Tunnelling to Freedom - part 1/2
Tunnelling to Freedom by A.J. Hall
written for New Year's 2010
Dr. Who-verse
Rating: R or Mature
Warnings: Choose not to Warn for Some Content
A/N: Compliant with canon up to and including Journey's End. The alien in question does in fact exist, in its dormant, sculptural form in the V&A. The final quote is from Stevie Smith.
TUNNELLING TO FREEDOM
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.
Crowned with lilies and with laurel they go: but I am not resigned.
Edna St Vincent Millay.
"Shouldn't 've done it, shouldn't 've bleeding well done it Breakin' her 'eart, she is, every day, without knowin' why she's frettin' herself into a sliver, and Sylvia can't see it and won't see it, and it's my Donna! What am I supposed to do?"
Geriatric drunks slumped against the wrought-iron pillars in the entrance hall of Cardiff Central Station were all in a night's work for Andy. He slid his hands behind the old man's parka-encased shoulders. "Come on, Grandad. Let's be having you. Can't sleep here. Corporation bye-laws, see?"
The old man twisted in his grasp, faster than he'd expected, catching him off-balance, staring up at him with dark intense eyes with reddened, sleepless whites.
"Don't you go calling me 'Grandad', you young whippersnapper. Wasn't for me and plenty like me, you wouldn't have anyone giving you room for any of your Saucepan Farks and your Welsh Assemblies. No, it'd be all Heil Hitler, and don't you forget it! So just you show a bit of respect." He thrust out his chin, rimed with three or four days growth of white beard. The assertiveness was somewhat eroded by the tears welling up behind the old man's swollen lids.
"Sorry, sir. But if I let you sleep here, then tomorrow there'll be a dozen, and day after tomorrow I'll be on a charge. Isn't fair to ask a man to put himself on jankers, sir, is it?"
The old man, still in his tumbled heap against the pillar tossed off a salute, raising arthritic fingers to the crown of his navy-blue beany hat.
Granted, it might be touching, But now, preserving public order, that was the thing.
"Anyway, what brings you to Cardiff, all the way up from the Big Smoke?" Andy gambled on the accent. Even if he was wrong about his origin the old man had doubtless passed through London on his travels.
"But she was mentioned in dispatches!" The old man was still having his conversation with some invisible other, giving Andy only limited attention. Beside him, P.C Foster (Not a patch on Gwen! Not a patch!) radiated silent disapproval.
"Very distinguished, sir."
"Don't give me that bromide, mate!" The old man's hand flashed out, seizing Andy's wrist, started to twist it. His skinny, age-withered frame concealed surprising strength: Andy's eyes watered with the pain.
"I'm warning you, sir -"
"Don't you -" P.C. Foster chimed in, a trifle later than one might want from an on-the-ball colleague.
"Stop that. Now." The new voice was familiar - and incredibly irritating. If welcome, all the same. Andy felt almost guilty at the relief surging through him as the old man obeyed the whipped-out command, letting Andy's wrist fall.
Ignoring both police officers, Captain Jack Harkness crouched down beside the huddled figure on the platform.
"Wilfred? Or do you prefer Wilf? They called you Wilf in the North Africa Campaign, didn't they? Wilf the Wizard. Mott the mechanic. The man who kept the tanks going on spit and elbow-grease. Enormous stars they have in the desert, aren't they amazing? The skies there, they look like nowhere else."
The old man tilted his face upwards. "You. You tell 'em. They don't believe an old man, But she was a bleedin' hero and I'll be damned if I'll see it all pissed away down the drain - pardon my French, Miss."
P.C Foster treated the old man's belated notice of her with a withering glare. It was wasted: he wasn't looking in her direction. Just up into the face of the man in the great-coat as though he hoped to read the secrets of the world there. In response, Harkness reached out a hand, laying it gently on the old man's arm.
"I know, Wilf: I know. For one moment, one shining moment, she was the most important woman in the whole wide universe. Coining epitaphs. That's his second-best talent."
The old man's voice became querulous. "So what's his best talent, then?"
"Running."
And Harkness clasped his arm around the old man's shoulders, drew him to his feet and led him gently out into the soft Welsh night.
Beside him P.C. Foster had plainly already dismissed the odd incident, only relieved it seemed it had resolved itself without the need for paperwork. "Should we be getting on? We've wasted enough time here as it is."
Andy bit back a comment. She'd learn, soon enough, if she stuck with the job.
Nutters. You met them in Cardiff any night of the week. Except, every so often, they were Torchwood.
Alien nutters. Worst sort.
____________
Regrettably, it wasn't the Polish "helper" who, no doubt thanks to a youth spent under a repressive régime, understood perfectly the proper relationship between prisoner and warder and didn't try to muddy it with nauseating fake intimacies. Instead, it was Shelagh; a large, sloppy woman from Walsall with a skin like a rhinoceros's and no concept of irony.
She breezed into my room without knocking. "Now, we need to make a special effort to look extra specially pretty today, don’t we? And can we remember why?"
She beamed encouragement, as if to a backwards four-year old.
How long it had been since they'd brought me to this place? I couldn't remember a time before I'd become so feeble and so fragile, before every movement set up shivers of pain through my body, when standing veins and liver spots had not disfigured my hands, when the sun had given warmth rather than momentary ease for my bone-deep chill.
Living under deep cover is hard.
You must change yourself from the cell level upwards. Even your dreams must reflect your cover's sub-conscious, not your own. When I was in France I could have recounted the number and spacing of the patches on the sails of my cousin Etienne's fishing boat, recalled the joints of fingers aching as my sail-maker's palm drove the enormous needle through the stiff, stinking, canvas to repair split seams. I would have tears in my eyes as I recalled my sister Marie's losing battle with little Philippe's diphtheria. My eyes would light with remembered gusto as I recounted all the blows and counter-blows fought in the village's huge internal feud of the later '20s, concerning the design of the local memorial to Les Perdus.
Not bad for a girl brought up in Golders Green, of Russian/Lithuanian stock on the one side and from a raucous tribe of Dublin brawlers, hack journalists and indifferent poets on the other. A girl, too, whose total previous experience of France had been a summer's language school in Deauville, and a couple of holidays scrambling up the less challenging ascents of the Massif Central with a party of cousins who were keen on that sort of thing.
Shelagh's expression changed at my lack of response, became disapproving. "Now, now, Naomi. No being Miss Frowny-Face." And then, God help us all, she burst into song, dipping and swirling across my room just out of time with her tuneless warblings, like a circus elephant in a patterned overall. "The sun has got his hat on! Hip-hip-hip hooray! The sun has got his hat on and he's coming out today!"
