amand_r

Title: Any Other Day: Tuesday (aka 2a/8)
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Team, Rhys (Jack/Gwen, Gwen/Rhys, Jack/Ianto)
Ratings: NC-17 (in some parts)
Timeline: Post-Meat, Pre-Reset (assumes flashback knowledge from Fragments)
Summary: Hey, this one time? At Torchwood? Gwen and Jack switched bodies and everything went pear-shaped.

Author's Notes: Thanks to

idyll, who caught four GLARING issues. Also? I love this fic, because I love the team, I say, THE TEAM. Thanks to

51stcenturyfox for the beta! Thanks also to Pornsultant Bob, who schooled me in the ways of cock, man-style. And I mean that practically—when you don't have one, you never stop to think about some of the day to day issues. Note: This was started back in May, when I wasn't nearly the TW freak that I am, and so I think it's more cracky than I had intended. It's funny. It's potboiler fic.

SPECIAL THANKS to

laurab1 for the bitching fanart! Check that shit out!

This fic is a WIP, divided by days: Monday-Tuesday. It should have 8 parts, some longer than other, depending on what happens any given day. There you go.

PREVIOUSLY, on TORCHWOOD: Monday

PART TWO: TUESDAY

If you get invited to your first orgy, don't just show up nude. That's a common mistake. You have to let nudity 'happen.'
--Jack Handey

The sun streamed in the bay window when Ianto stumbled out into the sitting room, rubbing his face with his hands and passing Jack snoring on the sofa, the menu screen to Tout va bien on replay. He'd been watching Letter to Jane again. Ianto turned off the DVD player and shuffled into the kitchen to make coffee. He didn't bother to wake Jack; Jack, if he was anything like normal, had only been asleep for about fifteen minutes, and Ianto suspected that he was like himself, since Gwen had slept through what was left of the night, and now was messing about in the shower with her new bits.

Besides, as soon as Ianto started the grinder, Jack would bounce in and offer to--

Oh dear.

"I slept like the dead," Jack said, poking his head around the corner of the kitchenette, his hair horribly askew. "Not that I'm complaining. I haven't slept like that since--" He cocked his head. "Well." He reached a hand into the sweat pants that Ianto had given him, and which were enormous on him, and scratched himself, yawning. Ianto looked away. He wasn't as adept at substituting personalities as he had hoped, and to think that this was Gwen in his kitchenette grasping for anatomy that she didn't have was rather disturbing.

Instead, he dumped a cup of Kenya AA in the grinder and busied himself with cups and water for the pot. "Yeah? Gwen was out like a light until I woke her up." He paused. "Could it be that everyone got a good night's sleep?" He stared off into the distance, until the horrid daisy paper border on the walls was blurry. "Is that even possible?"

"Everything is not so clear. Everything is not so obvious," Jack said, sticking his nose almost into the grinder.

"I'm starting to think that you're actually listening to the film, and not getting off on Godard's accent," Ianto said wryly. He dumped the grounds in the basket and flipped the lid closed.

Jack shrugged. "It's the closest thing you have to Barbarella," he replied, then snaked his hands around Ianto's waist. Ianto didn't tell him that he'd picked up Barbarella on DVD three weeks ago, and it was hidden in the recesses of his sock drawer, waiting.

Gwen's hands were much smaller and colder than Jack's as they crept underneath the waistband of his pajamas. Ianto had slept in shorts, pajamas and socks, as if every bit of him needed to be covered with Gwen in the bed next to him.

Gwen had been in the bed with him specifically because, according to all three of them, Jack could not be trusted. That was rather unfair; Jack might have been sexually flexible, but he could, occasionally, contrary to popular opinion, keep it in his pants. Jack had stayed on the sofa because he usually didn't need sleep, though Ianto wondered about that, with the body switch and all. Who currently held the prize at the bottom of the cereal box? Gwen, inside Jack's body? Or Jack's immortal spirit, housed in Gwen's usually fragile human shell?

He made a note to discuss it with Owen later.

Ianto pulled the wandering foreign hands from his waistband and sighed. "None of that right now," he murmured, and felt Jack's forehead rest between his shoulderblades. "We have company." He smirked. "It looks like you."

Jack's hands slapped a drum rhythm on Ianto's stomach. "Yeah. One of us should help her out."

