Fic: Get Loved, Make More, Try to Stay Alive (2/8)
part 1
This time when Ianto came down the steps into autopsy, there was a reassuring, if peculiar, assortment of objects laid out on the table. A glass-sided cage with a screened top was at Owen's right hand, emitting a distinct odor of rodent though no actual rodent was visible in the piles of bedding. Gwen was peering inside, apparently trying to spot the creature.
At Owen's left hand was a darkly gleaming object about the same size as the cage, its edges rounded, with proportions and markings that had the distinctive not-quite-rightness of non-human alien technology. Tosh was poking at the side with a stylus of some kind, muttering to herself and looking back and forth between the alien device and a tablet computer.
Owen himself was trying to watch Gwen and Tosh both, and glanced up immediately when Ianto moved off the lowest step. He looked like nothing so much as a mother trying to corral her wandering children. Autopsy had got entirely too lively, today.
Ianto looked over at Gwen, who was tapping softly on the glass.
"When Jack said you were testing on terrestrial mammals..."
"Hamster," Owen said tersely. "Gwen, she's been bothered enough, honestly. She's still there. The machine is picking her up just fine."
Ianto looked at Tosh, whose frown was deepening. "And as for getting the machine to be intelligible..."
"I almost have it," Tosh said. "The material doesn't scan well, so it's been hard to input the characters, but the translation algorithms are almost..."
"You really don't need to be able to read it," Jack said, sounding like he'd repeated this several times. Ianto looked up to watch him come down the stairs, but Jack only met his eyes for a second, giving him a bland smile, as though this were just another piece of interesting tech to try out.
Jack brushed past Ianto, with barely any deliberate invasion of personal space. They were all the way back to the level of Ianto's third week on the job, after he'd ceased to be novel and begun really working on his invisibility. It nearly didn't come across as a reprimand, and in any case Ianto was too tense to feel either chastened or relieved.
Jack went to stand across the table from Owen, Gwen, and Tosh. Ianto stayed where he was, at a safe distance from all of them. "It's emergency medical technology, it's meant to be useable for the widest possible range of species. There aren't even that many buttons, and if you just--"
Jack reached over and slapped his hand down blindly on the opposite side of the device, presumably where the controls were; Owen and Tosh both stepped back sharply, crying out in protest. Gwen threw her arms around the hamster cage.
Ianto himself flinched, but stood his ground, and saw a holographic display appear above the device, divided into differently-colored blocks. Each block contained a simple line drawing, and, beneath it, a picture of a button.
"There. Mash the buttons and it goes into idiot mode," Jack said cheerfully. "The little pictures show you what to do next."
Tosh straightened up. "You couldn't have mentioned that sixteen hours ago?"
"If you had figured it out that would have been useful information, and we had to get the hamster and let the scan run anyway. All set now?"
Owen straightened up and touched the holographic display; one square began to flash. It was yellow, and pictured a small oval inside a larger oval, and a box to one side. After it had flashed a few seconds, the smaller oval popped into the box.
"Right," Owen said. Ianto thought he could almost see the man clinging to his dignity. "I reckon I've got this. Ready?"
Gwen belatedly let go of the hamster's cage, and Jack turned and looked at Ianto, holding out his hand palm up in silent invitation. Ianto folded his arms but stepped closer, taking his place at Jack's side. A moment later Jack's hand dropped to the small of his back, and Ianto kept carefully, perfectly still under the touch.
He had been a little too forceful, perhaps, when he'd asked Jack this morning to let him alone to do his job. Or perhaps he'd been precisely as forceful as necessary, because even this much contact was making Ianto's heart speed up unpleasantly.
Owen wasn't the only one clinging to his dignity. It would all be over soon, and once it was, Ianto could just forget it. But until he was free of this, he was still at Jack's mercy--more at Jack's mercy than usual--and he couldn't help but be aware. He could hardly be aware of anything else.
"Right," Owen said again, glancing around to make sure he had everyone's attention, and then he pressed the button. The yellow square in the display flashed brighter, the device emitted a three-toned mechanical chirp.
The hamster squealed horribly, and the bedding exploded in a flurry of motion.
Gwen snapped, "Owen!" in a tone of horrified reproach, and Jack's hand dropped from Ianto's back as he reached out to hold down the lid of the cage before Gwen could lift it.
"Don't, Gwen, she'll bite," Owen snapped, grabbing a scanner and fiddling with settings.
Jack was watching Gwen for any sudden moves; Gwen was staring at Owen as though he could fix it. Owen was cursing softly at the scanner, Tosh peering anxiously at her computer again. Ianto stood alone, and watched the hamster.
She didn't make another sound like that first startlingly loud noise of protest, though she did give small distressed chirrups at intervals, pawing at her own slack belly and breathing like a bellows. She looked like a little half-deflated football, covered in soft golden fur. The tiny creature was confused and frightened, maybe in pain, maybe just aware that something had gone horribly wrong. Ianto's stomach muscles clenched in involuntary sympathy.
"She'll do," Owen said. "Spot of bleeding, but no hemorrhage. Heart rate's elevated, I think. Tosh, what's normal for hamsters?"
Tosh huffed, but a moment later said, "Up to four hundred twenty-five beats per minute."
"Bit fast but all right, then," Owen said, and actually turned to look at Ianto, putting a note of reassurance into his voice. "She's scared, that's all. Doesn't know what's going on. And the litter was a pretty fair percentage of her body mass, so it's a bit traumatic. You'll be all right."
"There are nine of them," Tosh said, and instantly all attention was on her. She pressed the button that was highlighted in an oddly shimmery green-blue and the idiot mode display shrank, revealing what must be an internal view of the device--not the black-and-white still sonogram Ianto had somehow expected, but a live camera image, all yellow-pink squirming things, suspended in translucent balloons of fluid.
"They have paws," Tosh added, perilously near a squeak, and Ianto half-saw the abashed look she exchanged with Gwen. It was true, though; they had paws, and ridges of spines, and dark spots where their eyes would be, and transparent skin.
Ianto couldn't take his eyes off them. "They were almost finished."
"There should be a countdown, actually," Jack said, and reached past Ianto to poke a finger into the display. A grey box held something that looked like nothing so much as a computer's progress bar, shrinking by infinitesimal degrees. Jack poked it a couple of times and it expanded, until the motion was detectable. "See, it's a universal clock."
"I can calculate rate of change against total size," Tosh said, sounding herself again. Ianto stood quite still, eyes fixed on the shrinking blue bar, all his attention on Jack's presence beside him, just out of contact.
"There," Tosh said. "You're right, Ianto. Twenty-nine hours to go."
"Right," Owen said. "Not actually done testing, if you don't mind, Tosh, Jack." Owen consulted the display's remaining buttons and selected the one whose illustration showed a box with an unmoving oval inside.
Owen pressed the button, the machine chirped, and the image froze. Nine little squirmy things stopped squirming, just... stopped.
"And that's stasis," Owen said. "Or... Jack, d'you know if it's true stasis or just time dilation? We've got a clock again."
It wasn't visibly running down at all, but Tosh was already tapping at it, until the blue line stretched the length of the room and seemed, possibly, to be flickering at one end.
"That's battery life," Jack said. "You can leave 'em in stasis till they run down the battery, about--"
"Six hundred years," Tosh announced. "Give or take."
"Right," Owen said, aiming a scanner at the device. "No life signs, just the energy reading from the battery. Stasis. So, then..."
The button Owen had pressed before was now illustrated by an oval inside a box wriggling around. He punched it, and the image was instantly animated again, squirmy pink things floating in a ball of noses and paws. Any one of them was already bigger than the thing inside Ianto.
"And, nine life signs, all... probably normal, for hamsters. Same as they were, anyhow. So they're safely back out of stasis."
Owen set down the scanner and looked across at Ianto and Jack, including them both under his gaze as he said, "Test is successful. The device will support a terrestrial mammal in and out of stasis."
He reached toward the device again, his finger headed toward a mauve button illustrated by an empty box. "So I'll just flush them, then, and we can get it started scanning Ianto."
Gwen and Tosh made precisely the same high-pitched wordless noise, in stereo; Jack extended a hand toward Owen and then stopped short.
Owen kept still, finger hovering above the button, and focused on Ianto. "Or we could continue the test. Not really completely done until we actually get a terrestrial mammal out of it alive, I suppose."
Ianto glanced around at the others. Tosh wouldn't meet his eyes, while Gwen stared pleadingly. Jack met his gaze steadily, and Ianto had to look away, not wanting to know what Jack was reading on his face, not wanting to read what might be visible on Jack's.
It was only another twenty-nine hours. Owen said the thing was growing at a perfectly normal human pace; he would have weeks and weeks to go before there was any possibility of really feeling anything there. If he could just keep from thinking about it for a few days more, it would be all over. It would be out of him, put away inside the device, where it could stay for six hundred years, till Ianto was so long dead that Jack forgot his name.
Ianto took a step back from the table, away from Jack.
"I'll go and look into the care and feeding of orphan hamsters," Ianto said, and continued backing toward the steps as Tosh looked up at him with a small, sheepish smile and Gwen grinned unabashedly.
"But I am not doing all the feeding and cleaning up. They go on a rota, just like Myfanwy."
Not that anyone but Ianto ever remembered that there was an actual rota for feeding Myfanwy, and not that he imagined he would escape being solely responsible for nine blind hamsters. Still, it was good to have the idea out there, to hold over them later.
The monitor that transmitted information to the alien device turned out to be a small flexible black square. It looked like a piece of tape, though there was no adhesive on either side; when Owen pressed it to the skin just below Ianto's navel, it clung and then appeared to melt in, disappearing entirely.
Ianto looked quickly from that spot to Owen and back. There was a faint tingling sensation for a few seconds, then nothing. "That's supposed to happen, right?"
Owen shrugged. "I haven't got an animated cartoon acting it out for me, but it worked the same way on the hamster."
