Wishverse 1.07 - Part 1 of 6
Aug. 8th, 2009 10:18 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: 14+, just to be on the safe side.
Genre: Romance/Angst, for this part. Plus some dark humour.
Series: Wishverse.
Warning: repeated character death(s) in each chapter.
Timeframe: "Greeks Bearing Gifts". 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.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
EPISODE 07 – GIFT HORSES, Part 1
Author’s notes:
Again, this one turned out very differently from my original intention, but I’m quite pleased with it.
The title comes from the saying we have in Hungarian. “Never look a gift horse into the mouth”. I don’t know if it exists in English or not; it means one shouldn’t criticize that which one gets for free.
This story will be posted in several short parts rather than in one big chunk, as it serves better the development of the relationship(s).
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Sometimes Police Constable Andy Davidson thought he was cursed to run into Gwen Cooper every other week – and that related to work, too. When she’d left the police to join Torchwood, he’d been so relieved he nearly burst out in tears. Getting a new, reliable and sane partner meant that he’d be able to try for Desk Sergeant, soon, perhaps even fro Detective, one day. That was his long-term goal for which he’d been working in all his duty years. Without all the team reprimands earned due to Gwen’s stupidity and her blatant disregard of every rule that was ever written, now he might get the chance to make that long-nursed dream reality.
Admittedly, he’d been quite surprised that she got accepted. Andy knew more about Torchwood than most people in Cardiff. Not nearly enough to get more than a very vague idea about what exactly they were doing, but enough to know that it was a high-risk job that required skills, competence and discretion. Things that Gwen Cooper never had and would never develop, even if she lived a thousand years.
If anyone, he knew that. He’d suffered from her incompetence and clumsiness for years. Thankfully, though, that wasn’t his burden to bear any longer. Or it wouldn’t be, hadn’t he run into her and her new team-mates with alarming regularity.
Like right now on the building site where the workers had found a grave and some strange object no-one could identify. Andy carefully retreated out of immediate eyesight when he saw the black Torchwood SUV drive around the corner, wallowing like some top heavy barge. The usual four people – the tall man in the outdated military greatcoat, the cute Japanese girl with the glasses and the palmtop-like high-tech device she never seemed to go anywhere without, the weaselly, dark-haired bloke that was their doctor and Gwen herself – got out of the car and went directly to the big colourful set of tents that had been put up over some of the digging.
Andy inched after them carefully. Not that anyone could have sent him away. He had every right to be there – had been posted here to guard the frigging site, in fact. But he knew if they spotted him they wouldn’t speak openly in his presence, and he really wanted to know what was going on.
He sneaked up to the big tent and peaked through the flap that had been left open for an inch or so. Team Torchwood was inspecting the mess the workers had dug up. The doctor was standing hip-deep in the grave, examining some sort of skeleton, while the others took various readings with their high-tech gizmos. Save Gwen, of course, who was just standing around, asking stupid questions as was her wont.
“Once, just once, I'd like to walk into one of these tents and find it's a party,” the leader of the team, that Jack bloke – Andy doubted that he was really a Captain of anything – mused. “You know, food, drink, people dancing, girl crying in the corner.”
Gwen paid no attention to him. She was watching the doctor working in the grave. “Is it alien?” she asked distractedly.
”And how,” her boss replied, pushing some seemingly random buttons on the weird wrist gadget he was wearing. “I'm picking up traces of ilmenite, pyroxene, and even dark matter.”
Andy’s eyes widened hearing that. Could it be that they’d found some alien spaceship or a UFO that had crashed in Cardiff decades ago? Wouldn’t that be kind of cool?
”Any idea what it is?” Gwen asked.
”Not a clue,” her boss turned the big, rusty-looking angular object this way and that. It was about the size of a vacuum cleaner. “Could be a weapon, or a really big stapler. How's our friend there?” he asked, glancing down into the grave.
Their doctor looked up at him. “She's dead.”
Harkness rolled his eyes. “Yeah, thanks, Quincy,” then he paused and asked. “She?”
The doctor shrugged. “Judging by the size of her skull.”
Their boss nodded his understanding and looked at the cute Japanese chick. “How long have they been here, Tosh?”
”From the depth they found them...” she used something that looked like a penlight. “a hundred and ninety-six years, eleven to eleven and a half months. The earth's been disturbed so I'm afraid I can't be more accurate.”