Ianto flipped the switch on the coffee maker and turned in the curve of Jack's arms. "Do you think that's quite wise?"

Jack sighed and buried his face into Ianto's chest, his arms tightening, Ianto found himself circling Jack's shoulders and wondering how the hell his life had gotten so fucked up. It was too easy to say 'Oh well, Torchwood, that'll do it,' because a great deal of it wasn't Torchwood, per se. Well. Jack made a snuffling noise into his t-shirt, swaying a bit as they paused there, still sleepy and not quite paying attention to anything in particular, and Ianto simply understood, in one of those moments of tired clarity.

Finally, as the first note of coffee hit the air, Jack pulled away and yawned, smacking Ianto on the hip. "Right then. Gwen's probably freaking out about now." He made a heroic flying gesture with his hands. "Super Jack to the rescue."

Ianto reached up into the cupboard behind him and blindly retrieved a mug. He wasn't moving. He'd be able to hear the screaming from here.

***

"JACK!" Gwen yelled, reaching down to cover her crotch. Jack rolled his eyes and raised an eyebrow.

"Think about this," he said, his head peeking around the shower curtain. "Never more so than now is it true that you do not have anything I haven't seen before."

Gwen was grumpy and not a little confused at her current state. Firstly, she was not herself, a fact that she didn't feel like she could reiterate enough. Secondly, she was naked and washing a male body she'd never washed before. She was a modern girl. She'd been in the shower and bath loads of times with blokes, mostly Rhys, and she'd even washed them before in a non-sexual 'you wash my back, I'll wash yours' manner. The problem was that a great deal of the time, taking a shower with a man became something other than a shower, and here she was, in the shower with the body of one of them, one that she'd –okay, she could say it in her head, she'd fantasised about Jack. Multiple times. Several times in the shower.

And now she had come full circle. She tried not to think about the body she was in, then, wall, not so much. It shouldn't matter, really. She was Gwen Cooper. This was all just a temporary thing. She had resolved to simply handle it.

She'd studiously washed her hair, rubbed her face and noted the lack of stubble, scrubbed her back with Ianto's 'loofah on a stick'. She stood in the spray and read the instructions on the tube of facial cleanser that sat in the wire basket at eye level. Finally, there had been no way to ignore it anymore. She'd taken the bar of soap on hand and grimly set out to tackle…her new tackle.

Jack was generous, and she had no plans to tell him that ever. She'd suspected that she never would, he would just imply that she knew how well-endowed he was for the rest of their lives, every time he looked at her, it would be there in the glint of his eyes. Forever. Bastard. Gwen'd stared at the head of her cock and wondered what the hell she was supposed to do with her other unexpected development.

There was An Issue: she was amazingly hard and had only been capable of leaning against the tile, clutching the soap and stroking herself curiously at the time Jack had found her. Over the years, Gwen had sometimes wondered what it would feel like to have a penis, especially the part where it was on the outside. Well, more than girl bits. And the whole involuntary physical stimulus response was fascinating. She was fairly sure that in the night she'd half-woken from sleep to find herself hard, pressed into the bed, and in one instance, Ianto's back, but he had seemed to be snoring, so she might have rolled over and thanked Jesus that he hadn't woken.

But the reality, which brought her back to this moment, was that she was going to have to do something. It stunned her how much she didn't know about basic male physiology, aside from the fact that she prided herself on being able to use that anatomy quite well, as a participant. For instance, if she ignored it, and softened, would that mean that later she might become aroused more quickly? Could she lessen her chances of an erection later by getting off now? That would beneficial. And yet, possibly erroneous.

Except, there he was, or she was, Jack, peeking around the shower curtain and grinning, hair horribly tangled. Gwen hoped that Jack knew that he was going to have to do something about that. He'd not washed off Gwen's makeup from the night before, and she wondered if he knew about that too. His eyeliner was worn and smeared, and the corners of his eyes had streaks.

"Yeah well, I don't want to—what are you doing?"

Jack had stripped off all his clothes and joined her in the shower. This was like one of her daydream fantasies in reverse, because usually when Jack joined her in the shower, he was in his own body (though she couldn't fail to notice that watching herself naked was not unlike the third person view that came with fantasy sometimes), and oh, by the way, they were usually not in Ianto's flat.

