Title: Evolution (7/?)
Author: Emma
Characters: Jack Harkness, Ianto Jones, Rhys Williams, others
Rating: Starts PG, but hey, it’s got Jack and Ianto in it!
Disclaimer: Oh, please. If I owned them, would I let some of those idiots write the scripts? And if I were making any money off them, would I be where they could find me?
Summary: Rhys Williams has his own monsters to fight, but why can't he remember?
Author’s Note: This story takes place in a totally different AU from Homecoming. In this one, Gwen and Owen died at the end of TW2.
Prologue is here; Part one is here; Part two is here ; Part three is here ; Part four is here ; Part five is here ; Part six is here

 

            “What surprises you the most? That Jack and Ianto would want to adopt the baby or that Jack is a Tolkien fan?”

 

            I twisted around to look at her. She had marched me into my own bedroom and ordered me to strip to the waist and lie down. She removed my bandages carefully; the flow of air over the wound made my skin tingle unpleasantly. Someone had left a medical bag on the floor. From it she took a box the size of a small book. It didn’t have any controls that I could see, but as she ran her palm across the top it started to hum. She waited until the sound became a low thrumming, like someone plucking the same string on a bass over and over again, and then placed it directly on top of the wound. I had expected it to be cold, but it felt strangely like warm flesh; it stilled the tingling and relaxed the muscles.

 

            We chatted as we waited, catching up with each other’s lives. We had only met a couple of times during the time she had worked with Gwen, usually over beer at the pub, and never really exchanged more than a few sentences. She was sharp-tongued and funny, and remarkably easy to talk to. We slipped easily into more personal ground; we spoke of Tom and Gwen, and how we had both wanted children – and that brought us in roundabout fashion to Jack’s announcement.

 

            “Martha, I mentioned my spending time in America, right?”

 

            She pushed me down again. “Talk but keep flat, unless you want to end up with a hump. I’m joking, you git! It just needs a little more time. Now, then. Yes, you mentioned it.”

 

            “There’s this trainer I know. He has this saying, don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. Why do I get the feeling Torchwood is trying to piss on my leg?”

 

            She sighed. “We’re not, but…” She left the comfortable armchair she had been using and came to sit on the bed next to me. “Jack said I should tell you if you asked. For obvious reasons we can’t tell the Woodstalls some of the background on this.”

 

            I caught myself nodding. Amazing how quickly Torchwood habits returned.

 

            “We had been investigating the weevil sightings but weren’t getting anywhere. Then John Hart came looking for us. Down, Rhys, dammit! I know you have a very good reason to hate him, but just listen, all right? John had been working as a courier. He made a couple of deliveries to a very discreet, very expensive fertility clinic. Being John, he made friends with one of the technicians and she gave him a tour. Turns out one of the things Time Agents are trained to do is to analyze and evaluate the uses of unfamiliar technology. Jack says John was the best at it. What he saw sent him back to Cardiff at a dead run.”

 

            She removed the box. I sat up so I would be able to look at her face. Martha was good a lying to strangers, but I had a hunch that she found it difficult to lie to people she considered friends.

 

            “What did he find?”

 

            “An operation using alien tech to combine incompatible strands of DNA to produce human-alien hybrids.” She hugged herself, rubbing her hands up and down her arms as if she were chilled. “Rosie’s not just a human baby with some weevil genes clipped on, Rhys. Her mother was a test tube and her father was a knife. That’s a quote from a science-fiction novel by Robert Heinlein. A story about a world in which Artificial Persons are engineered as slaves to the ‘natural-born’ humans. Faster, stronger, more intelligent, but still slaves.”

 

            “Sounds like Blade Runner.”

 

            “Similar concept.”

 

            “Are you telling me that little girl is a…. a replicant? With an expiration date?”

 

            “Not that, although we can’t be sure.” She took a deep breath. “There’s more. John managed to smuggle out some samples. Several blastocysts that had been discarded because they were not viable. Each one had up to four strands of human DNA as well as weevil genes. All the human DNA strands were traced back to Torchwood One.”

 

            “I don’t understand.”

 

            “Torchwood policy has always been to keep blood and tissue samples of all its employees. It’s insurance against alien diseases, mostly. Sometimes the only way to save someone’s life is to engineer a vaccine specifically for him or to clone new blood and tissue to replace diseased or damaged one.”

 

            “It’s also a good means of identification in case of horrific death.”

 

            She nodded. “Yes. Originally, all samples were kept at Torchwood One. When Jack took over Cardiff he decided to keep our samples at home.”

 

            I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Gwen was not involved in this, then. Her blood and tissue was safe somewhere under the Plas. I couldn’t have borne to see Gwen’s eyes in the face of a strange child.

 

            And then it hit me. It must have shown on my face, because Martha nodded.

 

            “Yes. Jack and Ianto both had tissue samples at Torchwood One. So did Lisa Hallett, my cousin Adeola, and a couple of thousand others."

 

            “But Jack’s DNA would be different, wouldn’t it? A scientist would notice.”

 

            She smiled. “Jack said you were good.”

 

            “Rosie?”

 

            “Tosh is still running tests, but the answer to your question is yes. Technically, Rosie is the child of seven parents, including two separate strains of weevil, but about sixty percent of her is Jack and Ianto.”

 

            “That can’t be a coincidence.”

 

            “Very, very good. We don’t think it is. All the blastocysts John brought us used pieces of Jack’s nucleotide strand sequences to anchor the other genes. One of the blastocysts used DNA from Alex Hopkins, another Torchwood Three leader and a good friend of Jack's. Whoever is doing this is using Jack’s DNA to create a completely new race. And he's trying to force Jack's hand by breeding children carrying the DNA of people he loves.”