Using the Rift to Our Advantage

It was early morning in the Hub and the doors were being unlocked for the first time that day. The sun was shining but a man in a carefully ironed suit stepped through the door into the pseudo tourist office. He did not look dressed for the weather but Ianto Jones wasn’t comfortable working in anything else.

Ianto began tidying the Hub as usual, in preparation for the arrival of the rest of the team. He liked to be there first so he could get things just so. A small smile of satisfaction crept over his face as he moved things back into their proper places and picked up the empty pizza boxes to throw away. Owen still wouldn’t eat meat feast pizza.

Methodically tidying, Ianto worked his way through the Hub, eventually reaching the conference room. To any onlooker, had there been any, it would have looked at first as though he’d skipped the room altogether and moved onto the adjoining coffee room but he soon emerged again carrying a large black plastic bag. From this bag, colourful decorations had been withdrawn; some shaped balloons, confetti and a banner he had made himself. Ianto wasn’t one for going over the top but, knowing how Jack liked to be made a fuss of, he had tried as hard as he could to make the room look appropriate.

There was just one more thing left in the black bag. Ianto withdrew the wrapped box carefully and crooned at it for a moment, smiling. Suddenly, the main door to the Hub opened and Ianto heard shouts from downstairs. Stuffing the box back into the bag and stowing hurriedly it in the coffee room, despite the muffled squeaks emitting from the box, Ianto prepared for the arrival of the team. When none of them came into the decorated room, Ianto decided to emerge.

“Ianto! Good to see you! We have a situation, shape shifter just off Cardiff Bay. Must have come through the rift.” Jack informed him whilst rushing over to check several monitors.

“Jack, I just wanted to – ”

“Can’t it wait, Ianto?” Jack asked, not looking up from the screen. When Jack used that tone of voice it was never really a question.

“Oh, sure,” Ianto replied, masking how put out he had been. “Coffee?” he tried again, brightly.

“That’s why I keep you around, tea boy,” Jack did look up at him this time, with a huge mischievous grin plastered across his face, and the look nearly made Ianto break into a fit of delighted giggles. Instead, he kept calm and walked steadily over to the coffee room to prepare the team’s morning dose of caffeine. It looked like they were going to need it.

By the time Ianto got back with the coffee, the rest of the team were already packing up to go out. Jack told them all to meet up in ten minutes outside the entrance, took a swig of his coffee from the tray of mugs Ianto was holding, kissed him and billowed out of the room. The others followed suit, but without the kisses. Tosh was the last one to leave and as she replaced her mug she whispered softly in his ear.

“Happy anniversary.”

With those words, she took her exit and Ianto was left standing with a tray of barely-touched coffee and the feeling of sadness that Jack had forgotten it was such an important day. He pushed his unhappiness inside him and went to clear up the coffee. It wasn’t like they had anything official going on or anything. They were just sleeping together. There were no dates out together, Torchwood didn’t allow them time for that. Despite all that, Ianto couldn’t help but wish that Jack had at least remembered the day.

Ianto was the last to arrive at the location, even though it seemed that he had been given little to do compared to the others. They were all standing in a group under the early summer light in nothing but bathing suits. Owen was sporting a tiny pair of black Speedos that didn’t leave much to the imagination; Gwen looked ridiculous in a pink and white stripy bikini and hastily waxed legs, she had clearly needed more than ten minutes to prepare; Tosh was as respectable as usual with a plain one-piece swimming costume and Jack was, well, Jack. He wore a pair of long trunks decorated with colourful flowers and was deliberately flexing his well-toned upper body muscles in the general direction of the girls Ianto could see out of the corner of his eye.

“It looks like you lot are going to the beach,” Ianto sniffed, pretending to disapprove of the bare flesh on display but enjoying the view as much as the giggling girls.

“Great!” said Jack. “We’re supposed to! Didn’t anyone tell you…?” he asked. When met with a negative silence, Jack continued, “never mind, you can mind the SUV. Come on, everyone! Ear pieces in and off to the beach we go!”

“Mind the SUV,” Ianto muttered to himself several minutes later while the rest of the team giggled their way through unloading the SUV for a day at the beach.

“Ianto, you hear me?” Jack’s voice resonated into his ear at a volume that was louder than Gwen’s snoring.

Turning the volume down, Ianto replied in the affirmative. “Yes, I can hear you, Jack. Owen? Gwen? Tosh? Are you all online?” Receiving yeses from all of them, Ianto gave them the go-ahead.

“Make sure you watch the monitors. We don’t know what form the shape shifter will have taken and it’s highly likely that it is intelligent and will try to blend in. But we think we have a trace on the footprint it left as it tore through the rift, so you should be able to identify something that matches with the scanner.” Jack told Ianto, preparing to leave.

“Jack?”

A muffled response came from Jack’s mouth; he’d put a spade in his mouth to leave his hands free to tie his waistband.

