Title: Starting over
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Ianto, Gwen
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 3,600 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for Challenge 225 Amnesty & Challenge 7 Do-Over
Summary: Ianto and Gwen are at a crossroads.



Ianto let his hand run up along the line of tape that would seal up the room. They'd have to come back later with proper equipment to decontaminate the space before anyone could be let near it again. This was just all they had in the SUV for the job, a ream of thick plastic sheeting and tape marked "Police - Do not cross" followed by its Welsh translation. A lucky break neither of them had been exposed for long. Dying with the person who disliked him most would have been a fine way to end things. When he got back to the hub he was going to buy Tosh the biggest box of chocolates he could find. If it hadn't been for her, they would never had been alerted to the danger. Funny how so much had changed from just a few hours earlier.



'Owen? Tosh?' Gwen called out. She looked around but the only person in the hub she could see was Ianto, puttering around with a black bin liner in hand, tidying up.

'Have you seen the others?' she asked.

'They went home about an hour ago,' he replied.

She twisted her wrist to get a look at the time on her watch, hanging upside down and loose. Eight fifty. The lateness of the hour caught her by surprise. No wonder they were gone. It was half a wonder Ianto wasn't gone as well. Then she remembered that she couldn't recall a single day where he hadn't been here before her, nor left before everyone else had gone. She half wondered if he went home at all.

'Anything you need?' Ianto asked, pausing in his cleaning duties.

She paused in her indecision. It wasn't anything major, but she probably shouldn't go alone either. You just never knew. 'Just some strange readings I was getting from a hotel in Barry. I was looking for someone to come check it out with me.'

'I can give one of them a call.' He didn't have to ask to know that if Gwen had been amenable him going with her she would have just said so and told him that they were going.

'That's okay,' she replied. 'We can go have a look tomorrow.'

'How long have you been getting strange readings?'

'All day.'

He put the bag down and looked at her. 'Well, we'd better go check to it tonight then. We're both here already.'

He hadn't really intended on muscling his way in, but it was just the four of them now. He didn't like to dwell on it, that Jack had left them, but that was the reality. He had to step up and start sharing the load of fieldwork with the rest of them. Not that he hadn't wanted to before, only there hadn't really been a need. Now there simply wasn't a choice.

'Are you sure?' Gwen asked.

'The sooner we go, the sooner we can go home and get some sleep.' Lord knew there'd been precious little enough of it as it was.

'Okay,' Gwen said. Ianto wasn't her first choice for companions, but she supposed it was probably nothing so it didn't make much matter.



Gwen did a double take as Ianto unlocked the SUV and slipped into the driver's seat. Driving was usually reserved for Owen or her.

'I assumed you'd want to keep an eye on the situation whilst we were headed down there,' Ianto said, seeing the look of confusion on her face as she'd stopped.

'Of course. Good idea,' she said.

Letting Gwen take the lead was fine when there was the four of them, but when it was just him and Gwen, he didn't want to be pushed around like he didn't know what he was doing. Technically they'd all voted Owen to be their new leader, but it hadn't really worked out. In essence only three of them had voted for Owen - Tosh and Ianto having colluded on their vote to prevent a stalemate. Owen seemed like the lesser of the two evils if they had to have a leader, but after about a month, he'd conceded that all the responsibility was more than he wanted. He just wanted to do his job and do it well.

Gwen on the other hand relished the opportunity to lead. She was a natural at it, he had to admit. After Owen's failed attempts to coordinate them, she had at least realised they should all play to their strengths. That didn't mean however that his only contribution was filing, cleaning and coffee. From an administrative standpoint, he'd kept the place ticking over, whilst helping Gwen to conceal Jack's disappearance with the other organisations and departments they had to deal with. None of them could be sure what would happen if anyone found out, and hoped that by the time they did, they'd more than proven they could handle things without Jack. That didn't mean however that Gwen should dismiss his contributions to the team going out with them in the field. He'd done it plenty of times with Jack when there'd been no one else there. He wanted to prove it to himself as much as he did the rest of them.



Traffic was light, and the drive to Barry took no time at all as they traveled there in silence. Gwen became fixated on the PDA signal in front of her whilst Ianto kept his eyes firmly on the road. There was a tension between them which was palpable.

