amand_r

Title: Any Other Day: Saturday (aka 6/8)
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: I love this fic, because I love the team, I say, THE TEAM. Thanks to

51stcenturyfox and

cruentum for the beta! 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 (A), Friday (A)

SATURDAY

Too bad you can't buy a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin real fast and freak everybody out.
----Jack Handey

Tosh hated one part of her job at Torchwood beyond reckoning, and that was debris cleanup. It was sad, considering how much debris cleanup she did, picking up chunks of wall and door and—was that asbestos?—and dumping them in the chute that would carry them down the twelve stories to the skip that Ianto had arranged to have parked there not three hours ago. But here she was, in coveralls that never fit right in the crotch, hands wrapped in equally ill-fitting workman's gloves and a paper mask over her mouth.

It could be worse, she could be carting bodies, like Owen and Gwen. And there were two of them here. Ianto had taken care of the three on the Plass, and he'd already taken the third one from the safehouse with him. In fact, the only person not working overtime was Jack, and that had mostly been because in Gwen's body he wasn't good for the massive hefting and firemen's carries that he normally did. Gwen was normally a crowd control person, and she did clean up with Tosh, so that was what Jack was supposed to be doing.

Instead he was staring out the window at the birds winging across the bay, his hands full of wiring and chunks of demolished plaster.

Tosh had decided that he deserved a pass, because whatever was going through his head was something distressing. He'd chewed Gwen's lipstick off, and the raggedy remains of it lined the dogged skin of his lips.

Tosh tossed another load of lift door shrapnel down the chute and wiped her brow. They were almost done here. The dogs and Simran and Dylan carted off to the Hub the night before, and bedded down as comfortably as possible, Simran on the sofa, Dylan in the infirmary. The Xogs had been confined to the conference room until they could be sure that they wouldn't fall off anything or be consumed by the giant flying sheep-eater that already lived there. Tosh had gone home last night and fallen asleep in her clothes, and the morning hadn't been quite as wonderful as it should have been, what with the debris and the dust and the ill-fitting coveralls.

Someday she was going to design good coveralls for women and make a million pounds.

She and Ianto had got the Plass cleared of bodies before Ianto had gone and collected Jack and Gwen, shoveled them into his car and taken them both home with him, where, if everyone was telling the truth, he'd slept on the sofa and they'd slept on the bed.

Owen had sat with Simran and Dylan the night before, and that had apparently ended up in a little…something, because he'd not been nearly as grumpy as he should have been under the circumstances. Tosh was torn between not wanting to like Simran and feeling sorry for Owen that they were going to have to retcon her, and anything he might have had with her would be lost, since Torchwood discouraged fraternising with the retconned; it just led to memory issues.

In any case, she liked new and reformulated Owen (now with 80% less Bitchiness!), though she hadn't been paying attention to him as much as she normally would be when he was giving report to Jack because she'd been busy telling Gwen the story of the exploding space yo-yo, a story that Ianto had asked, sotto voce, could they just…leave that part out? Jack would make that face at him. Tosh didn't know what that face was, but she could imagine.

"Jack," she said softly, trying not to startle him too much. "We're pretty much done here."

"Can I throw the body down the chute?" Owen asked, emerging from the splintered flat door with the front half of a bagged body on his shoulder.

Tosh glanced at Jack, and he didn't say anything. He was standing next to the chute and staring out the open window at the sky. She waved her hand and Owen fed the body into the chute, letting Gwen push the bottom half in, and they all listened to the thunking of the thing falling straight down the crinkle chute to land in the skip.

"Ianto called," Gwen said, and at that, Jack did snap put of it, glancing back at them to show he was listening before looking away. "He's got the last of the the mess on the Plass sorted. Must have been nice to just toss them down the invisible lift." She dusted her hands and Owen mirrored her. "And he's called the police and dealt with that."

Tosh pulled her mask off and threw it down the chute, leaning in to watch the light blue paper flutter to the bottom like a lazy butterfly. "What are we going to do about all of this?" she asked.

Jack threw his handful of debris down the chute and turned, smiling. "This goes back to the Hub. We sift out the bodies—" he glared pointedly at Owen. "--and any proprietary tech that we'd installed. Then we'll dump it." He waved his hand. "This place. We could get someone in, I suppose. It was useful to have in a situation like this. Or for those loud parties I like to have with the strippers and the mud wrestling."

Gwen rolled her eyes, and it was such a role reversal that Tosh was having trouble parsing the reality, and not the physical fallacy of a Gwen who loved strippers and a Jack who thought the whole thing was smarmy.

"If the translation I got was right," she told them and they disengaged the chute and let it drop straight down. "Then the switch is going to take place at seven thirty-nine, which is almost exactly the time there was the first spike last Saturday, and therefore the swap."

