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There were times when Jack worried about Suzie, her sheer unlikeliness. How many other engineering grads with firsts
from Imperial would come to join Torchwood on a junior civil servant's pay instead of going into industry? Especially given
that she was a female engineering grad and they were rarer than hen's teeth, and being headhunted. Why join the offshoot of
an organisation who couldn't give a clear job description?
But Suzie did. She never gave a reason, and that intrigued
him more. She was so competent, and so in control that he loved his cool, collected second in command more than the hidden
demon that shared his bed. Because, now that Cardiff operations were expanding, he was going to have to hire more people,
but Suzie would always be his second in command. She could hold it together enough to cover for him if he were ever indisposed,
not that it was ever going to happen but he liked to think it might and worried in case it did happen, but also she had an
almost genius ability with machinery. She could do more than Jack could, because while he found taking things apart easy enough,
if it was machinery he'd never encountered before he found it difficult to put it back together so that it worked. She didn't,
and it was a thankfully common enough occurrence that made her marvellous abilities wonderfully useful.
He still couldn't
shake a slight unease as she rode him, fingernails he could have sworn were shorter than his turning into claws that raked
his back and sober, calm face contorted with devilish delight, God, he wanted her.
How he was ever going to explain
that he loved his cool, calm, genius second in command more than the banshee in his bed was beyond him so he just wasn't going
to. He could keep everything up in the air, even once they did expand.
~~~~
There were times when Jack worried
about Owen. Those times were often and regular. Owen was trouble. He'd seen enough to know trouble when he saw it, and he
saw it in Owen's eyes, in his walk, the way he stood. Owen was trouble stretched out into the shape of a man.
And,
oh dear, did he ever remind Jack of himself.
Jack didn't think that Owen was his illegitimate offspring, for one he
didn't look one bit like Jack and, if he'd taken after his mother, Jack liked to believe he'd remember a woman that looked
like Owen.
That was why Owen got the job. The other man who applied was a Cambridge grad, nice young man, floppy dark
brown hair and the perpetual air of someone who'd shove his glasses up his head to ask where they were. Owen didn't even put
on interview airs. Jack chose him because death really was too good for him.
One of their fights had got out of hand,
again, and he was having Owen up against a wall in HQ. Owen probably chose it deliberately, hoping that Suzy would walk in,
find out about them. Jack, meanwhile, didn't kid himself that Suzy didn't know, of course she did. He knew about her and Owen.
It was just Owen that didn't know about him and Suzy. Maybe.
It was just begging for someone to find them. He still
wasn't sure what the Torchwood policy was on commanding officers having it away with their sub-ordinates, he'd never been
caught yet, but if they kept doing this he was bound to be. Which would be awkward. He could probably Retcon whoever it was
that found them, and then Retcon Owen to make him forget that anyone ever caught them. It did seem to be awfully far to go,
when just moving into his office would be so much easier.
But he didn't think the sex would be as good.
~~~~
Jack
worries about Ianto, because he knows this isn't him. Ianto Jones is in love with the lovely Lisa whose brain is buried with
that poor pizza delivery girl who officially died in a car accident and whose body is still in the freezers downstairs because
they don't know what to do with it. They couldn't bury her in case the Cybermen cybernetics weren't quite as dead and fried
as they appeared to be; they couldn't hand her over to Torchwood One who are officially in charge of all things Cyber because
they would figure out that she hadn't died a year ago but only two weeks ago and then there'd be awkward questions that Jack
didn't want to answer because he's still not thought up good enough excuses.
But what Ianto might need was a burial,
a memorial service, something that proves that Lisa Hallet existed and wasn't just a botched conversion job. He needs something,
because it's her name he cries out as he comes.
Having sex with Ianto is painful, not just in the emotional sense,
Ianto lets himself loose on Jack, brings out all the things he knows about hurting people and Jack lets him. He heals, and
no one knows about it. He worries sometimes that this might be the time he doesn't heal, and Ianto will have a dead body on
his hands whose cause of death he'll have to disguise. But Ianto's done that enough times that Jack trusts him to do that
for him. Or maybe that'll be his final revenge on Jack, having his body found in some unlikely and deeply perverse position.
There are worse ways of being remembered; at least he'd not be forgotten.
As the breath is choked from his body again,
that's his last thought.
~~~~
Jack was worried about Gwen. He couldn't expect her not to take Rhys leaving her hard,
they'd been together for so long, but she had taken it so hard.
Then again it had been a terrible way to let someone
go. Rhys had had it with her and gave her both barrels in a way that would make most career widows cheer. Unfortunately the
entire team heard because they'd bugged Gwen's house because they thought she'd been possessed by an alien. It turned out
she hadn't, the stress at home really had been affecting her that badly.
But he was reasonably sure that no matter
how badly it was going, this was not the way to make her feel better. He'd tried turning her down, gently at first but with
increasing venom. Eventually she'd turned on him, pointing out that she was a grown woman (naked as she was, that was obvious)
and could do what she liked. The way he saw it, if it wasn't him it would be someone else, and he was more of a gentleman
than Owen, and less fragile, emotionally, that Ianto, who still wasn't right. He'd be better for her, could, when she got
over it, cope with all the stages from hatred to coldness to awkwardness, far better than the other could and would make it
easier for Gwen too.
It didn't stop him worrying that this would be the end of Torchwood for Gwen.
~~~~
It
was that little touch of grey in the corner of Toshiko's brow that worried him. It never used to be there when he rejuvenated
her.
What if it stopped working?
She was all that he had left; Rhys had seen sense and rescued Gwen from being
eaten alive by Torchwood. He'd been sad to see her go, but relieved that someone had got out alive and reasonably sane. Owen
and Ianto ran off together not long after, to everyone's shock, probably including their own. Not that Jack knew, he hadn't
been on either of their Christmas card lists.
All of that was more than two hundred years ago. The only person still
left with him was Tosh and he was going to keep her here if he could.
"How are you still awake?"
"What can I
say, I have great stamina." He ran a finger down her naked side.
"And really?" Tosh must have noticed him looking.
"You're more vain about the colour of my hair than I am." Jack wanted to say something but she put her finger on his lips
to stop him. "You're not the only one who's noticed."
"But you're not scared."
"Think about what I've seen already.”
She gestured to the view from the balcony of their apartment, “I've seen hovercars as taxis in New York, I've stood
on Mars, I've been allowed to talk to aliens without having to pretend that it didn't happen, medical advances beyond mine
or Owen's wildest dreams, not all of them from alien tech, and it's all because of you." They'd travelled together, as man
and wife, woman and toyboy, mother and child and then he'd wake her up one morning and she'd be thirty again. Some fancy alien
tech he didn't bother telling the Doctor about. "But nothing lasts forever, eventually it will stop working, we don't know
enough about how that machine works. And I'm only human, we all die some time."
"I won't."
"You never know,
you might get lucky." She kissed him.
"I thought it was only me that distracts people with sex,"
"I'm learning
from the best."
~~~~
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