VS3:05 -- "Factory Settings", Part One
When a mysterious pod comes through the Rift, the team faces an ethical dilemma - one that hits a little too close to home for Gwen and Jack.
Factory Settings
by: amand_r and cruentum
The fluorescent light buzzed. Jack didn't know why it did that - was there a wire loose? Was it made by a faulty connection? What was in those tubes, anyway? Jack had a laundry list of twentieth century tech that he simply knew nothing about. He meant to look at it all, but it seemed like something always came up to eat any free time he had for personal projects.
Case in point, he decided as he leant against the wall in the small utilitarian sink-toilet-shower-hole that passed for the en suite to his bedroom at the Hub. He reached up, plinked the light with his index finger a few times, and then glanced back at the paper in his other hand.
"Right. Okay. 'Each pouch contains one One-Step hCG Strip Test.'" He glanced at the sliver of cardstock in his hand and back at the paper. The light buzzed. "'Desiccant-discard, do not eat.'" He fished out the small packet, sniffed it, touched the tip of his tongue to the paper wrapping, then tossed it behind him, where it landed in the very corner of the room with a salt shaker sound. "'One package insert.' Right." He glanced about for the package insert before realising that he was reading the package insert. "Ah. Okay, so…"
There was a clunking noise from out in the room and he froze. Being discovered had not been in the game plan. But the sound didn't get nearer so he dismissed it as the temperamental banging of the radiator in the far end of his room, yet another form of technology that he'd do well to learn more about, and yet.
Jack shrugged and felt his lips move along with the words he was reading on the paper. It didn't help with calming him down, but it did keep him from cursing or praying to a deity he didn't really believe in. His old Sergeant used to say there were no atheists in foxholes; Jack wondered what he'd think of this moment here.
"'If one coloured line appears in the control region on the test strip and there is no line in the test region, then this indicates a negative result… if two coloured lines appear on the test strip-'"
"Jack?" Ianto rapped twice on the door and then opened it, popping his head in. Jack dropped the strip in his hand straight down to land in the open toilet bowl. He could see it from the corner of his eye, swimming in a tight circle of water ripples. He crunched the paper in his fist and made a tight smile before turning to flush the toilet and start the shower all at once.
"Yup."
Ianto cocked his head. "Are you all right?"
Jack made a show of testing the water with his hands. "This takes forever to warm up."
Ianto rolled his eyes. It was the same thing he told Jack every time he was forced to shower here. "Right. Well, JJ got a report in. Seems we have a... thing."
Jack shrugged and peeled off his pyjama bottoms. "A thing. That a scientific term?"
Ianto glanced up at the light, which had resumed its irritating noise orchestra. "Yup. Out in Sully. Something floating in the water. Fancy a day trip?" The light made a brrrrzaaakt noise when the first roll of steam hit it. Ianto blinked. "I forgot about that. Is that the one you need to have fixed?" Ianto asked, his fingers running along the edge of the door. They both looked up when the light blinked and then half of it went out. "New bulb."
Jack shrugged. "Sure. Later. Give me ten minutes, okay?"
Ianto smiled. "I'll make you a travel cup." And then he was gone.
Jack ignored the shower and uncrumpled the packet insert, then stared at the toilet. He ripped up the directions and tossed them into the bowl, letting them soak up the water before he flushed them. The last one to go was a small strip of paper with blue lettering on pastel pink: '…there is a strong possibility that you are pregnant.' It swirled around and around until it was a blur of letters and then slipped down the pipe, along with the rest of the box's contents, and any answers he'd been determined to obtain this morning.
Jack closed the lid to the toilet and sank down on the seat, his head in his hands. "Oh, I am so fucked."
The SUV tore down Penarth Road and left Grangetown behind in favour of Industrial Cardiff at its best, past the big DIY markets and the Porsche car dealer to propel them straight through Penarth eventually and out the other side.
Ianto was not driving. He monitored the satnav - alien, really - as if everything outside Cardiff city limits was foreign territory. Pressing the buttons, that's what it was all about. Jack was clutching his travel cup with determination, managing not to spill coffee all over himself as he took a long bend one-handed. Those were the true superpowers, ah, if only they had capes and emblems. Ianto's cup was in the holder, bubbling the occasional coffeebubble through the small slit of the drinking hole.
JJ was in the back. JJ had no coffee because he didn't like coffee (imaginary airquotes popped in Ianto's head), but to be fair, JJ was talking too much to even have the time to drink it, anyway.
"I was monitoring the," JJ paused to pronounce carefully, Ianto had seen him memorise names from sheets, "Cranium Modulating Sequence Band. I wanted to make sure it wasn't only coincidence that the energy pattern appeared, the levels were 59 and 77 respectively, I researched it in the database, I thought maybe it was a coincidence, that it had just appeared, but the readings... and then I checked the Rift monitor and there'd been that spike and see there-" JJ pointed over the back of Ianto's seat at the green dot blinking in and out. "It's still there." JJ's voice went off the scale on the same sequence of events he'd reiterated continuously since they'd pulled out of their parking spot and Jack had steered the SUV into the blazing brightness of a sunny day.
"The... thing," Jack said, glancing at Ianto. He took another sip of coffee, hiding glee.
"The thing," Ianto agreed. JJ bobbed his head wildly in the back. In a blip of indulgence, Ianto let him have the excitement. Torchwood made you cynical early enough without any outside help.
Sending the SUV past sleepy neighborhood houses, Penarth at their backs, Jack looked more at his coffee than at the road until Ianto said, "Next left," and Jack forced the car into a hard turn, coffee sloshing over the wheel to the floor boards. Ianto rolled his eyes in response to Jack's mouthed 'Whoops.'
"Risk assessment?" Jack asked, slowing the car in the quiet mid-morning neighbourhood, glancing at Ianto even as JJ was gesticulating in the back, front row student begging for a say.
"Low, for all we know," Ianto replied. "The readings are within normal parameters if unusual, no discernible radiation."
"We can go in, then."
"It's in the water," Ianto ventured, and the thought of wading into the Bristol Channel in October was not his idea of a quiet day. Torchwood: Wales was not warm enough for this. And the waters were too shallow for the boat. Yes, he had researched that between pouring the coffee and securing a chocolate snack for himself for later. Pity. That would have been a sweet outing.
Jack looked into the rearview mirror. "Your first big one," he said to JJ as if the coffee gurgling amusement had never happened on the way. More head bobbing and bouncing on seats. Someone was about to cream his pants. "It'll be good," Jack added. The fond look that stole over his face when he looked at JJ, it was different. Even with Gwen, Ianto had never felt like they were teaching a toddler the ways of the world. Way to feel old. He'd got cannibals for his first real outing, fingers crossed this affair was more benign and less bitey. It wasn't an apology for all the other things that went down with Torchwood regularly, but maybe a reminder that it could be good, and JJ was lapping that up. Hard to feel bad about that lie.
A cricket pitch to their left, a school to their right and Jack pulled the car to a stop. They got out and Jack saluted the children in the playground who gaped open-mouthed at their parade of a black superman car, soldier, suit and eager beaver. Ianto grabbed a bag with instruments he thrust at JJ. You couldn't possibly kick puppies.
He glanced up to the sky, squinting, and lips pronouncing his distaste. The sun was out, cold, crisp and not raining. It was too bright by far, going for punishment. Ianto pencilled sleep into his schedule for the near future; he scowled at the brightness biting at his eyes and hoped that someone appreciated the solar glare.
"That," Jack said, sporting smart sunglasses and a big fat grin, finger dancing in pointy gesture in front of Ianto's eyes, "is because you don't get out enough."
Ianto reserved a reply. Instead he filed it under 'When more convenient' in his head.
JJ bounded ahead, somersaulting himself over the dunes and he was halfway down to the water, balancing God knows how on jagged stones before Jack and Ianto could even see the waterline. The tide was out.
JJ waved and pointed and shouted something that was carried away by the wind.
"Ma, can I keep him?" Ianto asked, hands thrust into the pockets of his trousers. Huh, there were five twist-ties in the left one.
Jack caught his eye and needed more than a second to nod and grin. "I'll give him a collar for Christmas."
Ianto didn't think the if he lasts that long. You did not think that in Torchwood, or you'd be thinking about nothing else the next time you stared at a weevil up-close.
"You never gave me one," Ianto replied. "I'm crushed." Jack half-snorted amusement and forewent an answer. There were too many responses to that, Ianto supposed, some of which were sexy and some of which spoke volumes about what Jack had once considered Ianto's own aptitude for Torchwood-life. Watching JJ hop from rock to rock on the beach, Ianto wasn't sure he'd ever been that innocent, not after Lisa.
"Over there," Ianto murmured, and he and Jack made their way down the concrete boat access route and reached the waterline just as JJ did.
"Are you indulging him? With this thing?" Jack asked when JJ pointed to the bobbing thing, actually not that small at all, and Ianto was surprised by that, some twenty yards off the low tide line.
"I was. Now I'm not. The readings didn't indicate that it'd be that..." Ianto walked a few feet closer, tried to shield his eyes with his hand to get a clearer picture. Grey and roughly the size of a chair? The boss chair with wide arm rests and whatnot. He'd been hoping for paperweight size.
"You didn't scan for size?"
"I didn't double-check someone else's readings." Defensiveness, he had it, in spades. Jack shrugged in 'fair enough,' and Ianto reached up for his bluetooth, activating it. "Gwen?"
"Boys?" Gwen said, a little out of breath, over the comm. "Having a good day out?"
"Overwhelmingly so," Ianto said as he watched JJ hop closer to the water. "He's not going to jump in, is he?"
"Oh, I'd like to see that," Jack replied, the sun reflecting off his glasses. Voice distracted, eyes impossible to see looking out to sea, maybe, at the... thing, maybe. At JJ's arse, very likely. The glasses were a useful tool. Ianto would admit that he wanted a pair, if he wasn't being stubborn.
"And how is your 'sad tummy,' Gwen?" he muttered, ignoring Jack's amused smort.
"Oh, you know how these bugs are," Gwen said distractedly but didn't elucidate.
The gulls were interested in the thing. Ianto wasn't sure that was such a good plan. Nothing good could come of birds eating alien whatever and then flying off to let it gestate in their bellies in Porthkerry. "Can you check the risk assessment for this again, Gwen? There should be a copy of mine on the desk." Gwen made affirmative noises in Ianto's ear, and he barreled on, "Run the same tests again. Did anything change?"
Jack walked down to where the water was lapping up the boat access track and he watched JJ hopping about on the beach, waving Torchwood equipment, perilously close to losing it to the waves.
