a chance to slack off. Jack was shut up in his office doing who knows what, leaving Tosh on the computer, and Ianto to continue his unending clean-up duties. And to keep poor Tosh caffeinated while the others took their repose.
The cappuccino machine was kept constantly steamed up, ready for him to extract a fresh shot each time anyone needed a fresh boost of caffeine. He turned the grinder on, disconnected the group-handle, and wiped the basket clean before dosing the handle with enough coffee for a double shot of espresso. Normally Tosh prefered a café latte with a single shot, but since she was the only one not getting any sleep today, a double seemed preferable.
He tamped the grounds down, purged the group head, locked the handle into place, and pulled the lever to begin the extraction. While he counted in his head to the twenty-five seconds needed for the ideal flavor, he glanced back past the water tower to the workstation platform.
Jack stepped out of his office and paced up behind Tosh. He leaned over, muttered something, and Tosh nodded and made some sort of gestures with her hands. Jack nodded and stepped back, but instead of going back to his office he stood at the base of the catwalk stairs and watched the progress. That probably meant that Tosh's programs were almost done compiling the data. Without even consciously noticing, Ianto pushed the handle back up to stop the flow on Tosh's espresso. If it was almost done, he should probably get to work on everyone else's coffee too.
He shrugged, set Tosh's mug aside, and pulled the handle off to dump the used grounds and start the process over again.
He'd pulled everyone's shots and was busy stretching the last of the milk (he could get two mugs worth from each jug of steamed milk - this last jug was for Lucy and Jack) when Tosh announced the results.
"Gas traces confirmed as vorax and ceranium"
She glanced around the others as she spoke. Owen had been leaned back, balanced in his desk chair, so he just had to sit up. Gwen rolled off the couch where she'd been sprawled, almost tripped over the edge of the coffee table as she jumped up to see what was going on.
"Great," Jack commented, walking back to look at the screen over Tosh's shoulder. "My two favorite gases."
Ianto had the mugs loaded on their tray and had started down the catwalk stairs. Lucy, who had been curled up on the floor just inside the upper platform of the autopsy room with her hoodie doubling as a pillow, rolled over, stretched and threw it back over her head as she stepped in as well to see what was going on.
"Can we do a check and find out what we know about them?"
Jack looked pointedly at Owen.
"I'm all over it."
Owen jumped into action as if he HADN'T just been sleeping on the job.
"What's this doing?" Gwen demanded of Tosh, right as Ianto passed behind her workstation.
"I've taken an image of the girl from the CCTV of the club," Tosh explained casually. "This cross-checks her face with the UK population."
As Ianto handed Jack his coffee (his usual blue-striped mug was still sitting on his desk, so instead Ianto had used a cream-colored mug with, of all things, a dragon-fly printed on it), he saw Lucy try unsuccessfully to suppress a yawn.
"And then it's my job to find out more about her." She probably intended just to answer Gwen's question, since it WAS her job to mentor the newbie - but Ianto knew her well enough to hear the grumbling in her tone of voice. He managed to keep the smile from showing too much - he hoped.
"You can't have every face in the UK on there" Gwen protested "That would be against civil liberties, data protection, all that stuff…"
Lucy looked torn between amusement and irritation at Gwen's reaction - but when she saw the mug Ianto held out to her, she had no focus to spare for anything else. She grinned up at him.
"Thanks Yan, you're an angel."
He grinned back.
"No problem."
He glanced up at Jack, who gave a small smirk at their interaction before turning back to Gwen.
"Still doing that 'you' instead of 'we' thing?" he asked, pointedly.
Just then the program finished running through faces, and the final results flashed red across the screen.
"Damn." Tosh blurted as the number came up.
"A hundred and nineteen suspects?" Owen asked, incredulous. "This this is supposed to give us a single clear match."
The coffees all distributed, Ianto stood behind Tosh and Gwen, where he still had a clear view of the screen.
"The CCTV was too low res," Tosh explained - or complained, she was clearly irritated her program couldn't get the results she prided herself on. "I've tried magnifying and augmenting, but it just breaks up, which means the software can't function properly."
"It's narrowed the numbers down." It wasn't her fault, and the program had done the best it could with what it had to work with. There were just some things that AIs weren't as competent at yet. "I could check through the rest."
