Wishverse 1.09 - Part 1
Title: The Many Departures of Gwen Cooper
Author: Soledad
Fandom: Torchwood
Category: Heavy-duty Gwen bashing.
Rating: General, suitable for all.
Genre: A bit of action, for this part. Plus a great deal of irony.
Series: Wishverse.
Warning: repeated character death(s) in each chapter.
Timeframe: "Random Shoes". Major spoilers - at least in theory. Since nothing truly Torchwood-related happened in the original episode, I'm not really sure, though. This is still an AU.
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.
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EPISODE 09 - RANDOM FOOLS, Part 1
Author’s notes:
I’ve actually made the effort to re-watch Torchwood’s most boring and pointless episode for the sake of this story. It made me itch… and want to break things… For the sake of my furniture, I had to release some of that venom here. ;))
Once again, the story is told from PC Andy’s POV. I like the guy. CoE wasn’t his fault. The unfamiliar characters are all nameless extras from “They Keep Killing Suzie”. I only gave them names.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Police Constable Andy Davidson’s previously good mood darkened considerably as he saw the Torchwood SUV pull up at the crime scene. And it had been such a pleasant day till now! A few lost tourists to nanny, a few bar brawls to break up, and now a nice, clean car accident… nothing out of the ordinary.
What the hell was bloody Torchwood doing here, then?
Andy tried to sneak up unnoticed to the yellow police tape, where Detective Trefor Pugh, a square-jawed, somewhat stocky man in a blue jacket, was listening to the report of the crime scene investigators.
“How fast, do you think, they were driving?” Pugh was just asking a tall, blonde woman in the hooded white paper coverall every member of the Soco was wearing. Andy recognized her as Sara Lloyd.
“I’d say at least fifty miles per hour,” she replied with a shrug. “Probably drunk, too, if the wheel prints are any indication. The victim probably didn’t even notice the car coming.”
“Travelled on the bonnet, bounced, maybe rolled, smashed his face on the road,” Tim Cochrane, a scruffy little Soco man added, flashing his camera to document every possibly important detail of the case. “At least the poor bloke didn’t suffer long.”
“So it was simply a car accident, right?” Pugh asked hopefully.
“Based on the evidence, it is,” Sara Lloyd confirmed.
“I see,” Pugh paused for a moment, then his expression darkened. “In that case, what the hell is Torchwood doing here?”
Lloyd shrugged. “Detective Swanson says they knew the victim. Well, at least Cooper did. And you know that Inspector Henderson would do anything to keep Captain Harkness in a good mood - only the devil knows why.”
Pugh pulled a face. “True enough,” he said unhappily. “And since the poor bloke was apparently one of Cooper’s drones, this has suddenly become a Torchwood project… a threat to national security, right?”
“Nah,” Andy quipped from the sideline, “that would be Cooper with a gun.”
Detective Pugh snorted. “Yeah, I’ve heard about it… So, Davidson, you used to work with her; how comes she always gets what she wants if she’s so bloody incompetent?”
“She’s like a dog with a bone,” Andy replied. “She just can't ever leave things bloody alone. After a while, people just give in, so that she’d stop nagging them.”
“I say it’s the bulging eyes,” Tim Cochrane commented. “She hypnotizes her victims to do whatever she wants. There’s no other explanation.”
“That, and the fact that she spreads her… favours rather generously,” Sara Lloyd added dryly. “Makes the… the recipient fairly vulnerable to blackmail.”
Andy, for a short time also a recipient of Gwen’s… favours, blushed furiously, cursing his fair complexion that betrayed his discomfort to everyone within a radius of ten miles. Sara Lloyd grinned at him.
“Make nothing of it, Andy, it’s not so as if you’d been the only one she’s taken advantage of,” she said. “How else would she have managed to get through police school? He only one I truly feel sorry for is that long-suffering boyfriend of hers. The poor bloke puts up with a lot of shit from her and still believes the sun shines out of her arse.”
While they were sharing a laugh at Cooper’s expense, the doors of the Torchwood SUV opened and out got Captain Harkness, complete with that ridiculous greatcoat of him, comm device in his ear and looking like he owed the place, as always. He was perhaps the most arrogant bloke Andy had ever seen. He walked to the Soco car in his customary, theatrical manner, coat billowing behind him, and Gwen, looking unkempt and rumpled like someone who’d had to dress in a great hurry, jogging after him like a poodle.
Several possible scenarios were played before Andy’s inner eye, and he felt his annoyance growing steadily. Had Rhys not said that Captain Harkness had something running with that Ianto bloke, from the tourist office of Roald Dahl Plass? They’d supposedly been seen in that little-known coffee shop/second-hand-bookstore in a hidden little lane… and they weren’t shopping.
