amand_r

Title: Any Other Day: Thursday (aka 4a/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 others, depending on what happens any given day. There you go.

PREVIOUSLY, on TORCHWOOD: Monday, Tuesday (A), Wednesday (A)

THURSDAY

If they ever come up with a swashbuckling school, I think one of the courses should be Laughing, Then Jumping Off Something.
---Jack Handey

Gwen woke up and tasted fur. An experimental hand to the face revealed that the fur was less like actual fur and more like one of the Hub sofa cushions, and it was wedged in her mouth. She tossed it aside and rolled upright as much as she was able to with a head that felt as if it was a bowl of porridge. She might have felt a physical clicking sensation when she turned her neck.

She was in the hole under Jack's office. Gwen blinked a few times in the dimness and then fumbled for the lamp on the bedstead. The bulb was bare and the light bored into her skull for a second, mostly because she had been dumb enough to look at it as she turned it on.

How many scotches had she had?

It was a slow and tiring trip up the ladder to Jack's office. She probably should have dressed or changed or whatever, but she was more than a little curious as to how she'd ended up down there, fully clothed, with a sofa cushion on her face. As soon as she reached the top, Gwen remembered the sofa cushion and looked back down at it, sitting there on the camp bed. Oh, whatever. She waved a hand to no one and stumbled into the main atrium.

No one was in sight, and a trip by Tosh's workstation revealed that her purse was there, and the display read six-thirty. Why had they let her sleep? She shuffled to the sofa and sat down, slamming her back into the portion without a cushion. Figured.

"Good morning!" Tosh sang as she emerged from the kitchen. "Ianto's left you a pot of coffee!" She smiled sympathetically. "Jack looked rather like he'd been hit by a bus. Are you any better?"

Gwen sighed and put her head in her hands.

"How many of these have I had?" Jack asked, examining the lipstick on his glass. "You use the wrong shade, you know. You need something with more fire."

Gwen shrugged. "I'm busy. Haven't had my colours done since…ever." They sprawled on the sofa and grasped scotch glasses, feet up on the coffee table. Jack's trainer was in a plate of curry.

Jack snorted. "Colours." Then he turned his head to her. "So, you want to ask about my cock."

Gwen felt the scotch go up the back of her nose, and it wasn't pleasant. She shot forward, snorting and coughing. Jack ineffectually slapped her on the back. Lord it burned. When she was reasonably subdued, she fell backwards and confronted the conversation head-on. "Yes, your cock."

Jack finished his scotch and leaned forward to pour another. "It's a nice cock. I know." He winked. "You saw how it works yesterday. Do you want another demonstration?" He licked his lips and sipped from his glass, eyebrows up as if asking a question.

Gwen looked at her lips on the glass and considered; she was wearing the wrong shade. "No," she decided aloud. "I do not." And then she finished her drink. She'd had three of these, and she didn't feel drunk. Maybe she was. Maybe she needed more.

Jack sighed. "All right then. The answer you are looking for is no, wanking does not prevent erection, and no, thinking about gross stuff will not make you soft faster."

"How did you—"

Jack looked at her, and she shut up. "It's my cock. You know--" Hand wave. "--most of the time."

"Gwen? Are you all right?" Tosh waved a hand in front of her face and she started. Tosh's face was one of concern, and she proffered a cup of coffee in Jack's striped mug. Both of their eyes fell on it, and Gwen wondered if it had been deliberate. No, of course not. It was an accident. Tosh smiled weakly when Gwen took the mug and sipped from it. "You look terrible."

That was probably true. Gwen had no idea what she looked like, couldn't even imagine it. She ran a hand through her hair—did she have bed head? A self-check assessment/inventory revealed that she didn't have a hangover per se, just a bit of grogginess, and a very very bad taste in her mouth. She accepted the coffee and sipped it; it didn't make the bad taste better. She was going to have to use Jack's toothbrush. The thought seemed gross, until she realised, oh yeah, Jack.

She made a mental note to replace her toothbrush at home.

