A/N Sorry I kept you waiting so long. Not as young as I used to be, which means bouncing back from sickness takes longer. I think I'm back back though. Enjoy the new content.
Disclaimer - as usual, I don't own it.
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While Ianto was in the archives, he stopped by his secret stash - the dark chocolate he kept to give to Myfanwy when the pterosaur was under particular stress. At this moment, he felt Lucy probably needed it more, so he left a large bar on the weapons table down at the shooting range before heading back up to the tourist office. It wasn't exactly a peace offering, since he knew he wasn't the one she was angry with - but since he still had to live with her when the day was done, it was still probably a good idea.
On his way back through the Hub, Lucy was nowhere around, so he snuck into her desk and raided her sweets stash of a pack of Maltesers. He'd thought about picking one up at the corner store, but on principle he tried to avoid contributing to her chocolate addiction - though he was aware that he probably wasn't being particularly logical about it. After all, he had no problem getting her completely dependant on his coffee.
Though when he saw just how many packs of Maltesers she had in her drawer, he didn't feel that bad about his light fingers - besides, he had to try out his...erm, her… sweetie shooter, right?
But first, he really did need to clean the crumbling old books before the damage from sweet-and-sour splatter was permanent.
It was a finicky job, and Ianto took the books and his restoration supplies into his private office so he wouldn't be disturbed while he worked. He was just finishing applying the stain-fader onto the spine of the last book when he heard the sound of the lift arriving, and the secret door that was typically shut opening on its own.
As he stepped out of the office to investigate, light running footsteps came down the corridor, followed by the heavier tread of someone who could only be Jack - so it wasn't completely startling when Carys rushed into the tourist office, carrying Jack's precious hand-in-a-jar,
Jack was only a second behind Carys, and as soon as was squarely in the doorway, he thrust his Webley revolver, two handed, into Carys's face.
"Need me to do any attacking, sir?" Ianto asked, more amused than he should have been.
"Appreciate the offer," Jack pulled his gun back and fumbled with the holster on his belt, his eyes never leaving Carys. "Just open the door."
Jack was rubbish when something he cared about was at stake - surely in his hundred-plus years with Torchwood someone had taught him the basics of hostage negotiation, hadn't they? For that matter, had he never had to haggle for a better deal on a large purchase? Never let the other person know you want the thing you want, or they'll know they've got you right where they want you.
Ianto sighed - this wasn't going to end well, was it? - but he pressed the button that opened the outer door - releasing an alien who killed with sex into the heart of Cardiff.
Never taking his eyes off Carys, Jack held out his hands, as if to catch a baby.
"Now give me the jar," he pled - so different from the confident and calm protector he'd been earlier when Lucy was threatening Gwen.
Whether it was the girl or the alien, Carys knew weakness when she saw it. Instead of giving Jack what he wanted, she turned and hurled the bubbling container across the counter, where it smashed on the floor as she fled through the door.
"NO!" Jack vaulted over the counter and knelt by the broken container while Gwen and Tosh rushed through the door just as Carys was gone.
It was actually somewhat creepy the way the hand, freed from the container and covered in clear goop, wiggled its fingers as Jack held it, distraught.
Gwen and Tosh rushed out after the fleeing fugitive, and Ianto wondered where Lucy and Owen were. Though he had some experience with weevil hunting, Ianto knew his role. He wasn't a field agent, never would be. But he could fix messes before they became irreversible. And he knew exactly where the spare glass panels for the specimen container Jak had converted into an odd life support system (for a hand? Although, considering who he was supporting the basement, he probably didn't have much room to comment), as well as some silicone to create a new water-tight seal, and the powdered ingredients to add to create the strange bio-gel that kept the hand...thing from decomposing.
He sighed, slid into his office and found a pitcher. Squeezing his way around Jack, as he stared blankly at the hand, Ianto knelt down and scooped up as much of the gloppy bio-gel as he could into the pitcher. Then he gently took the hand from Jack's and slid it into the pitcher. There wasn't quite enough goop to completely cover it, and it would of course need to be oxygenated soon, but it should preserve the severed appendage long enough for him to repair its fishbowl.
*** &&& %%% &&& ***
The jar Jack's "hand-in-a-jar" lived in wasn't the only one that had come through the Rift. One would pop through every once in a while, and even parts that were obviously designed to fit - Ianto suspected there was a factory that made the things located on one of the other rifts, and sometimes he amused himself by imagining the hassle the factory managers had keeping the loss of their inventory secret from the workers who were very superstitious and might flee if they knew how often things randomly disappeared from the production line.
The bio-stasis jars were so good at preserving random organic materials in their original state, though, that every one that came through quickly found a use, so it wasn't as though there were shelves full of empty ones that Ianto could raid quickly. If he remembered right though, there was one tucked away in the back of the armory that just held some sort of alien oregano (or maybe it was more like marijuana - there wasn't anything in the archive hat could identify this particular piece of alien flora) that he was pretty sure wouldn't die on its own in the few hours it would take to fully repair the broken stasis jar. It was a slightly different model, not as effective when integrated with the biogel, but it would do for an hour or two. Probably. Assuming the hand hadn't already begun to degrade.
