Sci-Fi Big Bang - Children Through Time - David's Book
Title: Children Through Time - The Book of David
Chapter: 6
Rating: R
Characters: Team Torchwood, David Ortiz, OC's
Spoilers: Children of Earth
Disclaimers: I do not own Torchwood or the characters therein, they belong to the BBC and RTD. Any original characters and places are my property.
Author's Notes: The series of events in Children Through Time take place after Children in Time. It is not necessary to read Children in Time but it can be found here.
Special Thanks: To my awesome beta faithharkness, and to my artist laura_guerin, and great cheerleading from knitchick1979, chicago_girl_07 and all the others. It was rough going this time, but we did it.
Chapter 6
David slurped down the miso soup he had reheated from lunch. It had been a long day of running between clients, Melissa by his side. Even though lunch had been delivered, all he had time for was to basically swallow two small teka maki rolls.
It was hard to imagine that only a couple of weeks ago, David had faced spending the rest of his life locked up in a UNIT facility. Now, he might even have a new “cure” for his stomach pain. Well, he wished it was a cure: it was more of a pain-reliever, now that he could give Mr. Yoshi the exact specifics of what was wrong with his stomach on the atomic level. Mr. Yoshi amused him, with his herbal remedies, along with his degrees in pharmacology and interest in cybernetics.
Chuckling, he dribbled a little soup on his shirt. Letting out a sigh, he put the cup down and stood up, unbuttoning his shirt. He quickly took it off, throwing it into the corner and pulled out a new shirt from the closet. Slipping that on, he had turned his back when he heard the door open.
“Oh, sorry,” Melissa said.
David turned back around and saw her standing in the doorway, a couple of digital pads and some files in her hands. As far as he could tell, Melissa had no idea what had happened between him and her brother - or she was a good actress.
“What do you want?” he gruffly asked. “Can’t I get a moment to breathe?”
“Then you bitch if I don’t get things to you right away,” Melissa retorted.
“Put them on my desk,” David said.
Melissa let out a sigh as she put the pile neatly on his desk. She then turned to him, watching him. David tried to not pay attention to her as she smoothed out the invisible wrinkles in her skirt and blouse. He started to sip his soup again, but she continued to watch him.
Slamming the cup of soup down, David let out a groan and turned to Melissa. “Now what the fuck do you want?”
“I’m going to say this quickly to not disturb you,” Melissa said. “But, thank you.”
“What the fuck for?”
“I know it was you. No one else I know has the means to pay off the rest of Stacy’s tuition, much less her after-school care and classes for the rest of the year.” A small smile sneaked onto her face.
“You’re wrong,” David said as he pulled the first digital pad toward him and began reading. He had said he would take care of them, and he didn’t like being beholden to anyone not of his choosing. At least one good thing had happened because of his meeting with UNIT - he finally had something tangible to rest his mind on, something that could explain what happened to them. Now if he could just figure out why the name Torchwood kept plaguing his mind and dreams…
“No, I’m not, especially since I saw the data confirmation.”
“What the hell were you doing snooping through my shit?” David clenched his fist, trying to remain calm.
“I didn’t go snooping. If you want to hide something from your assistant, you shouldn’t have the data confirmation sent to your office and the funds be taken out of your public account,” she stated, hands on her hips. “Especially when I know you have so many private ones.”
David’s body felt like stone as his head jerked to the side, staring at Melissa. “What the fucking hell do you mean?”
Melissa looked chagrined for a moment, but continued on. “You have the ‘public’ account that is linked to the business and then you have six personal accounts.”
David propelled himself up from the desk. He could feel the heat rising within him. “NO ONE touches those accounts but me!”
Melissa stumbled backwards to the wall, leaning against it for support. He hadn’t touched her, but the way she looked, one would have thought David had struck her. When David hired her, he thought he could trust Melissa, but the last three months had taxed their professional relationship. They had worked well together, but now he was wondering if he needed to do something about how nosy she seemed to be lately.
“I… I didn’t touch them,” she stammered out. “You were loopy in the hospital and it was time for some kid of annual security check that the bank needed. So I took a chance and used your authorization code.”
He glared at her, seething with anger. Those were specific accounts for specific reasons. They were his one way of keeping a future for those from his past. “That better have been all,” David growled, punching his thigh, trying to keep from punching Melissa.