Tosh left her side and returned to her workstation and her own coffee. "The others already left on a retrieval," she said over her shoulder. "Jack looked about as bad as you do. But he said you should feel free to use the showers and his room, you know." She gestured generically in the direction of Jack's living space. "For. Obvious reasons."

Gwen looked down at her rumpled clothes. Her top shirt was impossibly wrinkled and unbuttoned. She had curry on Jack's vest. Oops. Her braces were wrapped around one leg, and she wondered how that had even happened.

"I can't believe that I've never thought about these things," she moaned.

Jack shrugged. "If you want any consolation, I don't think much about the daily workings of your vagina." Just him saying the word was obscene. "Like, tell me, are you always this wet? Is this a girl thing? Is this your girl thing?" Jack unbuttoned his denims and stuck his hand in.

Gwen watched him do it, reclining on the sofa, his denims open, his hand thrusting into (hopefully) panties to feel the area. Jack's face was lost in concentration, academic, and he removed his fingers and brought them up her face. "See? Really wet." He smiled. "That's just the way you are, isn't it?" He wiped his hand on his denims and Gwen finished her drink. "If not, then obviously I've been doing something wrong."

"No," she said, glancing away. "That's just me."

Jack picked up his own glass. "Hrm." He licked his finger before taking a drink. "Have you noticed things taste different?"

Gwen stood unsteadily and walked to Tosh's workspace, bypassing a discarded takeaway bag on the floor. There were curried footprints from Jack's trainers that led to Gwen's workstation, probably from where he'd been looking at whatever they'd been called out for.

"Hrrrngh," she said as she steadied herself on the desk. Tosh smiled and shook her head.

"I don't think Jack drinks much." Then, as if she couldn't help herself, "Did you two, you know?"

Gwen sipped her coffee and shared a conspiratorial wink with Tosh. Tosh was all right.

Jack was pretty drunk. He set his glass down on what he thought was the coffee table but what was really the air next to the coffee table. The glass landed on the concrete with a shattering noise. Gwen laughed, and that noise startled her.

"Woah, we should make this thing longer," Jack told her. "Ianto should get us one big enough to hold the drunk."

"You and Ianto," she said suddenly, "is this a—"

Jack fell against her a little and ran a hand up her chest. Gwen had to turn away, because the sensation stirred her cock, and she didn’t want to go there. Not with herself. Not drunk, and not now.

Jack apparently did. "We could have sex," Jack offered, smiling.. His fingers walked up her chest to her neck and lay there, on her throat. Gwen closed her eyes and then opened them, because she was afraid that Jack would try to kiss her when she wasn't paying attention. At least he wasn’t digging into her trousers.

"No," she told him, pushing at his body a little. Her body. Oh fuck. She was starting to have trouble thinking, and it occurred to her that all those years in which she'd regarded men sceptically when they referred to sexual haze, she hadn't known what the fuck they were talking about. The booze probably wasn't helping. "No, I don't think."

Jack pulled back and flopped to the other side of the sofa then. "Yeah, I didn't think so," he replied, face mild. "I was just throwing it out there."

She sighed. "It's just, the shower, and it wasn't, and I—"

"Gwen, Gwen," Jack said, waving a hand around like he was directing traffic and everyone was supposed to move to the right. "It's all right." His hand hit the table and he yelped. "God, I think I broke a nail."

Gwen ignored him, instead setting her glass down. "I think we covered it all, but you know the others will never believe that we didn't have a go," she groaned. She hadn't thought about the others until now.

"Well, if you change your mind, let me know." Jack yawned. "I'm just gonna close my eyes. Mmmm, spinny."

She must have fallen asleep, because Gwen didn't recall anything after that. Maybe it had been the scotch, or the curry, or just relief at hearing Jack snoring (softly!) on the other end of the sofa, but Gwen had slept hard, and apparently not heard Jack leave, or Ianto come in, or Owen.

That was a relief.

Gwen downed the rest of her coffee and walked away from Tosh's workstation as she talked. "A retrieval? They find another Xarxian?"

Tosh sat back and picked up her breakfast—what looked to be a croissant with chocolate. Gwen sighed. She could use one of those herself. "Yeah," she said to Gwen. "A dead one."

***

"You know what I hate?"

"A mystery?"

