Archive of Our Own

Careless went the Scottish rogues
Full of farmers' food and rest,
Scenting Gustav's bloody gold
Sweden-bound from Norway's west.
Then at once steel arrows flew,
Woods alive with musketball.
First Sinclair went to his death
Shortly, they had slain them all.
(Tempest, 'Sinclair')

The thing about a shark, it's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes. When it comes at you it doesn't
seem to be livin'... until he bites you, and those black eyes roll over white and then... ah then you hear that
terrible high-pitched screamin'. The ocean turns red, and despite all the poundin' and the hollerin' those
sharks come in and... they rip you to pieces. (Peter Benchley and crew, Jaws)

IT'S TUESDAY AFTERNOON, AND NOT REMOTELY SUNNY. IN FACT, IT'S DOWNRIGHT DARK (OH AND HOT):

The sodium lights on the boat were so bright Ianto thought he'd need shades. Jack seemed to think that because the water had no painted lane lines, he could turn the wheel any way he wanted, and for the past fifteen minutes the boat had been making lazy wavering lines. It was rocking with not just the bad weather, but the accumulated effects of the poor steering, and now it listed back and forth perilously. Ianto steadied his hand on the edge of the boat, flipped another scoopful of fish parts and blood over the side and closed his eyes, resisting the urge to vomit.

"You keep doing that," he muttered, "and I'll make you come down here and shovel some of this shite."

Jack's coat billowed about him as he worked the wheel at the top of the pilothouse with one arm. "Ianto! Starboard side!"

Ianto looked aft.

"No no! Starboard! Look right!"

Ianto glanced toward the water just in time to see it shoot up from the waves, crest and submerge back into the water. He dropped the scoop in the bucket and stumbled backwards, moving his galoshed feet until his back hit the wall of the main cabin.

"Fuck," he mumbled. "We're gonna need a bigger boat."

"Hey Ianto!" Jack called over the wind, his voice almost chipper. "I think we're gonna need a bigger boat, yeah?"

A WEEK BEFORE, A TUESDAY EVENING, IN FACT, SLIGHTLY CHILLY FOR SUMMER:

What he hated most about pulling was the actual pulling part. Drunk birds stumbling up to his flat, or letting him into their flat, or the time before that when he had to chat them up and look like he cared about a) their problems, b) anything they liked or didn't like aside from a drink preference or c) anything remotely personal about them, such as job, friends, etc.

The beach fire and piss-party was supposed to be an easy way in, but the girl –Jennifer? Ginny? Ginevra, no that was a Harry Potter bint—wanted to tell him about her ex-boyfriend while she downed the shite Irn-Bru and rum someone had made in a plastic jug and dragged out into the sand. On one hand that meant that she was on the rebound. On the other hand it meant that he had to work to get any, like a fucking monkey peeling a banana.

Maybe she'd be really grateful.

But now, he was almost in there, and she had wanted to go off somewhere private. She had been swaying, and he had had too much of that fucking rum, too, and so she ran down the beach, pulling off her top, and he could feel himself plodding along behind her to keep up, like his cock was a goddamn divining rod, pointing: this way—pussy.

Ginn..nnunvana whatever ran further away, her bra gone and pants peeling when she stopped for a split second so that he could catch up. Just these little knickers. Not a thong, but meh, he'd live.

"Come on, then!"

The water was fucking cold, and what did she think this was? The fucking Cote d'Azur? He stood on the rocks with his feet almost in and looked for her, but it was too dark to see anyway. There was no way he was going in that fucking swamp, no matter how summer it was supposed to be.

"I'm starkers! It's nice."

He liked water sex. It made lifting the birds easier. But his fingers didn't want to work, and he plunked down on the rocky beach and tried again to pull one trainer off to no avail. The laces were all scrotty and tangled and he couldn't pull hard enough to get them off and—he fell over onto the rocks and stared at the sky. There were billions of stars. He was pissed.

He could hear Ginninniny splashing in the water and raised a hand to get up, but his body felt heavy. He was just going to lie here for a while and sleep. Well, close his eyes. Charge his prick for action. She'd come out of the water all wet and shivering, and he'd fuck the heat right back into her. He'd never fucked cold pussy before. Huh.

There was a noise from out in the water, sounded like gulls or screaming. Were there gulls this late at night? Did seagulls ever sleep? Come to think of it, where did seagulls sleep?

He was still sort of thinking about that and what it would be like to screw Ginny's icy cunt when the thing came out of the water and just…took him away.

WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, DAMP; GOOD WEATHER FOR A CUPPA. ALAS:

"Ianto! Just the man I wanted to see!" Jack called as Ianto ran across the car park. "And the lovely Mrs. Williams! Come on down!" Gwen peered out at him from under a drenched newspaper as she approached from the opposite direction. Only Jack looked remotely dry, shoulders square and gait loose as he strolled along the front of the building under a giant black umbrella that read "Torchwood" down the paneling in red letters.

"It's not Mrs. Williams," she told Jack for the millionth time as they entered the side door to the police station, the one closer to the morgue.

Jack collapsed the umbrella, handed it to Ianto and watched with some amusement as he hung the hook handle over his arm. "I know, I just hope that we can get you in a catsuit and Ianto in a bowler hat and the two of you can fight crime."

"We're perfectly capable of doing that without the catsuit and bowler," Ianto sniped, and Gwen hit Jack in the chest with her newspaper, leaving a wet black ink smear down the front of his blue button-down. Jack's lips twitched, but he didn't say anything. "Though if Gwen really wants the catsuit," Ianto capitulated as they strolled the hallways, looking for the entrance to the port mortem rooms. "Far be it from me to protest her fashion decisions." With that he earned his own bad dog smack, albeit a black smudge on a black coat was rather futile.

Jack took the newspaper and tossed it in the bin as they passed. "Right. Cult TV jokes later," he admonished, as if hadn't started it. "For now, let's go see what happens when a killer shark prowls the coastal waters."

Gwen cocked her head as he held the door for her. "A shark."

Ianto nodded and walked through the door past Jack, just a little too close. There was the shadow of something on his arse. Oh hello there, Jack. It was going to be one of those days, where they sort of almost perhaps touched until it drove them crazy and they ended up shagging in the archives.

Ianto liked those days.

Jack raised an eyebrow, and it had nothing to do with aquatic life. "No," he said distractedly to Gwen, "not really. I just wanted to say that." He shoved his hands in his pockets now that they were standing in the small arena that held the open litters waiting for drawers. The morgue must not have been full because they were all empty. Or maybe zombies. Ianto reached to his arm and wrapped his fingers around the cane of the umbrella.

"Oh, hello," came a voice before a head popped into view from one of the litters. The head was attached to shoulders, which were attached to a scrawny chest and the tall form of Vladimir Kotch, one of the Medical Examiners attached to the police force. Ianto wasn't sure where the man hailed from, but with a name like Vladimir, it certainly wasn't Cardiff. Or maybe yes, the world was becoming more global, the man could have been born and raised in Splott, for all Ianto knew.

Jack liked Vladimir, but then again, Jack tended to like anyone. Then there were the people that Jack really liked, of which Vladimir was not one.

Gwen liked Vladimir, whose affection for her would have been puppy-like if it hadn't been for the fact that he respected the ring, as Jack called it. Instead of something creepy, Vladimir always looked at Gwen with a mixture of admiration and respect.

"Vlad the Embalmer," Jack said, sticking his hands in his pockets and rocking back and forth. "I hear you have some interesting things for us down here."

Vlad grinned and pulled the gloves from his hands, tossing them in a nearby bin marked 'Biohazard'. Ianto hung his umbrella on the coat tree by the door and clasped his hands. He didn't like touching anything in the morgue unless he was gloved, even if it was by accident. It was unsanitary.

"My boss says that this is a boating accident," Vlad said, turning to wash his hands in the sink. "But you know me," he glanced at them over his shoulder, "I see monsters everywhere."

Ianto had always thought that Vladimir was a loose cannon. He didn't like the idea that there were people out there who knew what he did, what any of them did, enough that if Vlad had felt like selling their stories to the press, he…well he'd sound like a nutter, but still. Jack always waved his hands and said that Vlad was harmless, cute, adorable, and more importantly, useful. Vlad liked being in on the secret, and that was enough for him. Gwen was pleased enough that he deferred to her when most of the police didn't bother, a fact that stuck in Gwen's craw.

Vlad opened the drawer and pulled the metal tray from the recesses. Ianto pulled on the cautionary gloves and watched as Jack and Gwen did the same. Jack generally didn't touch things; Gwen was the toucher, but if Jack was willing to be handling body parts then he was probably willing to let Gwen sit this one out, should she want to. Ianto wedged his fingertips in between his fingers, tightening the snug fit.

The morgue might have unsettled him, but he was Torchwood's body man (all jokes about being Jack's body man aside), and that meant that he got to dispose, arrange, incinerate and occasionally dismantle bodies in the line of duty. That didn't mean that he didn't still feel a little queasy when confronted with a person who fit into a washing up bowl.

"Tissue decay indicates that time of death was less than twenty-four hours ago. The, uh, flesh that we do have is, uhm, choppy. Chunky?" He glanced at Gwen, who looked away to study the prerequisite lab skeleton. "Yeah, well, this is what they brought in." He pulled the plastic cover from the basin, a plastic tub about a half-foot high and two feet long. Jack made a face, but then peered into the basin, his face hovering as far away as he could be and still look.

Jack whistled. "Whoa there, that's nasty."

Vlad shrugged and crossed his arms, tucking his gloveless hands into his underarms. "Yeah. I figure, it's got to be some sort of beastie. The cutting is too ragged to be a boat propeller, but you know the boss."

Ianto made a face. Examiner Wemble was not their favorite person in the world to deal with. Too smart to be hoodwinked easily, and possibly immune to retcon, Ianto was fairly sure that they would have hired her to take Owen's place if she wasn't so very rule-bound. Ianto was all for rules, but even he recognized that they had to be broken sometimes. Torchwood just had fewer, but more important rules to break.

In any case, Examiner Wemble, AKA 'the boss', was one of those people who staunchly refused to believe that 'The Truth Was Out There.' Sometimes Ianto wanted to hire her just so that he could put her down in the observation cells to watch Janet for a while, see what she thought about The Truth then.

Until they managed to officially work around her, Vlad was their go-to guy at the morgue.

"Give us a minute," Jack said, reaching out one hand to poke the contents of the basin.

Vlad raised his hands in a surrender gesture. "Hey, I get it. Sure. Just don't steal anything, all right?"

Ianto rolled his eyes. "We'll try to keep our fingers away from the tongue depressors." As Vlad gave him a weak smile and shuffled off to the back room, Jack cocked his head and grinned.

"Tongue depressors, huh?"

"Body, Jack," Gwen mumbled.

"Bodies," Jack said with a bit more emphasis than Ianto would have liked, a little waggle to his eyebrows that seemed wholly inappropriate when standing above a bucket of person, or rather, people.

Gwen inched forward, her hands still gripping the edge of the table. "Really?" Her hair swung in her face and Ianto couldn't read her eyes.

"Also? This was no boating accident," Jack said, lifting part of an arm from the basin and peering dangerously close at the strips of meat that hung from the bone. Ianto told himself that if he called it meat, then he could get through the autopsy without booting. Gwen wasn't doing much better, but at least she hadn't thrown up on a body in the past year.

Sometimes Ianto even missed Owen taking the piss about it.

Gwen leant forward but something hit her nose and she pulled back violently. Ianto reached out a hand to steady the small of her back. "May I have a glass of water, please?"

The smell hit Ianto then, acrid, like puke, like rotting seaweed, like beef mince gone off. He didn't want to know what all he was looking at, now that he could smell it.

Jack let Ianto get Gwen and himself a glass of water before he stepped back to the basin filled with…whatever that was. "Look at this." He lowered the arm and pulled out what most assuredly were thumbs. One of them was still attached to the meat of the palm and an index finger. Ianto wondered why people ever thought severed hands were funny, even as fancy dress on Halloween. Once you saw the real thing, it just wasn't amusing anymore. Well, unless you were Owen.

Again with the Owen; what was with him today?

"Two right thumbs, and one of them is dressed to go out on the town." He turned the thumb so that Gwen and Ianto could see the bright blue nail polish with glitter stars on it.

Ianto wondered who she was, who they were. They obviously had fingerprints, or thumbprints, but that wasn't always helpful. He'd get the prints from Vlad and take them back to the Hub. If they had ever been printed for anything in the world, Ianto could find them.

Jack replaced the thumbs and arm back into the basin, manhandled what looked like the left side of a left foot and then put everything back in the basin, covering it. "Neither one of you wanted to…?"

Gwen set her glass down on the desk next to her. "No, thank you," she said in a soft voice, her hand still covering her mouth.

The drawer slid back into the vault, and the door shut on it with a refrigerated vwip seal sound. Jack peeled off his gloves and stepped back. Ianto took the gloves from his fingers and noted that he hadn't even touched anything until now. At least Gwen had touched the table.

"So if it wasn't a boat," Gwen said, tossing her gloves in the bin with her empty paper cup. Ianto swallowed his water to cover the fact that he was still queasy from the odour, and blinked at the wordless exchange between Jack and Gwen, an exchange that he read as Gwen demanding answers and Jack being unwilling to provide them (yet. If he even had them.).

"We have to close the beaches," Jack said, then turned and barreled out of the room, leaving them standing in the deserted morgue.

Ianto blinked at Gwen. "He does know this is Wales, right?"

WEDNESDAY EVENING, OUTRIGHT WET:

"Oh I might have been transferred here last month, but I know all about you, Harkness," Colonel Storr said from the speakerphone. "Most recently, you called UNIT out for a series of mutilations and it turned out that a bunch of errant gang members were exploring things they'd seen in the films?" Ianto cocked his head at that—Storr said it like 'fill-ems', an accent hitch that he thought was rather endearing.

Storr was anything but endearing, especially right now. And he was right and wrong. They had called UNIT, but that had been because they needed about seventeen more men to patrol, and the police had just rolled their eyes and said something about allocation of resources.

Come to think of it, the police were doing a lot of sideskirting, they had been since, well since Gray had blown the city up. Not that they knew that, but Jack had gone easy on them, not demanding resources, nor demanding things that he used to demand (respect, mostly), possibly out of some twisted sense of guilt. In any case, the police scented the blood in the water, and they took the inch Jack had given them and made it a foot.

"They were hopped up on alien drugs!" Jack said loudly, a little too loudly. Gwen winced and mouthed the words, 'Indoor voice', and Ianto restrained a smile. "You were there, you saw it!"