She fetched up against my window and drew the curtains back. As luck would have it a short, violent hailstorm had just begun beating against the windows out of a pewter sky. I suppressed a snort of laughter. Being undercover means not giving the authorities anything they can hold against you, nothing they can use to pick you out of the crowd. Certainly never letting the enemy see when you find them ridiculous. Sometimes you must foster someone's illusion of power over you to prevent its turning into the real thing.
Shelagh looked at me. "Well?"
I tried to shape the words; the numb side of my face made the effort almost overwhelming. They told me it had been a stroke, told me I was making 'A splendid recovery'. I didn't believe them. Not on either count. Nerve gas. Or botulism toxins, injected directly into muscle tissue. But that would mean that someone was onto me, someone suspected my game. All the more reason to give them nothing to confirm their suspicion.
"Vis - visitor." The corner of my mouth dropped a little after I'd got the word out; spittle trailed down my chin, its spider-touch an intolerable irritation. If Shelagh had any notion of doing her job properly she'd have noticed and handed me a tissue from the package which lay handy to her left hand. However, she continued to beam inanely at me, without doing anything to help. My left arm was still more-or-less useless but I raised my right sleeve, brushing my mouth clean with the quilted cuff of the dressing gown, a slovenliness I detested even while forced to perform it.
Her face split in an approving smile. "Yes! That's right! Your young man's coming to see you." She tittered at her own witticism.
He passed himself off to the authorities here as my great-nephew. I could have imagined Catherine having such a grandson, but she'd died of peritonitis before her sixteenth birthday. Also, judging by the empty-eyed, desolate girl in school uniform, a stranger to all of us, who had appeared at the funeral and then vanished silently away, the secrets my sister had taken to her grave were unlikely to have included men.
As for my brother - well, no-one who knew my family would have thought him anything of Lionel's getting, even one generation removed.
Still, it did as well as anything, as a cover story. He visited three or four times a year and, though he never said anything inconsistent with our supposed relationship, my heart always beat quicker when I knew a visit was in the offing. Perhaps this time would reveal to me why I was here. Surely a mission so secret that it has to be concealed even from one tasked with carrying it out must be of supreme importance?
Despite the imperative of secrecy, sometimes I toyed with the bitter fantasy of tying Shelagh to a chair, gagging her and - somehow overcoming my hampered speech - sharing with her that most classified of classified secrets.
You call him my young man. It is a joke, though not the same joke you think it is. Appearances are deceptive and he is older than I. I was never in love with him, though we made love, once, up on the mountainside, waiting for a signal not due for hours, rocks poking through dry soil and the sharp scent of crushed herbs breathing up from beneath us. Five minutes later a random patrol all but stumbled over us. That was the night I killed my seventeenth Nazi; the night before my twenty-first birthday. Half a thrust later and he would have killed me.
We women of the SOE took precautions, naturally, but I doubt you could say we practised "safe sex". How could we? Those were not safe times.
I wish I had ever managed to feel that alive since.
There came a knock at the door. I managed a quick nod of assent before Shelagh leapt to open it; she hardly noticed, but it mattered to me. Such trivial assertions of agency were all I had left - at least, so it felt, on those days when faith quailed and I doubted even the existence of my mission, believing I had been parked here to wait out my last few years and then die, at the least possible inconvenience to everyone around me.
They stood in the doorway. Two of them; when he had only ever come alone before. Surely this was the sign for which I had been waiting so long. I read it in his arched brows, in the secret half-wink as he entered the room. True, the man behind him seemed hardly the stuff of legend; white-haired, stubbly-chinned, dressed like a labourer in corduroy pants and a knitted hat. It didn't matter. I had seen a hundred or more less plausible, less prepossessing warriors. This was the hour, so this must be the man.
"Thank you," my ersatz great-nephew said, holding the door open with infinite politeness for Shelagh to leave. I don't know what she'd expected. Surely she could hardly have thought I needed a chaperone? Still, she goggled, non-plussed for a moment, before scurrying out, squeaking mindlessly.
I had little attention to spare for her discomfiture. I was awaiting my call to action.
"Naomi, this is a guy you need to meet. Sergeant Wilfred Mott. He was at Al-Alamein, with the armoured divisions. There's this little problem he wants us to help him with."
It occurred to me there was another thing I should tell Shelagh about my soi-disant great nephew.
In France, we used to call him l’Ange du Mort. You should have prayed for death before ever you saw him put on his true colours.
___________________
When he turned his key in the lock he'd half hoped that there wouldn't be anyone there, but the silence of the burglar alarm foretold either that someone was home or that a long discussion with Chiswick police station would feature in his near future.
Actually, it turned out to be Donna, slumped on the sofa in front of the TV with the now-familiar air of dejection which never failed to tear at his heart. He moved into the kitchen, hefted the electric kettle to judge there was enough water in it and switched it on before venturing back into the living room and sitting down next to her on the settee.
"Hey!" he said. "Chin up, tea'll be along in a minute. No go at the agency, love?" He stretched out his arm, curved it around her shoulders. Her long, lean body snuggled up against him as she had when she was five.
"First place - they told me I was overqualified. Second place, they told me I should have passed French ‘O’ level. Third place - they'd got the receivers in. The Agency hadn't bothered to let me know."
"Ah." After a moment he added, feelingly, "Bastards."
She shrugged, brushing off her day as if one could twitch away cosmic injustice with a muscle movement. "Anyway. Where've you been all this time? You dirty stop-out."
There were so many things he might have said. Guilt and the fate of galaxies weighed heavy on his tongue.
"Oh, I went to an old people's home."
She swirled round, all in a fire of red rebellion. "You what? Look, if Mum's been saying anything again -"
He raised his hand. "Donna! Only way they'd get me in one of them places is over my dead body, so don't you go fretting about that. You've got enough to worry about as it is. No: someone I know asked me to go along with him, look up someone he served with, in the War."
She nodded. "Oh. British Legion stuff."
He let that slide. "To be honest, I think he needed a bit of moral support. Comes to us all in the end, o'course, but it must bring it home to you seeing someone in a wheel-chair, hardly able to get two words out, when you can remember them taking out a Nazi machine gun post with a side-arm. From the way he tells it, she must have been quite a girl, back in the day."
"She?" Donna sat up, her attention caught at last.
"Didn't I say? Special Operations Executive. One of the lasses they parachuted into France, undercover, to help the Resistance."