Jack nodded. "A myst—no wait, I like mysteries." He glanced at Ianto, who was holding a plastic body bag over the alien's feet as Owen prepared to lift them. "I was gonna say that I don't like eviscerated aliens on my doorstep."

Owen dropped the Xarxian's lower half onto the body bag under it. "We're in Splott. That's hardly our doorstep." He glanced up and frowned that the rumble of thunder in the distance. "Sodding Cardiff rain…."

Ianto nodded. "He's right. The Plass would, technically, be our doorstep." Then the corner of his mouth twitched, like it did when he thought he was being clever. "The Tourist Office would figuratively be--well. You get the idea."

Owen glanced up. "I thought that was the invisible lift?"

Ianto tilted his head in consideration. "You might have a point."

Jack crossed his arms and tried to frown, but it was amusing to watch Owen struggle with a body that was larger than his own. "You two have no appreciation for a good line."

Ianto began zipping up the body bag, but stopped at the knees when Owen waved his hands away, attention caught by the lacerations on the chest and stomach. "I have plenty of appreciation for good lines, when I hear them." Ianto shook his head and smiled at Jack. "And by the way, this is still a mystery."

Jack sighed. He was right about that. They had got the call early that morning. In fact, that the police had called them at all (the police hated calling them; Jack could always hear the bile in the PCs' throats when they relayed that Torchwood's assistance would be greatly appreciated at a crime scene) was something of a signal about what a mystery this was.

Jack looked at the Xarxian lying in the plastic bag and wondered what the police had thought it was. It was hard to explain that away—some aliens could be attributed to rabid animals or, he was rather ashamed to admit, circus freaks. The Xarxian, with its rubbery, glowing skin and elongated limbs, couldn’t pass for either of those. They had brought a few carafes of coffee, styro cups and a healthy selection of Retcons four through seven.

"These cuts," Owen muttered, sticking his gloved fingers into the methodical slashes across the abdomen. "They're too good. Too purposeful."

Ianto stood and watched Owen poke around in the cavity for a second before glancing at the crowd. Ianto was always thinking of crowd control—it was one of the reasons that Jack liked to have him along. Tosh and Owen were often too engrossed in the task at hand, Gwen was often preoccupied by motives and process, but Ianto, Ianto wanted to preserve the image, the dark mysterious nature of Torchwood, their clandestine acts. Jack was happy to let him manage this angle—Ianto was best utilised when he was controlling, or rather, directing things from behind the scenes. Jack figured that he'd make a good Torchwood director someday, if Torchwood ever decided to expand again, or maybe he could just understudy Jack. Jack liked to be understudied, with an emphasis on the under part.

But right now, Ianto wanted them gone from the scene, everything wrapped up, and he couldn't blame him. They were losing darkness, and even though the day was overcast, the natural light in the sky illuminated the scene too well. They still needed to move the body. Tosh and Gwen were on their way with the hoses to take care of the mess.

"I think you might want to wait on the autopsy until we're back at the Hub," Jack said nonchalantly, eyeing some coppers who were edging closer to the scene. One of them had a cell phone palmed in his left hand, trying to take a picture of the Xarxian. Jack smirked. Like they didn't scramble those first thing.

"This was deliberate. Considering that, it seems to me," Owen said, standing and stretching his gory hands over his head. Something blue dripped behind him from his fingers. "That we have a new player in our little drama, here."

Ianto looked on dispassionately. Jack sighed and stared at the body, wondering if he could will it to tell him something useful. Anything. Those cuts were specific; they had to tell him something. The worst part was that they were familiar.

There were a lot of things that Jack had a passionate dislike for—nuts in brownies, for example. But this, this inability to dredge information, critical information, from his brain was one of the bigger ones. It was infinitely frustrating to know that one knew something, but not be able to recall what it was.

He often tried not to think about it, because when he did, he saw the Doctor's face, heard his voice, and feared for the future.

The Xarxian's eyes stared at the wall next to them.

Ianto handed Owen the carafe of coffee and the stack of styro cups. "They already think I'm creepy," he told him. "It's the suit. They've seen too many films."

