Title: Evolution (10/?)
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.
Author's Note: The root canal went very well. Unfortunately, I had scheduled an eye exam the same day, but in the morning. They dilated my eyes and proceeded to use several kinds of drops. The whole process, which was supposed to be over by 11:30am was not finished until a quarter to two. I had to rush to the dentist still nearly blind. Thank God someone else was driving! And guess what a dentist does in order to look into your mouth? RIGHT. Shine a big bright light directly into your face. Three days of intermittent migraines later...

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 ; Part seven is here ; Part eight is here ; Part nine is here

           Once in a while, the Universe, God, Fate, or whoever will grant you a perfect moment. One of my top five was the gobsmacked look on Jack’s face when he swept into the Hub, arms full of pizza boxes, to find me at one of the workstations, little Gwen on my knee, explaining to her the fine points of steeplechasing and poring over the racing calendar.

 

            “Papa! Papa!” she shrieked, running full tilt to throw her arms around his waist. “Uncle Rhys is going to take me to the races, and teach me to ride a pony, and everything! I’m going to be a famous ama… ama…”

 

            “Amateur,” I prompted.

 

            “Amateur jockey! Isn’t it great?”

 

            He gave her a one-armed hug. “Sure is, sweetheart. Here’s Tad now. Why don’t you help him set the table and tell him all about how Uncle Rhys is going to teach you to control a big beast about a hundred times your size and weight?”

 

            “More like five hundred.” Ianto said sedately as he gave me an expressive eye roll. He was carrying Rosie in one of those weird kangaroo pouch things. “Papa would love to keep his baby wrapped in cotton wool until she’s thirty-five. Come on, poppet. There’s someone I’d like you to meet before we go upstairs.”

 

            I grabbed the pizza boxes out of Jack’s hands. “Go with your family, you great big pillock. You don’t want to miss this. I’ll take care of the table. Conference room?”

 

            He nodded, but he wasn’t really paying attention. He was completely focused on the three people on the couch. At that moment I really, really hoped for an afterlife, because I wanted Gwen to see her two best friends so happy.

 

            I found Tosh in the conference room, doing who knows what to the computer. She made exaggerated sniffing noises and ran into Ianto’s butler’s pantry, emerging a few minutes later with plates and cutlery.

 

            “Here we are. We’ll wait on mugs until Ianto gets here.”

 

            “He’s still the designated coffee guy?”

 

            “Oh, yeah. Nobody touches the coffee machine.”

 

            Martha and Andy came in, arguing quietly but fiercely about something. It was amazing how comfortable Andy seemed; the competent, if a bit pedestrian, policeman had become… whatever it was Gwen had become, right before her death: someone with a purpose larger than themselves. Not for the very first time, I wondered what the hell plain old Rhys Williams was doing mixed up with all these heroes.

 

            Lunch with an energetic, bright seven-year-old can be both fun and tiring. Lunch with an energetic, bright seven year old with her mum’s brains, her tad’s vocabulary, and her papa’s uncontrollable curiosity was exhausting. By the time little Gwen’s tad had settled her down on the couch with a dozen books and her little sister dozing away peacefully beside her on a buggy, all the adults were ready for a nap. Ianto refilled all the mugs with strong, sweet coffee.

 

            “Bless you,” I said, sipping. “Mate, you aren’t going to survive two of them.”

 

            He returned to his place at Jack’s right. “We’ll manage.”

 

            “Better you than me!”

 

            He and Jack traded a small smile that sent a chill up my spine. I’d have to watch myself. Those two were up to something.

 

            Jack sighed as he leaned forward, elbows on table, fingers steepled. “Rhys, I’m sorry you have been dragged into this. You wanted to be shut of Torchwood, and I don’t blame you. If I could I would retcon you again and leave you to your peaceful life. But I have a feeling I’m going to need you, and for this I’d draft the Devil himself if I had to.”

 

            He activated the virtual keyboard in front of him. The hypnotic flowing designs on the large screen faded away to show a star system. “That star is called by humans Zuben El-Akrab, or Gamma Librae. It’s a pretty nondescript place, really. Its only claim to fame is that its fifth planet, which the locals called Archangel’s Rest, was the site of the largest recorded experiment carried out on human beings by other human beings. Or, to be exact, by one human being.”

 

            The screen changed again. This time it showed an elderly man seated on a big armchair and surrounded by children, obviously a family portrait.

 

            “Meet Doctor Aloysius Granger. Doctor Granger believed that humans were meant to be the supreme species of the Universe and he saw in interspecies breeding a conspiracy to stop humans from reaching their ultimate potential. He also believed that humans could be optimized through complete discipline and judicious culling. He had even worked out a detailed plan.”

 

            “In other words, a complete nutter,” Andy said.

 

            “And would have remained an obscure one if one doctor Markus Zabrini hadn’t been desperate.” The screen changed to display the photo of a man sitting behind a dingy desk. He looked exhausted, but there was something about his eyes that made you want to look away quickly. “Doctor Zabrini was the chief medical officer of the Archangel colony. Things were going to hell very fast. Archangel’s Rest is the kind of planet that requires starship loads’ worth of terraforming equipment in order to make it livable, and the colonists had spent their last penny in just getting there. Doctor Zabrini decided that if he was going to save the colony he would have to cull the herd, leaving behind only the strong and fit, and then follow Doctor Granger’s plan to optimize it.”

 

            “Dear God,” Martha whispered.

 

            “Yeah. And the hell of it was, it worked. Over a period of four hundred years, Archangel’s Rest rose to be the dominant power in that sector of the Galaxy. Its citizens called themselves Archangels and lorded it over eighty or ninety planets. Then, within sixty years it all collapsed. Historians and archaeologists are still debating how and why. Several groups of survivors managed to escape to other planets. They scrubbed their pasts clean and started new. One of the groups settled in the Boeshane peninsula.”

 

            From the looks in everyone else’s face this was a pretty significant piece of information. Jack smiled at me. “I was born in the Boeshane, Rhys. I’m a descendant of the Archangels.”

 

            “And you are… optimized?”

 

            “Sort of. By the time I came along, a great many intermarriages had put paid to the purity concept. My mother had G’lan ancestors, for example. But I did inherit certain physical advantages from them, yes.”

 

            “And you think whatever is happening now has to do with these Archangel people?”

 

            “The bag the Woodstalls were keeping for Mike? I recognized it immediately. It’s a crèche carrier. The embroidery on the blanket identified the child as number thirty-seven of the Weir crèche. I think the crashed plane was actually an escape pod that went through the Rift somehow. Mike is probably the last surviving purebred Archangel.”

 

            “And you think whoever is cloning, or whatever it is, babies like Rosie would want his genes? Wait. How would they know? About who he really is?”

 

            “You know, I am definitely going to draft you permanently. You're wasted in the horse business. I think someone else survived the crash. I think the Archangels are trying to revive their Empire.”