‘We are’, Jack insisted. 

 

‘Owen will be pissed that he had to work,’ Ianto continued, knowing their medic and Gwen were on the road halfway to Newport to follow up on a pair of aliens who could virtually pass for human, making sure they were settling in okay. 

 

‘Owen's always pissed about having to work,’ Jack replied. ‘And he doesn't work half as many hours. You're overdue an afternoon off.’ 

 

Be that as it may, he had a list of things as long as his arm he could have been doing on a quiet afternoon at the hub. Entertaining Jack wasn't on that list, though clearly it was at the top of Jack's own list. He sighed as Jack continued to pull at him, drawing him across the Plass. It didn't seem worth arguing the point. Jack was the boss and he supposed he should do what his boss wanted. And it was a beautiful day. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen the sun poke out through the thick layer of cloud that usually rested over Cardiff. It was bright and warm and only would have made the idea of going back inside to slave away in the cold, dark archives even less appealing. 

 

'What flavour gelato do you want?" Jack asked, mind already fixated as he led them towards the Italian cafe overlooking the bay.' I think I'm going the mix and match: strawberry, chocolate and lemon. In one of those little waffle cone bowls, of course. What do you think?' 

 

'Ice-cream makes my head hurt,' Ianto reminded him. Which was a pity because they did a lovely raspberry sorbet, and the chocolate mud gelato was pretty good too. Jack had let him have a lick last time, which was about as much as he could do without getting that nail through the skull sensation. 

 

'Well, I'll buy you a cannoli and bottle of limonata, then,' Jack said, undeterred. 'My treat.' 

 

Ianto broke out in a smile. 'Well, since you're treating.' 

 

Jack ordered their treats and then they took them on a walk along the bay. Ianto kept his cannoli in its bag, sipping the limonata from its bottle with a straw and enjoying it whilst it was still cool and refreshing - just not a cold as Jack's ice-cream, which was disappearing quicker than it would ever have a chance to melt. Ianto could forgive Jack his indulgences - even Torchwood leaders deserved the odd afternoon off. 

 

They wandered down to Landsea Gardens, having the same idea as many locals out enjoying the sunshine. They parked themselves on one of the benches overlooking the bay so that Ianto could eat his pastry. The sun made the water glitter and Ianto wondered why he'd ever resisted the idea in the first place. Owen really didn't work nearly as hard. 

 

Jack talked the whole while as Ianto nibbled his treat, trying not to get pastry flakes or icing sugar on his clothes. It wasn't until he was finished and the sun dipping lower in the sky behind their backs that he noticed something odd. The people who wandered past them cast long shadows across the paving stones, stretching off towards the bay. In front of him. His own shadow did much the same, his stretched outline angling off towards Roald Dahl Plass, but next to him, Jack's matching silhouette sensed to be missing. 

 

'Jack, where's your shadow?' 

 

'Hmm?' Jack had his eyes closed and was just enjoying basking in the sunshine like a cat on a sunny window ledge. 

 

'Your shadow,' Ianto repeated, indicating the ground in front of them. There was the outline of the bench they were sat on and then Ianto's shadow, but no Jack. 

 

'Don't be silly, it's just the angle,' Jack said, brushing it off as nonsense. He took a tone with Ianto that suggested he couldn't even relax for five whole minutes without trying to find some crisis. 

 

Ianto tried to ignore it but he found that now he couldn't stop looking down at where Jack's shadow ought to be. 'Jack, I swear I'm not imagining it.'

 

'Ianto…' there was a warning in that word. 

 

'Just humour me for a moment.' He stood up and reached down to pull a reluctant Jack up from his seat. 

 

'There's nothing wrong, Ianto,' Jack insisted. 'See, there's your shadow,' he said, pointing down at the ground, 'and here's… Oh. Well, that's a little weird.' Now that they were both standing, it was even more apparent that Jack was somehow missing the one thing that everyone else had. 

 

'Weird? Jack, your shadow is missing! That's not just a shrug your shoulders thing.' 

 

Jack turned and looked behind him, then looked around the immediate vicinity, as if it were something you could just misplace, like a set of car keys. 'Step back?' he asked, making sure Ianto gave him a wide berth enough to establish that he was definitely not creating any kind of shadow from the sunlight hitting his back. 'Okay, well that's a first.' 

 

'We should get you back to the hub.' This time he was the one grabbing Jack by the hand and tugging him along. With his spare hand he pulled his phone from pocket and dialled. 'Tosh? Yeah, can you meet us at the top of the water tower? We're only a few minutes walk away and headed there now. We've got a slight problem.' 