Owen shook the carafe and grabbed the cups in his other hand. "You know," Owen muttered. "Just once I'd like to set off a flash bulb and tell everyone that what they saw was swamp gas reflected off of Venus or something." He stalked off to the police barrier.

Ianto and Jack finished loading the body and closed the back of the SUV. Ianto dusted his gloved hands together in distaste. "That's a horrible smell, that is."

Jack watched his lips purse as he leant against the vehicle and regarded Jack with a critical eye. "That look is never good, Ianto," he said cheerfully, examining the crowd for abnormalities as a convenient way to avoid looking Ianto in the eye. "If you have something to say, you should feel free."

"If," Ianto began, and then paused, as if he was searching for the words, "if something is going to be looking for these creatures, then maybe the dogs and Simran would be safer at Flat Holm—"

Jack quirked an eyebrow. "Who told you about Flat Holm?"

Ianto sighed and worked his hands in his coroner gloves. "Your private accounts didn't do themselves while you were away, Jack."

"Ah." Jack sighed; it was probably just a matter of time, anyway, before someone found out. Still. "Does anyone else know?"

Ianto looked out over the crime scene, now pretty much a bunch of gawkers and police and empty bloody spaces. "No. That's not my decision." He stared hard at Jack. "But you should tell them anyway."

Jack shoved his hands in his pockets before he remembered that Gwen's fucking jeans were painted on her legs. He settled with his jacket pockets. It was unsatisfying, as far as gestures went. "No."

"Fine."

Sometimes Jack wondered when Ianto would argue with him for real, and not in the face of disaster or petty arguments like when he'd dropped his toothbrush in the toilet. Part of him wanted Ianto to argue with him the way Gwen argued with him. On second thought, no, he didn’t think he could take that much debate.

Oh yeah, he totally could.

"Anything else?" he asked, waiting for Ianto to press the issue.

He didn't. "Nope."

"Good then, because I was afraid you were going to ask me what Gwen and I did last night after you all left. I took polaroids."

Ianto's face reddened. "Not. Not that that wasn't on my mind, but I—"

"I'm messing with you," Jack said, but decided not to elaborate on what they'd done last night, because he hadn't been sober for most of it, and his skull was repaying him for that indiscretion today. He might have actually taken polaroids; he made a note to ask Gwen later. It wasn't often that he drank, and he had seriously misjudged Gwen's alcohol tolerance. That she hadn't seen fit to correct him after the third drink was suspicious.

Ianto peeled off his rubber gloves and tossed them into the bin that the police had set up for waste disposal. Owen breezed past them with a thumbs up sign and dove into the backseat of the SUV. "You two better get the hell in here. This car is already getting ripe." To punctuate the urgency to leave, the beginnings of the rainstorm hit Jack's face.

Ianto shrugged his shoulders. "Well, Gwen is fit, as you are fully aware. And if you wanted to," Ianto said, or more appropriately didn't say the important words in the sentence, and Jack thought that rather charming. Maybe it was because they were in semi-public. The other man rounded the SUV to the driver's seat. "I wouldn't stop you. How often does one get the chance?"

Jack put his hands on his hips and cocked his head, watching the door shut. "Huh."

***

Tosh thought the dogs were unnerving. There were eight of them, but they sat about the flat mutely, sedately, as if they knew exactly what was going on, could understand every word. She made eye contact with a Bull Mastiff, who blinked first and then turned his head away, gazing forlornly at the sliding glass doors of the balcony.

The flat was rather posh, but empty and bright. Simran and the dogs fit nicely in the three-bedroom space, and now that they had settled her in with a few necessities and luxuries that Gwen and Tosh thought she shouldn't have to do without, it was a livable space.

Simran sipped from her mug of tea and curled her legs under her; it was, Tosh thought, a remnant gesture of the woman trapped inside the body, not the body that housed her. She spared at glance at Gwen. Did Gwen feel trapped? Granted, she and Jack hadn't had to cope with nearly the confusion of the poor woman in front of them, and they were familiar enough with the concept of 'oh, this is a wacky situation' (Once they'd all been gassed by a giant flower and woken up naked in the Hub pool. To this day they never spoke of it, not even Jack.).

