Disclaimer: Torchwood and all characters are the property of the BBC. No infringement intended. This is me goofing off on a science fiction idea I had nothing else to do with.

N.B.: Takes place between season two and season three.

Scared

1

The blood curdling screams brought Ianto Jones running.

He had to shoulder his way through a panicked crowd running in the opposite direction, threatening to pull him along with them like a swift moving tide. The fact that he had his gun out seemed to have no impact whatsoever. They were so scared that they didn't care that he might be another kind of threat.

This was what being with Torchwood did to you. It made you run towards the danger rather than from it, even when every sensible cell left in your body – not many, to be honest; there hadn't been many to begin with – was telling you to run with the rest of the crowd. This time, he could almost forgive himself for the small rebellion of his fight or flight response.

Why the Weevils decided to come up on a busy shopping street near Cardiff Bay was anyone's guess. Why they were being so suddenly, mindlessly aggressive was another. Ianto shouldered his way through the crowd, glad for his failed attempt at playing rugby as a teen teaching him at least how to function in a scrum, and found a Weevil snacking on a woman sprawled on the sidewalk. She looked like someone's grey haired old mum, only her throat was now a raw red mess, a puddle of deep crimson liquid beneath her head reflecting the early streetlights. The Weevil seemed to sense him, looked up with its gleaming, glass like eyes, its muzzle stained red with the woman's blood. Ianto didn't even think – he raised the gun and fired, hitting it in the head. It jerked back and hit the asphalt hard, legs and arms akimbo. Despite it being a head shot, he knew it wasn't dead; the skull of a Weevil was too thick to be penetrated by a mere bullet. No, it was the impact alone of a close shot that put it down, knocked it out like a donkey's kick would. He should kill it, especially for killing and eating a Human, but general policy wasn't to kill them if you didn't have to. He didn't have to, not yet, but if the fucking thing regained consciousness, he would kill it, with little remorse. It ripped out a little old lady's throat; it had wasted his mercy. He didn't need to search for a pulse to know the woman was dead.

Ianto didn't have a long time to dwell on it, as he heard Jack down the street shout an obscenity, followed by a thud as a large Weevil hit a parked car hard enough to leave a dent in the side and set off the loud siren of a car alarm. Ianto tried to ask him if he was okay over the comm, but the alarm was so loud it totally drowned any response. Gwen said something over the open channel too, or so he thought, but all he could hear was the sound of her voice; the syllables were gone.

Ianto ran past another body, this an overweight man dressed in a t-shirt and slacks, laying on the sidewalk outside a cafe in a pool of blood almost twice as big as he was. He saw no injury, but blood had soaked his t-shirt burgundy, even though most of the pool was the color of ink. Arterial blood, internal; he'd seen enough death by now to know the different colors of blood, to know when someone had lost too much to survive. But two bodies already? They just got news of the Weevils. They were on a rampage; this was a massacre. Why?

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a dark blur, a Weevil charging for him, but he didn't pause his run, simply shot, and he got it. Where he didn't know, but it went down, and that was all he cared about at the moment. But he was nearly knocked over by two tumbling figures as they fell out of a small alley in front of him, a stocky Indian man fighting with a growling Weevil. The Weevil had rolled on top of the man and pinned him down, but Ianto pulled his stun gun out of his jacket and jabbed it right into the back of the Weevil's neck, sending the electrical jolt straight down its spine. It whined briefly and then went limp. The man kicked the alien off, and then asked him, as he scrambled to his feet, "Thanks, mate. What are these things?"

There was no official story to tell civilians. Sometimes they said "cult members in masks", but the man was so close to the Weevil he had to know it wasn't a mask. Would mutant do? Probably not. He didn't know what to tell him, so he decided not to tell him anything. "I don't know. Where did they come from? Did you see?"

The man shrugged, then started looking around at the chaos. It was sinking in that the attack was not on him alone, and that he was very lucky to be alive and in one piece. "I was just taking out the garbage when this thing just jumped out of nowhere and tried to bite me. Umm, where are the police?"

"On their way. You need to clear the area now."

The man seemed to really look at Ianto for the first time. "You're ... you're MI-5 or something, yeah?"