"I didn't think it'd be that big," Ianto said to no-one.
Jack caught that and smirked. "I've heard that one before."
It was barely worth an eyeroll. "Risk still low," Gwen's voice came on, "but the readings are minimally different. It all points to more activity, but the increase isn't enough to be alarming."
"Might be the sun," Ianto said, pacing two steps into one, another two into the other direction.
"Safe to bring in?" Jack asked. Ianto relayed the question.
Gwen gave a definite yes over the comms.
"No signs of life?" Ianto asked, just to make sure again, as he followed Jack into that field of stones to get closer to both the thing and JJ taking his own intrepid readings.
"None," Gwen confirmed.
Jack turned to Ianto and shook his head at the passed-on information. "Prepare quarantine anyway," Jack said.
Ianto repeated it for Gwen, then clicked the line out. The ragged stone edges proved a nuisance through dress shoe soles, and a glimmer of regret at indulging both Jack and JJ with a spot of team building settled somewhere in Ianto's gut. Someone walked past with dogs higher up on the shore, stopping, watching JJ and his beeping, blinking bag of Torchwood tech.
"Surveying," Ianto called across to the man.
The man turned towards him. "Down there?"
Ianto shrugged and nodded at Jack in a 'What can you do with a boss like that?' gesture and the man nodded and walked on, shaking his head in amusement. Jack's coat was good for deflection as well as hours spent with it after work in more imaginative manners.
Ianto made his way to Jack and JJ, who was talking, showing Jack the readings, well, holding them up to his face to force his eyes to them. Jack nodded absently, fingers scratching at his chest, no, pressing at his chest, as if he hurt, making a face when JJ practically pulled on his sleeve to get his attention again. Jack pulled his glasses down his nose and glanced at JJ over them, then out at the thing that was floating on the waves as he took off the glasses altogether, putting them in the pocket of his coat.
"Is it alive inside?" JJ asked, almost reverently as he stood to Jack's right, gazing out at the water from behind Jack's shoulder.
Jack glanced at him, then to Ianto, who stood three rocks over and shrugged. "Maybe it's a dinosaur egg?" he offered to them.
Ianto snorted and crouched on his rock. He pulled a small container from his jacket pocket and took a sample of the water. It wouldn't be the first time Wales was breeding its own... things. If anyone asked Ianto, it was due to Merlin fucking up majorly somewhere down the line.
"It doesn't look like an egg, though," JJ ventured and then found the answer to the dangling herring of a test. "No life signs," he said triumphantly. Jack smiled. It was missing the 'good boy' or else JJ would have preened. Ianto watched the bobbing thing through the A of Jack's feet spread to shoulder width. He had to give JJ that; appearance couldn't be more unegglike, smooth grey planes, then crusted patches that curled the waves to white as they swept over it.
"Engineered?" Ianto asked Jack, ignoring that JJ was intently consulting the instruments.
Jack shrugged, arms crossed over his chest, hands tucked under the arm pits. He frowned, looked down himself, then shook his head and glanced at Ianto with his small container of tepid beach water. "Could be," he managed for a vocal answer.
Ianto wanted more coffee just about now. And the Hub. He hated the sun. That and the stink of rotting seaweed.
"The tide is going out still," Ianto said, pointing at the wet spots as the only reminder of water that had covered rocks.
Silence.
"The thing is only going to be out farther the longer we wait," Ianto explained.
"Oh come on, Ianto, you're having fun on the beach, aren't you?" Jack called him out. It was only missing a glance over sunglasses to be a parody of something funny.
"It's shocking how much," Ianto replied and nodded at their floating retreating quarry. The wind came up sharper in a breeze, not exactly adding to beach day ambiance.
"Well then." Jack turned in half a swivel. "Get it to the shore, Jones."
Ianto smiled. Jack looked at him. And Ianto's smile never wavered.
"Right," Jack said, turning on JJ, clapped him on the shoulder with a winning grin. "Time to earn your keep. Exciting, isn't it? Oh yes."
JJ nodded.
Jack nodded.
Ianto rolled his eyes.
"We'll meet you back at the Hub," Jack said. "Let's hope it's not going to bite you. You never know!" Jack hopped back across the rocks towards Ianto.
JJ gestured with his Torchwood tech and a decidedly pathetic puppy dog expression. "It's in the water."
"I know you can swim. Ianto, time's a-wasting," Jack called over his shoulder as he pushed past Ianto, making his way up the shore again. Ianto walked down to JJ, pressed a card from a haulage firm into his hand. "They know us. They'll get it done."
"Gwen," Ianto activated the comm, "JJ will bring it in. Keep an eye on the readings and him updated."
"What if it-what if it explodes?" JJ called after Ianto.
Ianto smiled as he turned, following Jack's path back up the shore. "Welcome to Torchwood," he said. Ah, he didn't mind the sun at all now, maybe he could convince Jack to have a water whilst he sat with a pint in a roadside pub. Torchwood: promising good times when someone else does the dirty work.
Gwen confirmed in his ear and he relayed a few of the parameters from JJ's on-site readings to her. Jack was waiting on the dune, surveying his kingdom. He was wearing the sunglasses again. So much for a sunny day out.
"They grow up so fast," Ianto joked.
Behind them JJ was shrugging out of his clothes. Ianto didn't quite know whether to laugh or nod approvingly.
Jack snorted and turned on his heel. "Let's hope he doesn't drown."
Gwen folded her arms about her stomach. "So this is it. The thing."
Jack mirrored her and they peered at each other over the enormous... what was this? "Yup."
"From Sully."
Jack's eyes sparked. "There's nothing silly about it." He mock-shrugged. "I admit it's rather goofy-looking but-"
Gwen accepted the mug of tea from Ianto as he finished his journey down the steps to the med bay. "Ianto, Jack just made fun of my accent again."
Ianto, whose arm had been on the uplift of a coffee mug into Jack's hands, abruptly u-turned at the elbow and brought the mug to his own lips instead. Jack raised his eyebrows and Ianto simply shrugged, as if to say, 'It's out of my hands.' Gwen blew on her tea and hated the smell of it already.
Behind Jack, JJ hovered and bobbed like a balloon version of himself. He could have stood anywhere, but he ducked behind Jack, as if he wanted to look over his shoulder. Gwen thought it would be endearing if it wasn't so annoying, actually. Or maybe she was just hormonal. The books she had been sneaking didn't specifically say much about hormones at this stage. She figured it was all a big racket, the baby book business. No idea why she was thinking about this whilst Jack was already talking about their find; again, probably hormones. Bugger.
"Well," Jack said, poking the ball with one gloved hand. "It's emitting some sort of gas, right?"
Ianto turned the monitor towards them so that they could read the spikes scribbling themselves on the screen. Gwen didn't exactly want to admit it to them, but she had no idea what any of that meant. This was Owen's domain, down here, with the squiggly lines and the metal instruments and the bloody inappropriate sex jokes when he was cutting open aliens. Had been. And she didn't want to think about that either.
Jack scrubbed his face with his hand and looked at the screen. "Yeah, I don't know what that is."
Ianto set his mug down on the table farthest from the... ball, thing. "Nitrogen, oxygen, a little bit of hydrogen, nothing poisonous or harmful to humans or... anything, really. Low level radiation-"
Everyone stepped back from the ball at the same time except Ianto, who rolled his eyes and continued. "But nothing worse than a microwave oven." He let his gaze linger on Jack, and if Gwen didn't know better, she'd have said he was communicating the surly insult right into Jack's skull. It flared in subliminal neon.
She was intrigued. The ball was huge, but light, JJ had said, as he wheeled it in in the containment unit, wheeled by himself, because it was light enough to give the impression that there was nothing in it, just a hollow shell, a locust husk, maybe. Alien husk. Pale sick grey, almost like airbrushed stone, except for the scraggly seaweed on it that JJ hadn't bothered to peel off once it had dried.
She reached out for it, fingers almost touching then pulled back before she made contact, looking at the others. Right, overeagerness was JJ's department now. Who knew what it could do? Trust it to open up into gaping jaws and swallow her in some kind of miniature Rift, or rip off her wrist, or something. "Okay then, but what's inside?" Gwen asked.
Ianto frowned at the screen. "I'm tapped out, here. JJ?"
JJ shrugged. "I, I thought we'd have some gadget that could just like, scan it and tell us what it is."
Jack smiled at the ball, the secret smile that Gwen used to get, the one that she now knew meant, Oh, oh you silly puppy. She was quite glad she didn't get that look anymore. Or depressed. It meant that she knew too much. She could feel the corners of her own mouth turn up in a similar way and knew then she had her own silly puppy look, which was even more depressing.
Not that Jack seemed to have any easy answers either. No joy.
She imagined that her kid kicked in her belly, even though it was the size of a peanut. To cover her sour expression, Gwen lifted the mug in front of her face.
JJ's PDA chirruped and they stared at him as he yanked it from the little leather holder at his waist. Gwen restrained a snort; Rhys had had one of those until it had caught on everything and he'd got it smooshed by a lorry door when pulling it down. "Oh, that's..." JJ two-stepped it out of the med bay and Gwen shrugged at Jack.
"Youth," she said slowly, and Jack raised an eyebrow.
The computers beeped cheerfully and mostly unhelpfully. Ianto sighed and followed JJ up, but he looked down at them over the railing. "Tosh had some other programs in her experimental file that we could patch into the test equipment. I had meant to test them more thoroughly before we used them, but I suppose there's no time like the present." He cocked his head at them, as if he wanted to say something, but nothing happened. In her head, Gwen called these the 'dead grief moments,' spaces that they left where one of the absent members would have said something. She'd once had a Jewish friend who left a place setting for some Biblical character at Passover or something. Sometimes she wondered if they had set two places in the Hub, or if she was desecrating a religious ritual with secular issues.
She looked away and sipped her tea. Jesus, it was horrible. She could taste the lack of caffeine.
"So, yeah," Ianto said, picking up where he left off. "I'll set those up, and we'll see what we can eke out of them." And he left them standing there with the thing.
Jack crossed his arms again, oddly, one of his hands cupped over his chest, over his-
"I think it's an egg," he said to her, and she had to drag her eyes away from his hands and what they were doing. Did he know? Was this a signal that he knew? Her own breasts were bothering her - bras too small, and she was too busy to buy new ones - and maybe he could see the lines at the top of the cups where she was sort of spilling out and, oh. Or maybe he could smell it on her. He once said that he could smell hormones, something about knowing when to avoid Gwen and Tosh on their 'special days,' yet one more reason she would want to deck him but never would, really, but oh God, what if he hadn't been joking?
