Torchwood fic: Some Say in Ice
Title: Some Say in Ice
Author: rustydog
Characters: Team, a bit of Gwen/Rhys
Rating: G
Words: 3348
Beta: donutsweeper
Notes: Fluff, inspired by a line from my drabble Symmetry. For travels_in_time and donutsweeper, who seemed to want more.
Summary: Just a simple story about a dragon.
"Gwen? Gwen, look at this!"
Gwen stirred under the covers. This was her first chance to have a lie in since early last month, and Rhys knew it. She grunted her objection.
"Gwen, you won't believe me unless you see it. Come on, come to the window!" he pleaded.
She pulled the duvet over her head. That just prompted Rhys to burrow back under the covers and employ a tickling strategy. She resisted the urge to subdue and handcuff him and settled for a long, hungry kiss before she slid out of bed. It was colder than she had expected for an October morning.
Drawing the curtains aside, she was temporarily blinded by a glare. Their bedroom window faced east, but it was never this bright in the morning. When her eyes adjusted, she understood: the city was itself shining, nearly every surface covered in a smooth, reflective layer of ice.
The rooftops were glazed, and the cars parked in the street below looked more like watercolor blobs. The tree below their flat, only half its leaves lost to autumn yet, was bowed over with the weight of what looked like a two-inch layer of ice on every branch and twig. Nothing seemed to be moving until a pigeon lit on a garden wall across the street, flapped its wings for balance, and then slipped off and fluttered to the ground anyway, its claws finding no purchase.
Rhys had gone out and turned on the television. "Nobody in this part of the city can drive," he called. "Lucky for you, darling-don't think I'll be going in to work today!"
Gwen smiled ruefully at his innuendo. "But I bet I will."
*
Ianto picked her up in the SUV, which he had somehow already outfitted with chains on the tyres. When they arrived in the Hub, Toshiko and Jack were in the middle of a good-natured argument. Gwen and Ianto paused at her desk to let them finish.
"It's a simple state change, Jack. Remove heat from water and it turns to a solid. Low surface temperature plus precipitation, that's all it is. Even a child knows that."
"Speak for yourself," Owen called from his workstation.
Jack grinned. "Did I say it wasn't ice? I know it's ice. All I'm asking is, where did the precipitation come from? And why did it all fall in a precise, half-kilometre wide band across the city?" He raised his eyebrows at Tosh expectantly.
She huffed with frustration and turned back to her computer, bringing up a weather map she had accessed previously. "The computers don't show any cloud cover last night at all, and humidity was even lower than usual," she admitted. Then she added in a lower voice, "But it's not a dragon."
"You don't know that," Jack bent down to bring his face level with hers, his eyes pleading and playful.
"Now that you mention it, Myfanwy has been more restless than usual in the past twenty-four hours," Ianto interjected.
Tosh leaned back in her chair and folded her arms, taking Jack's challenge. "All right, Jack. Show me a dragon."
Jack punched the air. "I thought you'd never ask. Bundle up, kids, it's gonna be colder than Santa's workshop where we're going!"
Ianto leaned over and whispered to Gwen, "Ten pounds says he's actually been to Santa's workshop."
*
Jack had Tosh pull up records on all the abandoned warehouses and large tunnels in the city. She was cross-referencing them with areas of anomalously low temperature when Owen suggested they could just look in the neighborhood where the ice stopped. With that, they were on their way.
What would normally have been a ten minute drive took three times that, even with no other traffic on the road. Two blocks from their destination, the ice became so thick and uneven that they had to get out and walk, picking their way over and around ice boulders and troughs. When they came in view of one of the warehouses Tosh had pinpointed from her calculations in the Hub, it was clear that she had got it right.
"Looks like a wedding cake puked all over it," Owen observed. It wasn't a bad description. The building was sheathed in ice, and there were frozen waterfalls of ice, layer upon bubbly layer, spilling out of some of the broken windows. The icicles hanging from the roof looked big enough to kill a yak. But unlike the ice in the rest of the city, this was all frosted over, white like a cold window touched with breath. In fact, something like fog rolled out of the windows on the ground level.