Why did he think MI-5? Was it because he was wearing a suit and tie? Or was it because he had a gun? Both? "Or something. You need to go, now." He pointed behind him, towards the backs of the fleeing crowds. "That way. Run."

Ianto had started ahead towards Jack when the man said, "I could help!"

"No you couldn't." Another Weevil surged out of the alley, and Ianto had to shoot it twice to bring it down. The Weevils were so agitated. Why? What was riling them up? They weren't a milquetoast species, but they usually weren't this aggressive, not without cause. They preferred the darkness, which was why they generally stayed in the sewers. The sun had just barely gone down; the sky still had that curious half light, a sort of lavender color that hadn't quite committed to dark blue yet. It was too light a backdrop for the stars to be visible. Something drove them up from underground, something that enraged them and drove them to this. On the one hand, it wasn't hard to drive a Weevil to violence, it seemed to be their go to instinct. But why come out into the light, why just rampage as opposed to hunt? (If there was a group of them, they usually hunted like a pack, several of them singling out prey. As far as Ianto had seen, they weren't grouping, and they weren't hunting; they were just grabbing anything that moved. Odd.) The last time that had happened, Gray, Jack's brother, had sent out a signal that they responded to, brought them up and brought them up angry. But there had been no signal, not to their knowledge, and Gray was still frozen in cold storage. This was something else, but something almost as bad.

"Little help here," Jack shouted, as an incredibly big Weevil threw what must have been a perfect shoulder tackle straight into Jack's midsection, throwing him back against a wall so hard that it must have broken bones. Pain creased his face briefly, but Jack still brought an elbow down hard on the back of its neck, making it drop him. But it roared in rage and went in for a bite.

Jack kicked it away, but another one lunged for him. Maybe because Jack had a cut on his head, just trickling a tiny bit of blood, but the smallest hint of blood could stir Weevils up like a group of sharks. Ianto was finally in range and shot one high in the back, and it went down hard and fell on top of Jack just as the big one came back after him. It stopped and looked at Ianto with its black, alien eyes, snarling like a mad dog. Ianto didn't stop his forward charge, but he still felt something cold slither through his gut, fear given form. It was the biggest Weevil he had ever seen, almost seven feet tall and probably three hundred pounds, which would explain why Jack was having a hard time subduing it. How many shots would this one take before it went down? A half dozen? A dozen? Was someone feeding the Weevils steroids?

Jack tossed the stunned Weevil off of him, and it hit the large Weevil side on, sending it falling to pavement. "Catch," he taunted before getting to his feet and retrieving his gun, which had been knocked from his hand. Although he had a big cheesy grin on his face, Ianto saw him wince and use the wall to help himself stand. He'd been hurt, but he wasn't going to admit it until it was all over, if even then. That just wasn't Jack's way.

He flashed Ianto an inordinately cheerful look, the adrenaline rush making his blue eyes bright, but the look dropped instantly, and Ianto sort of knew why, even before he shouted, "Behind y-"

He was turning when the Weevil slammed into him, sending them both sprawling to the asphalt as it roared in his ear, its fetid hot breath washing over him like the smoke of burnt garbage. This Weevil wasn't as tall, but it was heavier than him, and it had pinned the gun between their bodies. Ianto could fire it, but he wasn't sure if he would hit it or him. As he tried to turn the gun and kick it off, it sank its jagged teeth into his shoulder.

He screamed involuntarily – it hurt; it hurt like fuck; serrated teeth by the dozens tearing through skin and muscle like it was the flimsiest of fabric, scraping bone – and bucked, finally getting some room, and he was able to wedge the gun up and shoot the Weevil in the gut. His finger convulsed on the trigger, he kept firing, but it sank its teeth deeper and started to shake its head like a dog with a toy, tearing more flesh, startling a deeper scream from the base of Ianto's throat.

Gunshots hit the Weevil from another direction, blood exploded from the top of its skull and splattered on Ianto's face, and it loosened its bite enough that Ianto was finally able to shove it off him. It might have tried to go for him again, but Jack was still emptying his gun into the Weevil; he kept shooting until it finally stopped moving. "Ianto, are you all right?" he asked, crouching down beside him. But Jack didn't wait for an answer, he looked at his shoulder and grimaced before shouting into his comm, "Gwen, I need you here now, Ianto's hurt."

