Unexpected Gifts

[aviv_b_artwork]

TITLE:  Unexpected Gifts
Author: Aviv_b
RATING:  PG
CHARACTERS:  Ianto/Jack, Gwen/Rhys, Tosh, Owen, Other Canon Characters 
DISCLAIMER:  Not mine; Aunty B's and RTD's
WORDS: ~ 11300 (Mini Bang)
Written for  tw_classic_bb
Beta: My incomparable co-worker LJ.

SUMMARY:  The team is forced to confront long held secrets. Secrets about themselves, their families, and Torchwood all collide after an encounter with the Faeries. Will these painful revelations help them to forge a closer bond or tear them irreparably apart.

A/N:  While this story references canon events, I’ve moved them around in time significantly.  None of the team know that Jack is immortal.


Part 3

Spring came to Cardiff and with it came changes for the team. Gwen spent most of her free time working on her wedding plans and Owen was certain that Jack and Ianto had something going on between them. Not a relationship, more like friends with benefits. Fine by him; if it kept Ianto from bringing any more threats into the Hub and kept Jack from being disagreeable, they could shag like bunnies for all Owen cared.  Some things didn’t change. Owen still spent most of his evenings out on the pull and Tosh was completely immersed in working on her rift predictions.

Then Ianto spotted some funny weather patterns and when Jack awoke from his dream about the dead soldiers and rose petals, he knew immediately what it meant. Faeries!

Not long after, he learned that his former lover Estelle was lecturing on the creatures. He dragged Tosh away from her computer programs to go with him to the lecture. 

“A lecture on faeries?” Tosh repeated dubiously. “Like Tinkerbell?”

“Not at all like Tinkerbell,” Jack replied. “They’re mischievous at the best of times, dangerous, even deadly when they feel threatened or don’t get what they want.”

After the lecture, Tosh wanted to get a closer look at Estelle’s photographs. Jack smiled and told her he could arrange for that.  Tosh was caught by surprise when Jack introduced Estelle as an ‘almost relative.’

The handsome older woman laughed.  “You really do take after your grandfather.  It’s a shame you didn’t get to know him. He was so suave and sophisticated. But he was lost in the final days of that tragic war. ”

If Tosh was confused by this, she was stupefied when back at Estelle’s house; Estelle began to reminisce about Jack’s grandfather. They’d looked at Estelle’s pictures and listened politely to Estelle’s beliefs that the faeries were benign creatures. Jack tried to discourage this view, telling her that they were dangerous and she could get hurt. She’d laughed and offered them some drinks, which they had politely declined. She’d had two martinis when she began to speak of more personal things.

“I was thinking about him the other night. We only had one New Year’s Eve together. It was awful. Horrible supper club, I didn’t have a nice dress, so I borrowed this hideous frock from my sister. It was two sizes too big and a very unflattering color, and my shoes didn’t match it at all, but your grandfather, bless him, made me feel like I was the most beautiful and special woman in the world.”

She sighed and showed them a picture she had on a sofa table. “You look so much like him, whenever I see you, it takes me a moment to realize that it’s not him at after all,” she said handing the picture to Jack and Tosh.

The picture was of Estelle and a man looking exactly like Jack. Across the bottom of the photo, ‘December 31, 1943’ was inscribed. Toshiko realized that it was probably taken on the New Year’s Eve Estelle had spoken about. Estelle confirmed this laughing. “Yes, they had a photographer there and Jack insisted that we have our picture taken. I didn’t want to, I knew I looked a fright but Jack said that we should have a memory of our first New Year’s together. His words turned out to be prophetic. He was drafted within months into a highly classified intelligence position. I’d get an occasional cryptic letter and then they stopped. It was only after the war that I learned that he had been captured in Italy and executed as a spy.”

“It’s the only photograph I have of him. To think you found his diary, read about me and tracked me down so many years later. And then taking the time to check up on your grandfather’s former lover; it never ceases to amaze me.”

Jack barely had the car in gear for the drive back to the Hub before Tosh was peppering him with questions. “Who was that man in the photograph? That can’t be you can it?  But that story she told was almost identical to the story you told me. How could your grandfather be here during World War II if you are American?”

Jack just smiled and shrugged. “We Harknesses get around a lot.” Tosh had many more questions to ask but when saw the look of pain and sadness on Jack’s face, she decided against it.