Walking carefully on the ice, they each took different entrances. Gwen's door appeared to lead into the main space of the warehouse. She pulled the door open with one hand and then pressed her back against the wall outside for a moment, waiting for any danger to clear. Freezing fog tumbled out as if it had been piled against the door, then cleared. She peeked warily around the door frame...
And swore, her voice a soft hiss. "Jack, do you see this? Owen? Tosh?" she whispered into her earpiece.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" Jack's voice replied.
Owen, who had entered through the large double doors at the far end of the warehouse, also had some choice words.
"Tosh, are you there?" Gwen checked. The reply came as a chuckle, then a strangled laugh.
"Sorry," said Tosh's voice a moment later, "just remembering something my grandfather told me once. I apologize, Jack. It's definitely a dragon."
The fog in the warehouse was only a few inches deep, and beyond it, in doorways on different sides of the huge room, Gwen picked out both Owen and Tosh, then Jack on a catwalk above. Directly below him, coiled and slumbering, lay a great snake.
It was easily three times the size of Myfanwy, with pearly white scales that became more purple or blue as the fog shifted and the light changed. It seemed to be generating the fog, though with the way it was curled, Gwen couldn't see exactly how.
"Orders, Jack?" Owen whispered. "Is it dangerous?"
"How should I know?" Jack replied, also speaking low into their earpieces. "I've never seen one of these things before. I had it on good authority that they existed, but I never met one." He continued, much louder, "So who wants to go make friends?"
"Jack, what are you doing?" Toshiko whispered. Gwen froze, and across the warehouse she could see Owen dropping to a wary crouch, his attention on the beast below Jack.
It was moving. Gwen watched as the serpentine body shifted, slipping over itself as it unknotted; from the center of the knot, a head appeared. It was huge, almost too big for the massive body. It raised itself on a muscular neck and swayed back and forth, ribbons of steam trailing from its enormous nostrils as it sniffed the air. Gwen hoped its eyesight was poor.
Her hand went to her weapon. Owen and Tosh had drawn their guns, too, but Jack was leaning over the railing of the catwalk, unarmed. "Hey, beautiful! What are you doing here?" he called.
The animal snorted and its head swung around, giving Gwen a better view. Somehow, it reminded her of a camel's head, with its large eyes, long concave snout and generous lips. "Jack, be careful," she hissed. "That looks like a very big mouth."
"It's okay," came his quiet reply. "If he wanted to attack me, I think I'd be crushed by now."
"Or a block of ice," Owen added. "I get the feeling that if he exhaled hard-"
"Like breathing fire, in the stories," Tosh followed his logic.
"Exactly!" Jack smirked from his perch, abandoning his ‘inside voice’. "Dragon. Ice dragon!"
"I said you were right, Jack," Tosh replied, and Gwen bet she was rolling her eyes, "but I am curious about how you know it's male. You said 'he.' What if it's a 'she'?"
Jack shrugged. "I don't know, it just... doesn't smell like a female."
From his doorway across the room, Owen gave a laugh and shook his head in disbelief.
The dragon was still weaving its head and upper body slowly back and forth, as if it could hear some invisible charmer's flute. It hadn't turned its attention away from Jack, but when it heard Owen, it swung its head around. The upper part of its sleek body shot forward as it stretched closer to Owen, who jumped back, slipped, and landed on his seat. The dragon snorted loudly, more aggressively if Gwen wasn't mistaken.
Gwen took a step forward. "Jack?" she called to him. "I'm coming over. I want to try something."
"Careful," Owen said in a low voice, and out of the corner of her eye she could see him standing up carefully and raising his arms to train his gun on the dragon. She walked gingerly over the slick floor, feeling her way so that she didn't stumble over anything hidden by the fog. When she was within ten meters of the dragon's body, she stopped, glanced up at Jack, and concentrated on making her voice both friendly and soothing.
"Hello! Hey, lovely, what are you doing here?"
The dragon had been looking confused in its attempts to monitor both Jack and Owen at opposite ends of the warehouse at once. Now it stopped its weaving, held itself tall and still, and looked down at Gwen. It huffed once, softly.
"We don't want to hurt you, darling, we just don't know what to do with you." Gwen held her hands behind her in case the creature felt threatened by flailing limbs. She still couldn't see that it had any limbs at all. It was lowering its head, slowly, though, and she stood very still.
