Pilot 4

[a_silver_story]

Pilot 4




Okay ... last one now! This starts a week before series 2, and won't be overly compliant with canon.

In case you haven't noticed, I don't like canon at the moment.

Also - ever noticed how 'Gwen' and 'Owen' only have one letter difference?







It wasn't the most intriguing artifact Owen had ever seen. If anything, it was boring - so he put it on Tosh's pile and decided to be done with it.





"Ianto?"

"Mm?"

"Did you put this on my desk?"

Ianto glanced up from the clipboard he'd been checking. He shook his head silently, then returned to his clipboard.

Toshiko turned away and bit her lip, watching him out of the corner of her eye. She was worried about him, and he had probably worked out about two months and two weeks ago - when Jack left - that she was picking up on basically any excuse to try and engage him in conversation. She'd been around to his flat with pizza and beer, and felt like she'd done nothing more than force him to tolerate her presence for three hours out of politeness rather than helping to comfort him.

He wouldn't talk about Jack, and she, Owen and even Gwen had given up trying to find out what had been going on between them. Owen had had the most luck, after apologising to him quite earnestly for 'that comment', and explaining that he'd never realised that him and Jack hadn't just been Ianto's fantasy until ...

... and Ianto had nodded and walked away at that point, hesitating just before the corner leading away to the Archives. "You know what, Owen?" he'd called back. "It must feel so fucking good to have the Captain prove you right."

Owen blinked after him, having been sincere in every word and hurt to have been rebuked, and decided to leave him to his Archives.

Gwen had taken over leadership, and whether or not Ianto was comfortable with it none of them knew. He came up for lunch, they told him the decision, he nodded, took his fruit salad and ate it in the catacombs. He did as he was told, which they supposed was enough for now, but they could see every day that he was slipping further and further inside himself, and that if they didn't act soon they'd wind up with a robot instead of a Ianto.

Toshiko sighed, looking at the mysterious artifact in her hand, then glancing back up to Ianto doing his checklist on his clipboard, efficiently scribbling down notes with the pencil he'd attached to it with a string. She then noticed Gwen, walking towards him with purposeful strides, a slight frown on her face as she thought to herself, probably considering what she was going to say. Owen was watching from the direction she'd just walked from, probably privvy to what was about to be said. Toshiko sat down primly at her desk, listening hard though it looked like she was examining the artifact.

"Ianto? Ianto! Hi," smiled Gwen. "I was wondering if you could do me a favour?"

"Mm?"

"Cheer the bloody hell up will you? You're a right misery - and the coffee's suffering. There's a love," she grinned brightly, pinching his cheek. She walked on and sat down at her desk, clearing her throat and beginning work as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

Ianto stared after her a couple of seconds, re-attached his pencil to his clipboard and tossed it onto the couch. Without a word, he marched through the cog door, picking up his coat and keys on the way.

"Well ... that was a slap in the face ...." Owen called bemusedly on his way to the medical bay. "Didn't expect you to say it quite so bluntly, but ... there we are ...."

A long, awkward silence stretched out, where they all tried to ignore the elephant in the room. The atmosphere was tense, none of them really knowing where Ianto might have gone, or what he might be doing. After fifteen minutes, Toshiko finally broke the heavy silence.

"Maybe we should ... follow him on CCTV," she suggested.

"Why?" asked Gwen.

"To find out what he might be ... doing," Tosh mumbled.

Owen was walking up from the autopsy bay. "He must be feeling a little ... suicidal ... as it is ... if you think about it ...."

Tosh bit her lip and looked away as Owen came to a halt by her desk.

"He's down, he's depressed, he feels like his life is going nowhere; the man we assume he loves has left him, none of us know him well enough to know how to get him to open up and he hasn't had time to properly grieve; his days have become autonomous, automatic and boring and now you've just attempted the 'slapped by a wet fish' method to wake him up, and I think it may have backfired tremendously."

"You said I should put it succinctly!" huffed Gwen.

"Okay ... that was my fault," admitted Owen. "I just don't know what to try anymore ...."

They jumped as a deep, Welsh voice sounded behind them. "Insulting the coffee really, really didn't help."

"Ianto! You came back!" smiled Gwen, standing up.

"I came to get some things," he said flatly. "I'm working from home today."

"Ohh don't do that. Have the day off."

"Sometimes I just don't get you sense of humour, Gwen."

"Ianto ... sorry about ... before ... it was ... we were just trying to ...."

"To interfere?" he offered, crossing over to the coffee machine and taking a cardboard box out from under it. He started filling it with with his coffee and hot chocolates, before crouching down into the fridge and getting the biscuits. Then he got his clipboard, collected several different reports and forms, and left them all in silence.

"Should one of us go with him?" asked Gwen.

"I'll check on him later," sighed Owen. "Whatever we do, it won't be the right thing."