"I don't know what I saw—"

"One of them put his fist through the skull of a police horse."

"I think we have enough to worry about with the Earth drugs, Captain," Storr sighed. "That doesn't change the fact that you've been known to exaggerate from time to time."

Jack's mouth worked and his jaw ground in the seconds of silence in which he was most assuredly trying to craft a response. Ianto sat on the edge of the desk and raised an eyebrow at the coffee mug in his hand. "I assure you, I am not exaggerating. You have to send some people out here. You have to tell the coast guard that they need to close out the waters—"

"For one body?"

Jack took the mug from Ianto and shrugged. "You mean the two bodies we saw this morning that fit in a chip basket? Those bodies? Yeah, them." He sipped from his coffee. "I'm telling you that something is in the waters off South Wales, and until it's found, these bits and bobs of human flesh are gonna keep washing up and scaring everyone along the Bristol—"

There was an audible sigh, like the deflating of a balloon, and for a second Ianto thought Jack's visceral imagery had struck a chord.

Not so much. "I sympathise that you want to take a proactive stance on…whatever it is that you have out there, but you have to understand that we're stretched thin. It's the height of the environmental summit, and UNIT is overworked with security. There's all that Dalek damage to deal with—"

Jack rolled his eyes and Ianto didn't want to point out to him that there had, in fact, been a lot of damage from the Dalek invasion. In fact, UNIT's numbers had been cut in half.

"At least take the Valiant over the water here, run some infrared—"

"The Valiant is over Copenhagen," Storr said, audibly irritated, or more irritated than he was before. Maybe he was making an effort. "At the environmental talks. We're not pulling out the model of the UN's green-powered vehicular initiative just so that you can wheel it about like—"

"Wheel. It. About?" Jack's voice was cold and crusting over with ice. Ianto winced and exchanged a worried glance with Gwen. Jack had a sensitive spot about the Valiant. He didn't even like to know when it was scheduled to fly over Cardiff, and that he would even ask for it to be deployed was a tiny signal to Ianto as to the gravity of the matter.

"I'm afraid that you're going to have to have more than a box full of possible boating accident victims before UNIT can even begin to think about authorising the assignment of personnel."

Something that Jack saw in those bodies scared him, it was writ across his face when he stared at the speakerphone. "Tell me, how many more bodies do I need before you decide to help? Three? Eight? Baker's dozen?" He crossed his arms. "How long before this thing capsizes a ferry—"

"Well, if it does, you'll be sure to call," Storr drawled. "Look Harkness, we'll keep the request on the table, but I can't go to my superior officers with what you gave me."

Jack shrugged, and the coffee mug dangling precariously from his fingers sloshed lukewarm Guatemala Antigua all over his side. Ianto rolled his eyes and threw a wad of serviettes at Jack while Gwen sat back in her chair. "All right. Fair enough." He jammed the button on the phone with his finger and disconnected the call. "That went well," he said brightly, holding out his mug so that Ianto could refill it.

"Do you really think that was wise?" Gwen asked. She snapped a digestive in half and licked the broken edge. "Now it will be harder to bring him in later."

"Oh, that was never going to be easy. Storr has the willpower of a mule on strike." Jack sipped from his coffee and looked at Ianto blankly before raising a finger and pointing at Gwen. "I want you to make a note. This is one of those things that is going to come back to bite everyone on the arse." And then to Ianto, "Prep an 'I Told You So' bouquet for the Colonel."

Ianto smirked, but it was wan. "A rose for every body, then?" The joke remained as flat as ever.

Gwen shuddered. "We could do it ourselves."

Jack glanced at her and saluted her. "I admire your perspicacity, PC Cooper, but we are three and that's hundreds of miles of water."

"And what are we looking for?" Ianto settled in one of the free chairs and crossed his legs at the ankles. "I like to believe that my faith in you is sacrosanct, but Jack," he paused, trying to figure out how to say it without sounding as if he questioned Jack's reaction. "It's two chewed up bodies." He shrugged. "Sad, I'll warrant but—"

Jack set his mug down and stared at the glass wall in front of him. "There'll be more."

"How do you know?"

Jack shrugged. "I don't." That toothy smile, frosted with doubt. "But there will be."

FRIDAY MORNING, THE SUN AND THE SURF AND OH THE BLISS. A NICE DAY SUR LA PLAGE:

Ianto found Jack standing on the Quay, looking out at the water with a pair of binoculars.

"Lemme guess," Ianto said, leaning on the rail and squinting out to sea. "White whale. Goes by the name of Moby Dick."

Jack paused, lowered the binoculars, and shook his head. "Too easy. Besides I was going to make a peg leg joke."

Ianto choked back a response about 'wood' and handed Jack the iced coffee. So he would never love Starbucks, but they made the iced coffee for him, and that was a plus (He might have also asked for hazelnut syrup, but he'd only admit it under duress, and he'd use the heat as an excuse.).

Ianto took the lid off the coffee cup and sipped; he was okay with syrup, but he'd be damned if he were going to drink from a straw. Jack let the binoculars hang from the strap around his neck and drank his coffee from his straw. Jack Harkness: secure in his manhood.

"You know, the bodies were in Barry, so the odds that we'll see our beastie here in the Bay are—"

"Just as likely as they'll be in Barry," Jack said, waving a hand and leaning on the rail. "Or Sully, or Porthkerry or any other place along the Channel." He squinted and frowned. "There's something out there. I can feel it in my bones."

Ianto wondered where Gwen was. He glanced up at the CCTV camera and winked. The camera wasn't a stationary one, and it bobbed up and down. Oh, hello, Gwen.

The wind picked up off the water and carried a bit of spray. Ianto leant against the railing and tilted his face to the sun. He was up here in shirtsleeves, no jacket, and though it didn't raise any eyebrows, to him, it felt as if he were topless. Even the waistcoat gone, otherwise his sweat would have painted the shirt directly under it a distinctly darker shade of blue than it had started life this morning.

"What do you think it is, Jack? You know, what are your bones telling you?"

"It's telling me that all the ducks are gone." Jack sipped his drink and cocked his head. "Did they put vanilla in this?"

"Caramel," Ianto replied distractedly, looking for the ducks and geese that usually kept close to the stone walls of the harbour so as to benefit from the food detritus of humans: they were gone. Not one. Even the gulls were roosted on the railings, as if they didn't want to sit and float out on the tide like they normally did. It also explained why they seemed unusually hungry.

"Hrng."

Rattle of ice in plastic cups. Three kids dancing on the dock for the water taxi. Gwen was right—it was a nice day and he was glad that she'd shoved him up the stairs to the door. The sun was just bright enough that he could have used some sunglasses. Pity he hadn't any; he made a mental list of things he should own but did not: sunglasses, a professional shoe polishing kit, a metric tonne of Scotchguard, a PSP. Games for said PSP. A case for PSP. An extra three hours a day to play PSP.

Sunglasses. He could do something about that one. Someday.

There was a shriek and they whipped their heads around to see a girl running down the Quay, a determined gull in pursuit. She threw whatever it was that she'd been eating at the gull and bolted. Jack barked a laugh and Ianto his his smile behind his cup.

"Well, if that's the worst we see today it—"

Off in the bay out on the water, there was another shriek and they glanced out in time to see a yellow WaterBus, about a hundred yards off the docks, bend in half, as if someone had pulled a line in the water and folded the boat. The railings of the ship ground with a metal noise and the stern flipped with a crunching sound before the whole boat sank—no, was yanked—under the water. Jack dropped his coffee and bolted for the stairs, vaulting the railing instead of going down the last five.

It was at that moment that the boat shot out of the water like an air-filled balloon would when held under the surface. It flew into the air, parts of it flying in high arcs, more than one person—Ianto could see a body flailing like a licorice whip out one of the semi-crushed windows of the flattened pilot house. The boat flipped over in the air, a few crunching somersaults, and then landed in the water like the world's largest cannonball.

Ianto handed his cup to a passing tourist without explanation, ran down the steps at a brisk clip, and wondered if they were going to be able to—

Jack jumped on the second WaterBus still moored to the dock, ordered the driver out and was already throttling the engine when Ianto jumped on the edge, nearly falling back into the water as the boat surged forward. He grabbed onto one of the awning supports and fished in his trouser pocket for his commlink, fitting it in his ear. Over the sounds of the few people screaming out in the water, Gwen was already calling his name.

"Ianto? Ianto?"

"Gwen, we're on the way out, what can—"

"No rift spike, no rift activity at all, except for some very minimal residual traces out in the bay."

The screaming tapered as they approached, as if those left alive and floundering in the water were disappearing like guttering flames in the wind.

Ianto watched Jack yank on the throttle and swing the wheel about in what he would admit was a bit of an overly dramatic manner. It occurred to him that Captain Jack was…captaining, but he saved that nugget for later, when they weren't about to possibly confront a giant sea monster that left bits of people to wash up on the shore.

The last screaming voice, a man, waving his arms in the water at their boat, was cut off as he was pulled violently under. Ianto glanced about for life vests, then realised that if this thing was going to take their boat like it had the first WaterBus, there was nothing he could do to stop it. Sobering. His hands twitched for the comforting ineffectiveness of the stun gun.

The taxi slalomed as Jack tried to take her out in a wide turn, almost overshooting the site. The sides of their vessel thunked when they passed the area where the boat had been sucked under water. Ianto scanned the surface for bodies, people, and also, he wasn't ashamed to admit it, tentacles or arms, or whatever it could have been that could collapse a WaterBus like closing a briefcase.

"So—did you see anything?"

"No," Gwen sighed, and he understood. The cameras simply weren't advanced enough to focus that far off in the water. He added better cameras to his list of things he wanted. "But the police are on their way. Lots of chatter."

"Gwen," Jack said finally, as the boat swung while he tried to steer and fit his earpiece in at the same time. "Gwen, radio the harbour master and tell him to lock it down. Then call the coast guard and tell them we need a salvage crew." A long pause as Jack brought the boat around for another pass at the wreckage. "And call UNIT and tell them at least I didn’t send them flowers."

Gwen made a noise that sounded like assent, but Ianto was too busy cataloguing the items that passed by his side of the boat. He should be going to the front to ask Jack what he wanted to do, but he couldn't. There: a coffee cup, here: a life preserver, farther away, a straw tourist bag that proclaimed, 'Cardiff!"

"Ianto, keep an eye out!" Jack shouted, though he didn't need to because the comms were still on. He didn't need to say what he was supposed to be keeping an eye out for, though he should have: monsters, survivors, bodies, et cetera, actually. Jack parked the boat in the wreckage, cutting the engine. The boat glided through the water before coming to a relative halt, as much as any boat could in a moving body of water. He left the wheel and exited the pilothouse on the other side of the craft.

"Ianto," Gwen whispered, "what do you see?"

Ianto peered over the railing at the waves below, eyes scanning the wreckage for anything. A plastic doll floated on the current, blonde curls drenched and waving as it drifted towards him as if pulled by a magnet. His eyes followed it when it bounced off the hull of the boat and flipped, sinking as water filled the hollow head, and the hair slid away, on its way to the bay floor.

SATURDAY, SUNNY AND OVERWHELMINGLY CHEERFUL, IF YOU THINK RED CAPS ARE CHEERFUL:

The Quay and marina were filled with trucks and boats, some of them military, some of them UNIT, some of them Heddlu. None of them Torchwood, Ianto noted sadly. It was just as well, he decided as he stood in front of the Norwegian church and contemplated simply not going to work today. He hated the water, ironic for someone who lived so close to it.

Jack was nowhere in sight, which was odd, because Ianto had expected him to be all over the place like…Jack interfering in military business. He was good at that. Maybe he was going to leave it to Gwen, who liked to use every opportunity presented to her to liaise with police and military, something with which she said she wanted practise. It was also a good way to grease some wheels, wheels that Jack often made un…greased.

He walked down the Quay a little, then doubled back and sat on the stone ledge framing the grassed area between the church and the water railing, and thought about the Milka bar in his office drawer. He also thought about some vegetarian chili. And then he thought about maybe going down to pull rank on a few low-level UNIT officers, just for kicks (It was amazing what he could get a Lieutenant to do if he scowled and said, 'Torchwood'. He might even be able to get them to load all that debris from the sub-basement to the incinerator. It was taking him ages at his pace of three runs a day.).

His comm crackled to life. "Ianto," Gwen said, "you have to get down here. They're loading a sonic disrupter onto one of these boats."

He stood then, eyes trying to pick out the boat. It would be a UNIT craft. "Where's Jack?"

Gwen sighed. "He's arguing with the harbour master about letting civilians out on hunting yachts."

Ianto's pace doublestepped. "They are actually going to discuss this?" As he approached, Ianto watched a small two-man motorboat take off from the jetty, loaded with about ten men. "They're all going to die."

Gwen grunted and he heard her cover the mic with her hand as she yelled. Her voice had that loud 'POLICE CONSTABLE' air to it, and he smiled. You could take The Man out of the police, but you couldn't take the police out of The Man. Or something.

"Do not move one more step, sir. That is not cleared ordinance." Ianto increased his pace until he was jogging, catching the eye of a few constables until they saw his glaring green badge. He liked the green badge. He and Jack had made them once as a sign of, 'BACK OFF—TORCHWOOD' for crime scenes, and had successfully trained all the local Cardiff police to respond to it by averting their eyes and never asking them what they were doing anywhere. Occasionally they asked if Ianto wanted coffee. He never did.

Gwen turned away from a disgruntled civilian who had parked his gamefisher johnboat on the edge of the dock, between a police cruiser and a UNIT Ocean Yacht patroller. Ianto's eyes widened when he saw what she cradled in her arms.

"Is this," he paused when she gingerly handed the red sticks to him. "Is this dynamite?" He'd never actually ever seen dynamite before. Some childish part of his heart raced and wanted to go out with the man and throw a few sticks.

No, of course not. Adult.

Most of the civilian boats had taken off, despite Jack's screaming and flailing arms, which Ianto could see from down here. Up in the office, Jack was stabbing fingers out at the water and shouting, and even as he did so, the last boat launched and they were left with a few decommissioned UNIT vessels that were there just to salvage things. The coast guard had authorised the wet lease of a few Sikorskys to clean up the creature when, not if, they brought it in. Ianto figured they thought they'd need the 'copter for recovery of a carcass large enough to squeeze a WaterBus like a snapdragon.

Ianto stood on the dock next to Gwen, arms full of dynamite, and felt vaguely like a cartoon character. Jack slammed the flimsy wooden door to the Harbour master's office and trotted down the steps to join them.