 

 

Tosh knew better than to question her teammates when they said they had a problem, least of all Ianto. The fact that he hadn't elucidated exactly what only made her curious, and why did she have to meet him up on the Plass? She'd already checked the CCTV cameras up there and everything appeared totally normal - just locals and tourists alike out enjoying a perfect Cardiff afternoon. 

 

She took the long route, coming out via the tourist office, up the stairs from the quay and across the Plass to wait for them just outside the Millennium Centre. She kept her eyes sharp for any signs that something was wrong. 

 

She spotted the two men striding towards her, trying to read their expressions from a distance. 'What's wrong?' she asked as soon as they were in earshot. 

 

'Jack's shadow is gone,' Ianto replied. 

 

'What?' She was sure she'd misheard him. 

 

'He doesn't have a shadow, Tosh.'

 

She shook her head. 'You can't just lose your shadow. That's not possible. A shadow only exists by virtue of you blocking light rays from reflecting back visible light and colour.'

 

'Then how do you explain that?' Jack asked, pointing down at his feet.

 

Tosh looked down and frowned. Ianto was standing right next to him and his shadow was as perfectly visible, as was her own, angling off in precisely the same direction. The afternoon was so bright and sunny that there was absolutely no mistaking the fact that one of their threesome was missing something that simply couldn't be missing. 'I don't even understand how that could be possible,' she said. 

 

'He's not like, uh, invisible or something?' Ianto suggested. 'I mean, invisible in the sense of visible to us and nobody else.' 

 

'Hey!' Jack yelled and waved about in front of some confused looking tourists who seemed concerned that they'd been singled out by the crazy man in the long military coat. 'You guys can see me, right?'

 

'Er, yes?' 

 

Ianro tugged at the edge of his cuff, embarrassed by the display. 'Well, I suppose that answers that question.' 

 

Tosh turned her mind to a more methodical approach to the problem. 'Do you remember when you first noticed it missing?'

 

Jack raised his eyebrows at her like she was the crazy one. 'It's Cardiff. How often do we get a day like today? And just for the record, I'm not exactly in the habit of checking my shadow is following me everywhere. Do you?' 

 

Tosh nodded thoughtfully. It was a fair comment. She couldn't say she noticed whether she was casting a shadow on anything, and the hub was dark and gloomy at the best of times. Sometimes use was guilty of not even noticing her colleagues, so fixated was she in the work she was doing. 'Alright, well, I guess we just have to run some tests and see if there's anything unusual about you.' She received a snort from Ianto at the suggestion there was anything that wasn't unusual about Jack. 'It might be helpful to know when this started happening.'

 

Ianto sighed. 'I guess I could go through our CCTV and see if I can pick up when approximately we can start to notice Jack not casting shadows.'

 

'Any excuse to sit there and watch me all day,' Jack teased. 

 

'Well, it wasn't how I planned on spending my afternoon off, ice-cream aside.' 

 

'We can always go back and get ice-cream if you've changed your mind.'

 

'How about we worry about your missing shadow first. If we figure out how to fix that, then maybe you can convince me into having a waffle cone.'

 

 

With Owen still out in Newport, it was hard to go through a thorough medical screening for Jack and anything that might shed light on the fact that he was currently unable to block any. They started with the basics - a full body scan from their alien augmented scanner and some blood draws, which neither of them particularly liked attempting, leaving Jack to poke himself with a needle to extract his own blood. Jack tinkered with Owen's equipment to study his own blood samples whilst Tosh compared his body scan with previous ones on file. Ianto was left with the tedious task of working backwards through their CCTV, looking for any signs of when and where Jack had cast off his shadow. 

 

'I'm not seeing anything unusual here,' Tosh, Jack reported, righting himself after being bent over one of one's microscopes. 

 

'Nothing different in your scans either,' she replied, 'unless you count a new freckle on your right forearm.'

 

'I've got a new freckle?' He sounded genuinely enthused about it. 

 

'I doubt the two things are connected.' 

 

'What about you, Ianto?' Jack called out. 'Anything?'

 

Ianto leaned sideways from his computer so that it wasn't blocking his line of sight to Jack. 'Well, unlike you two, mine is going to take a bit longer. I've only worked back through the twenty minutes since we left the hub just after lunch. And, before you ask, no, you didn't have a shadow then, either.' 

 

'I can help you check the footage,' Tosh offered. 'Now that Jack's not got me doing anything else.'

 

'There you go. Help is always on hand if you only but ask,' Jack said. 