***

Sadly, Jack was right about the faeries. Estelle ended up dead and the team ended up bargaining for the life of a little girl named Jasmine.

“You can’t just give her to them,” Gwen whispered in horror to Jack.

“They’ll destroy the world Gwen, if we don’t. What would you have me do?” he said as they confronted the faeries in the forest.

To the faeries, Jack bluffed, “You can’t have her, ask for something else.”

“What have you to offer us? Another to take her place?”

“I offer myself,” Jack stated calmly.

“We have no use for a man not of this world, but you bring others that might do.”  The faerie looked at the Torchwood team and laughed.

“Two of you have the blood of a Chosen in your veins. Would one of you take her place?” the faerie said indicating Jasmine.

The team looked at each other in confusion. Ianto stepped forward. “I will go.”

The faeries buzzed about this offer. One faerie came close to Ianto and searched his face. “Very pretty and brave. But unsuitable. We almost never take a man child. And you are too old and too corrupted by the world. I see great horror in your eyes. Metal and fire,” she paused as she felt excruciating emotions move through her, “and the violent loss of many dear to you. One particularly close and violent death whose pain cannot be removed. Unsuitable, step back.”

Ianto moved back.

“Will the other not step forward?” When no one moved the faerie pointed her finger at Gwen. “What about you, child? Do you not know about the Chosen blood you carry?”

Gwen was so frightened she couldn’t move. She shook her head ‘no’ violently.

“Come here,” the faerie growled and Gwen felt herself propelled forward. The faerie was so close Gwen could feel her rancid breath on her face. She was examined in complete silence. Finally the faerie spoke.

“Woman child. You are older than we would like, and while you are not an innocent, you have not been exposed to much of the evil this world has to offer. You are a lesser choice but since you would be paying the debt owed by your mother, we would find this substitution acceptable.”

She turned to Jack. “Do you give me this woman as a substitute for the child?”

“I cannot,” Jack replied. “Her life is her own, and it is her choice. If you take her unwillingly, she will be of no use to you. We both know that.”

The faerie hissed in frustration. How she hated this not-of-this-world-man.  She would have taken the dark haired woman without her consent for spite as well as the girl if only to defeat this unnatural man standing before her. Now she could not.

She held her hand out to Gwen. “Come with us child. You will live forever with us. Immortality, that is what is given to a Chosen.” Gwen was crying. She didn’t want to go, but a little girl would perish if she didn’t.  Before Gwen could speak, Ianto interrupted.

“That’s a lie,” Ianto spit out. “If she was a child it might be true. But even then it doesn’t always work, does it? And when it doesn’t, you return them broken to their kin.  That’s what will surely happen to Gwen if she goes with you. She’s not a child and she’s not a true Chosen, but you would drive her mad in order to preserve your pride.”

The faeries laughed.  “A shame, if we had found you sooner, we would have taken you man-child.”  She looked at Gwen. ”Then we’ll have to take the child won’t we.” When she saw Gwen hesitate, the faerie continued, “Do you object? Do you offer yourself in her place?”

Gwen couldn’t look at the hideous creature before her. She shook her head.

“Speak child,” the faerie shrieked. “Speak so all may hear and all may know your choice.”

“No,” Gwen said in a whisper. She looked up and made eye contact with the faerie. “No,” she said louder, “I’ll not go with you,” she said and then lowered her eyes to hide her shame.

The woods echoed with laughter, and when Gwen looked up the faeries and the child Jasmine had disappeared.

The team walked back to the SUV each in their own thoughts. Between the story from Estelle and this afternoon’s confrontation with the faeries, Tosh’s brain was roiling in confusion; everything she knew about Jack, Ianto and Gwen had been turned upside down. She looked over and saw the bewildered look on Owen’s face. “Well at least he’s feeling the same as I am,” she thought.

Gwen was still crying, between the little girl being taken and new revelations about her birth mother she felt shattered. Was her mother a Chosen? Why had she refused to go with the faeries? She hadn’t wanted to know anything about Joanna Cooper, but if she didn’t get answers to these questions, she knew she’d never have peace.

Ianto walked quietly behind the rest of the group. He always knew there was more to his mother’s story then he had been told. But he doubted that his father would have known anything about the faeries, and his sister wasn’t a Chosen or she would have been long gone. He was furious. They had taken his mother and turned her mad. And there was nothing he could do about it and no older relatives still alive to question. His mother was dead and that was the end to it.