Andy was impressed – both by her skills and her equipment. Had the police any tools half this sophisticated (and any detectives half this smart) there wouldn’t have been any unsolved murder cases in Cardiff.
“What killed her?” Gwen asked. “The stapler?”
On the other hand, they didn’t have Gwen Cooper in their rows any longer, and that promised more properly solved cases in the future.
The doctor shook his head. “Nah. See those shattered ribs? I reckon she was shot.”
Their boss wrapped the rusty metal object into some kind of plane. “Well, let's get her back to the Hub and find out,” he said. “Ianto promised to have the corpse sent in within the hour.”
Gwen proffered the doctor a helping hand and pulled him up out the grave. “You're so light!” she teased him in a manner that sounded way too familiar to Andy. Things always started like that with Gwen. “You're like a girl.”
”I'm not light,” the doctor retorted darkly. “I'm wiry. Fat girls go mad for it,” he shot Gwen a sardonic look and added nastily. “But I guess I don't need to tell you that.”
Andy snickered quietly at the doctor’s mean remark. Gwen was always so full of herself, so sure she looked better than anyone else, so quick to criticize other women; it served her good to be taken down a few pegs. Then he realized that Team Torchwood was about to leave; and that he had to do the same, unless he wanted them to catch him spying on them.
Nonetheless, he was more than a little disappointed that they seemed to have no idea what he strange metallic object could be. Perhaps they’d figure out eventually; but it wasn’t likely that anyone would tell him afterwards. The only one of them he could ask was Gwen, and she wouldn’t tell him anything. She’d just play up her new, shiny secret agent status and make him feel inadequate, the stupid cow.
It was really annoying, knowing someone in a top secret organization and not being able to learn anything. If he only could meet someone else from the Torchwood team, outside of work… that might actually work, if he played his cards right.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
His chance came earlier than he’d hoped for. Getting off-duty, he decided to go for a drink… alone. He usually went for a pizza and a beer with his mates from the police station, but when he wanted to mull over a problem, or to think about a question that interested him for some reason, he preferred to be alone.
He could shut out the background noise easily – a useful skill he’d developed growing up with four sisters – and the constant movement of shapes and colours helped him to think. Which sounded weird, but it worked, so why not put it to good use?
When he entered the pub – his usual watering hole when drinking alone – they were playing “I Broke Into Your House Last Night” in the background, and he saw her immediately. The cute Japanese chick from Torchwood. Toshiko Sato. She was sitting at the bar, nursing a drink, looking distant. It must have been a not-so-good day at Torchwood, if it drove such a classy lady into a pub, alone.
But again, it wasn’t really surprising. Poor chick had to work with Gwen now. For a woman who couldn’t even hope for sexual favours for doing all the work and cleaning up Gwen’s mess afterwards, it was probably even worse… although he wouldn’t put it beyond Gwen to do sexual favours to other women. That Rhys bloke really had a lot to put up with.
Putting Gwen out of his mind in favour of a much cuter girl, Andy walked to the bar and smiled at Miss Sato… if he remembered her name correctly, that is.
“Evening,” he said conversationally. “I never thought I’d find you here, all on your lonesome… unless you’re waiting for someone, in which case I’ll just shut up and leave.”
She looked at him a bit startled at first – then recognition dawned on her, and she smiled apologetically.
“Constable Davidson, is it? I’m sorry; I haven’t recognized you without the uniform right away.”
“Andy,” he corrected, grinning like a loon that she’d actually remembered his name. “Do I look so different in me civvies?”
She nodded. “You look older,” she judged. “Less like a toy soldier and more like a man. Looks good on you.”
Andy laughed. “I’ll take it as a compliment.”
She smiled at him; a bit tiredly, but smiled. She had a beautiful smile. “You should.”
Andy ordered a beer and planted himself on the bar stool next to hers. “So… are you alone here, then?”
She nodded. “I barely go to bars anymore. Not since Suzie…. Anyway, it’s always too much to do. Especially when one’s stupid and irresponsible co-workers manage to ruin the results of weeks of hard work in a second.”
Oh-oh, that sounded very familiar. Gwen-Cooper-kind of familiar. Andy patted her hand encouragingly.
“Tell me about it?” he invited.
She shook her head. “I don’t think I can. It’s… classified.”
For a moment, Andy hesitated whether he should tell her anything, knowing all too well Torchwood’s official policy about making people forget everything they might have learned about them. But she looked so burdened, so in need to talk to someone who’d actually understand her sorrow that he decided if she made her forget their conversation it wouldn’t be too bad.