 

Ianto scowled somewhat displeased at Jack. 'I should be asking you to help, or you should at least be offering. It is your shadow that's gone missing, after all. I'm a little surprised you aren't more concerned.'

 

Jack jogged up the steps and came over to reassure him with a hand on his shoulder. 'I'm here, aren't I? I feel fine. You can all see me and hear me and feel me. If it was something serious of course I'd be worried, but how bad can it be?' 

 

Ianto's eyes narrowed at him. 'You're defying physics, and I didn't even pass physics in high school and I still know that much.' 

 

Jack shrugged off the concern. 'I defy physics every day. Can't die, remember?' 

 

Ianto's lips pursed. 'Fine. Tosh and I will do all the leg work, as usual,' he added. 'Go be useful and retrace your steps. Maybe it'll jump out and find you.' 

 

 

Tosh was going cross-eyed staring at the grainy CCTV images on her screen. Even with all their fancy software, there was only so much you could do with basic camera footage, and she was looking for something that wasn't there, rather than something that was. 

 

She really needed a coffee but she was too polite to ask for one, especially when Ianto was probably going twice as cross-eyed as she was. He had two sets of CCTV running on different screens to try and cut down the time it would take them to go through it all, tracing Jack's movements around the hub. And he did get around a lot. 

 

She liked to think of him always cooped up in his office when he wasn't out on the city streets being all brave and heroic, but he was remarkably mobile. Most vexing were the moments when he seemed to disappear altogether, not passing from one CCTV camera to the next as she came to expect. It was perplexing. Where else could you go? There were no doors or corridors you could duck down to avoid passing the next camera. It was just as if one second he was there and then he wasn't. Still, she set it aside as paranoia. A few minutes later he would always turn up on a camera somewhere not too far away. 

 

She focused on the feeds for a few minutes longer before finally hitting on something. 'There. I think I've got it.' 

 

Ianto turned to look at her from across the way. 'Got what?' 

 

She rewound the footage and checked it again as Ianto came to hover over her desk. 'Yes, I think definitely. Look at this.' 

 

'That's the corridor leading down to the archives,' Ianto said before even bothering to check the tiny data stamp in the top corner of the screen. To anyone else it looked like just another corridor, but Ianto walked down there so often he could spot it in a heartbeat. 

 

'Jack headed your way,' Tosh agreed. 'And look, there's clearly a shadow on the wall when he walks down there. But take a look at this.' She clicked a few keys and brought up the same hallway, only with Jack walking back the other way. 'This is from half an hour later. See? No shadow.'

 

'Okay. So that gives us an approximate time and also a location. When was that?' 

 

She checked the time stamp. 'Day before yesterday?' 

 

'So, Jack's been going around for three days without his shadow and nobody has noticed? Great.'

 

She nodded. 'He went into the archives with one and left without one. 'She turned to look up at Ianto. 'Do you remember what he was doing down there?' 

 

Ianto rolled his eyes at her as if the question were in fact rhetorical. 'We could both probably take a guess.' 

 

She smirked. 'Distracting you from your work?' 

 

'Among other things.' He tapped the comms unit in his ear. 'Jack? Where are you?' 

 

'Anywhere you need me to be,' came the cheeky response. 

 

'Well, you can be on your way down to the archives and we'll meet you there. It seems your shadow stealer is living down there.' 

 

 

Jack was already down there when the pair of them reached the corridor just a few feet from the entrance to Ianto's little domain.

 

'What do we know?' Jack said, asking for an update. 

 

Ianto shrugged. 'Not much. Only that when you left the archives two days ago, you left your shadow behind. And you stole my pad of multicolour post-it notes. I caught you on camera pocketing them when I had my back turned. You don't even use them, you just think they look pretty.' 

 

Jack attempted to look sheepish, which was to say contrition was not a look he'd mastered. 'Whoops. Busted. So, shadow goes in and doesn't come out?' 

 

'That's how it looks.' 

 

'So, what thing that we shouldn't have touched did we touch?' 

 

Ianto extracted a folded piece of paper from his jacket pocket. He'd come prepared to answer that precise question, going back through the logs of things he himself had been cataloguing at the time when Jack came looking for him. Drawing on his recollections, Jack hadn't even been all that naughty during his visit. If anyone knew the true extent of how often he ended up with his pants around his ankles - or even further away - when Jack came calling, he'd probably lose all respect from his teammates. That or they already suspected as much and had simply stopped caring. 

 

The afternoon in question had merely been a little bit of kissing, stolen from Ianto when his defences were down. It was hard to resist when you never knew when you might next get a quiet moment alone and still have all your limbs. 