Ianto looked around. The litter were in a cage under a heat lamp on Tosh's desk, since the brief experiment in reintroducing them to their mother had failed. Ianto had assumed that the mother hamster had been brought back to autopsy, but the other cage was nowhere in sight. "Speaking of..."
"Gwen took her home," Owen said, busying himself with some readout on the device which couldn't possibly be that difficult to make out, given it was being acted out by moving circles and squares. "Said something about practicing on a pet before she and Rhys tried anything more complicated."
Gwen had to have heard what Jack said about the regulations--but maybe she believed they didn't apply to her. Maybe they wouldn't, when the living child in question wasn't half Jack's, when the parent in question wasn't Ianto. Or maybe Gwen would have the good sense to leave, someday. She had a life outside, she had something to leave for. She might just beat the odds.
"Right," Owen said. "Want to let that go twenty-four hours, so the machine picks up a circadian rhythm."
That made perfect sense, of course, only...
"I've got to stay in base for twenty-four hours, then?"
Owen looked briefly caught out, as though he actually hadn't thought of what it would entail. It wasn't as if Ianto hadn't spent nights in the Hub before, of course, and they all did what was necessary in a crisis. They were all treating this like the standard sort of problem to be solved by Torchwood. Owen wouldn't have thought twice about it.
"Actually," Owen said. "You should stay put for twenty-four hours after the transfer as well, for observation."
Forty-eight straight hours in the Hub. It still wasn't all that unusual. Ianto's reluctance to do it was the only thing standing out, in fact.
"If you needed to leave..." Owen said, eyeing the device. Ianto could likely take it with him--it was obviously portable--but taking tech off-base would mean asking Jack, which would mean talking to Jack, and telling him why.
Ianto quickly shook his head. "It's fine. I've got a few changes of clothes, I don't need anything else."
Ianto turned away before the look on Owen's face coalesced into words. Least said, soonest mended. He had twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes to kill.
There was something so blessedly simple about target practice. The world went away, blocked out by hearing protection and safety glasses, and his body simplified itself to a machine for aiming and firing with the occasional pause to reload. His arms hummed with recoil, and the bitter taste in his mouth was nothing but blowback.
It was just him and the gun, and when he sensed something at his back, it was automatic to swing around with the weapon up. Ianto managed to keep from squeezing the trigger, at least.
Jack didn't flinch. He was slouching against the wood stalls, six feet behind Ianto, his arms folded.
Ianto was aware that he ought to lower the gun, or put the safety on. Firing posture just felt right. Comfortable. Necessary.
They stayed like that long enough that Ianto had to put a conscious effort into keeping his arms steady, and still didn't lower the gun.
Finally, Jack reached up and tapped at his own ear. Ianto firmed his right hand grip, and used his left hand to tug the headphones down around his neck.
"Go ahead," Jack said easily, a hint of a smile in his voice that showed nowhere on his face. "If you need to take out some aggression, you might as well take it all the way, right?"
Ianto's hand clenched on the gun, and he gritted his teeth. His anger flared, but he knew that tone in Jack's voice, calculated to a nicety to obtain just that reaction. Jack was daring him to pull the trigger, but Ianto hadn't spent this long at Torchwood without learning to keep his composure under fire.
"That depends almost entirely on whether you're humoring me in my delicate condition."
Jack's gaze swept down his body and back up, and now Jack showed him a smile. "Oh, I wouldn't say delicate--"
Ianto turned on his heel and finished firing his clip into the head of the nearest Weevil target. When the chamber clicked, empty, he tugged off his safety glasses and tossed them to the floor; his ears were ringing, but they'd had worse in his misspent youth than a few gunshots in an echoing space. He tugged off the headphones, too, dropping them, and let his gun hand fall to his side before he turned back to face Jack again.
Jack had the decency to look chagrined, at least.
"Sorry," he said, almost sighing the word. "Really. I came down here to apologize." Ianto said nothing, and Jack looked away, quirking a small smile. "I can't stand you being angry with me."
It would be ludicrous, if Jack weren't so obviously in earnest. If he demanded Ianto's forgiveness, that would be the moment that all of this became actually unendurable. But Jack wouldn't, of course. He wouldn't even ask for it. He would just come down here and offer Ianto the opportunity to shoot him in the head as though that would solve anything.
"You've apologized already," Ianto said.
Jack shook his head. "You have to understand--this is my fault. More than just--" Jack made a vague but perfectly intelligible hand gesture to indicate that technically speaking, the actual conception had been a fairly mutual act. Ianto had officially been spending too much time working out how to parse Jack.
"This is my fault," Jack repeated. "I'm pretty sure I know what changed you. I didn't know it could happen, I didn't think I could--I just didn't think. That's all. It's no excuse, it's never been any excuse."
"You've done this before?"
Jack flashed him a smile and looked away. "Not exactly. But I almost wiped out the human race, once--"
It was going to be one of those explanations. "So did I, once."
Jack looked back at him then, thoughtfully. "So you did."
There was really nothing to say to that. Ianto couldn't even hold Jack's gaze. And of course Jack had never met a silence he couldn't fill.
"This was 1941, in London. During the Blitz. I was running--"
It dawned on Ianto that he didn't actually care. Explaining whatever he'd done that almost destroyed humanity before Ianto's parents had even been born--that was just one more way for Jack to get shot in the head. One more way for Jack to (fail to) apologize on his own terms. And whatever the explanation was, it wouldn't change the facts.
Ianto turned away from him again, this time to the table where he'd stacked the spare ammunition, ejecting the spent clip and sliding another home. The click rang out in the silence. He'd shut Jack up.
Ianto kept his back turned, looking down at the weapon in his hands.
"What you're saying is, it happened because you're Captain Jack Harkness, and this is Torchwood, and these things happen. I know that. You don't have to explain it to me."
Jack stayed silent long enough for Ianto to turn and sight on the next target, and then he said, "No, I do."
Ianto fired, once, twice, three times, and then paused to find out what Jack would say next.
"It happened," Jack said, from not at all far behind Ianto, "because I'm Captain Jack Harkness, and you're Ianto Jones, and I love you, and I couldn't--"
Ianto whirled to face him again, and this time his right hand dropped and held the gun aimed away toward the floor, finger safe on the trigger guard. He couldn't speak, but the look on his face was clearly more than enough.
Jack stopped short, eyes going as wide as Ianto's felt.
"Ianto," he said, his voice rough with something that sounded like pain. "For Christ's sake, tell me it doesn't come as a surprise to you that I--"
Ianto shook his head quickly, waving his left hand to cut off Jack's words though he still couldn't find his own. He didn't need to hear it twice, that was just greedy--and it didn't come as a surprise. It had been obvious to him for a very long time that Jack loved his team, and though it might have been in doubt a time or two, Ianto knew he was part of that team. He was one of Jack's, ergo Jack loved him.
But for all he was--so far as he knew, currently--the only one Jack was shagging, it wasn't as if there were anything terribly special about him. Jack made occasional spasmodic attempts to carry on something like a normal dating relationship--rather as if he'd read books about normal dating relationships--but mostly Jack was Jack, Jack was Torchwood, and Ianto was one of his people. Nothing more, nothing less. His only special skill was getting the temperamental Hub coffee machine to emit something drinkable--not nothing, but not exactly irreplaceable, unless Tosh's theory about the thing literally liking Ianto best was borne out.
Torchwood One had wanted Ianto because he was disposable, obedient, and bright, in roughly that order; Jack had accepted him because he happened to catch Jack's attention and looked good in a suit, and then kept him because Jack never let anyone go. Ianto knew his place, and he wouldn't trade it for anything.
"Because I'm..." Ianto said, fighting to keep his voice level, fighting not to make it a question.
Something softened in Jack's eyes. "Ianto Jones," he repeated. "Particularly, specifically, individually, you."
Jack's hand closed around his on the gun, and brought it up between them, tilted to keep the barrel pointed down. Jack smiled and touched his lips to Ianto's knuckles, and his breath was hot against Ianto's skin as he added, "And your reason for almost wiping out the human race was so much better than mine."
"Oh," Ianto said, which was a bit stupid. He probably ought to be saying something back, but he couldn't really think straight. He never could, when Jack focused on him like this--and still he'd never realized it was him Jack was focusing on, really him, instead of a boyfriend-shaped object, or a sex-partner-shaped one, or an interchangeably beloved member of his team.
He was looking at Ianto. He had been, all this time.
Oh.
Jack let Ianto's hand fall but kept hold of his wrist, taking a half-step closer to him.
"This is why I can't apologize to you properly," Jack said softly, his thumb rubbing over the bone of Ianto's wrist. His body was trying to be soothed and aroused all at once, and he wound up standing very still, staring into Jack's eyes and trying to remember to breathe.
"I am sorry," Jack said. "I'm sorry I didn't explain myself clearly, and I'm sorry I hurt you, and I'm sorry I backed you into a corner. I'm sorry I made unfounded assumptions about what you would want and what would be best for you. I'm sorry I sent you away just because I didn't know what else to say."
Jack's other hand landed on Ianto's chest--over his wildly thumping heart--and slid downward to stop, quite chastely, on his belly. Just there, just where it was.
"But I'm not sorry about this. I'm not sorry your child is going to exist. This is the kind of immortality people are supposed to have, Ianto Jones, and somehow I managed to give it to you. I can't even pretend to regret that, not for a second."
If Ianto tried to say anything at this point, it was just going to be oh again, so he didn't bother. He got a fistful of Jack's collar, instead, and leaned in for a kiss.
Jack's mouth was yielding under his, letting him find his own way, and Ianto sighed shakily against Jack's lips. The kiss was like the first smoke after quitting, so good it was almost too much, the touch of Jack's mouth and the smell of him on every breath, the feel of his body so close and the knowledge that they'd soon be closer still. Two days away from Jack, and Ianto was shaking for him.
Jack's hand left his stomach, settling on the small of his back and tugging him closer. Jack smiled against his mouth and whispered, "I missed you," into another kiss.