“Yes.” She looked down at the floor and then slowly brought her head back up, looking chagrined. She bit her lower lip. That was never a good sign: the lip-biting was one of Melissa’s tells.
“You better start telling me what the fuck you did,” David said, clenching his teeth as he stalked around his desk. “And tell me quickly before I lose it.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Melissa stated, taking a deep breath. “But when I saw them earlier I saw that only two of them were being used reciprocally, the one in your name and one for someone named Eve Marsh. One of the other four has suddenly been used today. Funds were withdrawn.”
“Funds were what?” It couldn’t be. The only people who should be able to draw any funds out of those accounts were David and whom the account was named for. He stared ahead, his mind trying to grasp what this meant. If an account had funds withdrawn from it, and he didn’t do it, and neither did Melissa, then that meant one of them was alive and somewhere in the world. David choked on the words, trying to form a coherent thought. “Where? I need to know where.”
“A banking kiosk in a piazza in Rome,” Melissa stated.
“Name! What was the name on the account!” David shouted at her as her pulled out his newest laptop, Jeannie, and turned her on.
“Yes Master, what can I do for you?” Jeannie asked in a light, feminine voice.
“I need access to the video surveillance for Rome,” David said as he began inputting a sequence of numbers for the accounts. “What was the name?” he demanded of Melissa.
“Elizabeth Murphy,” she stated, stepping forward. “Mr. Ortiz, what does this mean?”
“It means I’m not alone,” David replied. His mouth hung open as he saw that approximately $1,000 had been withdrawn from a kiosk in St. Peter’s Square. His heart began beating rather quickly and he had to remind himself to breathe. “Please let it be true,” he muttered under his breath, keeping the tears at bay.
Jeannie quickly culled the video feeds for the piazza and started playing them. There were about ten different angles; it was such a large piazza. David’s eyes scanned picture to picture trying to find something familiar.
“Time code!” David’s head snapped towards Melissa. “What time was this at?”
Melissa stepped forward, leaning on the desk. “Ummm… It was 9:00 a.m. Chicago time,” Melissa stated, looking at the multi-pictured screen. “How do you have this access?”
“Don’t ask such silly questions at a time like this,” David said as he typed in the appropriate time codes. “Where was it in the piazza?”
“Northeast quadrant if I saw the map correctly,” she replied. Melissa shook her head. “What are you doing?”
“Praying to whatever god will listen that this is not some random fucker who…” David’s voice trailed off as he looked at the screen. He clicked on the one camera footage and enlarged it to full-screen. “Madre de Dios,” he whispered. A couple of tears fell down his face as he clicked from camera to camera as the person who had taken out the money walked across the piazza, constantly looking over their shoulder, blonde hair trailing in the breeze.
“Mr. Ortiz?” Melissa questioned.
“Get me a plane! Get me on a plane to Rome now! I don’t care when it’s leaving, I’ll take a chopper to the airport from the rooftop if I need to.” David’s voice strained as he tried to keep it from breaking.
He kept replaying the footage, and found himself zooming in until the shot was too pixilated. Even then, he swore he saw her hazel eyes, but not her smile. In none of the shots was she smiling; but David, he was grinning bigger than the world’s greatest idiot. He had found one of them. He was not alone anymore.
Melissa had been making a couple of phone calls on his personal line, but now she was quiet and looking at him, the phone in her hand. David turned to her, a huge grin on his face.
“When’s the flight leaving?” He asked, standing up and putting on his jacket.
“It’s not,” she said, her voice soft. “You’ve been grounded.”
“What?” He turned to her, trying to see if she was fucking with him.
“You’ve been grounded. You’re not allowed to leave the country for any reason,” she stated, looking down at the ground and biting her lower lip.
“Who?” He asked, his voice cold and hard.
“UNIT,” she replied, not even looking at him. Melissa hung up the phone and walked around his desk, away from him.
David’s head swam with disbelief. It felt like an iceberg had smacked headfirst into his body. “No one, and I mean no one is keeping me from Elizabeth,” David stated. Even he was startled at how scary his voice sounded. “Go into your office and make the appropriate arrangements and grab my international ID.”
“But you’ve been blocked from leaving the country by UNIT and if you-“
“I’ll be fine and I’m going to get Elizabeth. Make sure the garage has the car ready to roll,” he said, his hand on Melissa’s back, shoving her out the adjoining door. He slammed the door in her face and turned to face the phone. He could feel the heat rising up through his body. No one would stop him.