 

He handed the sheet of paper across. 'This is the location of the box of items I was cross-referencing when you came to ah, check on my progress. Just not sure we should head down there in case the rest of us suffer the same problem.' 

 

'Not exactly dangerous stuff you were handling,' Jack mused, reviewing the list for himself and concurring with Ianto's assessment of largely innocuous artifacts. 

 

'Kind of why I'm thinking it wasn't anything to do with that box of items. Anything could be hiding down there in the shadows, as it were if you pardon the pun. Some days you just get the feeling you're being watched by something down here. I mean, apart from Gerald.' 

 

Jack grinned at the reference to the white, thirty foot long cross between a dog and a dragon. How anything that big could hide down here was a complete mystery, but he seemed content enough with his own company. 'How is the old boy?' 

 

'Haven't seen him for a while. Keeping the rats at bay which is all that really matters.' A pity Gerald was so shy, and also that it didn't speak - as best they knew, since they'd only seen him a handful of times - or they might have been able to ask if he'd seen anything else strange down here. 

 

'Well, I say we take the risk and go down and have a poke around,' Jack announced. 

 

'We came prepared,' Tosh said, holding up a torch and indicating Ianto also had one at the ready. 

 

'I wouldn't if I were you,' Jack warned. 

 

'But it's dark down there,' Ianto replied. Normally he'd take a portable free-standing lamp if he was planning on spending more than a few minutes down there to locate something. 

 

'Exactly. Maybe if there's something down there stealing shadows, it can only do so if it can see them. No lights equals no shadows. Nothing to steal.'

 

Tosh exchanged a look. 'It does make sense, I suppose.'

 

Ianto set his torch back on his desk. 'Fine. No lights then. We'll just head off into the creepy dark without knowing what's down there.' 

 

'Stop worrying,' Jack chastised. 'You spend whole days down there unafraid of the dark. No use starting to worry now.' He strode off in the direction of the tall row of shelves where he'd last cast his own shadow between their own, letting the others trail after him in his wake. 

 

If Jack knew what they were looking for he didn't let on, and if he didn't, that made three of them with no idea what to be searching for in an otherwise dull gap between twenty foot tall shelves full of dust laden crates of artifacts all well overdue for reassessment, and often re-cataloguing. Whoever had this job before Ianto - several someones given the number of decades that had passed - really had no idea how to organise things in a system that made sense. Not that anyone on the team seemed to be able to grasp Ianto's system either. It made perfect sense to him and that was its limit. 

 

'There's nothing down here,' Jack finally said after they'd searched in all directions for several rows of shelves, casting their haze up, down and in between the boxes that filled them, caked in the dust of decades of neglect. 

 

'How can you tell?' Ianto quipped. 'We can't see anything.'

 

'We can sort of see.' It wasn't as if the archives were totally pitch black. There was always a muted glow from some ancient sodium lights that were clogged with so much dust and grime that they scarcely lit anything anymore. Just enough not to walk into anything but not enough to read a label on a crate. 

 

'Are we getting anything at all, Tosh?' Jack asked, studying Tosh as she kept her eyes fixed on her PDA, running all kinds of scans for ambient traces of, well, he didn't know what exactly. The point was that Tosh did know. 

 

'Nothing.' 

 

Jack let out a disappointed sound. 'Okay, well, nothing in the immediate area. We should set up some equipment down here to monitor things. Extra motion sensors and cameras, a couple of those Trabtrantren mass spectrometrical analysers, yadda yadda. If there is anything wandering around down here, we should pick up some trace of it once we're no longer here to scare it off. Oh, and grab that box of bits you were cataloguing, Ianto. We'll double check all of them, too. You never know.' 

 

It was a dissatisfying response but Ianto slid the box off the shelf and carried it back with them all the same. He doubted they were about to uncover some magical shadow splitter in the box of broken and ancient artifacts, even if there were a couple in there that were still logged in the archive database as "purpose unknown - not deemed dangerous". 

 

He'd been reconsidering that classification when Tosh called from behind him. 

 

'Uh… Ianto?' 

 

He paused and turned in the corridor, looking back at her. 'Yeah?' 

 

'Not to alarm you, but it's your shadow.' 

 

Ianto let his eyes shut for just a second, dreading what he was about to find - or not find - when he reopened them and looked down. They'd only been down there twenty minutes or so. How had they gone from just Jack losing his shadow to Ianto now missing his as well? He reluctantly opened them and saw what Tosh was seeing. 

 

'Oh, you are kidding,' he said when he finally looked down and then along the wall to his left. His shadow wasn't missing at all, but now he was seeing double. 