Not so confident about that hand, Ianto made a bee-line from the blast door to the armoury, carrying the empty frame and the bits of broken glass he'd been able to salvage. Although, come to think of it, he wasn't really sure why he'd bothered since he was going to have to use new, factory panels anyway. Jack wouldn't let go of the pitcher he'd scooped the hand into - sometimes he really did wonder about his boss, although more and more he just shrugged it off as something he probably really didn't want to know.
The alien plant temporarily resting on a shelf in one of the back rooms of the armoury, Ianto took the replacement bio-stasis jar over to Jack, then started towards the workroom area where he knew there were replacement panels and various tools before he remembered that he's actually left the broken container in the back room of the armoury.
Damn it. Oh well. His own fault.
By the time he came back out of the armoury with the broken jar, the girls had come in Tosh and Gwen from chasing after Carys, and Lucy had almost certainly been in the shooting range. Jack had the Hand bubbling again - although the level of biogel was lower, as well as being rather watered down just to get it to that level. Still, the entire hand was submerged, and it should stay oxygenated or whatever it was it needed long enough for him to repair the original jar - he'd mix up a fresh batch of biogel once he was done.
"Owen's always a cock." Lucy sounded confused "doesn't mean you need to send the emergency signal" - Carys escaping wasn't funny, but Ianto still held in a smirk as he set the empty container on the workbench. Lucy had her back to him and hadn't noticed he was there. The others probably didn't even care, he wasn't doing anything they needed him for. He sighed and turned to pull the two curved panels he needed from Suzie's store cupboard. Or, no, it wasn't Suzie's anymore, was it? Well, whoever's it was, he'd stacked the eight spare panels that had come through in the last two years in a corner of the cupboard and now they were going to come in handy.
"I didn't need that mental image," Lucy went on as Ianto headed back to the bench. Tosh had said something or other - and judging from Lu's response, he was glad he hadn't heard. Whatever it was, he probably didn't need that mental image either. He pulled out the heat gun to get started, and whatever Lucy said after "so what do we do now" was drowned in white noise.
While the others continued to bicker by the blast doors, Ianto held his heat gun to the seams, softening the adhesive that held the broken glass to the frame. Finally it was soft enough, and he switched off the gun. Taking a utility knife, he began to carefully slice between the glass and the frame.
"Oi! You'd better get in here!"
Ianto was tempted to follow the others to the autopsy bay - whatever Owen had discovered was no doubt gruesome but probably relevant to finding Carys (or at least to what the alien was doing to her body), but the adhesive wouldn't stay soft for long, and he'd already learned from painful experience that this glass didn't take heating and cooling cycles very well. It tended to shatter into splinters that embedded themselves in the most irritating locations.
Unfortunately the acoustics of the Hub and the white noise of the water tower and babbling brook of water running below the floors meant that Owen's lecture or demonstration or whatever he was doing boiled down to an garbled rise and fall of sounds that were no doubt English, but were utterly incomprehensible. He resigned himself to scanning through the CCTV footage later and focused on clearing the now-goopy caulk-like material from the edge of the biojar frame, along with the broken pieces of glass that were embedded in it.
He was scraping the last bits away from the first side of the hand when there was a loud BANG from the autopsy room.
"Rat jam!" Owen crowed triumphantly.
Ianto rolled his eyes. That sounded messy. He just hoped that this time Owen's experiment had been slightly more contained.
"And that's what's going to happen to Carys?" Gwen sounded horrified - and rightly so, if what the words "rat jam" implied had actually happened. He grimaced as he took out a rag and soaked it in the general solvent under the workbench. A few seconds pressed up against the edge of the opening, and the rest of the adhesive could be rubbed off with your (gloved) fingers.
"You timed that perfectly," Lucy's voice rang out across the Hub. "Just how many rats have you exploded to know how long it would take and what would happen? And more importantly, have you told Ianto he has to clean exploded rats from those boxes yet?"
He turned the biojar over and turned the heat gun on to begin to soften the epoxy on the other side. He smiled. Bless Lucy. At least someone saw how much he did for them, and thought it wasn't fair. She was wrong of course. Whatever experiments Owen was making (exploded rats? That's what's going to happen to Carys? Better not to think about that - Torchwood could really destroy you if you let it) were important, and it was his job to be the butler, the attack dog - what all had he said when he was begging Jack to hire him? Besides, the less anyone noticed him, the safer Lisa would be. Come to think of it, he really should go see her, he hadn't made it down yet today.
Still, it was nice to have someone who noticed, and thought what he did mattered. As the rest of the team wandered out of the autopsy bay and through Jack's office into the display area, he turned off the heat gun and began to cut through the softened adhesive one last time.