Picking up the phone, David debated for about a second what he was about to do. In the long run, it would be the best thing. Shit, it might even help them figure out what happened to them in Cardiff 16 years ago. Pausing a moment before he dialed, David looked in the mirror above the credenza. He was nearing 50, and was starting to look it, in the eyes especially. They knew too much, and yet not enough about this fucked-up universe.
Dialing, he held the phone to his ear and waited until his intended assistant answered on the other side. Before they could say hello, he jumped ahead. “Good afternoon, Dr. Graf. It’s David Ortiz.”
“What do you want, Mr. Ortiz?” Andrew said.
“I need to leave the country.”
“That’s not happening. Nothing you say will make it negotiable.”
“Another one of us that was abducted from Cardiff has appeared somewhere else in the world. They will only trust me. If you arrange it so I can get to them today, I will arrange it that you can do tests on them as well.” David’s heart was nearly beating out of his chest.
“Why would we do that when we could just pick them up ourselves?”
“If we want to go boom as you think we must, do you think raiding someone’s bedroom in the middle of the night will make them not destroy the world?” David knew he needed a clincher, and not knowing what made him say it, he continued on, “plus, maybe we can figure out how Torchwood factors into our disappearance.”
“Torchwood?”
“Oh yes,” David said, a grin on his face. “I can tell you part of this is because of Torchwood, but I don’t have all the pieces.” David looked at himself in the mirror and questioned himself. He didn’t even fully understand what Torchwood was yet, why was he saying this?
After a long pause, Andrew continued to talk. “You will be escorted wherever you need to go, you will never be alone outside of country, even when you are sleeping. Once the target is acquired, both of you will return here immediately. There will be a plane waiting for you on the private tarmac at O’Hare, you will only go to that plane, is that understood?”
“Oh yes, Sir,” David said. “I’m leaving now, so they better be ready.”
“Where is this other person?”
“I’m not stupid. I’ll tell the pilot when I get there,” David said and hung up the phone. He had bargained with the devil and may have taken down someone he didn’t even know, but in the end it would be worth it. He had Elizabeth back. Smiling from every core of his being, David threw on his leather coat and waltzed out the door.
Chapter: 6
Rating: R
Characters: Team Torchwood, David Ortiz, OC's
Spoilers: Children of Earth
Disclaimers: I do not own Torchwood or the characters therein, they belong to the BBC and RTD. Any original characters and places are my property.
Author's Notes: The series of events in Children Through Time take place after Children in Time. It is not necessary to read Children in Time but it can be found here.
Special Thanks: To my awesome beta faithharkness, and to my artist laura_guerin, and great cheerleading from knitchick1979, chicago_girl_07 and all the others. It was rough going this time, but we did it.
Chapter 6
David slurped down the miso soup he had reheated from lunch. It had been a long day of running between clients, Melissa by his side. Even though lunch had been delivered, all he had time for was to basically swallow two small teka maki rolls.
It was hard to imagine that only a couple of weeks ago, David had faced spending the rest of his life locked up in a UNIT facility. Now, he might even have a new “cure” for his stomach pain. Well, he wished it was a cure: it was more of a pain-reliever, now that he could give Mr. Yoshi the exact specifics of what was wrong with his stomach on the atomic level. Mr. Yoshi amused him, with his herbal remedies, along with his degrees in pharmacology and interest in cybernetics.
Chuckling, he dribbled a little soup on his shirt. Letting out a sigh, he put the cup down and stood up, unbuttoning his shirt. He quickly took it off, throwing it into the corner and pulled out a new shirt from the closet. Slipping that on, he had turned his back when he heard the door open.
“Oh, sorry,” Melissa said.
David turned back around and saw her standing in the doorway, a couple of digital pads and some files in her hands. As far as he could tell, Melissa had no idea what had happened between him and her brother - or she was a good actress.
“What do you want?” he gruffly asked. “Can’t I get a moment to breathe?”
“Then you bitch if I don’t get things to you right away,” Melissa retorted.
“Put them on my desk,” David said.
Melissa let out a sigh as she put the pile neatly on his desk. She then turned to him, watching him. David tried to not pay attention to her as she smoothed out the invisible wrinkles in her skirt and blouse. He started to sip his soup again, but she continued to watch him.
