lt_indigo

lt_indigo

Ianto blinks fuzzily, trying to clear his head and work out where he is. As the room comes into focus, it becomes clear that he is lying on the sofa in the Hub, and there is the thick, bitter taste in his mouth and a pounding in his head that he associates with Retcon.

With a groan, he checks his watch: the date is right – it’s still the twenty-first of April – and it doesn’t seem to be much later than he expects. He’s maybe lost an hour or two. They did have Retcon that mild – the shorter the time someone lost, the more easily disguised it was. Otherwise the city of Cardiff would have been asking a lot more questions by now.

But why? Why is Ianto lying on the ailing, seventies sofa with time missing from his memory? The last thing he can remember before waking up was being up in the tourist office, talking with a brash American couple about Welsh history (he would have thought that Yanks would understand the idea of a native people being oppressed by the English, but apparently not), with the start of a headache forming between his eyes.

“Oh good, you’re awake.”

Jack’s voice is loud, abrasive, and it echoes around between Ianto’s ears, exacerbating his headache. His face floats into Ianto’s vision, looking concerned but slightly bemused as well.

Ianto rubs at his eyes in a futile attempt to disperse his headache, one that is getting worse as time goes on rather than better.

“What happened?” he asks, his voice thin but full of exasperation.

There is a shuffling of feet from someone outside of his field of vision. Jack turns towards the sound, a stern frown forming.

“Tell him,” he instructs.

“Um…?”

It’s Owen who is shuffling nervously, hovering where Ianto can’t see him, that Jack is clearly unimpressed with him.

“Owen,” Jack warns, a promise of things that will come if he doesn’t confess. This intrigues Ianto, because Jack is fairly easy-going unless they do something really stupid. Jack isn’t really mad, it’s more like disappointed. So Owen has done something stupid, but probably not fatal.

Owen sighs. “Last week, when you steam-cleaned Autopsy? Some of the labels peeled off the drug bottles.”

Ianto groans. He has a feeling he might know where this is going now, and if Owen is right, it’s half his fault.

“I, er…” Owen continues, sounding embarrassed now. “I might have mixed up some of the drugs. The aspirin looks a lot like level one Retcon, you know. I’m… I’ll get back to running the samples through the scanner now, make sure there’s no more mistakes.”

Ianto drops his head back onto the sofa and closes his eyes. The pounding in his head is not being helped by the bright lights in the Hub. He suspects a soft whimper escapes him.

He hears a bottle of pills rattle as they fly through the air, caught by Jack.

“Here, give him some of these,” Owen says softly. “I’ve already okayed them – they’re my hangover cure. Should sort his head out.”

Owen’s footsteps hurry away after that, leaving them alone. Ianto feels soft lips brush against his forehead; Jack, showing his affection in a way that the rest of the team probably wouldn’t believe because of how overt he normally is.

“I’ll get you some water,” he whispers. “You’ll feel better soon.”

Ianto nods weakly and slumps back into the depths of the sofa. He knows that Jack is telling the truth, but he has been concentrating for too long already and at the moment, all he can think of is the blissful oblivion of unconsciousness.

As he swallows down the new pills and the cool, sweet water, it occurs to him that at least all he has forgotten is pain. There could have been much worse reasons for forgetting than some mixed-up labels. And Ianto is thankful it was only the level one, stealing an hour or so, rather than something much stronger, that might have robbed him of his whole life.

Still, he thinks as he drifts back off to sleep, he needs to get Owen a Sharpie.