"I'm okay," Ianto lied. His shoulder felt like it was on fire, the warm blood crawling down his chest and soaking into his back feeling like saltwater. Muscles in his back and arms were starting to spasm, but he didn't know if it was from pain and trauma or actual damage. He didn't actually want to know.

A shadow rose over Jack, one way too large to have been Gwen, and Ianto raised his gun and fired. He hit the huge Weevil in the chest, making it stagger back a step, and looking around and seeing it, Jack pulled out his own stun gun and stabbed it deep into the big Weevil's chest. It took a moment, he had to hold it on for a very long time, but the stun finally took and it collapsed like a poorly made bridge.

Ianto sat up and almost screamed in pain as muscles inside his wounded shoulder pulled and shifted. Hie right arm was pretty much useless now, it felt limp and unresponsive, and he was glad he had the gun in his left. It was empty, though, he could feel it in the slight weight, so one handed he ejected the empty clip and tried to make his right arm move, pull a full clip out of his jacket pocket. He was able to shift his right hand closer to him, but the amount of effort and pain involved made him pause. He was holding back the pain as best he could, but he felt his face flush and closed his eyes, trying to control his reaction.

He felt Jack reach over and pull a full clip out of his pocket. He knew it was Jack because he knew his scent. "You're gonna be a stubborn bastard, huh?" Jack asked.

Ianto opened his eyes and met his gaze. "It's the Torchwood disease."

"You'd think they'd have a cure for it by now." Jack threw him a wink and a half grin, reassuring him it was okay without words.

Jack had put the clip in his right hand, so Ianto could slam the clip home into the butt of the gun, and rack the slide so there was a bullet in the chamber. It sent a lightning bolt shudder of pain through his arm, but Ianto refused to acknowledge it. Ignoring it didn't make it go away, but he could almost fool himself.

Jack had to reload his own gun in a hurry, as he had already spun and fired, taking down two other Weevils who were trying to converge on them. (Scent of blood, bringing them in like sharks.) Ianto raised his gun and took down another one before other gunshots joined theirs, and Gwen came sprinting up, stopping long enough to turn and walk backwards, gun aimed out at any approaching threat. She trusted them to cover her back. "I've counted seven bodies, Jack," she reported. "At least a dozen wounded, maybe more. Why the hell are they freaking out?"

"Got me. They didn't like how the World Cup turned out? It's not like they're talking."

They all shot and brought down a Weevil before Gwen took a chance and crouched down beside Ianto as Jack stood guard, trying to watch all the angles as Gwen gave him a small, reassuring smile before gently peeling back what there was of his suit coat and shirt near the wound. He could feel the blood coursing down his back like hot oily sweat, and wasn't really surprised by the way Gwen scowled at the wound. "He needs a hospital."

"I hate hospitals," Ianto said, almost a plea. He didn't want to go if he absolutely didn't have to. Gwen gave him a troubled but sympathetic look, a friendly pat and squeeze on his uninjured arm.

"Who doesn't?" Jack replied, but he wasn't looking at him. He was looking around, frowning in thought, and said, "They're retreating."

Both Ianto and Gwen joined him in looking around. The Weevils were disappearing, sinking back into the shadows, returning to the sewers. "Why?" Gwen asked, genuinely puzzled. "They outnumber us ten to one. We've barely brought down a dozen."

Jack shook his head, still searching the streets as if they may have held an answer. "I don't know. None of this makes much sense." There was a distant wail of police and ambulance sirens, and that seemed to kick Jack out of his musings and back to now. "Come on, let's get him out of here. We'll deal with the cops later."

Ianto hated to be the one that had to be helped from the fight, but it seemed there was nothing for it now. Jack and Gwen helped him up, and Ianto couldn't help but notice that Jack grunted in pain as he straightened up, draping Ianto's left arm across his shoulders. Yeah, Jack was hurt, but he wouldn't say it. Not that it mattered with Jack; whatever the injury, he would heal. He always did, the lucky bastard.

Ianto and Jack holstered their guns, but Gwen kept hers out just in case. They walked out through eerily abandoned streets, save for the blood, bodies, and wreckage. It was like the aftermath of a bombing. Ianto assumed they'd eventually get the answers to this senseless slaughter, but he wondered if any answer would ever be good enough.