The last of the boats disappeared on the horizon, which wasn't hard, because the sun was blinding again.

Gwen sighed. "They're all mad."

Jack crossed his arms. "I'll say. A dozen pleasure crews manned by a bunch of amateur weekend fishermen, three decommissioned UNIT cruisers with no ordinance heavier than a few bad Saiga 12s, two police pandaboats as cuddly as pandas themselves, and two coast guard boats off the port, ready to recover." Jack laughed and Ianto considered the mental image of a panda floating out in the ocean, Heddlu Neighbor Totoro. He stopped before he created a dopey music theme song for it.

One of the families from the WaterBus had put up a 12 thousand pound reward for the capture of the creature, and that was being matched by a local ferry service that hadn't wanted to see their business dry out while the terror that stalked the bay…stalked the bay.

The downside was that every Rhys, Bran and Daffyd with a boat had decided that he was the bloody Crocodile Hunter, and the harbour master, urged by the ferry owners, had allowed them to dock in the arena. The police hadn't been happy, but they had figured, Ianto understood from what he had overheard, that the civilians would go out, have a pleasure cruise, and then just return empty-handed. In fact, the current scuttlebutt down at Heddlu headquarters was that the WaterBus accident had been a faulty engine explosion and subsequent cover-up.

Ianto almost wished that it were that easy to plant a cover story. Whenever he needed people to believe one, they never did, but when he would prefer that they take him seriously, their sense of cover-up came into play.

"UNIT had a sonic disrupter," Gwen told him, turning her head to look at his face and then Ianto's.

Jack laughed. "Can't fire it under water. Refraction. Nice, guys." He shoved his hands in his pockets.

There was a burst of seagulls off the harbour master's roof, flying overhead and coming to land in the water of the bay. Ianto frowned. Something was wrong about that.

Jack wasn't lost, though. "Gulls in the water. It's nowhere around here." He shoved his hands in his pockets. "Let's go back to work. I'm sure we'll hear them screaming from downstairs if they come back with anything good."

Ianto turned to walk next to him, Gwen in the lead, for the information centre. Jack double-taked at his arms. "Is that dynamite?"

THAT SATURDAY AFTERNOON, AS WE HAIL THE CONQUERING HEROES:

It hadn't been screaming as much as the internal sensors on the rift monitors going off that had brought the three of them topside again, alarms that detected traces of residual rift energy. Nothing had come through the rift now, but something that had once come through it was approaching.

Ianto squinted in the afternoon sun. "Ah, look at that."

"That," Jack said, raising his eyebrows as the winch lifted as much of the carcass into the air as it could. The flashing of cameras was blinding, even in the light of day. "Is an Amaldan."

Colonel Storr stood in front of the dead, squid-resembling Amaldan and waved a hand, pointing out the contours of something. Two officers jumped to and reached out to pry open the Amaldan's mouth. It was huge, Ianto had to admit, razor teeth and all. He wasn't particularly upset to see it, now that it was dead.

"Amaldan," Gwen said slowly. "That's not from this planet."

"Too true, Gwennie-me-love, the Amaldan was indigenous to the tropic moons of Quasis, before they were burnt out by a raiding—well, it wasn't pretty." He lifted a thumb in front of him and squinted, as if he was measuring something. "Forty-five."

Ianto watched the UNIT officers drag a tentacle from the water onto the dock so that the press could see the arms that had pulled the ferry under. It was possible, actually. Those tentacles were huge, as wide in diameter as the length of his forearm, and long—they pulled for a solid three minutes before reaching a relatively tapered end. The dock stank with the smell of rotted fish.

"What are you measuring?"

"Bite radius," Jack said airily. "Perspective from here, how many feet away, the size of my thumb multiplied against the proportions of—"

"I'll take your word for it," Ianto said. And then, "Nerd."

Colonel Storr approached them and stopped short, crossing his arms. The press was having a field day behind him, and the two officers explored the Amaldan's large and grisly mouth with metal pokers.

"Well, Harkness, you were right," Storr mumbled. "Far be it from me to not admit when I'm wrong—"

Jack shrugged. "How do you know this is it?"

Storr's brows became a solid line across his forehead. "Excuse me?"

Jack smiled. "Get some of your strapping young men—who look stunning in those little red caps, by the way—to cut that bad boy open. We'll check the contents of the stomachs, plural, and make sure we have the right creature."

Storr glanced back at the Amaldan, as if he were trying to find a physical sign that they'd caught the right thing. "This is the creature," he said, voice painted with uncertainty. "It has to be."

"The waters of Earth are the last great frontier, Colonel," Jack said breezily, and Gwen nudged him when Storr wasn't looking. A UNIT officer bumped into Ianto's shoulder as he hauled cargo nets down the wooden dock.

The Colonel seemed to consider that for a split second before he caught a glimpse of the press again, swarming along the creature, digital cameras working overtime as the officers pulled it from the water. Ianto wondered what they were going to do until he heard the rumble behind him, and understood that hauling lorries were coming across the Plass. He wondered if they'd get past the circular monument he referred to as 'the sphincter of Cardiff' in his head.

"It's a hundred to one chance," Jack said, "hundred to one. Let's just cut her open and—"

Something seemed to resolve in Storr, because he closed the last few feet and grabbed one of Jack's shoulders. "Now see here, Harkness," Storr whispered loudly, "I am not going to cut that thing open and have parts of those people from the ferry spill out all over the dock!"

"Should have thought of that before you invited the press," Jack murmured, eyes still on the Amaldan and its bite radius, no doubt. Ianto shifted from foot to foot and tried to look horrified at the suggestion that Torchwood was willing to display such grisly matters in the light of day.

Storr nodded. "This is the creature. We're done here." And with a nod, he was back to the press, all smiles and attaboys.

Jack shrugged. "Have it your way, Colonel."

The three of them watched as one of the lorries backed up, narrowly missing a WaterBus placard. The press was starting to disperse, and Ianto wanted to be out of the way when one of their wandering eyes caught the three of them, in civilian clothes but green badges, standing to the side and watching the show. Ianto had no urge to be the 'man on the street' in this case (or any case).

Jack didn't want to either. He patted Gwen's shoulder. "Okay then. We're done here."

"Really? So that was it?" Ianto asked as another UNIT soldier almost rammed into him from behind.

Jack shoved his hands in his trouser pockets as they strolled down the pier, away from the press and the din, right back into the Tourist Centre. "Nope."

SATURDAY NIGHT, AFTER EVERYONE HAS TIED ONE ON:

It was odd how the lack of bodies could be just as bothersome mentally as a container of human chum, Ianto mused. Not one body had been recovered from the wreckage of the WaterBus, even though the boat had been half-full. Ianto imagined pieces of the people floating in the eddies and currents of the bay, being eaten by the gulls that touched down in the water. Eaten by fish. He knew it happened, he just didn't want to have to think about it.

In his head, Ianto always put on victims the faces of people he loved: Gwen, Rhi, Mica, David, reduced to parts and fish food. It was enough to drive a man to drink.

And well, hey…

Ianto sat in front of the weevil cage and drank from his beer. He settled back on the chair and placed the bottle on the floor beside him. Janet's eyes darted to the bottle, then back at his face. He leant forward and rested his arms on his knees. That lasted for a few seconds and then he put his head in his hands. There was a rustle in front of him, and when he rolled his eyes up at Janet, she was sitting on her cot with her head in her hands, peeking out at him.

Ianto slid his fingers down his face. Janet slid her fingers down her face.

Ianto clasped his hands in front of him. Janet curled her hands into a prayer gesture.

Ianto scrunched his face up into a snarl. Janet's lips slid away from her teeth more than they already did.

He curled his fingers into claws. Janet raised her hands, curled the (real) claws, and growled.

Ianto smiled. "Give us a kiss."

Janet foamed at the mouth with rage and ran at the glass, banging her head with a resounding thud and falling backwards onto the floor of her cell. Ianto sat back in his chair and picked up the beer bottle, taking a drink.

"Good girl. I needed that." Janet shook her head and growled at him from her crouch on the floor.

"You're vindictive, you know that?" Ianto turned his head and watched Jack push off from the doorframe. He raised a bottle in his hand. "Chateau Lafite, nineteen…" Jack glanced at the bottle, whose label had worn to almost illegibility. "Something something." He pulled the cork from the bottle with his teeth. "I opened it upstairs and let it breathe, whatever."

Ianto shook his head. "Glasses?"

Jack held out his other hand and let Ianto choose one of the identical thick-bottomed tumblers clipped in his fingers. "Only the best."

"Hm." Ianto didn't bother asking how Jack had got his hands on it. He didn't have to. Jack started to pour a little into his glass, sinking onto the floor in front of him and leaning back against his left leg.

"I got a case of this from Élie de Rothschild back in forty-five when we moved through Bordeaux," Jack said. "I'm not a wine person. But something about investment, and I could stand to have some money, you know, with my life span and," he gestured with his tumbler, filled two inches. "Blah blah blah." He pulled Ianto's glass-filled hand forward and tipped the bottle over it. "Say when."

The wine passed the halfway mark in the glass and Jack paused. Ianto shook the glass minutely and the bottle tilted again.

There was about a centimeter left of the glass when Ianto nudged Jack with his knee. Jack held the bottle up to the light and examined the three inches remaining. Ianto merely rested his back against the chair and helped himself to a long swallow.

Jack sipped his wine. "So here's the thing."

"There's always a thing," Ianto agreed. It was true. Even Janet agreed. There were things.

Okay, so maybe he'd had about four beers before this.

"Yeah, so here's the thing. That monster they caught. The Amaldan." Jack shrugged. "It could be the monster we're looking for, it really could, but I would just…"

"You would feel better if we knew for certain." Ianto drank deeply and admired the robust something or other he was supposed to be appreciating about the wine. He liked the fermented grapes part. That was the part that made him all tingly.

Jack toasted Janet, and for a second, Ianto could see them both reflected in the glass of her cage, Ianto all dark except for a pale floating head, and the blue of Jack's shirt, light enough to give him more definition than just a spectre of a face, more permanency in even their reflections in the glass.

"I would." He leaned his head back and regarded Ianto upside down. "What do you say about breaking into UNIT's facility?"

Ianto grinned. "And I was complaining that you never take me anywhere nice."

Jack grunted and rose to his feet, holding out a hand. "We don't have to break in, you know."

Ianto nodded and Janet let out a low moan. "We can do anything; we're Torchwood."

UNIT FACILITY #69947-K664, PENARTH, THIRTY MINUTES LATER:

"Wow," Jack said as they entered the warehouse to see the Amaldan hanging from the ceiling by a couple of jerry-rigged hooks and levers. Stink and water and…whatever sloughed off dead creatures dripped onto the floor below it, and Ianto was glad he'd put on the wellies from the back of the SUV.

They hadn't had to break into anything, really, just flash their badges. Ianto had signed them into the facility while Jack had sexually harassed the gate guard, and then they'd procured a motor cart and rolled through the area at what was probably an inappropriate speed. Jack had driven the SUV, and so he had let Ianto drive the cart, saying, "How fast can this thing go, anyway?'

Answer: forty kilometers per hour.

But now, Jack circled the Amaldan and looked up at it, Ianto wondered just how they were going to search the innards of a rotting flesh piñata above their heads.

Laser Saw it was, then. Jack held the device as close to the creature as he could, tilted at an angle so that he could avoid the spillage, and set the laser to work. It cut a large slit in the Amaldan's purple underbelly (now more a milky lavender), and as soon as the flesh parted, innards began to fall down onto the concrete, splashing against the crates scattered about the room, and Jack, who made a noise and covered his mouth with his arm.

"Now that," he said loudly, "is rancid."

The smell hit Ianto and he staggered backwards. Dear god, it occurred to him, the things pooling about his feet could very well be digested people, or at the least, a sea of stomach acids. He lifted one wellie and examined where the acid had come in contact with it: still intact. He didn't want to be standing there and suddenly feel a burning sensation in his toes.

It was easy to see the large chunks of things the Amaldan had consumed: clumps of seaweed, a tyre, multitudes of fish, whole and in varying stages of digestion. What might be a chunk of human flesh or a fish close to becoming liquid. Ianto pushed things around with his toes and looked for the pocket handkerchief he'd brought along on purpose.

"It did a circuit in Northern waters," Jack said, kicking through the debris on the floor.

Ianto was glad that he'd dipped his handkerchief in cologne that morning in anticipation of smelling some very rank fish-related things. He coughed and waded through the spillage. "How you know?"

Jack kicked an object and it skittered towards Ianto, slipping and spinning a few feet from him. Once it was still, Ianto realised that he was looking at a sheep head. Oh ha ha.

"You know what I'm not seeing," Ianto said softly.

Jack took a long metal pulley rod and poked at the Amaldan around the open flaps of the carcass. "Yeah, I know."

"Could they have been…digested already?" Ianto queried. "Or, no, not if that head is still intact. It couldn't have eaten that today, right? It had to have been—"

Jack shrugged. "I'm guessing it's slow. It's a huge thing, sluggish, cold water. Slow digestion. We should be seeing something." He tossed the rod off to the side in the darkness and brushed his hands on his coat before spying a bunch of rags off in the corner. Ianto took advantage of Jack's retreat to move out of the mess itself and lean against a crate. Jack ran the rag under the tap in the corner, then wiped his face.

"Are you okay?" Ianto asked.

Jack was frozen, staring down, lost in thought probably, though what was on his mind was anyone's guess. Probably what Ianto was going to say now.

"We've got to close the bay. Call the coast guard. UNIT. All the—"

"We've got a bigger problem than that, Ianto. We've still got a hell of a thing out there with a mouth about as big as the SUV." Jack sighed. "We should look into getting ourselves a boat." He handed Ianto the wet towel and watched as he washed his hands. "We have to go out there."

Ianto looked up. "On the water?"

Jack smiled and turned, leading the way out of the warehouse. "Well, if we're looking for a sea monster, we're not going to find him on the land."

Ianto threw the towel over one of the spare crates. UNIT could clean up this mess. "Yeah, but I'm not drunk enough to go out on a boat."

"Yes, you are," Jack laughed.

Ianto slid the door shut and breathed in the wet summer air. "No, I'm not."

"Yes, you are."

"I can't do that."

"Yes, you can."

LATER, PENARTH MARINA, 'STEALTH MODE' IS ENGAGED:

"Where did you get this boat, anyway?" Ianto said as they boarded the small motorboat that Ianto was sure doubled as a deathtrap in a former life. The thing rocked perilously as he stepped on board, and he knew it had to be his drunken imagination, because the boat was big enough that boarding shouldn't have rocked it as much as he thought.

