Wishverse 1.01 - Take One
Aug. 7th, 2009 10:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wiseheartTitle: The Many Departures of Gwen Cooper
Author: Soledad
Fandom: Torchwood
Category: Heavy-duty Gwen bashing.
Rating: Teens, mostly. If not, additionally given.
Genre: Take your pick. It’s different with each part.
Series: If Wishes Were Horses aka The Many Departures of Gwen Cooper, called the Wishverse, just to make it short.
Warning: repeated character death(s) in each chapter.
Timeframe: All along both Series One and Two. Major spoilers. This is an AU, though.
Summary: Many different ways to get rid of Gwen Cooper, while keeping the episodes as canonical as possible.
Disclaimer: the usual: don’t own, don’t sue! Everything belongs to RTD and BBC. I used a great deal of rewritten original dialogue, though. The additional dialogue in the bar between Jack and Andy uses lines from the deleted scenes, my thanks to![[insanejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/ij-userinfo.gif)
beccaelizabeth.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
EPISODE 01 – NOTHING CHANGES, TAKE ONE
Author’s notes:
To certain episodes, there are two or more different versions. The pilot is one of those.
This particular chapter is rated 16+, for bloody violence. Personally, I find it a lot more harmful for young readers than moderate sex scenes.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Police Constable Andy Davidson was not a religious man. At least, he didn’t go to church, unless him mother came to visit and dragged him there. However, he firmly believed in karma. He believed that one’s deeds had consequences, and one had to live with those consequences, whether one liked it or not.
And so he accepted the fact that having walk the beat with Gwen Cooper, of all people, was the well-earned punishment for that moment of weakness (or insanity) two years ago. For the fact that – after a particularly stressful day – he’d kept comforting Gwen Cooper till they’d ended up shagging like bunnies in the police station’s broom closet. Speak about horrible clichés.
It wasn’t that he downright disliked Gwen – she could be funny and nice sometimes, especially if she wanted one to do things for her – but he hadn’t planned to spend his professional life handcuffed to her. No, Andy Davidson had plans for his future career with the police. He wanted to become a sergeant one day, even to go to detective school eventually. That was why he’d asked for permission to participate in weapons training and self-defence courses, even though all that wasn’t strictly mandatory for mere constables. That was why he went to the fitness studio and on morning runs to keep himself fit, and was learning for the sergeant’s exam in his every spare minute.
Unfortunately, being given promotions and supported to climb to career ladder required to be at least moderately successful in his current job, and having Gwen Cooper as his partner nipped all those efforts in the bud. Not only was she bossy and behaved as if she were his superior (despite having been paired up with him to learn something), she didn’t listen to reason, wither, and blundered headfirst into every crime scene, screwing up about eighty per cent all of their cases and getting hurt in half of them.
When called on her mistakes, she always widened her eyes to a fairly alarming size, under they all but bulked out of her face, made them fill with tears and her lower lip tremble, and began to simper.
“Ooh, sir, I’m sooo sorry! I mean, really, I mean really, really sorry. God, I can't believe it. I'll sort it. Whatever's happened, I'll deal with it, I promise! I can deal with it, I really can!”
For some reason, their superiors always seemed to buy the show. Andy could never understand hwo she did it. Perhaps those bulging eyes could mesmerize people somehow. After all, he had ended up in the broom closet with her, and he never did it in the broom closet, with anyone!
What was even worse than Gwen’s complete inability to deal with the simplest cases was her annoying stubbornness. Once she sank her claws in something (or someone – Rhys Williams could tell a tale about that, the poor sod, were he not so completely besotted with her), she’d never let it go. Ever.
Like with those Special Ops people (or whatever) from Torchwood. Ever since they’d taken over the murder case on Llangyfellach Lane, all she could think (and talk) about was Torchwood. She even buggered Yvonne into doing a search on their leader. Some Captain Hark or something like that. Andy could tell that Yvonne was not pleased, being overworked as she was and all that. She’d still agreed to look into it, should she find the time. People always ended up doing as Gwen asked, just to get rid of her.
“I listened to the detectives while I served them coffee in the morning,” Gwen mused. They were sitting in their police acr, patrolling the streets. “They said the murdered bloke from last night was the third victim, all killed with the same weapon: a blade, about eight inches long, three inches deep. Two of them were elderly women, stabbed from the front, but this John Tucker was only nineteen, and he was stabbed from behind. I wonder what that could mean.”
Andy shrugged. He found Gwen’s efforts to play profiler fairly ridiculous, to be honest. If she could stop trying to look more than she was and do her own bloody work for a change, life would have been so much easier!
“Perhaps that he didn’t have the balls to attack a man face to face,” he replied, starting through the engine, as the call to break up a bar brawl had come through.
As usual, Gwen couldn’t let go. Like a pit bull with a bone, she kept nagging on the problem.
“But those people last night, the people in the car, who were they?” she pondered as they got out of the car. “What is Torchwood?”
“I’m not sure,” Andy shrugged again. “Special Ops, I guess. I heard Detective Swanson has worked with them on some really weird cases.”
“Yeah, but what does that mean?” Gwen asked.