It stopped when its face was almost level with hers, the enormous head bobbing ever so slightly. Its eyes were murky green pools with black slits for pupils.
"Jack," she said quietly, "it looks sad." It was so close to her and so quiet, she reached out her hand to touch its face.
"Woah, woah," Owen's voice came over her earpiece insistently, "no skin-to-skin. Have you ever touched your tongue to a frozen post?"
"It sounds like you have," Tosh teased Owen.
Gwen heeded the warning, very slowly reaching up to unwind the scarf from her neck and wrap part of it around one hand, which she placed gently on the dragon's cheek. "There," she cooed to it, "see, we won't hurt you."
The dragon blinked once, then heaved a great sigh, sending a freezing fog over Gwen's face and the front of her coat. The cold was a shock, but she wiped her face with her sleeve and patted the dragon. It responded by laying its head on the ground at Gwen's feet with a smaller sigh.
Owen had more choice expressions of surprise, which were a little too loud and elicited something like a growl from the animal. "All right, shutting up and keeping back," Owen conceded, backing up until he was right in the doorway through which he had entered. "Hey, Jack, you think it's a man hater?" he asked in a whisper they could all hear.
"Some lizards respond to human hormones," Tosh suggested, "and they'll only bond with humans of the opposite sex. They see other males, or other females, as rivals."
While the dragon had been focused on Gwen, Tosh had been walking up behind it and begun taking scans. She was near enough now that Gwen could hear her when she spoke normally. "I don't know if it's sad, Gwen" she said, "but it might be sick. Its temperature is rising. It's already five degrees higher than the scan I took when we came in. Wherever it's from, Jack, I think it needs to go home."
"Through the Rift?" Owen's question was a statement of the problem. They were all silent for a few moments, thinking. Gwen squatted and stroked the great nose with her muffled hand. Then Jack tapped his earpiece.
"Ianto, you there?"
"I'm here, Jack, but I'm picking up a lot of reports by the night owls of a 'giant flying snake' seen early this morning. Did you find it?"
"We did, and it's a dragon!"
"Well, congratulations, sir."
"Right, well, it is a bit of a problem. Question for you: what does Myfanwy do first when she goes out at night?"
"Ah, flies straight up, as fast as she can. I've always thought it was because she liked the view of the city."
Jack nodded. "And then she circles down slowly. But it's cold up there. Cold enough, do you think, Tosh?"
"To bring the dragon's temperature down?" Tosh looked up from her readings. "Maybe, but-"
"Cold enough to make him want to stay there," Jack finished. "I think it's our only option. We can't just wait for Rift activity and then-shove him through. If he was an iguana, maybe."
No one could think of a better option than hoping a giant dragon would prefer the upper atmosphere of their planet, which was a sad state of affairs, Gwen thought. "Maybe he can find his way to the North Pole," she said hopefully.
"Maybe he could pull Santa's sleigh," Owen suggested, sarcastically but not really unkindly.
"Antarctica would be better," Tosh agreed, "but I think he's on his own once he's up there."
"All right," Jack said, beginning to make his way toward the end of the catwalk where there were some stairs. "Let's head back to the Hub; obviously we need to wait til dark."
Gwen patted the dragon's head, rose, and made her way toward the door she had come in by. From behind her came a rumbling sound, then something shifting and sliding, and she heard Toshiko gasp.
Turning, she met a huge face directly behind her. The dragon was completely unfurled now, and its neck and body snaked all the way back to its original place on the other side of the warehouse floor. It stood on four short, bent legs, and then Gwen realized what must have made Tosh gasp: opening from just above the forelegs and all along the body behind them were a pair of blue-green wings, the skin on them so delicate, they were almost translucent.
"Oh, you beautiful creature," she soothed, but then ducked carefully to the left where she could see Jack. "Ah, why is he following me?"
"My guess? He likes you." Jack grinned.
"Well, we can't have him following us all the way home-"
"Which is why you're going to have to babysit. Sorry," Jack apologized to the animal, "dragon-sit."