Jack turned the key and the engine grumbled crankily. "I didn't get it. The keys are in it. Remember about ten seconds ago when I told you to keep a look out for anyone?"

Ianto glanced about the Penarth Marina. "Are we stealing this?"

Jack shrugged. "We're commandeering it."

"Good to know when the police are taking me away I can say, 'But constable, we commandeered it." He rummaged about in a bin for a life vest and found two, offering one to Jack, who waved him away with a hand.

Jack turned over the engine and grinned. "Don't you love being above the police?"

Ianto slipped the vest over his head. If he was this drunk on land, that had to increase exponentially when he was off land and out in water. His brain was sure that if he were to blast into space, he would be even more intoxicated. This was possibly drunk-logic talking.

"I do," he mumbled, fussing with the straps. There were about six, no wait, eight too many of them.

Jack steered them out of the marina with a minimum of fuss, only one minor almost-collision with a parked yacht, and that might have been because a drunken Ianto had grabbed Jack's shoulders and said, "Dear god, watch out for that boat!" and thusly prevented him from steering around the boat. As it was, they cleared the hull of the much larger and more expensive ship and headed out to the dark waters with only a few lit buoys to guide their way.

"How far do we have to go out?" he asked Jack, trying to stand next to him at the wheel but rather falling backwards every time Jack hit the throttle, which seemed to be every five seconds or so. It was as if Jack was doing it on purpose. Ianto watched his hands. Maybe he was doing it on purpose.

Jack glanced at him and waved a hand. "I don't know. It's a night feeder."

Ianto blinked. "No, it's not." When Jack stared at him, he gesticulated wildly at the water in front of them. "Keep your eyes on the road."

Jack laughed. "Sit down before you fall down." And then, over the increasing throttle as Ianto fell back into the side seat, "Are you drunk enough now?"

Ianto took his pulse. "Possibly."

"Then now is a good time." The engine gunned and Jack took them through the sound barrier and all of the sudden when Ianto looked back at the marina, it was a thin ribbon of indistinguishable lights. He took in a deep breath and tried not to think of watertaxis. Maybe the creature would think they were insignificant. Maybe it wouldn't even notice them. Maybe later he'd turn into a dolphin and swim back to shore, too.

Jack swung the boat about. It was as if he loved being on the water because he didn't have to stay in a lane. Ianto wondered if this was how he had flown spaceships. Probably. He sat back against the seat and felt the patterned rocking of the boat when he closed his eyes and tried to pretend that he was on a star cruiser, headed out to the Lotus Nebula or the Orion…Gazega or something, but the wind on his face and the bell-like ringing of the buoys and Jack's singing were distracting him from his fantasy.

"Shooooow me the way to go hooooome," Jack sang, swinging the wheel and kicking something at his feet. "I'm tired and I wanna go to bed!"

Ianto gritted his teeth and just thanked the gods of rugby (the only gods he prayed to, actually) that eventually Jack would stop and they would be able to drift for a while. Also that they wouldn't get eaten. And that he wouldn't vomit. And for some chips. And then, just so he didn't seem selfish, for the health and safety of the Queen and his sister and her family. He was considering the possibility that he might have asked the gods of rugby for too much when Jack slowed the boat and cut the engines, his voice becoming louder for the lack of sound.

"…and it's gone right to…." His voice slowed and softened as he became distracted and Ianto opened his eyes to see Jack staring out in front of the boat's path. "…my head."

Ianto turned his head to see the object that had distracted the Captain whilst captaining (a joke he had yet to redeem). Ahead of them, part of a boat sat in the water. It was obviously some sort of large sailboat, or rather it would have been if it had had intact masts. They stuck into the sky like broken fingernails, shreds of sails hanging down and into the water where they floated at the surface, coating the water with an extra white sheen.

His eyes tried to move quickly over the boat, looking for bodies, whole or partial, blood even, and he found none. The boat groaned with the slow sucking in of water pressure changing as it sank; it had been sinking for some time.

"What is that?" Ianto slurred. Oh Jesus, it was true: the half a bottle of Pinot Grigio he'd drunk on the way here in the car under Jack's enabling eye was catching up with him.

Jack turned the sodium light so that it hit the structure more clearly. "That is a schooner. Well, what's left of her." He waved the light about gently, and Ianto had the feeling he was either looking for something specific, or moving the light slowly enough so that Ianto could keep up with it. He was about to tell Jack that second option was a lost cause when the schooner listed a little and sank further into the water. Something had seriously compromised her hull.

"What is a schooner?" he drawled, hands on the railing and trying not to lean out over the edge of the boat. He had this feeling that if he wasn't visible from in the water, then the creature wouldn't know that he was there.

"A sailboat with two or more sails, fore and aft," Jack said lightly. His mouth was drawn in a line and he ground his jaw.

Ianto leant closer to the boat—no, no, schooner. "How do you even know that?"

Jack snorted. "Captain." Self-identifying finger stab.

"In the RAF," Ianto said, rolling his eyes. "That's the air."

"Close enough, just as apt, might as well," Jack rattled off. "I read, okay?"

Ianto tried to laugh, but it wasn't funny. Not when the boat in front of them was sinking into the water. Or maybe it was just floating. Only half of it was visible, so it had to be sinking. Ianto didn't know anything about a) boats or b) how fast they sank or c) if he was wearing this life vest correctly. Suddenly that seemed very very important. He pulled a cord and almost cut off his air supply.

Jack hooked the sodium light on a pole next to the boat's windshield and fiddled with the straps to Ianto's vest. His brow knit and he patted the vest with finality. "Okay, you're set. Unless you want a pair of water wings?" When Ianto reached up and smacked his shoulder, he chuckled. "I have to go in the water for a sec, okay?" Jack's hands travelled to Ianto's arms, sliding up and down from elbow to shoulder in what Ianto would have found a comforting gesture if he hadn't been three sheets.

The schooner had three sails. Not. A. Good. Comparison.

"Okay, but you do know that something ate that boat, right?" Ianto said, wondering if he was going to get hysterical. It had not, really, he reminded himself, escaped his notice that he was in the middle of more water than he could drink. Whenever one was in more water than they could drink, the possibility of drowning increased by ninety-eight percent.

"Ianto, look—" Jack pointed out to the water, where a dozen or so seagulls floated on the waves. Ianto blinked and tried to remember what was important about them. Oh. Oh.

"Well, that's cracker," he said. "Oh but not for…" He looked back at the boat sagging in the water. Something silver and shiny in the wreckage caught his eye. "That looks significant."

Jack followed his pointing finger to the wooden splinters of the sinking boat. "I dunno. Let's find out."

He watched Jack kick off his shoes and socks, shed his coat and outer shirt and peeled off his trousers, setting the Webley on top of the pile and eyeing Ianto in a way that was a sort of passing of the torch. He stood, pointed at the controls of the boat.

"Ignition, throttle, brake, wheel." He winked. "I don't think you'll have to worry about hitting anything if you have to do this yourself, but remember you want to go northeast, right here," he tapped the lit electronic compass. "But that's bollocks, because I'll be right back."

Ianto nodded and watched Jack pull the diving knife from the same place he'd got the life vest, and wondered if this were the end. Oh come on now, Jones, Jack was indestructible. If the thing ate him, he'd just cut himself out of the stomach and swim up to the surface.

Jack gave him a peck on the cheek, sat him on the bench and slapped his shoulder. "I'll be back," he said in a bad accent and sat on the edge of the boat, knife in one hand, a waterproof torch in the other.

"Oh ha ha," Ianto said and pushed Jack over the side. Oops. Well, he was going that way anyway.

He wanted to take out his stopwatch and time Jack, but he was afraid of what the sea air would do to the mechanics of it, and so he simply patted his waistcoat pocket and wished that he had his jacket. It was considerably cooler out here on the water, especially now that the sun had set. The boat rocked in the wind and the waves, and he clapped his hands together before resting his forearms on his knees and leaning forward. Oh, no, that was nauseating.

He didn't know how long to give Jack. He could hear the occasional knock of something on the sides of the sinking boat, possibly Jack working with his knife, doing something in or on the hull. Ianto wondered if he'd encountered bodies. Or the creature. A glance out at the gulls drifting about in the water brought some reassurance, not unlike a canary singing in a mineshaft.

He lost track of time, but he thought about counting in the manner his Gran had taught him when waiting for thunder after lightning: one Glenmorangie, two Glenmorangie, three Glenmorangie and so on, when there was a screech on the hull behind him and he shot to his feet so suddenly that he almost fell over the other side of the boat.

Jack surfaced with a shuddering intake of air that reminded Ianto of other times that Jack seemed to rise from the dead (did rise from the dead), and he grabbed for the side of the boat, his fingers skidding along the smooth surface frantically. "Get me up, get me up," he rasped impatiently, and Ianto complied by reaching down and locking forearms to haul Jack up to the deck. Jack seemed to shoot out of the water when Ianto pulled and they both flew backwards into the boat. Jack rolled off and knelt, probably some sort of reflex, but Ianto righted himself more gradually.

"No sign of anyone," Jack said quickly. "But this, this, I got from the hole in the bottom." He sighed. "I know this," he breathed, using the sodium lights hanging in the boat to illuminate what he held in his hand. Ianto noticed that the diver's knife was gone. Maybe he'd dropped it. Whoops. Sorry, actual owner of said boat.

"I know what this is," Jack muttered, "oh god, I know what this is." He pushed himself to standing and swayed a little, staggering back, the tooth clattering to the deck. Ianto stared at it. It was a wicked thing, metallic silver, like metal, and as long as Ianto's hand from middle tip to bottom palm. He wasn't looking forward to meeting the thing in whose mouth it belonged.

Jack recovered quickly. "Get the mooring lines," he muttered, yanking on his trousers and stuffing his feet into his boots, socks forgotten. His fingers scrabbled at the laces as if he was frantic to tie them and get the hell out of there. "We have to tow this in."

Ianto glanced about. What the hell were mooring lines? "Jack," he started, but stopped when Jack turned away and walked to the far end of the boat, rummaging in one of the huge bins, producing coils of rope.

Ianto thought about sicking up over the side of the boat. He'd told Jack that he wouldn't when they were on the way over in the SUV, but now he wasn't so sure. Plus, so he vomited in the ocean, it wasn't as if he'd have to wash it off anything.

Jack tossed a coil of rope at him before he leant over towards the sinking boat and clipped some carabiners to a few of the holds and stays on the bit of bow still above the water. Ianto tried to fasten the ropes to the back of their boat, but Jack simply waved his hands away, securing the lines and clearing the engine propellers before starting her up and steering them off. There was a jolt when the mooring lines were pulled taut, and the engine bucked until the schooner started to drift with them. Jack geared the engine down and stood rigidly at the wheel, wet clothes drying in the wind, hair puffing a bit in the humidity.

Ianto wrapped his arms about his waist and rested his chin on Jack's shoulder. They were out in the middle of the water and no one would ever see; that was just the way he liked it sometimes. "What is it Jack? What's this thing?"

Jack leaned back into him, but Ianto couldn't be sure if it was authentic or just the swaying of the water that did it. "It's a nightmare," he said softly, almost too softly to hear over the purr of the engine. "A nightmare from another world."

MONDAY MORNING, JUST OFF THE GLAMORGAN HERITAGE COAST:

"The Mistral Maiden," Ianto said in a booming voice so that Jack could hear him over the thousand or so homicidal seagulls that littered the beach to pick through the wreckage washing up with the tide. "A hundred-foot pleasure yacht loaded with wedding guests sailing up and down the coast while the DJ played hits of the seventies and eighties." At that moment a vinyl 45 clacked against the rocks at his feet, and he bent down to scoop it out of the water. The Captain and Tenille.

Jack looked over his shoulder. "'Love Will Keep Us Together,'" he mused. "There are many things we could say right now."

Ianto threw the record out in the water again, where he hoped it would sink, never to be seen again. "None of them appropriate at the site of a boat wreckage."

Gwen trotted towards them, her mouth taut. "There were people on the shore," she said when she got close enough to yell comfortably, and then her voice tapered down to a reasonable tone when the three of them stood in a huddle, protecting their eyes from the wind and occasional gust of sand.

Jack and Ianto glanced back at the gaggle of people, most of them gawkers, but a few that had been pulled aside by the police to have their statements taken. "Ah, what did they see?"

Gwen held out a palm camera. "See for yourself."

They huddled over the little flip out screen, shielding their eyes and the LCD, but it was impossible to see until Jack took off his coat and flung it over their heads. Ianto had no doubt they looked a sight, three people smashed together, top halves hidden under a military greatcoat. On a beach in the middle of summer. Lovely. Torchwood: confounding the locals since…ever.

The video was dark, it being shot at night and all, but the boat was clearly visible out on the water, a floating nest of fairy lights outlining the shape of her, from stern to bow, bottom to top. All the way up the rigging. Gwen had turned the volume up on the player, and even with the wind in the mic and the giggling of the cameraperson, he could hear the dull thumpa thumpa of the bass from the ship's onboard speakers.

"Nellie wants shots from the shore," a female voice said. "For the video." Ianto's stomach turned. This was Nellie's wedding video right here. The rest was on its way to the bottom of the ocean.

"Do you think Clive really has a giant pecker?" another female voice asked. "Nellie said it's huge." Ianto wondered if they'd planned on editing the sound after they'd shot this.

The camera swayed a little. Obviously whoever was taking the video was a little pissed herself, if the cant of the lens was any indication. "Well, I'm not asking, and I don’t care. He's got a dog face." Oh, they had to have been planning to edit this.

Both women were giggling when the first shadow slid over the fairy lights on the boat, down by the stern, almost unnoticeable, unless you were looking for it, which Ianto was.

"That's where it start—" Gwen began, but suddenly the outline of the boat shuddered and the middle bent, just like the WaterBus had. There was the faint noise of unified screams from the boat's passengers, and as the craft made a V of lights, the cameraperson steadied the machine, no doubt in shock. The other person's voice whispered, "Oh my god."

More shadows fell on opposite ends of the boat and pulled down, bending the halves in half, and the line of the boat made a capital M for a second before the lights blinked out.

"Oh my god oh my god," the cameraperson whispered. "Oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god," over and over as the screams offshore grew louder, each distinct voice too soft to hear but altogether sounding like a cacophony of anguish and grinding metal and plastic and wood until what Ianto thought might be the boat (it was difficult to tell now, now that the lights had gone out and the moon was dark—he stared at the screen where the boat had been) was sucked, pulled or yanked under, or into pieces.