“Bet you ten quid they're DNA specialists,” Andy replied, heading for the bar. “It's all DNA these days, like that CSI bollocks.”
“Well, it could be useful,” Gwen insisted. “I mean, analyzing bullet paths and fingerprints and all that stuff… it really could help, couldn’t it?”
Andy snorted. “CSI Cardiff, I'd like to see that,” he said. “They'd be measuring the velocity of a kebab. We’ve got SOCO; that should be enough.”
He tossed open the doors, and they entered the bar, walking right into the middle of a full-blown brawl. Andy looked around to get the general picture about the participants and the state of the furniture. Such things could be crucial when breaking up a brawl. A broken chair leg could cause serious injuries.
“Thank you very much!” he then shouted, to get their attention. “Break it up! Break it up! Thank you!”
He got between two combatants and pushed them away with enough strength to separate them but not hard enough to injure them. They weren’t hardened criminals, after all, just some drunken blokes who couldn’t hold their liquor. The two men sauntered in two different directions, and Andy smiled in satisfaction. All that weight-lifting and sandbag-punching in the fitness studio came in handy in such situations.
From the corner of his eye he could see Gwen latch onto a burly, bald-headed man's arm, trying to get him to let go of another man he was holding. He man shook her off his arm, hurling her against the wooden wall. She hit her head, hard, and stayed on the floor, moaning, her eyes welling with tears.
The brawl continued on. Andy suppressed an exasperated growl – another simple job screwed up, another nail in the coffin of his career – and ran back to the car to call in reinforcements. Any chances to solve the problem on their own had been thwarted.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
About an hour later, he was with Gwen in the hospital, seeing that she got her head wound tended to. Gwen whimpered while the cute young doctor worked on her – perhaps to wake his sympathies – and, surprisingly enough, accepted Andy’s help to walk along the hallway after all had been done.
“Ow!” she complained, touching the back of her head gingerly. “That really hurt. You shouldn’t have left me fight those big brutes alone, you know! They were at least twice my size, each!”
“Don’t worry,” Andy replied dryly, because really, everyone should have learned some decent unarmed fighting style beyond the basic training, which was, to be perfectly honest, bollocks. “With that extremely thick Welsh skull of yours, you’ll be up and running in no time.”
He didn’t mean that quite literally. Honestly, he didn’t. Nonetheless, he wasn’t the least surprise when instinctively Gwen looked up hearing the overhead announcement Dr. Roberts to ME. Dr. Roberts to ME. Thank you., and – freeing herself from Andy’s grip – began to run up the stairs, following a man in a long grey trenchcoat and exclaiming. “It’s him! My God, it’s him!”
Swearing a blue streak, Andy ran after her. Gwen was a pain in the arse, that was true, but she was still his responsibility. He was still the NCO in charge, due to the fact that he had two more years of duty under his belt, and it was his duty to keep her alive and relatively unharmed – despite her repeated efforts to get kidnapped, taken hostage, beaten up or killed. It was a dirty job, but someone had to do it, and Police Constable Davidson took his duties very seriously.
He reached the top of the stairs and saw that the corridors had been sealed off. Hearing a door slam shut, he turned around and hurried down a few stars again, calling out to a chubby, round-faced, slightly long-haired man – presumably the porter – who was walking up to him.
“Excuse me… It's all sealed off up there. Who did that?”
The porter shrugged, recognizing him being from the police. “Thought it was you lot.”
“Not that I’d have been told,” Andy murmured. “Have you any idea why it was done? What’s happened?”
“Well, I don't know,” the porter replied, not terribly concerned. “Nine o'clock this morning, it was all sealed off, they never said why. Chemicals or something, I’d guess.”
He turned away, but Andy stopped him. “Sorry, but have you seen my partner? Young woman, brunette, with shoulder-length hair and really big eyes.”
“Yeah, sure,” the porter pointed at the corridor on top the stairs. “She went thataway; that’s why I thought you were the ones who had everything sealed off.”
With that, he left Andy alone, presumably returning to his room. He had work to do, after all. So did Andy, for that matter, but he couldn’t turn up one partner short. So he took upon himself the task to regain his errant partner.
He ran up the stairs again, and could now indeed see Gwen entering the sealed off corridor. Business as usual, then, he thought sourly. Gwen Cooper ignoring the rules as always. What’s new?
At the far end of the corridor, he could see someone walk out of a side room. It looked like a grown man wearing a jumpsuit – a completely bald man, he corrected himself – but there was something wrong with his posture, something off in his movements, in the angle he held his head. Andy was getting very bad vibes from the whole thing.
“Gwen, don’t get any closer!” he said warningly.
As expected, Gwen didn’t listen to him; perhaps hadn’t even heard him. She did have this sort of selective hearing, in order to have her own way. In fact, she started to head over to the man… thing… who seemed to feel her approach and stopped mid-stride.
“Hello?” she asked tentatively; bloody hell, she even waved to get his – its – attention, that silly woman. “Sorry, I'm just looking for someone.”
The… thing turned and looked at Gwen. It didn’t answer. Andy moved on in faster, looking frantically for something that he could potentially use as a weapon, because the closer he got, the stranger the creature looked to him. He really doubted they were dealing with a human being, although he couldn’t even imagine what else it could be. Only Gwen couldn’t be distracted from her track by a face that looked like some sort of mask from Hellraiser.