He glanced around to see them all staring at him - well, all but Lucy, who had her lips pressed together, her chin all wrinkly as if she were trying not to give in to some inappropriate reaction.
He couldn't resist - somehow she knew what he'd thought about saying, and it really wouldn't be fair to disappoint her, would it?
"You know, the old fashioned way?" He caught Lucy's eye with the slightest smirk as he pointed to his own. "With my eyes."
Maybe it was a little unfair, but she WAS stressing, he could tell she wasn't actually enjoying 'babysitting' the newest team member. And it was so much fun watching her try to keep a straight face when he knew she was going to fail.
As it always did, it started with a snort. Then her face broke into a grin - but almost before it was a grin, it was a giggle. One hand held her coffee, the other curled into a fist that she raised to cover her mouth. She was shaking, her shoulders trembling, starting to double over.
By then, there was no stopping, and she knew it. He could see the slight helplessness as she started to double over. She reached out, trying to find a place to set her mug before she could break it, or splash coffee all over herself, the equipment or the rest of the team - but the nearest safe surface was the coffee table, and she was in no position to get her mug there safely and upright. It was time to step in - if only because he knew he'd be the one to clean up any mess she made.
He caught her eye and raised an eyebrow. Of course it wouldn't help her calm down - for some reason he knew that it would almost always get a rise out of her - but as long as she wasn't in danger of making a mess (and he deftly plucked her mug from her hand to make sure she wasn't), he didn't really feel guilty about enjoying the diversion.
"It appears that Lucy has had too much caffeine," Jack commented. He was enjoying this a bit too much too, or he wouldn't have blamed Lucy's lifeblood for her hysterics. Ianto knew the perfect response to that.
"I've always got the decaf, sir."
Lucy's eyes got huge, and the hysterics stopped at once. She stared at Ianto, looking stunned and even betrayed.
"You wouldn't dare!"
He raised a brow again, wordlessly asking "wouldn't I?"
"Give me my coffee!" she pled, reaching for it. He backed away.
"Please, Ianto!" Her eyes drilled into his - as if that would work. He smirked. She should know better, it's not like he ever gave in to puppy-dog eyes.
"What about the fingerprints I took off the alley wall?"
Although that might not have been the point. When Gwen broke in and split his focus for a second, he realized that somehow Lucy was closer and he'd missed exactly how she'd even managed it.
Quickly he tried to tune out the rest of the team - he'd give her back her coffee in time, but it would be a bit embarrassing if she managed to get it back before he was ready.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Tosh look away from her screen at Gwen, and heard Gwen sigh.
"It was a long shot"
This time he caught Lucy's furtive step - he lowered his eyes to her shuffling feet, then back up to her eyes. She huffed out an irritated breath at being caught. He tilted his chin up at her. Reluctantly, she took a step back.
Owen and Gwen were bickering behind him, pointedly ignoring the coffee drama playing out around them. Jack broke in to stop it before it got too heated.
"The CCTV must have picked up her arrival at the club. Tosh, can you reformat the image recognition software to trace her journey backwards via the street camera network?"
And then, while Tosh was responding to Jack, Ianto made the fatal error.
Out of habit, before he even noticed he was doing it, his mind started racing, mentally pulling out the map of the city that he held in his head, imagining each camera and each intersection as he ran through each possible route…
"HA!"
Suddenly, he found his hands empty, and Lucy's triumphant cry rang through the Hub.
"MY COFFEE!"
"Yes, Lucy, it's your coffee." Ianto could almost hear Jack's eye-roll, though he didn't even turn around. "Please don't turn hysterical again."
Lucy took a long drink from her mug.
"This part of the job bores me," she whined, then took another sip.
Ianto tuned out her complaints. He'd lost this time, but it really was a bit ridiculous in the first place so he turned towards Tosh's workstation. Lucy deserved to be bored - if she hadn't beaten him so unjustly, she'd still have the challenge of getting her coffee back, instead of having to do actual work.
Actual work, which really did need to be done. Tosh unslaved one of her monitors and handed Ianto a second bluetooth mouse and another keyboard so he could scroll through the matches and try to narrow them down further while she carried out her CCTV search using the rest of her workstation.