Ianto managed to release Jack's crumpled collar to curl his hand around the nape of Jack's neck, brushing a fingertip against the closer-cropped hair. Jack shivered a little, too, and that was enough to let Ianto speak.
"You know, Owen said I'm to be sure and get a full night's sleep."
"Oh?" Jack's hand slid lower, down to his arse, but he drummed his fingertips against it instead of grabbing. "Are you sleepy?"
Ianto smiled. "Not a bit, I'm afraid."
"Well." Another staccato beat of Jack's fingers against his back pocket, Jack's breath hot against the corner of his mouth. "I'm sure we can find some way to wear you out."
Ianto turned his head for another kiss, and then he tugged his wrist from Jack's grip and finally put down the gun.
Owen made him put on scrubs for the transfer, in case something went horribly and messily wrong. Ianto tried not to be too acutely aware that he was sitting just where the hamster had sat, being regarded by Owen, Tosh, and Gwen with nearly the same air of curious concern.
Given the option of sitting with his feet dangling like a child, or sitting cross-legged like a child, Ianto had chosen the option that at least left him self-contained. He rested his hands on his knees and tried to seem calm, though he knew his racing pulse betrayed him on the monitor. It would all be over soon, and they'd go back to looking at him or not in the ordinary way.
Jack stood at his side, one hand resting over one of Ianto's. Ianto had a feeling that Jack was never going to look at him in quite the same way again, but they were on the same side of this, now. Nothing mattered more than that.
"Ready?" Owen glanced from Ianto and Jack to Gwen, watching the monitors, to Tosh, beside the device. When everyone had nodded, Owen pressed the button.
"Fuck." Ianto's whole body jerked, fists clenching as he forced himself not to try to fight the sensation. Jack's arms were around him instantly, holding him tight as he gasped.
"Ianto?" Jack's voice pitched up, worried, but his grip on Ianto released. He spread one hand on Ianto's back and the other on his chest. Ianto's heart raced between Jack's palms, his chest heaving. He was listing sideways, toward the stability of Jack--not quite equal to the task of keeping himself upright, not quite willing to lean.
Ianto shook his head. "I'm all right, I'm all right--"
He could hear the frantic note in his own voice, reassuring to no one, and forced himself to stop. Jack's arms went around him again, and Ianto gave in and slumped sideways, drawing his knees toward his chest and closing his eyes as he curled down to rest his head on Jack's shoulder.
Gwen spoke, and Owen answered, but Ianto kept his eyes closed, trying to match his own breathing to the evenness of Jack's. It was an unsettling feeling, to be aware of something's absence when he hadn't been able to tell it was there in the first place.
"Does it hurt?" Jack asked softly. One of his hands moved restlessly up and down Ianto's arm. He smelled good, like always, like Jack.
Ianto shook his head. "For a second, like ripping off a plaster inside out. Startled me. It just feels... strange."
Jack kissed his temple and Ianto opened his eyes--and there, floating in holographic representation at the other end of the table, was the subject of all the excitement.
It still looked more prawn than human, but by rights it must be more or less a baby now, if horribly premature and housed in a terribly advanced and alien sort of incubator. It was out of him and on its own in the world: nobody's parasite. A baby--Jack's baby. And his, he supposed, for the time being.
"Hello there," Ianto said softly.
"He's got your prefrontal lobes," Jack whispered, "but I think definitely my eyebuds."
Ianto laughed, sharply and loudly and more than the comment warranted, straightening up as Jack let him go. He could laugh, now. It was over. It was safe.
"Right," Owen said, when Ianto had quieted. "Then we just--"
"Let me," Ianto said, catching Owen's cool hand as it reached toward the button. "I should be the one to do this."
Jack's hand rested on the small of Ianto's back as he leaned forward, and the emptiness inside him had already settled down to a twinge, a small ache. Nothing he'd notice in the general background noise of bumps and bruises, if he didn't know just what it was.
Owen dropped his hand, giving way, and Tosh took a step back, watching. Ianto let it be for another few seconds, the tiny grotesque thing with its visible heartbeat and its fluttering movements. He thought he probably ought to say something, but what was there to say? Not good-bye, not quite yet, and not good night, either. Stasis was not sleep, and Ianto would never put this baby to bed.
Jack's hand moved up and down his back, and Ianto nodded firmly and pressed the button. The fetus went still before his eyes, and that was that.
Jack's hand stopped moving on his back at the same instant, and Ianto felt a bit like he'd gone into stasis himself. He knew he should take his hand away, sit back, get up and go back to work, but he felt frozen.
It was Tosh who moved, finally, reaching out--toward his hand or toward the device, Ianto wasn't sure.
Jack was suddenly coming around the table, saying, "Don't--don't touch it, Toshiko."
Tosh jerked back, turning a startled look toward Jack.
"There's one more thing," Jack said. "At least, I think this must be how..."
Ianto started to withdraw his hand, but Jack caught it, holding it to the device's control panel and interlacing his own fingers so that they touched it between Ianto's.
The still image of the waiting child shrank, and beside it a new menu appeared. Ianto had barely glimpsed the new array of options before Jack selected one, pressing a button with his free hand. Beneath Ianto's hand, the device was suddenly, briefly warm. Jack tugged Ianto's hand away and set his own hand on the same spot. When he took it away, the device chirped once and then went dark, all displays disappearing, the controls retracting into a gleaming, solid surface.
Ianto looked up at Jack, who was staring intently at the device. "Jack?"
Jack met his eyes and smiled reassuringly. "Security. It's locked up tight now, so only you or I can access it. See?"
Jack touched the spot where the controls had been, and the buttons reappeared; he pressed one and the holographic display returned, the motionless fetus in living color. He took his hand away and it winked out, the device encased once again in an unbroken shell.
"Here," Jack said. "Tosh, you try."
Tosh touched the same spot, and nothing happened. She tried something with her computer, shook her head, and then said, "What about your wriststrap?"
"Nope," Jack said, quite confidently, but he made a show of trying it anyway; he punched a sequence of commands on his wrist, but nothing happened. The thing stayed unnervingly dark and silent.
Ianto reached out and touched it, and it sprang to life. He took his hand away and it went dark.
"Safe and sound," Jack affirmed. "You could blow it up, launch it through space, and it'd still stay locked up, waiting. Whoever made these things, they didn't mess around with the security features."
Owen reached over and rapped his knuckles against the device, then caught Ianto's wrist and checked his pulse, though that had to be redundant. Ianto turned to look at him, and Owen immediately looked away, dropping his hold and peering at his scanner.
"Looks like you're fine, but you should still stick around the Hub for a day or so, let us keep an eye on you." Owen looked up then, glancing from Ianto to Jack and back again. "That won't be a problem, will it?"
Ianto grinned. "I think I'll be all right."
"Right," Gwen said abruptly, behind him. "In that case--"
A small alarm began chirping.
"Not my turn, just been operated on," Ianto announced immediately.
"It's me, I think," Tosh said, and headed off to her workstation quickly. Ianto thought of following her--but there was no way he could apologize for being offered better choices than she had. He didn't think she'd even want him to.
"I think it was mine, actually," Gwen murmured, and headed after Tosh.
Owen yanked the wireless lead for the monitor off Ianto's arm. "If you could clear off my autopsy table, I believe I have some dead aliens I need to be working on. You've put me days behind with this stunt."
Ianto looked over at Jack, who was grinning, and couldn't help grinning back. It was over. They'd won. They'd all won, everyone had, just this once.
"My fault, Owen," Jack said. "You can file a complaint if you like."
Owen rolled his eyes, and Ianto slid down from the table, standing across the device from Jack.
"Help me with this?" Jack asked, and Ianto reached for the near end. At his touch, a section slid out, making a handhold, and he and Jack lifted it between them and carried it easily up the stairs. It wasn't so large or heavy that it would have been harder for one person to carry than two, but the symbolism was obvious, and Ianto couldn't refuse Jack this.
Jack led the way to his office, past Tosh and Gwen entirely absorbed in feeding the litter of hamsters their hourly eyedropperfuls of kitten formula. Neither of them looked up as Jack and Ianto passed, busy coaxing their tiny charges to drink.
Once in Jack's office, they came to a stop in the middle of the cluttered room, Ianto waiting as Jack looked around for a spot to set the thing down. Finally he headed for the corner behind his desk, and Ianto followed, lowering the device carefully to the floor. It might be indestructible, but that was no reason to be careless with the baby.
Jack knelt, clearing away boxes and papers to make a space for the device. There wasn't room for another body in that corner, so Ianto stayed where he was, watching Jack.
"You ought to name it," Jack remarked to a stack of dusty files which Ianto had not yet mustered either the courage or the patience to organize.
Ianto blinked, looking down at the device. The fetus was still too early in its development to even have differentiated sex organs, and there was no knowing when or where it might grow up; the choice of a name was surely premature.
Jack looked back at him.
"The device, I mean." He touched its surface gently. "I know Owen usually names the medical artifacts, but I'm sure he'd let you have this one."
Ianto reached out as well, tracing one of the incomprehensible symbols that remained visible on the device when sealed. "You've seen one of these before. Don't they have a name?"
"Found one that had got lost," Jack said, as if Ianto hadn't half-known that already. He hadn't sounded as though he were guessing, when he mentioned launching a device like this through space. "No idea what the people who made them called them, and the report I filed with the Time Agency just referred to it as Damaged Medical Equipment, Subtype Reproductive, Originating in the Keresla Sector. Not much of a ring to it."
"Ah," Ianto said. "I suppose Inventory Item 49-GS-K-7 isn't much improvement."
Still, given the enormity of what the thing had accomplished, Ianto could hardly imagine what to call it.
"I keep thinking of Pandora's Box," Jack said, shifting a box sideways and peering critically at the floor beneath.
"The source of all the world's trouble," Ianto said, eyeing the device dubiously. Though, if one considered the likely consequences of unleashing the next generation of Jack Harkness on the universe, the analogy did begin to recommend itself.
