m_findlow

Title: Medical mystery
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Owen, Ianto
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,246 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for Challenge 106 - Anatomy at beattheblackdog
Summary: Nothing irritates Owen more than a medical mystery.

Owen cursed as he studied the results of his petri dish under the microscope. He swore under his breath. Another wasted experiment. He wanted to throw it straight into his medical waste bin, but instead he sighed, and took it downstairs to a secondary lab.

Inside the lab was an enormous cold store. He opened the door with a hiss, watching clouds of cold air hit the slightly warmer air outside. He cast an eye over the shelves before selecting a suitable spot to store the sample for future reference, making a note on the top of it with masking tape and permanent marker. Not that he was ever likely to refer to it again.

It wasn't so much that they were wasted experiments as much as they were considered failed experiments. Anything that left him none the wiser as to how Jack managed to regenerate his body was considered a failure.

Jack kept insisting that there was nothing special about his blood. Owen wasn't just interested in his blood, though. He'd taken whatever samples he could get from Jack, blood, plasma, skin cells, saliva, spinal fluid - he'd even conned him into a marrow donation once, before Jack cottoned on to the fact that marrow donation was both painful and unpleasant.Owen's chances of getting a biopsy of any other tissues was dealt a huge blow after that. Jack insisted he could have all the hair and toenail clippings he wanted, but he wasn't going to let Owen poke him with any more needles than was strictly necessary.

He refused to believe that Jack's uniqueness stemmed solely from what he described as his fixed point in time status. There had to be more to it than that, Owen was sure. You couldn't just turn back time on the human body. If Jack were truly a fixed point, he wouldn't even be alive. Every living thing was constantly regenerating itself, that was the law of nature. It was simply that Jack's body did it to a much more extreme level. He still needed to breathe, to eat and to drink to sustain basic organ function. Hair continued to grow, he still shaved every morning, he still sweated, produced saliva, and Jack's body otherwise functioned normally. He still got sick and injured, it was simply that his body healed itself in a shorter time frame. His blood cell reproduction was on a scale that even Owen couldn't comprehend, yet at the cellular level, nothing looked out of the ordinary. Cells divided and multiplied at the same rate as anyone else. Nutrients were metabolized at a rate that fell within one standard deviation of what was acceptable for a male of Jack's age and weight. Watching Jack regrow a limb was both medically and scientifically disturbing. It shouldn't be possible, new cells creating skin and bone, fusing with existing flesh and forming missing parts with genetic perfection. They weren't mutating or repairing themselves, because there was nothing left. It was utterly perplexing. Jack's anatomy and its ability to regenerate was a total mystery.

Owen had introduced all manner of bacteria and viruses to samples of cells. As expected, the viral cells went to work, breaking down and destroying healthy cells. It wasn't that the cells were resistant to disease, nor that antibodies went into overdrive. He'd even nuked a few samples with radioactive material, watching as the cells were completely obliterated from the inside out. They were dead. Then, just as suddenly as the half life of the nuclear material dissipated, there were new cells there, completely healthy and whole. Cells didn't just appear out of nowhere, yet every sample he had stored away, looked just the same: healthy cells with no signs of disease or deterioration. If he could just understand how Jack's body created new cells, the whole face of medicine would change.

'It doesn't work that way,' Jack told him over and over again. 'If it did, the future would have cures for everything and it doesn't. You're not going to revolutionise the world. Sorry.'

Jack's flippancy annoyed Owen. He knew how Jack felt about so-called modern medicine. 'They drilled holes in people's heads in the twelfth century to dispel disease and called it modern medicine,' Jack would say. 'Maybe I should drill a hole in your head, then,' Owen replied. 'Probably nothing in there but stuffing, though.' Jack would just laugh at him. 'In another three thousand years they'll call what you do primitive.'

That rankled Owen. Primitive? They could already grow stem cells that could regrow organs for transplant. Medical advancements were being made exponentially every year. Nothing they were doing was primitive by any stretch of the imagination.

It had to be right down at the DNA level, Owen was sure. Even with Torchwood technology it could take ten years to map Jack's entire genome, but he'd do it. There was too much at stake to ignore the potential to save lives and treat serious injury, as well as to develop disease resistant vaccines.

If Jack though Owen to was going to give up easily, he was mistaken, especially since Jack flaunted his unique abilities on a regular basis. It was almost vindication when Jack came down with something as mundane as the common cold, relishing telling him there was nothing for it but to ride it out. One thing Owen had learned was that whilst cells regenerated, they sometimes exacerbated the condition. Healthy cells appeared from nowhere whilst diseased cells were still present, one infecting the other. Then it just becomes a game of catch-up until diseased cells either take over and die completely, or are subsumed by healthy cells. Either way, every last petri dish in Owen's cold store ends up just the same.

'I swear you have more of Jack down here in this fridge than we have upstairs,' Ianto jokes, leaning in the doorway, watching him.

'Well, maybe if he wasn't so obstinate, I'd have made some progress by now. Even at a cellular level, he's a pain in the arse.'

'If it's a pain in the arse then you're doing it wrong,' Ianto replied.

'Huh?'

Ianto shrugged. 'Just something Jack would say, although I think he was being literal when he said it.'

Owen shook his head at the young man. 'Doesn't it bother you?' he asked. 'All this genetic material and no one can explain why he can't die. I would have thought you of all people...' He didn't finish the sentence. Something about knowing that the two of them regularly exchanged bodily fluids just felt wrong to say out loud. He checked them all out on a regular basis, but there was nothing different in any of their test results that could be explained by long term exposure to what Owen called the Torchwood factor. And in Ianto's case, nothing that could seemingly be put down to the Jack factor, either.

'I like that there's still things in the universe that defy explanation,' Ianto replied. 'Life would be boring otherwise.'

'Well, whatever it is, it's clearly not able to be transmitted by any conventional methods.' He had all the evidence right here in this room to prove it.

'Or unconventional ones,' Ianto added, remembering last night.

'Leave the experimenting to me,' Owen said, slamming the cold store door shut. 'If I want your input, I'll ask for it.'

Ianto couldn't wipe the grin off his face. He and Owen had very different interests in Jack's anatomy.