Gwen set her mug on the table away from the... well, egg was as good as any other thing until they knew for sure. "Jack," she began. She was going to tell him, end the farce. Now was as good a time as any. They were going to eat soon. (Well they were. She was probably going to take three bites and then boot.) They could talk it out over lunch, yeah, food greased all the wheels of conflict, didn't it?
Jack finally reached out a hand and ran it down the smooth plane of the egg, picking at the seaweed, his eyes peering at the surface. "Hmm?"
Gwen lowered her hand to her belly, as if she needed to feel the child in there. Alas, she was still as flat as ever. Well, as flat as she always was. As it was. "I have to tell you-"
"All right!" JJ called as the cog alarms went off and he presumably stepped into the atrium. Jack snapped his hand back to bury itself in his pocket before he turned and bounded up the stairs to peer over Ianto's shoulder at Tosh's workstation. Gwen followed him in double time, and JJ joined them, holding out the cardboard box filled with brown paper bags. "Who's for Chinese?" A nod and a grin and he was gone, off to the conference room to set up, the scent of sweet and sour pork leaving a nauseating trail behind him. Gwen took a few discreet breaths.
Jack chuckled and Ianto watched him go. "That used to be me." He turned to Jack. "Was I ever that..."
"Perky?" Jack filled in. "Oh yeah. Well, in other ways."
Ianto turned back to the screen. "I was going to say eager."
Jack smiled and winked at Gwen. Oh, now it was a show, the Jack and Ianto banter show. "That, too. Or are you talking about job performance?"
"Right then, that's all set up," Ianto said to Gwen, pointedly ignoring Jack and his question. "We should have something by afternoon. Good old Tosh." His hand ran along the workstation absently.
The places set themselves at the table.
Jack turned to her then, brows furrowed. "Did you have something you were going to say? Down there?" He rubbed thumb and fingers together in one of those accidental gestures as if to dust egg shell residue all over the place, but Gwen couldn't help but stare at it, then caught herself and looked up to find Ianto looking at her, the same mirrored expectation, and they stared, both of them, blue eyes full of too many questions, and they didn't even know what questions they should be asking yet.
"No," she said quickly, turning away and towards the stair to the conference room. She could hear JJ clanking the water glasses from the service tray. "Nothing." She didn't turn around to check if Jack and Ianto were exchanging meaningful looks. She hoped not.
When had they ever needed this many chairs? Even at capacity, Jack was fairly sure that no one had ever sat at the far-left chair in the conference room. It probably had the factory settings on it. Virgin chair.
He thought about pulling it out and sitting on it, but deflowering virgins had been part of what had got him into this mess, if he was in a mess and if Ianto was a virgin per se which was dubious and really, it wasn't the virgin part at all, it was that every sexual thought took him back to what was probably gestating inside him.
But Jesus, too many chairs. They should open a soup kitchen. They had space enough. Gwen would love it. They could feed the homeless, the children, the poor starving souls, do something for the world at large. Make someone approve. He tended to think of the Doctor a little too often still; he tried to do it with fondness, but it often turned into something that burnt more bitter and more sad, low in his stomach. Even still. It ached like failure.
Jack strolled about the conference room, hands in the pockets of his trousers, staring at the steaming plastic tray of food at the head of the table. Community outreach, maybe they should do something about that, go into schools and present programs about... aliens?
Gwen would be good at that.
They should recruit people. It was as plain as day this morning, watching JJ jump around in the surf, and Ianto's sheer relief at not being the one to strip down on the beach. He'd earned his stripes, and some things needed to be delegated.
JJ's eager hands tipped over one of the water bottles, still-closed, as he set one out for each of them. It rolled across the table and dropped. Jack watched it in slow motion, bang as it landed and vanished under the table. He gave JJ a broad grin when the man's shamefaced fumbling hands and head disappeared under the table, arse sticking out. Jack appreciated the view. Who wouldn't?
They should recruit, yes.
"Typical," Gwen said as she brushed past Jack and sat in her chair, pulling the plastic tray to her and poking at the veggies with a fork.
"What?" Jack was all innocence.
A meaningful look from her went to Jack, then slid to Ianto, who had come up behind Jack. "He's doing it," she said.
"I know," Ianto said, and a mock-sigh brushed past Jack's lips.
JJ crawled out from under the table and set the bottle on top, slid into his chair, blush up to his ears and burning.
Jack raised an eyebrow at Ianto, question mark hovering in his mind at the secret conversations to which he wasn't privy. This morning seemed to be chock-o-block with them.
Ianto smiled back at him as he sat at the table and nodded to Jack's take-away box. "Food? Mouth? Mmmm?" The only thing that was missing was the bellyrub gesture.
Gwen snorted into her noodles; even JJ made chuckling sounds. Maybe they were becoming a new kind of family. Maybe everything was starting to slot into place, the return of comfortable gestures and-well, Jack could do without the betrayals, however small and insignificant, this time around. As he sat and fumbled the plastic fork out of the plastic sheet to eat from a plastic box (well on the way to the future, this century), it felt like Torchwood again. This.
They should get another medic before the dynamic sealed itself and they'd have to peel the lid off to let the new person in, like opening the top of a rice steamer.
Jack shoved a mouthful of food in. "So, this egg," he began.
Ianto raised an eyebrow at the rice that flew across the table and into his plastic container of... whatever that was. Jack didn't have standards, but he did notice that Ianto often ordered the one thing he figured Jack wouldn't want to steal. It was a good game plan, and effective. Gwen was too far away to steal food from, and JJ well, he could order JJ to fork it over (fork, ha-ha on so many levels), but he wouldn't. Not yet.
"If it's an egg," Ianto chided Jack as he lifted his cutlery and air-stabbed the screen. "Tosh's program is-"
The chimes sounded and the Torchwood logo appeared on the screen, whirled like a top, and then burst into a hail of glittering virtual confetti. Sometimes Jack wondered if Tosh had been bored working here.
The screen beepbeepbeeped a little song, and Ianto blinked. "Is done," he completed. "Fortuitous."
Jack stabbed what he was fairly sure was chicken and twirled his fork before chowing down. "So, dazzle us."
Ianto fiddled with the remotes. (Tosh had made the remotes action-guided using Wii controllers, and Jack wished they still possessed their regular function. How great would a group game of bowling in the conference room be? On the other hand, he'd miss out on Ianto in those manky shoes. Still the bending over would be present, and that was what made bowling great.) Gwen hunched over in her chair, her face hidden behind a curtain of hair, her shoulders slumped and her fork a little gravestone in the cemetery of her noodles. JJ was so excited to see the results that his chair frame all but rattled.
Decaf for that one from now on.
"It's an egg," Ianto said when the results scrolled through the screen. "All those readings we took thirty minutes ago are different. It's gestating something. The nitrogen levels are all different. The radiation is a little higher. But still not remotely harmful," he added quickly as Gwen's head shot up and her eyes widened. "The carbon dioxide level is much much lower, and something is…" He trailed off and played with the remote, his arms swinging as he tried to activate something on the menu. Or serve a volleyball. It was hard to tell.
Jack watched the view on the screen change to show a few infrared and ultraviolet scans of the egg, this time illuminating the insides. Yellow and green whorls moved in the egg, with a dash of purple bioluminescence around the edges of it.
That wasn't the interesting part, though. What was interesting was a small emblem close to the bottom, or at least the bottom of the egg as it rested on the table and let the scanners run over it. Jack wiped his mouth with a serviette and tossed it on the table, narrowly missing the communal dumpling plate.
"Well, hello there," Jack said, watching the swirl of what was probably the beginnings of an exoskeletal structure, maybe, something more concrete than amnion and gas. There, the little swish of what might be a head or antennae.
"You know this thing?" JJ said, pushing his barely-touched container away. He glanced at Gwen, who was looking a little green around the gills. "Did you notice the prawns being off?"
Gwen glared at him for a split second. "I told you no fish." She eyed her container suspiciously. "Is that what this is?"
Jack shrugged. "Ianto, please magnify the top left scan, the lower right quadrant." He shoved back in his chair and thought that, well, sometimes things went well, and sometimes when he'd paid attention in school and told himself that all of this knowledge would pay off someday it never did (He was still a little bitter about all the time he wasted on Vorgosian poetry. No one ever liked it.), but now he was about to be rewarded. Everyone loved a team leader who had answers, and Jack liked providing them.
Plus Ianto treated informative exposition as foreplay sometimes.
His stomach flipped and he remembered that it had probably been expositional foreplay that had got him into his small… mess in the first place.
By then the screen had complied with Ianto's interpretive Wii dance and magnified the bottom right corner of the egg scan to reveal a circular blue-green mark. In the ultraviolet of the picture it looked like a brand, but Jack knew that it had been there since the egg's inception. As the computer program cleared and filled the pixelation further, the resolution finally finished with a triangle shape inside a circle, a little bit like the biohazard symbol.
"PlaneTech, PlaneTech, PlaneTech," Jack murmured. "How I miss your toys and baubles."
"Planet Teck?" JJ asked. "What is that?"
"PlaneTech, as in 'Planet Technologies, Incorporated,'" Jack supplied, eyes on the screen. Something about running into this thing bothered him, and felt slightly nostalgic. "Your one-stop supplier of planet crafting tools, machinery and chemicals from the late thirty-third century and into the fifty-fifth." When he and John helped the Agency bust PlaneTech for insider time trading, but that was neither here nor there and no one needed to know that story. Especially since it ended with Jack naked and in an airlock, in the bad way.
"This is a promotional item, of sorts." Jack waved a hand. "They send them out to far flung reaches of the galaxy."
"What is it?" Gwen said with a bit of impatience, but she did still look a little green.
Jack leant back in his chair. "It's a terraforming egg." He paused. "I haven't seen one in a long time." He shrugged. "Well, see, I was-" he glanced at JJ and in the corner of his eye Ianto tapped his index and middle fingers on the table. "I read about them," he supplied feebly. JJ's newness and not being in the loop was putting a damper on his expositional show.
Gwen drank from her water, deeply, pretty much draining the whole thing. "Okay," she gasped when she was done. "What does it terraform?"
Jack blinked. "Planets." Ianto snorted and Jack felt a surge of victory. He was going to score with this. "Say we wanted Mars to be a breathable, livable place. Earth is getting crowded and we'd like some room to stretch out in." He neglected to tell them that this was pretty much the way things went, in the future, the near future. "PlaneTech comes along, and sells you about fifty of these little babies." Thumb stab at the screen. "You lob them at the planet from orbit, and they do their thing."
The egg on the screen shook minutely and Jack blinked. If it was doing that then they might have an issue.