Why would Gwen always want - and take - that which belonged to someone else? Like at the time when she’d had a romp - well, several romps - with PC Davies, after which Mrs. Davies demanded a divorce, and poor Dion had to stay in some cheap motel ever since. The woman was like a contagious disease… nobody was safe from her, she destroyed everybody. Andy was over his infatuation, thank God… well, mostly… but he felt sorry for Torchwood’s receptionist guy. Ianto was a decent bloke, even if he was queer. He deserved better.
However, Andy’s mood brightened considerably when he saw the third Torchwood member emerging from the SUV. It was that cute Japanese chick with the brains of the size of a small planet, or so Detective Swanson liked to say. Toshiko Sato. Although clad almost similarly to Gwen, in casual jeans and a short, black jacket, she managed to look classy and well-groomed, while Gwen was looking neither of those things. Seriously, had no one ever told her that beyond thirty a gal ought to wear a bra that actually helped? Or did she think that he boobs hanging down to her kneecaps were sexy?
Andy wondered how in seven hells could he have fallen for her a year ago… and so badly. Perhaps Tim Cochrane had been right. Perhaps it was the hypnotic effect of her bulging eyes, after all.
He edged a little closer to the crime scene, not wanting to miss any piece of info he might pick up from Torchwood, since Gwen would never tell him anything. She only pumped him for police info, never reciprocated. So he could see clearly when Captain Harkness stared down at the body in resigned recognition, saying, “Well, something like this was to be expected, wasn’t it?”
Toshiko nodded in agreement. “He couldn't even cross the road without messing it up,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“I understand you knew this bloke?” Detective Pugh asked. “He didn’t have any papers on him - we thought to ID him through his fingerprints at first, until Kathy Swanson called.”
“His name is - was - Eugene Jones,” Toshiko explained. “We don’t really know anything about him, save that he used to nerve us with his so-called discoveries for quite a while. I think he was a geek… and a rather pathetic one at that.”
Gwen kneeled down near the body. “No bag - nothing,” she murmured, checking the victim’s. Andy winced, hoping that Soco had already taken their DNA samples, because if they hadn’t, well, the crime scene was compromised now. “I mean, what was he doing here?” Gwen wondered, pawing the victim’s jacket in the vain hope to find something - anything - useful. “Perhaps he was hit deliberately... maybe he really did have something important.”
“Like what?” Toshiko asked. That simple, reasonable question seemed to push Gwen completely off-balance. She opened and closed her mouth several time before she could find an answer, making a remarkable impersonation of a blowfish.
“I don't know,” she finally said defensively. “He was always trying to talk to us, show us stuff. Perhaps we shouldn't have been so...”
“So… what?” Toshiko asked, a little impatiently. “We can’t take in every idiot who thinks they have seen a UFO, and I think this,“ she added, looking down at the body, “is just an ordinary RTA.”
“It was a red car,” Sara Lloyd supplied. “We’ve found red paint under his fingernails. We’ll send the sample to the lab for identification,” he added, looking at Detective Pugh, “and to determine the brand and where it is generally used. Other than that, we’re done here, Detective.”
Pugh nodded. “All right. Wrap things up here and return to the lab.”
“Wait!” Gwen cried, “You can’t just dismiss the chance that someone may have killed him!”
“Oh yes, I can,” Pugh replied calmly. “As far as I can tell, it was an ordinary RTA, just as the lady said. If Torchwood has the time or the resources to waste on such unnecessary work, be my guests - we have real cases to solve. Constable Davidson will assist you in everything you might need from the police. Good day.”
With that, he climbed into his car and left. The forensic team packed their kits and followed suit, leaving the body behind for Torchwood to deal with it. Andy had a hard time to suppress his grin. Detective Pugh might be a bloody moron sometimes, but at least he knew how to put Gwen in her place. Must have been a rare case of immunity to bulging eyes.
Unexpectedly, a mobile phone began to ring somewhere in the grass. Toshiko bent down to pick it up - then she froze in the last moment, giving Lloyd a questioning glance.
“You can check it,” Lloyd said. “We’ve already secured any possible fingertips.”
Toshiko answered the phone, frowned, then held it out to Gwen who had already extended a demanding hand. Gwen took it and glanced at the caller’s ID.
“Hi, Mrs Jones,” she said in what people at the police station called her drama queen voice. “Something's happened. We need to talk to you. Can you give us an address?”
Something’s happened. Classy, Gwen, really classy. Frighten the poor woman to death, would you, and that without telling her a thing, Andy thought in disgust. They had regular trainings about how to deal with the families of the victims - had Gwen slept through every single one of them? Of course, why pay attention when one can pass the exam in the broom closet…
“Well,” Captain Harkness gave Andy the thorough once-over, “since you’ve been assigned as our liaison in this particular case, PC Davidson, why don’t you get into the car?”
Surprised by the unexpected turn of events but happy that he wouldn’t be left out this time, Andy followed them to the SUV. He wanted to see more of Torchwood ever since Gwen had joined the not-quite-so-secret organization. He’d always been into this secret agent stuff and wanted to become a detective one day.