They resumed work slowly, Owen occasionally cursing or throwing something around his medical bay as he tried and failed to identify a sample, isolate a molecule or had the gastric tubes of an alien corpse explode in his face. Eventually, he threw down his tools, thinking about maybe possibly but probably not washing them later, and wandered over to where Tosh was working.

"Anything interesting?" he asked.

She sniffed, trying to ignore the stench of dead alien hanging around him. "Not really. Working my way through some pretty ... mundane ... artifacts."

"What've you got so far?"

"A piece of jewellery, a doorstop and what I think might be a bookmark. Then there's this:"

She showed him the grey, oblong box that had mysteriously appeared on her desk earlier that day.

"Ohh that! Yeah - couldn't figure that out either."

Tosh frowned at him. "You couldn't be bothered scanning it so you left it for me to do?"

Owen had the decency to look abashed. "Well ... you're better at that stuff than me," he tried, flattery usually working unfairly well with Toshiko.

Indeed, she flushed very slightly, and set the box back down. "Well," she began. "I did a few preliminaries, and I think it might be some form of organiser - for DNA."

Owen raised his eyebrows, intrigued. "How?"

"The original - the 'map', if you like - holds this end, and then a beam comes out of the other end. I assume it's a medical implement used to restore a body to wholeness or health, based off the state of the map. I think."

"That," Owen grinned. "Is fucking impressive."

"It would be - if I could get the thing working," scowled Toshiko. "I think it only reacts to certain DNA, though. We'd have to try it with a few other species to test the theory ...."

Owen picked it up. It looked like a smooth, grey, rectangular box with a tiny hole in one of the small sides. He squinted at it. "No markings," he observed. "No buttons. No touch-screen."

"... no instruction manual," grumbled Tosh. "Give it back a minute, I just want to - oh!" she exclaimed, the box glowing as both her and Owen's fingers were touching the artifact. They stared at it, then quickly dropped it onto the desk simultaneously.

The box began to emit a high-pitched wail, and Myfanwy screeched and flapped above them in fright. Tosh curled against Owen, and Gwen let out a yell of surprise, nearly falling off her chair to scramble over to them.

It was deafening -the wail of the box, coupled with Myfanwy's shrieks and the mournful sounds of the Weevils in the vaults was painful to hear. The three covered their ears, and Owen found himself, for a moment, feeling a strange sort of satisfaction as both women tried to bury their heads against him to get away from the awful sounds. They all squeezed their eyes shut, willing the noise to go away.

As suddenly as it began, it stopped.

Toshiko blinked. The box was quiet again, the Weevils were only keening low and Myfanwy had calmed. Tentatively, she reached out to the box and poked it. Nothing.

"Maybe I misjudged it slightly ...." she pondered aloud.

"No shit, Sherlock ...." murmured Owen, shaking his head to try and get rid of the ringing, even though all his years at medical school had taught him there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that method would work.

"Did it do anything?" asked Gwen, peering around, trying to see if it had damaged anything.

"Not that I can see. I'll run a scan," offered Toshiko, and began typing away. After a few minutes, it beeped it's completion. "Hmm ... well ... oh. Oh dear," she said, wide eyed. "Um ... er ... I wasn't ... entirely wrong," she tried with a small smile.

"What do you mean?" frowned Owen.

"Erm ... it did what I thought it would ... only I don't think it was meant for use inter-species ...."

"What do you mean?"

"Myfanwy's quiet ...." observed Gwen.

Toshiko nodded.

They jumped as a clatter sounded from the medical bay, and quickly they all ran down towards the sound.

Gwen's hand flew to her mouth. Toshiko stared in wonder. Owen was nearly sick at the state of his autopsy room - even he never managed to get it this bad. Well, almost never.

There, sat on the floor with a mouthful of Blowfish and surrounded by alien entrails, was a small, green, black-eyed woman, naked and hairless, clearly having a whale of a time with all the food she had found in the samples cabinet. She wolfed it down, hardly chewing, eating whole chunks in one swallow before starting on the next. Her teeth seemed to be more hardened extensions of her gums than separate entities, and they were pointed and ridged, with a long, thin tongue darting out to taste things before they went straight down her throat.

"Myfanwy?" Owen called, the two girls still stunned into silence. She recognised the sound of her name and turned, and Owen saw she had no whites of eyes, only large, black ovals.

She stood precariously, cuddling the bit of Blowfish to her protectively, watching them carefully. She was tiny, still bearing the same leathery skin and the exact same patterns of yellows, purples and greens ... only humanoid. Her nails were long and claw-like - as were her toe-nails - and there was a scar on her right arm that she must have gotten in her home-time.

"Myfanwy?" Toshiko called, too. She leaned to Owen, whispering, "Do you think she might attack us?"

"Only if we try and take the fish, I think," he told her. "She probably thinks she's in trouble - she knows she's not allowed down there."

"Erm ..." said Gwen. "What do we do? I mean ... we can't put her in the vaults, can we?"

"I'll give her a check-up - Tosh, could you find out if this is reversible? And Gwen ... I think you should call Ianto. He's her favourite human ... and she's his favourite living thing. He might want to know she's a tiny, low-level intelligence, green and yellow lady now."