Gwen examined her sweat stained armpits with disgust. "So, this place is clean. What do we do until then?"

Owen hit her arm. "You shower. You reek." She hit his shoulder and he staggered into the wall, but for the first time Gwen didn't look sorry. "And here we go again with the physical abuse."

Jack pulled his stay from his hair and shook it out. "You earned it this time."

Tosh yanked her own hair out of her tail and rubbed her scalp. "Well, There's plenty of unpacking to do back at the Hub," she said, and Owen groaned at her, probably for reminding them of the work that awaited them. Owen had six bodies to process; she didn't blame him to wanting the wheels to grind slowly. She had a urine-soaked blaster to play with. It was a cruel justice that that blaster was the one in the best condition. God was punishing her for being allergic.

"Yeah, that all sounds boring," Jack said suddenly, shrugging. "Let's go get lunch."

"Lunch." Gwen raised an eyebrow.

Jack nodded at her. "Lunch. The midday meal. Let's go somewhere nice." Then he seemed to see the bedraggled and sweaty and dusty condition they were in. "Oh, well, let's get takeaway from somewhere nice."

***

At seven thirty-three, Ianto had corralled the Xarxian bodies in a corner of the large underground room he'd been using to run them, and Gwen looked behind her at the calm, controlled grouping of Xogs with a sense of smug satisfaction. On the other hand, it wasn't hard to herd the Xogs. They just kind of did whatever she wanted and could communicate with gestures, probably because they, like her, were relatively intelligent, no matter what they happened to be trapped inside at the moment.

Jack and Ianto had brought the bodies up from cold storage earlier, and they lay on the litters, covered up to the chests with dark logo-ed sheets. Gwen wondered when they'd ever need Torchwood branded sheets. Then she wondered if she could get some to put on Jack's bed as a joke.

She was still having a hard time looking at Jack. She was having a hard time looking at herself in the mirror for that matter. Something was dancing in her skull. She'd come back to life, and something extra had come with her. Or maybe something had punched a hole in her brain, just a little hole, but like a pinprick in a condom, it caused damage.

She was quite glad that she had other things to think about, because just the sound of the lack of sound that flashed through her brain when she thought about it made her heart beat fast. More than once in the day when she had stopped moving she'd had to put her palm over her heart, feel it beating, feel it speeding up involuntarily.

The box was set up in the middle of the room. Tosh had explained in big words and waving hands that it didn't need to be in the room with them, but then she had added that having it in the vicinity probably wouldn't hurt, so Ianto had carried it in, still covered with a tea cosy, his own hands swathed in his archival gloves.

"Seven thirty-eight," Ianto said to them, and pulled the tea cosy off and stepped back to hold back the Xarxian bodies, whose inhabitants were curious about everything they saw. Jack dumped a bag of new collars and leashes they'd picked up from ASDA on the table next to the tea cosy and the Gender Bender, four of them, to be exact.

She wondered if the dogs would just drop dead too, since their owners wouldn't be coming to claim their bodies. What would happen if Jack died in her body? Would the switch just kill them both? Or could she be trapped inside Jack's body forever? Her hand flew up to her chest for the millionth time today, and Jack stared at her.

Ianto was counting down with his stopwatch. "And three, two, one—"

The box flashed bright light, and the litters holding the dead Xarxians were pushed back violently by an invisible hand. The live Xarxian bodies fell, stumbling. Gwen used a hand to cover her eyes and when she lowered them, she could see that Jack and Ianto had done the same. It was strange to have been in the room and felt nothing, when the last time it had gone off it had been so disastrous for her. And Jack. Gwen watched Jack stare at his fingers when he lowered them and thought about what it must have felt like to be trapped inside a shell that was so very very mortal. Did he feel stymied? Frustrated? Something to ask later then, when she could stand to look at him for more than five seconds.

She was distracted then, by the change in events. Four of the dogs were running about, barking like mad. One of them lifted a leg on the table that held the box, and she was very glad that they hadn't simply placed the machine on the ground, else it might have gone the way of the Belbel blaster. The other four dogs simply sat passively where they were, blinking. Gwen could almost see the expression on the mastiff's face, one of, 'This can't be happening to me.'

The Xarxians in their real bodies glanced about frantically, and one of them began to lumber towards Ianto, who backed up a step. Gwen's hand flew to her gun, but she didn't draw it, because Jack was quicker on the draw, and he raised the gun, and his other hand in her direction.

"Stand down, Gwen."

Gwen let her hand rest on the butt of the gun in the holster, and the Xarxian stopped, the others shakily coming after it but staying behind him. It. Gwen didn't know about Xarxian genders, but sometime in all of this she'd decided it was a he. One glance at her own body should have told her how stupid that idea was.