Jack picked it up gently, and set it in the space he'd made, spreading one hand on the surface. "All the evil escaped long ago, at the beginning of time. Then Pandora sealed it up again, with just one thing still inside."
Jack looked over at Ianto, reaching out a hand to touch his. "Hope."
Ianto looked at it again. Sealed up tight, carrying a little life just waiting to happen--and it would survive anything, just like Jack would. No matter what might happen in the intervening years, decades, centuries, this child would be waiting for Jack, and Jack would be waiting for this child.
Jack took hold of Ianto's hand, tugging him up as he stood. "Of course, in the original Greek myth, it wasn't a box. They didn't really store things in boxes back then. They used jars."
Ianto considered that for a moment.
"I see," he said finally. "Pandora's Amphora it is, then."
When the small, insistent alarm woke him, Ianto was alone in Jack's bunk. He shut off the noise and then spent a moment wanting to pull the covers over his head and hide--a rational reaction to waking up in the Hub, really, but it took him a moment to remember what exactly he wanted to hide from--what he couldn't hide from, inside him--but it was over now.
He felt the same rush of relief all over again, and hard on its heels he realized that the alarm had gone off: his turn to feed the hamsters. He spent a few selfish seconds wishing he'd slept through it, and could brush off negligence as accident. But he was awake, undeniably so, and it actually was his turn by now. And after all, the little beggars were his responsibility as much as anyone's. Probably more so--he'd been the only one with the right to veto their existence, and he hadn't. Ianto pulled on trousers and someone's undershirt and climbed up to Jack's office.
The cage was there, set up on Jack's desk with the litter's feeding supplies beside it. Clearly Ianto wasn't the only one who knew it was his turn.
Ianto mixed the formula, filled a dropper, sanitized his hands, and then reached into the cage and held his hand under the light, to be sure of being warm enough before he tried to touch. The litter were waking, squirming over and around each other, emitting barely-audible chirps. Ianto let his fingers dangle just beside them, half curled, and the boldest soon found its way into his grasp. He lifted it up, cupped carefully in his palm, holding the tiny thing nearly level with his face as he guided the eyedropper to its mouth.
Three careful drops, that was all it could hold. Ianto kept it there in his hand a moment longer, closing his fingers gently around the tiny animal. It was still blind and hairless, but it moved strongly in his grip, and he could feel the racing of its heart, the rigidity of its bones. It was warm and alive--and only one of nine, and keeping him from his sleep.
Ianto sighed and set it down, and only then glimpsed Jack standing, fully and properly dressed, leaning in the doorway. Jack smiled and came inside without saying a word, just picked up an eyedropper and filled it from the beaker of mixed formula. His fingers brushed over Ianto's palm as he reached into the cage, and he made a soft sound as he coaxed one of the hamsters into his hand. Ianto picked up his own charge, but even as he fed it he couldn't help watching Jack's hands, tender and confident all at once. It occurred to Ianto that he didn't know what time it was, how many feedings had gone by while he slept. Jack's office wasn't only convenient for Ianto, after all.
Ianto set down the hamster with the one he'd already fed, and Jack's joined them a moment later. As Jack cut another from the pack, Ianto said quietly, "You'll be a good father."
Jack looked at Ianto, his expression unreadable, and then down at the hamster in his hand. His frown, Ianto thought, was concentration.
Ianto picked up another and started feeding it; they got more difficult as they went along, because the hungriest and easiest to feed always pushed themselves forward. This one just kept trying to roll away, cheeping a little frantically. Ianto got a tighter grip, shushing it softly, and was so absorbed in what he was doing that it took him a moment to understand when Jack said, "So would you."
Ianto carefully didn't look up, and carefully squeezed a drop of formula into the hamster's mouth. "But I won't, Jack. You will."
"You could," Jack said softly, and this time when his knuckles brushed Ianto's wrist, reaching into the cage, Ianto shivered. "Not now, not anytime soon--you've made your choice for now and I respect that. But later, if you decided to. When you're ready. You could."
Ianto finished with the hamster he was holding and set it down carefully as he considered his words. He refilled the empty eyedropper, and then he lifted his chin, looked Jack in the eye, and said steadily, "Spoken like a man who's never had to do more with the Torchwood Statistical Survey than use it to prop up a wobbly table."
Jack opened his mouth, but Ianto shook his head and reached for the next hamster.
"When you're in the middle of it, it must seem like every death could have been prevented, like each one is a singular event. But they're not, Jack. Ninety-eight point two percent of Torchwood personnel die before their fifth anniversary of hire, and that figure rises to ninety-nine point four when the Cardiff office is taken separately."
Jack was frowning harder now, but his hands were as perfectly gentle as ever as he reached into the cage again. "You can't apply statistical findings to a single data point."
Ianto didn't know whether to roll his eyes, or to be pleased that at some point Jack had paid enough attention to statistical principles to know that. "That's why I don't tell you that I will be 99.4% dead in a year's time, Jack. That doesn't prevent properly applied statistics from functioning as a predictor of future outcomes."
Jack said nothing to that, and Ianto knew he should let it go--there was no harm in letting Jack have this hope as well as the other--but Ianto wanted him to understand. He wanted Jack to know that this, too, had been his choice for his body, his life.
"I was a junior researcher in London," Ianto said softly, rubbing his thumb over the tiny ear of the dozing hamster in his palm. "My third day on the job, I got the same assignment they gave every new researcher recruited from outside. I had to recompile the mortality statistics for Torchwood personnel going back thirty years, across all offices and job titles. The median lifespan after hire for a researcher is only two months longer than for a field agent, did you know that?"
Jack gave Ianto a wary look, but said nothing.
"I knew," Ianto said, setting the hamster down and reaching for another. "I knew when I got out of bed and came in for my fourth day of work. I was still in my probationary period. I could have quit and lost nothing but the memory of a week spent working with the sort of borderline sociopaths who give you that assignment as soon as they're sure you can find your desk. I didn't quit, Jack. I knew this job would kill me sooner or later, and I chose it anyway. Just like we all did."
"But you could choose again," Jack said doggedly, picking up the last unfed hamster. "The situation is different now. You could change your mind."
Ianto looked down at the creature in his hand, prodding it with his thumb to get it to open its mouth.
"And if I did?" Ianto shrugged. "The life expectancy of a former Torchwood employee is eight years from date of separation. Leading causes of death in decreasing order of prevalence are suicide, murder, violent accidents, exotic and aggressive cancers, and miscellaneous causes impossible for a civilian medical examiner to determine. The sample size is small, but well above ninety percent are dead within ten years, and the majority of those who survive are in some form of long-term care."
"Ianto--"
"I might beat the odds, yes," Ianto said, finally getting the hamster to swallow its first drop. "But how can I take that chance? Not when it's someone else's life I'm playing for, not when you're a sure thing."
"Ianto, it's not one of us or the other. There's no double standard in the regulations."
Ianto blinked down at the hamster, squeezed out another drop of formula for it, and did not, at all, consider what Jack was saying.
"If you left with our child--if our child were alive in the world... I'd lose my mind knowing you were both out there. There's no way I could continue. If you left Torchwood, I would--"
"Don't say that, please," Ianto said, quite evenly, keeping all his attention on the hamster. "I don't know if it would be worse if you believed it or if you knew you were lying, but don't say it. It would be obscene."
Jack set the eyedropper down. Ianto braced himself for argument, flat rejection or cold dismissal, but whatever he was actually thinking, Jack contrived to sound only mildly exasperated. "Tell me this, then, if you're so big on statistics--why are we bothering with this? The odds of keeping nine orphaned hamsters alive by hand-feeding can't be good."
Ianto shrugged, unbearably relieved by the half-change of the subject. He glanced in Jack's direction as he took a breath. "When I die, I won't have to worry about Gwen looking at me like it's my fault afterward."
Jack's mouth twitched a little, and he let out a sharp breath, the ghost of a laugh. Good enough, tonight. "Well, then."
Ianto nodded, and looked down to concentrate on getting the last drop of formula into his hamster, so he could go back to sleep.
The motion in his peripheral vision caught his attention, and he knew better than to look straight on. Jack had both hands cupped around the hamster, raising it to his face, to his mouth, his pursed lips. Ianto just had time to think that he was about to find out that Captain Jack Harkness was the sort of person who kissed his pets when Jack stopped. Barely audibly, he blew on the tiny creature in his hands.
Ianto's head whipped round almost involuntarily, but Jack just lowered the hamster back into the cage with the others.
"You just blew on that hamster," Ianto said, trying and failing not to sound accusing. "Because you don't want it to die."
Jack raised his eyebrows, but didn't look up. "People blow on dice for luck, why not mice? It's nothing special."
As if anything about Jack was nothing special. As if they didn't know he carried life enough for all the rodents in the world, if he could just figure out how to give it away--and there was proof in this room that he had, at least once.
But Ianto couldn't say a word of that. What would be the point?
When Jack finally did meet his eyes, Ianto just smiled, and raised the hamster he still held until it was level with Jack's lips. Jack smiled back, and blew.
Lying in Jack's bunk again a little later, this time with Jack wrapped around him tighter than a blanket and in lieu of clothes, Ianto said, "Promise me something."
Jack's arms tightened. "Depends on the something."
Ianto closed his eyes. "Promise me you won't rush into it. After I die, promise me you won't run off and have the child right away, just because it's a piece of me and you want me back. It wouldn't be fair to either of you."
Jack kissed his forehead and relaxed his grip enough to let Ianto breathe, and Ianto figured that was as much of an answer as he was going to get. At least he knew Jack had heard him. That was something.
But when Ianto was on the edge of sleep, Jack said, "Yeah."
He spoke so softly that Ianto felt the word more than heard it, Jack's breath blown out warm on the top of his head.
