Fandom: Torchwood

Characters: Torchwood team

Author: m_findlow

Rating: PG

Length: 4,012 words

Content notes: none

Author notes: Written for Challenge 200 - Disguise

Summary: A bit of bad BO is upsetting everyone around the hub.



'Which floor is the signal coming from?' Ianto asked as he and Tosh marched across the foyer of the building, heading for the elevator. Fortunately for them, it was a Saturday, so there was no one around to interrupt their investigation. There were probably a small handful of people putting in overtime, but they'd probably never even know something alien had just entered the building with them. Torchwood would have it collected and taken away before anyone could be the wiser.

She checked her PDA again. 'Fourteenth,' she replied as Ianto pressed the up button. Her PDA trilled out a warning and she looked at it again. 'No, thirteenth floor,' she clarified.

'Bad luck to have a thirteenth floor,' Ianto said, though superstition didn't bother him.

Tosh's PDA trilled again. 'No, wait, it's now the twelfth, er, eleventh...'

They both stared at the elevator frontage, watching the numbers overhead scrolling downwards. It was in the elevator. They put away their devices and set down their other cases of equipment, reaching into pockets and belts for their weapons. Just because the signal indicated something small, didn't mean that it couldn't be deadly.

They each took a position to either side of the door, guns poised, carefully eyeing the numbers as they ticked down to the ground floor. As the elevator finally pinged, they held their collective breath, hearing the doors slide open. They spun to confront their visitor.

'Oh. Well, that's different,' Ianto said, grip relaxing around his gun.

The elevator was empty, except for a small straggly little plant sitting in the middle of the space. It looked all sad and wilted with hardly a leaf on it. At its top was one bulbous orange shape, and a single pale pink petal hanging on for dear life. For all intents and purposes it looked to be dead, but for the fact that it had set roots down into the very floor of the elevator itself, clinging to life.

'How has it managed to do that in less than an hour?' Tosh wondered out aloud.

'Maybe the rift put it there,' Ianto replied. Maybe it was just luck that more things didn't get dumped here, halfway shoved through the middle of something solid that had simply gotten in the way.

'Guess we should just be grateful it wasn't some kind of flying alien piranha,' she said, smirking as she tucked her gun back into her belt.

They grabbed their stuff and moved it into the elevator. From a cleaners closet somewhere nearby, Ianto had pulled out a bright yellow bollard and set it outside the doors to the elevator, indicating it was out of operation, before letting the door close behind them, sealing them inside and away from prying eyes.

'So, any ideas what it is?' he asked, kneeling down opposite Tosh as she consulted the screen in front of her.

'Hard to say,' she replied. 'Without much in the way of identifying features, it's difficult to cross reference to our database. There's a half dozen things it might be, or it could be something totally new.'

'Anything dangerous we should be worried about?'

'Not that I can see.'

'Right,' he said, sitting back on his heels, 'so the question is how do we get it out?'

They took a closer look, realising that it wasn't just stuck halfway into the floor, but that it had set its roots down into the carpet and metal underneath, trying to make itself at home.

'Without really knowing what it is, I don't want to damage it,' Tosh said. Plants weren't really her area of expertise. Owen would be better placed to figure out its species and whether it could be put to use use. 'I don't want to be responsible for being the person who killed a plant that might be able to cure disease.'

'I think it might be on its last legs anyway,' Ianto said, seeing how forlorn a thing it was. It looked like it has spent all of its remaining energy settling into the floor, the last wilted petal dropping off as he thought it.

Tosh rifled through their equivalent, pulling out a laser saw and holding it up for approval.

Ianto nodded and sighed. 'The partners of Martin, Mulcahy and Thomas aren't going to be impressed that someone has vandalised their lift over the weekend, but I don't see what choice we've got.'

Tosh flicked on the laser saw, no bigger than a large pen, and they could feel the tiny vibration in the air as it powered up, ready to slice through inches of thick metal and upholstery like a hot knife through butter. As she did, they both noticed an almost imperceptible shuddering in the plant, and then the orange bulb at its peak exploded.