 

Jack noticed that the two of them had fallen behind and stopped to double back the half dozen yards. 'Woah,' was all he said. 

 

'No, that's not even possible,' Ianto said, shaking his head in pure disbelief. It was one thing to have two shadows, resulting from two different sources of light hitting you at different angles. He'd seen it happen all the time watching the rugby on TV as the stadium lights targeted the players from four different angles. But this? He now had two shadows and one was slightly taller and a lot broader than his first. It had some tell-tale features including a lot more hair swept from right to left in a style that was distinctly familiar. Somehow, upon exiting the archives, he'd not only found Jack's shadow, but now it was following him. 

 

'It's not even attached to me,' he said, noting that the second shadow didn't actually emanate out from his feet as his own did. It was just standing there next to his own, clinging to it like it might blow away at the slightest breeze without something else to hold onto. 'That is the creepiest thing I've ever seen.'

 

'Hey, but at least we found it,' Jack said, smiling with relief. 

 

'Yes, but where did it come from and how is it now attached to me and not you?'

 

'But it's not really attached to you,' Tosh said. 'It's just sort of… hitched a ride, I suppose,' she said, studying it with intense curiosity. As she leaned a little closer to it, it raised a hand and gave a little wave which made her jump back in alarm. 'Oh my God. Did you just see that?'

 

Jack's shadow gave them another wave, this time a little more confidently and more like the physical entity himself might have done. 

 

'Hi,' Jack said, waving back as if it were perfectly pedestrian. Good to see you again. 'We thought we'd lost you.' 

 

'Jack, I don't think it can hear-' Jack cut off the rest of Ianto's sentence with a raised hand but Ianto wasn't having a bar of it, however strange this was. 'But… no, shadows can't just do their own thing,' he insisted. 'They're not sentient independent things. They're just…' 

 

Jack's shadow moved and set a hand on its hip in a manner that clearly suggested it wasn't happy with Ianto's assessment of it. 

 

'Maybe we should reserve judgement for the time being,' Tosh suggested, though she looked just as bewildered by the situation as he did. 

 

'I'm glad to see you, too,' Jack told it, trying to be placating, 'but how do we get you over here back with me? I'm taking a wild guess and saying that the only way you were able to make it back out of the archives was by latching onto the shadow of someone else?' 

 

The shadow just kind of shrugged and shook its head, keeping its other hand firmly fixed on the shadow Ianto's arm was casting on the wall as he continued to clutch the box of items from the archives. It either had no idea or had just gotten lucky and was now too scared to let go lest it disappear or become completely adrift again. 

 

Jack gave his shadow his best reassuring smile. 'Okay, well we'll think of something. Just hang tight.' 

 

Ianto rolled his eyes. 'I think it already is.' 

 

 

Once they were back upstairs, Jack set Tosh to work on Ianto's box of artifacts, trying to determine if any of them was responsible for what had happened. Ianto had to keep his eye on his shadow and that of Jack's as it clutched to his. 

 

Up here in the main hub, the lighting wasn't as good and there were less places where a shadow could comfortably cast itself. Jack's office was always dark, and the little alcove under the stairs where Ianto made his coffee wasn't much better. Even the desk he'd inherited from Suzie didn't have a lot of light, and Owen's medical bay, whilst well it was not somewhere he liked to hang out for too long. In the end he grabbed a laptop and made a spot for himself up in the boardroom where the light was good and a shadow could be easily spotted. He worried about how anxious Jack's shadow might be at having to climb the spiral stairs, which were always notoriously poorly lit. He couldn't say why he thought a shadow should care or have opinions on the matter, but Jack's shadow had already begun to ooze personality traits that married up with his owner. Still, they made it up there okay - all three of them, Ianto, his shadow and Jack's. He wasn't quite sure what else to do now. Tosh was doing her technical genius thing and Jack said he was going to do some research on the matter, which left Ianto on babysitting duties. He contented himself with a thorough search of the archives databases for anything shadow related, knowing that Jack's methods of research were more scattergun than his. 

 

There just had to be an explanation for what had happened and how to fix it. Weird was the normal around here and there was almost always a reason why things happened. 

 

Jack poked his head about an hour later and Ianto assumed it was a request for coffee. 

 

'I'll do coffee in a minute,' he promised. 'I just want to finish reading this entry.' It hadn't ended up being relevant to their current problem but it was interesting nonetheless and might come in useful down the track as things often did. 