“Right, yeah,” she muttered. “Clever.” She raised her voice again. “Anyway, I don't know if you saw a man come through here – a tall man, in one of those big sort of military coats.”
The creature still didn’t answer. It probably wasn’t even capable of speaking, with those teeth, prosthetics or not, and Gwen’s voice rose half an octave as always when she was getting annoyed.
“Okay. If you could answer? This is official business.”
“No, Gwen, it isn’t”, Andy said in a low, even voice, trying not to upset the creature, whatever it was. “We’ve got no bloody business to be here, so would you just bugger off and let those who know how to deal with weird, freakish stuff deal with him?”
Of course, Gwen ignored him as usual. She smiled and pointed at the thing’s face. “That's good,” she babbled in that stupid manner she called winning the subject’s trust. “That's a good mask sort of thing.”
Andy rolled his eyes, because honestly, who the hell talked like that? Or did Gwen really think someone was having an early Carnival in the hospital corridor? The thing, as it could be accepted, didn’t answer, just stared at Gwen with those strange, inhuman eyes, and finally even in Gwen’s head began to dawn a vague idea that something just wasn’t right here.
“Look,” she said in what she considered her authoritative tone, “I'm sorry if I'm interrupting something, but ... I think we can stop this now, okay?” The thing kept glaring at her, and her voice once again turned shrill with annoyance. “It's all very well playing silly buggers, but I'm busy, all right? Now, I'm looking for a man in a big grey coat. I said we can stop being silly.”
She stomped with her foot in frustration. The thing opened a mouth full of pointy teeth and hissed at her.
“Gwen, get the hell away from that thing!” Andy all but begged. “Whatever it is, it can’t be safe!”
“Oh, don’t be silly!” Gwen threw the reply over her shoulder. “I’m a trained policewoman, I know what I’m dooo… aaaaaaah!”
Her last words were drowned in a terrible scream as the creature grabbed her and bit her neck. Blood spurted out all around them, and Andy wasted a precious second fighting the urge to get violently ill. Then he lounged to help her, forgetting that he was unarmed – despite everything, he couldn’t just let her being butchered by… by something he couldn’t even name.
At the same moment, the lift stopped on their level, and a tall man in a heavy grey coat stepped out of it. He matched the description of the one Gwen had been looking for to the iota. He also seemed grim and concerned. Assessing the situation, he grabbed Andy and shoved him behind.
“Stay out of the way,” he ordered. He had an American accent. “We’ll deal with it; this is our job.”
Recognizing true authority when he saw it, Andy obeyed. He could see three other people – two women and a rather scrawny, black-haired man – rush out of the lift. They sprayed the creature with something (and Andy was sure it wasn’t just pepper spray), apparently trying to detain it. The thing dropped Gwen’s limp body and covered its eyes with its clawed hands.
“Get it down!” one of the women, a lovely Japanese chick, called out to the others “Get it down! Cuff it!”
“Down on the floor!” the black-haired man shouted.
The three of them overwhelmed and handcuffed the creature. The other woman – a vaguely oriental beauty with a regal posture – put a hood over its head. They dragged it to its feet and held it tight. Just after it was secured did the dark-haired man go down on his knees to check Gwen’s pulse. His movements were those of a trained professional – he had to be a doctor or at least a medic of some sort. He looked up at the man in the greatcoat (presumably their team chief) and shook his head in regret.
“I’m sorry, Jack,” he said. “She’s dead.”
“I see,” the man whose name was apparently Jack closed his eyes for a moment, as if the news would hurt him personally. Then he looked at his team again. “Get the Weevil to the Hub. As for the rest – standard procedure.”
“What about him?” the cute Japanese chick nodded in Andy’s direction. Under different circumstances, her interest would have flattered him, but now…
“I’ll deal with him,” the team chief replied.
Andy was seriously asking himself if he should be worried.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Twenty minutes later the two of them were sitting in a slightly seedy, traditional pub that the tourists would never find. It was for the locals, and Andy found some strange comfort in that fact. The wood-panelled walls, the flashing slot machine at his back, the simply-clad men drinking their beer… all this had a reassuring touch of normalcy to it, something that he desperately needed right. Now.
Jack returned from the bar, bringing pints fort hem both. Andy accepted the beer thankfully – it was against regulations, sure, but after all that he’d just witnessed, he needed a drink badly – and Jack seemed to be drinking water. Watching Andy with clinical interest over the rim of his water glass, until the young constable couldn’t take it any longer.
“You’d be a cheap date, you know,” he said, trying to ease the tension with a joke. “What’s that, tap water?”
“Yeah,” Jack had taken off his coat and laid it over the back of his chair. He was wearing some sort of beige jacket underneath, and old-fashioned bracers to his slacks. The last time Andy had seen such things when his grandfather had been still alive. “Gotta keep myself hydrated. Might have to travel any moment.”
Andy got that strange feeling again, not sure why. “Travel where?” he asked.