Gwen, on the other hand, seemed decidedly unhappy with Andy being involved. Little Miss Sensitive apparently doesn’t want to share her shiny new toys, Andy thought sarcastically, remembering the nickname that Ianto bloke had mentioned Gwen by, the only time the two of them had actually spoken to each other. There was clearly no love lost between those; not on Ianto’s side anyway. Which wasn’t really surprising, considering how Gwen was making cow eyes at her new boss all the time, blithely ignoring the fact that Captain Harkness was - supposedly! - with Ianto, and that she was all but betrothed to Rhys.
At the moment, though, Captain Harkness didn’t seem very perceptive for Gwen’s charms, who was holding the door of the SUV, trying to give him the puppy eyed routine and pouting. He simply pointed at the car.
“Stick with the team, Gwen,” he said.
“What?” Gwen snapped. “You're driving, aren’t you?”
Harkness rolled his eyes and got behind the steering wheel. Toshiko climbed into the back seat and gestured to Andy to join her, which he did more than happily. Gwen glared back at him over her shoulder.
“Jaack,” she whined, “why are we taking him with us? He’s not Torchwood; we’ll have to Retcon him afterwards anyway.”
Andy didn’t like the sound of that. Whatever Torchwood might be involved with on a daily basis, it suddenly seemed rather sinister.
“In case you’ve forgotten, it’s still me who decided who gets Retconned and who doesn’t,” Captain Harkness replied dismissively, and started the car.
He turned out to have a rather reckless driving style, and Andy did his best not to lose his lunch by some of the abrupt U-turns and braking maneuvers. He was amazed to see that Toshiko was able to type away on her laptop, completely unfazed.
“Hey, take care!” he protested. “Are you trying to kill us all? You may be a secret agent or whatnot, but you aren’t immortal, you know… and neither are we!”
He couldn’t understand why that made both Gwen and Toshiko break down in hysterical giggles.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
They drove to the victim’s address first, as they couldn’t find anything of interest on his phone from the current day, save from some pictures of random shoes… even though Gwen kept insisting that those had to mean something. That finding the people who wore those shoes could possibly reveal the motivation behind the crime.
“Gwen, there was no crime,” Andy said patiently. “Evidence clearly points at a simple car accident. You still know what those are, right? Not everything ought to be the super secret stuff you’ve been doing lately… whatever it is.”
“But he wanted to tell us something,” Gwen went on doggedly. “Wanted to show us something. Jack, you were there, you tell him!”
“He was a stalker; and a fairly crazy one at that,” Captain Harkness interrupted, his patience fading rapidly. “Owen and Ianto are already at his place, looking through his things. If he had something of true interest for Torchwood, they’re gonna find it. Ianto is nothing if not thorough… and he has ample experience with recognizing that kind of stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?” Andy asked with a frown.
“Alien artefacts,” Gwen replied absent-mindedly; at Captain Harkness’ death glare, she simply shrugged. “We’re gonna Retcon him anyway, aren’t we? So what does it matter if he knows?”
“One would think Suzie’s case has made even you understand how dangerous a Retcon overdose can be,” Captain Harkness replied, his voice unusually harsh. “I wish sometimes you’d think before you blurt out confidential things, Gwen. This isn’t about you showing off to your former partner, you know. Try to grow up a little, for God’s sake!”
Gwen was too insulted to even find an answer, and they sat in stony silence until Captain Harkness pulled up the SUV next to the Jones house. There they broke the news to the victim’s mother, a rather simple-minded yet good-hearted woman, who promptly started to cry, unable to answer any questions in her understandable grief. Gwen soon lost patience with her and left to question the victim’s teenage brother, leaving the grieving mother in Andy’s care, as usual.
As much as she loves to lecture other people about compassion, she’s always been rubbish at dealing with victims’ families, Andy thought sourly. She has the compassion of a brick wall, really… unless she wants to make someone do her bidding.
With a practice developed through dealing with such situations during his years in the service, Andy managed to calm Mrs Jones down a bit. Then he walked over to the victim’s room, where that weasel-faced Torchwood doctor (the one Gwen was currently shagging - Andy recognized the signs as well as the fact that the affair was apparently winding down) and that Ianto bloke, all posh in his impeccable suit as usual, were looking over the items lying around.
The doctor leafed through various pamphlets and read out their titles with increasing bewilderment, shaking his head in disbelief.
“Black Hole and the Uncertainty Principle by Dr. Louise Nagli, FRS and Dr. William Spencer,” he sighed. “What are we doing here?”
“Trying to get to know the victim, I believe it’s called,” Ianto replied and opened the display cabinet door. “Look at this!”