“Listen,” he said, choosing his words very carefully, “I know Torchwood is a tad… unusual as a workplace. An uncle of mine, Mum’s second cousin from the maternal side, used to work for Torchwood Cardiff – until he died under mysterious circumstances, back in 1999. Right when Mum got the news, some people came from London, talked to her about Uncle Merion, and on the next day all she could remember was that he’d worked for some security firm owned by a Mr. H. C. Clements and had a lethal car accident. They never thought to check whether we kids knew anything.”
She stared at him, clearly shocked by this news.
“And do you?” she asked. “Know anything, I mean?”
“Not much,” he clarified. “Uncle Merion didn’t visit us a lot; not in the last years anyway. But earlier, when I was ten or twelve, he sometimes told me stories. About giant spaceships and weird creatures and stuff. Quite frankly, I thought he was a little mad and the stories all pure fantasy… until he died.”
“Why that?” she asked, more than a little worried. He shrugged.
“I was already with the police when he died, and when I visited Mum, I found it… strange that she would have false memories about her own cousin. That made me think; that and the strangers who’d visited her, according to the old lady in the wheelchair from the neighbourhood. She was a nosy one, you know, bored to death at home and used to watch her neighbours through an opera glass. So I began to suspect that perhaps not all of Uncle Merion’s stories had been made up and put my antennae out in all directions. You’d be surprised how much you can learn about supposedly confidential things if you pay proper attention.”
“I can imagine,” she said darkly. “It seems that our security protocols need a serious update. Did you figure out what had really happened to your uncle?”
He shook his head. “Not beyond the fact that he was killed at his workplace. I realized that these people from London had made Mum forget to cover up the murder for some reason… and that they’d do the same to me if I wasn’t careful. So I was careful and never spoke to anyone of what I’d figured out… until now. I wanted to remember Uncle Merion and his stories.”
“Why bring it up now, then?” she asked. “Aren’t you afraid that I’ll make you forget?”
He shrugged again. “Why should you want to? I’m no danger for you folks. I’ve kept my mouth shut for nine years already; I don’t intend to start gossiping now.”
“That still doesn’t explain why you have told me all this,” she pointed out. She was smart, and not the least gullible.
“You look like someone who really needs to get things off her system,” he replied simply. “I’m not asking you about any big, dark Torchwood secrets. I’m just asking what’s bothering you right now.”
“It’s not really important,” she said with a sigh. “I just had an unpleasant encounter with one of my team-mates, that’s all.”
Andy grinned. “Let me guess. Are we talking about Gwen Cooper?” at her surprised reaction he grinned even broader. “Been there, done that, still have the scars.”
“I thought you were the bestest pals,” she said with fine irony.
“As long as I did all the work she felt too fine doing herself, yeah, we were,” Andy replied dryly. “So, what has she done this time? Spill!”
“It wasn’t her alone,” she admitted. “She and Owen – another colleague of us – were playing some sort of silly game in the office. Throwing things at each other… that kind of childish stuff. And then Owen accidentally I kicked out the plug of my computer.”
“Which, I assume, had some really important stuff running on it,” Andy finished, getting the picture. She nodded, her eyes glittering with annoyance.
“It was a translation programme I'd written,” she explained. “It had taken me weeks – no, months, actually – to collate every scrap of every alien… I mean foreign language we’ve got in our databases, and broken it down into binary threads to see if there was a common derivation…”
“I don’t pretend to understand half of what you’re talking about,” Andy said slowly, “But it sounds like an awful lot of work.”
“It is,” she sighed in defeat. “And now I can start from the scratch again – I couldn’t even back the results up before the programme had run its course, and since it was interrupted… damn, I was so looking forward to see how it would work!”
“I don’t assume either of them apologized,” Andy half-asked. He had no illusions about Gwen, but perhaps the team’s doctor was a more decent chap than he looked.
“They made dirty jokes about my explanation being ‘a bit of a mouthful’, and that was basically it,” she replied bitterly. “Then Owen told me that even the stick up my arse has got a stick up its arse.”
Okay, apparently not. Andy briefly contemplated the possibility of breaking the doctor’s nose by some well-orchestrated accident. Granted, he was paid to uphold the law, not to break it, but this was no way to talk to a lady.
“I’m really sorry, Miss Sato,” he said, hoping that he got her name right. She gave him a small smile.