The next morning, one of the hamsters had died, Gwen broke a coffee cup when she found out and then cut herself trying to clean it up without Ianto's help, the Rift belched out something vile-smelling which eventually turned out to be some other planet's rubbish heap, and Ianto began to get into the habit of not thinking about the sealed Amphora in Jack's office at all.
part 3
This time when Ianto came down the steps into autopsy, there was a reassuring, if peculiar, assortment of objects laid out on the table. A glass-sided cage with a screened top was at Owen's right hand, emitting a distinct odor of rodent though no actual rodent was visible in the piles of bedding. Gwen was peering inside, apparently trying to spot the creature.
At Owen's left hand was a darkly gleaming object about the same size as the cage, its edges rounded, with proportions and markings that had the distinctive not-quite-rightness of non-human alien technology. Tosh was poking at the side with a stylus of some kind, muttering to herself and looking back and forth between the alien device and a tablet computer.
Owen himself was trying to watch Gwen and Tosh both, and glanced up immediately when Ianto moved off the lowest step. He looked like nothing so much as a mother trying to corral her wandering children. Autopsy had got entirely too lively, today.
Ianto looked over at Gwen, who was tapping softly on the glass.
"When Jack said you were testing on terrestrial mammals..."
"Hamster," Owen said tersely. "Gwen, she's been bothered enough, honestly. She's still there. The machine is picking her up just fine."
Ianto looked at Tosh, whose frown was deepening. "And as for getting the machine to be intelligible..."
"I almost have it," Tosh said. "The material doesn't scan well, so it's been hard to input the characters, but the translation algorithms are almost..."
"You really don't need to be able to read it," Jack said, sounding like he'd repeated this several times. Ianto looked up to watch him come down the stairs, but Jack only met his eyes for a second, giving him a bland smile, as though this were just another piece of interesting tech to try out.
Jack brushed past Ianto, with barely any deliberate invasion of personal space. They were all the way back to the level of Ianto's third week on the job, after he'd ceased to be novel and begun really working on his invisibility. It nearly didn't come across as a reprimand, and in any case Ianto was too tense to feel either chastened or relieved.
Jack went to stand across the table from Owen, Gwen, and Tosh. Ianto stayed where he was, at a safe distance from all of them. "It's emergency medical technology, it's meant to be useable for the widest possible range of species. There aren't even that many buttons, and if you just--"
Jack reached over and slapped his hand down blindly on the opposite side of the device, presumably where the controls were; Owen and Tosh both stepped back sharply, crying out in protest. Gwen threw her arms around the hamster cage.
Ianto himself flinched, but stood his ground, and saw a holographic display appear above the device, divided into differently-colored blocks. Each block contained a simple line drawing, and, beneath it, a picture of a button.
"There. Mash the buttons and it goes into idiot mode," Jack said cheerfully. "The little pictures show you what to do next."
Tosh straightened up. "You couldn't have mentioned that sixteen hours ago?"
"If you had figured it out that would have been useful information, and we had to get the hamster and let the scan run anyway. All set now?"
Owen straightened up and touched the holographic display; one square began to flash. It was yellow, and pictured a small oval inside a larger oval, and a box to one side. After it had flashed a few seconds, the smaller oval popped into the box.
"Right," Owen said. Ianto thought he could almost see the man clinging to his dignity. "I reckon I've got this. Ready?"
Gwen belatedly let go of the hamster's cage, and Jack turned and looked at Ianto, holding out his hand palm up in silent invitation. Ianto folded his arms but stepped closer, taking his place at Jack's side. A moment later Jack's hand dropped to the small of his back, and Ianto kept carefully, perfectly still under the touch.
He had been a little too forceful, perhaps, when he'd asked Jack this morning to let him alone to do his job. Or perhaps he'd been precisely as forceful as necessary, because even this much contact was making Ianto's heart speed up unpleasantly.
Owen wasn't the only one clinging to his dignity. It would all be over soon, and once it was, Ianto could just forget it. But until he was free of this, he was still at Jack's mercy--more at Jack's mercy than usual--and he couldn't help but be aware. He could hardly be aware of anything else.
"Right," Owen said again, glancing around to make sure he had everyone's attention, and then he pressed the button. The yellow square in the display flashed brighter, the device emitted a three-toned mechanical chirp.
The hamster squealed horribly, and the bedding exploded in a flurry of motion.
Gwen snapped, "Owen!" in a tone of horrified reproach, and Jack's hand dropped from Ianto's back as he reached out to hold down the lid of the cage before Gwen could lift it.
"Don't, Gwen, she'll bite," Owen snapped, grabbing a scanner and fiddling with settings.
Jack was watching Gwen for any sudden moves; Gwen was staring at Owen as though he could fix it. Owen was cursing softly at the scanner, Tosh peering anxiously at her computer again. Ianto stood alone, and watched the hamster.
She didn't make another sound like that first startlingly loud noise of protest, though she did give small distressed chirrups at intervals, pawing at her own slack belly and breathing like a bellows. She looked like a little half-deflated football, covered in soft golden fur. The tiny creature was confused and frightened, maybe in pain, maybe just aware that something had gone horribly wrong. Ianto's stomach muscles clenched in involuntary sympathy.
"She'll do," Owen said. "Spot of bleeding, but no hemorrhage. Heart rate's elevated, I think. Tosh, what's normal for hamsters?"
Tosh huffed, but a moment later said, "Up to four hundred twenty-five beats per minute."
"Bit fast but all right, then," Owen said, and actually turned to look at Ianto, putting a note of reassurance into his voice. "She's scared, that's all. Doesn't know what's going on. And the litter was a pretty fair percentage of her body mass, so it's a bit traumatic. You'll be all right."
"There are nine of them," Tosh said, and instantly all attention was on her. She pressed the button that was highlighted in an oddly shimmery green-blue and the idiot mode display shrank, revealing what must be an internal view of the device--not the black-and-white still sonogram Ianto had somehow expected, but a live camera image, all yellow-pink squirming things, suspended in translucent balloons of fluid.
"They have paws," Tosh added, perilously near a squeak, and Ianto half-saw the abashed look she exchanged with Gwen. It was true, though; they had paws, and ridges of spines, and dark spots where their eyes would be, and transparent skin.
Ianto couldn't take his eyes off them. "They were almost finished."
"There should be a countdown, actually," Jack said, and reached past Ianto to poke a finger into the display. A grey box held something that looked like nothing so much as a computer's progress bar, shrinking by infinitesimal degrees. Jack poked it a couple of times and it expanded, until the motion was detectable. "See, it's a universal clock."
"I can calculate rate of change against total size," Tosh said, sounding herself again. Ianto stood quite still, eyes fixed on the shrinking blue bar, all his attention on Jack's presence beside him, just out of contact.
"There," Tosh said. "You're right, Ianto. Twenty-nine hours to go."
"Right," Owen said. "Not actually done testing, if you don't mind, Tosh, Jack." Owen consulted the display's remaining buttons and selected the one whose illustration showed a box with an unmoving oval inside.
Owen pressed the button, the machine chirped, and the image froze. Nine little squirmy things stopped squirming, just... stopped.
"And that's stasis," Owen said. "Or... Jack, d'you know if it's true stasis or just time dilation? We've got a clock again."
It wasn't visibly running down at all, but Tosh was already tapping at it, until the blue line stretched the length of the room and seemed, possibly, to be flickering at one end.
"That's battery life," Jack said. "You can leave 'em in stasis till they run down the battery, about--"
"Six hundred years," Tosh announced. "Give or take."
"Right," Owen said, aiming a scanner at the device. "No life signs, just the energy reading from the battery. Stasis. So, then..."
The button Owen had pressed before was now illustrated by an oval inside a box wriggling around. He punched it, and the image was instantly animated again, squirmy pink things floating in a ball of noses and paws. Any one of them was already bigger than the thing inside Ianto.
"And, nine life signs, all... probably normal, for hamsters. Same as they were, anyhow. So they're safely back out of stasis."
Owen set down the scanner and looked across at Ianto and Jack, including them both under his gaze as he said, "Test is successful. The device will support a terrestrial mammal in and out of stasis."
He reached toward the device again, his finger headed toward a mauve button illustrated by an empty box. "So I'll just flush them, then, and we can get it started scanning Ianto."
Gwen and Tosh made precisely the same high-pitched wordless noise, in stereo; Jack extended a hand toward Owen and then stopped short.
Owen kept still, finger hovering above the button, and focused on Ianto. "Or we could continue the test. Not really completely done until we actually get a terrestrial mammal out of it alive, I suppose."
Ianto glanced around at the others. Tosh wouldn't meet his eyes, while Gwen stared pleadingly. Jack met his gaze steadily, and Ianto had to look away, not wanting to know what Jack was reading on his face, not wanting to read what might be visible on Jack's.
It was only another twenty-nine hours. Owen said the thing was growing at a perfectly normal human pace; he would have weeks and weeks to go before there was any possibility of really feeling anything there. If he could just keep from thinking about it for a few days more, it would be all over. It would be out of him, put away inside the device, where it could stay for six hundred years, till Ianto was so long dead that Jack forgot his name.
Ianto took a step back from the table, away from Jack.
"I'll go and look into the care and feeding of orphan hamsters," Ianto said, and continued backing toward the steps as Tosh looked up at him with a small, sheepish smile and Gwen grinned unabashedly.
"But I am not doing all the feeding and cleaning up. They go on a rota, just like Myfanwy."
Not that anyone but Ianto ever remembered that there was an actual rota for feeding Myfanwy, and not that he imagined he would escape being solely responsible for nine blind hamsters. Still, it was good to have the idea out there, to hold over them later.
The monitor that transmitted information to the alien device turned out to be a small flexible black square. It looked like a piece of tape, though there was no adhesive on either side; when Owen pressed it to the skin just below Ianto's navel, it clung and then appeared to melt in, disappearing entirely.
Ianto looked quickly from that spot to Owen and back. There was a faint tingling sensation for a few seconds, then nothing. "That's supposed to happen, right?"
Owen shrugged. "I haven't got an animated cartoon acting it out for me, but it worked the same way on the hamster."