Gwen nodded, taking out her phone.

"Ianto? Hi, it's Gwen."

"Hey."

"Erm ... you might want to come back to the hub. Something's ... something has happened."

"What's happened?"

"It's Myfanwy. She's had an accident."

There was a long pause.

"I ... I'm ... I'm on my way."

Unusually for Ianto, he hung up without saying goodbye.






~*~*~*~





"What the hell happened?" Ianto asked, walking in through the cog door. "Is she okay? Is she hurt? Who's fault was it?"

Gwen whispered to Toshiko: "I haven't seen him this awake since ...."

She trailed off, not needing to finish the sentence.

After a bit of chasing, Owen had managed to restrain Myfanwy onto the gurney using fish as bait, though they were fast running out of Blowfish and Myfanwy's own supply of fish guts. Gwen had managed to wrestle the humanoid-Myfanwy into Tosh's spare jeans and top, while Toshiko herself was currently at the fishmongers trying to get something with a little more sustenance for her eat.

"Down here," Owen called, and Ianto strode quickly to the medical bay.

He stared at the scene before him, his mouth dropping open slightly.

"Did you see that?" smiled Owen. "Her face lit up like a Christmas tree when she saw you."

"Myfanwy?" gaped Ianto.

She let out a low keening sound and tried to raise one of her arms, but she was still restrained.

"Is she alright?" he asked, hastening down the stairs. "Did she get hurt?"

"Not that we can see - there's a bruise on her thigh where we assume she fell, but other than that totally healthy."

"What happened?"

Gwen explained about the tech and how Toshiko had theorised it worked, then about the noise spooking Myfanwy out of her nest and getting caught in the transmogrifying beam. It hadn't been intended for inter-species use, so they now had a small, green, hairless and very hungry lady-shaped pterodactyl on their hands.

Ianto folded his arms and glared at Owen and Gwen, an eyebrow raised. The big, black ovals that were Myfanwy's eyes flicked between them, before she started wriggling against the restraints. She got one hand free and reached out, grabbing Ianto's suit jacket and pulling it. Her hand reached up, patting his chest, and Owen and Gwen watched curiously.

"What do you want, eh?" he asked, the way he always spoke to Myfanwy. "You want come chocolate?"

She understood the word for 'chocolate' too, it seemed, and her face broke out into a massive, pointy-toothed grin.

"Wait there," he sighed, and went to retrieve his secret stash. He returned with a little egg, about the size of a chicken egg, wrapped in black and gold paper. "I was saving this as a treat," he told her. "Lindor Dark. Only 60% but I'm sure you'll love it."

"You fed the dinosaur ... chocolate?" Owen asked, disbelieving.

"She loves it," huffed Ianto. "You want her to do anything, give her dark chocolate. That's how we originally caugh-"

He stopped mid-sentence, and cleared his throat. "Okay ...." He unwrapped the egg for her, and pushed it into her free hand. With a little trial and error, she managed to use her newly shortened and opposable-thumbed limb to get it up to her mouth to pop the egg in. Unlike the fish, she let it sit on her tongue as if she was savouring the taste, then squealed in a strangely pterodactyl-like way when the smooth, truffle filling touched her tongue.

Ianto grinned and touched her head, and she moved her head against it like she had done in her original form.

Egg finished, she began to wriggle again.

"She doesn't like being kept in one place," sighed Ianto. "Can we let her out?"

"She runs around like a demon," scowled Owen.

"Because she's used to flying," pointed out Ianto.

"Fine - but if we need to catch her again, you're doing it."

Ianto rolled his eyes, then unfastened the restraints, gasping as the wind was knocked out of him when Myfanwy launched herself in his direction. Her head barely reached his shoulder, and with one arm around his waist she patted at his chest with the other.

"You're not having more chocolate," he told her sternly.

Unperturbed, she widened her eyes and made a high-pitched keen, nuzzling her cheek against his chest where his inside breast-pocket was located.

He sidestepped to move away from her, but she tightened her arms and followed.

Owen sniggered.

"Looks like you've got a limpet ...."

Ianto tried to prise her off, but she was far too strong. "Myfanwy ...." he complained.

"Women," sighed Owen. "All the same. They get their claws in and never, ever let go until you give them what they want."

Ianto glared at him, trying to get her off. Eventually, she did a little jump and gracefully settled herself on his hip, legs wrapped around his middle and adoring eyes turned in his direction, head on his shoulder. She weighed very little and was evidently very strong, but Ianto still felt the instinct to grip her so that she didn't fall.

"Okay ... maybe a little more. But then that's enough, Myfanwy. Don't want you getting fat."

He tried to prise her off again, but eventually had to walk with her attached to him.

Owen watched the strange pair wander away. You're a fucking pushover, Ianto .... he thought. Then again ... a pet might do him good ....

Fucking Harkness. This was all his fault.