Jack had known when he hired both Ianto and Gwen that there was something special about them. He could sense it, but couldn’t identify what it was. He certainly never expected to discover that they were descended from Chosen children. But it made sense. He’d never seen anyone break through retcon faster than Gwen. And Ianto and his idactic memory, remembering everything he ever read or saw in the archives. Twentieth century humans didn’t normally have those abilities.

Out loud he remarked, “You two are going to have some explaining to do when we get back to the Hub.

Owen walked ahead of the group. “I need a drink. Several in fact,” he mumbled.

“I’ll join you,” Tosh said catching up to him.

Part 4   

The team gathered the next day in the conference room.  Jack stood at the head of the table while the others sat nervously waiting for him to speak.

“We are a small team; our safety relies on our being able to trust each other completely. I never should have allowed this to happen. We are going to sit here and tell the truth about ourselves, all of us, until we are confident that there is nothing left to hide.”

Tosh shifted uneasily in her seat. Jack had promised her that no one would know about her imprisonment by Unit, but maybe Owen or Ianto had done worse.

Owen volunteered to go first. He was a bit hung over, and he just wanted to get this meeting done with. The team listened patiently as he told the story about Katie and the alien that had invaded her brain.

They were shocked when he wiped a few tears from his eyes saying, “Yeah, I swore I’d never get involved with anyone again. Especially anyone who worked here.”

No one missed the quick glance he gave Tosh. “I keep my distance so if one of you gets killed I will be able to go on. I can’t face losing someone else I care about to aliens.”

 He paused as he thought about what he had just said. “Truth is, I already care too much about all of you. Despite my best efforts, you’ve made me give a damn about you.”

He smiled at Ianto. “Even you, Tea Boy.”

Tosh went next. Gwen was the only one that didn’t know Tosh’s story. Jack of course knew, and Owen had pieced together much of it from her medical records. Tosh had confided to Ianto during his suspension establishing the kind of bond between them that Jack hoped to forge between the whole team.

Gwen listened to Tosh explain about her mother being used to blackmail her into committing espionage against the Ministry of Defense. The rest of the team waited anxiously to see how she’d respond.

“I would have done the same thing, Tosh,” Gwen said. 

Owen laughed. “What? I would have,” Gwen insisted. Suddenly it dawned on her why Owen was so amused. “Okay, if I knew anything about mechanical drawings, or what a sonic modulator was, I would have. I’d do anything to protect my family.”

“I have no doubt that,” Jack said. “So you’re next then. And remember, Gwen, there’ll be no more secrets between us.”

Gwen realized that she had put herself into an awkward position. She really didn’t want to share her story with the team, and she didn’t think her parents would be happy, but the team was like a family, wasn’t it?  And keeping secrets never turned out well, she silently mused.

“I had the most normal childhood I can imagine. I’m an only child and maybe my parents spoiled me a bit, and they were sort of overprotective, but I thought that’s how everyone’s family was.”

Ianto rolled his eyes disdainfully.

“Well I did,” Gwen protested.  “But there was a secret my parents were keeping which I only found out about when Rhys and I went to visit them at New Year’s.”  She told them about her birth mother, her parents really being her aunt and uncle and of her birth mother’s eventual disappearance.

“Do you reckon she went with the faeries?” Ianto asked with intense concern.

“I don’t know,” Gwen replied. “I don’t think my parents looked for her all that diligently, and twenty five or thirty years ago how far would you really have to go to disappear? People do it all the time. The Cardiff police have found missing person’s from as far away as Australia and as close as London. A new identity wasn’t that hard to create then; there weren’t electronic data bases and computers to look for missing people.”

“Or she could have been taken by the faeries though I would think once your mother had you, she would no longer be considered suitable,” Ianto said thinking aloud.

Jack nodded. “I agree. What does your gut tell you, Gwen?”

Gwen smiled but her heart felt heavy. “Honestly, given that she got pregnant at fourteen and seemed to be totally irresponsible when she was almost sixteen, I’d bet she ran off.”

Gwen felt something tug at the back of her mind, something her mother had said. Suddenly all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place.