“Just… Good luck,” Ianto said, changing his mind about what he was going to say at the last second. The forgotten celebration could wait, a shapeshifter in Cardiff bay probably couldn’t.

Owen was the first to spot something in the swarming mass of tourists. Whilst the girls were busy putting sun cream on each other, he was busily scanning the swimmers for anything suspicious. He was rewarded fairly quickly.

“Er, guys, do you know where the Queen likes going on holiday?”

“Owen, this really isn’t the time for stupid jokes,” Jack frowned over the coms.

Ignoring him, Owen continued, “coz if she doesn’t love swimming in an orange bikini just off the coast of Cardiff in early summer then there’s something suspicious going on.” Heads whipped round as he finished speaking and Owen smiled smugly.

“After her!” yelled Jack. “Ianto, get me a bearing on which way the monster is, will you?”

“You’re heading straight for it, Jack, 187 degrees.”

The team into the sea as fast as they could towards the Queen. She was an odd sight, not as wrinkly as you might think in her skimpy attire. She still had a tiara perched on her head that sparkled in the sunlight and was swimming calmly through bunches of tourists, who appeared not to mind that a member of the monarchy had joined them for a dip.

As the team neared the shape shifter, she began looking around sharply, as if she could sense that she was being chased. Catching sight of the four people rushing towards her, she screwed up her face like she was trying to concentrate and promptly disappeared.

“Where’d she go?” Tosh yelled, deafening Ianto down the coms.

“She’s right there, but there was a really massive energy pulse there a second ago. She shift?” Ianto wondered.

“I saw,” said Jack confidently. “She turned into a beachball.”

“Right,” said Owen. “Which one, exactly?”

Looking round the beach, the team realised that this had been a good disguise. There were many beachballs on the scene; floating in the sea, being played with, being chased after. “Burst em!” Jack commanded. “Whichever one tries to run away or explodes into a giant goopy alien mess is the one we’re after.”

For Ianto, most of the rest of what he heard was loud popping sounds, followed by the screaming of small children. This continued for a good ten minutes and Ianto started to get vaguely bored. He started to amuse himself by thinking of the next coffee machine he would buy for the Hub. It would be able to make the whole team’s coffee simultaneously… His dreaming was interrupted by a loud splat sound, a triumphant yell from Jack and even louder screaming than before.

“We got him!” Jack reported. “Warm up the SUV, Ianto, we need to get out of here.”

Minutes later, the team were bundling themselves into the car in varying states of cleanliness. Jack was grinning from ear to ear and was covered in purple alien goo and sand. Owen also had the purple substance smeared all over himself and was clutching a glass jar that looked like a large jam jar. The jar was full of what was left of the creature.

Jack was the first to give orders again. “Ianto, get down to the beach with a flashy thingie later, will you?”

“A flashy thingie?” Gwen repeated dumbly.

“Oh no, that was ‘Men in Black’, right?” Jack grinned. “Retcon tablets all round!”

On arriving back at the Hub, Ianto hoped that the team would go into the conference room to debrief but Jack told everyone that they deserved a rest and should all go home. Owen went down to the lab to freeze the shapeshifter so they could study it later and left with the girls. Jack went upstairs to have a shower in the room attached to his office and Ianto was, once again, left alone to tidy up the mess.

Ianto ordered a clean-up crew to go down to the beach and then walked slowly over to the conference room. He sat down one of the chairs around the table and looked sadly around the room. The decorations now looked sad and overdone than the cute surprise that Ianto had hoped they would appear this morning. He was just about to stand up and take them down when he heard something behind him. He whipped around to see Jack standing behind him, looking appreciatively at his handiwork.

“Cute,” was all he said with that smile. Then he dropped his gaze to Ianto and looked more serious. “I’m sorry I didn’t have time to see it this morning but, you know, duty calls.”

Ianto didn’t say anything; he didn’t need to. He just walked over to Jack and hugged him tightly. He felt Jack’s strong arms wrap around him and felt safe as they held him close. The pair stood there for several minutes, motionless, enjoying the feeling of being close. Ianto was the first to break the silence.

“I got you a present,” he said. Jack released him and he went to retrieve it from the coffee room. Handing it to Jack, he said, “I thought it was good, but I think it was what caused us the problems this morning.”

Opening the box, Jack saw that there was something purple and round inside the box. The purple was the exact same shade as that of the go that he had been covered in half an hour before. He took it out of the box and it squirmed in his hand.

“They came out of the rift,” Ianto explained. “Little shape-shifting blobs. I figured out how to control them, I can make them shift into pretty much any shape I want. One of them must have gone missing yesterday.”

“Ianto, why are you giving this to me as a present?” Jack asked, confused.

Ianto grinned and repeated, “Any. Shape. I. Want.”

“Oh right,” replied Jack, cottoning on, his face also splitting into a grin. “Well in that case, you’d better go order some meat feast pizza and we can stay in and experiment with this fun little device of yours.”

The two linked arms and walked out of the conference room, smiling. Not everything that came through the rift was completely useless.