Jack’s eyes got that strange look for a moment… the one Andy had only heard before. It was called the ‘thousand year stare’. Soldiers returning from war, having seen terrible things had that kind of stare, it was said.
“Home,” he answered softy, and there was such painful hope in that single word that Andy’s heart contracted in sympathy. Then Jack shook off his melancholy in a second, and gave him that wide, almost-too-bright smile again. “But perhaps not right now. There’s still much work for me to do here.”
Andy sipped his beer slowly, enjoying the taste and how it warmed his chest. “So, what’s gonna happen to me now?” he asked.
Jack shrugged. “It’s up to you. We can make you forget what’s just happened, planting altered memories in your head – and a completely plausible explanation for your partner’s death.”
“You can do that?” Andy stared at him in open-mouthed shock.
Jack nodded. “That and more. Although, to be honest, I’d be a little disappointed if you chose to forget.”
“What’s my other option then?” Andy asked.
“You could join us,” Jack replied simply. “We’re a little understaffed – chronically, I’d say – and frankly, the girls are more needed for research than for Weevil hunting. It’s a waste of their talents, but we don’t have enough field agents.”
“That… thing that killed Gwen…”
“It's called a Weevil,” Jack said. “Or at least, we call them Weevils. We don't know their real name; they're not too good at communicating. But we've got a couple of hundred of them in the city living in the sewers, feeding off the ... Well, it's the sewers, you can guess. But every once in a while, one of them goes rogue, comes to the surface, attacks. Actually, it's been happening more and more and we have no idea why. But it's alien. It was born on a different world and it's real.”
“How did it get here, then?” Andy asked, trying very hard not to freak out. It wasn’t an easy task. He was used to thieves and robbers and even murderers, but at least those were human ones. This was like Nightmare on Elm Street coming alive.
Jack lowered his voice and seemed to choose his words very seriously. “There's a rift in space and time running right through the city. The Weevils didn't come in a spaceship. They kind of just – slipped through. All sorts of things get washed up here. Creatures, time-shifts, space junk, debris, flotsam and jetsam.”
“And you scavenge the stuff they leave behind,” Andy guessed. That actually made sense… in a very weird way.
Jack nodded. “Now you’re catching on. Yes, that’s what we do. Find ways of using it. Arming the human race for the future. The twenty-first century is when it all changes, and you've got to be ready.”
“But who's in charge of you?” Andy was still more than a little confused. “Is it the government or what?”
Jack shook his head. “We're separate from the government. Outside the police. Beyond the United Nations. Because if one power got hold of this stuff, they could use it for their own purposes.”
“And you think I’d be suited for this sort of job?” Andy asked doubtfully.
Jack nodded. “Oh, yes. I had Ianto check out both of you, after your late partner started to sniffle around after us. I know you can handle a gun. I know you’re physically fit. And I’ve just seen that you can keep your calm and follow orders in a crisis. That’s a very important aspect of our job.”
“B-but… I want to become a sergeant… or even a detective one day!” Andy protested. “I want to finally do important work! I’ve wasted enough years already!”
Jack leaned forward and gave him a look of extreme intensity. “Believe me, Police Constable Davidson; nothing could be more important for the future of this town – this whole planet – than the work we do here.”
“You promise?” Andy knew it was an absurd question, but he couldn’t help. He needed to be sure.
To his pleasant surprise, the older man didn’t laugh. “I promise,” he said simply.
Andy swallowed. Hard. “Then I accept the job,” he said, every bit as simply as Jack had spoken.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Jack took him to the Millennium Centre on Roald Dalh Plass. They went to a small travel shop with lots of brochures and pamphlets on the counter, which, surprisingly, was still open at such a late hour. Hearing the front door open, a friendly-looking young man in an impeccable dark suit came out from the back that was separated from the office by a pearl curtain.
“New recruit, sir?” he asked Jack, who nodded and grinned at him.
“Police Constable – well, ex-Police Constable – Andy Davidson,” he replied. “Andy, this is Ianto Jones. You can call him our public face, I guess. He runs the cover shop, cleans up after us, gets us everywhere in time… and he makes a mean cup of coffee.”
The young man inclined his head in a ridiculously stilted manner, but his smile was genuine. “I do my best, sir.”
“And,” Jack added with a decidedly wicked grin,”he looks good in a suit.”
That comment threw Andy off-kilter for a moment, because honestly, that wasn’t something he’d have expected from his boss. At the police, such innuendos wouldn’t have been tolerated, and for a very good reason. Ianto, however, didn’t seem to be bothered by the flirtatious comment.
“Careful,” he warned, but his eyes were twinkling, “that’s harassment, sir.”
“File a complaint,” Jack returned, still with that thousand megawatt grin on his face, “but let us in first. I need to introduce Andy to the others.”
“Certainly, sir,” Ianto smiled and pushed some kind of button under the counter.
The front door slammed shut. At the same time, the wall panel opened behind Andy, revealing a hidden passageway.
“Go on,” Ianto said. “You can take the scenic tour next time.”
Andy was still hesitating, but Jack herded him through the secret entrance. Before following the new recruit, he looked back at Ianto for a moment.
“Things been cared of?” he asked.