Donna snorted. "Must've passed her French ‘O’ level, then. Been me, back then, and you can bet I'd have sat out the War behind a typewriter, making sure Britain's vital Spam reserves were accounted for."
He'd snorted a laugh before he saw Donna's eyes, bright as gun-sights, staring him down. But it didn't stop the joke being funny and anyway. Donna was like that, had always been like that. She could make you crease up at the same time as she got you wanting to advance on the barricades with a burning banner.
Wilf wondered if, perhaps, it was their fault Donna had never made anything much of her life ("except being a jewel. My jewel. My Donna."). Sylvia, of course, was adamant that anything wrong in Donna's makeup, she'd inherited from her father, but Wilf begged leave to doubt.
He'd liked Jim, anyway. Not that it mattered, now. He paused for a second, making sure he had the right, casual tone.
"There's one thing. They need a temp. My friend went into the office, something about the bills, and it turned out to be in a right old shambles. You give them a ring in the morning, love, and who knows?"
A long hard pause and then she nodded. He let out a covert breath.
_______________
We were down at the far end of the gardens, near the pond. Shelagh hadn't wanted to push me so far, but I'd managed, somehow, to persuade her into it, though resentment hung off her like a cloud. Fortunately for me, she was a silent sulker.
I saw the woman approaching before Shelagh did. Long waves of auburn hair, a sharp, long, narrow face like a red setter. And something - something almost like a second shadow about her.
Something on her back. No: the remnants of something which has once been there and has since been torn away.
Fear trembled along every nerve; fear and the familiar, unexpected adrenaline rush of sheer exhilaration. The red-head approached, favoured Shelagh with a curt nod which suggested she'd already been introduced to her and hadn't enjoyed the experience much, and then extended her hand to me.
“Donna Noble. I've just started temping in the office here. You must be Doctor Rubenstein. My granddad Wilf asked me to look you up if I got the chance.”
Shelagh wore her special, patented, sour lemon face. “Now, now, we're all much too good friends round here to be bothering with all that formality. And Naomi gave up all that 'Doctor' business long ago, didn't you, dear?”
A most peculiar expression flitted across Miss Noble's face. She looked like someone who has just had an inspiration about a cryptic crossword clue and is trying to juggle the letters to make it fit.
Shelagh dropped her voice, though she remained perfectly audible, and hissed in Miss Noble's ear, “Anyway, Naomi was never a real doctor, you know. Not like a GP.”
During an over-long life I'd met this peculiar delusion about the status of a D.Litt too often for it to cause any particular irritation. With Shelagh, my cup had long since run over with irritation, in any event.
Miss Noble advanced firmly, grasped the handles of my wheelchair, glanced at Shelagh and said, “I've still got half an hour of my break left. I'll take Doctor Rubenstein back in when I've finished, if you like.”
Shelagh looked doubtful; no doubt she thought herself a health care worker, and abandoning her charge to a lowly book-keeping temp went against the grain. On the other hand, it was growing chilly out here and no doubt there would be tea and celebrity gossip magazines waiting for her inside. She consigned me to Miss Noble's care, and headed briskly off back towards the house. Donna - Miss Noble - dropped to the garden seat beside me, looking sidelong at me under the curtain of her long auburn hair.
“Well,” she said, “as my Granddad says, don’t know what you bothered to fight the war for at all.”
“Always - always worth fighting. No - surrender.”
She smiled; a quick vivid smile which transformed her face, like a kingfisher flashing into view beneath the willow branches above the Cam on a summer’s day.
“He used to say something like ...”
Her voice trailed off, her eyes suddenly lost focus. The Home has made me familiar with practically every variety of dementia known to man. Most likely if I asked her who “he” might be she would deny ever having mentioned the man. Sufferers can never quite conceal how such questions wrack them, though. They sense the enormity of their loss, even while its nature eludes them and an uncaring world mocks their very confusion.
My problems have always been physical, thank God. And I have kept certain - resources - by my side in case that situation should ever change. In France, I became used to taking comfort from feeling the slight weight of those pills, secreted inside my clothing, each time fear threatened to overwhelm me. That same comfort has taken me through many dark times since. It’s not just superstition - I’ve taken care to renew them over the years as opportunity offered. Not that I’ve had access to laboratories for a good many years now. Cyanide, though, has a very long sell-by date.
I shivered, though not because of the chill air of the garden. The sight of that young, mobile, expressive face contorted with confusion, seeing self-assured Miss Noble revealed as someone who has just found the planks of her mental attic rotten beneath her feet, struck me as wholly obscene.
Something very wrong here.
I recalled Jack Harkness’s face last time I’d seen him - recalled, too, the banked, incandescent intensity of that corporal from the Armoured Divisions, Wilf Mott. Miss Noble’s grandfather, it appeared. I cursed myself for being a fool.
Something very wrong has been done here.
Natural disasters have never been much in Harkness’s line - there are always too many unnatural disasters clamouring for his attention. Illness might have evoked his pity, but it would take injury - deliberate, premeditated injury - to waken his sense of justice. And for him, in turn, waken me; the deepest of all his sleeper agents.
We’d had little in common, in our shared past, save for one thing. A preoccupation with justice which almost amounted to an obsession.
Two things in common, perhaps. I suspect we each focus on justice by way of compensation. After all, we have both been demonstrably short-changed in the mercy department.
___________________
“So, how’d your first day go, love?”
“Have we got a soldering iron?”
The spare room, with the cupboards where the tools were kept, looked like the aftermath of a burglary carried out by a particularly disorganised gang. Donna, kneeling amid the chaos on the floor, looked up from under the curtain of her red hair, the glint of fanatic enthusiasm in her eyes. Something inside him loosened; he found himself having to brush the back of his hand across suddenly watery eyes.
“Might be one in the shed, maybe.”
“Look it out for me, will y’? “ She scrambled to her feet, scrabbling for her car-keys in her hand bag. “Gotta get down to Maplins, pick up some connectors, transistors ‘n that. See you.”
Wilf blinked as she passed him like a whirlwind and he heard the front door slam and then the noise of the car starting up. He stretched a hand for the phone, lifted the handset, had dialled the code for Cardiff before he thought better of it and hung up. Most likely they’d have no more idea than he had of what might be happening, and anyway, he’d better have found that soldering iron before Donna got back or Sylvia started sticking her nose in things.
One thing had been certain; before she’d started - travelling - Donna wouldn’t have known one end of a soldering iron from the next. Electronics and a light in her eyes again, something must have happened today. Thank God for the Captain - and no-one back in the old days would have expected to hear Wilf Mott say that about any officer, still less a Yank.