There were various labelled items on a glass shelf: a disturbingly phallic-looking… something of rose quartz, part of some unknown machine, looking like the weird hybrid of a bathroom tap and a motorcycle model, a lamp that had no visible light source, a translucent container that for some reason was reinforced with a metal part that seemed to have no function at all, several smaller stones, a handful of coin, something that seemed to be petrified flowers and so on.
To Andy, every single one looked like rubbish, but he assumed the Torchwood folks would recognize at least some of them. Even though at the moment they seemed fairly clueless themselves.
The doctor poked at the handful of round metallic objects. “Are these Roman coins?” he asked doubtfully. Ianto leaned closer to be able to read the label. In his dark suit, deep purple dress shirt and white-spotted purple tie, he looked rather out of place among the rubbish that apparently had been their victim’s life.
“This says pre-Gorgon Pilurian currency,” he said. “Authenticated, too, it seems.”
The doctor gave him a queer look. “Pre… what?”
“It means they are fake,” Ianto explained placidly. “Nothing about pre-Gorgon Pilurian culture is mentioned in the Archives; if there were, I’d know about it. Consequently, we can’t have any clue if they had any currency, and if yes, what it was like.”
The doctor nodded. “That’s right. You practically live down there… you and all those frozen corpses.”
“Besides,” Ianto continued, ignoring both the snide remark and Andy’s slightly… green complexion, “the only one who could authenticate alien objects in this country would be Torchwood. And we hadn’t received any such request.”
“What about Torchwood One?” the doctor asked. “Perhaps these are old enough to have been identified by them.”
Ianto shook his head. “They’d have confiscated them; and I can’t imagine that a random fool like Eugene would have been able to find Archie in Glasgow. Nah, I’m fairly sure that this stuff here is fake - which still doesn’t explain how Eugene would have heard about the Gorgons in the first place, of course.”
“There’s quite the market for rubbish like this,” Andy said. “You’d be surprised to know how many fools are out there who believe in little green men and things like that.”
The two Torchwood types turned to him in surprise, as if they’d have completely forgotten about his presence. Perhaps they had. They usually didn’t take outsiders with them while investigating a case.
“I beg to differ,” Ianto replied easily. “We not only know how many folks out there believe in aliens… we also know that those fools are absolutely right. Even though Gorgons are by no means green, of course. They have the appearance of blue, ethereal serpents, each of them composed of several of those serpentine forms.”
“Oi, Teaboy!” the doctor warned him. “Are we supposed to discuss such things with Prince Charming here?”
Ianto shrugged. “Jack must have taken him here for a reason,” he said. “He will know what he’s doing.”
“Yeah,” the doctor agreed, “unless he’s allowed his dick to make the decision again, of course,” he picked up another item, one that looked like a piece of stone with a petrified walnut kern glued to it. “Hey, look, Rice Krispies. Man, there are some rogues out there.”
“Apparently,” Ianto agreed with a blank face.
In that very moment, Gwen stormed in, interrupting their discussion. She was positively fuming in self-righteous indignation.
“You won’t believe what that little toad of his brother said!” she declared dramatically. “He walked into a road and got run over - was all he had to say. About his own brother! Unbelievable!”
“Well, wasn’t that exactly what happened?” Ianto asked reasonably.
Gwen glared daggers at him. “You’re impossible, all of you! Do you have a heart? Do you care about anyone? This poor young man was trying to tell us something, but we never listened, never! And now he’s dead, and…” she trailed off, noticing an empty display stand on the shelf. “Oh, hang on, there's something missing here!” she whirled around to the puffy-eyed mother of Eugene who was just walking into the room. “Mrs. Jones, do you know what's missing from Eugene's collection?” she demanded.
But Branwen Jones wasn’t listening to her. She looked around in her son’s room, turned upside down by all these strangers, and her tears started falling again.
“Why didn't they stop?” she asked brokenly. “They killed my boy and just drove on...”
Not getting the answer she’d been hoped for, Gwen put down the display stand with an annoyed scowl. Dismayed with the manners of the Torchwood people, Andy took the grieving woman’s arm.
“Come with me, Mrs. Jones, let’s leave them to their work,” he encouraged her gently. “You can tell me a little about Eugene in the meantime.”
Half an hour later the doctor and Gwen had packed Eugene’s things in cartoon boxes and were carrying those boxes to the SUV, where Ianto was storing them in the back of the car. Mrs Jones, standing in the doorway with Andy, stared at hem in shocked disbelief and started to cry again when the doctor walked past her. That finally made Gwen stop for a moment on her crusade.
“I am sorry, Mrs. Jones,” she said in an overly emotional manner that, in Andy’s opinion, lacked any sincerity - then she left, without as much as a glance back. Andy felt obliged to say something comforting to the grieving mother… since nobody else seemed inclined to do so.
“I’m sure they’ll bring it all back as soon as the investigation is closed, Mrs Jones,” he said. “They’ll figure out what really happened, trust me. They’re good at that sort of thing.”