"Jenn, call 999. Call them," the cameraperson said, and the camera was lowered to the ground, jostling as it hit the sand and stared sideways out at the water. "Call 999, Jenn, go!" They could hear the clatter of someone, probably Jenn, dropping her bag to the sand and digging, no doubt for a mobile. The cameraperson—not Jenn—came into view as she ran towards the waterline.

Ianto couldn't make out what she was screaming, what she was saying at the edge of the water, but he heard Jenn get the 999 operator: "Oh sweet Jesus come, the boat there's something with the boat it's gone oh god—"

Gwen snapped the screen shut on the camera and they de-huddled. Jack pulled the coat from their heads and the solar flare of sudden sun was blinding. He really needed those sunglasses.

"By the time the police got here with water rescue, the Coast guard was already out there--" She waved a hand at the two small boats out on the water, pulling wreckage in with hooks and nets. "They haven't found a single body, except for…." They followed her finger to the ambulance that sat on the side of the road, and the small litter that protruded from it, a litter that carried a tiny body. "The flower girl, I reckon, by the looks of her dress. Poor thing can't be over three and a half, and she's in shock."

Ianto stared back out at the water, forcing his eyes to remain open so that he could think about a child's plastic doll floating in the water.

Jack sighed. "Probably hung on to something and managed to stay off the creature's radar. It sees heat signatures."

Gwen stuffed the camera in her bag and crossed her arms, glancing from the ambulance to Jack and back again. "Yeah? And how do you know that?"

Ianto had been waiting for Jack to open up about the creature that he'd seemed to recognise the night they'd gone out on the boat. Ianto had been pretty pissed, but he had remembered the metallic tooth and Jack's panicked mumbling, and the way he'd clenched the steering wheel of the boat in a deathgrip all the way back.

The problem was that Jack didn't talk about these kinds of things, things that were obviously from his past, almost to an infuriating degree, seeing as how twice already that past had come back to bite them. Kill them, actually, not that Ianto thought knowing about Gray could have prevented what had happened to Tosh and Owen.

They walked towards the road away from the shore, Gwen accepted a cup of water from the SOCO, and they separated from the gaggle of people, one of them the Jenn from the video, as she was still shaking and saying, "It was horrible, just terrible," to the officer taking her statement. Ianto wondered just how long he'd been taking it. It wasn't her fault. People who witnessed violent atrocities were rarely coherent for a while after, and if they were coherent, it usually meant that there was something to worry about.

Jack was a few feet ahead of them, but he was already talking. "We need to call Colonel Storr again, this time no more flower jokes." Ianto smirked in spite of himself. It wasn't funny. Okay the plastic flowers he'd sent Storr the first time had been macabre and funny.

Everyone loved plastic daisies.

Jack finally stopped about a hundred feet from the emergency vehicles and faced the water. "They're going to tell us that they want us to take care of it, because it's a Welsh problem," he said softly. "And they'll send us a boat, but it will be a piece of shit." He glanced at Gwen over his shoulder. "And they'll say, 'What happened to the mighty Torchwood?'"

Ianto snorted. "I think it imploded in London." He cocked his head. "Where was UNIT then?"

Jack tsked. "Now is not the time to quibble. I want a platoon, or a squadron, or whatever they call it over there, and I want some big bombs." Jack pulled his hands from his pockets and waved them in the general direction of the channel. "Do they make harpoons big enough for this?"

Ianto winked at Gwen. "I saw them at Costco in a twelve pack," he retorted lightly. It was good. If they could all get past the video, past the little girl back there on the litter, past the Captain & Tenille sinking to the bottom of the ocean, then they could do their jobs.

Jack didn't laugh. "I bet they'll send Llewellyn." Another glance back at Ianto. "You'll like him." He shoved his hands back into his coat and rocked on his heels. "We'll have to hear all about the beasties of the deep."

"Jack," Gwen said, sitting down on the rock edge of the fence and drinking her water before making a face and pouring it on the sand. "Ianto says you know what this is."

Ianto parked himself a few feet from her on the ledge and allowed for a space where Jack could sit between them if he wanted to. Jack liked to confide in them when they were next to him, sometimes, a fact that hadn't escaped Ianto's notice. Maybe he wanted them to be able to hear him the first time, or maybe he wanted the assurance of them both being near him, or maybe he just liked to be in the middle. Probably all three.

But Jack was turned away in front of them, hands in his coat pockets, staring out to sea. He just needed a swell of some music and the picture would be complete: the hero broods. Ianto rolled his eyes at Gwen and massaged his temple with two fingers. It was bright, and that brightness had caught up with his skull.

It was good that they were going to do this, though, Ianto thought. Jack had declined to tell either of them what they were dealing with, and soon Ianto and Gwen had planned to stage a coup. They figured that they could lock Jack in the conference room and then force him to tell them. Gwen had suggested that Jack would listen to logic. Ianto had solemnly added, yes, and failing that, tickling had been known to subdue him as well.

Gwen sometimes had no sense of humor. Gallows humor, really. He didn't blame her. Gallows weren't really funny, once you got a good look at them. Much like severed hands.

"I grew up on the sea," Jack said softly and Ianto sat up straighter. Gwen glanced at him, one eyebrow raised. Ianto was fairly sure that Gwen knew less about Jack's origins than he did, which was pretty much next to nothing. Even after Gray and Hart, Jack remained tightlipped about even the name of his home. Homeworld, Ianto corrected himself, since he'd long convinced himself that Jack wasn't from this planet. Or from this now.

He held his breath, as if the expiration of air was going to change Jack's mind about confiding. Gwen glanced back down at the cup that she was slowly dismantling into a long curled paper strip.

"The waters of my homeland," Jack said, as if rebooting the story to start in a less personal way, "had a monster just like this one. Many of them, actually."

Ianto sucked in his cheeks and stared at the bird on the shore. Gwen shredded her coffee cup in her fingers. Jack stood away from them, but they could hear his voice, bright and chipper, as if he were simply describing the seaside view to an onlooker: And here we have the majestic shores of the Glamorgan, a historical stretch of land that as of last night was a graveyard to at least seventy-five people…

"They weren't native to it, but they were brought by the…well, they were brought. Grown." Jack turned and smiled weakly. "I don't remember if they were always there, but they were as far back as I can recall. Agents of war, actually, hard to control." His hands flapped in his pockets, and the coat flew out in a woolen shrug. "I don't think they were ever controlled."

"What are they?" Gwen said, and Ianto wanted to tell her to hush, but he wasn't the inquisitor here. Gwen had training in this sort of thing, this gentle prodding, and he had to admit that sometimes Jack told her more than he told Ianto sometimes. It should have been the other way around, probably, but he had long since reconciled himself to the fact that Jack would tell more tales to an old soldier than an old lover. Ianto was still working on the soldier part.

"We didn't name them." Jack made his way back to them, as if now that he had opened the floodgates, he could sit down, could look at them, could voice what he wanted to say to the faces, their bodies. "I only saw them a few times, when I was a boy."

Ianto let one of his hands, the one closest to Jack, rest on the rock between them, tips of his fingers just barely under Jack's thigh. Gwen took Jack's other hand in hers and held it in her lap, a placeholder maybe for someone else. Jack's eyes traveled the length of the water, as if he were looking for it even now. Ianto watched the gulls sail out over the waves.

"They were giant creatures," Jack said, his eyes still darting. "Made of mouths, too many to count, and tentacles, sure, but so many mouths they looked like pincushions of blinding silver teeth."

Ianto remembered the dagger-like thing they'd pulled out of the schooner the other night and shuddered. A creature made up of rows upon rows of them was something he would desperately wish to avoid.

"All right then," he said with finality. "How did you kill them?" Ianto glanced at Gwen across Jack, and knew that she wanted to ask tonnes of things: What are they called? Where are you from? How do you know this? Why do you never confide in us? It wasn't as if he disagreed, but they didn't need Jack clamming up on them either.

Jack reached down and picked up Ianto's hand from the rock ledge and dragged it into his lap, and they sat, looking out to sea, the sounds of the human chaos winding down behind them, the crash of the surf in front of them, sounds squeezing the peace too much to be insignificant.

"We never did."

TUESDAY MORNING, HOT AND NASTY, IANTO CALLS IT 'CLOSE':

"Absolutely not," Ianto said, turning abruptly on the dock. "No. No way."

Jack smiled. "I'll get you one of those cute yellow blow up-vests."

Ianto stabbed Jack in the chest with his finger, then pointed to the ship beside him. "It's called the Shamu."

Jack smiled. "I know."

"The Shamu. As in killer whale. As in Orca. As in Quint. As in Jaws. As in dead."

Jack flipped his fingers on his left hand back and forth. "You connected this boat to a giant fictional killer shark in the States in the seventies in less than six moves. Good job, Jones." He smiled and whistled at the boat, presumably to hail its captain. "I bet you can really kick arse at that Kevin Bacon game."

Gwen stopped next to them and handed Ianto a large thermal satchel. "Enough sandwiches to feed a third-world country, courtesy of Rhys." To Jack she said, "Why can't I come? This smacks of sexism."

Jack pulled a tube of something out of his pocket and unscrewed the cap. He looked quite out of place on the dock, in his long coat despite the stuffed heat. He'd changed to a pair of heavier denim trousers for the occasion, but he hadn't yet shed the woolen coat or the button-down. Just looking at him made Ianto warm. He'd left the suit at home in favor of denims and a T-shirt, and his bag was packed with more of the same. Gwen twisted her hair into a sloppy tail and looked irritable in her summer uniform: jeans and a sleeveless top that Jack had privately told Ianto was called the 'glass cutter'.

"Gwen," Jack said, squeezing the zinc oxide on his finger and brandishing it. "Why do we do anything in life?"

Ianto set his duffel down on the docks next to Jack's and eyed the five crates of items that they had compiled from the armoury and sub basements the night before in preparation for UNIT's boat. UNIT'S boat, Ianto mused, named after a killer whale that had died multiple times in captivity. Ianto appreciated irony, just not when it was killer irony.

Gwen crossed her arms and the muscles stood out. Ianto liked arm muscles on women. Good going, Gwen. "This is a macho thing, isn't it?" Her eyes narrowed as if she dared them to say it. Ianto was pretty sure that it both was and wasn't.

Jack ran a finger down her nose quickly and left a white zinc streak. "No, it's a brute strength thing." He smiled. "And a 'I would prefer you yell at UNIT' thing."

"And a 'Boss Ianto around' thing," Ianto added , sitting on one of the pier thrusts and staring out at the sea.

Gwen crossed her arms, and Jack leaned in closer, until his lips were almost flush with her ear. "I got him a little sailor cap—"

"That's it," Gwen said, pulling back and waving a hand. "I'm out of here. Storr is going to be stropped as fuck when he learns that you've not waited for his official clearance."

Jack shrugged and smiled. "If only people delivered on the second when they were the first." He looked at Ianto. "I like angry sex, don't you?"

Ianto smiled. "I'm more than willing to punch you in the face later. We can find out," he offered, and Gwen gave them both the V as she stalked down the Penarth Marina dock.

"So, what's the real reason?" Ianto asked as they watched her get into the SUV and drive away. Jack's eyes followed the car, but he didn't say anything. Ianto simply shrugged. "Ah."

He turned to lift the lid on the nearest crate so that he could determine which one it was, but he was stopped by a hand on his arm. Jack's eyes vied with the sky above him for clarity. "Hey, you know it's not like that, right?"

Oh Jesus, what was he supposed to say to that? It never seemed to come at a good time, a conversation about them and their relationship. He would have suspected that was planned on Jack's part, but for the fact that it took two to tango. So instead he just nodded and opened his mouth to say something when he was interrupted by a loud groan from on the boat.

"Fucking hell, Harkness, you bringing your girlfriend on my boat? Women are bad luck." A head popped into view, followed by a pair of rugby-issue shoulders and a chest that looked like it had come straight from the navy. Ianto squinted in the sun and sighed.

Jack patted Ianto's shoulder and laughed. "I sent her away, Kel. I know how you feel about the ladies." He shouldered his pack and stepped around the gangplank to board the ship, stopping at the last step onto the boat. "Though this is the twenty-first century and you might want to get with the times. Even UNIT has female officers on deck."

Kel, presumably Captain Kel Llewellyn, shrugged his massive shoulders and cracked a knuckle on his left hand with just the hand. Ianto could hear it from where he was standing. "'Bout round the time when the chain of command got all muddy, too," Kel grumbled.

Oh god, it was a living sailor stereotype. Ianto had read about them in books. Like Treasure Island. And Deadliest Catch. Now he just needed a beard and a pipe. Instead, Kel Llewellyn was scraggly and unkempt in that unmoisturised way: tan, leathery face, five days worth of beard, hair that needed a trim tucked behind his ears. Most of all, what Ianto noticed were the scar-covered arms under a painted-on T-shirt. A horizontally striped T-shirt, like one of The Village People or something. Ianto wished he could see the man's legs to check if he was wearing those bellbottomed sailor pantaloons. Instead he put his hands on his hips and waited.

"No, I meant this one," Llewellyn muttered around an unlit cigarette, thumbing at Ianto.

Oh. Son of a bitch.

"Now now Kel, Jones here is a great soldier and outstanding Torchwood operative." Jack reached down and Ianto handed him the second duffel, and he tossed both of them past Kel onto the deck. "Ianto, this is Kel Llewellyn, formerly UNIT Colonel Kel Llewellyn, right?" He grinned when Llewellyn rolled his eyes and lit a match off the boat railing. "Kel here headed up the maritime division of UNIT up until, what was it? Eighty-eight?"

Llewellyn took a long hit from his cigarette and Ianto realised the he also wanted a cigarette. In the worst way. His nerves were on edge. He was about to get on a boat with Popeye the sailor and look for a killer monster.

"Ninety-three," Llewellyn answered. "Then they reallocated the funding to desert climes. Fucking sand aliens."

Jack laughed again and left the gangplank to walk about the boat deck. "Yeah, they came out of nowhere, didn't they?" he agreed, and Ianto filed all of it away to ask about later. Sand aliens. Instead, he leaned on the lid of the crate in front of him and sighed again. It was probably the first of many. He needed a dolly to get these things on board, and even then, he wanted help. Apparently Captaining meant that you got to stand there and look menacing while the first mate and the others hauled things.

"Well then," he tried to say as amicably as possible, "we're in the safest possible hands." It simply came out snippy, and he was forced to make a small smile of surrender.

