'This is nice, isn't it?' Jack asked, swinging his arm slightly as it gripped Ianto's hand, wandering through the busy market stalls that had popped up overnight in St Mary's Street. Summer meant better weather and better weather meant the local Saturday markets returned to town, bringing with them all the handmade produce that Welsh cottage industries could muster.

'Mmm,' Ianto hummed, too busy flicking his gaze from one stall to the next to even notice the way people no longer frowned at two men holding hands in public, but rather giving them a little happy smile instead.

Jack didn't even know where to start. He wanted to try everything and buy most. There was just no comparing supermarket goods to those made by hand. He was already carrying a brown paper tote full of cheeses they'd sampled, and some honey nougat that Ianto hadn't seen anywhere since last summer. Sure they were four times the price of anything in Tesco, but it was worth it.

'There's jams and honey over there,' Jack said, using their intertwined hands to point in the general direction.

'There's some here, too,' Ianto replied, gesturing in the opposite direction.

Jack frowned at the stall, comparing it to the one he'd spotted. Where the one he'd seen had neat rows of dozens of different types of preserves with fancy labels and plaid fabric covers, the stall Ianto had indicated was just a few shabby trestle tables and some handwritten signs.

'They look like hippies,' Jack said, taking in the two men manning the stall, with their ponytails and paisley shirts.

'Says the man who was obsessed with the seventies,' Ianto quipped. 'We're only trying them. No one said anything about buying.'

Jack conceded that was true. Who was he to knock back a free sample of anything?

There wasn't much variety on offer. There was one type of marmalade and neither of them was a big fan of marmalade, but the jam looked promising despite its packaging. Jack took a wooden stirrer and dipped it in to the rich red mixture, spreading it across his tongue. It had a sharp tang to it, like someone had tipped way too much citric acid into it.

'It's good, isn't it?' Ianto remarked. 'Really tangy.'

Jack pulled a face. 'Too tangy if you ask me.'

'Well, we all know what a sweet tooth you are.'

'I like my raspberry jam sweet.'

Ianto picked up a jar and studied it. 'It doesn't actually say it's raspberry. Maybe it's a blend. Currants are quite acidic when fresh.'

'What kinda berries are in this?' Jack asked when one of the stall holders came close enough.

'All kinds,' he replied. 'Secret recipe.'

'Well, there you go,' Ianto said, as if that answered the question. 'We'll take two.'

Jack raised an eyebrow at him. 'We will?'

'Fine. I will. One jar for home and one jar for work. We can go over to that other stall and you can pick out whatever you like, however sweet you like until you make yourself sick on it.'

Jack didn't argue with him. It was too nice a day to have a silly argument over jam, and he did end up with two jars of a very nice blueberry jam and several others they both agreed on amongst the many other purchases they made. They'd spend all night gorging themselves on cheese and fresh fruit and chocolate. If only every day could be quite so perfect as this.



Jack's perfect day didn't last. Not if he counted the night attached to it. No sooner had they fallen into bed than Jack's wrist strap was beeping angrily at the pair of them to go and sort out a rift alert four blocks away. Whatever it was, or had been, Jack couldn't tell. It was merely a large exploded patch of goo by the time they got there, having to clean it all up and retcon a whole street of people who were convinced that rather than a chemical spill from a passing truck, it had been something round and furry and purple before going kaboom.

Jack dropped the house keys on the sideboard as he trudged back in through their front door. 'I'm so tired I don't think I could fall asleep even if I wanted to.'

'Too tired to even be bothered falling asleep,' Ianto repeated. 'Only Torchwood.'

'Shower?'

Ianto tugged at his sleeve, noticing the large purple stain on his white cotton top. 'Yep.'



Ianto raised an eyebrow at Gwen as she came rushing in to the hub, late again with her hair flying around her face. 'Sorry. Sorry,' she apologised, dropping her bag and coat into the battered leather chair beside the coffee machine.

'You look like hell.'