He found himself humming as he made his way to the back door. It was only after a few moments that he put words to the tune.
So we’re saying goodbye to them all
The long and the short and the tall -
He looked back at the photographs of her on the mantelpiece and his heart skipped a beat.
__________________
“Gwen, what the -?”
Ianto turned his head sideways, trying to see whether the writhing entanglement of green and yellow glass tubing sitting on the base of Gwen’s workstation looked any more coherent that way up. She smiled at him.
“Present, see. Rhys’s nephew went on a school-trip to London, and he brought it back. All the kids were buying them, kind of a craze, like. Well, to be honest, he brought it back for his Mam, and I don’t think she fancied it in the house, really. Said she imagined it wriggling, every time she turned her back to get on with the hoovering. So she gave it to us, and Rhys said he thought I might like it, to brighten up the office. Nice to get the chance to see a touch of greenery about the place - at least, ‘til I think it’s safe to go back into the conservatory.”
He felt himself flushing, though there was nothing more than gentle teasing beneath Gwen’s tones.
“Say, is that a triffid on your desk or is it just pleased to see you?”
Familiar mocking tones came from above. They looked up to see Jack leaning against the rail, his arms crossed.
He descended the stairs towards Gwen’s workstation, picked the artefact up, turned it over and over in his hands. His voice remained as casual as ever, but Ianto fancied there was something about the set of his shoulders under that crisp blue shirt, something tense.
“Mind if I borrow it for a bit, Gwen? I’ve always fancied having something green and phallic about the office.”
She looked up at him, eyebrows raised. “Normal bosses settle for cacti.”
“Eew-ouch. Whatever they may say about me, I’ve never been a guy who makes the same mistake twice. Specially not mistakes that need tweezers to put right. So, say I wanted to get one of these for myself, where should I look? Did your nephew say?”
Gwen narrowed her eyes. “You up to something?”
Jack looked at his most innocent. Ianto made a mental note to cancel all non-urgent personal engagements for the foreseeable future, update his will and get in some gun practice on the range. From the look of her, Gwen was going through the same mental process - together with, presumably, adding up how much pizza she had in the freezer at home and thinking up some reassuring platitudes to feed to Rhys about her whereabouts.
However, all she said was, “Dunno - but here’s the box it came in.”
She pulled out a small cardboard box from her desk drawer. Jack fished about inside it for a second or so, and extricated a crumpled leaflet. He read it, and let out a low whistle.
“Well? You going to share it with us - sir? We are a team, after all. Least, so you keep telling us.”
Jack paused for a moment and then nodded. He passed the leaflet across to Ianto. The paper was cheap, the typeface was cramped, difficult to read, slightly smudged. If it had accompanied some garish plastic horror, packed by the tens of thousands in some factory in the Pearl River delta and retailing for £1.50 on one of the stalls in Barry market it would have caused no comment, but packed in with this, this exquisite, fascinating, unsettling thing -
Ianto traced the artefact’s intricacies with one intrigued forefinger.
“Put it down, Yanto, and read what’s on the leaflet. I’ve set up the recorders. Why don’t you give Gwen and me a thrill, give it your best shot at the Richard Burtons, huh?”
“Would this be what you had in mind, sir? “ He stood, hands by his side, feet apart, like he’d been taught at school, rounding his tongue over the words, mellow and rich as plum-cake.
“But that was nothing to what things came out
From the sea-caves of Criccieth yonder - "
Jack exhaled. “Yanto! If you’re not good, I’ll read you the Torchwood archives version of that incident, as a bedtime story. While you’re over my knee. You’d not see the funny side if you’d had to Retcon the whole of the Lleyn peninsula, and then realised you’d managed to miss a major inter-war poet whose version’s been included in every anthology published ever since. Read the frigging leaflet, ok?”
Thus admonished, Ianto blinked and turned to the leaflet.
Thank you for choosing to commemorate your visit to the exhibition today by buying a Grow-Glo. For us at Grow-Glo Enterprises, a souvenir should be more than simply a memory of an event gone by; it should an organic part of a living whole, as a conker remembers the horse-chestnut from which it fell, or the sea-shell, when held against the ear, reminds one of the ceaseless lift and swirl of the oceans. Take good care of your little Grow-Glo - make sure it has plenty of sunlight, for only in sunlight can life flourish. We hope you have a long and close future together.
He heard a strangled sound over to his left; Gwen, with her fingers down her throat, pretending to throw up into the waste-paper basket. Jack’s expression, though, was cold; deadly serious.
“Gwen - take a break, look up your sister-in-law, find out where it was he got it, what this exhibition was. I’ll be in my office. There’s a coupla calls I have to make.”
__________________
resistancegrrl: You up to something?
Yankcap: Me?
resistancegrrl: Don’t call for weeks, then all over place like rash. Don’t trust coincidences.
Yankcap: that was quick!
resistancegrrl: new keyboard. Special 1 hand. Donna’s idea. Electronics whiz.
Yankcap: Donna? U got right girl?
resistancegrrl: How many stroppy redheads do you know?
Yankcap: do aliens count?
Resistancegrrl: Scrub question. What “S” goes with “Screwdriver”?
Yankcap: What???????
resistancegrrl: Something D. said today. Thought crossword clue, but not. Worried her.
Yankcap: Should do.
resistancegrrl: something wrong? Thought so. Shd she see doctor?
Yankcap: NO!!
resistancegrrl: no need to shout.
Yankcap: Sorry. But last thing she needs. Trust me.
resistancegrrl: Suppose 1st time for everything.
Yankcap: Do something, pls?
resistancegrrl: What?
Yankcap: U in London. Need something from the V&A. U just girl 4 job. Inside track.
resistancegrrl: You want me to burgle V&A???
Yankcap: just gift shop. Take Donna with U.
resistancegrrl: why?
Yankcap: Great place, V&A. Was there on opening day. Personal invite Prince Albert.
resistancegrrl: You knew Prince Albert?
Yankcap: Sure. Nice chap. Wife didn’t understand him.
resistancegrrl: & you did?
Yankcap: official secret. Lips sealed.
Yankcap: tell U one thing 4 free. No truth in rumour. All urban myth.
resistancegrrl: Harkness, you couldn’t shock me when I was 20. Try it on yr young man instead.
Yankcap: Who told U about Ianto?
resistancegrrl: Ha! Guessed. Nice name. Local? Anyway, what do I get from V&A?
Yankcap. U’ll see. Harkness out.