"Gwen?" Tosh said from the comm in her ear. "It's done here. Are you all right?"

Gwen watched Jack lower his gun, and the Xarxian in front punched a few keys in his translator band. Two other Xarxians were petting their arms and touching their heads and legs and each other. The last one was rising from four legs to two.

"Yeah, we're okay here," she said into her comm.

Ianto pressed his own comm. "Tosh, you can send Owen down for the dogs."

Gwen ignored the rest of the conversation, because she was distracted by the four dogs now running free and helter-skelter all over the room. She was aware that Ianto was talking and Jack was digging into another box and handing the newly bodied Xarxians additional translators (all but one of them had been missing, possibly dropped off and eaten or something. They might be finding them about Cardiff for weeks, months even.). There was a bunch of fine-tuning and Ianto chasing a Yorkie about to strap a collar on, and Gwen ignored them both to meander to the litters with the dead bodies, now several feet back from where they started, but for all of that, completely lifeless and motionless.

Were the spirits of the Xarxians trapped in the rotting flesh? Or had they gone to some other place? Gwen scratched lightly at the front of her shirt when her heart started its rev up again. Where had they gone? Gwen had never really put much store by religion, yeah, she'd gone to church as a child and every once in a while she went with Rhys on Easter or Christmas if she'd been booked off, but that hadn't been for a while, and it was more for Rhys than her, and even then, that was more for ritual than an actual belief in a divine creator.

And if she didn't believe in that, then maybe it never applied to anything. To anyone. Or maybe she made her own afterlife. That would say a lot of things about what Jack saw when he died, what she'd seen, or where the Xarxians had just gone. Nothing? Ether. Molecules. Macrocosm, maybe. Suzie's yawning darkness.

Owen had tried to explain it one night when they'd been a little wasted, shortly after Jack had left and they'd been in a bit of a dull numbness, still trying to process the fact that he'd got up from so many gunshots and then from giving a demon from hell a cosmic cuddle that had resulted on his cooling body on a slab for about a week.

Owen had said something about hallucinations and the chemicals that the dying brain gave off, and that was why people claimed that they saw a tunnel of light. And Tosh had waved her hands and said he was full of shit and that there had to be some maker of the math. And then Ianto had said that if he was god, he would plant hundreds of explanations against his existence, so that he could suss out his real followers.

They hadn't had much to say to that.

Ianto wrangled the four dogs and held the leashes, standing by the door when the first Xarxian spoke, and it was—

"Jack Harkness," the Xarxian said, "you still run the Torchwood."

She glanced at them as they stared at her, and it took a second to decipher what was going on. Oh. Oh.

She pointed at her body. "That's Jack," she said, and Jack smirked and shrugged at the aliens.

"You know those Q'nog devices…" He covered the Trans______ back up with the tea cosy.

The Xarxians all let out what might have been growls, or chuckles, or perhaps they all had phlegm in their throats. But Jack didn't seem to be alarmed, and she had to remind herself that he'd been partnered with one way off in space somewhere when he'd been From! The! Future! And living a life of Fancy Swaggering Poshness.

"I'm not used to being recognised these days," Jack drawled and then paused, squinting at the Xarxian in front. "You look like—" and here he made a few extremely disgusting noises with his throat.

The Xarxian waved a hand. It seemed to be a nervous gesture. "He's distantly related." Here it leant in the way a human might, but the universal translator didn't distinguish between regular volume and whispered volume. "We don't like to talk about him much. Thank you for the watches."

Jack started. "I knew he lifted my—anyway, I think there a great deal of explaining to do on all sides," Jack said, hands in pockets now that the gun was cleared, he leant against the table with the ease of someone who wasn't in the least perturbed that he was sharing space with a creature that could probably snap him in half.

The lead Xarxian waved a hand. "You found these ones dead?"

Ianto and Gwen exchanged a look. Gwen was sure she'd been responsible for delivering the fatal blow to at least one of them. Jack had done the rest, except for the mutilated one. It was hard to tell if Jack was going to tell the truth or if he was going to ride out the wave of lies. After all, no one would know better, right? And if they didn't make these things angry, then the higher their chances of getting out of this underground chamber alive. Well, Jack and Ianto's chances. Gwen realised ruefully that she'd walk away no matter what.

It wasn't even remotely comforting, like she had thought it would be. Instead, she thought about the fact that no matter how many times she might reanimate, if these things killed Jack and Ianto, they killed Jack and Ianto.

It made sense in her head.

The Xarxian and Jack stared at each other for a second and then Jack shrugged. "No, but that's a long story, and we were fully justified. What you need to explain is how you brought down bounty hunters on my house."