For a second, she wondered if Jack had ever had Ianto up against the shower wall she was leaning against, and her groin responded to the thought. Jack's mouth quirked a little, but he didn't acknowledge it. In fact, he hadn't said anything about it at all.

"Showering. Believe it or not, I'm thinking of Ianto." He snagged the loofah from its hook on the wall and waved it about. "If we use all of his hot water before he has a turn, he will kill us and leave us in the skip outside."

Gwen turned away from him, facing the wall, and suddenly felt more exposed. "This doesn't feel right," she said to the shower curtain and its navy stripes.

"You're telling me. I lose like, six inches in this deal." He grinned lazily. "Well, more than six inches, really." Jack soaped up the loofah as much as one could soap up a loofah and lazily cleaned himself. Gwen, still not remotely comfortable, settled for half turning, facing slightly away from him so that she could see him out of the corner of her eye. Not that she was watching Jack soap up her breasts.

"The last time I was in the body of a woman," Jack said, making conversation, "she was a Swedish sex worker. Had a pair of tits like you wouldn't believe, but she shaved everywhere, and that was a pain in the ass." He paused. "Can you pass me that tube thing from…."

Gwen passed him the facial scrub, then gave up on washing her legs, scrunched like a ball in the corner, lifting her knees up while she stared at the soap bubbles slide down the shower curtain. Instead, she leant against the tile and watched Jack wash her face, only realising as Jack moved towards her blindly that she was going to have to let him use the spray, which she had rather been blocking since he'd gotten in there.

Gwen took Jack's hand and slid past him in the shower, so that he could stand under the spray. Ianto's shower was much longer than it was wide, though, and the front of her brushed against Jack's rear, her rear, when he moved by. Jack hummed tunelessly as he rinsed his face and reached for the shampoo.

"Do you ever get used to it?" she asked. It was better when his eyes were closed and he couldn't see her. She might have even felt like having a heart-to-heart if he had only remained on the other side of the shower curtain.

Jack shrugged. "No. And would you want to? I think that the spirit recognises that it's not in the right place, and that's one of the main reasons you feel funny. Itchy." He opened his eyes and closed them quickly. "Or, ow. Soapy."

Gwen took advantage of Jack's closed eyes to wash the rest of herself, not concerned anymore with her erection or anything else. She was mostly just concerned with getting out of the vicinity of Jack, naked in her body and not seeming to mind. He even acted happy about it.

"The machine," she said, reaching over him to redirect the spray towards her in the back of the shower. "It didn't do this because of who we are, right? It did this because we both touched it."

"The machine isn't sentient. It's a machine. A brilliant, complex, fucked up alien machine," Jack answered. He ducked under the spray and sighed in the heat. "Gwen, I know we don't always see eye to eye, but I like to think that we can manage our relationship without drastic measures." His mouth quirked in a grin. "And if we do need drastic measures, I would prefer Jell-o wrestling. Ianto can referee."

Gwen grunted, because she didn't have a reply except to argue with him, and he was using humour to answer a complicated question. On the other hand, he'd pretty much answered it, and she didn't even have to look into his eyes to know that he meant it. She reached for the shower curtain but was surprised when his hand grabbed her wrist. It was small and pale against her own current arm, and she had to blink at it, because when she looked, all she could think was that she knew what that felt like in the reverse, his skin under her hand, not his arm under her skin.

Jack blinked, and his eyes looked huge. "Don't take this the wrong way," he mumbled, "Because it's not like I actually spend a lot of time making faces in the mirror. Hard to believe, I know."

Gwen rolled her eyes, but she didn't move away. "Jack—"

"But I'm not sure I have ever looked as freaked as you do now." Gwen opened her mouth to speak, but Jack glanced away. And then, almost too soft. "It's okay to be scared, because I'm not okay either."

And then he was on her, which was odd because, in all truth, she could have taken him so easily, even knowing half of the fighting moves he knew, even though he was smaller and more experienced, there were some things that brute strength was good for, and tackling and subduing smaller people was one of them.

Jack licked a bit at her chest. Gwen's brain wasn't fusing thoughts together very well, and her cock was rigid, pressed against Jack's belly. "I think, in my log, I'm going to refer to this as 'The Gwen Cooper Experience'," Jack said, reaching his hands up to run along her neck. Gwen sucked in a breath. "Like the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Just as hallucinogenic in ways, but completely sober."