She appraised his own face, complete with its shadows under the eyes. 'You can talk.'

Ianto forced a chuckle. 'Yeah, fair call. Another late night rift mess to clean up. Toast?' he asked, holding out a plate to her. 'We didn't get time for breakfast this morning.'

Gwen gratefully accepted the half slice of toast with its thick layer of bright red jam. 'Thanks. Rhys snorted all night, keeping me awake. All bloody night,' she repeated for Jack's benefit as he approached the pair of them. 'I hope your other half doesn't do that.'

'Ianto snuffles more than snores,' Jack said, answering the question before Ianto could comment. He went straight for the biscuit tin, inhaling a jammie dodger and then grabbing two more.

'Well, I was going to ask you if you wanted breakfast,' Ianto muttered.

Jack leaned over Gwen's shoulder. 'Is that your jam from yesterday?'

'Yep. Lovely fresh homemade jam.'

'You know I thought it tasted homemade,' Gwen observed, making herself more comfortable and tucking one leg under the other as she balanced the plate on her lap.

'I'll pass,' Jack said, stuffing another biscuit in his mouth.

'What's wrong with it?' Gwen asked, taking another bite of toast.

'See? It's just you,' Ianto said. 'I'm going to start cutting your sugar intake in half so you can reacquaint yourself with what's normal for everyone else.'

Jack pulled a face. 'Keep your toast. Gwen can have mine,' he replied. 'Coffee would be great though.'

There was an eye roll which was richly deserved. Ianto set aside his plate of toast, abandoning it for more pressing matters. 'Coming right up. Three sugars as always.'



Jack was glad for the quiet morning. Everyone seemed to have something they were working on that was neither urgent nor serious, leaving the hub in a rhythm of peaceful industry. He was glad he too was short on overdue reports or unpleasant phone calls. The lack of sleep last night was beginning to wear even him. Tonight he and Ianto were definitely going to be in bed by eight with nothing in their minds but sleep, the rift be damned.

He stretched and reached for his empty water glass, picking it up and walking it to the kitchen for a refill. He couldn't help but notice the serious frown on Gwen's face as he passed by. She seemed to be fussing with the lid of her pen under tip her nail. 'Just get out,' he thought he heard her mutter.

'Everything okay?'

She glanced up for just a split second, looking slightly annoyed by the interruption. 'Yes, fine. Do you want something?'

'No. Just checking.'

She turned away from him and went back to what she was doing. Jack took it for the dismissal it was.



It wasn't until about an hour later, Jack could hear raised voices outside his office.

'There's nothing there!'

'I'm telling you, there is.'

'Right, and who's the doctor around here, huh?'

'Pretty bloody useless doctor, if you ask me!'

Jack stood up and walked out towards the source of that shouting. He leaned over the railing of the medical bay. Gwen and Owen were in a stand-off of some kind. 'Where's the fire? Can't you two ever just play nice?'

Gwen was studying her hand, a look on anxiousness on her face, chewing her lip as she debated something. 'It's in there. Why can't you see it?'

Owen lowered his voice. 'I'm telling you, there is nothing there. I checked.'

'Owen? Everything okay?' Jack asked, sensing the rising tension.

Gwen stared up at the roof. 'God! I can feel it. If you're not going to help me then I'll do it myself.' She grabbed for a scalpel off the tray on Owen's table and held it out as a weapon in front of her, trying to get Owen to back away. He threw his hands up, backed up against the wall with nowhere to go. The move was so quick even Jack hadn't realised what she was planning until she'd done it.

'Gwen, what are you doing?' Tosh exclaimed, having joined Jack at the railing.

'Owen doesn't want to get it out.' She let out a little muffled cry. 'It's crawling in deeper. I've got to get it out.'

'Gwen,' Owen said, taking a step forward. 'Let me help.'

She flung the scalpel back out towards him and he moved quickly backwards again.