“She was pregnant! That’s got to be it. My mother said she was sick every morning and fine by the afternoon. And while Mam didn’t say, it sounded like she did not approve of the girls she went into town with.  I’ll bet my parents suspected and that’s why they didn’t look for her. They just washed their hands of her. Sad when you think of it.”

“Or maybe she ran off with the father of the baby,” Ianto interjected. At fourteen she couldn’t get married, at sixteen she could have with her parent’s consent.”

“That makes sense,” Gwen agreed, “she could have gone with her new man to my Tad’s parents, told them she was pregnant and they signed the papers so they could marry. I’ll bet they were relieved that it wasn’t going to be their problem or reflect on them anymore. If that’s so, I’m certain they never told anyone, not even my father. They both were gone by the time I was ten, so no one to ask unfortunately.”

Ianto had a look of amusement on his face. “My Mam got pregnant with my sister when she was not much older than your mam and she and my Tad had to get married. They always said that Rhi was a bit premature, but I don’t think anyone was really fooled. And just to keep the family tradition going, Rhi was already pregnant when she married Johnny.”

Ianto continued to tell the team about his mother. All he remembered was that she had always seemed a bit strange but also wonderful to him. She told fantastical stories about faerie folk, and other ancient spirits, but she had loved both her children fiercely and had taken good care of them. 

“Her face would just glow as she spoke about magical creatures and then it was like she’d be coming out of trance. She'd look around and say, ‘where’s the time gone. I’ve got to get the washing done or your Tad will have a cow.’”  Ianto smiled at the memory.

Ianto recalled her disappearance for a few days when he was six or seven. His father had searched frantically for her but she was gone without a trace. She reappeared five days later completely changed. She was talking to invisible people and hearing voices and wouldn’t let anyone but Ianto come near her.

“Don’t you hear them Ianto, try hard and you will.” Ianto shook has head. “I told her I didn’t and she would start to mumble in some strange Welsh dialect that none of us could understand.”

“It seemed like it went on this way forever, but as I reflect, it was probably just a couple of months. I came home from school one day and Dad and Rhiannon called me over and told me that Mam wasn’t well and was in the hospital. They never would tell me what was wrong with her, but it wasn’t long before the other kids began to tease me about my mam being a witch, or a mad woman.”

“I couldn’t tell Tad, he’d started drinking and if we upset him he’d wallop you good. He eventually lost his job and went on the dole. He started drinking even more heavily and Rhi and I were terrified of him. I think about a year later, Tad said he had heard from the hospital that Mam had died. He had her cremated and her ashes returned to her parents.”

Ianto concluded his story. Rhiannon had escaped by getting married. She was under eighteen and at first their father refused to sign the papers. Even when Rhiannon had told him she was pregnant, her father had continued to refuse. Ianto remembered several shouting matches between Johnny and his tad. Finally, Mr. Jones relented and allowed them to marry on the condition that they took Ianto with them.

“My sister did the best she could. But being pregnant and stuck caring for me could not have been the fulfillment of any newlywed’s dream. I left a little after I turned sixteen.”

Jack’s senses were on full alert. He could tell that there was something else. Something Ianto didn’t want to reveal. “Why did you leave your sister’s home?”

Ianto thought about what he was going to say next. He had never told anyone what had happened. It wasn’t related to the faeries, but he reckoned that this was his one chance to just get it out in the open. That way he could never be accused of holding back from the team. “I got caught with a boy, you know, uh, fooling around. My sister and especially Johnny were not best pleased.”

“I’m guessing that’s the understatement of the century,” Owen snarked.

“So you heard the shouting all the way in London, did you?” Ianto countered.

Jack smiled but inside he couldn’t help but thinking about how much unnecessary grief humans of this time made for themselves with all the quaint little categories they created for their relationships.  “But what about your mother, Ianto? Did you ever learn what was the matter with her?”

“Even a junior archivist at Torchwood One had some pretty amazing access to public records. She had been hospitalized at Providence Park and diagnosed with schizophrenia.  The official records said that she had committed suicide through asphyxiation. I dug deeper and found out the details but until this week I didn’t know the significance of them. She had been particularly happy the day of her death. Told everyone that her friends were coming to get her. She was found dead the next morning….her mouth stuffed with rose petals.”