Ianto tucked back into his lunch, the only one who was remotely interested in food. "So what is their 'thing'?" he asked around a mouthful of something of which Jack was still unsure.
"They release the terraforming gasses, chemicals, like byproducts of their hatching, and, uh, growing," Jack shrugged. That part had always been a little unclear. "They fly, so they move all over the surface of the planet and spread the love," he said, waggling his eyebrows. "PlaneTech comes right behind them and sows the seeds of life itself." He grinned. "Like grass. And nematodes."
"How do you know this stuff?" JJ asked, his food forgotten, hands doing a dance on the tabletop. It looked a little bit like typing.
"I know a lot of stuff," Jack replied at the same time Gwen and Ianto said, "Jack knows a lot of stuff."
JJ raised an eyebrow. "Will I get to know a lot of stuff?"
"Probably not," Ianto muttered at the same time Jack shrugged and replied, "Maybe." Ianto's glare was worth the voice over.
"Anyway," Jack said, flattening his hands on the tabletop. He glanced at his food and felt slightly queasy. Oh, sicking up would be a bad thing, he told himself and took a few breaths. "That's what they do. I don't even know what they're called."
"Is it…" Gwen paused, brows knitting as she watched the egg on the screen. "Are they alive?"
"Well, they're bioengineered-"
"Emphasis on the bio part," Gwen said. "It's alive. What did they do with them once they're… done terraforming?"
Uh oh. Jack knew where this was going. Gwen was getting her compassionate face on, and he wondered for a second what they were going to do with the egg. It could hatch here, but what would they do with it? The thing lived on the gasses and waste of uninhabitable planets. Earth was already hospitable. Well, most of the time. Spend a night out in Splott and you could forget about that real easily.
The egg rocked a little again, and he bit his lower lip. Why did big problems always seem to mirror littler ones? And did they really? And was he preoccupied? And was he going to puke? Shit.
"Who knows?" he said finally. "PlaneTech said that they became space worthy, but I never heard of one actually ever flying about space."
"Heard of one, from where?" JJ mumbled and Jack glanced at Ianto. They were going to have to address this thing with JJ not having access to certain information about them all, and soon. It put a cramp in his style to have to censor himself, this situation being a good case in point. Look, it's not that he even wanted the big musical number.
No, yeah, he did want the big musical number. Ianto managed not to catch his eye. Smart.
"So if it hatches here," Gwen said. "Why would they send one to us? Party favour?"
Ianto snorted. "Party on Mars and you're all invited?"
Jack shrugged. "They don't even exist yet," he said, and decided to push on before JJ asked him how he knew that. "More likely this thing came through the Rift. So no," he smiled at Ianto. "Put your party shoes away for the time being."
"Shame," Ianto said, spearing a piece of something - ah ha! Beef! It had to be beef - on his fork and gesturing at the screen. "We could have all got in on the ground level of prime real estate. Retired rich and moved to Barbados."
"They have speedboats on Barbados," Jack mused looking at the screen and poking his fork at the air. The colours in the egg whirled and spun, and the creature writhed a little, enough that he could see the feather-tracings of what would become wings of some sort, eventually. Don't think of it as prawn. Don't think of it as prawn. Something about this wasn't sitting well with him.
"Do they all do the same thing?" Gwen moaned. Yeah she moaned, Jack decided, and that had to be the precursor to sicking up in a major way. "If this thing hatches, how do we know that it can't unterraform us?" JJ's eyes went wide with that last bit, chopstick hanging out of his mouth like a kid playing walrus. "I mean, not all beings in the universe need the same planet environment, and would it be good business sense to be able to make a... a..." She cast about, covering her mouth with a serviette before continuing through the muffled folds, eyes wide. "Neptune or something?"
"Nothing lives on Neptune," Ianto muttered, reaching for a dumpling, only to be mirrored by JJ, his chopsticks sharp and clacking disposable expertise. "But she has a point."
Jack swiped the Wii controller and with much less movement (he didn't need to bowl to bring up gas readings, because Tosh had taught him all the cheats) and brought up the current readings from the egg. "Look. Nitrogen takes the lead, oxygen coming up on her tail, but there's argon and a host of other negligible horses trailing way back in the third lap," he joked, turning his chair to see the three of them giving him faces that meant that they never went to watch the ponies. Or maybe he just wasn't funny.
He lowered the controller to the table and retrieved his fork. "That's our atmosphere that thing is making in there. And in case you're worried, the colour of the PlaneTech seal designates the type of planet you'll get by breaking the egg." He shrugged. "Or eggs, actually. For something the size of Earth, you'd need at least sixty of these puppies."
JJ tilted his head. "Is it going to look like a puppy?" Ianto drank deeply from his water at precisely that moment, probably to restrain whatever comment he had in his throat. Good man, washing it down like that.
Jack rotated the view on the egg again so they could see the seal, blue and green like the colours of Earth from orbit. They'd never seen that, of course, not like Jack had, but they'd all seen pictures. "Look at that," he said, waving in a circle in the air around the seal with one finger. "The bread and butter of PlaneTech: The Good Mother Earth Model."
Ianto sighed. "Well, that saves me the trouble of worrying about gas masks and shooting things in the face," he mumbled.
Jack sat back and stared at the food, the pieces of chicken that were looking at him like they wanted to go for this eyeballs. They had tasted subtly off. He wouldn't put it past Ianto to mess with JJ and have given him a menu from the discarded take-away services. Jack reached for the water, tried to drink down the subtle carousel in his stomach.
He cleared his throat. "Anyway, that's all I-"
Gwen was out of her chair, plastic knife and fork clattering to wood enamel and then she was out through the door in seconds, her hand to her mouth and a slightly choking sound in her throat. Her shoes clacked hard on the metal steps. Jack stared at Ianto, then both of them stared at JJ.
"You don't suppose-" JJ started.
Cold shivers, the world swam slightly in front of Jack's eyes. He set the water glass down and pushed the chair back as he stood. The scraping got oddly amplified in hyperrealism as his stomach rolled, somersaulting, like on one of the modern fair rides that he hated because they were too much like the crappy space transporters of old that creaked and fell apart in midflight in space. He laughed about people this century still being afraid of aeroplanes, at least aeroplanes didn't crack open and suck you into space to make you space dust or Beastie chow. He closed his eyes, imagining that for a second too long.
Ianto called out something, but it flew over Jack's head as he walked past. His thigh caught on a chair, dull ache spreading to knee and hip. A cough, choked, made it up his throat. He hated Chinese. Ianto was so not getting any if it was the food.
If.
His stomach rolled as he made it to the lower levels of the Hub, even as the Hub Tub seemed tempting a place to let go in, and he felt like a teenager with too many issues that he actually crawled down the ladder to his bunk for privacy in the shithole of a bathroom. His knees cracked as he crashed onto them in front of the toilet bowl and coughing, choking, screwed up his eyes against the acid in his throat. Chicken bits dropped into the toilet bowl, splashing stomach acid water with satay sauce into his face. His stomach tightened again and he retched.
Cold sweat settled on his forehead and spine. So much for pathetic. He wondered if this morning's stick was swimming in the sewers now, or, well, clogged up something just out of sight and pinged in baby-pink or whatever it was. Blue. Green.
Twenty-first century colour. Surely this century wouldn't betray him like this with a freak accident.
But we used protection, Ma.
Well. They had until flowers and exchange of rings and a wedding in white. He knocked on his head. Wood, lame joke there, to straighten it out from irrational thoughts and stared down into the toilet bowl. This wasn't vomit, couldn't be.
He poked at it with his index finger.
Yeah, it was.
His stomach rolled with a second wave and he curled his fingers around the seat of the toilet, pinkie finger pressing to the edge of sharp plastic (thank god he'd never caught on that with other parts of his anatomy) to give him something else to feel besides his stomach pressing up against lungs and things inside. He coughed, choked, then spit out more of the chicken with eyes into the toilet bowl. It looked at him even now. Accusing.
"I don't like this either, buddy." Jack pulled his knees under himself, kneecaps hitting the toilet bowl. He brought a hand to his stomach, thumb rubbing back and forth as if he could feel the prawn-like creature inside underneath the shirt and the layers of muscle and... no, not fat, muscle, pure sirloin beef. Surely he was too old. He was a bit shaky on reproduction in the fifty-first, granted, no idea either how the metaphysical whambam of vortex gold affected it either. Far as he was concerned he'd done his duty. Once.
He kept his finger pressed there. Unbidden, the thought of a baby prawn with a Ianto talking-face-head appeared in his mind and called him Daddy.
He choked up the last of the chicken, and pulled a face at the stench. He'd blame the food until the twenty-first century gave him colour-coded truths. No need to buy the pink push-chair yet and turn the Hub Tub into a baby swimming pool. His stomach twitched like the Ianto-talking-head inside laughed in baby gurgles.
"Jack?" Ianto called, and opened the door, sticking his head in, a repeat of that morning. Jesus, was this going to be their life for the next nine, no eight months? Seven months? Oh fuck, it was too irritating to even think of.
Jack sat back and wiped his mouth with his hand. "You need to call that Chinese place and tell them that their satay is-"
"I believe JJ is already doing that," Ianto said, closing the door behind him and leaning against the wall. "When he's done sympathy vomiting for you and Gwen."
Jack thought of the fact that three of them were currently doing the technicolour yawn and it was relieving. Easier to cover up his. His thing. "Oh that's horrible-"
The last few heaves were always the worst because it was that nasty yellow stomach acid, and he spat it in the bowl while Ianto watched dispassionately. Jack wondered if anything bothered him anymore. Well, he was in the habit of disposing of bodies, bodies in all manner of duress and condition, most of them having relieved their bowels-
And now there wasn't any stomach acid left.
"We've some anti-nausea drugs," Ianto said mildly. "If you still feel queasy. I think they're for chemo patients, but Owen stole them from NHS."
Jack snickered. "Owen was always an altruist," he mumbled, resting his arms on the seat of the bowl and setting his forehead on them. He wanted something cool on his face, a rag, soaked with ether, maybe. If he was unconscious then he wouldn't be feeling the roiling in his stomach. Then again, maybe he'd choke on his vomit and die.
Holy fuck. What would happen to… if he died? Did it just come back? Would it just abort like…? It was enough to make him want to walk off the top catwalk into the atrium pool. Or go into confinement for the rest of his-
He wasn't thinking about this. It was ridiculous. It was-
"I'm sorry to bother you about this," Ianto said, holding out a bottle of something pink and viscous. "But unless you do want something from Owen's pharmacological cornucopia, I need you to drink this." He shook the bottle, nudged the little plastic cup on the rim of the sink. "Because UNIT is on the phone, and they aren't pleased."