__________________
continue to part 2
written for New Year's 2010
Dr. Who-verse
Rating: R or Mature
Warnings: Choose not to Warn for Some Content
A/N: Compliant with canon up to and including Journey's End. The alien in question does in fact exist, in its dormant, sculptural form in the V&A. The final quote is from Stevie Smith.
TUNNELLING TO FREEDOM
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.
Crowned with lilies and with laurel they go: but I am not resigned.
Edna St Vincent Millay.
"Shouldn't 've done it, shouldn't 've bleeding well done it Breakin' her 'eart, she is, every day, without knowin' why she's frettin' herself into a sliver, and Sylvia can't see it and won't see it, and it's my Donna! What am I supposed to do?"
Geriatric drunks slumped against the wrought-iron pillars in the entrance hall of Cardiff Central Station were all in a night's work for Andy. He slid his hands behind the old man's parka-encased shoulders. "Come on, Grandad. Let's be having you. Can't sleep here. Corporation bye-laws, see?"
The old man twisted in his grasp, faster than he'd expected, catching him off-balance, staring up at him with dark intense eyes with reddened, sleepless whites.
"Don't you go calling me 'Grandad', you young whippersnapper. Wasn't for me and plenty like me, you wouldn't have anyone giving you room for any of your Saucepan Farks and your Welsh Assemblies. No, it'd be all Heil Hitler, and don't you forget it! So just you show a bit of respect." He thrust out his chin, rimed with three or four days growth of white beard. The assertiveness was somewhat eroded by the tears welling up behind the old man's swollen lids.
"Sorry, sir. But if I let you sleep here, then tomorrow there'll be a dozen, and day after tomorrow I'll be on a charge. Isn't fair to ask a man to put himself on jankers, sir, is it?"
The old man, still in his tumbled heap against the pillar tossed off a salute, raising arthritic fingers to the crown of his navy-blue beany hat.
Granted, it might be touching, But now, preserving public order, that was the thing.
"Anyway, what brings you to Cardiff, all the way up from the Big Smoke?" Andy gambled on the accent. Even if he was wrong about his origin the old man had doubtless passed through London on his travels.
"But she was mentioned in dispatches!" The old man was still having his conversation with some invisible other, giving Andy only limited attention. Beside him, P.C Foster (Not a patch on Gwen! Not a patch!) radiated silent disapproval.
"Very distinguished, sir."
"Don't give me that bromide, mate!" The old man's hand flashed out, seizing Andy's wrist, started to twist it. His skinny, age-withered frame concealed surprising strength: Andy's eyes watered with the pain.
"I'm warning you, sir -"
"Don't you -" P.C. Foster chimed in, a trifle later than one might want from an on-the-ball colleague.
"Stop that. Now." The new voice was familiar - and incredibly irritating. If welcome, all the same. Andy felt almost guilty at the relief surging through him as the old man obeyed the whipped-out command, letting Andy's wrist fall.
Ignoring both police officers, Captain Jack Harkness crouched down beside the huddled figure on the platform.
"Wilfred? Or do you prefer Wilf? They called you Wilf in the North Africa Campaign, didn't they? Wilf the Wizard. Mott the mechanic. The man who kept the tanks going on spit and elbow-grease. Enormous stars they have in the desert, aren't they amazing? The skies there, they look like nowhere else."
The old man tilted his face upwards. "You. You tell 'em. They don't believe an old man, But she was a bleedin' hero and I'll be damned if I'll see it all pissed away down the drain - pardon my French, Miss."
P.C Foster treated the old man's belated notice of her with a withering glare. It was wasted: he wasn't looking in her direction. Just up into the face of the man in the great-coat as though he hoped to read the secrets of the world there. In response, Harkness reached out a hand, laying it gently on the old man's arm.
"I know, Wilf: I know. For one moment, one shining moment, she was the most important woman in the whole wide universe. Coining epitaphs. That's his second-best talent."
The old man's voice became querulous. "So what's his best talent, then?"
"Running."
And Harkness clasped his arm around the old man's shoulders, drew him to his feet and led him gently out into the soft Welsh night.
Beside him P.C. Foster had plainly already dismissed the odd incident, only relieved it seemed it had resolved itself without the need for paperwork. "Should we be getting on? We've wasted enough time here as it is."
Andy bit back a comment. She'd learn, soon enough, if she stuck with the job.
Nutters. You met them in Cardiff any night of the week. Except, every so often, they were Torchwood.
Alien nutters. Worst sort.
____________
Regrettably, it wasn't the Polish "helper" who, no doubt thanks to a youth spent under a repressive régime, understood perfectly the proper relationship between prisoner and warder and didn't try to muddy it with nauseating fake intimacies. Instead, it was Shelagh; a large, sloppy woman from Walsall with a skin like a rhinoceros's and no concept of irony.
She breezed into my room without knocking. "Now, we need to make a special effort to look extra specially pretty today, don’t we? And can we remember why?"
She beamed encouragement, as if to a backwards four-year old.
How long it had been since they'd brought me to this place? I couldn't remember a time before I'd become so feeble and so fragile, before every movement set up shivers of pain through my body, when standing veins and liver spots had not disfigured my hands, when the sun had given warmth rather than momentary ease for my bone-deep chill.
Living under deep cover is hard.
You must change yourself from the cell level upwards. Even your dreams must reflect your cover's sub-conscious, not your own. When I was in France I could have recounted the number and spacing of the patches on the sails of my cousin Etienne's fishing boat, recalled the joints of fingers aching as my sail-maker's palm drove the enormous needle through the stiff, stinking, canvas to repair split seams. I would have tears in my eyes as I recalled my sister Marie's losing battle with little Philippe's diphtheria. My eyes would light with remembered gusto as I recounted all the blows and counter-blows fought in the village's huge internal feud of the later '20s, concerning the design of the local memorial to Les Perdus.
Not bad for a girl brought up in Golders Green, of Russian/Lithuanian stock on the one side and from a raucous tribe of Dublin brawlers, hack journalists and indifferent poets on the other. A girl, too, whose total previous experience of France had been a summer's language school in Deauville, and a couple of holidays scrambling up the less challenging ascents of the Massif Central with a party of cousins who were keen on that sort of thing.
Shelagh's expression changed at my lack of response, became disapproving. "Now, now, Naomi. No being Miss Frowny-Face." And then, God help us all, she burst into song, dipping and swirling across my room just out of time with her tuneless warblings, like a circus elephant in a patterned overall. "The sun has got his hat on! Hip-hip-hip hooray! The sun has got his hat on and he's coming out today!"