The confined space was quickly filled with a thick yellow dust. Without thinking, they reached into their equipment box and clamped small masks over their mouth and nose, squeezing their eyes shut to prevent any from getting inside their bodies. It wasn't foolproof, but it was better than nothing.

The dust hung in the air for a good five minutes before finally beginning to dissipate and they chanced an eye open to check. As it began to clear, Tosh tried to take some readings, one hand still with her mask held tight to her face, before giving them the all clear. Whatever it was, it wasn't poisonous.

'We're good?' Ianto asked, pulling his mask away and dusting down his sleeve which was now covered in a thin residue of yellow.

'Seems so. I think it just spawned on us.'

'Lovely,' he replied. 'Covered in alien pollen.'

'Owen can confirm when we get back, but otherwise it seems inert.'

'One last hurrah for our latest visitor,' Ianto said, seeing how the poor plant was now bent over itself, even more shriveled than before.

They finally managed to cut away the piece of floor that held the plant in place, though it was hardly more than the layer of carpet now. The plant had withdrawn much of its roots from the floor below, only hanging on by a few threads. They carefully bagged it and set it inside their case before dusting themselves off and heading back to the hub, sealing the lift behind them, just in case.



'Phaw!' Owen groaned when they entered the hub. 'What on earth is that smell?'

'What smell?' Tosh asked.

'Oh, it's you two,' he said, coming up the stairs and pinching his nose shut. 'Did you go trawling through a dumpster or something?'

They both frowned, unsure what Owen was talking about. 'I can't smell anything,' Ianto said. If there was a bad odour in the hub, his sensitive nose would have spotted it for sure.

Jack and Gwen came out a moment later.

'Owen, what the hell are you doing down there?' Jack said, hand over his face. 'It stinks.'

'It's not me!' Owen grumbled. 'It's them,' he said, pointing at Tosh and Ianto.

'Oh, that's rank,' Gwen said, trying not to gag.

'What happened?' Jack asked.

'We came, see saw, we conquered,' Ianto replied, holding up the bag with the dead plant in it. 'It's a plant, well, at least it was until it spored and died.'

'Spored?' Owen asked.

'Yeah, we got covered in the stuff,' Tosh said, 'but it's okay. I checked and it's not dangerous.'

'How about you let me be the judge of that?' Owen said, looking stern.

'Agreed,' Jack said. 'But maybe have a shower before Owen checks you out, yeah?' he added, still looking a bit green from the smell.



'You swear you can't smell that?' Owen said, pulling more faces as he checked them over, taking blood samples and saliva swabs.

'Nope,' Ianto replied.

'What's it smell like?' Tosh asked, curious.

'Only the worst dead body ever. Maybe it affected your olfactory senses.' He pulled out a small bottle and opened it, holding it under their noses. They both flinched in turn, the astringent scent more than they could stomach.

'Well, not your sense of smell then. Maybe you're just immune to your own body's emissions.'

Ianto raised an eyebrow. 'Emissions?'

'Whatever that stuff was, it's absorbed into your skin.'

'So, we're stuck like this?' Tosh asked.

'Probably not. Just until the dermis regenerates. Dead skin cells are replaced all the time. Ten days, two weeks tops.'

'And until then we're going to smell?' Ianto asked, clearly not finding the concept appealing.

'Wear lots of aftershave,' Owen said, quickly dismissing them so that he didn't have to stand near them any longer.



They tried to get on with their day as best they could but it was impossible to ignore the looks on their teammates faces every time they came within fifty feet of them.

Gwen tried desperately to keep focused on the computer screen in front of her, but then her hand flew to her mouth as he gagged, reaching for the small bin underneath her desk and dry fetching into it.

'I'm sorry, Tosh, but I just can't work here,' she said, disappearing from her desk, rushing toward the lift and the fresh air above ground.

Jack was having an equally tough job of things. Even the scent of Ianto's coffee was do nothing to help him cope with the odour. In the end, he made the decision for them.

'I'm sorry, but you'll have to be put in isolation,' he said.

'Why?' Ianto said.