Ianto nodded. “Efficiency is part of our job, sir,” he replied, and hung up the Closed sing on the door of the tourist shop.
~The End – for now~
Author: Soledad
Fandom: Torchwood
Category: Heavy-duty Gwen bashing.
Rating: Teens, mostly. If not, additionally given.
Genre: Take your pick. It’s different with each part.
Series: If Wishes Were Horses aka The Many Departures of Gwen Cooper, called the Wishverse, just to make it short.
Warning: repeated character death(s) in each chapter.
Timeframe: All along both Series One and Two. Major spoilers. This is an AU, though.
Summary: Many different ways to get rid of Gwen Cooper, while keeping the episodes as canonical as possible.
Disclaimer: the usual: don’t own, don’t sue! Everything belongs to RTD and BBC. I used a great deal of rewritten original dialogue, though. The additional dialogue in the bar between Jack and Andy uses lines from the deleted scenes, my thanks to
beccaelizabeth.* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
EPISODE 01 – NOTHING CHANGES, TAKE ONE
Author’s notes:
To certain episodes, there are two or more different versions. The pilot is one of those.
This particular chapter is rated 16+, for bloody violence. Personally, I find it a lot more harmful for young readers than moderate sex scenes.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Police Constable Andy Davidson was not a religious man. At least, he didn’t go to church, unless him mother came to visit and dragged him there. However, he firmly believed in karma. He believed that one’s deeds had consequences, and one had to live with those consequences, whether one liked it or not.
And so he accepted the fact that having walk the beat with Gwen Cooper, of all people, was the well-earned punishment for that moment of weakness (or insanity) two years ago. For the fact that – after a particularly stressful day – he’d kept comforting Gwen Cooper till they’d ended up shagging like bunnies in the police station’s broom closet. Speak about horrible clichés.
It wasn’t that he downright disliked Gwen – she could be funny and nice sometimes, especially if she wanted one to do things for her – but he hadn’t planned to spend his professional life handcuffed to her. No, Andy Davidson had plans for his future career with the police. He wanted to become a sergeant one day, even to go to detective school eventually. That was why he’d asked for permission to participate in weapons training and self-defence courses, even though all that wasn’t strictly mandatory for mere constables. That was why he went to the fitness studio and on morning runs to keep himself fit, and was learning for the sergeant’s exam in his every spare minute.
Unfortunately, being given promotions and supported to climb to career ladder required to be at least moderately successful in his current job, and having Gwen Cooper as his partner nipped all those efforts in the bud. Not only was she bossy and behaved as if she were his superior (despite having been paired up with him to learn something), she didn’t listen to reason, wither, and blundered headfirst into every crime scene, screwing up about eighty per cent all of their cases and getting hurt in half of them.
When called on her mistakes, she always widened her eyes to a fairly alarming size, under they all but bulked out of her face, made them fill with tears and her lower lip tremble, and began to simper.
“Ooh, sir, I’m sooo sorry! I mean, really, I mean really, really sorry. God, I can't believe it. I'll sort it. Whatever's happened, I'll deal with it, I promise! I can deal with it, I really can!”
For some reason, their superiors always seemed to buy the show. Andy could never understand hwo she did it. Perhaps those bulging eyes could mesmerize people somehow. After all, he had ended up in the broom closet with her, and he never did it in the broom closet, with anyone!
What was even worse than Gwen’s complete inability to deal with the simplest cases was her annoying stubbornness. Once she sank her claws in something (or someone – Rhys Williams could tell a tale about that, the poor sod, were he not so completely besotted with her), she’d never let it go. Ever.
Like with those Special Ops people (or whatever) from Torchwood. Ever since they’d taken over the murder case on Llangyfellach Lane, all she could think (and talk) about was Torchwood. She even buggered Yvonne into doing a search on their leader. Some Captain Hark or something like that. Andy could tell that Yvonne was not pleased, being overworked as she was and all that. She’d still agreed to look into it, should she find the time. People always ended up doing as Gwen asked, just to get rid of her.
“I listened to the detectives while I served them coffee in the morning,” Gwen mused. They were sitting in their police acr, patrolling the streets. “They said the murdered bloke from last night was the third victim, all killed with the same weapon: a blade, about eight inches long, three inches deep. Two of them were elderly women, stabbed from the front, but this John Tucker was only nineteen, and he was stabbed from behind. I wonder what that could mean.”
Andy shrugged. He found Gwen’s efforts to play profiler fairly ridiculous, to be honest. If she could stop trying to look more than she was and do her own bloody work for a change, life would have been so much easier!
“Perhaps that he didn’t have the balls to attack a man face to face,” he replied, starting through the engine, as the call to break up a bar brawl had come through.
As usual, Gwen couldn’t let go. Like a pit bull with a bone, she kept nagging on the problem.
“But those people last night, the people in the car, who were they?” she pondered as they got out of the car. “What is Torchwood?”
“I’m not sure,” Andy shrugged again. “Special Ops, I guess. I heard Detective Swanson has worked with them on some really weird cases.”
“Yeah, but what does that mean?” Gwen asked.
“Bet you ten quid they're DNA specialists,” Andy replied, heading for the bar. “It's all DNA these days, like that CSI bollocks.”