At that moment, there was a light rap on the hollow metal door, and it opened wide enough for Owen to pop his head in.

"So hey there," Owen said, glancing about nervously and drumming the fingers of one hand on the door's edge.

"You…you are the bringer of treats," the lead Xarxian said to Owen.

Owens face flushed. "Yeah, nice to meet you." His head swiveled to them. "Jack, I'm going to take Simran and…which ones are they?"

Ianto gathered four leashes and handed them over to Owen's fingers as they poked through the still barely-open door. "One hundred percent canine."

"Excellent. We're off to…do that thing."

"Farewell, bringer of 'noms'," the lead Xarxian said, and Owen pursed his lips, as if he wanted to decry his royal title, but instead he just nodded curtly, opened the door enough to get all four of the real dogs through it, and closed it behind him.

Gwen wondered if they could get 'BRINGER OF NOMS' branded on a t-shirt.

"Oh come on," Jack said, resuming whatever he'd been saying before Owen had come. "There are six dead Belbels who all want something you guys have. You should have seen the tech we salvaged from that one's belly. And no, you're not getting it back."

Was there was a technical term for the pouch? Probably. Were the Xarxians were offended that Jack didn't use it? Jack waved at the dead Xarxian on the end of the row, and the Xarxians clicked to each other in something not being translated. Nice bit, that. It wouldn't do to have everything translated all the time. Took some of the fun out of talking about how poorly dressed people were in pig latin whilst out for few at the local pub, that did.

"We did not know what Aubrey was trading in items on the side," The Xarxian's translator slurred out.

"I bet you didn't," Jack murmured under his breath.

"Aubrey?" Ianto asked, "His name was Aubrey?" Gwen didn't blame him; it was bizarre and strange that a creature millions of light years away would have a human name, albeit a rare one.

Jack smiled at him and waved to the wrist strap on the Xarxian's arm. "The universal translator approximates what it thinks would be the equivalent of their name in our language. Like Michele is Michael in French."

Ianto clasped the wrist of one arm in front of him and resumed a lax stance, a soldier at rest or a butler awaiting his next order. His eyes flitted to her and she sighed. Ianto had been strange around her all day, ever since he'd found out that she'd died. She didn't want him to look at her anymore, and if he was going to, she wasn't going to stare back.

"I have to—" Gwen turned and left, Jack's eyes burning a hole in her. It wasn't a real burn, but it would match the one on the front from yesterday.

***

Owen sat with Simran on the bench outside the TIC and stared at the lights in the Bay. Tosh had taken Dylan home, and he'd given her the retcon in three different applications: oral, injectable and suppository. The last one was really just a glycerin capsule, so he hoped she wouldn't use it. He figured if she would, she wouldn't tell him anyway.

Simran's slight frame was bruised and battered, from her time in hospital and the day before, when the Belbel had dragged her about by the neck. The cuts on her wrists were healing, and at this point in time they didn't even look like self-harm marks, so Owen wouldn't have to medically interfere to keep the planned cover story going. On the other hand, though, the cover story was going to be much easier once the suicide attempt was excised from it, and it would probably fit better with Simran's personality.

Owen had considered what he would feel for her when she was back in the properly equipped body, and that body, he had to admit, was all right, he would, any other time. There was the whole confusion of her being in a bloke's body for the week that he'd known her, and well, was she a bloke to him? Or did he start to think of her as female regardless of the body? And if so, what was it about her that did it?

Or had he been attracted to Dylan's body? Did she wear it a certain way that--

Jesus, only in Torchwood. Life was simpler five years ago, he sometimes thought, when all he'd had to worry about was not getting the clap and the occasional A&E trauma in which he might have said, 'For fuck's sake, don't step on his intestines!'

Come to think of it, he'd yelled that to Jack last month.

As soon as the bodies had switched, they'd herded Dylan and Simran back up into the atrium and told them that they would take them home. Owen had stopped in briefly for the real dogs, and they waited in the SUV as he and Simran had a beer outside on the Trail.

Owen didn't know what was happening with the Xarxians and the…Xogs, but Ianto and Jack and Gwen had been slated to take care of that, and everyone had decided that the less the two humans saw of this stuff, the better off they might be, and of course, the better their chances for the retcon to work properly.

"Bringer of noms," he mumbled under his breath, and Simran raised her eyebrow a him. "Nothing."

"I'm still having trouble believing this week happened," she told him, but her sentence was punctuated with a stifled yawn, and he knew that their window of time was closing. "I don't know what I'm going to say at my job. Or to my parents. Or what are the police going to do?"

Owen shrugged and picked at the label on his bottle. "I wouldn't worry about that. Secret organisation. We can pull the right strings."