Slamming the cup of soup down, David let out a groan and turned to Melissa. “Now what the fuck do you want?”
“I’m going to say this quickly to not disturb you,” Melissa said. “But, thank you.”
“What the fuck for?”
“I know it was you. No one else I know has the means to pay off the rest of Stacy’s tuition, much less her after-school care and classes for the rest of the year.” A small smile sneaked onto her face.
“You’re wrong,” David said as he pulled the first digital pad toward him and began reading. He had said he would take care of them, and he didn’t like being beholden to anyone not of his choosing. At least one good thing had happened because of his meeting with UNIT - he finally had something tangible to rest his mind on, something that could explain what happened to them. Now if he could just figure out why the name Torchwood kept plaguing his mind and dreams…
“No, I’m not, especially since I saw the data confirmation.”
“What the hell were you doing snooping through my shit?” David clenched his fist, trying to remain calm.
“I didn’t go snooping. If you want to hide something from your assistant, you shouldn’t have the data confirmation sent to your office and the funds be taken out of your public account,” she stated, hands on her hips. “Especially when I know you have so many private ones.”
David’s body felt like stone as his head jerked to the side, staring at Melissa. “What the fucking hell do you mean?”
Melissa looked chagrined for a moment, but continued on. “You have the ‘public’ account that is linked to the business and then you have six personal accounts.”
David propelled himself up from the desk. He could feel the heat rising within him. “NO ONE touches those accounts but me!”
Melissa stumbled backwards to the wall, leaning against it for support. He hadn’t touched her, but the way she looked, one would have thought David had struck her. When David hired her, he thought he could trust Melissa, but the last three months had taxed their professional relationship. They had worked well together, but now he was wondering if he needed to do something about how nosy she seemed to be lately.
“I… I didn’t touch them,” she stammered out. “You were loopy in the hospital and it was time for some kid of annual security check that the bank needed. So I took a chance and used your authorization code.”
He glared at her, seething with anger. Those were specific accounts for specific reasons. They were his one way of keeping a future for those from his past. “That better have been all,” David growled, punching his thigh, trying to keep from punching Melissa.
“Yes.” She looked down at the floor and then slowly brought her head back up, looking chagrined. She bit her lower lip. That was never a good sign: the lip-biting was one of Melissa’s tells.
“You better start telling me what the fuck you did,” David said, clenching his teeth as he stalked around his desk. “And tell me quickly before I lose it.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Melissa stated, taking a deep breath. “But when I saw them earlier I saw that only two of them were being used reciprocally, the one in your name and one for someone named Eve Marsh. One of the other four has suddenly been used today. Funds were withdrawn.”
“Funds were what?” It couldn’t be. The only people who should be able to draw any funds out of those accounts were David and whom the account was named for. He stared ahead, his mind trying to grasp what this meant. If an account had funds withdrawn from it, and he didn’t do it, and neither did Melissa, then that meant one of them was alive and somewhere in the world. David choked on the words, trying to form a coherent thought. “Where? I need to know where.”
“A banking kiosk in a piazza in Rome,” Melissa stated.
“Name! What was the name on the account!” David shouted at her as her pulled out his newest laptop, Jeannie, and turned her on.
“Yes Master, what can I do for you?” Jeannie asked in a light, feminine voice.
“I need access to the video surveillance for Rome,” David said as he began inputting a sequence of numbers for the accounts. “What was the name?” he demanded of Melissa.
“Elizabeth Murphy,” she stated, stepping forward. “Mr. Ortiz, what does this mean?”
“It means I’m not alone,” David replied. His mouth hung open as he saw that approximately $1,000 had been withdrawn from a kiosk in St. Peter’s Square. His heart began beating rather quickly and he had to remind himself to breathe. “Please let it be true,” he muttered under his breath, keeping the tears at bay.
Jeannie quickly culled the video feeds for the piazza and started playing them. There were about ten different angles; it was such a large piazza. David’s eyes scanned picture to picture trying to find something familiar.
“Time code!” David’s head snapped towards Melissa. “What time was this at?”
Melissa stepped forward, leaning on the desk. “Ummm… It was 9:00 a.m. Chicago time,” Melissa stated, looking at the multi-pictured screen. “How do you have this access?”
“Don’t ask such silly questions at a time like this,” David said as he typed in the appropriate time codes. “Where was it in the piazza?”