*
After securing assurances from Jack and Tosh that the dragon was not likely to eat its sexual rivals, Owen offered to stay and keep Gwen company. ("Just don't touch her or you might end up a snack," Jack warned, and he seemed alarmingly serious.) Jack promised to send Ianto with some better clothing, coffee, and equipment to keep them warm. They arranged for Tosh and Jack to relieve them in the afternoon, if Tosh could establish a similar bond with the dragon.
By noon, Gwen and Owen had traded childhood pet stories, played every travel game Gwen knew and Owen had generously shared a number of rambling, decidedly off-colour jokes. Gwen was having trouble concentrating around her worry about the creature's health. It was listless, and if she wasn't mistaken, its scales looked more green than white now.
Finally, the dragon had been still for so long that even Owen was concerned. He picked up a chunk of ice and tossed it toward the animal's rear half.
The change was instant: the body tensed, the huge head snapped up, the tail whipped forward, connecting with the chunk of ice and sending it bouncing away toward the far door of the warehouse. The tail continued to lash back and forth, as if waiting for a new target. Owen turned to Gwen, eyebrows up and a mischievous grin on his face. "That was fun."
"No, Owen, he's sick! You'll torture him."
"Look at him! He wants more." Owen pitched another piece of ice with the same results. The dragon snorted with apparent eagerness. Gwen smiled and shook her head.
For the last hour before their relief team arrived ("substitute players" as Owen was calling them now), Owen pitched and Gwen stood afield to attempt to catch. She didn't much like running toward large flying chunks of ice-though she had played rugby once or twice, this seemed different-but she succeeded once and let out a whoop of triumph, holding up the ice in her mittened hand. The dragon lifted its head and echoed her cry with an eerie trumpet.
Two other times, the dragon's tail connected with the ice in just the right way and the chunk shattered, sending tiny ice pieces and ice dust into the air. Where the pieces passed in front of a sunny window they glittered like diamonds.
*
An hour after nightfall they were all in position: Gwen and Tosh inside the warehouse with their new friend, Jack and Owen outside ready to run interference and drive, and Ianto in the Hub with an agitated pterosaur. "Ianto," Jack checked in, "go anytime."
There was silence on the communicators for a moment, then Ianto responded, "Okay, Jack, she's away. I'm headed outside to track her."
"Okay, ladies," Jack called, "you ready? Bring him out." Gwen gave the dragon one last pat and she and Tosh turned and walked out the large double doors into the lamplit street and toward the SUV. The dragon plodded after them meekly, its wings tucked away against its body. Throughout the day, the October sun had melted the ice on the street.
"I don't know if this is going to work, Jack," Gwen fretted, "what if he wants to stay with us?"
As if on cue, the dragon huffed, something rattling eagerly, deep in its throat. It raised its head, looking up and sniffing the air. Its wings flapped open and began to stir the air-
Gwen pushed Tosh to the ground and ducked her own head as the dragon was off, slithering through the air, one wing tip brushing the top of the SUV as it passed by. It gained altitude as it flew down the street with puffing breaths, and by the time it reached the first intersection, it had cleared the buildings and treetops and was a just a pale, curving slash against the dark sky. The pavement and rooftops it had passed over gleamed.
"Come on," Jack said, helping Tosh up and leading them all back toward the warehouse. They followed him up a stairwell and onto the roof. Their eyes had just enough time to adjust to the dark when they saw what they were looking for, a broad dark shape and a long, thin light one meeting in the air above the city. They figures flapped, circled each other several times, and then the dark shape began to climb. The last they saw, a white streak was spiraling around her, higher and higher in an exotic moonlit dance.
"Myfanwy will come back," Gwen worried.
"She doesn't like the cold," Owen reassured her.
"Star-crossed lovers," Tosh sighed. "He'll be lonely in the arctic, or wherever he goes."
"Oh, you never know," Jack said, putting his arm around her. "The Rift might send him a friend one of these days. There might even be something already out there." His tone became lighter. "Now. Let's discuss my prize for being right about the dragon. How are you at making cake?"
Tosh groaned. As they were walking back toward the stairs, Gwen pulled Tosh aside and whispered, "Rhys makes excellent cakes. We've got you covered."
They giggled but wouldn't let Jack and Owen in on the joke. An ice-blue frosting would be perfect, Gwen thought.