She fetched up against my window and drew the curtains back. As luck would have it a short, violent hailstorm had just begun beating against the windows out of a pewter sky. I suppressed a snort of laughter. Being undercover means not giving the authorities anything they can hold against you, nothing they can use to pick you out of the crowd. Certainly never letting the enemy see when you find them ridiculous. Sometimes you must foster someone's illusion of power over you to prevent its turning into the real thing.
Shelagh looked at me. "Well?"
I tried to shape the words; the numb side of my face made the effort almost overwhelming. They told me it had been a stroke, told me I was making 'A splendid recovery'. I didn't believe them. Not on either count. Nerve gas. Or botulism toxins, injected directly into muscle tissue. But that would mean that someone was onto me, someone suspected my game. All the more reason to give them nothing to confirm their suspicion.
"Vis - visitor." The corner of my mouth dropped a little after I'd got the word out; spittle trailed down my chin, its spider-touch an intolerable irritation. If Shelagh had any notion of doing her job properly she'd have noticed and handed me a tissue from the package which lay handy to her left hand. However, she continued to beam inanely at me, without doing anything to help. My left arm was still more-or-less useless but I raised my right sleeve, brushing my mouth clean with the quilted cuff of the dressing gown, a slovenliness I detested even while forced to perform it.
Her face split in an approving smile. "Yes! That's right! Your young man's coming to see you." She tittered at her own witticism.
He passed himself off to the authorities here as my great-nephew. I could have imagined Catherine having such a grandson, but she'd died of peritonitis before her sixteenth birthday. Also, judging by the empty-eyed, desolate girl in school uniform, a stranger to all of us, who had appeared at the funeral and then vanished silently away, the secrets my sister had taken to her grave were unlikely to have included men.
As for my brother - well, no-one who knew my family would have thought him anything of Lionel's getting, even one generation removed.
Still, it did as well as anything, as a cover story. He visited three or four times a year and, though he never said anything inconsistent with our supposed relationship, my heart always beat quicker when I knew a visit was in the offing. Perhaps this time would reveal to me why I was here. Surely a mission so secret that it has to be concealed even from one tasked with carrying it out must be of supreme importance?
Despite the imperative of secrecy, sometimes I toyed with the bitter fantasy of tying Shelagh to a chair, gagging her and - somehow overcoming my hampered speech - sharing with her that most classified of classified secrets.
You call him my young man. It is a joke, though not the same joke you think it is. Appearances are deceptive and he is older than I. I was never in love with him, though we made love, once, up on the mountainside, waiting for a signal not due for hours, rocks poking through dry soil and the sharp scent of crushed herbs breathing up from beneath us. Five minutes later a random patrol all but stumbled over us. That was the night I killed my seventeenth Nazi; the night before my twenty-first birthday. Half a thrust later and he would have killed me.
We women of the SOE took precautions, naturally, but I doubt you could say we practised "safe sex". How could we? Those were not safe times.
I wish I had ever managed to feel that alive since.
There came a knock at the door. I managed a quick nod of assent before Shelagh leapt to open it; she hardly noticed, but it mattered to me. Such trivial assertions of agency were all I had left - at least, so it felt, on those days when faith quailed and I doubted even the existence of my mission, believing I had been parked here to wait out my last few years and then die, at the least possible inconvenience to everyone around me.
They stood in the doorway. Two of them; when he had only ever come alone before. Surely this was the sign for which I had been waiting so long. I read it in his arched brows, in the secret half-wink as he entered the room. True, the man behind him seemed hardly the stuff of legend; white-haired, stubbly-chinned, dressed like a labourer in corduroy pants and a knitted hat. It didn't matter. I had seen a hundred or more less plausible, less prepossessing warriors. This was the hour, so this must be the man.
"Thank you," my ersatz great-nephew said, holding the door open with infinite politeness for Shelagh to leave. I don't know what she'd expected. Surely she could hardly have thought I needed a chaperone? Still, she goggled, non-plussed for a moment, before scurrying out, squeaking mindlessly.
I had little attention to spare for her discomfiture. I was awaiting my call to action.
"Naomi, this is a guy you need to meet. Sergeant Wilfred Mott. He was at Al-Alamein, with the armoured divisions. There's this little problem he wants us to help him with."
It occurred to me there was another thing I should tell Shelagh about my soi-disant great nephew.
In France, we used to call him l’Ange du Mort. You should have prayed for death before ever you saw him put on his true colours.
___________________
When he turned his key in the lock he'd half hoped that there wouldn't be anyone there, but the silence of the burglar alarm foretold either that someone was home or that a long discussion with Chiswick police station would feature in his near future.
Actually, it turned out to be Donna, slumped on the sofa in front of the TV with the now-familiar air of dejection which never failed to tear at his heart. He moved into the kitchen, hefted the electric kettle to judge there was enough water in it and switched it on before venturing back into the living room and sitting down next to her on the settee.
"Hey!" he said. "Chin up, tea'll be along in a minute. No go at the agency, love?" He stretched out his arm, curved it around her shoulders. Her long, lean body snuggled up against him as she had when she was five.
"First place - they told me I was overqualified. Second place, they told me I should have passed French ‘O’ level. Third place - they'd got the receivers in. The Agency hadn't bothered to let me know."
"Ah." After a moment he added, feelingly, "Bastards."
She shrugged, brushing off her day as if one could twitch away cosmic injustice with a muscle movement. "Anyway. Where've you been all this time? You dirty stop-out."
There were so many things he might have said. Guilt and the fate of galaxies weighed heavy on his tongue.
"Oh, I went to an old people's home."
She swirled round, all in a fire of red rebellion. "You what? Look, if Mum's been saying anything again -"
He raised his hand. "Donna! Only way they'd get me in one of them places is over my dead body, so don't you go fretting about that. You've got enough to worry about as it is. No: someone I know asked me to go along with him, look up someone he served with, in the War."
She nodded. "Oh. British Legion stuff."
He let that slide. "To be honest, I think he needed a bit of moral support. Comes to us all in the end, o'course, but it must bring it home to you seeing someone in a wheel-chair, hardly able to get two words out, when you can remember them taking out a Nazi machine gun post with a side-arm. From the way he tells it, she must have been quite a girl, back in the day."
"She?" Donna sat up, her attention caught at last.
"Didn't I say? Special Operations Executive. One of the lasses they parachuted into France, undercover, to help the Resistance."