Gwen was glad she'd held on to her old police ID, as it opened many doors without making her liable to answer any questions. She could just say "Official business" and leave it at that. People didn't like it, but they knew they had to accept it.

The hospital's emergency room was sheer chaos, overflowing with people, but she flashed her old ID to the charge nurse and used her stern cop voice, which got them through the maelstrom and into a triage area right away. Jack got funny looks for his World War Two greatcoat, but Ianto wearing a suit actually helped foster the illusion they were police. A lot of the higher up detectives, not beat cops but the ones on special investigative squads, wore suits. Technically Ianto was a tad more dapper than they were – Gwen could remember them with their rumpled shirts and invariable stained ties, the suits off the rack numbers mostly from discount shops – but there was no time for that level of scrutiny now.

Ianto needed stitches and blood. There was some talk of possible rehabilitation for the damaged muscles, possibly even surgery, but Ianto just wanted them to patch him up so he could go now. He really didn't like hospitals; not in the normal way, like everyone did, he'd started sweating, his eyes getting a furtive look of panic in them the longer they stayed. Once the nurses hooked him up to a saline drip to bring his fluid levels back up, Gwen pulled Jack aside and asked, "He has a hospital phobia? Why hasn't it showed up before?"

Jack shook his head briefly, casting a worried glance in Ianto's direction. "It's not hospitals themselves, I think it's staying in hospitals he doesn't like. After the battle of Canary Wharf, he was in one for a few days. He wasn't the best patient."

Canary Wharf. She remembered her Torchwood history – the fall of Torchwood One, in London, during the aborted Cybermen invasion. Ianto was one of the survivors, and so was his half Cyber converted girlfriend Lisa, although no one knew about Lisa except for Ianto, who somehow managed to hide her out. If she remembered that part correctly, Ianto had dragged Lisa from the battle. Had he hurt himself in the process? Maybe he was already hurt, and in his desperation to save her, he made it worse. That would track. Ianto loved Lisa so much he seemed to become temporarily insane. He risked all their lives, the very safety of Torchwood, for her, but bizarrely, Gwen couldn't blame Ianto for that. If she was him, she'd probably have done the same thing. If it was Rhys, she'd never stop fighting to save him, even if it was impossible. "What was wrong with him?"

"Burns, broken bones, internal bleeding." Jack grimaced at the thought. "He was caught in the building collapse."

"Before or after he saved Lisa?"

"After. But he didn't seek medical treatment. He just went around injured for a full day before he finally passed out. He had been bleeding internally that entire time; he probably should have died." Jack sighed. "I don't know how he didn't die. Welsh luck, I suppose."

"I'm not sure my luck has ever been that good," she protested mildly. She wouldn't mind if it was. "Did you ever ... did you ever talk to him about that? That whole thing? Canary Wharf?"

He shook his head, and at her incredulous look, he said, "We're guys, Gwen. We don't talk about things like that." Before she could contradict him in any way, he changed the subject. "While we're here, maybe we should find out how many casualties there were."

"We could do that at the Hub later."

Jack shrugged a single shoulder. "We could, but I'd rather keep busy for the moment. I just don't get it – what set the Weevils off?" From the way a muscle jumped in his jaw, she knew this was really eating at him. "I don't like unanswered questions."

"You're not alone."

Jack gave her a nod and wandered off, going off on his casualty hunt. Should she have told him he had some of Ianto's blood on his coat? Well, this was a hospital in the fulcrum of a disaster – everybody probably had a bit of blood on them.

Gwen returned to Ianto's bedside, where he was actually sitting on the edge of his gurney like he was going to hop off and leave at any second, except the saline drip was tethering him there. He was bare chested because his shirt and coat had been taken off so the wound could be tended to, and he had refused to put on the miserable paper gown they gave you in these places, and it occurred to Gwen she almost never had seen Ianto like that. Well, once, but she didn't get a good look at him since he and Jack were both shirtless and in a clinch at the time. Hell, had she ever seen Ianto without a suit and tie for that matter? She wasn't certain she would recognize him if he just showed up one day in jeans and a t-shirt. He had a surprisingly good chest, just a little bit fuzzy, but nice muscular definition and a flat stomach. Not gym definition, but that made sense, as who the hell had time to go to the gym when you worked for Torchwood? You got your exercise chasing aliens and looking for artifacts that could destroy the world. There was little time left for a life, not to mention a hobby.