Ianto looked around. The litter were in a cage under a heat lamp on Tosh's desk, since the brief experiment in reintroducing them to their mother had failed. Ianto had assumed that the mother hamster had been brought back to autopsy, but the other cage was nowhere in sight. "Speaking of..."
"Gwen took her home," Owen said, busying himself with some readout on the device which couldn't possibly be that difficult to make out, given it was being acted out by moving circles and squares. "Said something about practicing on a pet before she and Rhys tried anything more complicated."
Gwen had to have heard what Jack said about the regulations--but maybe she believed they didn't apply to her. Maybe they wouldn't, when the living child in question wasn't half Jack's, when the parent in question wasn't Ianto. Or maybe Gwen would have the good sense to leave, someday. She had a life outside, she had something to leave for. She might just beat the odds.
"Right," Owen said. "Want to let that go twenty-four hours, so the machine picks up a circadian rhythm."
That made perfect sense, of course, only...
"I've got to stay in base for twenty-four hours, then?"
Owen looked briefly caught out, as though he actually hadn't thought of what it would entail. It wasn't as if Ianto hadn't spent nights in the Hub before, of course, and they all did what was necessary in a crisis. They were all treating this like the standard sort of problem to be solved by Torchwood. Owen wouldn't have thought twice about it.
"Actually," Owen said. "You should stay put for twenty-four hours after the transfer as well, for observation."
Forty-eight straight hours in the Hub. It still wasn't all that unusual. Ianto's reluctance to do it was the only thing standing out, in fact.
"If you needed to leave..." Owen said, eyeing the device. Ianto could likely take it with him--it was obviously portable--but taking tech off-base would mean asking Jack, which would mean talking to Jack, and telling him why.
Ianto quickly shook his head. "It's fine. I've got a few changes of clothes, I don't need anything else."
Ianto turned away before the look on Owen's face coalesced into words. Least said, soonest mended. He had twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes to kill.
There was something so blessedly simple about target practice. The world went away, blocked out by hearing protection and safety glasses, and his body simplified itself to a machine for aiming and firing with the occasional pause to reload. His arms hummed with recoil, and the bitter taste in his mouth was nothing but blowback.
It was just him and the gun, and when he sensed something at his back, it was automatic to swing around with the weapon up. Ianto managed to keep from squeezing the trigger, at least.
Jack didn't flinch. He was slouching against the wood stalls, six feet behind Ianto, his arms folded.
Ianto was aware that he ought to lower the gun, or put the safety on. Firing posture just felt right. Comfortable. Necessary.
They stayed like that long enough that Ianto had to put a conscious effort into keeping his arms steady, and still didn't lower the gun.
Finally, Jack reached up and tapped at his own ear. Ianto firmed his right hand grip, and used his left hand to tug the headphones down around his neck.
"Go ahead," Jack said easily, a hint of a smile in his voice that showed nowhere on his face. "If you need to take out some aggression, you might as well take it all the way, right?"
Ianto's hand clenched on the gun, and he gritted his teeth. His anger flared, but he knew that tone in Jack's voice, calculated to a nicety to obtain just that reaction. Jack was daring him to pull the trigger, but Ianto hadn't spent this long at Torchwood without learning to keep his composure under fire.
"That depends almost entirely on whether you're humoring me in my delicate condition."
Jack's gaze swept down his body and back up, and now Jack showed him a smile. "Oh, I wouldn't say delicate--"
Ianto turned on his heel and finished firing his clip into the head of the nearest Weevil target. When the chamber clicked, empty, he tugged off his safety glasses and tossed them to the floor; his ears were ringing, but they'd had worse in his misspent youth than a few gunshots in an echoing space. He tugged off the headphones, too, dropping them, and let his gun hand fall to his side before he turned back to face Jack again.
Jack had the decency to look chagrined, at least.
"Sorry," he said, almost sighing the word. "Really. I came down here to apologize." Ianto said nothing, and Jack looked away, quirking a small smile. "I can't stand you being angry with me."
It would be ludicrous, if Jack weren't so obviously in earnest. If he demanded Ianto's forgiveness, that would be the moment that all of this became actually unendurable. But Jack wouldn't, of course. He wouldn't even ask for it. He would just come down here and offer Ianto the opportunity to shoot him in the head as though that would solve anything.
"You've apologized already," Ianto said.
Jack shook his head. "You have to understand--this is my fault. More than just--" Jack made a vague but perfectly intelligible hand gesture to indicate that technically speaking, the actual conception had been a fairly mutual act. Ianto had officially been spending too much time working out how to parse Jack.
"This is my fault," Jack repeated. "I'm pretty sure I know what changed you. I didn't know it could happen, I didn't think I could--I just didn't think. That's all. It's no excuse, it's never been any excuse."
"You've done this before?"
Jack flashed him a smile and looked away. "Not exactly. But I almost wiped out the human race, once--"
It was going to be one of those explanations. "So did I, once."
Jack looked back at him then, thoughtfully. "So you did."
There was really nothing to say to that. Ianto couldn't even hold Jack's gaze. And of course Jack had never met a silence he couldn't fill.
"This was 1941, in London. During the Blitz. I was running--"
It dawned on Ianto that he didn't actually care. Explaining whatever he'd done that almost destroyed humanity before Ianto's parents had even been born--that was just one more way for Jack to get shot in the head. One more way for Jack to (fail to) apologize on his own terms. And whatever the explanation was, it wouldn't change the facts.
Ianto turned away from him again, this time to the table where he'd stacked the spare ammunition, ejecting the spent clip and sliding another home. The click rang out in the silence. He'd shut Jack up.
Ianto kept his back turned, looking down at the weapon in his hands.
"What you're saying is, it happened because you're Captain Jack Harkness, and this is Torchwood, and these things happen. I know that. You don't have to explain it to me."
Jack stayed silent long enough for Ianto to turn and sight on the next target, and then he said, "No, I do."
Ianto fired, once, twice, three times, and then paused to find out what Jack would say next.
"It happened," Jack said, from not at all far behind Ianto, "because I'm Captain Jack Harkness, and you're Ianto Jones, and I love you, and I couldn't--"
Ianto whirled to face him again, and this time his right hand dropped and held the gun aimed away toward the floor, finger safe on the trigger guard. He couldn't speak, but the look on his face was clearly more than enough.
Jack stopped short, eyes going as wide as Ianto's felt.
"Ianto," he said, his voice rough with something that sounded like pain. "For Christ's sake, tell me it doesn't come as a surprise to you that I--"
Ianto shook his head quickly, waving his left hand to cut off Jack's words though he still couldn't find his own. He didn't need to hear it twice, that was just greedy--and it didn't come as a surprise. It had been obvious to him for a very long time that Jack loved his team, and though it might have been in doubt a time or two, Ianto knew he was part of that team. He was one of Jack's, ergo Jack loved him.
But for all he was--so far as he knew, currently--the only one Jack was shagging, it wasn't as if there were anything terribly special about him. Jack made occasional spasmodic attempts to carry on something like a normal dating relationship--rather as if he'd read books about normal dating relationships--but mostly Jack was Jack, Jack was Torchwood, and Ianto was one of his people. Nothing more, nothing less. His only special skill was getting the temperamental Hub coffee machine to emit something drinkable--not nothing, but not exactly irreplaceable, unless Tosh's theory about the thing literally liking Ianto best was borne out.
Torchwood One had wanted Ianto because he was disposable, obedient, and bright, in roughly that order; Jack had accepted him because he happened to catch Jack's attention and looked good in a suit, and then kept him because Jack never let anyone go. Ianto knew his place, and he wouldn't trade it for anything.
"Because I'm..." Ianto said, fighting to keep his voice level, fighting not to make it a question.
Something softened in Jack's eyes. "Ianto Jones," he repeated. "Particularly, specifically, individually, you."
Jack's hand closed around his on the gun, and brought it up between them, tilted to keep the barrel pointed down. Jack smiled and touched his lips to Ianto's knuckles, and his breath was hot against Ianto's skin as he added, "And your reason for almost wiping out the human race was so much better than mine."
"Oh," Ianto said, which was a bit stupid. He probably ought to be saying something back, but he couldn't really think straight. He never could, when Jack focused on him like this--and still he'd never realized it was him Jack was focusing on, really him, instead of a boyfriend-shaped object, or a sex-partner-shaped one, or an interchangeably beloved member of his team.
He was looking at Ianto. He had been, all this time.
Oh.
Jack let Ianto's hand fall but kept hold of his wrist, taking a half-step closer to him.
"This is why I can't apologize to you properly," Jack said softly, his thumb rubbing over the bone of Ianto's wrist. His body was trying to be soothed and aroused all at once, and he wound up standing very still, staring into Jack's eyes and trying to remember to breathe.
"I am sorry," Jack said. "I'm sorry I didn't explain myself clearly, and I'm sorry I hurt you, and I'm sorry I backed you into a corner. I'm sorry I made unfounded assumptions about what you would want and what would be best for you. I'm sorry I sent you away just because I didn't know what else to say."
Jack's other hand landed on Ianto's chest--over his wildly thumping heart--and slid downward to stop, quite chastely, on his belly. Just there, just where it was.
"But I'm not sorry about this. I'm not sorry your child is going to exist. This is the kind of immortality people are supposed to have, Ianto Jones, and somehow I managed to give it to you. I can't even pretend to regret that, not for a second."
If Ianto tried to say anything at this point, it was just going to be oh again, so he didn't bother. He got a fistful of Jack's collar, instead, and leaned in for a kiss.
Jack's mouth was yielding under his, letting him find his own way, and Ianto sighed shakily against Jack's lips. The kiss was like the first smoke after quitting, so good it was almost too much, the touch of Jack's mouth and the smell of him on every breath, the feel of his body so close and the knowledge that they'd soon be closer still. Two days away from Jack, and Ianto was shaking for him.
Jack's hand left his stomach, settling on the small of his back and tugging him closer. Jack smiled against his mouth and whispered, "I missed you," into another kiss.