Llewellyn simply turned to Jack. "Metal teeth, you say?" he began, as if picking up a previous conversation. Jack and Llewellyn had spoken on the phone earlier, so they must have gone over the mission parameters. "Taking down whole boats lightning fast?"

Jack stuffed his hands in his pockets. "Ayup." Ianto rolled his eyes. In no time the two of them would be saying 'Arrrr,' and doing peg leg impressions.

"We took down one of these off the coast of Tangier back in eighty-two," Llewellyn drawled. "Don't know where you were, Harkness."

Jack stared out at sea. "Probably a whorehouse somewhere," he said lightly and Ianto almost snorted.

"It came through your rift here and went screaming mimi down the coast until we caught up with it. Loaded it up with napalm and C-4." Llewellyn dragged on his cigarette. "You were probably still in nappies, Jones," he called louder, as if Ianto couldn't hear him from where he was, about eight feet away.

"Actually," he answered. "I might have been in utero."

At that, Jack did bark a laugh. "He's feisty, that Mister Jones."

Ianto tried to win the staring match he found himself in with Llewellyn, but he had to look away, mostly because the sun came out from behind the man and blinded Ianto into blinking. Yeah, that was it.

Llewellyn grunted. "Let's get those workers something to do and get these crates on board so we can push off. We're losing daylight." Llewellyn waved over two of the dockworkers standing about and berated them from the prow until they hopped to. Ianto was relieved that he wouldn't have to be the one to clumsily wheel the things onboard; the gangplank looked like it had been decommissioned about the same time as the boat had, which was right around 1974. The year Jaws came out.

"Tie them to the port side and make sure they're secure," Llewellyn said as he tromped across the deck and flicked his cigarette over the side of the boat into the water. "The last thing I need is some alien gun falling out of one in bad weather and taking my balls off." Then he looked at Ianto, looked at him, and the whole insulting implication was made.

That fucker. Ianto tromped up the gangplank, sat on the edge of the boat, and imagined his impending doom. Maybe if he made peace with his oncoming death, it would be less surprising when it happened later today.

"I like him," Jack whispered as they watched Llewellyn disappear into the cabin. "He's got moxie."

Ianto rolled his eyes and watched as the dockworker wheeled the first of the crates of tech on deck. "Is that what they call it these days?" Jack leant forward and kissed Ianto's cheek. It was an obvious display, and not one that Ianto appreciated. "Oh fuck off."

Jack clapped his hands and looked at the second crate as it was delivered to the port side. "I do love a good ocean adventure, Ianto. The high seas, the waves, the endless depth, the salt air." He winked. "A bunch of sweaty men on a boat."

Ianto crossed the deck and grabbed a length of rope. No one else seemed to be willing to secure the crates, so it looked like this was a job for super-Ianto. "I suppose the fantasy of all those sweaty men will keep you warm whilst you float to shore as the only survivor."

Jack whistled under his breath. "If you don't want to come, Ianto, you don't have to."

Ianto refastened the latch on the loose crate lid he'd prised up earlier and turned to Jack. "You're an idiot." He kicked the crate so that it was flush with the edge of the boat, and one of the planks buckled under his toe. He swore and wondered what was inside the bottom the crate.

"Oh you're going to be loads useful," Llewellyn said dryly as he sauntered from the cabin, his cigarette still unlit. Ianto figured it was because he hadn't found a match to scrape across his face yet.

The plan of attack was unsteady here. He'd had loads of experience with tossers like Llewellyn. Hell, he'd worked with Owen Harper. On the other hand, Jack seemed to imply that Llewellyn outranked Ianto, sort of, if you tilted your head to the right and squinted. He might have even outranked Jack, except that UNIT and Torchwood were separate. And if one were playing the ranking home game, they could also flip over the card that added the fact that they were currently standing in Llewellyn's boat, which he owned, shitebox that it was. It was still loads better than the canoe Ianto had found gathering dust in one of the sub-levels of the Hub the night before whilst looking for equipment.

It had not been reassuring when Jack had taken one look at the canoe, with its painted moniker of 'HMS LOVEBOAT' and launched into a yarn about how he'd once taken this out on the Taff and caught a mutant alien fish 't—h—i—s—b—i—g,' and then something about Gerald and Harriet setting the river on fire, and by the time Jack was finished laughing and wiping tears from his eyes, Ianto had backed away and made a mental note that Torchwood should never, ever have a maritime division.

The fact remained that he was going to have to deal with Llewellyn on a very small boat, possibly for days on end. And Llewellyn wasn't going to let up, so he was going to have to pull the Harper maneuver number fifteen: be a bigger arsehole.

"If you have a problem, sir, then I would prefer that we address it now, while I have a chance to haul myself off this godforsaken excuse for a seaworthy vessel." He shoved his hands in his pockets and ignoreD Jack's small mewl that was probably supposed to be 'Dude, wtf?' in an alien language. "In fact, I bet if I made some calls, I could get a much larger boat that doesn't look as if it's about to fall apart any second."

Llewellyn scraped a match on the doorpost of the cabin and shielded his eyes for a minute with the cupping hands gesture that one used when lighting a cigarette in the open wind. Ianto avoided putting his hands on his hips (what Owen called the 'international sign of the ponce when engaged in argument'). At this point, he wagered that Llewellyn would either kick him off the boat, push him off the boat, keelhaul him (though Jack might save him from that), or further escalate their pissing contest.

"All right, then. You think you'll be useful?" Llewellyn reached to the crate next to him and yanked on the short length of discarded rope Ianto had set there after he'd secured it to the desk. "Tie me a sheepshank," Kel said as the rope hit Ianto's face.

"You've got to be kidding me," Ianto mumbled to Jack.

Jack leant against the railing of the boat. "Go on, boyscout, tie a knot for the man."

Ianto looked at the rope in his hands and tried to remember everything he'd ever learnt about knots. That was surprisingly a great deal. Okay, the little eel swims into the cave, he swims out of the cave and back—no that was something else. His fingers fumbled under Llewellyn's scrutinising eye, and it occurred to him that no matter what he did, this was a trap. He finally tried what he thought was a passable knot and handed it back to the man.

Llewellyn peered at the rope. "This is a trumpet knot."

Ianto crossed his arms. "They both do the same thing." Behind him, Jack snorted. "So does a noose."

Llewellyn threw the rope behind him, and right too, it was a useless length, Ianto noted, good for restraining small items, possibly an errant Captain and tossing him belowdecks. He reached out and grabbed Ianto's hand. "Lemme see your hands."

"Woah, now Kel," Jack said, coming up behind Ianto and leaning over. "This is going too—"

Llewellyn turned Ianto's hand over so he could run one callused finger across his palm. "You've got city hands, Mister Jones." He glanced up and met Ianto's eyes. "You've been pushing pencils all your life."

Ianto snatched his hands away and waved one at Jack. "Oh this is bullsh—"

"Ianto, calm down."

Ianto stared at Jack with one raised one eyebrow. He liked to think it was the look that was most effective at communicating the homicidal rage he felt at any given moment, namely this moment. Jack must have got the picture, because he clapped Llewellyn on the shoulder.

"Oh-kay then, Cap'n." He steered the man down off the boat and onto the dock. Let's get the last of these loaded and we'll be on our merry way."

Llewellyn shrugged. "He'll be useless on the boat."

Ianto pulled a length of rope and set about lashing the latest crate to the side of the deck. This rope was much longer, a better length for, oh say, tying someone up and keelhauling them in deep waters. Off the coast. Of Southern Wales. Later today. He'd only ever read about it in books, but Ianto was a quick study.

Jack almost sounded apologetic. "My charter, my crew. Jones stays."

"As long as he stays out of my way," the man groused. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and rocked on the dock, as if he were unsteady on unmoving ground.

"You know," Jack said, "I gotta ask, Kel: Shamu?"

"Got a granddaughter. Lives in Orlando."

"I thought boats were named after girls or ladies. What's your granddaughter's name?"

"Olive."

"The Olive. The Olive…nope, you're right, not a good name for a boat."

"Oh, but Shamu is," Ianto spat out from across the deck. He secured the fourth crate with the rope and stood, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. He really wanted Gwen to be there. That way he'd have commiseration. In the back of his mind he thought about a rumour he'd heard that it was good luck for women to piss on the boat before it went out to sea, and part of him wished that Gwen was here so that he could watch her deck Llewellyn when he suggested it.

Then he'd steal the man's fags.

Jack glanced over his shoulder and winked. "Down, boy." To Llewellyn, he added, "Okay, so what do we have left to do?"

The man grunted and put out his cigarette. "Gotta get clearance from the harbour master unless we want them Sikorskys to follow us out and try to run us ashore. UNIT protocol."

Jack sighed. "Your Colonel Storr is a pain in the arse, you know that, right?" Ianto rummaged in his pack, one ear to the conversation. "I'll get this last crate loaded, and you do that, and we'll be out of here before we can finish our 'Here lies the body of Mary Lee's'." He let the last dockworker wheel the last crate on board and followed him up the gangplank. While Llewellyn's back was turned, he made a shooing gesture, motioning for Ianto to stand back on the boat, then he set about pulling the mooring lines from the pier supports and tossing them on the boat, which listed a foot or so away from the dock.

Llewellyn was halfway down the dock when Jack sprinted up the stairs to the pilothouse and ran his hand along the steering wheel. He waved at Ianto and wiggled his eyebrows, then dangled something metallic from two fingers. They looked like keys.

Oh no.

Ianto took the stairs two at a time, but he wasn't there yet when Jack had started the boat's motor and Llewellyn turned, almost all the way down the pier to the harbour master's office. Jack turned and gave him a thumbs up sign, and that seemed to stop the man for just a second, a lull they needed because Jack gunned the engine and the boat slid away from the dock like a bat out of hell. A ten-mile-an-hour bat out of hell.

Ianto clutched onto what passed as a dashboard and stared at Jack. It wasn't that he wasn't pleased with their sudden loss of Llewellyn, but it did mean that they were now two, not three, or four. And that sounded a little foolhardy. A lot foolhardy. A plethora of foolhardy. The gangplank dragged down the length of the pier until it hit a support and knocked off into the water, not unlike driving away from the petrol station with the pump still attached to the tank.

The throttle groaned and the boat kicked up water in the front as Jack took the Little Engine That Maybe out onto the open sea.

"Doesn't this mean that the harbour master will be after us?"

Jack whistled merrily. "Not if I slipped him fifty quid to sit there and look perplexed."

"Did you?"

"Hell no. I pulled rank."

"Ah."

"What?" Jack asked, one hand on the wheel, and the other waving animatedly at Llewellyn's shrinking figure on the dock. "You think I was gonna let Captain Ahab come along?" Ianto was reminded of cartoons in which ants had temper tantrums at very large animals and they just looked like small jumping dots with high-pitched squeaking voices. Llewellyn needed some black squiggly lines over the top of his head. Ianto resisted the urge to stick his tongue out. He was an adult.

He might have flipped him off with one of his 'city hands' anyway.

Still.

"I saw Jaws. I know better," Jack said, with one more glance back and he turned the boat, both hands on the wheel and face tilted to the sun. "Besides, that man is crazy." He gave a pointed glance at Ianto and there was that look again, the one that said that Jack was worried. He looked over the open pilothouse to the crates of secured alien equipment on the deck, guns and drugs and rays and all manner of scanners and things that they could need.

"And you know what's bad luck?" Jack said, turning the wheel almost completely around and bracing himself with his knees. Ianto almost fell into him with the arc the ship cut in the water. "Two captains on one boat." He flashed his grin at Ianto, sodium lights in the daytime. "Let's go do this, Torchwood style."

Ianto turned and headed for the stairs to the main deck. "Oh yes, Torchwood style," he muttered. "With the screaming and understaffing and the buckets of blood."

"What was that, Ianto?"

"Nothing, sir! It's a smashing plan, we'll be sure to triumph."

STILL TUESDAY, BUT A BIGGER BOAT HAS YET TO BE PROCURED:

Ianto knew from an intellectual standpoint that the last three hours had happened, because he had been there and he'd seen it all, and he'd been doing things with his hands and feet and recording things with his eyes and brain, but as he sat on the captain's chair and held the connector cables to the explosive packs, he wasn't sure that it had actually occurred.

The sun silhouetted Jack's frame as he leant against the rails of the extended prow, the big gun strapped around his chest but dangling uselessly. His arms rested on the piping, dangling at the wrists, and Ianto could hear him whistling from time to time.

Hours ago, Jack had been gunning the throttle and merrily singing something about bow-legged women, and Ianto had been shoveling buckets of chum out into the water, attracting everything but the creature they were looking for. At one point, Ianto thought that maybe he'd see sharks, and wouldn't that be a little Discovery Channel? And he hadn't noticed when the gulls had left, but they must have, and he had been thanking his memory for the handkerchief tied about his mouth like he was about to rob a bank when Jack had shouted and he'd looked up to see the thing come up put of the water.

Jesus, it had been tentacles, long ropes of them, some of them as thick as tree trunks, and on every one of them, mouths and teeth and possibly little tongues. He had staggered back into the relative safety of the cabin and stared out the window, and Jack had cut the engine, jumping down the stairs and rummaging through the open crates for tools.

One of the long arms of the creature had swung about and taken down the rigging, not for sails, but possibly for towing or hauling nets; the big mechanical arm on the side of the ship had buckled and fallen deckward. It was as if the creature had been sure they were there, but not sure, and the arms, while reaching for them, hadn't figured out what they were, which had been rather odd.

Jack had got one good shot off with the Big Gun, mostly because their biggest concern was that the creature would take the boat apart before they had a chance to use the explosives, and while the gun seemed to have an effect, it had merely severed one of the tentacles, which had fallen into the water like a downed tree and presumably sunk to the ocean floor. Ianto had thought that maybe severed tentacles grew more monsters, like earthworms, but he had pushed that thought to the back of his mind to savour later. In the dark.

Ianto had got over his shock long enough to ready a few of the smaller guns and the trackers, but ultimately that had been the extent of the action they'd seen.

Now, he looked at the charges in his hands. Before they'd even gone out on the water, they'd debated putting barrels in it with harpoons, but they'd both seen Jaws, and they figured that if Jaws was immune to a bunch of floating barrels harpooned into it, then this thing wasn't going to give a shit about that either. Besides, they'd had a moment the night before in which Ianto had looked at Jack and said, "Do we even have barrels?" and Jack had been forced to shrug and admit that, no, they had never got the Torchwood branded barrels, not after the disaster of the HMS LOVEBOAT.