Simran took a pull from her beer and made a face. It could have been because of the retcon (level 4 had a bad aftertaste), or because she didn't like beer that much. Owen figured that even someone who didn't like beer wouldn't turn one down after the past twenty-four hours.

"Do you think," she began, blinking sleepily and laying her head on his shoulder. "Do you think that maybe you'd like to go out sometime?"

He tightened his grip on her shoulders, so she would fall over when she slumped down, almost unconscious. One of the buoys out in the bay was tossing so violently in the wind that the red blinker winked in and out of his eyesight.

"Yeah, sure," he told her, not needing to glance at her face to know that she was asleep. "I'd like that."

Sometimes, he hated his job.

***

Ianto was tired of being on his feet, and it seemed as if he was the only one. The Xarxians and Jack had been standing across from each other for the better part of thirty minutes, conveying information about the prior week, what they were doing here, a Rift accident, of course, and the dogs and the humans involved, and then the story of Jack and Gwen's exchange, a point that the Xarxians seemed to find quite funny.

Ianto didn't bother to point out that they had, until less than an hour ago, been housed in a bunch of canines. He was sure they wouldn't get what was so humorous about that anyway.

Gwen had flown out about twenty minutes ago, and Jack hadn't really said anything about it, but he didn't call her back or look surprised when she had just turned and walked away. Ianto was fairly sure that Gwen was at the end of her rope in some ways, and they hadn't really stopped long enough in the past twenty-four hours for her to process it, minus the few hours that her body had seemed to pass out on his bed the night before.

This was going to be one of those things that Ianto digested after the fact, really, way after the fact, since he was going to be busy for quite a few more days after this.

When his woolgathering ended, Ianto realised that they had got to the part where they were deciding what to do, when Ianto pointed to the Xogs, sitting passively with the Xarxians and blinking occasionally. "And you can care for them like this?"

Jack glanced at the Xogs, as if he was surprised to see them, and Ianto knew that he'd forgotten them completely.

"What would we do with them like this?" The head Xarxian, whose name the translator had decided was 'Eustace' waved a long clawed hand at the Xogs. "Carnivores who cannot speak or even breathe our atmosphere?"

He…it…ze had a point here, Ianto was forced to admit, but now he had a whole new track to worry about. What the hell was Torchwood going to do with them? He sensed that he might be becoming a dog person after all. Maybe Rhi and the kids wanted a dog…

"We cannot bring them with us," Eustace said, clicking his nails together in thought. "We cannot even get off this planet."

Jack coughed and Ianto raised an eyebrow.

"There's an old saying on Earth," Jack began, and Ianto resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Jack always got the old sayings wrong, especially that 'bird in the hand' one. "Something about closing a door and opening a window."

Ianto glanced at the Xarxians and frowned. "Sir?"

***

Owen cut the engine, stepping out of the SUV and rounding it to watch the Xarxians mill about on the grass. The trailer bobbed with the weight of the Xarxians as they stepped out and onto the grass of the field in Adamsdown. Ianto and Jack held the door in the wind so that they wouldn't wave about and hit their agitated guests.

The night was dark and chilly, quite windy, actually, and Owen zipped his coat.

Jack slammed the door shut on his side and the Xarxians jumped. Ianto rolled his eyes and shut his side more quietly.

"Oh, it's cloaked," Jack said to himself. "Those considerately sneaky bastards." He pulled one of Tosh's larger wavelength generators from his purse and revved it up, the whine of electronics singing on the air like a mechanical bird. Ianto and the Xarxians stood and waited expectantly. Jack knocked the side of the generator with the flat of his palm. "Come on you communist piece of sh—oh."

The generator let out a noise that sounded like 'squiiiiiigle squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee' and then Jack leapt up on one of the many large rocks sticking from the ground. He pushed some hair behind his ear and reached out the generator hand to wave it about in front of him.

About twenty feet away, something began to…appear in the middle of the air, like peeling back wallpaper or scraping the gray wax off a scratch ticket. Where Owen had been seeing air and a rather neutral view of the Welsh countryside in the distance, the view became an ugly shade of gray and black, the unmistakable sight of coated metal sheeting as the Belbel ship was divested of its shielding cloak.

Owen had thought it would be a smooth de-cloaking, what with all the Star Trek he'd watched as a kid making him therefore an expert on cloaking devices (He hadn't even bothered to not understand Ianto's mumbled words in Klingon when they'd driven over, just smiled and answered something from the sixth film. Kirk was brilliant.). But instead, Jack was hacking the cloaking device and it didn't want to go. It was rather like scraping paint off a wooden windowsill with a wide chisel: crude, uneven and spotty. One side of the dorsal fin-like wing at the top of the ship was still cloaked, and Owen squinted at it, trying to tell himself that even though he was staring through the thing at a spattering of lit houses a mile away on the hillside, he was actually looking at the wing of a metal and opaque ship.