“Toshiko,” she corrected. “Actually, Tosh will do. That’s how everyone calls me. I’m just so frustrated, you know? We're supposed to be professionals. We've got a job to do. Sometimes I have the impression that Ianto and I are the only people who actually work in that place.”
“The friendly bloke from the tourist office?” Andy asked.
“You’ve met him?” Toshiko seemed surprised.
“A few times, yeah,” he admitted. “Gwen always orders me to the tourist office when she wants something from us.”
She frowned. “That’s highly irregular. You aren’t even supposed to know that she’s connected to the tourist office in any way.”
“Yeah, tell Gwen-bloody-Cooper she can’t do something,” he said wryly. “As long as you don’t expect her to actually listen, that is. Listening has never been her forte.”
“I’m surprised Ianto hasn’t Retconned you yet,” she said.
“Retconned?” he repeated. The word sounded vaguely familiar.
“Made you forget,” she explained. “He’s very good at dosing the amnesia pill. Better than Owen, in any case, although Owen would never admit it, of course.”
“Oh, that,” Andy smiled. “He knows who I am, in relation to Uncle Merion. He was the only one who’s made the connection between us. I reckon he thought he doesn’t need to, since I’ve kept my mouth shut voluntarily.”
That seemed to amuse her for some reason.
“Ianto is nothing if not thorough,” she said. “And often underestimated. The two of us happen to share that aspect at Torchwood.”
“It’s always the quiet ones who surprise you,” he commented, grinning. Then he glanced at his watch. “Sorry, but it’s time for me to go home. I’ve got early shift tomorrow. Can you take you home first or are you staying a little longer?”
She smiled at him. “Thanks for the offer, but I think I’ll stay a little while yet. And don’t worry; your secret is safe with me.”
“I’m not worried,” he said. “Well, it was really nice talking to you. Perhaps we’ll run into each other again, some other time.”
“Perhaps,” she answered noncommittally. “Take care.”
“You, too,” Andy paid for his beer and slid from the bar stool to leave.
He was nearly out of the door when he saw that predatory blonde woman in that sleeveless purple top walk over and join Toshiko at the bar. He wondered briefly whether they’d go home together.
~TBC~
Author: Soledad
Fandom: Torchwood
Category: Heavy-duty Gwen bashing.
Rating: 14+, just to be on the safe side.
Genre: Romance/Angst, for this part. Plus some dark humour.
Series: Wishverse.
Warning: repeated character death(s) in each chapter.
Timeframe: "Greeks Bearing Gifts". 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.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
EPISODE 07 – GIFT HORSES, Part 1
Author’s notes:
Again, this one turned out very differently from my original intention, but I’m quite pleased with it.
The title comes from the saying we have in Hungarian. “Never look a gift horse into the mouth”. I don’t know if it exists in English or not; it means one shouldn’t criticize that which one gets for free.
This story will be posted in several short parts rather than in one big chunk, as it serves better the development of the relationship(s).
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Sometimes Police Constable Andy Davidson thought he was cursed to run into Gwen Cooper every other week – and that related to work, too. When she’d left the police to join Torchwood, he’d been so relieved he nearly burst out in tears. Getting a new, reliable and sane partner meant that he’d be able to try for Desk Sergeant, soon, perhaps even fro Detective, one day. That was his long-term goal for which he’d been working in all his duty years. Without all the team reprimands earned due to Gwen’s stupidity and her blatant disregard of every rule that was ever written, now he might get the chance to make that long-nursed dream reality.
Admittedly, he’d been quite surprised that she got accepted. Andy knew more about Torchwood than most people in Cardiff. Not nearly enough to get more than a very vague idea about what exactly they were doing, but enough to know that it was a high-risk job that required skills, competence and discretion. Things that Gwen Cooper never had and would never develop, even if she lived a thousand years.
If anyone, he knew that. He’d suffered from her incompetence and clumsiness for years. Thankfully, though, that wasn’t his burden to bear any longer. Or it wouldn’t be, hadn’t he run into her and her new team-mates with alarming regularity.
Like right now on the building site where the workers had found a grave and some strange object no-one could identify. Andy carefully retreated out of immediate eyesight when he saw the black Torchwood SUV drive around the corner, wallowing like some top heavy barge. The usual four people – the tall man in the outdated military greatcoat, the cute Japanese girl with the glasses and the palmtop-like high-tech device she never seemed to go anywhere without, the weaselly, dark-haired bloke that was their doctor and Gwen herself – got out of the car and went directly to the big colourful set of tents that had been put up over some of the digging.