'Are you going to tell me anything about this signal you've been following or do I have to guess?' Ianto said, opting for the direct approach.

Gwen blinked then looked at him as if noticing him for the first time. More than just your chauffeur today, Gwen, he thought.

'Not much to tell really. A strange pulsing that's barely discernable.'

'What do diagnostics say?'

'Very little.'

'And it came through the rift?'

'Unsure. There was no reported rift activity around the same time or location as the time the signal started up.'

'So, someone could have found whatever it is and set it off in some way.'

'That seems the logical explanation.'

'That's what Jack would say,' Ianto blurted out, without thinking. He cringed at the faux pas. They'd all done it at some point or another. No one really wanted to talk about Jack anymore. Three months and not a word nor trace of him. Begrudgingly they were all beginning to accept the fact that he wasn't coming back. It didn't stop Ianto from having imaginary conversations with him when the rest of them finally went home at night. It was pathetic and slightly unhealthy, but some little bit of him wanted to cling to hope that Jack was only detained or delayed rather accept that he'd run off with his Doctor, never to return.

Gwen didn't have a response for him. She didn't want to think that he'd abandoned them either, but whilst she'd been vocal about her opinions early on, she'd kept them to herself of late. There was no way anyone was going to respect her leadership if they thought this was just a temporary measure until Jack did come back. Plus she didn't want to second guess her own decisions. If Jack wasn't coming back, then she had to back herself and the others. No point wondering what Jack might have done if he'd been here. God but she missed that bright smile and that laugh, though. The place just wasn't the same, sombre with all of them focused on the job, forgetting to stop and have a little fun along the way. She needed to do something about that. They couldn't keep going on like this. She sympathised with Ianto who seemed to be having a hard time moving on himself. It seemed there were more of Jack's secrets she was uncovering every single day, not the least of which had been a special relationship between him and the man driving the car.



Ianto glided the SUV silently into the underground car park beneath the hotel before they both got out. Gwen used her PDA to override the electronic locks and let them into the complex.

'How's the signal now?' Ianto asked, deftly checking his semi automatic weapon as they waited for turn lift.

'Stronger now that we're close. Seventh floor, I think.' He pressed the button for seven, letting the doors close.

'This way,' Gwen said, as the doors reopened on the narrow corridor, plush carpeting and small wall lights bifurcating left and right, sending them down the right hand passage.

'Aliens don't usually arrive and put themselves up in a hotel,' Ianto quipped.

'Makes me think maybe it's not an alien,' she replied, pausing in front of a door marked 713. 'In here.'

Ianto slipped his wallet out of his pocket, fishing out a card and sliding it into the door slot, hearing the happy little beep. Gwen looked at him curiously. 'Jack made me get a master key for every major building in the city. Thought it might be handy to come prepared.'

Gwen resisted the urge to be annoyed. 'You could have told me earlier before I hacked the locked in the basement.'

'Looked like you had it in hand,' he replied. 'You didn't wait long enough for me to say anything.'

'You and Jack get a lot of use out of this special access?'

Ianto ignored the inference. 'He likes roofs. Better if he doesn't have to bribe someone every time he wants to go up there. To be alone,' he added. Most of Jack's bribes of course were nothing more than flirtations with security guards, but it didn't make Ianto feel any less comfortable about it. He pulled his gun out of his belt and readied it. The chivalrous thing would be to go first, but this was Gwen. She'd insist on taking point.

'Ready?' she asked, preparing to enter. He nodded silently.

She swept in through the door, gun aloft, scanning the room for occupants. Ianto flooded in behind, guide trained on the other half of the room as Gwen checked the ensuite.

'No one here,' she reported.

'Good luck or good planning?' Ianto muttered.

'Well, at least there's not much to search.'

'True,' he replied, beginning to rifle through the drawers under the television, finding nothing but tourist brochures, an outdated telephone book and a Bible.

Gwen upturned sofa cushions and then made for the bed, kneeling down to take a look under it in the narrow gap between the mattress and the floor. There she spotted a thin metal case, one that looked very much like some kind of laptop case, reaching in to pull it out.