Factory Settings: Part Two
Factory Settings
by: amand_r and cruentum
The fluorescent light buzzed. Jack didn't know why it did that - was there a wire loose? Was it made by a faulty connection? What was in those tubes, anyway? Jack had a laundry list of twentieth century tech that he simply knew nothing about. He meant to look at it all, but it seemed like something always came up to eat any free time he had for personal projects.
Case in point, he decided as he leant against the wall in the small utilitarian sink-toilet-shower-hole that passed for the en suite to his bedroom at the Hub. He reached up, plinked the light with his index finger a few times, and then glanced back at the paper in his other hand.
"Right. Okay. 'Each pouch contains one One-Step hCG Strip Test.'" He glanced at the sliver of cardstock in his hand and back at the paper. The light buzzed. "'Desiccant-discard, do not eat.'" He fished out the small packet, sniffed it, touched the tip of his tongue to the paper wrapping, then tossed it behind him, where it landed in the very corner of the room with a salt shaker sound. "'One package insert.' Right." He glanced about for the package insert before realising that he was reading the package insert. "Ah. Okay, so…"
There was a clunking noise from out in the room and he froze. Being discovered had not been in the game plan. But the sound didn't get nearer so he dismissed it as the temperamental banging of the radiator in the far end of his room, yet another form of technology that he'd do well to learn more about, and yet.
Jack shrugged and felt his lips move along with the words he was reading on the paper. It didn't help with calming him down, but it did keep him from cursing or praying to a deity he didn't really believe in. His old Sergeant used to say there were no atheists in foxholes; Jack wondered what he'd think of this moment here.
"'If one coloured line appears in the control region on the test strip and there is no line in the test region, then this indicates a negative result… if two coloured lines appear on the test strip-'"
"Jack?" Ianto rapped twice on the door and then opened it, popping his head in. Jack dropped the strip in his hand straight down to land in the open toilet bowl. He could see it from the corner of his eye, swimming in a tight circle of water ripples. He crunched the paper in his fist and made a tight smile before turning to flush the toilet and start the shower all at once.
"Yup."
Ianto cocked his head. "Are you all right?"
Jack made a show of testing the water with his hands. "This takes forever to warm up."
Ianto rolled his eyes. It was the same thing he told Jack every time he was forced to shower here. "Right. Well, JJ got a report in. Seems we have a... thing."
Jack shrugged and peeled off his pyjama bottoms. "A thing. That a scientific term?"
Ianto glanced up at the light, which had resumed its irritating noise orchestra. "Yup. Out in Sully. Something floating in the water. Fancy a day trip?" The light made a brrrrzaaakt noise when the first roll of steam hit it. Ianto blinked. "I forgot about that. Is that the one you need to have fixed?" Ianto asked, his fingers running along the edge of the door. They both looked up when the light blinked and then half of it went out. "New bulb."
Jack shrugged. "Sure. Later. Give me ten minutes, okay?"
Ianto smiled. "I'll make you a travel cup." And then he was gone.
Jack ignored the shower and uncrumpled the packet insert, then stared at the toilet. He ripped up the directions and tossed them into the bowl, letting them soak up the water before he flushed them. The last one to go was a small strip of paper with blue lettering on pastel pink: '…there is a strong possibility that you are pregnant.' It swirled around and around until it was a blur of letters and then slipped down the pipe, along with the rest of the box's contents, and any answers he'd been determined to obtain this morning.
Jack closed the lid to the toilet and sank down on the seat, his head in his hands. "Oh, I am so fucked."
The SUV tore down Penarth Road and left Grangetown behind in favour of Industrial Cardiff at its best, past the big DIY markets and the Porsche car dealer to propel them straight through Penarth eventually and out the other side.
Ianto was not driving. He monitored the satnav - alien, really - as if everything outside Cardiff city limits was foreign territory. Pressing the buttons, that's what it was all about. Jack was clutching his travel cup with determination, managing not to spill coffee all over himself as he took a long bend one-handed. Those were the true superpowers, ah, if only they had capes and emblems. Ianto's cup was in the holder, bubbling the occasional coffeebubble through the small slit of the drinking hole.
JJ was in the back. JJ had no coffee because he didn't like coffee (imaginary airquotes popped in Ianto's head), but to be fair, JJ was talking too much to even have the time to drink it, anyway.
"I was monitoring the," JJ paused to pronounce carefully, Ianto had seen him memorise names from sheets, "Cranium Modulating Sequence Band. I wanted to make sure it wasn't only coincidence that the energy pattern appeared, the levels were 59 and 77 respectively, I researched it in the database, I thought maybe it was a coincidence, that it had just appeared, but the readings... and then I checked the Rift monitor and there'd been that spike and see there-" JJ pointed over the back of Ianto's seat at the green dot blinking in and out. "It's still there." JJ's voice went off the scale on the same sequence of events he'd reiterated continuously since they'd pulled out of their parking spot and Jack had steered the SUV into the blazing brightness of a sunny day.
"The... thing," Jack said, glancing at Ianto. He took another sip of coffee, hiding glee.
"The thing," Ianto agreed. JJ bobbed his head wildly in the back. In a blip of indulgence, Ianto let him have the excitement. Torchwood made you cynical early enough without any outside help.
Sending the SUV past sleepy neighborhood houses, Penarth at their backs, Jack looked more at his coffee than at the road until Ianto said, "Next left," and Jack forced the car into a hard turn, coffee sloshing over the wheel to the floor boards. Ianto rolled his eyes in response to Jack's mouthed 'Whoops.'
"Risk assessment?" Jack asked, slowing the car in the quiet mid-morning neighbourhood, glancing at Ianto even as JJ was gesticulating in the back, front row student begging for a say.
"Low, for all we know," Ianto replied. "The readings are within normal parameters if unusual, no discernible radiation."
"We can go in, then."
"It's in the water," Ianto ventured, and the thought of wading into the Bristol Channel in October was not his idea of a quiet day. Torchwood: Wales was not warm enough for this. And the waters were too shallow for the boat. Yes, he had researched that between pouring the coffee and securing a chocolate snack for himself for later. Pity. That would have been a sweet outing.
Jack looked into the rearview mirror. "Your first big one," he said to JJ as if the coffee gurgling amusement had never happened on the way. More head bobbing and bouncing on seats. Someone was about to cream his pants. "It'll be good," Jack added. The fond look that stole over his face when he looked at JJ, it was different. Even with Gwen, Ianto had never felt like they were teaching a toddler the ways of the world. Way to feel old. He'd got cannibals for his first real outing, fingers crossed this affair was more benign and less bitey. It wasn't an apology for all the other things that went down with Torchwood regularly, but maybe a reminder that it could be good, and JJ was lapping that up. Hard to feel bad about that lie.
A cricket pitch to their left, a school to their right and Jack pulled the car to a stop. They got out and Jack saluted the children in the playground who gaped open-mouthed at their parade of a black superman car, soldier, suit and eager beaver. Ianto grabbed a bag with instruments he thrust at JJ. You couldn't possibly kick puppies.
He glanced up to the sky, squinting, and lips pronouncing his distaste. The sun was out, cold, crisp and not raining. It was too bright by far, going for punishment. Ianto pencilled sleep into his schedule for the near future; he scowled at the brightness biting at his eyes and hoped that someone appreciated the solar glare.
"That," Jack said, sporting smart sunglasses and a big fat grin, finger dancing in pointy gesture in front of Ianto's eyes, "is because you don't get out enough."
Ianto reserved a reply. Instead he filed it under 'When more convenient' in his head.
JJ bounded ahead, somersaulting himself over the dunes and he was halfway down to the water, balancing God knows how on jagged stones before Jack and Ianto could even see the waterline. The tide was out.
JJ waved and pointed and shouted something that was carried away by the wind.
"Ma, can I keep him?" Ianto asked, hands thrust into the pockets of his trousers. Huh, there were five twist-ties in the left one.
Jack caught his eye and needed more than a second to nod and grin. "I'll give him a collar for Christmas."
Ianto didn't think the if he lasts that long. You did not think that in Torchwood, or you'd be thinking about nothing else the next time you stared at a weevil up-close.
"You never gave me one," Ianto replied. "I'm crushed." Jack half-snorted amusement and forewent an answer. There were too many responses to that, Ianto supposed, some of which were sexy and some of which spoke volumes about what Jack had once considered Ianto's own aptitude for Torchwood-life. Watching JJ hop from rock to rock on the beach, Ianto wasn't sure he'd ever been that innocent, not after Lisa.
"Over there," Ianto murmured, and he and Jack made their way down the concrete boat access route and reached the waterline just as JJ did.
"Are you indulging him? With this thing?" Jack asked when JJ pointed to the bobbing thing, actually not that small at all, and Ianto was surprised by that, some twenty yards off the low tide line.
"I was. Now I'm not. The readings didn't indicate that it'd be that..." Ianto walked a few feet closer, tried to shield his eyes with his hand to get a clearer picture. Grey and roughly the size of a chair? The boss chair with wide arm rests and whatnot. He'd been hoping for paperweight size.
"You didn't scan for size?"
"I didn't double-check someone else's readings." Defensiveness, he had it, in spades. Jack shrugged in 'fair enough,' and Ianto reached up for his bluetooth, activating it. "Gwen?"
"Boys?" Gwen said, a little out of breath, over the comm. "Having a good day out?"
"Overwhelmingly so," Ianto said as he watched JJ hop closer to the water. "He's not going to jump in, is he?"
"Oh, I'd like to see that," Jack replied, the sun reflecting off his glasses. Voice distracted, eyes impossible to see looking out to sea, maybe, at the... thing, maybe. At JJ's arse, very likely. The glasses were a useful tool. Ianto would admit that he wanted a pair, if he wasn't being stubborn.
"And how is your 'sad tummy,' Gwen?" he muttered, ignoring Jack's amused smort.
"Oh, you know how these bugs are," Gwen said distractedly but didn't elucidate.
The gulls were interested in the thing. Ianto wasn't sure that was such a good plan. Nothing good could come of birds eating alien whatever and then flying off to let it gestate in their bellies in Porthkerry. "Can you check the risk assessment for this again, Gwen? There should be a copy of mine on the desk." Gwen made affirmative noises in Ianto's ear, and he barreled on, "Run the same tests again. Did anything change?"
Jack walked down to where the water was lapping up the boat access track and he watched JJ hopping about on the beach, waving Torchwood equipment, perilously close to losing it to the waves.
"I didn't think it'd be that big," Ianto said to no-one.
Jack caught that and smirked. "I've heard that one before."