Andy inched after them carefully. Not that anyone could have sent him away. He had every right to be there – had been posted here to guard the frigging site, in fact. But he knew if they spotted him they wouldn’t speak openly in his presence, and he really wanted to know what was going on.
He sneaked up to the big tent and peaked through the flap that had been left open for an inch or so. Team Torchwood was inspecting the mess the workers had dug up. The doctor was standing hip-deep in the grave, examining some sort of skeleton, while the others took various readings with their high-tech gizmos. Save Gwen, of course, who was just standing around, asking stupid questions as was her wont.
“Once, just once, I'd like to walk into one of these tents and find it's a party,” the leader of the team, that Jack bloke – Andy doubted that he was really a Captain of anything – mused. “You know, food, drink, people dancing, girl crying in the corner.”
Gwen paid no attention to him. She was watching the doctor working in the grave. “Is it alien?” she asked distractedly.
”And how,” her boss replied, pushing some seemingly random buttons on the weird wrist gadget he was wearing. “I'm picking up traces of ilmenite, pyroxene, and even dark matter.”
Andy’s eyes widened hearing that. Could it be that they’d found some alien spaceship or a UFO that had crashed in Cardiff decades ago? Wouldn’t that be kind of cool?
”Any idea what it is?” Gwen asked.
”Not a clue,” her boss turned the big, rusty-looking angular object this way and that. It was about the size of a vacuum cleaner. “Could be a weapon, or a really big stapler. How's our friend there?” he asked, glancing down into the grave.
Their doctor looked up at him. “She's dead.”
Harkness rolled his eyes. “Yeah, thanks, Quincy,” then he paused and asked. “She?”
The doctor shrugged. “Judging by the size of her skull.”
Their boss nodded his understanding and looked at the cute Japanese chick. “How long have they been here, Tosh?”
”From the depth they found them...” she used something that looked like a penlight. “a hundred and ninety-six years, eleven to eleven and a half months. The earth's been disturbed so I'm afraid I can't be more accurate.”
Andy was impressed – both by her skills and her equipment. Had the police any tools half this sophisticated (and any detectives half this smart) there wouldn’t have been any unsolved murder cases in Cardiff.
“What killed her?” Gwen asked. “The stapler?”
On the other hand, they didn’t have Gwen Cooper in their rows any longer, and that promised more properly solved cases in the future.
The doctor shook his head. “Nah. See those shattered ribs? I reckon she was shot.”
Their boss wrapped the rusty metal object into some kind of plane. “Well, let's get her back to the Hub and find out,” he said. “Ianto promised to have the corpse sent in within the hour.”
Gwen proffered the doctor a helping hand and pulled him up out the grave. “You're so light!” she teased him in a manner that sounded way too familiar to Andy. Things always started like that with Gwen. “You're like a girl.”
”I'm not light,” the doctor retorted darkly. “I'm wiry. Fat girls go mad for it,” he shot Gwen a sardonic look and added nastily. “But I guess I don't need to tell you that.”
Andy snickered quietly at the doctor’s mean remark. Gwen was always so full of herself, so sure she looked better than anyone else, so quick to criticize other women; it served her good to be taken down a few pegs. Then he realized that Team Torchwood was about to leave; and that he had to do the same, unless he wanted them to catch him spying on them.
Nonetheless, he was more than a little disappointed that they seemed to have no idea what he strange metallic object could be. Perhaps they’d figure out eventually; but it wasn’t likely that anyone would tell him afterwards. The only one of them he could ask was Gwen, and she wouldn’t tell him anything. She’d just play up her new, shiny secret agent status and make him feel inadequate, the stupid cow.
It was really annoying, knowing someone in a top secret organization and not being able to learn anything. If he only could meet someone else from the Torchwood team, outside of work… that might actually work, if he played his cards right.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
His chance came earlier than he’d hoped for. Getting off-duty, he decided to go for a drink… alone. He usually went for a pizza and a beer with his mates from the police station, but when he wanted to mull over a problem, or to think about a question that interested him for some reason, he preferred to be alone.
He could shut out the background noise easily – a useful skill he’d developed growing up with four sisters – and the constant movement of shapes and colours helped him to think. Which sounded weird, but it worked, so why not put it to good use?