He glanced at Ianto, who gave him a small smile. "Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam," Ianto whispered harshly.

Owen spread his middle and ring fingers and waved his hand minutely before they both returned their attention to the unfolding spaceship painting in front of them, as Jack stood on the tallest rock he could find and waved the generator like he was painting the air with a roller. Or conducting an orchestra. Drunk.

The Xarxians stood off and to the side, but their murmurs were soft on the wind, too low to hear over the whining of the generator, and besides, they'd turned off their translator. Seemed that they didn't feel much like letting the humans overhear them. That was fine with Owen; they obviously didn't understand what the humans were saying either. Jack seemed convinced that the Xarxians weren't going to rip their heads off, so that was enough for him.

The ship was about ninety percent revealed when there was a groan from inside it, and Owen took a step back. Ianto mirrored him, and they exchanged a worried glance. Jack waved the generator in both hands like he was either reeling in a big fish or lining up a tee off. It was hard to tell. He glanced back over his shoulder at them, winked at Ianto, and wiggled his arse. Oh, that was just wrong.

"Aaaand, BOOM!" Jack yelled as there was a metal clicking noise and then a shuddering sound like an old engine winding down, and the rest of the cloaking device peeled away, mostly from the landing pads and the nose of the thing.

Owen stepped back again so that he could see it more clearly. It was certainly large, large enough to house all of the Xarxians comfortably; it probably had multiple rooms and everything. No space shuttles for other alien species. The shape of it wasn't spherical, like in old films of aliens and UFOs, but triangular, with a high spiked fin on the top, and two flat, wings that ended in tips so pointed that if anyone had come out here and run into them with the cloak on they might have speared themselves on them.

"Oh," Jack said, a note of appreciation in his voice. "A Dathcloft 16-07. Now that is a high-class ship." He smiled at Ianto. "We are in the wrong profession."

Ianto finished buttoning his coat and smoothed the front of it down. "Quite."

"Can you fly one of these things, Eustace?" Jack asked.

Eustace petted the hull with one hand, and another one of the Xarxians lifted its head. "I can fly this," it said. "Once we rip out the seats."

Jack pressed a few more buttons on the generator, and the hatch opened, bringing down the loading dock ramp. Ianto approached the ramp but didn't board; his gun was out, and it occurred to Owen that there could have been more Belbels on board, wondering where their hunting parties had gone. No, that had been over twenty-four hours ago. They would have gone out looking by now, right?

Ianto turned back to Jack and the Xarxians. "Looks empty," he said, but he didn't holster his gun.

Jack tucked the generator back into his purse as he spoke. "And the keys should be in the ignition, you know." When Eustace just tilted its head Jack amended. "It should be all ready for you."

"Thank you, Harkness, for your courage and your clear thinking."

"He always gets all the credit," Owen groused to Ianto, who had joined him to stand closer to the SUV again.

"And to you, bringer of noms," Eustace said, looking at the two of them over Jack's shoulder. Ianto had the grace not to say anything.

Owen waved a hand. "Just…doing my job."

The Xarxians approached the landing dock and tested it with their feet and hands. They were of comparable size to a Belbel, so it was actually rather lucky that this ship was here. The last time they had salvaged a ship in the countryside of Southampton, it had been the size of a cricket ball.

"One last thing. Any idea who Aubrey planned to sell that Q'nog device to?" Jack asked suddenly, one hand on his hip.

Eustace did that face-stroking thing from earlier. One of the other Xarxians bent down to pick a dandelion, sniffed it and then ate it. Owen wondered if they were hungry.

"I'm not sure," Eustace said. "But it wouldn't have been Belbels."

"The thing or things that hired the Belbels, then," Jack said, sighing. "Good to know. Still." He removed his hand from his hip and shoved it in his jacket pocket, backing away slightly. "You shouldn't be offended when I say that we'd not like to see you again?"

The Xarxian eating the grass barked a laugh. "Your vegetation tastes like dead seals."

Owen glanced at Jack, who shrugged. "Universal translators."

They watched the Xarxians board the ship, and about thirty seconds later the landing dock ramp lifted, sealing into the side of the ship seamlessly. There was no hissing gas or hydraulic sound like he might have expected. Ianto left them and went to the SUV as the ship began to whine with what Owen figured was the start-up of the engine.