She wanted to say something. She had a speech planned for this moment, this moment that she had anticipated just for this occasion, the moment when Jack might want to take advantage of his own body, which, she had to admit, was probably a pretty big draw. Jack pressed her into the tile, and his tongue circled one of her nipples and she still couldn't bring herself to touch him, her, or whatever because she was still very aware that it was her body that was grinding against her. And that might have gone over well in the ninetieth century or wherever Jack said he was from this week, but to a twenty-first century lass it was still rather odd.

"I don't think that this—" she began.

"You know, just once, you can say you were thinking with your John Thomas," Jack whispered into the hollow of her ear. "Trust me, it's really easy to do, and very rarely is it as good an excuse as this time."

"But I—"

Her hands started to reach for Jack's shoulders, but Jack grabbed her cock and squeezed, and her feet almost went out from under her. She slammed her eyes shut and let him pump her, his other hand pulling her neck down so that he could whisper in her ear. "The fact of the matter is that I'm pretty sure I know what you might like, because well, I have some experience. And I've kind of always wanted to get myself off. You know. Like this."

"Oh." Gwen pressed her shoulders into the tiles and threw her head back. She didn't want to think about the fact that Jack was making a chipper commentary in her voice, albeit lacking in an accent, but still very much hers, like she was narrating a documentary. One of her hands grasped the towel bar and the other one scrabbled at her side. Jack's fingers played with her balls, his balls, oh Jesus this was confusing.

"I was thinking about this, and we have a novelty thing going on here," Jack purred, taking her free hand and lifting it to his breast. She closed on it convulsively and he squeaked a little when her fingers pinched the nipple. "You do have great tits Gwen, I wasn't joking about that." And he released he hand so that he could pull her down by the back of the neck, his mouth so close to hers. "I bet you give great tongue."

Gwen felt her eyes widen even more than she would have thought when Jack changed his rhythm on her cock, and the shock was enough to press their mouths together, and oh dear, that was lovely. Jack opened his lips, her lips, and his tongue was hot and insistent, his thin fingers curved about the back of her head, and part of her wondered in her mind (the ten percent that wasn't focused below her waist), if she was this good a kisser in her own body as Jack was in her body. Lords, that would be depressing if she wasn't.

Jack skidded his lips up to her ear and bit there, pulling on the lobe. His hand changed the movement on her cock and sped up. "Later, when the shock has worn off, and you have had a larger dose of 'The Jack Harkness Experience,'" he whispered, "you can show me what you've learned through independent study."

Gwen came on his chest. Her chest. Oh Jesus.

***

Tosh waved to them cheerily from the Plass, and Jack waved back, grinning. Gwen slouched in her borrowed leather coat and Ianto just looked on blandly as Owen's car sped past them and to the parking area, some sort of heavy metal music blaring even though the closed windows. He looked to be very grumpy, and Tosh wasn't excited about a whole day (or half-day, as it was already afternoon, and hopefully they wouldn't have to stay late. Oh, who was she kidding?) of Owen complaining about decontamination and unsafe workplace practices. The last time they'd had a decontamination shutdown, he'd bitched at her the whole day afterwards, as if it had been her fault that the alien tech she had been working on had a gaseous trigger switch.

Sometimes she missed Suzie; she always put Owen in his place, even if they were screwing on the side. Ianto was a fair replacement as far as passively-aggressively messing with Owen's head, but sometimes he needed a good ear cuffing.

Tosh hefted the bag of pasties in her hand and waved it about. Jack (in Gwen's body, wow, how odd was it that Tosh had no problems just seeing him in there? It was virtually obvious from the posture and the spring in his step.) made what she liked to call his 'jolly food face' and clapped his hands once. Jack was her partner in bad pasties.

"Hullo!" she chirped when they were within earshot. She already had good news. Well, and pasties. Gwen glanced out at the bay and seemed to shrink further into the collar of her coat. Ianto gave her a brief smile and shook his head as he approached the front door of the Tourist Centre and found it already open. "I took the liberty of going in and overriding the lock down," she added hastily. "After the last time I made a few modifications to make it easier."

She proffered the open bag, and Jack dug his hand in, pulling out a still-warm pasty and taking a big bite. "Is that wise? Did I approve that?" It was easy to remember who was in which body when they ate. Gwen never talked with her mouth full. Jack grinned and swallowed. "Toshiko, are you planning a coup?"