Part 2
Author: Soledad
Fandom: Torchwood
Category: Heavy-duty Gwen bashing.
Rating: General, suitable for all.
Genre: A bit of action, for this part. Plus a great deal of irony.
Series: Wishverse.
Warning: repeated character death(s) in each chapter.
Timeframe: "Random Shoes". Major spoilers - at least in theory. Since nothing truly Torchwood-related happened in the original episode, I'm not really sure, though. This is still an AU.
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 09 - RANDOM FOOLS, Part 1
Author’s notes:
I’ve actually made the effort to re-watch Torchwood’s most boring and pointless episode for the sake of this story. It made me itch… and want to break things… For the sake of my furniture, I had to release some of that venom here. ;))
Once again, the story is told from PC Andy’s POV. I like the guy. CoE wasn’t his fault. The unfamiliar characters are all nameless extras from “They Keep Killing Suzie”. I only gave them names.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Police Constable Andy Davidson’s previously good mood darkened considerably as he saw the Torchwood SUV pull up at the crime scene. And it had been such a pleasant day till now! A few lost tourists to nanny, a few bar brawls to break up, and now a nice, clean car accident… nothing out of the ordinary.
What the hell was bloody Torchwood doing here, then?
Andy tried to sneak up unnoticed to the yellow police tape, where Detective Trefor Pugh, a square-jawed, somewhat stocky man in a blue jacket, was listening to the report of the crime scene investigators.
“How fast, do you think, they were driving?” Pugh was just asking a tall, blonde woman in the hooded white paper coverall every member of the Soco was wearing. Andy recognized her as Sara Lloyd.
“I’d say at least fifty miles per hour,” she replied with a shrug. “Probably drunk, too, if the wheel prints are any indication. The victim probably didn’t even notice the car coming.”
“Travelled on the bonnet, bounced, maybe rolled, smashed his face on the road,” Tim Cochrane, a scruffy little Soco man added, flashing his camera to document every possibly important detail of the case. “At least the poor bloke didn’t suffer long.”
“So it was simply a car accident, right?” Pugh asked hopefully.
“Based on the evidence, it is,” Sara Lloyd confirmed.
“I see,” Pugh paused for a moment, then his expression darkened. “In that case, what the hell is Torchwood doing here?”
Lloyd shrugged. “Detective Swanson says they knew the victim. Well, at least Cooper did. And you know that Inspector Henderson would do anything to keep Captain Harkness in a good mood - only the devil knows why.”
Pugh pulled a face. “True enough,” he said unhappily. “And since the poor bloke was apparently one of Cooper’s drones, this has suddenly become a Torchwood project… a threat to national security, right?”
“Nah,” Andy quipped from the sideline, “that would be Cooper with a gun.”
Detective Pugh snorted. “Yeah, I’ve heard about it… So, Davidson, you used to work with her; how comes she always gets what she wants if she’s so bloody incompetent?”
“She’s like a dog with a bone,” Andy replied. “She just can't ever leave things bloody alone. After a while, people just give in, so that she’d stop nagging them.”
“I say it’s the bulging eyes,” Tim Cochrane commented. “She hypnotizes her victims to do whatever she wants. There’s no other explanation.”
“That, and the fact that she spreads her… favours rather generously,” Sara Lloyd added dryly. “Makes the… the recipient fairly vulnerable to blackmail.”
Andy, for a short time also a recipient of Gwen’s… favours, blushed furiously, cursing his fair complexion that betrayed his discomfort to everyone within a radius of ten miles. Sara Lloyd grinned at him.
“Make nothing of it, Andy, it’s not so as if you’d been the only one she’s taken advantage of,” she said. “How else would she have managed to get through police school? He only one I truly feel sorry for is that long-suffering boyfriend of hers. The poor bloke puts up with a lot of shit from her and still believes the sun shines out of her arse.”
While they were sharing a laugh at Cooper’s expense, the doors of the Torchwood SUV opened and out got Captain Harkness, complete with that ridiculous greatcoat of him, comm device in his ear and looking like he owed the place, as always. He was perhaps the most arrogant bloke Andy had ever seen. He walked to the Soco car in his customary, theatrical manner, coat billowing behind him, and Gwen, looking unkempt and rumpled like someone who’d had to dress in a great hurry, jogging after him like a poodle.
Several possible scenarios were played before Andy’s inner eye, and he felt his annoyance growing steadily. Had Rhys not said that Captain Harkness had something running with that Ianto bloke, from the tourist office of Roald Dahl Plass? They’d supposedly been seen in that little-known coffee shop/second-hand-bookstore in a hidden little lane… and they weren’t shopping.
