probably some distance away, somewhere under the Red Dragon Centre, if she didn’t miss her guess. How much of Cardiff rested on Torchwood’s tunnels? How many ways in or out were there?
‘Here we are,’ Ianto said, stopping by a stack of metal, bolt-together shelving. ‘Shelf eight, box thirteen.’ He indicated a box at eye level: an ordinary plastic box – more of a crate, in fact – institutional grey in colour, half a metre along each edge.
There was nothing written on the box, apart from what looked to Toshiko like a random string of alphanumeric characters. She couldn’t work out how Ianto had got to the right box so quickly. In fact, she couldn’t work out how he had even got to the right chamber, given that there was no way of telling them apart. She gave him a sceptical look.
‘I have a system,’ he said, affronted.
Together they pulled the box off the shelf and lowered it gently to the floor. It was about the weight of a portable TV. Funny, she thought, how they kept comparing alien devices to ordinary things, like iPods and portable TVs, as if they were just different examples of the same thing. But they weren’t. They really weren’t.
The box was sealed with tape. Ianto ran his thumbnail around the edge of the lid, splitting the tape in two.
‘Do you need me for anything else?’
She shook her head. ‘No. Thanks for helping me find the stuff. I might have been down here for days looking for it, otherwise.’
‘Helpfulness is my middle name.’ He looked down the tunnel, towards where Toshiko had seen him earlier on. ‘If there’s ever anything else you need down here, let me know. I can find it for you much quicker than you can find it yourself.’ And with that he walked off, back towards the Hub, walking fast and not looking backwards.
Dismissing Ianto from her mind, Toshiko reached down and pulled the lid off the box.
Afterwards, when all passion was temporarily spent, when they were lying with Gwen diagonally across Rhys’s chest and with his hand cupping the heaviness of her breast, with the sweat and the moistness of their bodies cooling on their skin, the silence between them was the silence of lovers who didn’t have to say anything, not lovers who couldn’t think of anything to say. Gwen had climaxed twice: once quietly, biting her lip, while Rhys touched her with insistent gentleness, and once again gasping, hips raised, while Rhys moved deeply within her. Rhys had climaxed once, crying out like a man who had just run into a brick wall, the sweat trickling down his face and dripping onto Gwen’s shoulder blades. Now they lay there, on the same bed where they had made love so many times before, trying to incorporate this latest time into the story of their lives.
‘That was incredible,’ Rhys said. He was still breathing heavily. ‘You were incredible.’
‘You weren’t too shabby yourself.’
‘Don’t expect me to recover any time this week. You’ve used me up.’
‘I could go again. Just give me a few minutes.’
He shook his head. ‘It’s no good. I’m finished. You go on without me.’
Gwen laughed quietly beside him, her breast moving gently in his hand in time with her laughter. He felt himself stir. Perhaps he could manage one more time. Once he’d caught his breath. And had a piss.
‘I need to go to the bathroom,’ he said. ‘I’m exhausted. Drained. I need vitamin pills. Lots of vitamin pills. In fact, I may just try to dissolve as many of them as I can in a glass of water and drink it.’
Gwen giggled, and rolled off him. He rolled in turn to the edge of the bed and stood up. His clothes were strewn across the floor. Responding to a half-formed thought provoked by the mention of pills, Rhys reached down and burrowed in his pocket for a moment. There, wrapped in a piece of tissue paper, was the blister pack that he had been given by Doctor Scotus that afternoon. Closing his fingers around the pills, he looked down at himself, at the curve of his stomach, at the way his thighs flattened out against the mattress. Gwen still loved him, but if he wanted to show her that he loved her then he needed to do something dramatic. He needed to lose that weight.
Padding to the bathroom, he was already pushing the ‘Start’ pill from its blister as the door was closing behind him. The pill was