She shifted her purse in her lap and wondered why she didn't just set it down. Then she remembered that her equipment was in there, and all of it was shiny. Tosh glanced at the dogs and decided that she didn't want to have to explain to Jack or the others why she'd had to chase her Plotznak frequency scrambler down the throat of a Doberman, an explanation that would result in mockery whilst sitting on a table at the A&E.

Gwen leaned in towards Simran from her perch on the overstuffed chair. "How are you getting on, then?"

Simran closed her eyes. "I'm taking all of this rather well," she muttered, almost smiling.

Gwen set down the Yorkie she'd been holding with a pat. "Yeah, that'd be the Xanax."

"It's cracker."

The dog (Xog? Tosh agreed with Ianto that the name was uncomfortably disrespectful, but she didn't know how else to think of it, really) wandered away to lie down under the eating table in the kitchenette.

Tosh liked this flat. She wondered if they had any other lodgings available. She could probably afford a place like this. Well, now that she was full salary. The previous four years had been comfortable, financially, but not this comfortable. Several months ago her paycheque had doubled and her inquiries as to its cause had been met by Jack with a wink and a shrug about government oversight and wretchedness. That it had been shortly after his return hadn't escaped Tosh's notice.

The three of them talked about the flat and the dogs and their frightening silence. Simran set down her mug of tea. "I took them for a walk this morning," she said, "Just around the garden. They were all very politic. I didn't want to use leashes on them, because, well." She shrugged.

Gwen nodded and scratched the ears of a Jack Russell. "They're a very intelligent race," she said softly, and Tosh idly wondered if the Xarxians felt trapped, too. That seemed to be the theme of this visit in Tosh's mind. She thought that it might be fun to be in a man's body for a while, but now just the concept of it was making her feel claustrophobic.

"Have you seen, well, me?" Simran asked. "I haven't heard anything since the other man, the doctor, came by yesterday with the dogs." She glanced about. "Can I call them that? Should I?"

Gwen flipped the Jack Russell's ears a little in her hand, and it leaned into her fingers. Alien or not, the Xarxians liked to be touched. Tosh made a mental note to ask Jack about it later. "I think you can call them that for now," Gwen told Simran. "And yeah, we saw her on the way here. Him," she amended quickly. She turned her hand over and studied the back of it closely before scratching it with her other hand.

Tosh sipped from her mug and sat back. "Your body is out of observation, and we're planning on bringing Dylan to stay here with you until Saturday, if that is all right with you. He's doing a little better about the whole thing, now that he's been spoken with." What she meant was that Gwen had gone into the room and had a heart to heart with him, and when she had emerged, he had stopped trying to yank his IVs out and curse at everyone who entered the room. Tosh didn't know what Gwen had said, but she had noticed that since Gwen had started at Torchwood, her communication skills, already rather formidable, had gone up at least ten new skill levels.

Simran sighed and ran a hand through her hair, then stared at her hand, too. "I guess that's for the best," she said glumly. "He's not going to, you know, do anything again, is he?

Tosh shook her head. "He understands that this is temporary, that you'll be here with him, and that you will knock him out at the slightest sign of destructive behaviour." She nodded firmly, to make her point, and Gwen mirrored her.

Simran looked relieved. Or at least, the body looked relieved. Tosh was trying not to decipher body language too much from anyone these days, even those people still in their bodies; if this had taught her one thing, it was that people's body language was often not as easy to read as she had previously thought. That little shrug Gwen gave, was it assent? Resignation? Frustration? Too difficult to tell.

There was the noise of splashing water, and Tosh understood immediately that something was drinking from the toilet. They all glanced at the loo when the drinking stopped, and there was a clicking of nails on the tile. One of the dogs, a large Rottweiler with a bullhead, sauntered into the room, stared at the three of them for a long moment, sniffing the air, and then walked over to one of the bare sunspots on the rug. It circled once and then flopped down on its side and promptly went to sleep.

Tosh smiled. Sometimes she wanted to be a dog instead.

***

Owen was elbow-deep in Xarxian guts when Jack found Gwen again. She was standing at the top rail of the theatre, ribbing Owen casually about his bedside manner.