Gwen's focus wavered from pointing the scalpel at Owen to wanting to use it to dig put the thing in her hand. Jack used it as the distraction he needed to slip silently down the stairs and come from behind. Owen shook his head slightly, giving Jack a no to his idea but Jack was having none of it. First chance he got, he wrapped his arms firmly around Gwen, keeping her hands at her side as she struggled against him. She was strong and unwilling to concede but he had the advantage.

'Let me go!'

'Calm down!' he commanded against her struggles.

'Get it out! Get it out of me! Jack! Please! I need to get it out.'

'Hold her still,' came Owen's voice, approaching from the side with a needle.

'No! No!' Gwen kicked out, hitting Jack hard in the shin, but he gritted his teeth and redoubled his grip. Owen poked the needle through clothing skin and all, injecting the contents into Gwen's arm. Gwen's thrashing quickly abated and she grew loose in Jack's arms as he lowered her to the floor. 'What the hell was that?' He felt shaken by what he'd just done.

Owen looked equally disturbed. 'She kept insisting there was something crawling under her fingernail. I checked and there was nothing but she wouldn't let up. She kept saying it's in there, it's inside.'

'What was?'

'She didn't say. I swear there was nothing there. She just kept saying we had to cut it out.'

'You're absolutely sure?'

'Yes.'

Jack looked down at her prone body on the cold concrete. 'Can we do a full body scan to be sure?'

They gently lifted her up onto Owen's table and rolled the trolley with the scanner over to it it, placing her limp hand on the plate. The scan ran itself quickly, producing no result. 'Told you,' Owen said. 'Nothing.'

'So, why was she so insistent?'

'I dunno!' Owen huffed. 'People don't usually just suddenly go all batshit crazy on you.'

'Run blood work and a second neural scan. In fact, I want everyone's blood work, just until we know what we might be dealing with. Tosh?'

She nodded slowly, loosening her white knuckle grip on the railing above them and slowly making her way down the steps.

Jack pulled his earpiece from his pocket and slipped it on. 'Ianto? Got a situation up here. Need you back upstairs asap.' When he didn't get an immediate response, he called again, before shifting a worried look towards Owen. Could they have two cases on their hands? 'Ianto, please respond,' Jack demanded. A chill ran through him at the absolute silence on the other end. 'Tosh, find his signal now.' He was already stripping off his coat and rolling up his sleeve, reaching for a rubber tie to wrap around above his elbow. Owen spotted what he was trying to do and helped, securing it and reaching for a needed an ampule to draw his blood whilst Tosh worked her computer magic. Owen had extracted a sample and Jack was quickly reciprocating when Tosh returned to lean over the railing.

'His comms unit was switched off but I managed to find him using heat signatures.'

'Where?'Jack said, ripping the tourniquet roughly from Owen's arm.

'He's deep within the archives. Deeper than I've ever been. I don't know why he'd be down that far.'

'Unless he's gone loopy like Gwen,' Owen said.

'Guide me down there,' Jack said, jogging back up the stairs and grabbing his gun as he came back out the other side of his office, dashing towards the door that lead out of the main hub. He ran the entire way, ignoring the stitch in his side. He couldn't put his finger on it but he knew down in his bones that Ianto was in trouble. Whatever was wrong with Gwen hadn't stopped there. He only prayed he didn't go mad before he found Ianto.

'Ianto?' he called out loudly, even as Tosh was there in his ear telling him to go left and right, directing him past shelves and cabinets that stretched all the way to the roof and beyond into darkness. The deeper he went, the darker it got, until he was forced to use a flashlight to stop himself from tripping over crates and large indistinct piles of who knew what covered in heavy canvas.

'Ianto!'

'Take the next doorway and go left,' Tosh instructed. 'You should be almost on top of his location.'

Jack slowed his footsteps and then stopped altogether, straining his ears for any sound at all. It came in the form of a slight whimpering. 'Ianto?' His voice was softer and more measured as he swept the flashlight slowly around the space before it finally landed on a figure hunched in the floor with his head in his hands. Jack rushed over, setting the light on the floor. 'Ianto?'