'Have you smelled yourselves lately? No, don't answer that,' he said, remembering their immunity.

'We're not contagious. Owen said so,' Tosh protested.

'Contagious is not on my list of concerns. Keeping my stomach and its contents where they belong is.' He caught the concerned looks on their faces. 'I'm not locking you up,' Jack said. 'All I'm saying is that I'm going to have to insist you work elsewhere, away from the main hub. I'll arrange for sleeping quarters to be set up for you both.'

'You're just going to deal with the end of the world all by yourselves, are you?' Ianto asked, getting annoyed.

'Believe me, this is as hard for me as it is for you.' Jack had already had to accept that Ianto was off limits until they could get rid of the smell. It was so bad that even he couldn't bear it, no matter how much he loved him.

Ianto's jaw clenched in that unhappy way that Jack knew meant no more coffee. 'Fine,' he said. 'I have dozens of boxes of stuff in the archives that need sorting and cataloging, and I needed Tosh's help anyway. We'll make ourselves useful down there if that's far enough away for you.'

Jack cringed at Ianto's tone. 'I appreciate it more than I can say.'

'Hmph,' he muttered, grabbing Tosh's hand. 'Come on, Tosh. Let's not upset their precious sensibilities any longer.'



Tosh couldn't tell if she was more offended that she smelled appalling, or that her friends couldn't put up with the smell, which was not their fault.

'This stinks. Pardon the pun,' Ianto said, as if hearing her thoughts, tugging the item out of the crate with more effort than was strictly needed. 'I can't think of any upside to being stuck down here. Jack had better make sure he swings by my flat and waters the plants, or they'll all be dead too. I'd do it myself, but Jack thinks I'll probably stink out the whole place.'

'I know,' she agreed, 'but what can we do? We can't even smell it. If it was one of the others, we might say the same thing.'

He sighed, knowing she was right. 'At least we've got each other to keep company. I suppose it could be worse. We can't smell each other.'

Tosh paused with the silvery object in hand. 'I thought you liked working down here alone?'

'Sure. I mean, I like being able to hear myself think and not be interrupted, but I like company too. Especially yours.'

She smiled. 'Me too. Your company, that is. I like your company. Sometimes Owen drives me crazy.'

'And Jack always wants something when you're in the middle of something,' Ianto added.

'And Gwen, well, sometimes... I love her but,'

'She just doesn't know when to stop talking,' they both said in unison, laughing at the comment.

Tosh ran a hand across the edge of the crate that sat between them. 'We must smell pretty bad.'

'I know. It takes a lot for Jack to kick someone out of bed,' Ianto agreed.

'Well, I for one am glad that I've got you,' Tosh said.

Ianto smiled back at her. 'Thanks, Tosh. Coffee?'

'Love one,' she said, unable to suppress her own delight that she was at least stuck down here with their resident barrista. If they thought they were suffering, it was probably nothing compared to their colleagues upstairs.



'Oi Gwen, do you know where I can find one of those portable battery thingies?' Owen said.

'Tosh will know,' she replied absently.

'Yeah, well Tosh isn't here, is she?'

Gwen turned around, looking another Tosh's empty desk, before realising she wasn't there.

'Sorry, Owen. Is it bad to say I'd almost forgotten they weren't here?' Gwen confessed.

'Well, I hadn't,' Owen grumbled. 'Teaboy must've gone and fetched something from the tourist office this morning. I nearly threw up in the lift on the way back down just from the stench left behind. Thought they were quarantined downstairs.'

'How much longer, Owen?' Jack asked, coming out of his office looking tired and grumpy. That was the expression of a man who hadn't slept well, and who was lacking coffee. Yet another thing that they'd had to give up in order to preserve the smell up here.

'It's only been three days. It'll be at least another week and I'm not checking up on them every five minutes to see if there's any change.'

Jack groaned again and disappeared back into his office to sulk. His resolve had only wavered once in the last few days, late at night when the others had gone home. He'd padded downstairs to join Ianto in his temporary accommodations, but by the time he was within thirty feet of the small rooms, he'd had to turn back. He'd stood there breathing through his mouth, but even that didn't help, tasting the vileness on his tongue and retreating backwards, defeated by the odour. Making do with phone calls and emails just wasn't the same.