Vaguely, he heard Jack answer Lucy, and Lucy shoot back some suggestion about cross-checking addresses of the potential matches with the route Tosh was tracking. It wasn't a bad idea, but he knew that Tosh was already doing it before any suggestions were made - honestly, why would you hire a genius and then assume she didn't know how to follow common sense procedures? She had been the one to train him, and he'd found everything he needed to find on PC Cooper with even less to go on than they had now with this girl.
While his eyes searched through the hundred and nineteen photos, Ianto let his mind tune them out and ramble where it wanted. He'd found that worked best when he was trying to make a visual connection when he didn't have other cues related to his search.
Behind him, Lucy was preparing to get Gwen into the system, and said something about Jack not minding her moving herself to an office by the shooting range - which of course Jack broke into. Ianto smirked to himself - Jack did hate to let someone else assume they knew what he was thinking, even if it actually WAS what he was thinking, so he was making the token protest that meant that Lucy would get what she wanted but he didn't HAVE to let her, this was him being nice…
Before Jack even gave Lucy the permission, Ianto starting planning the logistics. He wasn't even trying to, but he did know of several desks down in storage and he weighed them against each other to decide which fit the space and Lucy's needs best, mentally stood in front of the storage shelves picturing what 'extra' items she'd enjoy - there HAD to be something to fidget with, and he should probably make sure there was a sealable container for her chocolates, and a dustbin somewhere otherwise he didn't want to imagine the litter of wrappers and boxes he'd have to clear up.
He had tuned out all the dialogue around him, but the tone of voice told him when Jack had finally let Lucy know she'd get her way. She thanked him, of course, but there was something oddly disappointed in her tone, as if Jack had said something else he didn't mean to that bothered her.
All this time he'd gone through the matches - rejecting the ones that were obviously NOT the girl in the alleyway, and setting aside the ones that might be to go through again when he'd done. From a hundred and nineteen, he'd knocked the numbers down to a more manageable twenty. He looked over at Tosh's calculations, pulled up the addresses and settled in for his second pass.
"Got a hit," he announced ten minutes later.
"Carys Fletcher, 17, lives at 10 Brook Street, near the Stadium. I'm patching the information through to the SUV's SatNav."
"OK," Jack said, grabbing the biohazard overalls from one of the floor lockers and throwing them one after another to Lucy, Tosh, Gwen and Owen. "Everyone, get suited up, grab the gas masks on your way out - let's go."
While the others were still struggling with their overalls, Lucy shrugged the top of the overall onto her shoulders and walked over where Ianto still sat by Tosh's station.
"Thanks, Ianto."
She zipped up the front and checked to make sure that the front pockets were also zipped.
"It's my job," he said with a shrug as he stood and glanced around.
"I know, but you still found her."
Tosh and Owen brushed past - Jack had already passed, but now he stood at the entrance cage waiting for the others to pass.
"So, thanks and well done."
Lucy smiled up at Ianto, heedless of Gwen standing awkwardly behind her.
"You should go."
Lucy made a face. He smiled, but gestured towards to the door, while looking pointedly back at her training charge.
Lucy glanced back, saw his point. She sighed, but nodded.
"See you in a bit."
She turned to her mentee.
"Come on Cooper, first proper time out in the field. Rule 1. Listen to Jack. Rule 2, don't get yourself killed - I don't want all the extra paperwork."
Gwen looked back at Ianto, as if to ask if Lucy was actually serious. He just smiled as she caught his eye. Poor girl looked worried.
"Rule 3, the Doctor lies - no, sorry, that's rule number 1"
He smiled as the cog door closed behind the two women. That was Lucy - always telling her in-jokes, even though she knew no one would get the references.
He adjusted his earpiece, settled himself in front of Tosh's workstation, and got ready to start monitoring yet another retrieval. All in the days' work.
A/N Since we don't actually see anyone enter Carys's front door in the wide-shots of Brook Street, and the close-ups aren't actually filmed in the same location, I can't be a hundred percent sure which is Carys's address. However, given where the SUV is parked when they bring Carys back to her dad, I've narrowed it down to about three houses, and number 10 seems most likely.