“Northeast quadrant if I saw the map correctly,” she replied. Melissa shook her head. “What are you doing?”
“Praying to whatever god will listen that this is not some random fucker who…” David’s voice trailed off as he looked at the screen. He clicked on the one camera footage and enlarged it to full-screen. “Madre de Dios,” he whispered. A couple of tears fell down his face as he clicked from camera to camera as the person who had taken out the money walked across the piazza, constantly looking over their shoulder, blonde hair trailing in the breeze.
“Mr. Ortiz?” Melissa questioned.
“Get me a plane! Get me on a plane to Rome now! I don’t care when it’s leaving, I’ll take a chopper to the airport from the rooftop if I need to.” David’s voice strained as he tried to keep it from breaking.
He kept replaying the footage, and found himself zooming in until the shot was too pixilated. Even then, he swore he saw her hazel eyes, but not her smile. In none of the shots was she smiling; but David, he was grinning bigger than the world’s greatest idiot. He had found one of them. He was not alone anymore.
Melissa had been making a couple of phone calls on his personal line, but now she was quiet and looking at him, the phone in her hand. David turned to her, a huge grin on his face.
“When’s the flight leaving?” He asked, standing up and putting on his jacket.
“It’s not,” she said, her voice soft. “You’ve been grounded.”
“What?” He turned to her, trying to see if she was fucking with him.
“You’ve been grounded. You’re not allowed to leave the country for any reason,” she stated, looking down at the ground and biting her lower lip.
“Who?” He asked, his voice cold and hard.
“UNIT,” she replied, not even looking at him. Melissa hung up the phone and walked around his desk, away from him.
David’s head swam with disbelief. It felt like an iceberg had smacked headfirst into his body. “No one, and I mean no one is keeping me from Elizabeth,” David stated. Even he was startled at how scary his voice sounded. “Go into your office and make the appropriate arrangements and grab my international ID.”
“But you’ve been blocked from leaving the country by UNIT and if you-“
“I’ll be fine and I’m going to get Elizabeth. Make sure the garage has the car ready to roll,” he said, his hand on Melissa’s back, shoving her out the adjoining door. He slammed the door in her face and turned to face the phone. He could feel the heat rising up through his body. No one would stop him.
Picking up the phone, David debated for about a second what he was about to do. In the long run, it would be the best thing. Shit, it might even help them figure out what happened to them in Cardiff 16 years ago. Pausing a moment before he dialed, David looked in the mirror above the credenza. He was nearing 50, and was starting to look it, in the eyes especially. They knew too much, and yet not enough about this fucked-up universe.
Dialing, he held the phone to his ear and waited until his intended assistant answered on the other side. Before they could say hello, he jumped ahead. “Good afternoon, Dr. Graf. It’s David Ortiz.”
“What do you want, Mr. Ortiz?” Andrew said.
“I need to leave the country.”
“That’s not happening. Nothing you say will make it negotiable.”
“Another one of us that was abducted from Cardiff has appeared somewhere else in the world. They will only trust me. If you arrange it so I can get to them today, I will arrange it that you can do tests on them as well.” David’s heart was nearly beating out of his chest.
“Why would we do that when we could just pick them up ourselves?”
“If we want to go boom as you think we must, do you think raiding someone’s bedroom in the middle of the night will make them not destroy the world?” David knew he needed a clincher, and not knowing what made him say it, he continued on, “plus, maybe we can figure out how Torchwood factors into our disappearance.”
“Torchwood?”
“Oh yes,” David said, a grin on his face. “I can tell you part of this is because of Torchwood, but I don’t have all the pieces.” David looked at himself in the mirror and questioned himself. He didn’t even fully understand what Torchwood was yet, why was he saying this?
After a long pause, Andrew continued to talk. “You will be escorted wherever you need to go, you will never be alone outside of country, even when you are sleeping. Once the target is acquired, both of you will return here immediately. There will be a plane waiting for you on the private tarmac at O’Hare, you will only go to that plane, is that understood?”
“Oh yes, Sir,” David said. “I’m leaving now, so they better be ready.”
“Where is this other person?”
“I’m not stupid. I’ll tell the pilot when I get there,” David said and hung up the phone. He had bargained with the devil and may have taken down someone he didn’t even know, but in the end it would be worth it. He had Elizabeth back. Smiling from every core of his being, David threw on his leather coat and waltzed out the door.