 

'I didn't come for coffee,' Jack replied. 'Although now that you've mentioned it. Actually, I was just wondering…' 

 

'Yes, we're all still here,' Ianto said, pointing ahead of him to the wall where an outline of Jack gave a dull, bored wave. He didn't seem to find the documents Ianto was searching nearly as interesting, which came as no surprise. He had Jack's attention span, that was for sure. 

 

'No,' Jack said, sliding into the chair next to him. 'I was just wondering if… well, if you can sense any physical connection.' 

 

Ianto raised a curious eyebrow at him. 'How so?' 

 

'Like, if my shadow touches your shadow, do you feel anything? Is there any effect on you physically from having someone else's shadow touching yours?' 

 

'No.' He said it with a certain amount of wariness, as if he perhaps should have stopped to consider the question more carefully. He caught shadow Jack attempting to pinch the shadow of his own arm just to be sure, testing out the theory. If he hadn't been consciously aware that he was two shadows to the good, he would have said he felt perfectly normal. 

 

Jack looked disappointed. 'Okay. It was a long shot. Just some really old religious stuff I found about melding souls and what have you.' He gave a weary sigh. 'I'm going to go down there and have another poke around. There must be something to explain it. Tosh hasn't come up with anything yet.' 

 

'I'll come with you.' 

 

'No. You stay here.' Jack's tone was firm but friendly. 'I already lost it once down there. Safer if I go without it. Don't want to lose it again, or lose yours as well.' 

 

Ianto gave him a troubled look. 'If you're sure.'

 

'I'll have my comms with me. If I find anything you'll be the first to know.' 

 

'Alright. If you see Gerald down there ask him if he's seen anything unusual.' 

 

Jack chuckled. 'And if he replies and I discover I'm fluent in whatever it is his species might speak, I'll let you know that too.' 

 

 

Ianto had hit a dead end in his research and was now out of ideas. He wanted to be doing something useful to help. Instead he was killing time replying to emails and paying bills in the hope that one of Jack or Tosh would come up with some brilliant idea or explanation for things. The whole situation made him wish he'd enjoyed their afternoon more before he'd gone and ruined it. 

 

Jack's shadow made a point of teasing Ianto as it loitered nearby. When Ianto caught him making hand shadows of a barking dog in his line of sight he sighed. 'That's not funny, Jack.' Then he sighed again. 'Great, now he's got me talking to you. You don't even have ears.' 

 

Jack's shadow weekend to slump against the wall next to his win. 'Sorry,' he said. 'That was probably a bit rude of me. I'm sure it's not your fault this has happened and that you much rather be attached to your owner than having to latch onto me.' 

 

He manoeuvred himself so that his hand and arm were hovered Jack's hand, trying to give it a pat of sorts which felt odd and looked even odder as he attempted it. He never would have gotten a job as a shadow puppeteer.

 

Jack's head sank and then suddenly it bolted back up again and he slapped himself on the forehead. He waved and gesticulated wildly to make sure he had Ianto's full attention.

 

'What?' 

 

Jack made a pointing gesture at Ianto and then one at himself. You. Me, Ianto surmised. Then he leaned forward and made a theatrical silhouette of himself puckering up to kiss. 

 

'Such a one track mind,' Ianto quipped, thinking shadow Jack was just after a shadow snog. 'I'm not attempting to coordinate a shadow kiss with you.' He even had Jack's libido. 

 

The shadow waved at him wildly again and this time he made the same motions using his hands for puppets, demonstrating the action. 

 

'We're not…' Ianto wasn't quite sure how to describe what they weren't planning on doing. It was almost like having to deal with two Jacks instead of one and that was going to give him a headache in the long run. 'We'll fix this, okay?' 

 

'Ianto?' Tosh's voice broke through as she hovered by the side door, before entering. She must have thought he was having a row and hadn't wanted to impinge. 'I think I found something.' She had her PDA in her hand and gave it a few taps so that the images from it were transmitted to the large projector screen at the end of the room. 'I checked all of the items from the crate you brought back and this one stood out.' She brought up the file from their archive database. Recognise this? 

 

Ianto studied the object. It was triangular and a deep charcoal grey, made of some strange alien metal. There were no markings on it or any buttons. Whatever it was it was either operated by touch or some kind of mental telepathy, according to the files, not that anyone had ever managed to get it to do anything at all, which might mean they were wrong about the interface or it was simply broken, or even just a decorative knick knack. 

 

'I remember seeing it a few days ago. Do you know what it is?' 

 

'No idea,' she confessed, 'but here's an image of it I took just a few minutes ago.' She brought it up on the screen, side by side with the other archive photo. It was the same object but now it was more silvery red. 

 

'It's completely changed colour. Is that significant?' 