Jack sighed and tilted his head as he examined the ship, eyes roving over it with what almost looked like jealousy. He licked his lips and grimaced, and then when he caught Owen staring he smiled ruefully. "My first ship was a Dathcloft 12-08. Piece of shit, but still. You know," he shrugged, "when it's yours…"

Owen thought about his first car, a crap Vauxhall he'd bought from his mum for ten quid when he'd gone away to school. It had really been horrible, and it stalled and he'd almost driven off the M-5 one night when the brakes had gone, but still.

It was odd to think that someone he knew was getting sentimental about his first spaceship, but then again, he'd had to make a lot of adjustments in the past four years, and this was just another one. It suited Jack, actually, maybe it always had, even though this side of Jack, what with the spaceships and being from somewhere else and being immortal and all was still new, compared to how long he'd known Jack entirely.

It didn't help that Jack was Gwen being wistful. This should have been a manly masculine 'let's bond over cars and spaceships' moment, and Owen kept checking out her cleavage.

"You know what bothers me about all of this?" Owen said as they watched the ship take off and hover over the green Welsh grass, painted into black spikes in the night.

Jack waved to the ship as it rotated in the air and tipped up by the nose. "What, my fine feathered friend?"

Owen didn't pause. "One, that you're still pretending to be Burgess Meredith at bizarre times." He paused, but Jack didn't respond. "And two, that gas thing from Monday night."

Ianto handed him a cup of coffee and he took it. "It is bizarre," he said.

"I know. I just don't think the caffeine was the only reason. I mean, a poison gas from caffeine?"

Ianto toasted him, and then sipped from his cup and watched the ship take off, the wind blowing in such a rush that they had to brace themselves. "No I meant the Burgess Meredith thing."

Jack stole his coffee and drank from it, eyes never leaving the ship as it grew smaller and smaller. "You two still don't appreciate a good line." He turned when the ship hit the cloud-line and disappeared. Ianto regained his coffee and looked at the lipstick marks on the lip. "We have to bed down those Xogs and figure out how to add them to our menagerie before Myfanwy eats one of them."

"We should at some point worry about Gwen," Ianto said. "Seeing as how she lit out of the Hub with no indication of where she was going." He glanced at Jack but didn't add anything. He didn't need to. Even Owen in his psychically null brain could intuit that they were all hyper-aware of the fact that the day before, Gwen had taken one in the chest and shuffled off the mortal coil.

Owen wanted to run tests, he would admit it. He wanted to do a full work-up on Jack's body, he always had since the moment the man stood up in the Hub after Owen had shot him. At one point in time Jack had promised to stand still for it, but there never seemed to be an appropriate moment. After Jack had skived off after the Doctor, Owen had done a full work-up of Jack's blood sample in the fridge, but it had proved to be clean. Then later it had proved to be someone else's. Jack was sneaky sneaky.

Someday, though, he'd pin the man down and get more blood and devise a whole routine of tests. For now, it was wishful thinking and something he jotted notes about on post-its in his labspace.

Jack shoved his hands in his pockets and jumped up on one of the rocks that littered the grassy field. "We don't have to worry about Gwen," he said, not looking at then. "She needs time." He jumped from one rock to the nearest one three feet away and was forced to pinwheel his arms to keep his balance. Ianto ambled slowly along, next to Owen; they were two parents slowing their walk so that their shorter-legged child could keep up.

It was only a few steps, but Jack seemed to want to take them across the rocks; Owen was reminded of that game where one had to stay on the rocks to avoid the grass, or on the case of indoors, on the furniture to avoid the carpet, because the ground was considered 'radioactive'.

Sometimes he wondered what the hell children were thinking.

Jack lost his balance on a small rock and one foot went to the grass. "Hot lava," Ianto murmured.

Oh dear god.

"Honestly, though," Ianto said and they rounded the doors of the SUV. "Gwen—"

Jack pulled a small box from his pocket and shook it. "I have Gwen covered." He sat in the backseat and turned so that he could put his feet up on the seat next to him.

Ianto raised his brows. "You're tracking her?"

Owen smirked and started the engine, setting his coffee cup in the holder to his left.

Jack glanced at the tiny readout on the box. "Put a tracer in her coat. I think she's at ASDA right now."

Owen pulled them off the grass onto the C road, the trailer still following merrily along. "She's probably buying herself a fancy new coat."

Jack tucked the remote back into his pocket and pulled out a nail clipper, unfolding it to reveal the file, and started in on his nails with a grin. "That may be true. Oh well. Drive us home, Jeeves."

***

The wind almost carried her off the building this time, and she didn't fight against it, but swayed with it, the coat flapping about like a cape. The Altolusso pointed away from the bay but she felt as if she could hear it. All about her the ground was littered with lights and moving cars and specks that were people. None of them knew that she was up here.