'They're in my head,' he sobbed. 'I can't get them out.'

Jack knelt beside him. 'Get what out?'

'The voices. They keep screaming and they won't stop. They were chasing me and now they're inside and I can't get them out. I tried to hide but they found me.'

Jack pulled Ianto's hands way from his head, revealing deep bloody scratches where he'd clawed at his forehead and temples. Trickles of blood ran down both sides of his face, mixing with tears. Jack wrapped him in a hug, making shushing sounds. 'It's okay. I'm here.'

'I have to get them out,' Ianto insisted, trying to bring his hands back up digging his fingernails in deeper. Jack grabbed at both wrists and pulled them away again. 'Make them stop.' He sobbed. 'Please.'

Jack rested a hand on his cheek. 'Do you trust me?'

Ianto nodded slightly.

'I can make them go away,' he promised, 'but you have to come back with me so Owen can give you something to help. Okay?' He carefully helped Ianto to his feet, guiding them back out of the pitch black archives.



'Jesus,' was the only word Owen could find when they finally reached the main hub, seeing the state Ianto was in. Jack lead Ianto over to the battered sofa. 'Owen, have you got that special medicine for Ianto? The one to make the voices in his head go away?'

Jack saw him swallow visibly. 'Yeah, just a tick.' He came back with a second needle but this time there was no struggle. Jack's quiet reassuring voice was all that was needed to guide Ianto down into a lying position whilst the sedative took effect, sending him to sleep.

'What the hell is going on?' Owen asked. 'Could it be contagious?'

Jack shook his head. 'I don't know. I was with him all night. If it was contagious, wouldn't we both have it?'

'Nothing in your blood work, or mine,' Owen confirmed. 'Thought I'd better check ours first before we went gaga.' Tosh was by Jack's side, offering up some wet wipes, with a sympathetic expression as they began cleansing away the blood from Ianto's head and hands.

Owen came back seconds later. 'Tosh you're clear. But I did find something in Gwen's blood just now. Narcotics.'

Jack's attention was immediately diverted from his task of blood from under Ianto's nails. 'What?'

'Never seen this exact profile before but it's not alien. That's why the scanner didn't pick it. It's similar to LSD, which might account for the paranoia and the schizophrenic behaviour.'

'Run Ianto's bloods and see if you find the same. He was complaining about voices screaming in his head.'

Jack checked on Gwen whilst Owen was drawing blood samples from Ianto. They'd at least made her comfortable by wrapping a blanket over her, even if it didn't quite completely hide the cuffs strapping her wrists to the gurney. Preventative measures on Owen's part, Jack knew, but it didn't pain him any less to see her like that. He brushed her hair away from her sleeping face. Seeing any of his team like this was distressing, but having several of them at once was almost too much. He was just glad they'd gotten to both of them in time to prevent them from really hurting themselves. A few scratches would heal.

'Same thing!' Owen yelled out somewhere above the medical bay railing.

Jack leapt up the steps two at a time to reach Owen's desk, viewing the toxicology reports on the screen for himself. Both Gwen's and Ianto's showed the same chemical signature. 'Good news is that it should wear off on its own in a few hours,' Owen reported. 'Drugs like these have some serious side effects but not much of a half life.'

Jack frowned at the results. 'Why them and not us, though?'

'How would they get narcotics into their system?' Tosh asked. 'I mean, we're assuming you'd have to swallow them right?'

Owen folded his arms. 'We all had coffee this morning so it couldn't be that. I don't know what else they could have been exposed to that we weren't. Drugs like this start effecting you within hours, not days.'

Jack set his hands on his hips, looking around. He'd barely seen the pair of the together at all except for... His gaze landed on the small kitchenette. 'Breakfast,' he murmured.

'Come again?'

Jack marched over to the kitchen and picked up the jar of jam, peering at it suspiciously. He couldn't think of anything else and the image of those two hipsters and their stall from yesterday nagged at him. 'I want you to test this,' he said, handing over the jar.