When he entered the pub – his usual watering hole when drinking alone – they were playing “I Broke Into Your House Last Night” in the background, and he saw her immediately. The cute Japanese chick from Torchwood. Toshiko Sato. She was sitting at the bar, nursing a drink, looking distant. It must have been a not-so-good day at Torchwood, if it drove such a classy lady into a pub, alone.
But again, it wasn’t really surprising. Poor chick had to work with Gwen now. For a woman who couldn’t even hope for sexual favours for doing all the work and cleaning up Gwen’s mess afterwards, it was probably even worse… although he wouldn’t put it beyond Gwen to do sexual favours to other women. That Rhys bloke really had a lot to put up with.
Putting Gwen out of his mind in favour of a much cuter girl, Andy walked to the bar and smiled at Miss Sato… if he remembered her name correctly, that is.
“Evening,” he said conversationally. “I never thought I’d find you here, all on your lonesome… unless you’re waiting for someone, in which case I’ll just shut up and leave.”
She looked at him a bit startled at first – then recognition dawned on her, and she smiled apologetically.
“Constable Davidson, is it? I’m sorry; I haven’t recognized you without the uniform right away.”
“Andy,” he corrected, grinning like a loon that she’d actually remembered his name. “Do I look so different in me civvies?”
She nodded. “You look older,” she judged. “Less like a toy soldier and more like a man. Looks good on you.”
Andy laughed. “I’ll take it as a compliment.”
She smiled at him; a bit tiredly, but smiled. She had a beautiful smile. “You should.”
Andy ordered a beer and planted himself on the bar stool next to hers. “So… are you alone here, then?”
She nodded. “I barely go to bars anymore. Not since Suzie…. Anyway, it’s always too much to do. Especially when one’s stupid and irresponsible co-workers manage to ruin the results of weeks of hard work in a second.”
Oh-oh, that sounded very familiar. Gwen-Cooper-kind of familiar. Andy patted her hand encouragingly.
“Tell me about it?” he invited.
She shook her head. “I don’t think I can. It’s… classified.”
For a moment, Andy hesitated whether he should tell her anything, knowing all too well Torchwood’s official policy about making people forget everything they might have learned about them. But she looked so burdened, so in need to talk to someone who’d actually understand her sorrow that he decided if she made her forget their conversation it wouldn’t be too bad.
“Listen,” he said, choosing his words very carefully, “I know Torchwood is a tad… unusual as a workplace. An uncle of mine, Mum’s second cousin from the maternal side, used to work for Torchwood Cardiff – until he died under mysterious circumstances, back in 1999. Right when Mum got the news, some people came from London, talked to her about Uncle Merion, and on the next day all she could remember was that he’d worked for some security firm owned by a Mr. H. C. Clements and had a lethal car accident. They never thought to check whether we kids knew anything.”
She stared at him, clearly shocked by this news.
“And do you?” she asked. “Know anything, I mean?”
“Not much,” he clarified. “Uncle Merion didn’t visit us a lot; not in the last years anyway. But earlier, when I was ten or twelve, he sometimes told me stories. About giant spaceships and weird creatures and stuff. Quite frankly, I thought he was a little mad and the stories all pure fantasy… until he died.”
“Why that?” she asked, more than a little worried. He shrugged.
“I was already with the police when he died, and when I visited Mum, I found it… strange that she would have false memories about her own cousin. That made me think; that and the strangers who’d visited her, according to the old lady in the wheelchair from the neighbourhood. She was a nosy one, you know, bored to death at home and used to watch her neighbours through an opera glass. So I began to suspect that perhaps not all of Uncle Merion’s stories had been made up and put my antennae out in all directions. You’d be surprised how much you can learn about supposedly confidential things if you pay proper attention.”
“I can imagine,” she said darkly. “It seems that our security protocols need a serious update. Did you figure out what had really happened to your uncle?”
He shook his head. “Not beyond the fact that he was killed at his workplace. I realized that these people from London had made Mum forget to cover up the murder for some reason… and that they’d do the same to me if I wasn’t careful. So I was careful and never spoke to anyone of what I’d figured out… until now. I wanted to remember Uncle Merion and his stories.”
“Why bring it up now, then?” she asked. “Aren’t you afraid that I’ll make you forget?”
He shrugged again. “Why should you want to? I’m no danger for you folks. I’ve kept my mouth shut for nine years already; I don’t intend to start gossiping now.”