Ianto was inspecting the contents of a suitcase he found in the bottom of the wardrobe when his phone trilled an alert at him. He checked it, looked at Gwen and reacted in instinct, making towards her and pushing her back from the thing she'd pulled out from under the bed. He kept moving them quickly back until they were in the ensuite and slammed the door shut behind them.

'Ianto, what's going on?'

'Whatever you did when you touched that thing, set it off. It's the source of your weird signal.'

'I barely touched it!'

He checked his phone again. 'It was enough.'

'Why did you hustle us in here? What's it doing?'

'Soaking the room in beta radiation.'

'Radiation!' Gwen cried. 'Then we need to get out of here.' She made for the bathroom door and Ianto stopped her.

'We're safe in here.'

'What are you talking about?'

'Beta radiation isn't very strong. It's not like gamma rays. It can only travel a few yards at most. Behind this, we should be safe.'

Gwen tried to process the situation. 'How bad is it? Out there, I mean.'

'Not enough to kill us, but exposure could do a lot of damage at the cellular level. We'd be living with the consequences for years.'

'So, what do we do?'

'Stay here. Wait for it to dissipate. Hopefully. Wash you hands,' he instructed. 'You touched that case.'

Gwen sensed the shift of power in the room. She'd never known Ianto to be bossy or firm. She'd seen him get annoyed before, usually at Jack or Owen for leaving a mess, but this was different. It was controlled and commanding, but nor did she resist following his instructions. She picked up the soap, scrubbing them hard and letting the warm water ease some of the tension out of her. 'We should have gotten out while we could,' she said.

'The bathroom was the closest refuge and you were right on top of the source. The aim was just to get you away as quickly as possible.'

Gwen stopped. She'd been about to chew him out for poor decision making that had backed them into a corner. She hadn't stopped to consider that his sole priority had been her safety.

'Thanks,' she said. It suddenly felt very inadequate. 'How did you know?'

Ianto held up his phone. 'Tosh put this program on it last week. We were meant to be testing it, only it ended up on the back burner, what with everything else going on. It's supposed to pick up fifty different kinds or harmful radiation or chemical signatures. She thought it might come in handy.'

'Well, it did. We might have been exposed to any amount of harmful radiation. We'd have carried that case right out of the hotel, out into in the car with us and taken it all the way back to the hub without even knowing what it was doing. How are the levels in here? Do we know how much we were exposed to?'

Ianto toyed with the new program on his phone. 'Nothing in here, and looks like whatever we got dosed with has already broken down. Minimal at best. No more that a handful of x-rays, really.'

'Good,' Gwen nodded. 'So now we just wait ? It will stop eventually, won't it?'

'That's the theory. I'm not nuclear physicist, mind.'

'Or whoever brought it here might come back first,' she replied.

'I doubt they'd be impervious to the radiation, either. More likely some poor cleaner will come in.'

'Can we lock the door from here?' she asked.

Ianto frowned at his phone. 'I could probably get into their system and recode the lock so that the key cards no longer work.'

'Do it. We can't risk some innocent person coming in and being exposed.' Even if that meant they'd be restricting Owen and Tosh from coming and helping them.

'Okay, we're officially locked in,' Ianto reported.

'And now we wait.'

'And now we wait,' he repeated.

Gwen slid down to the cold tiled floor and leant back against the cupboard. Ianto joined her on the floor, sitting opposite.

'Congratulations, by the way,' Ianto said, looking pointedly down at her hand.

Gwen fingered the engagement ring. It had been there less than a day, though she'd been so excited when she'd arrived, showing it off to Tosh who squealed her delight, and Owen who looked slightly put out, but who congratulated her all the same. 'Thanks. Not sure I deserve it.'

'Of course you do. It's not every day you get engaged.'

She twisted it again, sighing. 'I cheated on him, with Owen. Though I suppose everybody knows that now. Everyone except Rhys, that is. And then there's Jack.'

She caught a look flash across Ianto's face just for the briefest of moments.

'I didn't. But that didn't mean I didn't want to. I thought maybe he... All of that and it makes you wonder if I deserve a man like Rhys.'

In her heart she still wasn't sure she did. She certainly didn't deserve Jack, and she'd gotten what she deserved with Owen, all in the past now. And Jack was gone, no longer here to tempt her into thinking she was something more to him than she was.

She watched as Ianto seemed to be staring intently at the floor, almost as if he were looking through it to the rooms below.