Owen shuffled up to their group and followed them into the darkened Tourist Centre. Ianto flipped the lights and they stood there, in front of the open door to the Hub. No one seemed particularly eager to be the first in.

"Readings say that it's all right," Tosh said into the silence. She placed both her hands around the pasty bag; her fingers were cold.

Jack hung back a little. If things hadn't already been crazy, she would have been worried. Jack was usually the first one to charge in where angels feared to tread, but someone (possibly Gwen, probably Ianto) had managed to drill into his skull that the body he was in wasn't, in all likelihood, going to recover from toxic gas. Gwen, for her part, looked at them all in turn, mouth fishing for something to say. Tosh didn't blame her; she still wouldn't be too eager to be the guinea pig.

Owen rolled his eyes. "Oh for fuck's sake," he mumbled, then reached under the counter and pulled out a small box. "Gas masks, remember?" He tossed one to each of them and Tosh felt somewhat sheepish. Of course, the gas masks. Hers was dusty.

There was some fumbling and general confusion about the gas masks until Jack checked them all over (in addition to bitching about how they'd all have to drill with masks again once this was all over), and, with Ianto leading the way, they all trooped down into the Hub. The hallway seemed to be in good form, but then again, with gas, it was hard to tell. Tosh looked at her exposed hands and rolled the top of her closed pasty bag even tighter. She could hear her breath though the mask, and the goggles cost her peripheral vision. All in all, an irritating beginning to the day, and it wasn't even the beginning, though she suspected that they would be here late into the night to make up for the lost time.

The cog hatch released and the alarms went off as usual, and Ianto peered into the room before Owen pushed him and he spun for a moment, raising his hands in questioning, but if he made a face the mask obscured it. He opened the invisible lift and they watched Myfanwy zoom back into the opening before it had even slid completely aside. Poor thing had been out all night.

Tosh had to remind herself that Myfanwy was a pterodon and not some pitiful cat. In fact, odds were she'd eaten someone's cat last night.

Her monitors were still on, and Tosh called up all the ventilation readings on the interior of the Hub. Jack leant against her shoulder and she could hear his breathing. "Everything is normal. Oxygen, carbon dioxide levels, no foreign substances above average."

"All right then," Gwen said, and they all watched, a little suspenseful, as she yanked off her mask and closed her eyes, breathing deeply. "It's fine. I'm fine."

They peeled their masks off tentatively, but Owen kept his on as he made his way down to the autopsy theatre and yanked a series of heavy black tarps from one of his lower cabinets. "One of you has to help me get this fucking time bomb out of my sight," he called. "Gwen! Man up!"

Gwen glanced at Jack and Ianto, then down at the autopsy theatre. Jack shrugged his shoulders and looked at Ianto, who busied himself at a console, fingers racing as quickly as Tosh's. It was all fine and good that the sensors said they were in the clear, and they obviously weren't suffocating or dying from poison, but there was no telling how far the toxin had got in the ventilation system, and there were things living in some of the lower levels that they wouldn't want to have to say goodbye to. At least, that was what Tosh assumed. She tried not to go down to the lower levels anymore.

Jack took the steps to his office. "You heard the good doctor," he told Gwen. "Use that Olympian physique and haul that shit out of here."

Ianto looked up, stared off into space, his brow furrowing in confusion. He caught Tosh's eye and mouthed the words Olympian physique? at her. She shrugged. Sometimes she ignored Jack. This was one of those times. At least he hadn't absconded with her pasty bag.

Gwen looked at Tosh, who waved her paper bag. "I have a pasty for you," she said helpfully. Gwen rolled her eyes but shrugged off her coat and grinned when Tosh held out the bag to her. She took one and set it on her coat at her desk before dusting off her hands and heading for the autopsy theatre, from where Owen was apparently already trying to move the body to the incinerator chute, because there was a more than normal amount of cursing floating out of the recessed area.

"All the water from the Hub Tub has been drained and settled into one of the storage reservoirs underground," Ianto said from what was fast becoming known as his station. Tosh rather liked that Ianto had a workspace down there with them. "Too soon to know if there's anything in it, but better to be safe than sorry." He glanced down at the pool around the water tower.

"Hub Tub?" she asked.

Ianto shrugged but didn't elucidate. Instead he checked a few more readings. "The fresh water is contaminant-free. Well, as contaminant-free as Bay water can be."