Author: rustydog
Characters: Team, a bit of Gwen/Rhys
Rating: G
Words: 3348
Beta: donutsweeper
Notes: Fluff, inspired by a line from my drabble Symmetry. For travels_in_time and donutsweeper, who seemed to want more.
Summary: Just a simple story about a dragon.
"Gwen? Gwen, look at this!"
Gwen stirred under the covers. This was her first chance to have a lie in since early last month, and Rhys knew it. She grunted her objection.
"Gwen, you won't believe me unless you see it. Come on, come to the window!" he pleaded.
She pulled the duvet over her head. That just prompted Rhys to burrow back under the covers and employ a tickling strategy. She resisted the urge to subdue and handcuff him and settled for a long, hungry kiss before she slid out of bed. It was colder than she had expected for an October morning.
Drawing the curtains aside, she was temporarily blinded by a glare. Their bedroom window faced east, but it was never this bright in the morning. When her eyes adjusted, she understood: the city was itself shining, nearly every surface covered in a smooth, reflective layer of ice.
The rooftops were glazed, and the cars parked in the street below looked more like watercolor blobs. The tree below their flat, only half its leaves lost to autumn yet, was bowed over with the weight of what looked like a two-inch layer of ice on every branch and twig. Nothing seemed to be moving until a pigeon lit on a garden wall across the street, flapped its wings for balance, and then slipped off and fluttered to the ground anyway, its claws finding no purchase.
Rhys had gone out and turned on the television. "Nobody in this part of the city can drive," he called. "Lucky for you, darling-don't think I'll be going in to work today!"
Gwen smiled ruefully at his innuendo. "But I bet I will."
*
Ianto picked her up in the SUV, which he had somehow already outfitted with chains on the tyres. When they arrived in the Hub, Toshiko and Jack were in the middle of a good-natured argument. Gwen and Ianto paused at her desk to let them finish.
"It's a simple state change, Jack. Remove heat from water and it turns to a solid. Low surface temperature plus precipitation, that's all it is. Even a child knows that."
"Speak for yourself," Owen called from his workstation.
Jack grinned. "Did I say it wasn't ice? I know it's ice. All I'm asking is, where did the precipitation come from? And why did it all fall in a precise, half-kilometre wide band across the city?" He raised his eyebrows at Tosh expectantly.
She huffed with frustration and turned back to her computer, bringing up a weather map she had accessed previously. "The computers don't show any cloud cover last night at all, and humidity was even lower than usual," she admitted. Then she added in a lower voice, "But it's not a dragon."
"You don't know that," Jack bent down to bring his face level with hers, his eyes pleading and playful.
"Now that you mention it, Myfanwy has been more restless than usual in the past twenty-four hours," Ianto interjected.
Tosh leaned back in her chair and folded her arms, taking Jack's challenge. "All right, Jack. Show me a dragon."
Jack punched the air. "I thought you'd never ask. Bundle up, kids, it's gonna be colder than Santa's workshop where we're going!"
Ianto leaned over and whispered to Gwen, "Ten pounds says he's actually been to Santa's workshop."
*
Jack had Tosh pull up records on all the abandoned warehouses and large tunnels in the city. She was cross-referencing them with areas of anomalously low temperature when Owen suggested they could just look in the neighborhood where the ice stopped. With that, they were on their way.
What would normally have been a ten minute drive took three times that, even with no other traffic on the road. Two blocks from their destination, the ice became so thick and uneven that they had to get out and walk, picking their way over and around ice boulders and troughs. When they came in view of one of the warehouses Tosh had pinpointed from her calculations in the Hub, it was clear that she had got it right.
"Looks like a wedding cake puked all over it," Owen observed. It wasn't a bad description. The building was sheathed in ice, and there were frozen waterfalls of ice, layer upon bubbly layer, spilling out of some of the broken windows. The icicles hanging from the roof looked big enough to kill a yak. But unlike the ice in the rest of the city, this was all frosted over, white like a cold window touched with breath. In fact, something like fog rolled out of the windows on the ground level.