“Well, it could be useful,” Gwen insisted. “I mean, analyzing bullet paths and fingerprints and all that stuff… it really could help, couldn’t it?”
Andy snorted. “CSI Cardiff, I'd like to see that,” he said. “They'd be measuring the velocity of a kebab. We’ve got SOCO; that should be enough.”
He tossed open the doors, and they entered the bar, walking right into the middle of a full-blown brawl. Andy looked around to get the general picture about the participants and the state of the furniture. Such things could be crucial when breaking up a brawl. A broken chair leg could cause serious injuries.
“Thank you very much!” he then shouted, to get their attention. “Break it up! Break it up! Thank you!”
He got between two combatants and pushed them away with enough strength to separate them but not hard enough to injure them. They weren’t hardened criminals, after all, just some drunken blokes who couldn’t hold their liquor. The two men sauntered in two different directions, and Andy smiled in satisfaction. All that weight-lifting and sandbag-punching in the fitness studio came in handy in such situations.
From the corner of his eye he could see Gwen latch onto a burly, bald-headed man's arm, trying to get him to let go of another man he was holding. He man shook her off his arm, hurling her against the wooden wall. She hit her head, hard, and stayed on the floor, moaning, her eyes welling with tears.
The brawl continued on. Andy suppressed an exasperated growl – another simple job screwed up, another nail in the coffin of his career – and ran back to the car to call in reinforcements. Any chances to solve the problem on their own had been thwarted.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
About an hour later, he was with Gwen in the hospital, seeing that she got her head wound tended to. Gwen whimpered while the cute young doctor worked on her – perhaps to wake his sympathies – and, surprisingly enough, accepted Andy’s help to walk along the hallway after all had been done.
“Ow!” she complained, touching the back of her head gingerly. “That really hurt. You shouldn’t have left me fight those big brutes alone, you know! They were at least twice my size, each!”
“Don’t worry,” Andy replied dryly, because really, everyone should have learned some decent unarmed fighting style beyond the basic training, which was, to be perfectly honest, bollocks. “With that extremely thick Welsh skull of yours, you’ll be up and running in no time.”
He didn’t mean that quite literally. Honestly, he didn’t. Nonetheless, he wasn’t the least surprise when instinctively Gwen looked up hearing the overhead announcement Dr. Roberts to ME. Dr. Roberts to ME. Thank you., and – freeing herself from Andy’s grip – began to run up the stairs, following a man in a long grey trenchcoat and exclaiming. “It’s him! My God, it’s him!”
Swearing a blue streak, Andy ran after her. Gwen was a pain in the arse, that was true, but she was still his responsibility. He was still the NCO in charge, due to the fact that he had two more years of duty under his belt, and it was his duty to keep her alive and relatively unharmed – despite her repeated efforts to get kidnapped, taken hostage, beaten up or killed. It was a dirty job, but someone had to do it, and Police Constable Davidson took his duties very seriously.
He reached the top of the stairs and saw that the corridors had been sealed off. Hearing a door slam shut, he turned around and hurried down a few stars again, calling out to a chubby, round-faced, slightly long-haired man – presumably the porter – who was walking up to him.
“Excuse me… It's all sealed off up there. Who did that?”
The porter shrugged, recognizing him being from the police. “Thought it was you lot.”
“Not that I’d have been told,” Andy murmured. “Have you any idea why it was done? What’s happened?”
“Well, I don't know,” the porter replied, not terribly concerned. “Nine o'clock this morning, it was all sealed off, they never said why. Chemicals or something, I’d guess.”
He turned away, but Andy stopped him. “Sorry, but have you seen my partner? Young woman, brunette, with shoulder-length hair and really big eyes.”
“Yeah, sure,” the porter pointed at the corridor on top the stairs. “She went thataway; that’s why I thought you were the ones who had everything sealed off.”
With that, he left Andy alone, presumably returning to his room. He had work to do, after all. So did Andy, for that matter, but he couldn’t turn up one partner short. So he took upon himself the task to regain his errant partner.
He ran up the stairs again, and could now indeed see Gwen entering the sealed off corridor. Business as usual, then, he thought sourly. Gwen Cooper ignoring the rules as always. What’s new?
At the far end of the corridor, he could see someone walk out of a side room. It looked like a grown man wearing a jumpsuit – a completely bald man, he corrected himself – but there was something wrong with his posture, something off in his movements, in the angle he held his head. Andy was getting very bad vibes from the whole thing.
“Gwen, don’t get any closer!” he said warningly.
As expected, Gwen didn’t listen to him; perhaps hadn’t even heard him. She did have this sort of selective hearing, in order to have her own way. In fact, she started to head over to the man… thing… who seemed to feel her approach and stopped mid-stride.
“Hello?” she asked tentatively; bloody hell, she even waved to get his – its – attention, that silly woman. “Sorry, I'm just looking for someone.”
The… thing turned and looked at Gwen. It didn’t answer. Andy moved on in faster, looking frantically for something that he could potentially use as a weapon, because the closer he got, the stranger the creature looked to him. He really doubted they were dealing with a human being, although he couldn’t even imagine what else it could be. Only Gwen couldn’t be distracted from her track by a face that looked like some sort of mask from Hellraiser.