Owen's look was skeptical. 'Jam?'

'Call it a hunch. I can't think of anything else, but they both ate toast with this on it. It came from a less than reputable source.'



Owen came back twenty minutes later with a positive result. 'You were right. It's in the jam. Enough to send a whole party crowd into happy la la land.'

'Except that in someone who isn't a regular stoner, and was maybe a little bit sleep deprived, it set off a full paranoid delusion reaction,' Jack replied. He shook his head. 'What kind of idiots would even attempt something like this? Tosh? I've got a job for you.'

She'd been fussing over blankets and pillows, alternating between her two teammates, trying to make them comfortable. 'What is it?'

Jack pulled up CCTV from a couple of shop fronts along the busy high street he and Ianto had wandered yesterday until he found one that was pointing almost directly in view of the stall where they'd bought the jam. He wound it back twenty four hours. 'I want you to trace these two guys on the CCTV,' he said, pointing at the men. 'Find out where they went after packing up for the day. I'm planning on paying them a visit.'



As soon as Tosh had followed them back to a beaten up green panel van, it hadn't taken long to trace the registration back to an address in a shabby estate block. By then Gwen had already come around and was curled up in her desk chair feeling sorry for herself with a cup of tea clutched in her hands. Jack was holding his temper in check as he waited for Ianto to wake up. He didn't want to leave until he knew he was okay. He was sitting on the coffee table, leaning in close when he finally noticed Ianto stirring. He reached out and squeezed Ianto's hand gently. 'Hey there.'

Ianto raised a hand to touch his face, wincing at the tender scratches. 'Ow.'

'Yeah. You really know how to do some damage. Lucky you keep your nails so short.'

Ianto frowned in confusion. 'What? Why? God, I have such a headache.'

'That jam you bought yesterday wasn't such a great secret recipe.'

Ianto groaned and Jack helped him sit up, moving in beside him on the sofa. He winced and touched his head again. 'Bad trip.'

Jack nodded. 'Really bad trip. You and Gwen gave us a scare.'

Ianto groaned again. 'Oh, God. I gave her some of my toast. Is she?'

'She's fine. Better than you in any case.' He cast a glance towards Gwen's desk and she gave them a sheepish little wave. Jack tried to lighten the mood. 'I mean, who hasn't wanted to threaten Owen with one of his scalpels before?'

'Only all the time,' Ianto said, attempting humor.

Jack gave it another half hour until Owen always satisfied that both his patients were recovering from their drug induced episodes, before taking the keys for the SUV. His annoyance was beginning to return and he wanted to close this out before the day was done.

'Try not to break any arms, Harkness,' Owen warned him.

Jack threw a smile back over his shoulder. 'You'd be amazed what I can do without breaking bones.'



The estate was just what he expected, shabby, run down and perfect for a bunch of low income hippies, not that he was judging. He'd lived like this once upon a time, but then again, it had actually been the seventies, and everybody lived like that back then.

He banged a fist on the door covered in peeling red paint. Eventually one long haired man opened it up. 'Hey, man.'

'Hey, yourself,' Jack said, his patience having already worn thin. He extracted the unopened jar of jam from his coat pocket. 'Wanted to have a little chat about this. You sold it to us yesterday.'

The hippie nodded, oblivious to Jack's obvious temper. 'It's good, huh? Really trippin.'

Jack scowled. 'Tripping is right.' He pulled his gun out with his spare hand and leveled it at the man's head. Hands immediately went up in surrender m but it was the relaxed kind rather than the panicked kind which only infuriated Jack more.

'Woah, man! No need to be mad.'

'Mad? Oh, I'm not mad. I'm furious. Thanks to you my two best friends nearly got hurt because of whatever you put in that jam, so...' He pulled slowly back on the safety catch. 'You're going to let me in and we're going to have a little chat about your so-called secret recipe.' He didn't wait for an invitation, forcing his way in at gunpoint.