It was barely worth an eyeroll. "Risk still low," Gwen's voice came on, "but the readings are minimally different. It all points to more activity, but the increase isn't enough to be alarming."
"Might be the sun," Ianto said, pacing two steps into one, another two into the other direction.
"Safe to bring in?" Jack asked. Ianto relayed the question.
Gwen gave a definite yes over the comms.
"No signs of life?" Ianto asked, just to make sure again, as he followed Jack into that field of stones to get closer to both the thing and JJ taking his own intrepid readings.
"None," Gwen confirmed.
Jack turned to Ianto and shook his head at the passed-on information. "Prepare quarantine anyway," Jack said.
Ianto repeated it for Gwen, then clicked the line out. The ragged stone edges proved a nuisance through dress shoe soles, and a glimmer of regret at indulging both Jack and JJ with a spot of team building settled somewhere in Ianto's gut. Someone walked past with dogs higher up on the shore, stopping, watching JJ and his beeping, blinking bag of Torchwood tech.
"Surveying," Ianto called across to the man.
The man turned towards him. "Down there?"
Ianto shrugged and nodded at Jack in a 'What can you do with a boss like that?' gesture and the man nodded and walked on, shaking his head in amusement. Jack's coat was good for deflection as well as hours spent with it after work in more imaginative manners.
Ianto made his way to Jack and JJ, who was talking, showing Jack the readings, well, holding them up to his face to force his eyes to them. Jack nodded absently, fingers scratching at his chest, no, pressing at his chest, as if he hurt, making a face when JJ practically pulled on his sleeve to get his attention again. Jack pulled his glasses down his nose and glanced at JJ over them, then out at the thing that was floating on the waves as he took off the glasses altogether, putting them in the pocket of his coat.
"Is it alive inside?" JJ asked, almost reverently as he stood to Jack's right, gazing out at the water from behind Jack's shoulder.
Jack glanced at him, then to Ianto, who stood three rocks over and shrugged. "Maybe it's a dinosaur egg?" he offered to them.
Ianto snorted and crouched on his rock. He pulled a small container from his jacket pocket and took a sample of the water. It wouldn't be the first time Wales was breeding its own... things. If anyone asked Ianto, it was due to Merlin fucking up majorly somewhere down the line.
"It doesn't look like an egg, though," JJ ventured and then found the answer to the dangling herring of a test. "No life signs," he said triumphantly. Jack smiled. It was missing the 'good boy' or else JJ would have preened. Ianto watched the bobbing thing through the A of Jack's feet spread to shoulder width. He had to give JJ that; appearance couldn't be more unegglike, smooth grey planes, then crusted patches that curled the waves to white as they swept over it.
"Engineered?" Ianto asked Jack, ignoring that JJ was intently consulting the instruments.
Jack shrugged, arms crossed over his chest, hands tucked under the arm pits. He frowned, looked down himself, then shook his head and glanced at Ianto with his small container of tepid beach water. "Could be," he managed for a vocal answer.
Ianto wanted more coffee just about now. And the Hub. He hated the sun. That and the stink of rotting seaweed.
"The tide is going out still," Ianto said, pointing at the wet spots as the only reminder of water that had covered rocks.
Silence.
"The thing is only going to be out farther the longer we wait," Ianto explained.
"Oh come on, Ianto, you're having fun on the beach, aren't you?" Jack called him out. It was only missing a glance over sunglasses to be a parody of something funny.
"It's shocking how much," Ianto replied and nodded at their floating retreating quarry. The wind came up sharper in a breeze, not exactly adding to beach day ambiance.
"Well then." Jack turned in half a swivel. "Get it to the shore, Jones."
Ianto smiled. Jack looked at him. And Ianto's smile never wavered.
"Right," Jack said, turning on JJ, clapped him on the shoulder with a winning grin. "Time to earn your keep. Exciting, isn't it? Oh yes."
JJ nodded.
Jack nodded.
Ianto rolled his eyes.
"We'll meet you back at the Hub," Jack said. "Let's hope it's not going to bite you. You never know!" Jack hopped back across the rocks towards Ianto.
JJ gestured with his Torchwood tech and a decidedly pathetic puppy dog expression. "It's in the water."
"I know you can swim. Ianto, time's a-wasting," Jack called over his shoulder as he pushed past Ianto, making his way up the shore again. Ianto walked down to JJ, pressed a card from a haulage firm into his hand. "They know us. They'll get it done."
"Gwen," Ianto activated the comm, "JJ will bring it in. Keep an eye on the readings and him updated."
"What if it-what if it explodes?" JJ called after Ianto.
Ianto smiled as he turned, following Jack's path back up the shore. "Welcome to Torchwood," he said. Ah, he didn't mind the sun at all now, maybe he could convince Jack to have a water whilst he sat with a pint in a roadside pub. Torchwood: promising good times when someone else does the dirty work.
Gwen confirmed in his ear and he relayed a few of the parameters from JJ's on-site readings to her. Jack was waiting on the dune, surveying his kingdom. He was wearing the sunglasses again. So much for a sunny day out.
"They grow up so fast," Ianto joked.
Behind them JJ was shrugging out of his clothes. Ianto didn't quite know whether to laugh or nod approvingly.
Jack snorted and turned on his heel. "Let's hope he doesn't drown."
Gwen folded her arms about her stomach. "So this is it. The thing."
Jack mirrored her and they peered at each other over the enormous... what was this? "Yup."
"From Sully."
Jack's eyes sparked. "There's nothing silly about it." He mock-shrugged. "I admit it's rather goofy-looking but-"
Gwen accepted the mug of tea from Ianto as he finished his journey down the steps to the med bay. "Ianto, Jack just made fun of my accent again."
Ianto, whose arm had been on the uplift of a coffee mug into Jack's hands, abruptly u-turned at the elbow and brought the mug to his own lips instead. Jack raised his eyebrows and Ianto simply shrugged, as if to say, 'It's out of my hands.' Gwen blew on her tea and hated the smell of it already.
Behind Jack, JJ hovered and bobbed like a balloon version of himself. He could have stood anywhere, but he ducked behind Jack, as if he wanted to look over his shoulder. Gwen thought it would be endearing if it wasn't so annoying, actually. Or maybe she was just hormonal. The books she had been sneaking didn't specifically say much about hormones at this stage. She figured it was all a big racket, the baby book business. No idea why she was thinking about this whilst Jack was already talking about their find; again, probably hormones. Bugger.
"Well," Jack said, poking the ball with one gloved hand. "It's emitting some sort of gas, right?"
Ianto turned the monitor towards them so that they could read the spikes scribbling themselves on the screen. Gwen didn't exactly want to admit it to them, but she had no idea what any of that meant. This was Owen's domain, down here, with the squiggly lines and the metal instruments and the bloody inappropriate sex jokes when he was cutting open aliens. Had been. And she didn't want to think about that either.
Jack scrubbed his face with his hand and looked at the screen. "Yeah, I don't know what that is."
Ianto set his mug down on the table farthest from the... ball, thing. "Nitrogen, oxygen, a little bit of hydrogen, nothing poisonous or harmful to humans or... anything, really. Low level radiation-"
Everyone stepped back from the ball at the same time except Ianto, who rolled his eyes and continued. "But nothing worse than a microwave oven." He let his gaze linger on Jack, and if Gwen didn't know better, she'd have said he was communicating the surly insult right into Jack's skull. It flared in subliminal neon.
She was intrigued. The ball was huge, but light, JJ had said, as he wheeled it in in the containment unit, wheeled by himself, because it was light enough to give the impression that there was nothing in it, just a hollow shell, a locust husk, maybe. Alien husk. Pale sick grey, almost like airbrushed stone, except for the scraggly seaweed on it that JJ hadn't bothered to peel off once it had dried.
She reached out for it, fingers almost touching then pulled back before she made contact, looking at the others. Right, overeagerness was JJ's department now. Who knew what it could do? Trust it to open up into gaping jaws and swallow her in some kind of miniature Rift, or rip off her wrist, or something. "Okay then, but what's inside?" Gwen asked.
Ianto frowned at the screen. "I'm tapped out, here. JJ?"
JJ shrugged. "I, I thought we'd have some gadget that could just like, scan it and tell us what it is."
Jack smiled at the ball, the secret smile that Gwen used to get, the one that she now knew meant, Oh, oh you silly puppy. She was quite glad she didn't get that look anymore. Or depressed. It meant that she knew too much. She could feel the corners of her own mouth turn up in a similar way and knew then she had her own silly puppy look, which was even more depressing.
Not that Jack seemed to have any easy answers either. No joy.
She imagined that her kid kicked in her belly, even though it was the size of a peanut. To cover her sour expression, Gwen lifted the mug in front of her face.
JJ's PDA chirruped and they stared at him as he yanked it from the little leather holder at his waist. Gwen restrained a snort; Rhys had had one of those until it had caught on everything and he'd got it smooshed by a lorry door when pulling it down. "Oh, that's..." JJ two-stepped it out of the med bay and Gwen shrugged at Jack.
"Youth," she said slowly, and Jack raised an eyebrow.
The computers beeped cheerfully and mostly unhelpfully. Ianto sighed and followed JJ up, but he looked down at them over the railing. "Tosh had some other programs in her experimental file that we could patch into the test equipment. I had meant to test them more thoroughly before we used them, but I suppose there's no time like the present." He cocked his head at them, as if he wanted to say something, but nothing happened. In her head, Gwen called these the 'dead grief moments,' spaces that they left where one of the absent members would have said something. She'd once had a Jewish friend who left a place setting for some Biblical character at Passover or something. Sometimes she wondered if they had set two places in the Hub, or if she was desecrating a religious ritual with secular issues.
She looked away and sipped her tea. Jesus, it was horrible. She could taste the lack of caffeine.
"So, yeah," Ianto said, picking up where he left off. "I'll set those up, and we'll see what we can eke out of them." And he left them standing there with the thing.
Jack crossed his arms again, oddly, one of his hands cupped over his chest, over his-
"I think it's an egg," he said to her, and she had to drag her eyes away from his hands and what they were doing. Did he know? Was this a signal that he knew? Her own breasts were bothering her - bras too small, and she was too busy to buy new ones - and maybe he could see the lines at the top of the cups where she was sort of spilling out and, oh. Or maybe he could smell it on her. He once said that he could smell hormones, something about knowing when to avoid Gwen and Tosh on their 'special days,' yet one more reason she would want to deck him but never would, really, but oh God, what if he hadn't been joking?