***

As astounding as Jack’s story was, after Ianto’s revelation it was almost a bit anti-climactic.  He didn’t tell them everything of course, but by the end of the conversation they knew that he was from the fifty-first century, couldn’t stay dead (though he didn’t know why), and that he was ‘stuck’ on twenty-first century earth.

When Gwen tried to ask him about his family, he dodged the issue. “I had parents and a brother. Not a tentacle on any of them,” he said smiling.

“Not much else to tell, Gwen, left home at sixteen to seek my fame and fortune and ended up stranded in Cardiff in the mid-nineteenth century.”

“Well that explains a lot,” Tosh thought. “Except for...”…“How did you get here, did you fall through the rift?”

Jack pointed to his vortex manipulator. “I can use this to travel through time, but it’s broken now. So you are all just stuck with me for the time being.” He wisely omitted anything about traveling with the Doctor or working for the Time Agency,

“But wouldn’t travel through time risk creating a paradox or possibly changing the time line?”  Ianto asked.

“In the future a small group of people will be allowed to travel through time under very strict conditions. Unfortunately that’s all I can say, otherwise there really is a risk of creating a paradox.”

No matter how they pressed him, Jack wouldn’t reveal any additional information about his past.

Owen was clearly annoyed by this. “Oi, you said no secrets, but I guess that doesn’t apply to you. We come here and spill our guts and you just give us a few facts about yourself and that’s supposed to be okay?”

Before Jack could answer, Ianto jumped in. “It’s probably better if he doesn’t. Changing the time line is a serious business. Naturally we wouldn’t know if it happened, but I’d suggest if you don’t want to wake up tomorrow and find yourself  living on an Earth that’s been subjugated by aliens, that you leave it alone.”

“Speaking of aliens, you,” Owen said pointing at Jack, “are getting a full DNA screening done when we’re finished here. If there’s anything different about you, I have to know so I can treat any injuries properly.”

Jack smiled. “As far as I know I’m one hundred percent human, but I imagine there’ll have been some small genetic mutations that have occurred over the millennia….most of which your equipment won’t be able to identify, thankfully.”  

“And you two,” Owen said nodding at Ianto and Gwen, “are also getting screened. We’ll see just what ‘having the blood of the Chosen’ really means.

Owen was disappointed when the genetic profiles of his teammates failed to reveal anything unexpected. His briefing a few days later was a bit of a let down for the team as well.

“We’ll do Harkness first,” Owen said as he shuffled the papers he was holding. Looking at Jack he continued. “I’m a bit surprised to say that you are almost certainly one hundred percent human.  There are some very subtle changes on two chromosomes, but our technology, even our gene sequencer from the thirtieth century, doesn’t explain what they are. Might be due to some type of genetic drift in the human population as they spread out into space, or even a founder effect if the population that settled your planet or the planet they came from had a limited gene pool.”

Jack shrugged.  “No idea, but your hypothesis seems reasonable.”

Jack was pretty sure that one of the changes was due to a vaccine given to his many great grandparents to protect against the Draconian plague that swept through the Andromeda Galaxy in the late fortieth century. It was the first vaccine that not only conferred immunity through changes in the recipient’s DNA, but also changed the structure of mitochondrial DNA so that the immunity would be passed on to the descendants of inoculated women.

It had taken twenty years to develop the vaccine, in the meantime over fifty million humans died. By Jack’s own time, it was considered as crude as Dr. Jenner injecting cowpox infection into patients in order to avoid smallpox.  Knowledge of this vaccine would change future history irreparably. The Time Agency’s first rule of information dispersion was ingrained in him; never, ever, reveal anything that could alter the life or death of whole populations. Some secrets were meant to be kept.

Owen waited to see if Jack had anything to add and when it was obvious that Jack wasn’t going to add anything to his short statement, he continued with his report.

“Right, so Gwen and Ianto,” he said smiling. “Your blood is perfectly ordinary. You are both blood type O-positive which is the most common in Wales. Interestingly enough your genetic screens showed that you both have an unusual mitochondrial DNA profile. Now this doesn’t tell you how closely you are related or anything like that, but just that you are descended from a common female relative about two thousand years ago. Only a small group of Welsh, probably about 2% have this profile. Its most commonly found in populations around Italy, and tends to decrease as you move further away from there so geneticists think it’s a remnant of Roman soldiers who were in Britain in the first centuries of the Common Era. 

Gwen snickered. “Oi Cousin Ianto, going to join us at the next family reunion?”