Ianto managed to release Jack's crumpled collar to curl his hand around the nape of Jack's neck, brushing a fingertip against the closer-cropped hair. Jack shivered a little, too, and that was enough to let Ianto speak.
"You know, Owen said I'm to be sure and get a full night's sleep."
"Oh?" Jack's hand slid lower, down to his arse, but he drummed his fingertips against it instead of grabbing. "Are you sleepy?"
Ianto smiled. "Not a bit, I'm afraid."
"Well." Another staccato beat of Jack's fingers against his back pocket, Jack's breath hot against the corner of his mouth. "I'm sure we can find some way to wear you out."
Ianto turned his head for another kiss, and then he tugged his wrist from Jack's grip and finally put down the gun.
Owen made him put on scrubs for the transfer, in case something went horribly and messily wrong. Ianto tried not to be too acutely aware that he was sitting just where the hamster had sat, being regarded by Owen, Tosh, and Gwen with nearly the same air of curious concern.
Given the option of sitting with his feet dangling like a child, or sitting cross-legged like a child, Ianto had chosen the option that at least left him self-contained. He rested his hands on his knees and tried to seem calm, though he knew his racing pulse betrayed him on the monitor. It would all be over soon, and they'd go back to looking at him or not in the ordinary way.
Jack stood at his side, one hand resting over one of Ianto's. Ianto had a feeling that Jack was never going to look at him in quite the same way again, but they were on the same side of this, now. Nothing mattered more than that.
"Ready?" Owen glanced from Ianto and Jack to Gwen, watching the monitors, to Tosh, beside the device. When everyone had nodded, Owen pressed the button.
"Fuck." Ianto's whole body jerked, fists clenching as he forced himself not to try to fight the sensation. Jack's arms were around him instantly, holding him tight as he gasped.
"Ianto?" Jack's voice pitched up, worried, but his grip on Ianto released. He spread one hand on Ianto's back and the other on his chest. Ianto's heart raced between Jack's palms, his chest heaving. He was listing sideways, toward the stability of Jack--not quite equal to the task of keeping himself upright, not quite willing to lean.
Ianto shook his head. "I'm all right, I'm all right--"
He could hear the frantic note in his own voice, reassuring to no one, and forced himself to stop. Jack's arms went around him again, and Ianto gave in and slumped sideways, drawing his knees toward his chest and closing his eyes as he curled down to rest his head on Jack's shoulder.
Gwen spoke, and Owen answered, but Ianto kept his eyes closed, trying to match his own breathing to the evenness of Jack's. It was an unsettling feeling, to be aware of something's absence when he hadn't been able to tell it was there in the first place.
"Does it hurt?" Jack asked softly. One of his hands moved restlessly up and down Ianto's arm. He smelled good, like always, like Jack.
Ianto shook his head. "For a second, like ripping off a plaster inside out. Startled me. It just feels... strange."
Jack kissed his temple and Ianto opened his eyes--and there, floating in holographic representation at the other end of the table, was the subject of all the excitement.
It still looked more prawn than human, but by rights it must be more or less a baby now, if horribly premature and housed in a terribly advanced and alien sort of incubator. It was out of him and on its own in the world: nobody's parasite. A baby--Jack's baby. And his, he supposed, for the time being.
"Hello there," Ianto said softly.
"He's got your prefrontal lobes," Jack whispered, "but I think definitely my eyebuds."
Ianto laughed, sharply and loudly and more than the comment warranted, straightening up as Jack let him go. He could laugh, now. It was over. It was safe.
"Right," Owen said, when Ianto had quieted. "Then we just--"
"Let me," Ianto said, catching Owen's cool hand as it reached toward the button. "I should be the one to do this."
Jack's hand rested on the small of Ianto's back as he leaned forward, and the emptiness inside him had already settled down to a twinge, a small ache. Nothing he'd notice in the general background noise of bumps and bruises, if he didn't know just what it was.
Owen dropped his hand, giving way, and Tosh took a step back, watching. Ianto let it be for another few seconds, the tiny grotesque thing with its visible heartbeat and its fluttering movements. He thought he probably ought to say something, but what was there to say? Not good-bye, not quite yet, and not good night, either. Stasis was not sleep, and Ianto would never put this baby to bed.
Jack's hand moved up and down his back, and Ianto nodded firmly and pressed the button. The fetus went still before his eyes, and that was that.
Jack's hand stopped moving on his back at the same instant, and Ianto felt a bit like he'd gone into stasis himself. He knew he should take his hand away, sit back, get up and go back to work, but he felt frozen.
It was Tosh who moved, finally, reaching out--toward his hand or toward the device, Ianto wasn't sure.
Jack was suddenly coming around the table, saying, "Don't--don't touch it, Toshiko."
Tosh jerked back, turning a startled look toward Jack.
"There's one more thing," Jack said. "At least, I think this must be how..."
Ianto started to withdraw his hand, but Jack caught it, holding it to the device's control panel and interlacing his own fingers so that they touched it between Ianto's.
The still image of the waiting child shrank, and beside it a new menu appeared. Ianto had barely glimpsed the new array of options before Jack selected one, pressing a button with his free hand. Beneath Ianto's hand, the device was suddenly, briefly warm. Jack tugged Ianto's hand away and set his own hand on the same spot. When he took it away, the device chirped once and then went dark, all displays disappearing, the controls retracting into a gleaming, solid surface.
Ianto looked up at Jack, who was staring intently at the device. "Jack?"
Jack met his eyes and smiled reassuringly. "Security. It's locked up tight now, so only you or I can access it. See?"
Jack touched the spot where the controls had been, and the buttons reappeared; he pressed one and the holographic display returned, the motionless fetus in living color. He took his hand away and it winked out, the device encased once again in an unbroken shell.
"Here," Jack said. "Tosh, you try."
Tosh touched the same spot, and nothing happened. She tried something with her computer, shook her head, and then said, "What about your wriststrap?"
"Nope," Jack said, quite confidently, but he made a show of trying it anyway; he punched a sequence of commands on his wrist, but nothing happened. The thing stayed unnervingly dark and silent.
Ianto reached out and touched it, and it sprang to life. He took his hand away and it went dark.
"Safe and sound," Jack affirmed. "You could blow it up, launch it through space, and it'd still stay locked up, waiting. Whoever made these things, they didn't mess around with the security features."
Owen reached over and rapped his knuckles against the device, then caught Ianto's wrist and checked his pulse, though that had to be redundant. Ianto turned to look at him, and Owen immediately looked away, dropping his hold and peering at his scanner.
"Looks like you're fine, but you should still stick around the Hub for a day or so, let us keep an eye on you." Owen looked up then, glancing from Ianto to Jack and back again. "That won't be a problem, will it?"
Ianto grinned. "I think I'll be all right."
"Right," Gwen said abruptly, behind him. "In that case--"
A small alarm began chirping.
"Not my turn, just been operated on," Ianto announced immediately.
"It's me, I think," Tosh said, and headed off to her workstation quickly. Ianto thought of following her--but there was no way he could apologize for being offered better choices than she had. He didn't think she'd even want him to.
"I think it was mine, actually," Gwen murmured, and headed after Tosh.
Owen yanked the wireless lead for the monitor off Ianto's arm. "If you could clear off my autopsy table, I believe I have some dead aliens I need to be working on. You've put me days behind with this stunt."
Ianto looked over at Jack, who was grinning, and couldn't help grinning back. It was over. They'd won. They'd all won, everyone had, just this once.
"My fault, Owen," Jack said. "You can file a complaint if you like."
Owen rolled his eyes, and Ianto slid down from the table, standing across the device from Jack.
"Help me with this?" Jack asked, and Ianto reached for the near end. At his touch, a section slid out, making a handhold, and he and Jack lifted it between them and carried it easily up the stairs. It wasn't so large or heavy that it would have been harder for one person to carry than two, but the symbolism was obvious, and Ianto couldn't refuse Jack this.
Jack led the way to his office, past Tosh and Gwen entirely absorbed in feeding the litter of hamsters their hourly eyedropperfuls of kitten formula. Neither of them looked up as Jack and Ianto passed, busy coaxing their tiny charges to drink.
Once in Jack's office, they came to a stop in the middle of the cluttered room, Ianto waiting as Jack looked around for a spot to set the thing down. Finally he headed for the corner behind his desk, and Ianto followed, lowering the device carefully to the floor. It might be indestructible, but that was no reason to be careless with the baby.
Jack knelt, clearing away boxes and papers to make a space for the device. There wasn't room for another body in that corner, so Ianto stayed where he was, watching Jack.
"You ought to name it," Jack remarked to a stack of dusty files which Ianto had not yet mustered either the courage or the patience to organize.
Ianto blinked, looking down at the device. The fetus was still too early in its development to even have differentiated sex organs, and there was no knowing when or where it might grow up; the choice of a name was surely premature.
Jack looked back at him.
"The device, I mean." He touched its surface gently. "I know Owen usually names the medical artifacts, but I'm sure he'd let you have this one."
Ianto reached out as well, tracing one of the incomprehensible symbols that remained visible on the device when sealed. "You've seen one of these before. Don't they have a name?"
"Found one that had got lost," Jack said, as if Ianto hadn't half-known that already. He hadn't sounded as though he were guessing, when he mentioned launching a device like this through space. "No idea what the people who made them called them, and the report I filed with the Time Agency just referred to it as Damaged Medical Equipment, Subtype Reproductive, Originating in the Keresla Sector. Not much of a ring to it."
"Ah," Ianto said. "I suppose Inventory Item 49-GS-K-7 isn't much improvement."
Still, given the enormity of what the thing had accomplished, Ianto could hardly imagine what to call it.
"I keep thinking of Pandora's Box," Jack said, shifting a box sideways and peering critically at the floor beneath.
"The source of all the world's trouble," Ianto said, eyeing the device dubiously. Though, if one considered the likely consequences of unleashing the next generation of Jack Harkness on the universe, the analogy did begin to recommend itself.