 

'Insofar as there's no such thing as coincidence?' she replied, answering the question for him. 

 

'I didn't touch it,' he assured her. There were anti-gravity gloves he used to move things that were sensitive to touch, or simply things that they didn't know anything about, where the mantra was always better safe than sorry. 

 

'We should let Jack know.' 

 

'Or we could just take it down there. Replicate the conditions from the time when this all started.' 

 

'That's not a bad idea. Something else might have triggered it to act the way it did.' He turned to face Jack's shadow. 'You okay with that?' Jack nodded. 

 

'Okay. In that case we're going to need a lot more lights down there to make sure we can see you.' 

 

 

Jack had been wandering around the archives for ages. He'd yet to find anything useful, poking his nose into boxes and crates of artifacts to see if anything jumped out at him as being responsible for his current predicament. He'd seen lots of different technologies capable of extracting things, right down to the atomic level, and remembering that time Ianto had fallen foul of a device that had removed all the calcium from his bones, turning him into a pile of boneless mush. That hadn't been what it was designed for, but that had been the consequence. Luckily they were able to reverse the process, otherwise he'd still look like a deflated balloon. And there'd been the Ghost Maker - that creepy guy who led the Night Travellers - who'd stolen people's last breath and very souls, trapping them in a silver flask that Jack still had locked away in the secure archives. He supposed if it were possible to steal someone's last breath, then stealing a shadow couldn't be that hard either. The only question that remained was why. 

 

Even more perplexing was that his shadow had a sentience of its own. That was something he definitely hadn't seen before. Like Tosh had said, a shadow was just a shadow; a product of simple physics and light. Something of himself now seemed to inhabit it however and he wondered if that meant he was now less himself because of it. It had been easy to brush off the whole situation earlier, but now it was beginning to trouble him. If only because it might not just be him that ended up affected by it. 

 

'Jack?' Ianto's voice called out. 

 

'Over here,' he called back, suddenly hopeful that perhaps they'd solved the mystery. Tosh came into view first, carrying the box of archive items, whilst Ianto had two large free-standing lamps, which he set down on opposite sides of the spot where the crate had been occupying the shelf. 'What are those for?' 

 

'To make it easier to see your shadow,' he explained, pushing out the tripod legs on the second lamp and switching it on. His shadow, plus Jack's, now graced the opposite row of shelves. 

 

'Take a look at this,' Tosh said, pulling the lid off the box of artifacts and indicating the item wedged at the front. 

 

'Still no idea what it is,' Jack said. 

 

'Me either, but it's a totally different colour than it was three days ago.' 

 

'Okay. So, we're doing what?' 

 

'Seeing if bringing it back down here might reverse what's happened. You might need to stand close to your shadow and see if it can reattach itself.' 

 

Unsure what other options they had, Jack humoured her, wandering close to his shadow and then standing right over the top of it, making sure his feet touched the floor where its legs rose up from the floor and met the rest of his shadowy body along the shelves. He stood there for a couple of minutes and then slowly took one large step sideways. His shadow didn't follow him. 'Nope.' 

 

'Okay, maybe try holding the device.' 

 

'I wasn't holding it before.' 

 

'I know, but let's just try. Process of elimination.' 

 

The second attempt wasn't any more successful than the first. He gave the device back to Tosh and she slipped it back into the box on the shelf. Meanwhile his shadow seemed to be getting more and more anxious, fidgeting and waving around. Jack revisited the urge to say "what is it, boy?" knowing how condescending that sounded. His shadow might normally follow him everywhere it went, but it was no puppy.

 

'We're trying to replicate the exact circumstances from before,' Tosh said, clearly frustrated that nothing was ever simple. 'Is there anything else you were doing when you came down here?' She looked away lest she'd asked an embarrassing question. 

 

Jack grinned shamelessly as he looked across at Ianto. 'Ianto? Were we doing anything else down here a few days ago?' He of course knew the answer and was disappointed he didn't get the full on blush out of Ianto that he expected. 

 

'I probably should have seen this coming, shouldn't I?' Ianto said, stepping closer. He didn't hesitate in kissing Jack on the mouth letting it linger there a few moments before stepping back. Unfortunately, Jack's shadow stepped back with his and threw its hands up as if it were annoyed with him. 

 

Jack's shadow made a show of grabbing Ianto's and thrusting himself face first at it, as if he planned on snogging the life out of it. It was certainly a full-blooded kiss and one that Jack could be proud of. Then he splayed himself up against the shelving in dramatic fashion, half expecting Ianto's shadow to follow him and keep going. 