Ianto grinned. “I believe you should be addressing me as Tiberius Flavius Iantius, though I’ll settle for Caesar, if you’d prefer.”

As Gwen started to retort, Owen interrupted. “Hang on, not done. Your Y-chromosomal DNA, which comes from the father’s lineage, also shows that you are related. From the analysis I’ve completed I can say with complete certainty that the closest relation you share is not thousands of years ago, but within the last twenty generations. So somewhere in the last three hundred to five hundred years, you share at least one male ancestor.”

Both Ianto and Gwen burst out laughing. “I think that probably includes just about everybody whose family is pure Welsh today,” Gwen said rolling her eyes.

“Oi! Gwen do you know what that means?” Ianto said trying to stop laughing.

“We’re both related to Banana Boat,” she replied. Ianto burst out laughing again and while no one else at the table had any idea what they were talking about the laughter proved to be contagious.

“What’s this all …” Tosh started to ask but was laughing so hard she couldn’t finish the sentence.

“Banana Boat, is that a person? Your kidding,” Jack said as he tried to catch his breath.

“He’s…Rhys…friend….snrk…a…total…hehehe…git,” Ianto barely managed to say.

Jack looked at the group sternly. “Well if were finished here…”

He never got to finish as the group broke into laughter again.

Finally, Owen stood up. He had a somber look on his face. “Oi, you Welsh are daft, every last one of you.” He turned around and walked out of the conference room.

The group looked shocked. Then they heard Owen as he walked away. “Hee hee hee, Banana Boat, that’s a good one.”

As the team burst into laughter one last time, Jack realized that this had been the perfect team bonding experience.

***

In the weeks and months that followed, Jack noticed that the team had grown much closer. Making them reveal their secrets had allowed them all to stop worrying about being judged by their team mates. They got along so well that by consensus they had made Wednesday nights, rift activity allowing, pub quiz night with Rhys and the infamous Banana Boat joining them. Jack would allow himself to be dragged along occasionally, but mostly he was content to hear about their evening out at breakfast the following day.

He smiled as they sat around the conference room telling Jack about their collective brilliance in winning their fourth quiz night in a row. This was exactly what he had hoped for. So what if he hadn’t told them everything about himself, they seemed more confident in his authority since he confided that he was from the future.

His thoughts were interrupted as Owen began to tease Tosh. “Oi, did I hear correctly that you went over to Banana Boat’s flat last Sunday? Did you get an up close and personal look at his...uh…banana?”

Tosh rolled her eyes at Owen’s crudeness. “You know very well that I went over to help him with some computer problems he was having. He must have had a half a dozen viruses on his hard drive. I’ve never seen anyone who is less careful about downloading.” She waited just a moment. “And besides, a lady never kisses and tells,” she added slyly.

The rest of the team pretended to be shocked.

“Routing Skype through half a dozen proxy servers isn’t all that hard, but fortunately Banana Boat isn’t bright enough to ask too many questions. I sent him out to get us dinner, and while he was gone I contacted my mother. I reckon he’ll be having problems with his computer at fairly regular intervals until my five year parole is up.”

“Look at her face she’s thinking about him,” Ianto said nodding at Tosh. Tosh was startled out of her musing, looked up and blushed.  “Yeah, Owen, you’re right, she’s definitely sweet on him.”  Ianto shook his head. Tosh and Banana Boat, he would have never have thought about them hitting it off.

“Okay, kids, I think we’ve covered all the important developments of the last few days,” Jack said effectively putting an end to breakfast.

Gwen and Tosh headed back to their work stations while Owen and Jack headed over to the medical bay. Ianto went down to the archives as he usually did on quiet mornings.

“I was poking around a bit more with Gwen’s and Ianto’s DNA samples,” Owen told Jack. “Turns out they are a bit more closely related than I first thought.”

“Yeah?” Jack was very curious.

“No more than second degree relatives. That means first cousins or half-siblings.”

“Well they must be cousins; they couldn’t be half-siblings.”

“Actually,” Owen interrupted, “if you look at the time line, they could very well have the same mother. Gwen’s birth mother left when Gwen was about a year old. Let’s say she did get pregnant a few months before she left. I took the liberty of looking up Ianto’s sister’s date of birth. Her name is in his file and it wasn’t hard to find her. Rhiannon Davies was born about seven months after Gwen turned one year old.”