Then they decided on a tracking device, and Jack had prepared about fifteen of them to various air powered rifles and guns, and Ianto had painstakingly rigged flechettes loaded with tracker darts so that they could unleash them in a volley of alien tech off the port bow. He had imagined that the thing would come up like some horrible creature in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. He'd even imagined the whole Jonah-esque being swallowed whole thing, but what he hadn't anticipated was that after the monster had surfaced and its long tentacles had waved about, it had left them alone.

Ianto might have been offended if it had been his boat. As it was, after a few minutes of being completely perplexed, he was relieved when Jack had confided to him that the entire hull of the boat had been treated with some sort of compound that rendered them all but invisible to the creature's infrared field of vision, which had been why they'd taken it in the first place. Huh. So, okay.

They'd been this way for hours now, floating in the water, waiting for the thing to come up for another go round. Ianto figured that it was nursing its wound, but it still had to be near by, because he couldn't even see any birds circling in the air. He wouldn't have put it past the creature to have snatched the things from the sky.

He was thinking of getting up. He really had to piss. But there was that nagging feeling, that feeling that if he took a break, if he got up, that would be the moment that the creature would resurface, and he'd be running to help Jack with his prick hanging out, and that wouldn't be useful.

Instead, Ianto glanced at his watch and thought about radioing Gwen. They hadn't eaten all day. Jack looked exhausted, standing for hours on the prow. Once his head lowered and snapped back up as if he had caught himself dozing, and Ianto made an executive decision.

"Jack," he said, standing, "It's not going anywhere." He set the charges and the detonators on the recessed bucket meant to hold fish or something and stretched. His arse was actually numb.

Jack joined him on the deck, looking for all the world like a kid with his oversized gun and expression of disappointment. Ianto didn't blame him—he would rather have got this over sooner than later. Ianto patted his back.

"Come on, then," he said, "we'll have some supper, and then you can wait a half-hour and go back in the water, sport."

Jack raised an eyebrow but followed him into the cabin anyway.

They both ate two of Rhys's sandwiches, stuffed with so much meat that Jack called them 'manwiches' in a clunky attempt at humor. Ianto sat rigidly; every sway of the boat felt like the creature coming back, and the night waters did nothing for his nerves. After clearing the dishes and securing them in the sink with the netting that would keep the unwashed cutlery from flying about and taking their eyes out if there was a problem (what was that called? Rough seas? Turbulence? The Last Thing You'll Ever Feel?), Ianto figured that a man like Llewellyn was probably a complete drunkard, and that there had to be alcohol on the boat somewhere.

Ianto opened the magnetised cupboard door and pulled out two plastic cups, setting them on the table and reaching for the bottle. This was so not a good idea, but he wanted a bolt of something, and Jack looked as if he needed something as well. The bottle was unlabelled, so Ianto opened the cap and sniffed experimentally. Jack would survive drinking lighter fluid, but one of these kids was doing his own thing.

It was apricot brandy. Ianto smiled at the bottle. Oh Llewellyn, you sentimental bastard.

Jack held up the cup by the handle and turned it around, frowning at the yellow boxy creature adorning its side, along with a scribble that said, Best Grandpa Ever! Yay!

"What is that?"

Ianto blinked. "That's SpongeBob Squarepants. Please don't ask," he hastily finished when Jack raised a critical eyebrow. Ianto poured them a measure of the liquor and then thunked down onto the bench next to Jack before taking a sip and grimacing. He wasn't fond of fruited alcohol, but this was pretty strong, as if Llewellyn had said, 'I like this, but it needs more rubbing alcohol and grenadine.'

"I suppose we can get a little sleep," Ianto sighed into his cup as he settled in the eating nook with its bolted table and padded booth seats. Jack leant on the table like he had leant on the rails of the prow—tired, wary, maybe a little defeated, if Ianto have to give a name to it.

"You get some sleep," he told Ianto. "I'll fix the guns, reload the triggers or something."

Ianto snorted. "Don't bother. Everything is as ready as it can be." He sighed. "As much as I didn't relish the thought of him being here, maybe Colonel Llewellyn would have been useful. He did kill one of these before."

Jack watched as Ianto sipped from his cup, his own untouched on the tabletop. "Perhaps."

"That's heartening."

Jack finally raised his cup to his lips and sipped the brandy. "This is horrible." He smiled. "Could you really put your life in the hands of a man who stocks a case of apricot brandy in his larder?"

Ianto shrugged. "This is where I make the appropriate seafaring joke about any port in a storm, right?"

The boat rocked and they drank in companionable silence. If Ianto didn't know better, he would have said that they were on a fishing trip. And they were, after a fashion. A terrifying, surreal, sure to end badly fishing trip that made Jaws look like Flipper the dolphin.

Ianto refilled his cup. A finger was a generous portion when one was trying to stay sober, but still.

"I wasn't exactly honest with you," Jack said suddenly, swirling the contents of his cup. "When I said that I'd only seen them a few times. I neglected to mention the rest of it."

Ianto finished his cup and poured more against his better judgement. "An omission," he supplied.

Jack smiled at the tabletop, his fingers picking at the peeling varnish. "An omission."

"Please don't tell me that you've had sex with one, because that might be too much for my brain to—"

"I had a sister, you know," Jack said. "She was about ten years older than me, a half sister, well, yeah," Jack shrugged. "Used to call me 'the perpetual nuisance machine'."

Ianto smiled and stilled Jack's peeling hand. "I can't imagine why."

Jack ignored the jest. "It was right about the time Gray was five, maybe, six?" He glanced at Ianto. "The details are difficult."

"Well, I gather it's hard, to think about—"

"I mean it was thousands of years ago," Jack amended, probably so they wouldn't have to have a heart to heart about his murderous family. Ianto didn't blame him; there was a reason he'd never brought it up before, and she was in a cryovault in the lower levels of the Hub with her skull stitched together. "In the future, still, but in the past. It was pretty much buried before, but now it's become…" He struggled for words.

"Un-dusty," Ianto supplied for him.

Jack smiled and pulled his hand from under Ianto's. Drumming the tabletop. "Yes, un-dusty." The boat creaked and he rocked with it; Ianto could see the casual move of his shoulders as he fell into the rhythm of it. Ianto's back was a mess of knots from resisting the pull. Not unlike the concept of being the passenger in a car. The driver's body went with the starts and stops because they were controlling them, they could sense them, but the passengers were jostled about at every pause. It wasn't a good metaphor on the top, but once the crust was pulled back, something deeper stirred beneath, when Jack lifted his cup to his lips and sipped even as the boat hit a cresting wave a bit and tipped up in the front, Jack rolled with it.

"The place where I come from, it's well, it's a peninsula, surrounded by water." Jack smiled. "Most folks lived in the more central area, we were at war, there were things, things that took advantage of the shelter of the sea."

"Like the thing out there."

Jack leant back and rested his head against the tatty vinyl pillow bolted to the wall of the booth behind him. "No, those things were brought, they don’t, oh hell I don't know what they are." He opened his eyes. "I was eight. I don't know enough about them, except what I remember from a child's brain, and those memories are over…they're old."

His cup dragged over the wood.

"My sister, Shirinn, she was headstrong, compassionate, one of those people who brings home everything she finds, you know? Wounded birds, interesting insects, stray dogs and cats, if we had had them she would have loved them."

Ianto could sense where he was going.

"It was small when she brought it home, really, and we'd never seen one, not like this, little sucker mouths that seemed harmless." He shrugged. "Our parents told her that she couldn't keep it, Dad made her throw it back into the sea, though I think he might have tried to kill it, but he never managed to get it alone, didn't want to kill it in front of her.

"She fed it every day, though, and I knew. I thought it was a secret that I was in on. I just didn't know." Jack shrugged. "I didn't understand what it was going to become. And maybe she didn't either."

Ianto reached over and laid a hand on Jack's arm, because he didn't know what else to do. Was he supposed to offer comfort? Good old-fashioned man-support of grumbling and taking the piss? Gwen would have known what to do.

Jack leaned into the touch , a little, closed the gap on the bench until they were arm to arm, shoulder to shoulder. It made the experience of rocking more intimate as the sea tossed them a little. "It went on for months. The thing, it—it was huge. I don't know how she managed to feed it, what she managed to feed it. The cattle were inland, and they were—they were too heavy for an eighteen year old girl to get anywhere unnoticed, and what did she think she could—" Jack stopped and blinked at the grain of the table, before his mouth quirked. "I guess she loved it. I guess we know about loving monsters."

Ianto blew out a breath. Boy, did he.

"I was watching Gray on the beach when she took the skiff out," Jack whispered, his eyes far away. "Dad said something about the water being too rough, but I think she had a bucket of something and she was going to feed it, maybe, go visit it. She never was all there in that way that some people have, like, remember Suzie, before she, well, before."

Ah Suzie. "I always thought Suzie was eerily competent," Ianto confessed. "If I were going to say who was the most well-grounded." When Jack glanced at him, he saluted him with his cup. "You know sometimes you're a space cadet."

"And how," Jack returned, but didn't elaborate.

The boat groaned and something in one of the cupboards rattled a bit with the tilt. "So, I gather she…I gather it killed her."

Jack sucked in his breath, as if preparing to blow out candles on a cake, or maybe metaphorical candles on the story. "Yeah, I saw her out there, so far out, and Dad was on the dock. Gray was eating sand, and I…I looked away for a second, and when I looked back it was just a mass of tentacles and the bottom part of the boat flipping in the air and my dad was screaming and screaming."

Ianto wanted to say something, anything, but he didn't have words, so he just waited. More would come, really. Not even Jack, the master of untelling, could leave the rest of this untold, when they were out here on the ocean, together, just them, trying to slay the beastie that had already cost him so much. Maybe not that exact beastie, obviously, but close enough. Once, when he was four, Ianto had been bit by a Rottweiler, and to this day, he gave all of them a wide berth, regardless of how their owners said, 'Oh, he's harmless! He's a big soft-hearted creature, oh yes he is.' It wasn't the specific dog. It didn't have to be.

"They took a few boats out to try and find her, but that was pointless. They must have known that she was gone. Maybe they thought they could kill the thing, I don't know, I didn't ask, and they never told me. Dad went with them, but by the time he got back it was dark and half of the boats didn't return."

"They…" Ianto drifted off, because it was obvious what had happened.

Jack shrugged. "Thirty men all killed because of her, if you want to look at it that way. Or maybe she was just victim one, and they were all inevitable." He sipped from his brandy and made a face. "It's impossible to say these things, I mean, to blame a girl for what she did and them for what they did. All we can do is blame the creature for what it did." Another shrug, not unlike one a teenager gives when it doesn't want to elaborate. "Or not. It does what it does. It's not malicious. But this is all it does, and we can't coexist with it.

"The thing I remember, though, more than anything else, is the parts that washed on shore for days afterward. You'd find a hand or a toe, or a big wad of hair, and you would just know." He shrugged. "I wasn't ever allowed back in the water after that."

Ianto wondered if he would have ever wanted to go back into the water after seeing that. He tried to imagine swimming in the water, knowing that thing was out there. Not even that seemed as bad as the possibility of floating out there and bumping into part of someone you used to know, bobbing out there in the waves. It was bad enough when it was someone you didn't know. He knew this from experience, tossing parts of people (okay, aliens, whom some might say are people on other planets) out in the bog himself.

For a split second he wondered what the difference between him and the monster was, but that was amazingly ridiculous. He didn't eat those people, and he didn't kill them, he just…disposed of them.

It was getting a little too philosophical.

"They blamed her," Jack said lightly, eyes darting to Ianto, then away. "They all blamed her for bringing the thing to the water. My dad never said her name again."

"I'm sorry," Ianto breathed, because he didn't know what he was supposed to say. He stared at Patrick the Starfish on his cup and wondered what the hell people were thinking, that this was a successful children's show. He should make something like this up and make a billionty dollars, then he could quit this job and go somewhere no one was eaten by giant sea creatures. Like…Kiel. No one was eaten in Kiel. As far as he knew.

Jack shrugged. "It wasn't until years later, once I left and had access to records, that I knew they'd been seeded there. My sister had just stumbled on one of them in the beginning stages. Even if she'd never found it, they would have come to the water. They would have grown and become…that. Them." A long pause, and the sonar above them trilled its quarterly message of, 'I got nothing.'

"I suppose," Jack said, "that they needed someone to blame, and she was the easiest target when you didn't have the facts. Doesn't change the fact that they were all dead, that she was dead, and we could never be safe on the sea ever again. It didn't matter anyway, because months later we were under siege, for the rest of my childhood."

Ianto wanted to ask about that. Desperately. "I have an older sister," he blurted out instead. Stupid really, a sudden thought, pushed up by the warmth of the brandy, offered as if it would make Jack feel better about opening up. As if he was offering Jack something he didn't already know. Jack knew everything. He was his employer, for god's sake.

Jack smiled into the air. "I know." And then, a capitulation, an out for Ianto's embarrassment, "Pains in the arse, really."

"Amen to that," Ianto mumbled into his cup. He was suddenly tired. He could sleep here. Instead, they would finish this and get back to work. Once he was on his feet he'd feel better. He'd make some of Llewellyn's shite instant coffee later. Maybe Jack would tell him to take a kip for a few hours, but that just felt like cheating. Though how he was ever going to feel anything but inadequate next to a man who didn't really have to sleep was beyond him.

The boat was a huge sedative, really, with the noises and the rocking, a whale speeding along the whale-path, as Beowulf said, and he wondered what it would be like, not for the first or last time, to be in the air instead of on the sea.

"Is this like being in space?" he asked Jack suddenly. He wanted to listen for the sound of gulls. Did they ever sleep? But he couldn't hear them over the clanging of the warning bell banging against the semi-cracked doorframe, and the water hitting the deck as it splashed over the railing, or even the crushed winch rigging slapping the ceiling above them. They should secure that. But not really. There was nowhere to put it and nothing to secure it with.

Jack tilted his head. "From a certain point of view. Everything is like being in space. How is Cardiff like Paris?"

Ianto smiled. "I get you."

Somewhere in the distance a buoy answered their loose claxon and they listened to the clash of the brass until it all died away, the wind changed. Ianto tilted his cup and stared at the contents. "I hate the water," he said softly. "You can't live in it, not naturally. Like space." He turned his head to Jack and it occurred to him that his fortifying belt had been more like a fortifying nightcap. "You can't breathe in space."