 

'I think he found our attempt a little half-hearted,' Jack remarked. 

 

'Voyeur,' Ianto grumbled. 'He was trying to get a kiss out of me earlier though I don't even know how that works and-' He stopped mid sentence. 

 

Jack frowned at him. 'What?' 

 

'We were kissing, and then you grabbed me and slammed me back against the shelves and…' He turned around and looked at the spot where Jack had pinned him before going in for the kill. 'And I whacked back into the crate because it was right there at chest height.' 

 

'And the device was packed right in at the front of the box,' Tosh added. 'And the sudden impact could have been enough to set it off.'

 

Jack's shadow flung its arms skywards, like it was celebrating a goal or a touchdown. 

 

'I know it sounds a bit stupid…' Tosh began. 

 

Jack didn't bother waiting for her to finish the suggestion. He grabbed Ianto by the lapels and kissed him hard. Teeth mashed together in the confusion before Jack threw him back against the shelving, hearing Ianto audibly crash back into the box. It wasn't pretty or elegant or coordinated, but Jack gave the kiss absolutely everything. At worst, if it didn't work he'd at least have gotten a decent snog out of it. 

 

Ianto eventually gave into Jack's strategy, wrapping his arms around Jack's neck as he so often did when he wanted Jack just as close as he could be. Jack pressed his body close, bringing them together in one tangled mess of arms and lips. He didn't relent until he could sense Ianto running out of breath, which had been a good long while, but even so, there was only so much air you could get in when someone had their tongue halfway down your throat. He pulled back just far enough for them to both catch their breath. 

 

'I've kissed a lot of people, Ianto Jones, but you still get an eleven out of ten every single time.' 

 

'Glad I have some transferable skills. But… did it work?' 

 

Reluctantly Jack drew away putting a firm yard between them. 

 

'You did it!' Tosh squealed. 'Look!' 

 

Jack looked down at his feet and there was his shadow, back where it should be. He raised his arm and checked that his shadow followed it as he waved it up and down. 'That felt a little too easy,' he finally said. 

 

'Speak for yourself,' Ianto said, rubbing between his shoulder blades where the shelf had pressed hard into his back. He glanced down just to make sure his own shadow hadn't gone walkabout before turning to pop open the lid on the box and check inside. 'Yep, it's changed colour back to how it was before.' 

 

'That is so weird,' Jack replied. 'Why would someone invent something like that? What's the point of it?' 

 

'Maybe if you could teach your shadow sign language it'd make a really good undercover spy.' 

 

'I could try and do some more research on it,' Tosh offered. 

 

Jack waved off the offer. 'Nah, I don't think we'll be needing it to arm ourselves against the future.' 

 

'Unless we're in need of a shadow spy,' Ianto teased. 'And maybe from now on we'll be a little bit more careful about not knocking into things down here, hmm?' 

 

'Which would be a lot easier if you didn't resist my attempts to get you to leave with me for more comfortable accommodations.' 

 

Ianto rolled his eyes. 'Noted for future reference. Be less resistant to Jack's overtures.' 

 

There was a burst of static in their earpieces. "Oi, where've you lot got to?" Owen's gruff voice grumbled. I know you're still here because Jack's stupid sports car is still parked so close to mine that I can't get the bloody door open. If I scratch the paintwork don't come crying. And we're gagging for a coffee, me and Gwen. Traffic on the M4 was a bloody nightmare. I hate Newport." 

 

Tosh gave a roll of her eyes. 'That's the peace and quiet gone for the day.' 

 

Ianto smirked. 'Give him a coffee and he'll be gone by half six.' 

 

'As should the two of you,' Jack added, giving them both the eye. Make the most of the rift behaving itself.' 

 

Ianto sighed.' Best go sort out those restless natives, then.' He flicked off one of the free-standing lamps and folded it back up, tucking the tripod under his arm. 'Grab that other one, would you Jack? Just leave it in the gap between the cupboard and the doorway is fine,' he said, taking off with Tosh right beside him. 

 

Jack paused a moment before he was ready to turn that lamp off. He wanted to be double sure his shadow was staying put, and more importantly staying attached to him. He cut a few sharp moves, watching it follow him seamlessly before deciding that all was once again right in the world. 'You missed a great afternoon out by the bay,' he told it. 'Promise we'll try and organise another one as soon as we can.' 

 

His shadow suddenly moved of its own accord, giving him a thumbs up which startled him. Maybe everything wasn't quite back to normal. 

 

'Alright, but maybe we just keep this our little secret, huh?' 

 

Jack's shadow stood up straight and gave him an overstated military salute. Their little secret.