“That still doesn’t explain why you have told me all this,” she pointed out. She was smart, and not the least gullible.
“You look like someone who really needs to get things off her system,” he replied simply. “I’m not asking you about any big, dark Torchwood secrets. I’m just asking what’s bothering you right now.”
“It’s not really important,” she said with a sigh. “I just had an unpleasant encounter with one of my team-mates, that’s all.”
Andy grinned. “Let me guess. Are we talking about Gwen Cooper?” at her surprised reaction he grinned even broader. “Been there, done that, still have the scars.”
“I thought you were the bestest pals,” she said with fine irony.
“As long as I did all the work she felt too fine doing herself, yeah, we were,” Andy replied dryly. “So, what has she done this time? Spill!”
“It wasn’t her alone,” she admitted. “She and Owen – another colleague of us – were playing some sort of silly game in the office. Throwing things at each other… that kind of childish stuff. And then Owen accidentally I kicked out the plug of my computer.”
“Which, I assume, had some really important stuff running on it,” Andy finished, getting the picture. She nodded, her eyes glittering with annoyance.
“It was a translation programme I'd written,” she explained. “It had taken me weeks – no, months, actually – to collate every scrap of every alien… I mean foreign language we’ve got in our databases, and broken it down into binary threads to see if there was a common derivation…”
“I don’t pretend to understand half of what you’re talking about,” Andy said slowly, “But it sounds like an awful lot of work.”
“It is,” she sighed in defeat. “And now I can start from the scratch again – I couldn’t even back the results up before the programme had run its course, and since it was interrupted… damn, I was so looking forward to see how it would work!”
“I don’t assume either of them apologized,” Andy half-asked. He had no illusions about Gwen, but perhaps the team’s doctor was a more decent chap than he looked.
“They made dirty jokes about my explanation being ‘a bit of a mouthful’, and that was basically it,” she replied bitterly. “Then Owen told me that even the stick up my arse has got a stick up its arse.”
Okay, apparently not. Andy briefly contemplated the possibility of breaking the doctor’s nose by some well-orchestrated accident. Granted, he was paid to uphold the law, not to break it, but this was no way to talk to a lady.
“I’m really sorry, Miss Sato,” he said, hoping that he got her name right. She gave him a small smile.
“Toshiko,” she corrected. “Actually, Tosh will do. That’s how everyone calls me. I’m just so frustrated, you know? We're supposed to be professionals. We've got a job to do. Sometimes I have the impression that Ianto and I are the only people who actually work in that place.”
“The friendly bloke from the tourist office?” Andy asked.
“You’ve met him?” Toshiko seemed surprised.
“A few times, yeah,” he admitted. “Gwen always orders me to the tourist office when she wants something from us.”
She frowned. “That’s highly irregular. You aren’t even supposed to know that she’s connected to the tourist office in any way.”
“Yeah, tell Gwen-bloody-Cooper she can’t do something,” he said wryly. “As long as you don’t expect her to actually listen, that is. Listening has never been her forte.”
“I’m surprised Ianto hasn’t Retconned you yet,” she said.
“Retconned?” he repeated. The word sounded vaguely familiar.
“Made you forget,” she explained. “He’s very good at dosing the amnesia pill. Better than Owen, in any case, although Owen would never admit it, of course.”
“Oh, that,” Andy smiled. “He knows who I am, in relation to Uncle Merion. He was the only one who’s made the connection between us. I reckon he thought he doesn’t need to, since I’ve kept my mouth shut voluntarily.”
That seemed to amuse her for some reason.
“Ianto is nothing if not thorough,” she said. “And often underestimated. The two of us happen to share that aspect at Torchwood.”
“It’s always the quiet ones who surprise you,” he commented, grinning. Then he glanced at his watch. “Sorry, but it’s time for me to go home. I’ve got early shift tomorrow. Can you take you home first or are you staying a little longer?”
She smiled at him. “Thanks for the offer, but I think I’ll stay a little while yet. And don’t worry; your secret is safe with me.”
“I’m not worried,” he said. “Well, it was really nice talking to you. Perhaps we’ll run into each other again, some other time.”
“Perhaps,” she answered noncommittally. “Take care.”
“You, too,” Andy paid for his beer and slid from the bar stool to leave.
He was nearly out of the door when he saw that predatory blonde woman in that sleeveless purple top walk over and join Toshiko at the bar. He wondered briefly whether they’d go home together.
~TBC~
