Title: Evolution (11/?)
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:  St. Winefride is of course the Welsh Saint featured in A Morbid Taste for Bones, the first of the Brother Cadfael mysteries. Her welsh name , BTW, is Gwenffrewi, so she's also a Gwen!

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; Part ten is here 
 

            “Anything I can do to help?”

            Martha looked up at me. “Actually, yes. I need someone to just sit and listen while I think out loud.”

            “That I can do.”

            After lunch, Ianto had taken the girls home to their minders, a retired UNIT sergeant major and his wife. Tosh and Andy, bickering like teenagers, settled at their respective work stations, she to keep on digging for information on the fertility clinic, he to run background checks on everyone who lived or worked in the area around Woodstall. Jack waded into the politics of it all, holding conference calls with very high ups from the government and the United Nations. Martha had retreated to the medical bay to finish reviewing autopsies and other documentation from her counterparts at UNIT. I wandered about for a while, snooping into odd corners.

            The cells were empty; Ianto had mentioned at lunch that their resident weevil, Janet, had died of massive respiratory infection during the winter. That thought led me to the vault where Torchwood agents – and Janet, and Gwen’s murderer Grey – now rested in their freezer drawers.

            One section had been replaced by a simple, elegant slab of black marble. Photos of Gwen, Owen, and two other women were mounted on it. The plaque under Gwen’s, after giving her name, her Torchwood number, and her years of service, said buried at St. Winefride’s Churchyard, Gwaelod-y-Garth. When I breathed a sigh of relief I realized that somewhere in the back of my brain had lurked the fear that Torchwood had given me an empty coffin to bury and kept Gwen’s body in a freezer as per regulations.

            “Penny for your thoughts,” Martha said.

            I shook my head. “Not that valuable, really.”

            “You were downstairs.”

            “How can you tell?”

            “Your eyes are a bit red,” she pointed out gently. “When was the last time you went to St. Winefride’s?”

            “Right before Christmas, why?”

            “Church officials decided it couldn’t keep it open. Nor enough parishioners anymore, everyone goes to the larger church in town. Jack bought the property. We contacted the families we could find and helped them relocate the remains if they wanted to.”

            I stared at her stupidly. “Nobody contacted me.”

            “No. New graves would have appeared from time to time and you wouldn’t have given it another thought.” She took a sip from the mug by her elbow. “Jack had Suzie Costello and Lisa Hallett cremated and buried on the other side of the plot from Gwen. Tom is nearer to her, under the willow. Jack decided to make Gwen’s grave the center of the new official Torchwood cemetery. None of his people in freezers, he says.”

            “He really did love her,” I blurted out.

            “Oh, yes. He loves all of us in different ways.” Her eyes sparkled with suppressed glee. “Jack has this insane capacity to love that gets larger the longer he lives.”

            I gave her a narrow-eyed don’t mess with me look. “You know something.”

            “A number of things. That’s why I went to medical school for.” She turned back to the work station. “Ready?”

            I resigned myself to ignorance. Whatever Martha knew about Jack’s future she wasn’t going to talk about it. “Ready.”

            “I’ve been looking at information UNIT sent me. They did the cleanup after Canary Wharf. There wasn’t much recovered from the medical labs. The cryogenic chamber where blood and tissue samples were kept was essentially vaporized. Whatever equipment survived was sent either here or to Torchwood house. As far as I can tell, everything UNIT found and removed is accounted for.”

            “Martha…” I hesitated. “Never mind.”

            “Spit it out, Rhys.”

            “I guess I don’t know enough. My only contact with Torchwood has been here, and I don’t see Jack as letting this sort of experimentation go on…”

            “Jack wouldn’t, but Torchwood One before Canary Wharf was a very different sort of animal. Oh, well done, Rhys! Yvonne Hartman would have done anything if she believed it would help the British Empire.”

            “What empire?”

            She giggled. “Yvonne was an old-fashioned Victorian girl. Her goal was to re-establish British supremacy in the world, cost be damned. An army of genetically enhanced soldiers would sound just brilliant to her. “She started tapping away at her keyboard. “Here we are.”

            “What are you looking for?”

            “Money, Rhys. Money. Medical research at this level costs a bundle. If Hartman bypassed the usual protocols, she had to have been funneling cash into it somehow. Let’s see….”

            I watched her work. She concentrated completely on what she was doing, sometimes chewing on her lower lip as she leaned in to read fine print. She had the kind of face that would get more beautiful as she grew older, big gorgeous eyes and a smile that could set off wildfires. And the way she moved, all precision and efficiency, was somehow incredibly sexy… Whoa, Rhys, I told myself. You are lusting above your station.

            “And here we are, boys and girls!”  As she spun on her seat to face me again, she caught me staring, and her smile grew wider and much more intimate. “Why, Rhys. Were you… watching me?”

            I could feel everything above my collarbones get bright red. “Ah. Yeah.”

            “Good. Hold that thought until this is all over and let’s revisit it then.” She pointed at the screen. “I think I found us the money trail.”

            “Where?”

            “Right in plain sight. Doctor Alan Sullivan’s lab was studying ways of adapting alien technology to field hospital triage. There’s no way in hell that should have been swallowing up nearly sixty million pounds a year.” She activated her comm. “Tosh, is there an Alan Sullivan showing up somewhere at your end?”

            “Sure is. Doctor Alan Sullivan is the senior partner at the fertility clinic. Why?”

            “He used to work for Torchwood One, supposedly on triage issues. You’ll need to run some checks on him. In the meantime, I’ll…”

            “Martha.” Ianto’s voice cut in. “You’ll have to postpone whatever you are planning to do or pass it on to Tosh or Andy. We just got a call from Woodstall. Mike Greene is back.”