wasn’t the ‘wild, sweaty, so desperate for deep penetration that clothes got ripped’ kind any more. It was more the ‘it’s been a week and we really should have a romp even though we’re both knackered’ kind. And that was only one step from the ‘let’s not bother, eh?’ kind.
A horrible thought occurred to Gwen. The definition of getting old was that you’d already made love for the last time in your life, but you hadn’t realised yet.
At which point, just as she got into the wrong frame of mind, she heard Rhys’s key in the lock.
For a moment, all Toshiko could see, illuminated by the orange ceiling lights of the tunnels, was the bulky, stooped shape of a Weevil. Then her eyes adjusted and she saw that it was Ianto. Only Ianto, wearing a suit and looking like he belonged there, in the darkness, underground.
Physics. Light and shade, and the electrical reactivity of cells in the eyes. That’s all it was. Keep telling yourself that.
‘Ianto?’ Her voice was shriller than she would have liked. ‘What are you doing down here?’
He glanced casually back into the shadows behind him, and then turned back to Toshiko. ‘I’m… auditing the Archive,’ he said carefully. ‘The records from the early years of Torchwood are pretty vague. I try and get down here as often as I can and correlate the contents of the boxes with the files we keep in the Hub. You’d be surprised at the stuff I’ve discovered we have but don’t know about, or don’t have but think we do. There’s stuff here going back to 1885. I was just checking the chamber we have set aside for the remnants of Operation Goldenrod. Were you part of that?’
She nodded, remembering with a shudder the sheer chaos of Operation Goldenrod. It had been before Gwen had joined them, when Suzie was still part of the team. Toshiko had been working for forty-eight, perhaps seventy-two hours, on a hugely complex piece of alien technology that kept reconfiguring itself while she worked, but what she remembered, above all else, was the people that had been melted together during sexual congress by Goldenrod; their flesh joined, teratological monstrosities that Owen had to try to separate surgically leaving, for the most part, deformity and death behind him.
Ianto raised an eyebrow. ‘And what about you, Tosh? What are you looking for down here?’
‘That device we recovered from the nightclub – I think it’s part of a set. According to the files, we have several more of them in a box.’ She waved vaguely down the tunnel. ‘Down there somewhere. Tunnel sixteen, chamber twenty-six, shelf eight, box thirteen.’
‘Ah.’ Ianto took her by the elbow and guided her back down the tunnel, the way she had come, away from the chamber where he had been working. ‘You’ve come too far. It’s a little confusing, down here. Let me help you orientate yourself.’
They walked back, Ianto holding Toshiko’s elbow all the way. Something made a noise behind them, a movement, a scuffling, but when Toshiko turned her head she couldn’t see anything. And Ianto didn’t turn his head.
It was a rat. Just a rat. That’s what Toshiko told herself.
‘This chicken is delicious. What did you do with it?’
Gwen smiled. Suzanne Vega was still playing softly in the background, the alien tech was glowing a soft amber, which had surprised her but fortunately blended in with the candle, and Rhys was wolfing everything down with an enthusiasm she hadn’t seen for ages. ‘Nothing, really. I just marinated it for a while.’
‘There’s nothing “just” about that. It’s inspired genius. And it certainly makes a change from the usual pasta in sauce.’ He took another sip of his wine. ‘We used to eat like this a lot,’ he said reflectively. ‘We used to cook together, remember? We’d buy a recipe book and go through the recipes, one by one. Sometimes they were great, and sometimes they were… well, not so great… but they were always interesting.’
‘Remember the turkey with chocolate and chilli pepper sauce?’ Gwen giggled.
‘Which might have worked if we’d read the recipe properly and used dark chocolate instead of milk? I remember.’
‘Give us some credit, we were drunk.’ She wasn’t sure if it was the wine or the alien tech, but she was feeling like she was slightly out of control now as well. Or possibly she and Rhys were synching together, so in a sense they were both controlling each other. Whatever: it was a nice feeling.
He was laughing