Why would Gwen always want - and take - that which belonged to someone else? Like at the time when she’d had a romp - well, several romps - with PC Davies, after which Mrs. Davies demanded a divorce, and poor Dion had to stay in some cheap motel ever since. The woman was like a contagious disease… nobody was safe from her, she destroyed everybody. Andy was over his infatuation, thank God… well, mostly… but he felt sorry for Torchwood’s receptionist guy. Ianto was a decent bloke, even if he was queer. He deserved better.
However, Andy’s mood brightened considerably when he saw the third Torchwood member emerging from the SUV. It was that cute Japanese chick with the brains of the size of a small planet, or so Detective Swanson liked to say. Toshiko Sato. Although clad almost similarly to Gwen, in casual jeans and a short, black jacket, she managed to look classy and well-groomed, while Gwen was looking neither of those things. Seriously, had no one ever told her that beyond thirty a gal ought to wear a bra that actually helped? Or did she think that he boobs hanging down to her kneecaps were sexy?
Andy wondered how in seven hells could he have fallen for her a year ago… and so badly. Perhaps Tim Cochrane had been right. Perhaps it was the hypnotic effect of her bulging eyes, after all.
He edged a little closer to the crime scene, not wanting to miss any piece of info he might pick up from Torchwood, since Gwen would never tell him anything. She only pumped him for police info, never reciprocated. So he could see clearly when Captain Harkness stared down at the body in resigned recognition, saying, “Well, something like this was to be expected, wasn’t it?”
Toshiko nodded in agreement. “He couldn't even cross the road without messing it up,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“I understand you knew this bloke?” Detective Pugh asked. “He didn’t have any papers on him - we thought to ID him through his fingerprints at first, until Kathy Swanson called.”
“His name is - was - Eugene Jones,” Toshiko explained. “We don’t really know anything about him, save that he used to nerve us with his so-called discoveries for quite a while. I think he was a geek… and a rather pathetic one at that.”
Gwen kneeled down near the body. “No bag - nothing,” she murmured, checking the victim’s. Andy winced, hoping that Soco had already taken their DNA samples, because if they hadn’t, well, the crime scene was compromised now. “I mean, what was he doing here?” Gwen wondered, pawing the victim’s jacket in the vain hope to find something - anything - useful. “Perhaps he was hit deliberately... maybe he really did have something important.”
“Like what?” Toshiko asked. That simple, reasonable question seemed to push Gwen completely off-balance. She opened and closed her mouth several time before she could find an answer, making a remarkable impersonation of a blowfish.
“I don't know,” she finally said defensively. “He was always trying to talk to us, show us stuff. Perhaps we shouldn't have been so...”
“So… what?” Toshiko asked, a little impatiently. “We can’t take in every idiot who thinks they have seen a UFO, and I think this,“ she added, looking down at the body, “is just an ordinary RTA.”
“It was a red car,” Sara Lloyd supplied. “We’ve found red paint under his fingernails. We’ll send the sample to the lab for identification,” he added, looking at Detective Pugh, “and to determine the brand and where it is generally used. Other than that, we’re done here, Detective.”
Pugh nodded. “All right. Wrap things up here and return to the lab.”
“Wait!” Gwen cried, “You can’t just dismiss the chance that someone may have killed him!”
“Oh yes, I can,” Pugh replied calmly. “As far as I can tell, it was an ordinary RTA, just as the lady said. If Torchwood has the time or the resources to waste on such unnecessary work, be my guests - we have real cases to solve. Constable Davidson will assist you in everything you might need from the police. Good day.”
With that, he climbed into his car and left. The forensic team packed their kits and followed suit, leaving the body behind for Torchwood to deal with it. Andy had a hard time to suppress his grin. Detective Pugh might be a bloody moron sometimes, but at least he knew how to put Gwen in her place. Must have been a rare case of immunity to bulging eyes.
Unexpectedly, a mobile phone began to ring somewhere in the grass. Toshiko bent down to pick it up - then she froze in the last moment, giving Lloyd a questioning glance.
“You can check it,” Lloyd said. “We’ve already secured any possible fingertips.”
Toshiko answered the phone, frowned, then held it out to Gwen who had already extended a demanding hand. Gwen took it and glanced at the caller’s ID.
“Hi, Mrs Jones,” she said in what people at the police station called her drama queen voice. “Something's happened. We need to talk to you. Can you give us an address?”
Something’s happened. Classy, Gwen, really classy. Frighten the poor woman to death, would you, and that without telling her a thing, Andy thought in disgust. They had regular trainings about how to deal with the families of the victims - had Gwen slept through every single one of them? Of course, why pay attention when one can pass the exam in the broom closet…
“Well,” Captain Harkness gave Andy the thorough once-over, “since you’ve been assigned as our liaison in this particular case, PC Davidson, why don’t you get into the car?”
Surprised by the unexpected turn of events but happy that he wouldn’t be left out this time, Andy followed them to the SUV. He wanted to see more of Torchwood ever since Gwen had joined the not-quite-so-secret organization. He’d always been into this secret agent stuff and wanted to become a detective one day.