"Oh Jesus!" Gwen shouted. "That's disgusting!"

"Watch it, Gwen, that shite is corrosive!"

Ianto rolled his eyes at Tosh and they both smirked. She liked being the tech geek, and also one of the smaller ones. It meant that she got out of a lot of unsavoury heavy lifting, and that suited her just fine; her boots were Prada.

"Oi! That hurts!"

"Then stop lifting with—"

"Oh bollocks!"

There was a thud and then the sound of a large carcass bouncing in freefall down the sheet metal duct that led to the incinerator room. Silence reigned for a few seconds until Owen broke it with a string of curses. "We have a sodding lift!"

Gwen wasn't in the mood, probably because her chest was covered in blue congealed blood, Tosh noted as she watched Jack's form storm up out of the autopsy bay, unbuttoning the shirt on the way towards Jack's office. Owen followed her up out of the theatre and stood there, trying to hold a smile back until Gwen disappeared.

Ianto sighed. "I hate it when you do that," he moaned. "It splatters everywhere."

Owen shrugged and pointed a finger at the office above. "She did it, not me." He wiped his hands with a towel and tossed it in a bin, possibly as a concession to Ianto, who watched his rubbish disposal methods like a hawk.

Tosh left her station and settled on the sofa for a few moments to eat her admittedly horrible lunch; the next few hours were going to be busy, and she understood that bad pasties were only good when they were warm, at least. Once they were cold they became bad-bad pasties, dough hard as a rock and filling too solid and unsettling.

Jack left his office, talking a mile a minute on his mobile. Tosh was a little bit surprised that he'd attempted to conduct any business in his current body, but then again, Jack (and a great deal of UNIT and other places) had collective experience with this kind of thing. She supposed that if Jack had the right clearances, then they'd accept that he was who he said he was. He probably had special clearances just to identify himself in this sort of situation. Tosh wished they had them too; that could easily have been her walking about in someone else's body.

She didn't look at Ianto for a few seconds until her brain cleared that thought.

Jack finished his call to someone named 'Neil' and flipped the phone closed, attempting to shove it in the front of Gwen's jeans and discovering that nothing fit in the front pockets of skintight jeans. Tosh almost laughed. Instead, he tossed the phone to Ianto, who caught it and slipped it absentmindedly into his suitcoat pocket.

"Colonel Storr doesn't believe that I'm me," Jack said, grimacing, but still managing to look rather amused. "I tried to explain, but he apparently doesn't want to hear about our 'wonky Torchwood business' today." He leant against the rails to the autopsy theatre and crossed his arms. "I was going to get into it with him and then I realized, I just don't care." He smiled. "Maybe this means that UNIT will stop calling."

Tosh swallowed a bite of pasty. "We could never be that lucky." She had no love for UNIT.

Jack smiled at her, and they shared something like a secret joke. It wasn't funny, it would never be funny, but somehow the common frame of reference they shared made it seem less frightening. "You're right, of course," he said. "It's not like we have pressing business with them right now anyway. Everything can keep until our…nineteen Geelucks is up."

Tosh took a bite of pasty and watched Owen shrug on his medical coat and saunter up to his station. He dropped into his seat, which rolled back a few inches with the impact. Then he leant forward, grabbed the frame of the monitor and peered at it, tapping a few keys, still staring.

"All the Weevils are dead." Owen sat back in his chair and grunted. "Well, all two of the ones we have, that is."

"What?" Tosh dumped her lunch on the table and raced over to her workstation, nearly falling over Jack to bring up the footage. Ianto left the coffee station and peered over their shoulders.

"No, not Janet," Ianto said. "I knew her well. A Weevil of infinite--"

Jack backed into Ianto and smacked him in the stomach lightly. Tosh smirked.

Owen sighed. "I'm sorry to disappoint. Janet has been tagged and released for a week. Did it myself." He frowned. "I did it early too. I wonder if I have a sixth sense about this shite."

Ianto shoved his hands in his pockets. "Is it wrong to say that I don't feel too badly?" he mused aloud.

Jack gave him a look at closely resembled one of Gwen's disapproving and disappointed stares.

Gwen came out of Jack's office, frowning. "Jack, do you own any shirts that aren't blue?"

"No," Ianto answered her as he returned to the kitchenette.