“Right, yeah,” she muttered. “Clever.” She raised her voice again. “Anyway, I don't know if you saw a man come through here – a tall man, in one of those big sort of military coats.”
The creature still didn’t answer. It probably wasn’t even capable of speaking, with those teeth, prosthetics or not, and Gwen’s voice rose half an octave as always when she was getting annoyed.
“Okay. If you could answer? This is official business.”
“No, Gwen, it isn’t”, Andy said in a low, even voice, trying not to upset the creature, whatever it was. “We’ve got no bloody business to be here, so would you just bugger off and let those who know how to deal with weird, freakish stuff deal with him?”
Of course, Gwen ignored him as usual. She smiled and pointed at the thing’s face. “That's good,” she babbled in that stupid manner she called winning the subject’s trust. “That's a good mask sort of thing.”
Andy rolled his eyes, because honestly, who the hell talked like that? Or did Gwen really think someone was having an early Carnival in the hospital corridor? The thing, as it could be accepted, didn’t answer, just stared at Gwen with those strange, inhuman eyes, and finally even in Gwen’s head began to dawn a vague idea that something just wasn’t right here.
“Look,” she said in what she considered her authoritative tone, “I'm sorry if I'm interrupting something, but ... I think we can stop this now, okay?” The thing kept glaring at her, and her voice once again turned shrill with annoyance. “It's all very well playing silly buggers, but I'm busy, all right? Now, I'm looking for a man in a big grey coat. I said we can stop being silly.”
She stomped with her foot in frustration. The thing opened a mouth full of pointy teeth and hissed at her.
“Gwen, get the hell away from that thing!” Andy all but begged. “Whatever it is, it can’t be safe!”
“Oh, don’t be silly!” Gwen threw the reply over her shoulder. “I’m a trained policewoman, I know what I’m dooo… aaaaaaah!”
Her last words were drowned in a terrible scream as the creature grabbed her and bit her neck. Blood spurted out all around them, and Andy wasted a precious second fighting the urge to get violently ill. Then he lounged to help her, forgetting that he was unarmed – despite everything, he couldn’t just let her being butchered by… by something he couldn’t even name.
At the same moment, the lift stopped on their level, and a tall man in a heavy grey coat stepped out of it. He matched the description of the one Gwen had been looking for to the iota. He also seemed grim and concerned. Assessing the situation, he grabbed Andy and shoved him behind.
“Stay out of the way,” he ordered. He had an American accent. “We’ll deal with it; this is our job.”
Recognizing true authority when he saw it, Andy obeyed. He could see three other people – two women and a rather scrawny, black-haired man – rush out of the lift. They sprayed the creature with something (and Andy was sure it wasn’t just pepper spray), apparently trying to detain it. The thing dropped Gwen’s limp body and covered its eyes with its clawed hands.
“Get it down!” one of the women, a lovely Japanese chick, called out to the others “Get it down! Cuff it!”
“Down on the floor!” the black-haired man shouted.
The three of them overwhelmed and handcuffed the creature. The other woman – a vaguely oriental beauty with a regal posture – put a hood over its head. They dragged it to its feet and held it tight. Just after it was secured did the dark-haired man go down on his knees to check Gwen’s pulse. His movements were those of a trained professional – he had to be a doctor or at least a medic of some sort. He looked up at the man in the greatcoat (presumably their team chief) and shook his head in regret.
“I’m sorry, Jack,” he said. “She’s dead.”
“I see,” the man whose name was apparently Jack closed his eyes for a moment, as if the news would hurt him personally. Then he looked at his team again. “Get the Weevil to the Hub. As for the rest – standard procedure.”
“What about him?” the cute Japanese chick nodded in Andy’s direction. Under different circumstances, her interest would have flattered him, but now…
“I’ll deal with him,” the team chief replied.
Andy was seriously asking himself if he should be worried.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Twenty minutes later the two of them were sitting in a slightly seedy, traditional pub that the tourists would never find. It was for the locals, and Andy found some strange comfort in that fact. The wood-panelled walls, the flashing slot machine at his back, the simply-clad men drinking their beer… all this had a reassuring touch of normalcy to it, something that he desperately needed right. Now.
Jack returned from the bar, bringing pints fort hem both. Andy accepted the beer thankfully – it was against regulations, sure, but after all that he’d just witnessed, he needed a drink badly – and Jack seemed to be drinking water. Watching Andy with clinical interest over the rim of his water glass, until the young constable couldn’t take it any longer.
“You’d be a cheap date, you know,” he said, trying to ease the tension with a joke. “What’s that, tap water?”
“Yeah,” Jack had taken off his coat and laid it over the back of his chair. He was wearing some sort of beige jacket underneath, and old-fashioned bracers to his slacks. The last time Andy had seen such things when his grandfather had been still alive. “Gotta keep myself hydrated. Might have to travel any moment.”
Andy got that strange feeling again, not sure why. “Travel where?” he asked.
Jack’s eyes got that strange look for a moment… the one Andy had only heard before. It was called the ‘thousand year stare’. Soldiers returning from war, having seen terrible things had that kind of stare, it was said.