Jack picked it up gently, and set it in the space he'd made, spreading one hand on the surface. "All the evil escaped long ago, at the beginning of time. Then Pandora sealed it up again, with just one thing still inside."
Jack looked over at Ianto, reaching out a hand to touch his. "Hope."
Ianto looked at it again. Sealed up tight, carrying a little life just waiting to happen--and it would survive anything, just like Jack would. No matter what might happen in the intervening years, decades, centuries, this child would be waiting for Jack, and Jack would be waiting for this child.
Jack took hold of Ianto's hand, tugging him up as he stood. "Of course, in the original Greek myth, it wasn't a box. They didn't really store things in boxes back then. They used jars."
Ianto considered that for a moment.
"I see," he said finally. "Pandora's Amphora it is, then."
When the small, insistent alarm woke him, Ianto was alone in Jack's bunk. He shut off the noise and then spent a moment wanting to pull the covers over his head and hide--a rational reaction to waking up in the Hub, really, but it took him a moment to remember what exactly he wanted to hide from--what he couldn't hide from, inside him--but it was over now.
He felt the same rush of relief all over again, and hard on its heels he realized that the alarm had gone off: his turn to feed the hamsters. He spent a few selfish seconds wishing he'd slept through it, and could brush off negligence as accident. But he was awake, undeniably so, and it actually was his turn by now. And after all, the little beggars were his responsibility as much as anyone's. Probably more so--he'd been the only one with the right to veto their existence, and he hadn't. Ianto pulled on trousers and someone's undershirt and climbed up to Jack's office.
The cage was there, set up on Jack's desk with the litter's feeding supplies beside it. Clearly Ianto wasn't the only one who knew it was his turn.
Ianto mixed the formula, filled a dropper, sanitized his hands, and then reached into the cage and held his hand under the light, to be sure of being warm enough before he tried to touch. The litter were waking, squirming over and around each other, emitting barely-audible chirps. Ianto let his fingers dangle just beside them, half curled, and the boldest soon found its way into his grasp. He lifted it up, cupped carefully in his palm, holding the tiny thing nearly level with his face as he guided the eyedropper to its mouth.
Three careful drops, that was all it could hold. Ianto kept it there in his hand a moment longer, closing his fingers gently around the tiny animal. It was still blind and hairless, but it moved strongly in his grip, and he could feel the racing of its heart, the rigidity of its bones. It was warm and alive--and only one of nine, and keeping him from his sleep.
Ianto sighed and set it down, and only then glimpsed Jack standing, fully and properly dressed, leaning in the doorway. Jack smiled and came inside without saying a word, just picked up an eyedropper and filled it from the beaker of mixed formula. His fingers brushed over Ianto's palm as he reached into the cage, and he made a soft sound as he coaxed one of the hamsters into his hand. Ianto picked up his own charge, but even as he fed it he couldn't help watching Jack's hands, tender and confident all at once. It occurred to Ianto that he didn't know what time it was, how many feedings had gone by while he slept. Jack's office wasn't only convenient for Ianto, after all.
Ianto set down the hamster with the one he'd already fed, and Jack's joined them a moment later. As Jack cut another from the pack, Ianto said quietly, "You'll be a good father."
Jack looked at Ianto, his expression unreadable, and then down at the hamster in his hand. His frown, Ianto thought, was concentration.
Ianto picked up another and started feeding it; they got more difficult as they went along, because the hungriest and easiest to feed always pushed themselves forward. This one just kept trying to roll away, cheeping a little frantically. Ianto got a tighter grip, shushing it softly, and was so absorbed in what he was doing that it took him a moment to understand when Jack said, "So would you."
Ianto carefully didn't look up, and carefully squeezed a drop of formula into the hamster's mouth. "But I won't, Jack. You will."
"You could," Jack said softly, and this time when his knuckles brushed Ianto's wrist, reaching into the cage, Ianto shivered. "Not now, not anytime soon--you've made your choice for now and I respect that. But later, if you decided to. When you're ready. You could."
Ianto finished with the hamster he was holding and set it down carefully as he considered his words. He refilled the empty eyedropper, and then he lifted his chin, looked Jack in the eye, and said steadily, "Spoken like a man who's never had to do more with the Torchwood Statistical Survey than use it to prop up a wobbly table."
Jack opened his mouth, but Ianto shook his head and reached for the next hamster.
"When you're in the middle of it, it must seem like every death could have been prevented, like each one is a singular event. But they're not, Jack. Ninety-eight point two percent of Torchwood personnel die before their fifth anniversary of hire, and that figure rises to ninety-nine point four when the Cardiff office is taken separately."
Jack was frowning harder now, but his hands were as perfectly gentle as ever as he reached into the cage again. "You can't apply statistical findings to a single data point."
Ianto didn't know whether to roll his eyes, or to be pleased that at some point Jack had paid enough attention to statistical principles to know that. "That's why I don't tell you that I will be 99.4% dead in a year's time, Jack. That doesn't prevent properly applied statistics from functioning as a predictor of future outcomes."
Jack said nothing to that, and Ianto knew he should let it go--there was no harm in letting Jack have this hope as well as the other--but Ianto wanted him to understand. He wanted Jack to know that this, too, had been his choice for his body, his life.
"I was a junior researcher in London," Ianto said softly, rubbing his thumb over the tiny ear of the dozing hamster in his palm. "My third day on the job, I got the same assignment they gave every new researcher recruited from outside. I had to recompile the mortality statistics for Torchwood personnel going back thirty years, across all offices and job titles. The median lifespan after hire for a researcher is only two months longer than for a field agent, did you know that?"
Jack gave Ianto a wary look, but said nothing.
"I knew," Ianto said, setting the hamster down and reaching for another. "I knew when I got out of bed and came in for my fourth day of work. I was still in my probationary period. I could have quit and lost nothing but the memory of a week spent working with the sort of borderline sociopaths who give you that assignment as soon as they're sure you can find your desk. I didn't quit, Jack. I knew this job would kill me sooner or later, and I chose it anyway. Just like we all did."
"But you could choose again," Jack said doggedly, picking up the last unfed hamster. "The situation is different now. You could change your mind."
Ianto looked down at the creature in his hand, prodding it with his thumb to get it to open its mouth.
"And if I did?" Ianto shrugged. "The life expectancy of a former Torchwood employee is eight years from date of separation. Leading causes of death in decreasing order of prevalence are suicide, murder, violent accidents, exotic and aggressive cancers, and miscellaneous causes impossible for a civilian medical examiner to determine. The sample size is small, but well above ninety percent are dead within ten years, and the majority of those who survive are in some form of long-term care."
"Ianto--"
"I might beat the odds, yes," Ianto said, finally getting the hamster to swallow its first drop. "But how can I take that chance? Not when it's someone else's life I'm playing for, not when you're a sure thing."
"Ianto, it's not one of us or the other. There's no double standard in the regulations."
Ianto blinked down at the hamster, squeezed out another drop of formula for it, and did not, at all, consider what Jack was saying.
"If you left with our child--if our child were alive in the world... I'd lose my mind knowing you were both out there. There's no way I could continue. If you left Torchwood, I would--"
"Don't say that, please," Ianto said, quite evenly, keeping all his attention on the hamster. "I don't know if it would be worse if you believed it or if you knew you were lying, but don't say it. It would be obscene."
Jack set the eyedropper down. Ianto braced himself for argument, flat rejection or cold dismissal, but whatever he was actually thinking, Jack contrived to sound only mildly exasperated. "Tell me this, then, if you're so big on statistics--why are we bothering with this? The odds of keeping nine orphaned hamsters alive by hand-feeding can't be good."
Ianto shrugged, unbearably relieved by the half-change of the subject. He glanced in Jack's direction as he took a breath. "When I die, I won't have to worry about Gwen looking at me like it's my fault afterward."
Jack's mouth twitched a little, and he let out a sharp breath, the ghost of a laugh. Good enough, tonight. "Well, then."
Ianto nodded, and looked down to concentrate on getting the last drop of formula into his hamster, so he could go back to sleep.
The motion in his peripheral vision caught his attention, and he knew better than to look straight on. Jack had both hands cupped around the hamster, raising it to his face, to his mouth, his pursed lips. Ianto just had time to think that he was about to find out that Captain Jack Harkness was the sort of person who kissed his pets when Jack stopped. Barely audibly, he blew on the tiny creature in his hands.
Ianto's head whipped round almost involuntarily, but Jack just lowered the hamster back into the cage with the others.
"You just blew on that hamster," Ianto said, trying and failing not to sound accusing. "Because you don't want it to die."
Jack raised his eyebrows, but didn't look up. "People blow on dice for luck, why not mice? It's nothing special."
As if anything about Jack was nothing special. As if they didn't know he carried life enough for all the rodents in the world, if he could just figure out how to give it away--and there was proof in this room that he had, at least once.
But Ianto couldn't say a word of that. What would be the point?
When Jack finally did meet his eyes, Ianto just smiled, and raised the hamster he still held until it was level with Jack's lips. Jack smiled back, and blew.
Lying in Jack's bunk again a little later, this time with Jack wrapped around him tighter than a blanket and in lieu of clothes, Ianto said, "Promise me something."
Jack's arms tightened. "Depends on the something."
Ianto closed his eyes. "Promise me you won't rush into it. After I die, promise me you won't run off and have the child right away, just because it's a piece of me and you want me back. It wouldn't be fair to either of you."
Jack kissed his forehead and relaxed his grip enough to let Ianto breathe, and Ianto figured that was as much of an answer as he was going to get. At least he knew Jack had heard him. That was something.
But when Ianto was on the edge of sleep, Jack said, "Yeah."
He spoke so softly that Ianto felt the word more than heard it, Jack's breath blown out warm on the top of his head.
The next morning, one of the hamsters had died, Gwen broke a coffee cup when she found out and then cut herself trying to clean it up without Ianto's help, the Rift belched out something vile-smelling which eventually turned out to be some other planet's rubbish heap, and Ianto began to get into the habit of not thinking about the sealed Amphora in Jack's office at all.
part 3