"You know I'm only taking your shite because I keep thinking you're Jack," Owen warned. "One more quip and this scalpel is aimed straight for your heart." He flipped the scalpel in one gloved hand, and just the action of his movements sent Xarxian ichor all over the place. Jack tried to breathe through his nose; the whole place smelled like some sort of abattoir. It was pointless to ask if it bothered Owen, because he had probably smelled worse, Jack was sure. Hell, Jack had smelled worse, but it had been a while, and he was usually in a body that he had learnt to control better than this one.

Hrm, back to the matter at hand. Jack wracked his brain for memories of last night as he sidled over to Gwen and watched her laugh at Owen. She didn't seem to have any issues with the body, aside from the fact that it wasn't hers. Jack had noticed that he wasn't as adept at minute motor skills, but he had been able to sign a few things this morning in a passable version of his handwriting, enough that Ianto had given it the stamp of approval and packed the forms off to Whitehall in a slim red envelope. Jack had watched his waistcoat-clad back leave the room with a little bit of a sigh. It was a nice back. He would be glad when nineteen geelucks was over, so that he could see it again without clothing.

"But Owen, it's like watching an episode of CSI, you're so posh down there," Gwen snickered. "Take off your glasses and say something meant to be deep and ponderous."

Jack had to dodge the scalpel Owen tossed over his shoulder. "Hey!" he shouted. "We don't throw knives here unless we're in the circus, Mister Harper."

Owen turned then, making his 'oops' face, which Jack thought never looked especially apologetic, probably for a reason. "Oh, sorry, I was provoked." But he had already turned back to the body, spraying the cavity with the hose so that he could look more closely at it without all the blood in the way. He reached into the cavity, pulled out a fork, and pitched it into the sink with a grunt.

Jack leaned on the rail and they both watched Owen take apart the latest Xarxian. "So last night," he said, trying to sound nonchalant, but not nonchalant. Chalant. Was that a word? He hooked his foot into the rail and cocked his head, studiously not looking at Gwen. "We uhm," he paused. "I don't think I remember much clearly after that third glass of scotch."

Gwen smiled, and he was struck by just how straight his teeth were. Huh. "Are you asking if we had sex?" she asked him, her voice low. "I'm crushed."

Now she was starting to sound a little too much like him, and he wasn't sure if that was sexy or not. Or even flattering. Did he sound like that? "Uh, should I be asking?"

Gwen stared at him for a long moment, and he realised that he had no idea what she was thinking. If they had been reversed, well, reversed-reversed (non-reversed?), he not only would have been able to tell what she was thinking, but he could probably tell her what she was about to say and craft a reply to deliver before she'd even finished constructing a sentence. Now, it was like looking into a mirror while drunk—it was his face, but he had no control over the expressions.

"No," she said finally. "You were quite eager, but you backed off when I said no," she told him. Jack narrowed his eyes; his own eyes were really really blue. He always knew that, but it was strange to see them and not be able to interpret them. Jack knew he'd be distracted by that for a while, the face that wasn't his.

He forced himself to look away and down at the theatre. "Oh, well then, good. I would hate to have offended your honour or something," he mumbled. To be honest, he wasn't as disappointed as he might have been. Gwen was a big girl (or a big boy, depending on how you looked at it), and could have defended herself, even in her own body, really. And secondly, Jack liked to think that if he ever did get to have sex with Gwen (and it would only be once, he was sure), he would remember it.

He would like to remember it in his own body, but beggars couldn't be choosers.

Tosh grunted from her workstation, and they turned to look at her when she took off her glasses and rubbed her temples. "This sodding rain is giving me a headache," she said. "I can't see anything on CCTV, and all the possible sightings of the Xarxians are on here, but they're all blurry and they could be anything. Another human, another alien, a Furry…"

Jack crossed his arms and watched Ianto pass with the tray of coffees and mouth the word 'Furry?' before shaking his head. Jack certainly hoped there weren't furries out there; rain wasn't good for a fifty-pound polyester fox costume. "So yeah, no leads on that, right. Owen, any time today? You look like our only entertainment."