Walking carefully on the ice, they each took different entrances. Gwen's door appeared to lead into the main space of the warehouse. She pulled the door open with one hand and then pressed her back against the wall outside for a moment, waiting for any danger to clear. Freezing fog tumbled out as if it had been piled against the door, then cleared. She peeked warily around the door frame...
And swore, her voice a soft hiss. "Jack, do you see this? Owen? Tosh?" she whispered into her earpiece.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" Jack's voice replied.
Owen, who had entered through the large double doors at the far end of the warehouse, also had some choice words.
"Tosh, are you there?" Gwen checked. The reply came as a chuckle, then a strangled laugh.
"Sorry," said Tosh's voice a moment later, "just remembering something my grandfather told me once. I apologize, Jack. It's definitely a dragon."
The fog in the warehouse was only a few inches deep, and beyond it, in doorways on different sides of the huge room, Gwen picked out both Owen and Tosh, then Jack on a catwalk above. Directly below him, coiled and slumbering, lay a great snake.
It was easily three times the size of Myfanwy, with pearly white scales that became more purple or blue as the fog shifted and the light changed. It seemed to be generating the fog, though with the way it was curled, Gwen couldn't see exactly how.
"Orders, Jack?" Owen whispered. "Is it dangerous?"
"How should I know?" Jack replied, also speaking low into their earpieces. "I've never seen one of these things before. I had it on good authority that they existed, but I never met one." He continued, much louder, "So who wants to go make friends?"
"Jack, what are you doing?" Toshiko whispered. Gwen froze, and across the warehouse she could see Owen dropping to a wary crouch, his attention on the beast below Jack.
It was moving. Gwen watched as the serpentine body shifted, slipping over itself as it unknotted; from the center of the knot, a head appeared. It was huge, almost too big for the massive body. It raised itself on a muscular neck and swayed back and forth, ribbons of steam trailing from its enormous nostrils as it sniffed the air. Gwen hoped its eyesight was poor.
Her hand went to her weapon. Owen and Tosh had drawn their guns, too, but Jack was leaning over the railing of the catwalk, unarmed. "Hey, beautiful! What are you doing here?" he called.
The animal snorted and its head swung around, giving Gwen a better view. Somehow, it reminded her of a camel's head, with its large eyes, long concave snout and generous lips. "Jack, be careful," she hissed. "That looks like a very big mouth."
"It's okay," came his quiet reply. "If he wanted to attack me, I think I'd be crushed by now."
"Or a block of ice," Owen added. "I get the feeling that if he exhaled hard-"
"Like breathing fire, in the stories," Tosh followed his logic.
"Exactly!" Jack smirked from his perch, abandoning his ‘inside voice’. "Dragon. Ice dragon!"
"I said you were right, Jack," Tosh replied, and Gwen bet she was rolling her eyes, "but I am curious about how you know it's male. You said 'he.' What if it's a 'she'?"
Jack shrugged. "I don't know, it just... doesn't smell like a female."
From his doorway across the room, Owen gave a laugh and shook his head in disbelief.
The dragon was still weaving its head and upper body slowly back and forth, as if it could hear some invisible charmer's flute. It hadn't turned its attention away from Jack, but when it heard Owen, it swung its head around. The upper part of its sleek body shot forward as it stretched closer to Owen, who jumped back, slipped, and landed on his seat. The dragon snorted loudly, more aggressively if Gwen wasn't mistaken.
Gwen took a step forward. "Jack?" she called to him. "I'm coming over. I want to try something."
"Careful," Owen said in a low voice, and out of the corner of her eye she could see him standing up carefully and raising his arms to train his gun on the dragon. She walked gingerly over the slick floor, feeling her way so that she didn't stumble over anything hidden by the fog. When she was within ten meters of the dragon's body, she stopped, glanced up at Jack, and concentrated on making her voice both friendly and soothing.
"Hello! Hey, lovely, what are you doing here?"
The dragon had been looking confused in its attempts to monitor both Jack and Owen at opposite ends of the warehouse at once. Now it stopped its weaving, held itself tall and still, and looked down at Gwen. It huffed once, softly.
"We don't want to hurt you, darling, we just don't know what to do with you." Gwen held her hands behind her in case the creature felt threatened by flailing limbs. She still couldn't see that it had any limbs at all. It was lowering its head, slowly, though, and she stood very still.