Gwen, on the other hand, seemed decidedly unhappy with Andy being involved. Little Miss Sensitive apparently doesn’t want to share her shiny new toys, Andy thought sarcastically, remembering the nickname that Ianto bloke had mentioned Gwen by, the only time the two of them had actually spoken to each other. There was clearly no love lost between those; not on Ianto’s side anyway. Which wasn’t really surprising, considering how Gwen was making cow eyes at her new boss all the time, blithely ignoring the fact that Captain Harkness was - supposedly! - with Ianto, and that she was all but betrothed to Rhys.
At the moment, though, Captain Harkness didn’t seem very perceptive for Gwen’s charms, who was holding the door of the SUV, trying to give him the puppy eyed routine and pouting. He simply pointed at the car.
“Stick with the team, Gwen,” he said.
“What?” Gwen snapped. “You're driving, aren’t you?”
Harkness rolled his eyes and got behind the steering wheel. Toshiko climbed into the back seat and gestured to Andy to join her, which he did more than happily. Gwen glared back at him over her shoulder.
“Jaack,” she whined, “why are we taking him with us? He’s not Torchwood; we’ll have to Retcon him afterwards anyway.”
Andy didn’t like the sound of that. Whatever Torchwood might be involved with on a daily basis, it suddenly seemed rather sinister.
“In case you’ve forgotten, it’s still me who decided who gets Retconned and who doesn’t,” Captain Harkness replied dismissively, and started the car.
He turned out to have a rather reckless driving style, and Andy did his best not to lose his lunch by some of the abrupt U-turns and braking maneuvers. He was amazed to see that Toshiko was able to type away on her laptop, completely unfazed.
“Hey, take care!” he protested. “Are you trying to kill us all? You may be a secret agent or whatnot, but you aren’t immortal, you know… and neither are we!”
He couldn’t understand why that made both Gwen and Toshiko break down in hysterical giggles.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
They drove to the victim’s address first, as they couldn’t find anything of interest on his phone from the current day, save from some pictures of random shoes… even though Gwen kept insisting that those had to mean something. That finding the people who wore those shoes could possibly reveal the motivation behind the crime.
“Gwen, there was no crime,” Andy said patiently. “Evidence clearly points at a simple car accident. You still know what those are, right? Not everything ought to be the super secret stuff you’ve been doing lately… whatever it is.”
“But he wanted to tell us something,” Gwen went on doggedly. “Wanted to show us something. Jack, you were there, you tell him!”
“He was a stalker; and a fairly crazy one at that,” Captain Harkness interrupted, his patience fading rapidly. “Owen and Ianto are already at his place, looking through his things. If he had something of true interest for Torchwood, they’re gonna find it. Ianto is nothing if not thorough… and he has ample experience with recognizing that kind of stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?” Andy asked with a frown.
“Alien artefacts,” Gwen replied absent-mindedly; at Captain Harkness’ death glare, she simply shrugged. “We’re gonna Retcon him anyway, aren’t we? So what does it matter if he knows?”
“One would think Suzie’s case has made even you understand how dangerous a Retcon overdose can be,” Captain Harkness replied, his voice unusually harsh. “I wish sometimes you’d think before you blurt out confidential things, Gwen. This isn’t about you showing off to your former partner, you know. Try to grow up a little, for God’s sake!”
Gwen was too insulted to even find an answer, and they sat in stony silence until Captain Harkness pulled up the SUV next to the Jones house. There they broke the news to the victim’s mother, a rather simple-minded yet good-hearted woman, who promptly started to cry, unable to answer any questions in her understandable grief. Gwen soon lost patience with her and left to question the victim’s teenage brother, leaving the grieving mother in Andy’s care, as usual.
As much as she loves to lecture other people about compassion, she’s always been rubbish at dealing with victims’ families, Andy thought sourly. She has the compassion of a brick wall, really… unless she wants to make someone do her bidding.
With a practice developed through dealing with such situations during his years in the service, Andy managed to calm Mrs Jones down a bit. Then he walked over to the victim’s room, where that weasel-faced Torchwood doctor (the one Gwen was currently shagging - Andy recognized the signs as well as the fact that the affair was apparently winding down) and that Ianto bloke, all posh in his impeccable suit as usual, were looking over the items lying around.
The doctor leafed through various pamphlets and read out their titles with increasing bewilderment, shaking his head in disbelief.
“Black Hole and the Uncertainty Principle by Dr. Louise Nagli, FRS and Dr. William Spencer,” he sighed. “What are we doing here?”
“Trying to get to know the victim, I believe it’s called,” Ianto replied and opened the display cabinet door. “Look at this!”