Donna snorted. "Must've passed her French ‘O’ level, then. Been me, back then, and you can bet I'd have sat out the War behind a typewriter, making sure Britain's vital Spam reserves were accounted for."
He'd snorted a laugh before he saw Donna's eyes, bright as gun-sights, staring him down. But it didn't stop the joke being funny and anyway. Donna was like that, had always been like that. She could make you crease up at the same time as she got you wanting to advance on the barricades with a burning banner.
Wilf wondered if, perhaps, it was their fault Donna had never made anything much of her life ("except being a jewel. My jewel. My Donna."). Sylvia, of course, was adamant that anything wrong in Donna's makeup, she'd inherited from her father, but Wilf begged leave to doubt.
He'd liked Jim, anyway. Not that it mattered, now. He paused for a second, making sure he had the right, casual tone.
"There's one thing. They need a temp. My friend went into the office, something about the bills, and it turned out to be in a right old shambles. You give them a ring in the morning, love, and who knows?"
A long hard pause and then she nodded. He let out a covert breath.
_______________
We were down at the far end of the gardens, near the pond. Shelagh hadn't wanted to push me so far, but I'd managed, somehow, to persuade her into it, though resentment hung off her like a cloud. Fortunately for me, she was a silent sulker.
I saw the woman approaching before Shelagh did. Long waves of auburn hair, a sharp, long, narrow face like a red setter. And something - something almost like a second shadow about her.
Something on her back. No: the remnants of something which has once been there and has since been torn away.
Fear trembled along every nerve; fear and the familiar, unexpected adrenaline rush of sheer exhilaration. The red-head approached, favoured Shelagh with a curt nod which suggested she'd already been introduced to her and hadn't enjoyed the experience much, and then extended her hand to me.
“Donna Noble. I've just started temping in the office here. You must be Doctor Rubenstein. My granddad Wilf asked me to look you up if I got the chance.”
Shelagh wore her special, patented, sour lemon face. “Now, now, we're all much too good friends round here to be bothering with all that formality. And Naomi gave up all that 'Doctor' business long ago, didn't you, dear?”
A most peculiar expression flitted across Miss Noble's face. She looked like someone who has just had an inspiration about a cryptic crossword clue and is trying to juggle the letters to make it fit.
Shelagh dropped her voice, though she remained perfectly audible, and hissed in Miss Noble's ear, “Anyway, Naomi was never a real doctor, you know. Not like a GP.”
During an over-long life I'd met this peculiar delusion about the status of a D.Litt too often for it to cause any particular irritation. With Shelagh, my cup had long since run over with irritation, in any event.
Miss Noble advanced firmly, grasped the handles of my wheelchair, glanced at Shelagh and said, “I've still got half an hour of my break left. I'll take Doctor Rubenstein back in when I've finished, if you like.”
Shelagh looked doubtful; no doubt she thought herself a health care worker, and abandoning her charge to a lowly book-keeping temp went against the grain. On the other hand, it was growing chilly out here and no doubt there would be tea and celebrity gossip magazines waiting for her inside. She consigned me to Miss Noble's care, and headed briskly off back towards the house. Donna - Miss Noble - dropped to the garden seat beside me, looking sidelong at me under the curtain of her long auburn hair.
“Well,” she said, “as my Granddad says, don’t know what you bothered to fight the war for at all.”
“Always - always worth fighting. No - surrender.”
She smiled; a quick vivid smile which transformed her face, like a kingfisher flashing into view beneath the willow branches above the Cam on a summer’s day.
“He used to say something like ...”
Her voice trailed off, her eyes suddenly lost focus. The Home has made me familiar with practically every variety of dementia known to man. Most likely if I asked her who “he” might be she would deny ever having mentioned the man. Sufferers can never quite conceal how such questions wrack them, though. They sense the enormity of their loss, even while its nature eludes them and an uncaring world mocks their very confusion.
My problems have always been physical, thank God. And I have kept certain - resources - by my side in case that situation should ever change. In France, I became used to taking comfort from feeling the slight weight of those pills, secreted inside my clothing, each time fear threatened to overwhelm me. That same comfort has taken me through many dark times since. It’s not just superstition - I’ve taken care to renew them over the years as opportunity offered. Not that I’ve had access to laboratories for a good many years now. Cyanide, though, has a very long sell-by date.
I shivered, though not because of the chill air of the garden. The sight of that young, mobile, expressive face contorted with confusion, seeing self-assured Miss Noble revealed as someone who has just found the planks of her mental attic rotten beneath her feet, struck me as wholly obscene.
Something very wrong here.
I recalled Jack Harkness’s face last time I’d seen him - recalled, too, the banked, incandescent intensity of that corporal from the Armoured Divisions, Wilf Mott. Miss Noble’s grandfather, it appeared. I cursed myself for being a fool.
Something very wrong has been done here.
Natural disasters have never been much in Harkness’s line - there are always too many unnatural disasters clamouring for his attention. Illness might have evoked his pity, but it would take injury - deliberate, premeditated injury - to waken his sense of justice. And for him, in turn, waken me; the deepest of all his sleeper agents.
We’d had little in common, in our shared past, save for one thing. A preoccupation with justice which almost amounted to an obsession.
Two things in common, perhaps. I suspect we each focus on justice by way of compensation. After all, we have both been demonstrably short-changed in the mercy department.
___________________
“So, how’d your first day go, love?”
“Have we got a soldering iron?”
The spare room, with the cupboards where the tools were kept, looked like the aftermath of a burglary carried out by a particularly disorganised gang. Donna, kneeling amid the chaos on the floor, looked up from under the curtain of her red hair, the glint of fanatic enthusiasm in her eyes. Something inside him loosened; he found himself having to brush the back of his hand across suddenly watery eyes.
“Might be one in the shed, maybe.”
“Look it out for me, will y’? “ She scrambled to her feet, scrabbling for her car-keys in her hand bag. “Gotta get down to Maplins, pick up some connectors, transistors ‘n that. See you.”
Wilf blinked as she passed him like a whirlwind and he heard the front door slam and then the noise of the car starting up. He stretched a hand for the phone, lifted the handset, had dialled the code for Cardiff before he thought better of it and hung up. Most likely they’d have no more idea than he had of what might be happening, and anyway, he’d better have found that soldering iron before Donna got back or Sylvia started sticking her nose in things.
One thing had been certain; before she’d started - travelling - Donna wouldn’t have known one end of a soldering iron from the next. Electronics and a light in her eyes again, something must have happened today. Thank God for the Captain - and no-one back in the old days would have expected to hear Wilf Mott say that about any officer, still less a Yank.