Jack continued to share at Tosh's monitor. Something was whirring in his head, but, as usual, it would become apparent when he chose to share. She had learned over the years to just let Jack percolate on his own and then say what he wanted when he was ready instead of pressing him for answers. Well, unless the world was ending. She sincerely hoped that the world wasn't ending.

Gwen peered over Jack's shoulders. "Are those the cells? What's wrong with them?"

Owen rolled his eyes. "Our resident Weevils below have snuffed it." When Gwen turned that disapproving stare on him (it looked so different in Jack's body, but it was unmistakable), he shrugged. "I'm sorry," he amended, a hand on his chest in mock sorrow. "They've passed on. Funeral services are Thursday."

Tosh always wondered about Owen and the Weevils. Even before the situation with Mark Lynch and the fighting ring, Owen seemed to be fascinated by them in a grotesque way. More than once he bemoaned the fact that he couldn't tell anyone about them, and had in fact written several papers on them for the Torchwood archives. Sometimes when he was gone for the night and she had nothing better to do, Tosh looked them up and read them (she hadn't read them all. There were at least eight and she didn't have that much free time.) Owen, for all his jackassery and rudeness, was an exceptional doctor, and he treated medical research the same way he approached all areas of his job. His papers were well-researched, cited, detailed and footnoted. His charts and graphs were impeccable.

Tosh treated her scholarly work for the Torchwood archives much the same way. Some day she would be dead, but parts of her, of what she did, would remain in the archives, papers and research and plans and projects that all bore her name: Toshiko Sato, Head Technician, Torchwood Three.

Jack backed away from the monitors and sighed. "Well, that's that. We're going to need that cleaned out, Owen." He shrugged. "No telling when we'll need the cells again." He frowned. "Wear masks. The ventilation down there isn't as good as it is up here, and I don't want to have to clear you out, too."

It was lighthearted, but Tosh knew better. Jack sauntered away towards the kitchenette.

Gwen sighed. "I hope they didn't suffer," she said, and Tosh wondered if Owen was going to make fun of her. He didn't. Tosh had to agree with her. They were monsters, of a fashion, creatures pulled from their homes, wherever that was, and deposited in a foreign world, where they were occasionally trapped and shoved into a cell and studied. Then out of the blue, they suffocated, or were poisoned, or whatever. She didn't know what had done them in, and she wasn't about to look up the CCTV footage to find out. Owen would do it later. It was his job, after all.

"It's a shame you changed your clothes, Gwen," Owen said, standing and stretching. "Because I'm going to need you to help clean up that mess." He nodded towards the cells on the monitor. Ianto flipped the steam wand open and a hissing noise covered any number of whispers from the café station. Who knew what was going on over there? Tosh glanced over, but Ianto was by himself, trying to look innocent and very very busy.

"I thought Ianto…." Gwen drifted off and shrugged. "Oh, all right then." She headed for the vaults with a resigned sigh.

"I would have helped you," Ianto said in a low voice.

"Oh come on, she never has to help." Owen smiled. "You know, women's lib and all that rot."

Jack shook his head as he materialised from the other side of the water tower. "When she figures out that you're taking the piss, you're going to be in trouble."

Owen fired a finger gun at Ianto. "So I expect excellent coffee for that, mate," he replied as he followed Gwen down into the passage that led to the vaults. Ianto offered him a mock salute and spun Owen's mug on one finger.

"Really, though, Ianto," Tosh said when she accepted her coffee a few minutes later, "Hub Tub?"

Ianto smiled. "Sometimes I get bored."

***

Owen opened the file as he walked to Jack's desk. "Well, the—" he stopped, cocking his head at the speakers. "Are you listening to the Ramones?"

Jack's pen stabbed mercilessly at the tablet in front of him and he didn't look up. "Yes," he grated out.

Ianto glanced up from the computer monitor. "Jack lost a bet," he deadpanned, then resumed typing.

No explanation was forthcoming. Owen shrugged. "Anyway, I found our toxin. It's an aggregate of the tea in the Xarxian's…" he scrambled for a word. "Storage pouch in the abdomen and a natural chemical from the body. I tried to isolate the chemical in the tea, and I think it's, well, uhm." He shuffled the papers and laid the top one on Jack's desk.