There were various labelled items on a glass shelf: a disturbingly phallic-looking… something of rose quartz, part of some unknown machine, looking like the weird hybrid of a bathroom tap and a motorcycle model, a lamp that had no visible light source, a translucent container that for some reason was reinforced with a metal part that seemed to have no function at all, several smaller stones, a handful of coin, something that seemed to be petrified flowers and so on.
To Andy, every single one looked like rubbish, but he assumed the Torchwood folks would recognize at least some of them. Even though at the moment they seemed fairly clueless themselves.
The doctor poked at the handful of round metallic objects. “Are these Roman coins?” he asked doubtfully. Ianto leaned closer to be able to read the label. In his dark suit, deep purple dress shirt and white-spotted purple tie, he looked rather out of place among the rubbish that apparently had been their victim’s life.
“This says pre-Gorgon Pilurian currency,” he said. “Authenticated, too, it seems.”
The doctor gave him a queer look. “Pre… what?”
“It means they are fake,” Ianto explained placidly. “Nothing about pre-Gorgon Pilurian culture is mentioned in the Archives; if there were, I’d know about it. Consequently, we can’t have any clue if they had any currency, and if yes, what it was like.”
The doctor nodded. “That’s right. You practically live down there… you and all those frozen corpses.”
“Besides,” Ianto continued, ignoring both the snide remark and Andy’s slightly… green complexion, “the only one who could authenticate alien objects in this country would be Torchwood. And we hadn’t received any such request.”
“What about Torchwood One?” the doctor asked. “Perhaps these are old enough to have been identified by them.”
Ianto shook his head. “They’d have confiscated them; and I can’t imagine that a random fool like Eugene would have been able to find Archie in Glasgow. Nah, I’m fairly sure that this stuff here is fake - which still doesn’t explain how Eugene would have heard about the Gorgons in the first place, of course.”
“There’s quite the market for rubbish like this,” Andy said. “You’d be surprised to know how many fools are out there who believe in little green men and things like that.”
The two Torchwood types turned to him in surprise, as if they’d have completely forgotten about his presence. Perhaps they had. They usually didn’t take outsiders with them while investigating a case.
“I beg to differ,” Ianto replied easily. “We not only know how many folks out there believe in aliens… we also know that those fools are absolutely right. Even though Gorgons are by no means green, of course. They have the appearance of blue, ethereal serpents, each of them composed of several of those serpentine forms.”
“Oi, Teaboy!” the doctor warned him. “Are we supposed to discuss such things with Prince Charming here?”
Ianto shrugged. “Jack must have taken him here for a reason,” he said. “He will know what he’s doing.”
“Yeah,” the doctor agreed, “unless he’s allowed his dick to make the decision again, of course,” he picked up another item, one that looked like a piece of stone with a petrified walnut kern glued to it. “Hey, look, Rice Krispies. Man, there are some rogues out there.”
“Apparently,” Ianto agreed with a blank face.
In that very moment, Gwen stormed in, interrupting their discussion. She was positively fuming in self-righteous indignation.
“You won’t believe what that little toad of his brother said!” she declared dramatically. “He walked into a road and got run over - was all he had to say. About his own brother! Unbelievable!”
“Well, wasn’t that exactly what happened?” Ianto asked reasonably.
Gwen glared daggers at him. “You’re impossible, all of you! Do you have a heart? Do you care about anyone? This poor young man was trying to tell us something, but we never listened, never! And now he’s dead, and…” she trailed off, noticing an empty display stand on the shelf. “Oh, hang on, there's something missing here!” she whirled around to the puffy-eyed mother of Eugene who was just walking into the room. “Mrs. Jones, do you know what's missing from Eugene's collection?” she demanded.
But Branwen Jones wasn’t listening to her. She looked around in her son’s room, turned upside down by all these strangers, and her tears started falling again.
“Why didn't they stop?” she asked brokenly. “They killed my boy and just drove on...”
Not getting the answer she’d been hoped for, Gwen put down the display stand with an annoyed scowl. Dismayed with the manners of the Torchwood people, Andy took the grieving woman’s arm.
“Come with me, Mrs. Jones, let’s leave them to their work,” he encouraged her gently. “You can tell me a little about Eugene in the meantime.”
Half an hour later the doctor and Gwen had packed Eugene’s things in cartoon boxes and were carrying those boxes to the SUV, where Ianto was storing them in the back of the car. Mrs Jones, standing in the doorway with Andy, stared at hem in shocked disbelief and started to cry again when the doctor walked past her. That finally made Gwen stop for a moment on her crusade.
“I am sorry, Mrs. Jones,” she said in an overly emotional manner that, in Andy’s opinion, lacked any sincerity - then she left, without as much as a glance back. Andy felt obliged to say something comforting to the grieving mother… since nobody else seemed inclined to do so.
“I’m sure they’ll bring it all back as soon as the investigation is closed, Mrs Jones,” he said. “They’ll figure out what really happened, trust me. They’re good at that sort of thing.”
Part 2