She thought about what would happen if she were to just step off. Worst case scenario: she'd land on someone. That would be bad. She could land and traumatise people, children. They'd call the police and she'd have a serious amount of explaining to do before Jack or Ianto (probably Ianto), could arrive and do some magic.

There were more reasons not to jump. The first was that it would hurt. It would hurt a lot. Not the landing part, because that would be instantaneous. The coming back. Jack had once mentioned offhand that it hurt, but he'd only been barely referencing the physical pain, though that was there, as if the pain of the death that you missed by being dead was flattened, mixed, hammered wafer thin and then concentrated so that you felt it all at once in the first three seconds of waking. It wasn't being dragged over broken glass, but she didn't want to honestly have an excuse to know how correct that might be from experience.

A pair of gulls flew past her in some sort of mating dance. Maybe they were fighting over something edible. She wasn't too concerned, not even when they came within touching distance.

When she had left earlier in the day, it hadn't been Ianto, not really, and she hoped that he didn't feel badly. Probably not. Jack hadn't bothered to stop her when she'd gone, and so he must have known, that she couldn't stop thinking about it, that the blackness that was more than blackness enveloped her thoughts every time she blinked. When she closed her eyes, it was like falling into an abyss.

Maybe she might have handled dying better if she hadn't already almost died when Suzie had tried to suck the life out of her last year. Maybe she would have handled it better if she had been in her own body. Maybe she would have been better prepared if she were more religious, knew how to see the baby Jesus in a Welshcake, knew more words to the Lord's prayer than, Our Father, who art in heaven.

"Hallowed be thy name," she whispered, and the sound of Jack praying seemed blasphemous in her ears.

It wasn't as if she had just found religion, not really. And she wasn't afraid that she was going to hell. It wasn't even the prospect that there was no hell or heaven to go to. It was that she had been cognisant of the fact that she was dead while she was actually dead, and the idea that there was nothing, and that she could be hanging in the middle of nothing and thinking about the fact that one was neither inside nor outside the box was horrifying. Nothing is a thing, right? Or the absence of a thing. Or maybe if it was truly nothing, they wouldn't have a name for it.

For three minutes or so she had been Schrodinger's Jack, and it had covered her with oil.

Her body rocked in the breeze still, and she thought about sitting down on the strut and just staying there until someone noticed her, or she fell asleep and fell off, or…Jack would figure it out. He had last time. Hell, he probably had a tracker in her coat.

She didn't want to jump. Two days before it had been terrifying and also alluring, and now it was just terrifying.

She turned, not even worrying about her balance (and it was easier to keep when she wasn't worrying about it, go figure on that one), and made her way back to the roof proper, where she meandered out to the street and caught a taxi to the one place where she could think and not think at the same time.

She had to knock. Rhys answered the door with a bed head, winky eyes, and he seemed genuinely surprised to see her, mostly because she always let herself in.

"What's wrong?" he asked, almost on a sort of autopilot, because he followed that with, "Is Gwen—Oh."

Gwen nodded and brushed past him. His cologne wafted across her face and she snapped her eyes shut for one brief second. "I left my keys at work."

"Is someone dead?" Rhys asked, following her into the kitchenette. She sat at the stool next to the counter and he flipped the kettle on.

She almost said, 'I was,' but then she'd have to explain Jack, and she couldn't do that, wasn't allowed to do that. Instead she just shook her head and picked at the fingernails that she'd done a great job of decimating over the past twenty-four hours. Rhys busied himself setting up the mugs and teabags.

"Are you still going to, you know, switch back?"

"Yeah," she murmured. "There was…there was a test run tonight. It'll work."

Rhys paused and closed his eyes, as if he had been waiting for something and she'd given it. It occurred to Gwen that she'd been so wrapped up in her end of this that she hadn't considered his.

"And you're sure no one is dead."

"Well, no," she amended, and when he didn't move she tried for levity. "But they were all bad," she said in her worst Arnold voice.

Rhys laughed, a little rough chuckle just for her, to let her know that he loved her, that she was his girl, that they were going to be okay. "I'm going to make you toast," he said decidedly.

Gwen watched him dig about for bread and didn't have the heart to tell him that she wasn't hungry, because it wasn't about the toast, and it wasn't about tonight, and it wasn't about her body, not really. "I miss you," she blurted out, unsure of what all that meant, but pretty sure of about ninety percent of it.

The kettle whistled and he pulled it from the stand to pour water into the mugs, being overly deliberate and careful. He set the kettle back in place and looked at her, hands on his hips. "You look like you're a Marmite girl," he said. She made a face and he nodded. "Marmite, definitely."

END SATURDAY

Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam: (Klingon) Today is a good day to die. ;P

On to Sunday