It stopped when its face was almost level with hers, the enormous head bobbing ever so slightly. Its eyes were murky green pools with black slits for pupils.
"Jack," she said quietly, "it looks sad." It was so close to her and so quiet, she reached out her hand to touch its face.
"Woah, woah," Owen's voice came over her earpiece insistently, "no skin-to-skin. Have you ever touched your tongue to a frozen post?"
"It sounds like you have," Tosh teased Owen.
Gwen heeded the warning, very slowly reaching up to unwind the scarf from her neck and wrap part of it around one hand, which she placed gently on the dragon's cheek. "There," she cooed to it, "see, we won't hurt you."
The dragon blinked once, then heaved a great sigh, sending a freezing fog over Gwen's face and the front of her coat. The cold was a shock, but she wiped her face with her sleeve and patted the dragon. It responded by laying its head on the ground at Gwen's feet with a smaller sigh.
Owen had more choice expressions of surprise, which were a little too loud and elicited something like a growl from the animal. "All right, shutting up and keeping back," Owen conceded, backing up until he was right in the doorway through which he had entered. "Hey, Jack, you think it's a man hater?" he asked in a whisper they could all hear.
"Some lizards respond to human hormones," Tosh suggested, "and they'll only bond with humans of the opposite sex. They see other males, or other females, as rivals."
While the dragon had been focused on Gwen, Tosh had been walking up behind it and begun taking scans. She was near enough now that Gwen could hear her when she spoke normally. "I don't know if it's sad, Gwen" she said, "but it might be sick. Its temperature is rising. It's already five degrees higher than the scan I took when we came in. Wherever it's from, Jack, I think it needs to go home."
"Through the Rift?" Owen's question was a statement of the problem. They were all silent for a few moments, thinking. Gwen squatted and stroked the great nose with her muffled hand. Then Jack tapped his earpiece.
"Ianto, you there?"
"I'm here, Jack, but I'm picking up a lot of reports by the night owls of a 'giant flying snake' seen early this morning. Did you find it?"
"We did, and it's a dragon!"
"Well, congratulations, sir."
"Right, well, it is a bit of a problem. Question for you: what does Myfanwy do first when she goes out at night?"
"Ah, flies straight up, as fast as she can. I've always thought it was because she liked the view of the city."
Jack nodded. "And then she circles down slowly. But it's cold up there. Cold enough, do you think, Tosh?"
"To bring the dragon's temperature down?" Tosh looked up from her readings. "Maybe, but-"
"Cold enough to make him want to stay there," Jack finished. "I think it's our only option. We can't just wait for Rift activity and then-shove him through. If he was an iguana, maybe."
No one could think of a better option than hoping a giant dragon would prefer the upper atmosphere of their planet, which was a sad state of affairs, Gwen thought. "Maybe he can find his way to the North Pole," she said hopefully.
"Maybe he could pull Santa's sleigh," Owen suggested, sarcastically but not really unkindly.
"Antarctica would be better," Tosh agreed, "but I think he's on his own once he's up there."
"All right," Jack said, beginning to make his way toward the end of the catwalk where there were some stairs. "Let's head back to the Hub; obviously we need to wait til dark."
Gwen patted the dragon's head, rose, and made her way toward the door she had come in by. From behind her came a rumbling sound, then something shifting and sliding, and she heard Toshiko gasp.
Turning, she met a huge face directly behind her. The dragon was completely unfurled now, and its neck and body snaked all the way back to its original place on the other side of the warehouse floor. It stood on four short, bent legs, and then Gwen realized what must have made Tosh gasp: opening from just above the forelegs and all along the body behind them were a pair of blue-green wings, the skin on them so delicate, they were almost translucent.
"Oh, you beautiful creature," she soothed, but then ducked carefully to the left where she could see Jack. "Ah, why is he following me?"
"My guess? He likes you." Jack grinned.
"Well, we can't have him following us all the way home-"
"Which is why you're going to have to babysit. Sorry," Jack apologized to the animal, "dragon-sit."