“That makes sense in some other ways. Children taken by the faeries have ranged from about seven to fifteen years of age. She had probably been told by the faeries that they were coming, but when they found out she was a mother, and worse, was pregnant again, they couldn’t take her.  The only question is why they returned ten years later and destroyed her mental capabilities.”

The two men spoke some more but couldn’t agree on a reason for the faeries taking revenge so many years later. They did agree on one thing; that Owen would destroy the test results and neither of them would ever say anything to Gwen or Ianto.

“It could throw off the whole balance of the team,” Jack worried.

“Not to mention how insufferable Gwen would be in trying to protect her little brother,” Owen added. “Ianto would go bonkers if Gwen tried to make him one of the family.”

“Some secrets are best kept that way,” Jack concluded.

***

Back her desk, Gwen was looking through bridal magazines. She wondered if she would ever get the nerve to ask Ianto to take a look of some photographs that her mother had sent her of Joanna.  Gwen had been startled to see that she really didn’t have much resemblance to her birth mother.  She knew she looked a lot like her father and his mother, but she never imagined that her father and aunt (or was that uncle and mother) would look so different. Her mother’s face was a bit rounder than her own and she had light brown hair and blue-grey eyes.

It was Joanna’s eyes that first made her think that she and Ianto were more closely related than Owen had speculated. They were exactly the same color as Ianto’s. She chided herself at the time realizing that lots of people probably had similar eyes. But her curiosity got the best of her and she started looking for images of Ianto’s family. She couldn’t find any of his mother, but an image of his sister from her primary school graduation made her gasp. Except for her brown eyes, Rhiannon was nearly a twin to Joanna at the same age.

As much as she wanted to ask him, something told her not to pursue this, not yet at least. She had a wedding to plan, and she had to think about her parents’ feelings as well as Ianto and his sister’s.  “No, some things are best left alone,” she said reinforcing her original conclusion.  She turned the page of the bridal magazine to see the most hideous mother-of-the-bride dress she had ever seen. Light peach chiffon dress with large purple tulips the size of her head, it was ghastly. Gwen snorted. Her mother was much too fashionable to be caught dead in something like that.

“Oi, Tosh, come here, I think I found the perfect dress for Mother Williams.”

***

Down in the archives, Ianto smiled as he switched off the audio feed. He had planted nearly microscopic listening devices all over the Hub when he was hiding Lisa in the basement. That way he always knew when the Team was coming back in or were looking for him so he never got caught by surprise. He had never removed them; the team didn’t like to bother him and this way he could appear at just the right moment with coffee or a helpful word or anything else they needed. Owen had told him more than once that his turning up unexpectedly at just the right time was more than a little creepy.

Nothing that Jack and Owen discussed surprised him. He had worked out the time-line the evening after they shared their secrets months ago. He was able to locate an old school picture of Johanna Cooper and she was the spitting image of Rhiannon. And he had heard other relatives remark on how much his sister resembled his Mam.

He really didn’t want to intrude at this time into Gwen’s family life, it sounded like there was plenty of drama without a long lost half sibling showing up. Though maybe, he thought it was time to see if his relationship with his sister couldn’t be repaired.  He could talk to her about this… “I must be daft, she can’t handle my life, how would she handle being told her mother was a Chosen One by the faeries and they’re what made Mam go mad.”  No some things really were better left alone. Nothing to be gained by this other than making his life more complicated.

***

Back in the medical bay, Owen finished up deleting the files from the memory stick he had stored them on. He might not be a computer genius like Tosh and Ianto but he was smart enough to realize that Ianto’s ability to predict what they needed had to be due to something tangible. And if Tosh, having swept the Hub numerous times for any bugs and Mainframe for any unauthorized back doors, had found nothing, than Jones was a sneakier bastard than anyone knew.

He printed out one small file before he deleted it from the memory stick. Maybe some day it would be time to tell Ianto, and maybe Gwen too. But not now. Not when Ianto finally seemed to be moving on from Lisa and Canary Wharf. And Gwen was starting a new life with Rhys, a wanker in Owen’s opinion, but still, it would turn her world upside down.

For now, he would have to be the keeper of the most shocking secret of all. Johanna Cooper later known as Nerys Jones wasn't dead. She was alive and well and living in London.