“Ianto…”

            “Leave it, Rhys.”

            “No. I need to say this before… well, whatever. I’m sorry. I remember some things and not others… and if I’m going to lose it all again this is my only chance of saying it.”

            “You think we are going to retcon you again?”

            I shifted, trying to make myself a little more comfortable. Whatever they had given me was wearing off, and a dull ache was starting to spread across my shoulder and down my arm. He noticed and came over to adjust the pillows behind me so I could sit up a bit more and ease the pressure.

            “Thanks. About the retcon,” I thought about it a bit more, “I would do it if I were you. Less trouble in the long run.”

            “Maybe, although circumstances have changed. After our most recent encounter with the Daleks, a lot of people have a better grasp on reality.”

            Andy stood up. “In any case, it’s Jack’s decision and he’s a sentimental sod when it comes to family. Sit down before you drop, Ianto. You’ve been going nonstop for a week. I’ll go help Martha.”

            Ianto sank on the vacated chair. “Thanks, Andy.”

            I took a good look at him. Andy was right. Ianto looked just about knackered. Underneath the exhaustion, however, he was still the most beautiful man I’d ever seen. Banana Boat used to say that the only reason regular blokes liked Ianto was because Ianto thought of himself as a regular bloke.

            “I wonder what happened to him.”

            “Who?”

            “Banana Boat.”

            “Copper. Splott beat. Does rather a good job, actually. Asks about you once in a while.”

            “I’ll have to call him one day, if…”

            “Oh, don’t be such a pillock!” He waved his hand at me impatiently. “You’re not going to be retconned. Jack wouldn’t have it in the first place. And besides we might, no, we will, need your help over this.”

            I heard his words, but my eyes were distracted by a flash of gold. I grabbed his hand and stared at the braided band on his finger.

            “Whoa. So you and Captain Gorgeous made it legal, then?”

            “Three years ago. He insisted.”

            My God, the man was blushing!

            “I’m glad for you both. Gwen would have been over the moon. Once she got past her crush on Jack, and yes, I knew all about it, all she did was worry about you, what with Jack having, well, a reputation no mother would want for her child’s intended...”

            We grinned at each other like loons.  It felt good to be able to talk about Gwen to someone who knew her well enough to know that she could be a right pain in the arse at times and loved her anyway.

            “Ianto,” I said, still hesitant, “did I really see a weevil out in the Woodstall woods?”

            “Oh, yeah. We started getting reports of weevil attacks as far as St. David’s about six weeks ago. We managed to catch up with most of them and then backtracked them to a research facility outside Carmarthen.”

            “Shit.”

            “Our feelings exactly.” He sighed. “What the hell is it about us humans that makes us want to experiment on other beings?”

            “Probably the same nastiness that makes us experiment on each other. Did you figure out what they’re doing?”

            “Maybe. The weevils we caught up to were all either dead or dying. When Martha autopsied them she found out they were hybrids.”

            “Hybrid what? …Duw.”

            “Yeah. The worst thing is, according to Martha they were basically babies. The human genes the bastards inserted in the weevil embryos control growth, and they were artificially mutated to accelerate weevil development at the speed of invasive cancer cells. These poor kids were meant to grow fast and die young. Five to ten years at most.”

            “What the hell for?”

            “Jack says one of two things. Either experimental subjects, you know, like lab rats. You can do several generations’ worth of observations in a couple of decades. Or they’re being bred as soldiers. Cannon fodder.”

            “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Breeding weevils like lab rats was about the most disgusting idea I’d ever come across. Maybe they weren’t human, but that was no reason to treat them like they had no value as living things, either.

            And then it hit me, and I had to keep my stomach from turning inside out.

            “Ianto, what does this have to do with the baby?”

            The look on his face reminded me that everything wasn’t all kindness and reason with this guy.

            “Turns out the experiments went both ways. Human embryos were given weevil genes. Only a few survived birth. Until yesterday, we hadn’t found one.”