"Oh why the hell not," Owen groused, pulling off his gloves and tossing them in the bin. "This is as good as it's going to get anyway. Do I still have to fill out the paperwork if you all sit in on the post mortem?"

Ianto descended the stairs, sidestepped a puddle of viscera and blood, and handed Owen a coffee. "Yes," he told him before pivoting and returning the way he'd come.

Owen sighed. "Figures. Bugger that for a game of--oh thanks." He took the packet of crisps Ianto threw at him with sigh and ripped the bag open before crossing to the camera display and punching a few buttons to show the screen. "Right then," Owen said as he magnified the camera view and projected it on the wall. "Gather round. Uncle Owen's story time is about to begin."

Ianto handed Gwen a coffee. "That is possibly one of the more disturbing scenarios I've had to consider all week," he told Gwen, smirking conspiratorially before schooling his face into one of placidity. Jack could tell just by looking at him that for a split second Ianto had forgotten that Jack wasn't in there. He faked it pretty well, though. Gwen probably didn't even notice "Uncle Owen reads the classics of Dear Penthouse."

Owen smiled. "You can't take them from the bags," he told Ianto, "or you ruin the mint condition."

Jack threw a pen cap at Owen and sighed. "The job you do to pay for those skin rags? Please do it."

"Riiiight then," Owen said, pointing the camera at the abdomen. "What you see here are the cuts that were made before I started my examination." The screen flickered and flipped images, and Jack was confronted with the feeling that he recognised the wounds again. The gashes across the stomach were wide and parallel, with one line directly down the center of the chest, like a double crossed plus sign. It had to mean something. Cutting that second line would have been difficult; the murderer would have had to hold the skin and muscle down so that it didn't snag. Or maybe the knife was just that sharp.

Gwen sipped her coffee. "Ritual killings?"

"Could be." Owen shrugged. "Not easy cuts to make, and these things are hard to bring down if they don’t want to be brought, am I right, Jack?" Owen glanced at them both, and it was hard to say if he had been confused or if he had actually been deferring to Gwen. Gwen, even Owen would grudgingly admit, had the training for police style investigations.

Jack squinted at the screen. Maybe if he looked at it a lot through different foci, it would jog his memory. Instead, it just looked blurry. So much for that idea. Jack wondered if memories like that weren't stored physically in his actual brain, and since he wasn't in that body, he couldn't access them, not unlike being on the wrong computer. He glanced at Gwen, who was blinking at the images as if she could divine their secrets just staring hard enough. Nah, this couldn't work like that. He remembered all kinds of useless things right now: a Blanda9 had three extra toes on the right hand; the fifth rule of the Time Agency was made to be broken, it was in the rulebook; John's favorite mushroom was the chanterelle. No, he remembered plenty of unhelpful things.

He realised that they were all staring at him and he didn't remember why. "Huwhut? Yeah," he mumbled, shaking his head. Gwen's hair whispered around his face. He wanted to pull it back. It felt too heavy, in his face all the time. He set his boot heel on the chains. Gwen sat down and let her legs dangle over the edge. Tosh raised her eyebrows but didn't say anything.

There was a click of keys as Owen advanced the images. "And now that I opened her up—I think it's a she—it seems as if whoever made these cuts was obviously trying to make a statement." He rolled his eyes, and Jack knew exactly what Owen thought of people who said it with murder, not flowers. "Aside from that, though, they knew exactly what they were looking for." He pulled a flap of skin back and pointed into the remains, all shoved and jacked open with a spring loaded brace and forceps like some sort of excavation site. "The storage pouch is gone. Cut out, pretty expertly too."

"The storage pouch, like where we got the…Gender Bender," Tosh said softly. "Why would they cut it out?"

"I've been thinking about that, and I wager that it's a delicacy on some foreign planet. They sauté it up and serve with a lemon volute and wilted leeks—"

"Or they could have wanted something inside the pouch," Gwen said.