Halfway down the hall the second man from the stall came wandering out of the kitchen. Jack could already smell the sticky sweet scent of berries bubbling in a saucepan on the cook top. Bags of oranges were piled up in the hallway just waiting for someone to trip over them. As soon as the second man saw he saw Jack with his gun pointed at his roommate's head, he went white.

'Cooking up next weekend's batch of dodgy jam?' Jack asked. 'What the hell kind of drugs are you putting in it? You're gonna end up killing someone.' He forced both men back into the kitchen. 'Sit down,' he commanded, forcing them both around the tiny op shop table with its scattered remnants of orange peels and paring knives.

'He's got a gun,' the second hippie whispered to the first.

'I know.'

'I told you we shouldn't have put them in the stuff we were selling.'

'Put what in?' Jack asked, casting a critical eye around the kitchen. It was a mess of pots and pans and every kind of spare jar they could collect, along with piles of discarded raspberry vines spilling out of the sink full of dishes. Just the steam coming off the cooking pot was enough to to make Jack feel a little bit floaty. He spotted a second batch of plantlife on the bench, covered in tiny dark orange berries. He recognised them immediately. 'Where did you get these?'

'They were just growing out the back with everything else. They're wild, man. Like mushrooms.'

'Yeah, and just as likely to send you into a psychotic tailspin.' When he'd come across them in his Time Agency days they'd been dried and crushed into a powder and then pressed into pills. Raw he supposed they were slightly less potent but still strong enough that after a little cooking you could imagine you were seeing pretty much anything.

'Stay here,' Jack ordered, moving down the hall and out through the back door out into the allotment yard. He couldn't call it a garden, that haphazard mess of weeds and blackberry vines. In amongst it however was a stack of tangled vines sporting more orange berries. In the cold Cardiff climate it had flourished, filling the yard full of its toxic fruit. There was enough there to have the whole city seeing purple unicorns and trying to slash their wrists open.

He went back inside and stood over the two men. 'Okay, so let me tell you what's going to happen. First, you're going to hand over every last jar of jam, chutney and pickle in this house so that it can be taken away and destroyed. Second, my team are coming over here and they're going to supervise the removal of every last root and stem of that plant, and you two are going to be doing all the pulling. And lastly, you're going to never show your face at another market ever. Get as high as you like in the comfort of your own home, but if I ever catch you selling your stuff to another person, you'll find out just how good a shot I am.'

Whilst he was waiting for the team to arrive, he set the two men out into the yard, beginning the backbreaking task of pulling up every last plant, alien or not.

'Rake up all those loose berries, too,' Jack ordered, parking himself on an upturned milk crate by the door. 'Don't want anything that could take seed three months from now.' Not that he was worried. He was going to nuke the whole yard with pesticides to ensure it didn't.



The others arrived within the hour, ransacking the house of its jars of produce, stacked pretty much anywhere there was an available space, boxing them all up and packing them in the car.

'Just the stink in this house is enough to make your head spin,' Gwen complained, coming out the back for some fresh air, even as Owen was shoving some of the plants into a firing barrel, watching them burn. She spared one of her coldest glares for the two men. 'Think it's funny making people lose their minds, do you?'

'We didn't think it was that strong.'

'Yeah, well maybe when you spend half your day getting high you've not got much mind left.'

Jack was sorely tempted to leave her out in the yard with them. If they thought he was running a punishing schedule, it was nothing compared to what Gwen looked ready to dish out to them.

'Gwen, why don't you, Tosh and Ianto go take that first bootload back to the hub and incinerate it. Owen found more in the back of their van so it'll take at least two trips.'

'I think I'm sticking to peanut butter from now on,' Jack heard Ianto muttered as he dropped more black bin bags full of stuff from inside the house out ready to be added to the fire.

Gwen gave them one last glare and went back inside. Jack smirked. When these two were done clearing the yard he'd was going to reward them with a little drug of his own - the kind that would make this whole enterprise a distant memory.