“Home,” he answered softy, and there was such painful hope in that single word that Andy’s heart contracted in sympathy. Then Jack shook off his melancholy in a second, and gave him that wide, almost-too-bright smile again. “But perhaps not right now. There’s still much work for me to do here.”
Andy sipped his beer slowly, enjoying the taste and how it warmed his chest. “So, what’s gonna happen to me now?” he asked.
Jack shrugged. “It’s up to you. We can make you forget what’s just happened, planting altered memories in your head – and a completely plausible explanation for your partner’s death.”
“You can do that?” Andy stared at him in open-mouthed shock.
Jack nodded. “That and more. Although, to be honest, I’d be a little disappointed if you chose to forget.”
“What’s my other option then?” Andy asked.
“You could join us,” Jack replied simply. “We’re a little understaffed – chronically, I’d say – and frankly, the girls are more needed for research than for Weevil hunting. It’s a waste of their talents, but we don’t have enough field agents.”
“That… thing that killed Gwen…”
“It's called a Weevil,” Jack said. “Or at least, we call them Weevils. We don't know their real name; they're not too good at communicating. But we've got a couple of hundred of them in the city living in the sewers, feeding off the ... Well, it's the sewers, you can guess. But every once in a while, one of them goes rogue, comes to the surface, attacks. Actually, it's been happening more and more and we have no idea why. But it's alien. It was born on a different world and it's real.”
“How did it get here, then?” Andy asked, trying very hard not to freak out. It wasn’t an easy task. He was used to thieves and robbers and even murderers, but at least those were human ones. This was like Nightmare on Elm Street coming alive.
Jack lowered his voice and seemed to choose his words very seriously. “There's a rift in space and time running right through the city. The Weevils didn't come in a spaceship. They kind of just – slipped through. All sorts of things get washed up here. Creatures, time-shifts, space junk, debris, flotsam and jetsam.”
“And you scavenge the stuff they leave behind,” Andy guessed. That actually made sense… in a very weird way.
Jack nodded. “Now you’re catching on. Yes, that’s what we do. Find ways of using it. Arming the human race for the future. The twenty-first century is when it all changes, and you've got to be ready.”
“But who's in charge of you?” Andy was still more than a little confused. “Is it the government or what?”
Jack shook his head. “We're separate from the government. Outside the police. Beyond the United Nations. Because if one power got hold of this stuff, they could use it for their own purposes.”
“And you think I’d be suited for this sort of job?” Andy asked doubtfully.
Jack nodded. “Oh, yes. I had Ianto check out both of you, after your late partner started to sniffle around after us. I know you can handle a gun. I know you’re physically fit. And I’ve just seen that you can keep your calm and follow orders in a crisis. That’s a very important aspect of our job.”
“B-but… I want to become a sergeant… or even a detective one day!” Andy protested. “I want to finally do important work! I’ve wasted enough years already!”
Jack leaned forward and gave him a look of extreme intensity. “Believe me, Police Constable Davidson; nothing could be more important for the future of this town – this whole planet – than the work we do here.”
“You promise?” Andy knew it was an absurd question, but he couldn’t help. He needed to be sure.
To his pleasant surprise, the older man didn’t laugh. “I promise,” he said simply.
Andy swallowed. Hard. “Then I accept the job,” he said, every bit as simply as Jack had spoken.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Jack took him to the Millennium Centre on Roald Dalh Plass. They went to a small travel shop with lots of brochures and pamphlets on the counter, which, surprisingly, was still open at such a late hour. Hearing the front door open, a friendly-looking young man in an impeccable dark suit came out from the back that was separated from the office by a pearl curtain.
“New recruit, sir?” he asked Jack, who nodded and grinned at him.
“Police Constable – well, ex-Police Constable – Andy Davidson,” he replied. “Andy, this is Ianto Jones. You can call him our public face, I guess. He runs the cover shop, cleans up after us, gets us everywhere in time… and he makes a mean cup of coffee.”
The young man inclined his head in a ridiculously stilted manner, but his smile was genuine. “I do my best, sir.”
“And,” Jack added with a decidedly wicked grin,”he looks good in a suit.”
That comment threw Andy off-kilter for a moment, because honestly, that wasn’t something he’d have expected from his boss. At the police, such innuendos wouldn’t have been tolerated, and for a very good reason. Ianto, however, didn’t seem to be bothered by the flirtatious comment.
“Careful,” he warned, but his eyes were twinkling, “that’s harassment, sir.”
“File a complaint,” Jack returned, still with that thousand megawatt grin on his face, “but let us in first. I need to introduce Andy to the others.”
“Certainly, sir,” Ianto smiled and pushed some kind of button under the counter.
The front door slammed shut. At the same time, the wall panel opened behind Andy, revealing a hidden passageway.
“Go on,” Ianto said. “You can take the scenic tour next time.”
Andy was still hesitating, but Jack herded him through the secret entrance. Before following the new recruit, he looked back at Ianto for a moment.
“Things been cared of?” he asked.
Ianto nodded. “Efficiency is part of our job, sir,” he replied, and hung up the Closed sing on the door of the tourist shop.
~The End – for now~