Owen gave her the death glare. Jack loved Owen's death glare, because he was so short and menacing, like a scrapper. Jack and Owen had tousled a few times, actually, and Owen was really good with his fists and feet. Jack had given him the address of a good Krav Maga school, and apparently he had taken advantage of it sometime, because the last time he'd seen Owen in action, he'd used an elbow-headbutt combination that should have put his assailant in hospital. Too bad it had been an alien species with no head and no pain receptors.

"Yeah, okay, that was what I had assumed," Owen said. "But they say that assumption makes an arse out of you and umption. So I thought I'd entertain all options."

Ianto sipped from his coffee and leaned on the railing next to Jack. "Who says that?" he mumbled.

Owen either ignored Ianto or he didn't care, because he pressed a few buttons and the pictures of the cavity changed to close-ups of tissue. "The pouch was severed right below the flap that's there to keep the…swallowed objects in. It's a one-way pouch, so I can only imagine that Xarxians somehow manage to bring their find back up the way it went down, so to speak." He reached back into the cavity with one gloved hand and dug into the crisps bag with the other. Jack wanted him to get his hands confused and eat from the wrong one, just for kicks. That'd be a laugh. A gross laugh.

"Okay, then," Gwen murmured, but it was loud enough for everyone to hear her. "Something in a storage pouch. Who else knows about the Xarxians?" There was dead silence.

Owen flipped off the images on the wall and tipped his crisp bag up to spill the crumbs into his mouth. "The police do now, or they did, before Ianto made them a cuppa" he said. "And our local vet and her psychotic bodyswapping mate, who is still in lockdown."

Jack cracked Gwen's knuckles and she glared at him for a second. "Neither of those are helpful, unless we think that Simran stole out of the safehouse in the middle of the night, happened to track this thing down and then eviscerate it with whatever she had handy in the kitchen—"

"And on a healthy dose of Xanax," Tosh added.

"And I wouldn't say eviscerate," Owen said, tossing the crisp bag away in the bin under Ianto's watchful (re: stalker) eye. "More like dissect. Possibly field dress."

Ianto sighed. "And we're back to your wilted leek theory."

Jack shrugged. "It isn't out of the realm of possibility," he said to the room, not wanting to give Owen too much credit. Sometimes when Owen got a theory, he latched onto it, and that was all fine and good, but it gave him tunnel vision. "But we should consider all possibilities. Like the possibility that something else came through the Rift after them." Even as he said it, his eyes travelled back down to the creature and he knew he'd hit the answer. It was in his gut, sitting there like the overly greasy bacon butty he'd eaten that morning (Tosh was a horrible enabler.). He thought about telling them all, but a hunch was a terrible thing to go on, and he wanted to look in the Archives for a little while before he decided that his hunch was more than indigestion.

Oh hell, the moment he said 'I'm going to do some poking about the Archives,' Ianto would know that something was up. Still.

Tosh started when her computer alarm went off, a soft tinkling of electronic chimes that sounded vaguely Asian. She swiveled in her chair, hands fluttering in surprise, little birds that settled on her keyboard and moved at lightning speed. "Oh!" Look at that!" When she looked back at him, her face was painted with smug accomplishment. "We have one!"

Finally, something was going right. They could bring in a Xarxian, live. In fact, now that they knew what was wrong with them, even if it were as ill-tempered as the first three had been, he was fairly sure that they would be able to take care of it without neutralising it.

"Tall, hideous slobbering grumpy alien sighted in Splott," Tosh said, "The exact words of the 999 call were, 'Oh god it's glowing and it has teeth, oh god help me oh god it's coming right for us'." She finished the transcript deadpan and blinked, sitting back in her chair. "That sound like us?"

Jack nodded. "Yeah, that's us." He was about to race to his office to get his coat when he remembered that he wasn't going to be doing a kid-dress-up impression. The idea of Gwen's body wearing the coat was ridiculous.

The idea of Gwen wearing nothing but the coat had lots of merit. Warranted consideration, maybe.

He stuffed his arms in her leather jacket instead and palmed the keys in the pocket. "Ladies? Care to go out for a jaunt?" He raised his hands in questioning, pointing at the door. "Just us girls?"

Tosh smiled and scrambled for her jacket, but Gwen's grin was widest of all.

***

On to Thursday, Part B