The afternoon had been quiet, which was a blessed relief given that they were technically two people short. If things got really bad, and the world really was ending, well, a few teammates being on the nose would be the least of their problems.

Jack shuffled the pages in front of him, unable to find them sufficiently interesting to keep his thoughts from drifting to his coworkers many floors below him. To their credit, they'd taken the whole thing quite well after their initial unhappiness about the situation. Tosh had told him that she was sure she'd scrubbed off several layers of skin in the shower each morning and night, but that according to Owen, it wasn't making the least bit of difference.

'Well, tell Ianto if he ever wants someone to come a scrub his back for him,' Jack had offered. He'd probably pass out in the shower from the smell, but the visual in his head was worth it.



Ianto dipped his hand back into the crate parked on the floor, pulling out the next item and searching for the small bar code tag before handing it to Tosh.

'You know, I've been meaning to get this stuff sorted out for months,' he said, still turning the object over in his hands. It all fell into the "too technical for me and Jack hasn't got a clue" box.

'Well, it's no trouble,' Tosh said, actually having fun. She loved a challenge and Ianto's boxes full of unknown items were proving just that.

'Huh,' Ianto said, 'I can't find the tag on this one.' Everything that had come past his desk at least received a tag so that it could be identified and logged later. The solid rectangular item had a couple of small nodules on one side, but the rest of the surfaces were plain. It wasn't as if it was lacking in appropriate places to stick the small tag.

'Maybe it fell off,' Tosh suggested, taking it from him.

Maybe, he thought, but highly unlikely. He couldn't remember even seeing this item cross his desk.

'It's made from something called carbidium pycetyline,' Tosh said, getting her first readings from the portable scanner. 'Too dense to get a look at the workings inside.'

'What's it do?'

Tosh peered closer at the screen. 'Not sure,' she said, skimming the readouts that were scrolling down the screen, unaware that she'd brushed a finger over one of the nodules as she'd held it.



Jack's office had been peaceful until his vortex manipulator had started beeping, going crazy in its protestations. He flipped it open and studied then display. Oh, no.

It was still going crazy when he came flying out through the door, whipping past Gwen and Owen at their desks.

'Jack, what's going on?' Gwen asked turning in her chair, sensing the urgency.

'Stay here. Whatever happens, you don't come after me unless I say so.'

'But,'

'Promise me.' His face was so stern and his command so firm that neither of them moved an inch as he spun and ran.



No, no, no, no, this wasn't happening, he thought as he belted down one set of stairs after another taking them two or three at a time. He tapped his comms.

'Tosh, Ianto, drop whatever you're doing and get the hell out of there, right now!'

There was nothing but static in the other end of the line, and Jack knew it was the radiation causing interference. He couldn't even be sure they'd received his message. They could be dead right now for all you know, the voice inside his head told him. No, there was still a chance they might get out and far enough away, he told his other half.

The alarm had tripped as soon as his wrist strap detected the radiation leak, and was beeping louder now as the strength of the readings grew at a constant rate. Even at a distance, it was enough to kill quickly and efficiently. How it had gotten into the hub in the first place baffled him. If he got too close, he was as good as dead, but he had to get down there. He had to find his team and save them if he could.

As he was sprinting down the long hallway toward the archive vault, the beeping stopped and so did Jack, completely breathless. He checked the readings again and found the radiation completely gone. It didn't matter. He jogged the rest of the way, needing to now what had happened to his team, fearing the worst. As he approached the doorway, he held his breath and slowly stepped into then darkened space.

'Nope, still no idea what it does. I've got better equipment upstairs we can use to try and analyse it, whenever were finally allowed to come back,' Tosh's voice floated towards him.

'I don't know why we keep Jack around,' Ianto joked. 'He keeps telling me he knows loads of stuff about the universe. Just nothing useful.'

Jack came to a dead stop, seeing them walking along the aisle between shelves towards him. 'Ianto? Tosh?'