Gwen set her mug on the table away from the... well, egg was as good as any other thing until they knew for sure. "Jack," she began. She was going to tell him, end the farce. Now was as good a time as any. They were going to eat soon. (Well they were. She was probably going to take three bites and then boot.) They could talk it out over lunch, yeah, food greased all the wheels of conflict, didn't it?
Jack finally reached out a hand and ran it down the smooth plane of the egg, picking at the seaweed, his eyes peering at the surface. "Hmm?"
Gwen lowered her hand to her belly, as if she needed to feel the child in there. Alas, she was still as flat as ever. Well, as flat as she always was. As it was. "I have to tell you-"
"All right!" JJ called as the cog alarms went off and he presumably stepped into the atrium. Jack snapped his hand back to bury itself in his pocket before he turned and bounded up the stairs to peer over Ianto's shoulder at Tosh's workstation. Gwen followed him in double time, and JJ joined them, holding out the cardboard box filled with brown paper bags. "Who's for Chinese?" A nod and a grin and he was gone, off to the conference room to set up, the scent of sweet and sour pork leaving a nauseating trail behind him. Gwen took a few discreet breaths.
Jack chuckled and Ianto watched him go. "That used to be me." He turned to Jack. "Was I ever that..."
"Perky?" Jack filled in. "Oh yeah. Well, in other ways."
Ianto turned back to the screen. "I was going to say eager."
Jack smiled and winked at Gwen. Oh, now it was a show, the Jack and Ianto banter show. "That, too. Or are you talking about job performance?"
"Right then, that's all set up," Ianto said to Gwen, pointedly ignoring Jack and his question. "We should have something by afternoon. Good old Tosh." His hand ran along the workstation absently.
The places set themselves at the table.
Jack turned to her then, brows furrowed. "Did you have something you were going to say? Down there?" He rubbed thumb and fingers together in one of those accidental gestures as if to dust egg shell residue all over the place, but Gwen couldn't help but stare at it, then caught herself and looked up to find Ianto looking at her, the same mirrored expectation, and they stared, both of them, blue eyes full of too many questions, and they didn't even know what questions they should be asking yet.
"No," she said quickly, turning away and towards the stair to the conference room. She could hear JJ clanking the water glasses from the service tray. "Nothing." She didn't turn around to check if Jack and Ianto were exchanging meaningful looks. She hoped not.
When had they ever needed this many chairs? Even at capacity, Jack was fairly sure that no one had ever sat at the far-left chair in the conference room. It probably had the factory settings on it. Virgin chair.
He thought about pulling it out and sitting on it, but deflowering virgins had been part of what had got him into this mess, if he was in a mess and if Ianto was a virgin per se which was dubious and really, it wasn't the virgin part at all, it was that every sexual thought took him back to what was probably gestating inside him.
But Jesus, too many chairs. They should open a soup kitchen. They had space enough. Gwen would love it. They could feed the homeless, the children, the poor starving souls, do something for the world at large. Make someone approve. He tended to think of the Doctor a little too often still; he tried to do it with fondness, but it often turned into something that burnt more bitter and more sad, low in his stomach. Even still. It ached like failure.
Jack strolled about the conference room, hands in the pockets of his trousers, staring at the steaming plastic tray of food at the head of the table. Community outreach, maybe they should do something about that, go into schools and present programs about... aliens?
Gwen would be good at that.
They should recruit people. It was as plain as day this morning, watching JJ jump around in the surf, and Ianto's sheer relief at not being the one to strip down on the beach. He'd earned his stripes, and some things needed to be delegated.
JJ's eager hands tipped over one of the water bottles, still-closed, as he set one out for each of them. It rolled across the table and dropped. Jack watched it in slow motion, bang as it landed and vanished under the table. He gave JJ a broad grin when the man's shamefaced fumbling hands and head disappeared under the table, arse sticking out. Jack appreciated the view. Who wouldn't?
They should recruit, yes.
"Typical," Gwen said as she brushed past Jack and sat in her chair, pulling the plastic tray to her and poking at the veggies with a fork.
"What?" Jack was all innocence.
A meaningful look from her went to Jack, then slid to Ianto, who had come up behind Jack. "He's doing it," she said.
"I know," Ianto said, and a mock-sigh brushed past Jack's lips.
JJ crawled out from under the table and set the bottle on top, slid into his chair, blush up to his ears and burning.
Jack raised an eyebrow at Ianto, question mark hovering in his mind at the secret conversations to which he wasn't privy. This morning seemed to be chock-o-block with them.
Ianto smiled back at him as he sat at the table and nodded to Jack's take-away box. "Food? Mouth? Mmmm?" The only thing that was missing was the bellyrub gesture.
Gwen snorted into her noodles; even JJ made chuckling sounds. Maybe they were becoming a new kind of family. Maybe everything was starting to slot into place, the return of comfortable gestures and-well, Jack could do without the betrayals, however small and insignificant, this time around. As he sat and fumbled the plastic fork out of the plastic sheet to eat from a plastic box (well on the way to the future, this century), it felt like Torchwood again. This.
They should get another medic before the dynamic sealed itself and they'd have to peel the lid off to let the new person in, like opening the top of a rice steamer.
Jack shoved a mouthful of food in. "So, this egg," he began.
Ianto raised an eyebrow at the rice that flew across the table and into his plastic container of... whatever that was. Jack didn't have standards, but he did notice that Ianto often ordered the one thing he figured Jack wouldn't want to steal. It was a good game plan, and effective. Gwen was too far away to steal food from, and JJ well, he could order JJ to fork it over (fork, ha-ha on so many levels), but he wouldn't. Not yet.
"If it's an egg," Ianto chided Jack as he lifted his cutlery and air-stabbed the screen. "Tosh's program is-"
The chimes sounded and the Torchwood logo appeared on the screen, whirled like a top, and then burst into a hail of glittering virtual confetti. Sometimes Jack wondered if Tosh had been bored working here.
The screen beepbeepbeeped a little song, and Ianto blinked. "Is done," he completed. "Fortuitous."
Jack stabbed what he was fairly sure was chicken and twirled his fork before chowing down. "So, dazzle us."
Ianto fiddled with the remotes. (Tosh had made the remotes action-guided using Wii controllers, and Jack wished they still possessed their regular function. How great would a group game of bowling in the conference room be? On the other hand, he'd miss out on Ianto in those manky shoes. Still the bending over would be present, and that was what made bowling great.) Gwen hunched over in her chair, her face hidden behind a curtain of hair, her shoulders slumped and her fork a little gravestone in the cemetery of her noodles. JJ was so excited to see the results that his chair frame all but rattled.
Decaf for that one from now on.
"It's an egg," Ianto said when the results scrolled through the screen. "All those readings we took thirty minutes ago are different. It's gestating something. The nitrogen levels are all different. The radiation is a little higher. But still not remotely harmful," he added quickly as Gwen's head shot up and her eyes widened. "The carbon dioxide level is much much lower, and something is…" He trailed off and played with the remote, his arms swinging as he tried to activate something on the menu. Or serve a volleyball. It was hard to tell.
Jack watched the view on the screen change to show a few infrared and ultraviolet scans of the egg, this time illuminating the insides. Yellow and green whorls moved in the egg, with a dash of purple bioluminescence around the edges of it.
That wasn't the interesting part, though. What was interesting was a small emblem close to the bottom, or at least the bottom of the egg as it rested on the table and let the scanners run over it. Jack wiped his mouth with a serviette and tossed it on the table, narrowly missing the communal dumpling plate.
"Well, hello there," Jack said, watching the swirl of what was probably the beginnings of an exoskeletal structure, maybe, something more concrete than amnion and gas. There, the little swish of what might be a head or antennae.
"You know this thing?" JJ said, pushing his barely-touched container away. He glanced at Gwen, who was looking a little green around the gills. "Did you notice the prawns being off?"
Gwen glared at him for a split second. "I told you no fish." She eyed her container suspiciously. "Is that what this is?"
Jack shrugged. "Ianto, please magnify the top left scan, the lower right quadrant." He shoved back in his chair and thought that, well, sometimes things went well, and sometimes when he'd paid attention in school and told himself that all of this knowledge would pay off someday it never did (He was still a little bitter about all the time he wasted on Vorgosian poetry. No one ever liked it.), but now he was about to be rewarded. Everyone loved a team leader who had answers, and Jack liked providing them.
Plus Ianto treated informative exposition as foreplay sometimes.
His stomach flipped and he remembered that it had probably been expositional foreplay that had got him into his small… mess in the first place.
By then the screen had complied with Ianto's interpretive Wii dance and magnified the bottom right corner of the egg scan to reveal a circular blue-green mark. In the ultraviolet of the picture it looked like a brand, but Jack knew that it had been there since the egg's inception. As the computer program cleared and filled the pixelation further, the resolution finally finished with a triangle shape inside a circle, a little bit like the biohazard symbol.
"PlaneTech, PlaneTech, PlaneTech," Jack murmured. "How I miss your toys and baubles."
"Planet Teck?" JJ asked. "What is that?"
"PlaneTech, as in 'Planet Technologies, Incorporated,'" Jack supplied, eyes on the screen. Something about running into this thing bothered him, and felt slightly nostalgic. "Your one-stop supplier of planet crafting tools, machinery and chemicals from the late thirty-third century and into the fifty-fifth." When he and John helped the Agency bust PlaneTech for insider time trading, but that was neither here nor there and no one needed to know that story. Especially since it ended with Jack naked and in an airlock, in the bad way.
"This is a promotional item, of sorts." Jack waved a hand. "They send them out to far flung reaches of the galaxy."
"What is it?" Gwen said with a bit of impatience, but she did still look a little green.
Jack leant back in his chair. "It's a terraforming egg." He paused. "I haven't seen one in a long time." He shrugged. "Well, see, I was-" he glanced at JJ and in the corner of his eye Ianto tapped his index and middle fingers on the table. "I read about them," he supplied feebly. JJ's newness and not being in the loop was putting a damper on his expositional show.
Gwen drank from her water, deeply, pretty much draining the whole thing. "Okay," she gasped when she was done. "What does it terraform?"
Jack blinked. "Planets." Ianto snorted and Jack felt a surge of victory. He was going to score with this. "Say we wanted Mars to be a breathable, livable place. Earth is getting crowded and we'd like some room to stretch out in." He neglected to tell them that this was pretty much the way things went, in the future, the near future. "PlaneTech comes along, and sells you about fifty of these little babies." Thumb stab at the screen. "You lob them at the planet from orbit, and they do their thing."
The egg on the screen shook minutely and Jack blinked. If it was doing that then they might have an issue.
Ianto tucked back into his lunch, the only one who was remotely interested in food. "So what is their 'thing'?" he asked around a mouthful of something of which Jack was still unsure.
