Chapter 3

"What did you say?" Jack looked outraged as if he really couldn't believe that Owen had the nerve to suggest he leave Cardiff.

"You're going to have to be isolated."

"What? You're gonna send me away like a naughty girl with a dirty secret?"

"Bloody hell, Jack – you're not exactly a low profile figure here in Cardiff and that coat may cover a multitude of sins but there's no way it's going to hide your ever-expanding waistline for long!"

"He's got a point, Jack." Ianto chewed his lower lip nervously. "You can't go dashing around the city fighting weevils and dealing with the police in your condition."

"My condition? Is that what you're calling this, Ianto? I'm having your child – you'd better get used to that idea!"

"I don't give a toss whose baby you're carrying, Jack, the fact remains that you can't go back in the field until you've … you're not pregnant any more… Owen's right."

"I can stay in the Hub –"

"What about Gwen and Tosh?" Owen interjected. "What are you going to tell them?"

"I hadn't thought – Ianto, this concerns you as well." Jack reached out and took hold of Ianto's hand. "What do you think?"

"To be honest, I think it would be a bad idea – Gwen would want to throw a baby shower and Tosh would want to dissect you." Ianto shuddered at the thought of the balloons and ribbons, he hated balloons.

"And Gwen would probably let something slip to Rhys …" Owen mused.

"Yes, that's a point – unless we retconned her at the end of every day." Ianto wondered how many times he could retcon Gwen before she became psychotic.

"Tempting though that may be, she's proven resistant to retcon in the past," Owen shook his head. " – all it would take would be a pram on the Plas and it would all come back to her."

"Shit – you're right, Owen." Ianto scowled as he contemplated other means to keep their secret safe.

"Jack – it's too dangerous for you to stay here. We know that UNIT take a keen interest in anything we do, and then there's the Rift itself – the three of us know what it can do and it'd be bad enough if a pregnant woman got taken, but if it took you…"

"Fuck, I hadn't thought of that – he's right, you really can't stay here." Ianto could see that it wouldn't be safe for Jack to stay in Cardiff.

"I guess you've got a point. Any suggestions, Owen? And don't think of sending me to Scotland, Archie would make me dress up in a skirt and wear a wig, just for the hell of it!"

"Scotland?" Ianto looked worried. He agreed with Owen that Jack had to leave Cardiff until after he'd had the baby, but he hadn't considered him being that far away. He was beginning to sense a need to protect Jack and this baby, which was a new sensation and one that made him feel rather uneasy.

"No, not that far. I'll need to be able to visit regularly to conduct check ups, although I've no idea what constitutes normal in a pregnant bloke. This is virgin territory for me -"

"Not for me," mumbled Jack, a sardonic smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

"What the fuck do you mean by that? Have you been pregnant before?" Ianto demanded, unaccountably jealous. "I thought that was just one of your weird jokes!"

"I guess I should've mentioned that earlier – this isn't my first pregnancy."

A dangerous silence descended on the autopsy bay, as Ianto and Owen both gazed at Jack open-mouthed.

"Fuck. How the hell did you manage?" Owen ran a hand through his hair looking exasperated. "Who was the doctor? Maybe we could-"

"No." Jack shook his head. "It happened a long time ago, before I came here… in the fifty first century."

Ianto frowned as he took on board the latest in a line of revelations.

"So, somewhere out there, you have a child?"

Jack took a deep breath and bit his tongue. This wasn't the time to tell Ianto that he'd also fathered several children, one of whom was alive and well, and living not far down the M4.

"It's complicated– I was kinda stuck in a time loop-"

"Oh no, are you telling me that… oh fuck!" Ianto pulled his hand free from Jack's grasp and pounded his fist repeatedly against the tiled wall. "John-fucking-tosser-Hart! He said you were partners in every way – so parents as well, huh? I hope to god that any child you produced was a girl because I'd hate to think that out there in the galaxy there's some testosterone-fuelled wanker that inherited genes from you two!"

"Ianto!" Jack went to grab hold of Ianto's arm before he did any further damage to his reddened knuckles.

"Bloody hell, Harkness." Owen moved to the other side of Ianto to keep him from hurting either himself or Jack. "Talk about carrying the spawn of Satan. Hold up Ianto – you're going to pass out again if you keep doing that-"

"I didn't faint." Ianto relented in his struggling and allowed Owen to turn his hand over to check out the damage inflicted.

"You nearly passed out earlier – I saw it."

Ianto leant back against the wall, with Owen on one side ostensibly checking from cracked knuckles, and Jack on the other side looking shifty.

"So, you and Hart had a kid together?" Ianto asked Jack, trying to keep a lid on a jealous rage that he'd not expected.

"Never went full term. Temporal anomalies really mess with embryonic development. Had to have it terminated…" Jack shrugged.

It hadn't bothered Jack at the time, he was a different person then and the thought of being pregnant had threatened to severely cramp his style. However, he was now secretly pleased that it was too late for him to have to think about terminating this pregnancy. He felt quite protective of the child he was carrying this time. The fact that it had apparently survived when he'd been impaled by the sleeper agent's sword-arm seemed to suggest that there was something special about it. But that was another secret he thought best not to share with Ianto, not yet, and not while he was in quite such a murderous mood.

"Oh. I'm sorry. I guess …" Ianto looked remorseful. He could see that Jack was upset and he was still struggling to come to terms with the fact that the man leaning against him was pregnant, never mind that he was the father. Father – the word was imbued with responsibility on one hand and memories on the other, unpleasant memories.