'Oh, hello,' Ianto said, surprised. 'We weren't expecting visitors.'

Jack's face scrunched up in confusion and astonishment. 'How are you alive?'

They both looked at him like he'd lost his marbles. Ianto stepped forward. 'Jack, are you okay?'

'Me?' Jack said, incredulous. 'I'm... How are you?' Then he spotted the item cradled in Tosh's hands. 'I don't understand. You should be dead. That... thing,' he said pointing to the box. 'There was enough radiation in there to wipe out anything within three hundred feet.'

'Seriously?' Tosh said, holding it away from her body, for all the good it would do. 'It wasn't working. It wasn't doing anything.'

'Believe me, it was,' Jack said. 'I... I thought you were dead.'

'Well, we're not,' Ianto huffed, finding the whole exchange thoroughly unamusing. 'Now how about you try a few complete sentences and tell us what the hell is going on?'

Jack tried to explain as he paced around the archive vault, taking readings all over the place, trying to understand where the radiation had gone, but there wasn't the slightest trace of it anywhere.

'I don't get it. This thing was going off like crazy.'

'Maybe it got its wires crossed,' Ianto said. Jack gave him a withering look that said it never got its wires crossed.

'I'm just saying. Days of being totally ignored and now you come down here all frantic. And you think we're the crazy ones.'

'Even though nothing happened,' Tosh added. 'We haven't had unusual readings. We've been working down here for hours.'

'You wouldn't,' Jack replied. 'This stuff is so futuristic your computers wouldn't even know what it was. It was interfering with the comms signal. I had to come down here and warn you.'

'Good to know our lives are more important than a bit of bad body odour,' Ianto quipped.

Jack stopped and stared at him as if he'd sprouted a second head.

'What?' Ianto asked, frowning at the look on Jack's face.

'The smell. It's gone.'

'I thought Owen said it was take another week?' Tosh said.

'I need to have Owen check you both,' was all Jack said.



'There's absolutely nothing wrong with you,' Owen reported.

'Well, I could've told you that,' Ianto replied, having let Owen prod and poke himself and Tosh for three better part of two hours. Jack hovered obnoxiously like a nervous mother hen, afraid either of them might drop dead at any second.

Whilst they'd been waiting for results to come back, Jack had shown Tosh the readings from his wrist strap and they consulted them in hushed tones, throwing around technical jargon that had Owen rolling his eyes.

'What about the smell? 'Tosh asked.

'Gone too. Tests show no residue trapped in the upper dermis anymore. It's completely broken down.'

Tosh turned to Jack. 'Could it have been molecular encasement?'

'Or a neutralizing atomic profusion,' he replied.

Owen groaned. 'English, please?'

'The pollen that was trapped in our skin could have absorbed and destroyed the radiation,' Tosh said. 'It's the only explanation for it.'

Ianto to raised an eyebrow. 'So you're saying we were saved by stinky plant spores?'

'Most likely. I can't be sure without running tests with a sample of the pollen.'

'Which we won't be doing,' Jack clarified. 'Nobody touches that box again. I've already put in a call to the Shadow Proclamation to tell them to send someone ASAP to collect it. They can have our samples as well.'

'In other words, let their boffins work it out and risk nuking themselves,' Owen smirked.

'Exactly.' He placed a hand on Ianto's shoulder and gave it a squeeze. 'Whoever thought smelling bad could be a blessing in disguise?' he said.

'Or that deadly radiation could fix it?' Ianto replied.

'Well, surely everyone not dying calls for a celebration,' Owen suggested. 'Must be your turn to pay, boss.'

'If it means having my team back, I'm happy to foot the bill,' Jack said, smiling at the four of them.

'Hear that ladies? It's beer o'clock. Let's go,' he said, herding them upstairs and towards the door.

'We might come back here and celebrate a bit more afterwards?' Jack asked, grinning at Ianto.

'So long as certain parts of me don't glow in the dark,' he replied.

'Oh, I don't know,' Jack said, unable to wipe the smile from his face. 'That could be the real blessing in disguise out of all of this.'