Jack patted Ianto's back, letting his hand rest there, fingers pressing in that way that meant he was making a conscious effort to keep them there. "I think you'll find that danger is everywhere. Planetside only gives you the illusion of control."

"I have control," Ianto mumbled into his cup. He tipped it up to finish it and the boat canted and he spilled brandy down his front. "That was an accident," he said, pointing a finger at Jack, whose mouth was perilously quirked, in danger of actually becoming a grin. Ianto cut it off at the pass. "It was not some cosmic symbolism or something."

"Right."

Ianto drained his cup and rested his forehead on his arms. He closed his eyes, feeling the rocking of the boat, Jack's hand on the small of his back, rubbing circles. The wood creaked and the wind made the metal stays of the winch clink against the pole. The sonar beeped harmlessly. Jack's own cup set down, a deeper note that indicated that it was still half-full.

Ianto wondered what they would do when they saw it again. He wondered if he and Jack would be enough, or if Jack would fall to it, as much as he could fall to anything, a victim of a monster from across the galaxy. A monster that he had survived, only to see it again in the most impossible of places.

He shrugged and let the boat rock him, a giant murderous cradle, and under his breath, Jack sang, softly and without irony, just a touch of sadness. Another mystery to add to the man's layers.

"Farewell and adieu to you, fair Spanish ladies. Farewell and adieu, you ladies of Spain. For we've received orders for to sail back to Boston. And so nevermore shall we see you again."

WEDNESDAY, ZERO DARK THIRTY:

The knocking on the side of the boat had been going on for about thirty seconds before Ianto opened his eyes and realised that it was happening outside his head, in reality, and not in his dreams, in which a giant clown had been headbanging to a German drinking song. Jack was nowhere to be seen, but the boat engine was running, and they were moving at a pretty fast clip, so he knew that someone was at the wheel.

"IANTO," Jack hollered, and there was a stomping on the ceiling above him. "IANTO, GAME TIME."

Ianto fell out of the seat and scrambled to his feet, wiping sleep from his eyes and wide awake, running for the door. He stopped at the frame, leaning on it so that he could watch the long tentacle roil in the sky, at least a dozen mouths on it alone. For a second, the house party song ran through his head: put your hands in the air, wave them like you don't care, and then he was off, darting to the array of guns and finding that he had no idea what to do.

Jack was there, though, big gun strapped across his front, air rifle in his hand and loaded with a transmitter flechette. They weren't going to let it go without tracking it, even if they didn't manage to blow it up this time either. Another tentacle as big around as a redwood (Ianto had seen redwoods in pictures) shot out of the water and the wake of its movement made the boat tip and roll. The sky was dark, and the sodium lights lit up the deck and the water around them in a way that made it both harder and easier to see.

Ianto scooped up a rifle in one hand and a handgun in another, then stuffed the gun, some leftover C-4 packs and detonators into a net bag and ran for the starboard quarter, feet slipping on the deck. He slung the netting over his shoulder and glanced at Jack, who waved him up the stairs.

"Get ready to bring her around!" he shouted to Ianto and he ran to the prow and aimed for the monster, which wasn't hard. The thing was bigger across then the SUV, what he could see that was out of the water, an amorphous blob studded with teeth-rimmed mouths and long tentacles that whipped in and out of the water, however it propelled itself through the waves.

Ianto staggered left and right on the deck as he tried to keep an eye on the creature in front of the ship and walk backwards to the stairs and up to the pilothouse. He managed to make it halfway up the stairs when the monster seemed to leap onto the port bow and the whole boat tilted precariously. Ianto fell down the stairs, banging his head on the railing and seeing stars for a second. Now would not be a good time to black out, the sane, calm and orderly part of his mind told him. It was a very small voice, because the rest of his brain was saying something to the effect of, "Ohshitohshitgetupgetupgetupohshitshootshootshoot."

Nevertheless, in the process of falling, he lost the items in his hands. The rifle skittered across the camber of the curved deck and bounced off the gunwale, sliding behind one of the unlashed crates. That was okay. Ianto had another one. He made for the stairs again and was rewarded by reaching the finish line.

Jack fired the big gun down into the water as he stood on the extended prow, and the water boiled and steamed before the whole bow was batted up in the air as the creature retreated into the waves. Jack flew backwards onto the deck and had to roll to avoid a tentacle with several mouths big enough to take several chunks out of him. He fired the big gun again and then it whined; Ianto could hear it over the groaning and creaking and water and cracking; it was out of gas. Jack cut the strap and lobbed the gun at the creature when one of the mouths got too close, taking a few teeth with it before he lost his grip on it, and it went flying off into the water.

"Ianto! Back it up!" Jack screamed, and turned, probably to make sure that Ianto was in place. Ianto was fumbling to turn the key when the winch arm, which had been pretty much crippled the day before (earlier in the night? It seemed so long ago) unbalanced and crashed to the deck, pinning Jack. Ianto threw the boat into reverse and hoped that he could somehow pull it away, like wrenching one's hand out of someone else's grip.

The bow of the boat finally crumpled, twisted and pulled away, and the rest of the deck tilted perilously. Ianto grabbed on to the steering wheel and watched Jack wrestle himself out from under the wreckage of the downed winch. One of his legs was bleeding pretty badly and it looked as if the femoral artery had been severed. Ianto clung to the wheel as the deck tilted and a yawning maw below it caught all the loose crates in its mouth. Jack scrabbled on the wooden beams, but his fingers couldn’t find purchase; he slid a few more feet towards the open mouth and rows of teeth, silver almost blinding in the lights.

The crates banged into its mouth, spilling open, and it ate them down, not paying attention to the things it was consuming. Jack's head lolled and his arms slackened and Ianto knew that he'd lost consciousness. It was all he could do to watch as Jack's body went limp and he spilled into the creature's mouth, just another item in the junk that it was collecting.

He wasn't aware that he was screaming, but he must have been, because when he stopped, all he heard was the grinding of the boat as it was pulled further apart. Another tentacle reached the stern behind him and squeezed, and he was caught at the top level above the water when the engine died. The pillars that held up the pilothouse fell away like a yanked wishbone, and Ianto tucked himself into ball to avoid being hit in a critical place with wood or glass. The boat had been effectively thirded, and he grabbed for anything that he could think would stay afloat, then remembered the netting bag as the pilothouse toppled into the water, and a tentacle was finally able to find him, now that the infrared masking abilities of the hull had been negated. He rolled away from it and crashed into the open sea.

Ianto's body ached, there was an indescribable sharp pain in his leg, and a glance at it told him that he was bleeding. He fell into the waves and cast about, spluttering and scrabbling onto the last part of the stern, which seemed to still have some buoyancy. His fingers tangled in the netting slung about his shoulders. He tried to replay the moment when the crates had fallen from the deck, but all he could see was Jack tumbling into the creature's mouth.

He was dead (sort of), but Ianto was going to be dead (for sure). His fingers tied themselves up, and he wasn't paying attention when the tentacle, a thin one, wrapped around his ankle and yanked, pulling so hard he worried that his leg would come from the socket. If his jacket hadn't been caught on the wooden shards of the splintered deck, Ianto would have gone flying, sucked right under the water and into some waiting mouth.

Mouths.

Ianto finally found what he wanted, flipped the remote open to reveal the red button that all but promised salvation, and glanced one more time at the creature about twenty feet away in the water, its limbs searching the area around it for anything it could dismantle or consume. He tried to remember which crates had held what, but anyway, it had eaten most if not all of them. Its main mouth curved up in a fake grin, just the anatomy of all the mouths, actually; how cruel that something this horrible would seem so happy. Ianto wondered where Jack was and if Gwen would ever forgive him. Then the thing really tugged on his foot and he almost lost his grip.

"Smile, you sonofabitch," Ianto whispered, pressing the button as soon as it fell into his grasp, the tentacle around his ankle yanking him further off the wreckage.

The explosion was deafening; even though most of it was underwater, it didn't stay there, and Ianto covered his ears as he looped one elbow through a rail on the gunwale to keep himself from being pulled under. It seemed as if all the water in a quarter-mile radius had shot into the air, reverse waterfalls, but filled with chunks of meat and teeth like shrapnel and three-foot lengths of tentacles and arms bursting in all directions. Something sharp caught Ianto in the shoulder, and he knew he'd been hit by something, but that it wasn't attached to anything living, so he could deal with it as soon as his heart stopped pounding and he was sure the thing was dead or dying.

The water in the air had to come back down, and it did in a cascade. The boat section that Ianto was perched on began to sink in earnest, and he had to scramble for something floatational to grab on to, finally managing to grab the lid of a fish cooler and some nylon rope, then laid on it, pulling the tooth from his shoulder and screaming, finally, finally, and the water around him bloomed black and oily. He sprawled on the white floating lid and sobbed into the plastic, fingers clutching the detonator switch as if it could ever save him again.

THURSDAY MORNING, CONSIDERABLY BRIGHTER, BUT EVERYTHING SMELLS LIKE FISH:

He didn't know how long he'd been floating, but Ianto watched the streaks of red fade as the sun rose, and knew that he'd been clutching the three life preservers he'd lashed to the cooler lid for hours. The boat was pretty much gone, and all around him floated pieces of fat and flesh and other things he didn't want to think about. It occurred to him that it wasn't probably a good idea to be out there in a veritable chum pit because there were other things that were just as dangerous to him that might fancy the idea of a mile-long floating smorgasbord.

But. Jack was nowhere to be seen. Ianto wasn't sure if Jack was dead, or simply elsewhere. What if he was dead inside the body of the creature, a part of it that hadn't exploded and had simply sunk to the bottom of the ocean? What if he was some of the pieces bumping into Ianto right now in the water?

How did Jack reform? Did Jack reform? He had to, right? He couldn't die.

Ianto wondered if it would be painful to cobble oneself together from pieces, raw and bloody in essentially a saltwater bath. His shoulder was killing him, and that was just a stab wound.

Something hit his ankle and he jerked, curling his legs towards his stomach. He wondered what part of him would hurt the worst to have bitten, and decided that the belly would be a bad place. He could keep that protected, hanging from the flotsam and curled like a ball. Once he'd read that anti shark bags on boats were shaped like blobs because sharks weren't interested in things that didn't wave about or have limbs that were easy to bite. He could be a ball. He was tired, but fear of being devoured from below overcame the exhaustion.

He didn't know how long he drifted, but it had to have been another hour, shivering and wondering why his lips were so fucking dry in the middle of an ocean. The sun wasn't all the way up in the centre if the sky, but it was getting there, when there was a shudder in the water and he jerked away from it.

Jack's head and shoulders broke the surface and he let out a huge shuddering gasp, arms flailing. Ianto shielded his face from the splashing even as he steered himself closer. Jack was covered in oily ichor, black and greasy like motor oil, just like everything else, but when he opened his eyes and blinked, scrubbing with one fist, it didn't take long for him to spot Ianto and wave a hand.

Ianto paddled his jerry-rigged raft and they closed the distance. Jack grabbed on and closed his eyes for a second, as if he were concentrating on breathing. Ianto simply treaded water and waited for his system to reboot.

"I think I'm perfectly within my rights to say this but, holy shit that was trippy," Jack gasped. His face was black, and he scrubbed at it with his free hand. Ianto blinked rapidly and wondered if he were imagining things.

Jack finally washed enough of the dead creature's blood from his skin that he felt satisfied and he looked at Ianto, eyes running over the parts of him above water. His eyes found the ragged bloody edges of Ianto's shirt where the tooth had cut him and his fingers touched it experimentally. "Are you all right?"

Ianto surged forward and threw one arm around Jack, pulling him in and pressing the side of his head against Jack's, feeling the movement of Jack's muscles against his body, feeling the other man's arms come around him, and dear Jesus, Ianto didn't like to think that he was overly sentimental, but if he could have cried at that moment, he might have. At this point, though, he was rattled and most likely in shock, and he figured that later, after they were in a better position, he'd have a good cathartic bawl at the near miss they'd had.

Jack's arms tightened around his chest and Ianto felt the press of Jack's lips on his neck before he spoke. "Hey there, it take more than being eaten to kill me, you know that, right?" His fingers moved along the back of Ianto's head and Ianto knew they were feeling for injuries. Jack at his most affectionate was still a soldier. Ianto almost let go of the preservers in favor of clinging to him. Foolish to think that Jack could bring them in. Nonetheless, he rubbed his cheek against Jack's, feeling oil and scum and stubble under his face, a reminder that he was alive, they were both alive, and they could go home how.

"I see you have a floatational device here," Jack murmured. "I bet if we started now we could be out of this oil slick and halfway to shore in an hour." He pulled back and glanced around, as if trying to get their bearings. "That way," he pointed. "If we're lucky, Gwen'll be out with helicopters to investigate the explosion and they'll pick us up."

Ianto let go of Jack and reoriented himself, draping his arms on one end of the cobbled together raft. "Right. I'm starving. Are you starving?"

Jack pounded his chest and let out a belch. "I swallowed about fifteen gallons of salt water." He tilted his head and settled his arms on the other end of the raft and they started kicking. "I bet I could eat. Eggs sound good. Maybe pineapple." He smiled. "It was on my cup last night and I've been thinking about it ever since then."

Ianto snorted. "He lives in a pineapple under the sea."

Jack glanced at him and they started to propel the raft forward in the water. All around them, the gulls swooped and screeched. An albatross landed a few feet away and dove down, probably looking for some prize meat. In for a treat; he was sitting in it. Ianto nervously watched for the telltale fins of sharks. He didn't know if there were any around here, or if they would be interested in him and Jack, but he would rather not find out.

"Who would live in a pineapple?" Jack argued. "I would think a shell or something would be better suited."

Ianto shook his head. "You're thinking about this too much," he said. "But now I want pineapple."

Jack's fingers must have still been a little oily, because he slipped on the preserver and his face fell under the water before he scrabbled back onto the foam and clutched at it. In the meantime, their little craft had become lopsided and was taking them towards the left, along the shore instead of towards.

"Hey, what day is this?" he asked after spitting out a bunch of water.

Ianto squinted at the sun. "It's Friday," he answered. "Eh, it's Thursday, I think."

"The tide is with us," Jack offered feebly. One of his feet hit Ianto's leg.

Ianto pumped his legs faster, then realised that overworking himself couldn't possibly get him there any faster. He'd take his time, and maybe Gwen would fly in on a helicopter and pick them up. "Keep kickin'," he said to Jack, and then, "You know, I used to hate the water."

Jack laughed a bit and the float bobbed. "And now?"

"Oh, now I fucking hate the water."

"I can't imagine why."

END