Ianto rolled away from the monitor and peered over Jack's diminutive shoulder. "1, 3, 7-trimethylxanthine," he said, then glanced up. "You mean—"

Owen snorted. "Good old C8H10—"

"Caffeine?" Jack said, a smirk on his face. "Mom always said too much of that would kill you."

Ianto shook his head and returned to the computer. "I think you mean stunt your growth."

Jack handed the papers back to Owen. "No, that's twenty-first century claptrap." Owen didn't bother telling them both to shut the hell up so that he could finish. He'd seen the Jack and Ianto show, with the right bodies, even, and he wasn't in the mood.

"So the caffeine combined with the chemical element in the Xarxian cavity, made some sort of gas, which, I should mention, is pretty fucking toxic, and I'm betting it made our body down there very ill."

Jack sat back and steepled his fingers. "So, you're saying that caffeine is what's killing our Xarxian visitors?" He glanced back at Ianto. "Told you."

Owen raised an eyebrow and wondered when Ianto would be ordering dinner for them. He fancied Pad Thai. "You know," he said, "It could be killing them. It could be what's driving them mad, as well. It'd be worth finding out if the other bodies we brought in have caffeine in them. I'll admit that I wasn't looking." He shrugged. "Can't find something if you don't know you're looking for it," he said, feeling strangely like a fortune cookie.

Maybe he wanted Chinese instead.

He stopped on his way out the door. "What do Xarxians eat, Jack?"

Jack glanced up from a mountain of paperwork distractedly. "They're herbivores, so, you know, plants, nuts, fruit. Why?"

Owen checked his files again. "Ours have large quantities of meat in the stomachs." He checked again. "Meat, restaurant skip rubbish, half eaten pasties swallowed whole, you know. Any reason? If they're as smart as we are, wouldn't they have sussed out the difference between flesh and flora?"

"Fauna," Ianto corrected. "Fauna and flora."

Jack grinned. "Somewhere out there is a set of sexy twins named that."

"Intriguing. And yet, you evade the question."

"Not evade. Just don't know the answer." Jack leant forward and clasped his hands, resting his chin on them. "What do you think, Mister Harper?"

Sometimes, when Jack got like this, Owen felt like he was back in school, being led into some sort of Socratic trap in which he would reveal his thundering ignorance. Nothing for it, though, but to push onward. He was the medical expert here, and he was damn well going to earn his paycheque. "I think I'd be able to figure it out," he said, "plants and flesh aren't similar, unless there's something I don't know about their home planet. They really should know."

Jack smiled and leant back into his chair, sticking Gwen's breasts at full attention. Damn. Owen and Gwen weren't on anymore, but sometimes when he looked at her, he still saw her naked body on his, her face sweaty, hair sticking to her neck.

"Good answer," Jack said, and Owen was able to snap out of the mental image. "I agree. Could the caffeine toxin thing be messing with their heads?"

That Owen could answer. "Absolutely. Give me more time with the first two and I'll have an answer by supper."

Ianto closed the file he'd been working on and leant back into his chair, hands behind his head. "On that note, you pick dinner."

Ah, Ianto still owed him for earlier. Owen smiled to himself. He liked when Ianto owed him; it increased the quality of his coffee and those snacks he had stashed in his desk magically stocked themselves. And of course, "I'm thinking Chinese."

Ianto nodded and pushed away from the desk. "I'm thinking excellent choice, Doctor."

Jack sighed. Jesus, did his face look like Gwen's. Well alright, it was Gwen's, but most of the time, from what Owen had been able to tell so far, the facial expressions were completely different. Even the posture was different. Jack stood at attention a great deal more often than he had ever noticed; he wasn't sure if it was to compensate for Gwen's shorter stature, or if it was something he always did and they never noticed because he was fucking tall, anyway.

"Don't I get a vote?"

Ianto turned his chair on the rollers minutely to regard Jack. "Do you ever care?"

Owen watched Jack consider for a second. "No. No I don't."

Ianto was smug. "Sorted."

Owen waved his folder and turned to go. "I'm off for real work. Call me when General Tso gets here."

As he left, a new song started, and he heard the volume rise. "This is my favorite," Ianto said.

"They all seem to be your 'favorite'," Jack noted dryly.

"They are today," Ianto chirped.

Owen smirked and double-timed down the steps before 'Blitzkreig Bop' could get stuck in his head for the rest of the night.

***

On To Tuesday (b)