The enjoyable view of his chest was marred by the fact that blood glistened, both wet and semi-dried, on his right side, both front and back, and the wound, while now stitched up, still looked grisly, red and angry. The stitches were little black exclamation marks on his skin, looking like staples in his flesh. "You should really sit back," she advised him. "You've lost a lot of blood."

"I've lost more before," he said, almost petulantly, but he frowned at his own statement and added, "I'm sorry, Gwen. I hate being here. Me getting bit was just stupid."

"No, it wasn't. It's just luck that we all weren't bitten or worse. And you know Jack's hurt, he just won't admit it, the big baby."

That made Ianto smile. "He's broken some ribs, I think. The non-fatal wounds always take longer to heal."

She nearly asked how he knew that, but he was Jack's lover after all. That probably meant he knew a couple of things about Jack that few other people knew. Although, considering how many lovers Jack had probably had over his long existence, you'd think that all Jack's secrets were out there, possibly published in encyclopedia form.

Ianto sat back as she had asked, and rubbed his eyes like he was tired. "So many people died tonight. Why? And how did it happen so fast? As long as I've worked for Torchwood, Weevils have never acted this way. I mean, the danger was always there, what little we know about the race suggests an almost boundless capacity for violence, but you could say the same about Humans. Just because it has the capacity doesn't mean it will act on it."

She sighed, sitting on the opposite edge of the gurney. The adrenaline buzz was wearing off, and she could feel herself starting to crash. Yes, a fight always made you wired, but afterwards, when the danger was over, the body seemed to want to find a nice place to collapse. But was the danger really over? The Weevils surged up with no provocation that they knew of, killed as many people as they could, and then mysteriously went away again as if it had been a normal night. It could happen again, it could be happening now someplace else. There was no one at the Hub to tell them.

No, that wasn't totally true. Toshiko had created an automated alert system, a "lobotomized A.I." she'd called it, where the Hub's own computer network would monitor incoming anomalies and reports, and alert them automatically if something was wrong. It wasn't like a Human being, though; it wasn't someone you can ask questions of, someone you could talk to. She still half expected to hear Tosh speaking to her on the other end of the comm, or maybe even Owen. She shoved it away, because if she thought about it she would tear up, and it wasn't the time or place for it. Later she could have a good cry, but now she was still on the clock. "Right now, all we can do is try to find out what triggered this, so we can prevent it from happening again." She patted his hand and just left it on top of his, and he made no move to pull it away. Since the deaths of Owen and Tosh, they had become a tighter unit, but there was no way Torchwood could keep functioning as only three people, even if one of them couldn't be killed no matter how many times to you tried. She and Ianto were still mortal, still fragile, and always courting death in one way or another. Except, of course, she had already decided they weren't going to die. She and Ianto were going to live long enough to be the first people to actually retire out of Torchwood (which, considering the high and quick death rate, meant they just had to live to forty to accomplish it). She had no idea how to implement it, so she just decided the power of positive thinking would be enough. They weren't dying, full stop. There – she decided it, now the universe was going to have to live with it.

A television was on, high on a wall mount in the far corner. It was almost impossible to hear over the cacophony of voices in the crowded hospital, but the flickering images included scenes near Cardiff Bay, garnering their attention. A news report on what had just occurred. What were the media going to say about it? She doubted the truth would come into it. A stocky but muscular Indian man was briefly interviewed, and Ianto muttered, "Good, he got out."

From what Gwen could see of the news crawl at the bottom of the screen, she read what the official statement on the matter was. Her eyes widened in disbelief as she said aloud, "Gang violence?" They were going to blame this on gang violence?

She exchanged a disbelieving look with Ianto. "Well, you know Cardiff is the new East LA," Ianto said, in his usual arid deadpan.

Oh yeah, they were the next Oakland. Gwen rubbed her eyes, and wondered how stupid the home office thought the public were. If this were any indication, it was remarkable the public was breathing on its own.

Wait until Jack heard about this.