'I'm sorry,' she said.

He looked dull. 'For what?'

'I didn't know you and Jack were...' What? 'I never would have, you know, if I'd known.'

'We're not a thing,' he replied. 'Not anymore.' Perhaps not ever, really. He'd had so much time to think on it all, he could no longer be certain that any of it had meant anything.

'That kiss,' Gwen said. 'That wasn't nothing.' She'd avoided poking around, asking questions about it. Owen hadn't let up teasing him about it, and she was sure Tosh must have mentioned it at some point, but it felt awkward having any kind of conversation with Ianto. She didn't think she even knew who he was, really. Jack clearly trusted him, so why couldn't that be enough for her?

'You know what Jack's like,' he said, as if that explained everything. True he seemed to be able to charm his way around, flirting with anything and everything that moved, Ianto included, but to her best knowledge she'd never seen him kiss anyone else. She knew Jack just well enough to know that he wouldn't let you in unless he thought there was something special about you. She'd thought she'd broken through herself. Somehow it seemed maybe Ianto had been the one that had broken that invisible barrier.

'I'm sorry.'

'You said that already.'

'No, I mean I'm sorry I've been so horrible to you. I know I've taken it for granted everything you do around here, and that I haven't really considered you part of the team. It can't have been easy, this past year, and now with Jack gone.'

Ianto shifted uneasily, which had nothing to do with the discomfort of the hard tile floor. 'Can we not talk about Jack?'

'Why not? Would you even still be here if Jack hadn't been around?'

'I'm here now, aren't I?' He wasn't sure what she was implying. Yes, he'd stayed because of Jack, but Jack wasn't here now. He didn't know why he stayed. Perhaps because he wanted to believe Jack would come back, or perhaps he just didn't know what to do with himself now that he was gone. There was always just something more that needed doing. Jack had built Torchwood up from nothing. He couldn't let it crumble away.

'Yes, you are here,' Gwen said. 'And because you were, you saved my life.'

'Just doing my job.'

'Ianto.' Sometimes it felt like she was talking with a five year old. He was so impossible to break down. Give him a research project and he'd have it all down to the last detail, but try and get him to talk about what he did on the weekend and you might as well have been talking to a stone. 'I was wondering if maybe you and I could start over. Forget this whole last year.'

'You want to forget being horrible?'

'Not forget. I want to make up for it. You're just as much a part of this team as anyone. I see that now. Jack saw it too. He could have sent you away after everything that happened, but he didn't. And then he died, and oh, Ianto, I wish you'd told me. I was down there all that time, watching over him and you didn't say a word. It must have been killing you not to be there.'

He didn't want to admit that, not even to himself, let alone Gwen. It was bad enough just thinking of him lying down there in the morgue, pale and cold, thinking he'd never come back. Going through all those thoughts of Jack not coming back again was too much.

'He's coming back, Ianto. I'm sure of it. He wouldn't leave us. And when he does we need to make sure that we're there. That's means we stick together and look out for one another.'

'I thought that's what we were doing.'

'I'm not sure we were all on the same page. You can hate me for what I've done, or what you think I've done. If I've flirted with Jack, or dismissed you, then I apologise.' She cleared her throat awkwardly. 'Perhaps if we'd all been a little bit more honest with each other, we wouldn't have ended up in such a mess.'

Did she really think he was going to come out and say "Hi, yes, I'm sleeping with the boss, hope you all don't mind". Maybe it would have been easier if he had. Everyone else seemed to sleep with everyone. Suzie, Owen, Gwen. Only poor Tosh seemed to get left out, though she had slept with Mary. He could hardly take the high moral ground here.

'It was complicated,' he said. That didn't even begin to describe things but he couldn't find words for any more.

Gwen chuckled. 'What part of Torchwood isn't? It's a wonder we don't all end up screwed up.'

'Too late, I think,' though he said it with mirth.

'So, what do you think, Ianto? Can we maybe try to start over? It'd be a shame to be stuck here forever and not at least try to be friends.'

Ianto sucked in a deep breath. Jack had given him a second chance, he supposed Gwen deserved one as well. 'Can't hurt for us to try. After everything that's happened today, we're probably going to be stuck with each other a lot longer, now.'