*
After securing assurances from Jack and Tosh that the dragon was not likely to eat its sexual rivals, Owen offered to stay and keep Gwen company. ("Just don't touch her or you might end up a snack," Jack warned, and he seemed alarmingly serious.) Jack promised to send Ianto with some better clothing, coffee, and equipment to keep them warm. They arranged for Tosh and Jack to relieve them in the afternoon, if Tosh could establish a similar bond with the dragon.
By noon, Gwen and Owen had traded childhood pet stories, played every travel game Gwen knew and Owen had generously shared a number of rambling, decidedly off-colour jokes. Gwen was having trouble concentrating around her worry about the creature's health. It was listless, and if she wasn't mistaken, its scales looked more green than white now.
Finally, the dragon had been still for so long that even Owen was concerned. He picked up a chunk of ice and tossed it toward the animal's rear half.
The change was instant: the body tensed, the huge head snapped up, the tail whipped forward, connecting with the chunk of ice and sending it bouncing away toward the far door of the warehouse. The tail continued to lash back and forth, as if waiting for a new target. Owen turned to Gwen, eyebrows up and a mischievous grin on his face. "That was fun."
"No, Owen, he's sick! You'll torture him."
"Look at him! He wants more." Owen pitched another piece of ice with the same results. The dragon snorted with apparent eagerness. Gwen smiled and shook her head.
For the last hour before their relief team arrived ("substitute players" as Owen was calling them now), Owen pitched and Gwen stood afield to attempt to catch. She didn't much like running toward large flying chunks of ice-though she had played rugby once or twice, this seemed different-but she succeeded once and let out a whoop of triumph, holding up the ice in her mittened hand. The dragon lifted its head and echoed her cry with an eerie trumpet.
Two other times, the dragon's tail connected with the ice in just the right way and the chunk shattered, sending tiny ice pieces and ice dust into the air. Where the pieces passed in front of a sunny window they glittered like diamonds.
*
An hour after nightfall they were all in position: Gwen and Tosh inside the warehouse with their new friend, Jack and Owen outside ready to run interference and drive, and Ianto in the Hub with an agitated pterosaur. "Ianto," Jack checked in, "go anytime."
There was silence on the communicators for a moment, then Ianto responded, "Okay, Jack, she's away. I'm headed outside to track her."
"Okay, ladies," Jack called, "you ready? Bring him out." Gwen gave the dragon one last pat and she and Tosh turned and walked out the large double doors into the lamplit street and toward the SUV. The dragon plodded after them meekly, its wings tucked away against its body. Throughout the day, the October sun had melted the ice on the street.
"I don't know if this is going to work, Jack," Gwen fretted, "what if he wants to stay with us?"
As if on cue, the dragon huffed, something rattling eagerly, deep in its throat. It raised its head, looking up and sniffing the air. Its wings flapped open and began to stir the air-
Gwen pushed Tosh to the ground and ducked her own head as the dragon was off, slithering through the air, one wing tip brushing the top of the SUV as it passed by. It gained altitude as it flew down the street with puffing breaths, and by the time it reached the first intersection, it had cleared the buildings and treetops and was a just a pale, curving slash against the dark sky. The pavement and rooftops it had passed over gleamed.
"Come on," Jack said, helping Tosh up and leading them all back toward the warehouse. They followed him up a stairwell and onto the roof. Their eyes had just enough time to adjust to the dark when they saw what they were looking for, a broad dark shape and a long, thin light one meeting in the air above the city. They figures flapped, circled each other several times, and then the dark shape began to climb. The last they saw, a white streak was spiraling around her, higher and higher in an exotic moonlit dance.
"Myfanwy will come back," Gwen worried.
"She doesn't like the cold," Owen reassured her.
"Star-crossed lovers," Tosh sighed. "He'll be lonely in the arctic, or wherever he goes."
"Oh, you never know," Jack said, putting his arm around her. "The Rift might send him a friend one of these days. There might even be something already out there." His tone became lighter. "Now. Let's discuss my prize for being right about the dragon. How are you at making cake?"
Tosh groaned. As they were walking back toward the stairs, Gwen pulled Tosh aside and whispered, "Rhys makes excellent cakes. We've got you covered."
They giggled but wouldn't let Jack and Owen in on the joke. An ice-blue frosting would be perfect, Gwen thought.