Owen had pulled over a lab stool and had perched on it to carefully observe the behaviour of the two men sitting on the floor of his autopsy bay. Not the most hygienic of places. However, he watched quietly as they leaned into each other, an almost tangible truce falling over them. He could see that Ianto was beginning to consider how this was affecting Jack and that the older man was starting to realise that Ianto was understandably in shock having got his male boss pregnant. He wondered if Jack had any comprehension of how confused Ianto had been about the status of their relationship before he'd dropped this bombshell.

As Jack gently took hold of Ianto's hand and softly kissed the bruised knuckles, Owen coughed loudly to remind him that they weren't alone.

"I was thinking about the safe house in Snowdonia."

"The quarantine home?" Jack frowned.

"That's the one. It's got a fully equipped operating theatre in the basement and medical facilities for coping with most medical emergencies. I take it I'll be delivering it by c-section?"

Jack nodded.

"It's not been used for a while, but I go up there every three months to make sure it's ready if needed. There's a network linking it into the Torchwood mainframe, so you could keep involved with any operations in Cardiff and liaise by phone with the police or government agencies if necessary."

"Where do we say I've gone?" Jack wasn't happy with the idea of leaving Cardiff, but being pregnant definitely made his position as leader of Torchwood untenable if he was unable to exert a physical presence.

"Sabbatical. Secret assignment. It's not as if you disappearing suddenly is an unexpected event any more."

A month later, Ianto was woken in the middle of the night by his phone ringing. It had become a regular event. Sighing to himself he took the phone from under his pillow and scrambled to turn on the bedside lamp.

"Jack? What's the matter? … You can't sleep? … Yes I was … no, it's ok, I'm awake now … yes, I do … what? … guess… yeah, same as usual… missing you, too…"

Jack couldn't sleep. It was too quiet. The farmhouse was situated in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere. His contact with other people had been restricted to weekly visits from Owen to check his vitals and scan his abdomen. The farmer's wife who looked after the living quarters came in twice a week to vacuum the rugs, change the bedclothes and leave pre-cooked meals in the fridge for heating up. She was retained by Torchwood for a significant amount of money, sufficient to prevent her from asking questions or prying into the locked areas of the property.

Rinsing his tea mug out at the sink, Jack looked out into the dark night and thought about calling Ianto. A quick glance at his watch made him wince. It was far too late. Ianto had sounded exhausted when he'd called the previous night. Jack felt guilty enough that his team had all been lumbered with extra work to do in his absence. The reason for Ianto sounding so tired was that there had been heavy rain storms flooding the sewers and flushing out weevils onto the streets. Ianto hadn't told him that of course, no, he'd found that out by looking through the logs of activity on the Torchwood computer system. Apparently the high tide coupled with heavy rainfall feeding the streams that flowed into the Taff had even caused Ianto's Tourist Office to be flooded.

By six o'clock in the morning, Jack thought he could risk calling Ianto. He frowned when Ianto's landline went straight to voicemail. Then he swore to himself as he remembered that Ianto had been sleeping in his quarters to make sure the Hub was manned overnight. Selecting his mobile number proved no more successful. There was no answer, it kept ringing but then cut off. Maybe Ianto was in the shower already?

In the back of his mind a jingling of alarm bells prompted Jack to access the Torchwood network. He frowned as he saw that there had been several reports of weevil activity in Penarth in the past six hours.

Calling the Hub he grew more anxious as he recognised the tone that indicated his call had been automatically transferred to the team's comm. units. It meant that they were all in the field, which wasn't a good sign.

"Jack?" Gwen's voice screeched in his ear. She was evidently out in the open, the sounds of wind and rain clear over the line. "What is it? – we're sort of busy right now."

"Gwen? What's going on? Is everyone OK?" Jack could detect a hint of panic and could imagine her, wide-eyed and drenched to the skin. Something was wrong. The alarm bells were now clanging loud and clear in his head.

"I'll call you later, Jack – please, now really isn't a good time …"

It was then that Jack heard both Tosh and Owen shouting urgently in the background:

"Ianto?"

"Ianto!"

His free hand reached down involuntarily to his swollen belly as Jack gripped the phone to his ear and demanded to know what the hell was going on.

"They're just checking on his position, that's all Jack… nothing to worry about … Owen?"

Jack listened on in horror as the frantic exchanges between Tosh, Owen and Gwen made it clear that he had every reason to worry. If it was only half as bad as it sounded there was a chance the child he was carrying would never see its father.

"There he is!"

"Where?"

"Down there!"

"Oh, fuck!"

"What about the weevil?"

"I can't see – it's too dark!"

"Ianto – hang on! Don't let go!"

Thirty feet from the top of the cliff, Ianto Jones clung onto a narrow ledge, his fingers digging into the soft, crumbling rock. The deadweight of the weevil that had fallen into the branches of a tree clinging to the side of the cliff was pulling at the soil at its base, inexorably loosening the already precarious ledge – Ianto could feel it slipping away from underneath him.

He felt a vibration in his pocket, his mobile ringing again, and he knew it was Jack. He wondered whether he'd have time to say goodbye, if he managed to get the phone from his pocket, before the cliff fell away from under his body and he plunged into the raging sea. His rain-soaked coat was heavy about his legs, making them ache and he could feel his arms being painfully wrenched from his shoulder sockets as he held on tight to a large boulder embedded in the cliff face. The sound of the waves crashing onto the rocks and the wind whipping around his ears drowned out the sounds of his angry cries. There had once been a time when he'd have welcomed the numbing embrace of the cold sea, but not now. Not now.