He found himself humming as he made his way to the back door. It was only after a few moments that he put words to the tune.
So we’re saying goodbye to them all
The long and the short and the tall -
He looked back at the photographs of her on the mantelpiece and his heart skipped a beat.
__________________
“Gwen, what the -?”
Ianto turned his head sideways, trying to see whether the writhing entanglement of green and yellow glass tubing sitting on the base of Gwen’s workstation looked any more coherent that way up. She smiled at him.
“Present, see. Rhys’s nephew went on a school-trip to London, and he brought it back. All the kids were buying them, kind of a craze, like. Well, to be honest, he brought it back for his Mam, and I don’t think she fancied it in the house, really. Said she imagined it wriggling, every time she turned her back to get on with the hoovering. So she gave it to us, and Rhys said he thought I might like it, to brighten up the office. Nice to get the chance to see a touch of greenery about the place - at least, ‘til I think it’s safe to go back into the conservatory.”
He felt himself flushing, though there was nothing more than gentle teasing beneath Gwen’s tones.
“Say, is that a triffid on your desk or is it just pleased to see you?”
Familiar mocking tones came from above. They looked up to see Jack leaning against the rail, his arms crossed.
He descended the stairs towards Gwen’s workstation, picked the artefact up, turned it over and over in his hands. His voice remained as casual as ever, but Ianto fancied there was something about the set of his shoulders under that crisp blue shirt, something tense.
“Mind if I borrow it for a bit, Gwen? I’ve always fancied having something green and phallic about the office.”
She looked up at him, eyebrows raised. “Normal bosses settle for cacti.”
“Eew-ouch. Whatever they may say about me, I’ve never been a guy who makes the same mistake twice. Specially not mistakes that need tweezers to put right. So, say I wanted to get one of these for myself, where should I look? Did your nephew say?”
Gwen narrowed her eyes. “You up to something?”
Jack looked at his most innocent. Ianto made a mental note to cancel all non-urgent personal engagements for the foreseeable future, update his will and get in some gun practice on the range. From the look of her, Gwen was going through the same mental process - together with, presumably, adding up how much pizza she had in the freezer at home and thinking up some reassuring platitudes to feed to Rhys about her whereabouts.
However, all she said was, “Dunno - but here’s the box it came in.”
She pulled out a small cardboard box from her desk drawer. Jack fished about inside it for a second or so, and extricated a crumpled leaflet. He read it, and let out a low whistle.
“Well? You going to share it with us - sir? We are a team, after all. Least, so you keep telling us.”
Jack paused for a moment and then nodded. He passed the leaflet across to Ianto. The paper was cheap, the typeface was cramped, difficult to read, slightly smudged. If it had accompanied some garish plastic horror, packed by the tens of thousands in some factory in the Pearl River delta and retailing for £1.50 on one of the stalls in Barry market it would have caused no comment, but packed in with this, this exquisite, fascinating, unsettling thing -
Ianto traced the artefact’s intricacies with one intrigued forefinger.
“Put it down, Yanto, and read what’s on the leaflet. I’ve set up the recorders. Why don’t you give Gwen and me a thrill, give it your best shot at the Richard Burtons, huh?”
“Would this be what you had in mind, sir? “ He stood, hands by his side, feet apart, like he’d been taught at school, rounding his tongue over the words, mellow and rich as plum-cake.
“But that was nothing to what things came out
From the sea-caves of Criccieth yonder - "
Jack exhaled. “Yanto! If you’re not good, I’ll read you the Torchwood archives version of that incident, as a bedtime story. While you’re over my knee. You’d not see the funny side if you’d had to Retcon the whole of the Lleyn peninsula, and then realised you’d managed to miss a major inter-war poet whose version’s been included in every anthology published ever since. Read the frigging leaflet, ok?”
Thus admonished, Ianto blinked and turned to the leaflet.
Thank you for choosing to commemorate your visit to the exhibition today by buying a Grow-Glo. For us at Grow-Glo Enterprises, a souvenir should be more than simply a memory of an event gone by; it should an organic part of a living whole, as a conker remembers the horse-chestnut from which it fell, or the sea-shell, when held against the ear, reminds one of the ceaseless lift and swirl of the oceans. Take good care of your little Grow-Glo - make sure it has plenty of sunlight, for only in sunlight can life flourish. We hope you have a long and close future together.
He heard a strangled sound over to his left; Gwen, with her fingers down her throat, pretending to throw up into the waste-paper basket. Jack’s expression, though, was cold; deadly serious.
“Gwen - take a break, look up your sister-in-law, find out where it was he got it, what this exhibition was. I’ll be in my office. There’s a coupla calls I have to make.”
__________________
resistancegrrl: You up to something?
Yankcap: Me?
resistancegrrl: Don’t call for weeks, then all over place like rash. Don’t trust coincidences.
Yankcap: that was quick!
resistancegrrl: new keyboard. Special 1 hand. Donna’s idea. Electronics whiz.
Yankcap: Donna? U got right girl?
resistancegrrl: How many stroppy redheads do you know?
Yankcap: do aliens count?
Resistancegrrl: Scrub question. What “S” goes with “Screwdriver”?
Yankcap: What???????
resistancegrrl: Something D. said today. Thought crossword clue, but not. Worried her.
Yankcap: Should do.
resistancegrrl: something wrong? Thought so. Shd she see doctor?
Yankcap: NO!!
resistancegrrl: no need to shout.
Yankcap: Sorry. But last thing she needs. Trust me.
resistancegrrl: Suppose 1st time for everything.
Yankcap: Do something, pls?
resistancegrrl: What?
Yankcap: U in London. Need something from the V&A. U just girl 4 job. Inside track.
resistancegrrl: You want me to burgle V&A???
Yankcap: just gift shop. Take Donna with U.
resistancegrrl: why?
Yankcap: Great place, V&A. Was there on opening day. Personal invite Prince Albert.
resistancegrrl: You knew Prince Albert?
Yankcap: Sure. Nice chap. Wife didn’t understand him.
resistancegrrl: & you did?
Yankcap: official secret. Lips sealed.
Yankcap: tell U one thing 4 free. No truth in rumour. All urban myth.
resistancegrrl: Harkness, you couldn’t shock me when I was 20. Try it on yr young man instead.
Yankcap: Who told U about Ianto?
resistancegrrl: Ha! Guessed. Nice name. Local? Anyway, what do I get from V&A?
Yankcap. U’ll see. Harkness out.
__________________
continue to part 2