"They release the terraforming gasses, chemicals, like byproducts of their hatching, and, uh, growing," Jack shrugged. That part had always been a little unclear. "They fly, so they move all over the surface of the planet and spread the love," he said, waggling his eyebrows. "PlaneTech comes right behind them and sows the seeds of life itself." He grinned. "Like grass. And nematodes."
"How do you know this stuff?" JJ asked, his food forgotten, hands doing a dance on the tabletop. It looked a little bit like typing.
"I know a lot of stuff," Jack replied at the same time Gwen and Ianto said, "Jack knows a lot of stuff."
JJ raised an eyebrow. "Will I get to know a lot of stuff?"
"Probably not," Ianto muttered at the same time Jack shrugged and replied, "Maybe." Ianto's glare was worth the voice over.
"Anyway," Jack said, flattening his hands on the tabletop. He glanced at his food and felt slightly queasy. Oh, sicking up would be a bad thing, he told himself and took a few breaths. "That's what they do. I don't even know what they're called."
"Is it…" Gwen paused, brows knitting as she watched the egg on the screen. "Are they alive?"
"Well, they're bioengineered-"
"Emphasis on the bio part," Gwen said. "It's alive. What did they do with them once they're… done terraforming?"
Uh oh. Jack knew where this was going. Gwen was getting her compassionate face on, and he wondered for a second what they were going to do with the egg. It could hatch here, but what would they do with it? The thing lived on the gasses and waste of uninhabitable planets. Earth was already hospitable. Well, most of the time. Spend a night out in Splott and you could forget about that real easily.
The egg rocked a little again, and he bit his lower lip. Why did big problems always seem to mirror littler ones? And did they really? And was he preoccupied? And was he going to puke? Shit.
"Who knows?" he said finally. "PlaneTech said that they became space worthy, but I never heard of one actually ever flying about space."
"Heard of one, from where?" JJ mumbled and Jack glanced at Ianto. They were going to have to address this thing with JJ not having access to certain information about them all, and soon. It put a cramp in his style to have to censor himself, this situation being a good case in point. Look, it's not that he even wanted the big musical number.
No, yeah, he did want the big musical number. Ianto managed not to catch his eye. Smart.
"So if it hatches here," Gwen said. "Why would they send one to us? Party favour?"
Ianto snorted. "Party on Mars and you're all invited?"
Jack shrugged. "They don't even exist yet," he said, and decided to push on before JJ asked him how he knew that. "More likely this thing came through the Rift. So no," he smiled at Ianto. "Put your party shoes away for the time being."
"Shame," Ianto said, spearing a piece of something - ah ha! Beef! It had to be beef - on his fork and gesturing at the screen. "We could have all got in on the ground level of prime real estate. Retired rich and moved to Barbados."
"They have speedboats on Barbados," Jack mused looking at the screen and poking his fork at the air. The colours in the egg whirled and spun, and the creature writhed a little, enough that he could see the feather-tracings of what would become wings of some sort, eventually. Don't think of it as prawn. Don't think of it as prawn. Something about this wasn't sitting well with him.
"Do they all do the same thing?" Gwen moaned. Yeah she moaned, Jack decided, and that had to be the precursor to sicking up in a major way. "If this thing hatches, how do we know that it can't unterraform us?" JJ's eyes went wide with that last bit, chopstick hanging out of his mouth like a kid playing walrus. "I mean, not all beings in the universe need the same planet environment, and would it be good business sense to be able to make a... a..." She cast about, covering her mouth with a serviette before continuing through the muffled folds, eyes wide. "Neptune or something?"
"Nothing lives on Neptune," Ianto muttered, reaching for a dumpling, only to be mirrored by JJ, his chopsticks sharp and clacking disposable expertise. "But she has a point."
Jack swiped the Wii controller and with much less movement (he didn't need to bowl to bring up gas readings, because Tosh had taught him all the cheats) and brought up the current readings from the egg. "Look. Nitrogen takes the lead, oxygen coming up on her tail, but there's argon and a host of other negligible horses trailing way back in the third lap," he joked, turning his chair to see the three of them giving him faces that meant that they never went to watch the ponies. Or maybe he just wasn't funny.
He lowered the controller to the table and retrieved his fork. "That's our atmosphere that thing is making in there. And in case you're worried, the colour of the PlaneTech seal designates the type of planet you'll get by breaking the egg." He shrugged. "Or eggs, actually. For something the size of Earth, you'd need at least sixty of these puppies."
JJ tilted his head. "Is it going to look like a puppy?" Ianto drank deeply from his water at precisely that moment, probably to restrain whatever comment he had in his throat. Good man, washing it down like that.
Jack rotated the view on the egg again so they could see the seal, blue and green like the colours of Earth from orbit. They'd never seen that, of course, not like Jack had, but they'd all seen pictures. "Look at that," he said, waving in a circle in the air around the seal with one finger. "The bread and butter of PlaneTech: The Good Mother Earth Model."
Ianto sighed. "Well, that saves me the trouble of worrying about gas masks and shooting things in the face," he mumbled.
Jack sat back and stared at the food, the pieces of chicken that were looking at him like they wanted to go for this eyeballs. They had tasted subtly off. He wouldn't put it past Ianto to mess with JJ and have given him a menu from the discarded take-away services. Jack reached for the water, tried to drink down the subtle carousel in his stomach.
He cleared his throat. "Anyway, that's all I-"
Gwen was out of her chair, plastic knife and fork clattering to wood enamel and then she was out through the door in seconds, her hand to her mouth and a slightly choking sound in her throat. Her shoes clacked hard on the metal steps. Jack stared at Ianto, then both of them stared at JJ.
"You don't suppose-" JJ started.
Cold shivers, the world swam slightly in front of Jack's eyes. He set the water glass down and pushed the chair back as he stood. The scraping got oddly amplified in hyperrealism as his stomach rolled, somersaulting, like on one of the modern fair rides that he hated because they were too much like the crappy space transporters of old that creaked and fell apart in midflight in space. He laughed about people this century still being afraid of aeroplanes, at least aeroplanes didn't crack open and suck you into space to make you space dust or Beastie chow. He closed his eyes, imagining that for a second too long.
Ianto called out something, but it flew over Jack's head as he walked past. His thigh caught on a chair, dull ache spreading to knee and hip. A cough, choked, made it up his throat. He hated Chinese. Ianto was so not getting any if it was the food.
If.
His stomach rolled as he made it to the lower levels of the Hub, even as the Hub Tub seemed tempting a place to let go in, and he felt like a teenager with too many issues that he actually crawled down the ladder to his bunk for privacy in the shithole of a bathroom. His knees cracked as he crashed onto them in front of the toilet bowl and coughing, choking, screwed up his eyes against the acid in his throat. Chicken bits dropped into the toilet bowl, splashing stomach acid water with satay sauce into his face. His stomach tightened again and he retched.
Cold sweat settled on his forehead and spine. So much for pathetic. He wondered if this morning's stick was swimming in the sewers now, or, well, clogged up something just out of sight and pinged in baby-pink or whatever it was. Blue. Green.
Twenty-first century colour. Surely this century wouldn't betray him like this with a freak accident.
But we used protection, Ma.
Well. They had until flowers and exchange of rings and a wedding in white. He knocked on his head. Wood, lame joke there, to straighten it out from irrational thoughts and stared down into the toilet bowl. This wasn't vomit, couldn't be.
He poked at it with his index finger.
Yeah, it was.
His stomach rolled with a second wave and he curled his fingers around the seat of the toilet, pinkie finger pressing to the edge of sharp plastic (thank god he'd never caught on that with other parts of his anatomy) to give him something else to feel besides his stomach pressing up against lungs and things inside. He coughed, choked, then spit out more of the chicken with eyes into the toilet bowl. It looked at him even now. Accusing.
"I don't like this either, buddy." Jack pulled his knees under himself, kneecaps hitting the toilet bowl. He brought a hand to his stomach, thumb rubbing back and forth as if he could feel the prawn-like creature inside underneath the shirt and the layers of muscle and... no, not fat, muscle, pure sirloin beef. Surely he was too old. He was a bit shaky on reproduction in the fifty-first, granted, no idea either how the metaphysical whambam of vortex gold affected it either. Far as he was concerned he'd done his duty. Once.
He kept his finger pressed there. Unbidden, the thought of a baby prawn with a Ianto talking-face-head appeared in his mind and called him Daddy.
He choked up the last of the chicken, and pulled a face at the stench. He'd blame the food until the twenty-first century gave him colour-coded truths. No need to buy the pink push-chair yet and turn the Hub Tub into a baby swimming pool. His stomach twitched like the Ianto-talking-head inside laughed in baby gurgles.
"Jack?" Ianto called, and opened the door, sticking his head in, a repeat of that morning. Jesus, was this going to be their life for the next nine, no eight months? Seven months? Oh fuck, it was too irritating to even think of.
Jack sat back and wiped his mouth with his hand. "You need to call that Chinese place and tell them that their satay is-"
"I believe JJ is already doing that," Ianto said, closing the door behind him and leaning against the wall. "When he's done sympathy vomiting for you and Gwen."
Jack thought of the fact that three of them were currently doing the technicolour yawn and it was relieving. Easier to cover up his. His thing. "Oh that's horrible-"
The last few heaves were always the worst because it was that nasty yellow stomach acid, and he spat it in the bowl while Ianto watched dispassionately. Jack wondered if anything bothered him anymore. Well, he was in the habit of disposing of bodies, bodies in all manner of duress and condition, most of them having relieved their bowels-
And now there wasn't any stomach acid left.
"We've some anti-nausea drugs," Ianto said mildly. "If you still feel queasy. I think they're for chemo patients, but Owen stole them from NHS."
Jack snickered. "Owen was always an altruist," he mumbled, resting his arms on the seat of the bowl and setting his forehead on them. He wanted something cool on his face, a rag, soaked with ether, maybe. If he was unconscious then he wouldn't be feeling the roiling in his stomach. Then again, maybe he'd choke on his vomit and die.
Holy fuck. What would happen to… if he died? Did it just come back? Would it just abort like…? It was enough to make him want to walk off the top catwalk into the atrium pool. Or go into confinement for the rest of his-
He wasn't thinking about this. It was ridiculous. It was-
"I'm sorry to bother you about this," Ianto said, holding out a bottle of something pink and viscous. "But unless you do want something from Owen's pharmacological cornucopia, I need you to drink this." He shook the bottle, nudged the little plastic cup on the rim of the sink. "Because UNIT is on the phone, and they aren't pleased."
Factory Settings: Part Two