The Velocity Of A Kebab [1/7]
Title: The Velocity Of A Kebab
Rating: Teen [language and sexual situations]
Characters: PC Andy/Tosh, Owen, Jack, Ianto, Rhys
Advisories: AU, character death
Disclaimer: I'm denying I speak English at this point
Note: Written for tw_bigbang 2009
Summary: The flap of a wing, a slight change of angle, and the task of chasing after the spooky-do's could have fallen to another of Cardiff's finest...
**********
The coffee in these places always seemed to be almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea, Andy thought morbidly, staring at the thin grey dregs in the paper cup. Maybe it was meant to be a disincentive to letting your friends take the sorts of risks that might end in this. A stupid bang on the head. A stupid bang on the head, sorting a stupid row in a pub, and here you were, sitting in a corridor, wondering how the day had gone from Gwen Cooper's gap-toothed grin talking X-Files rubbish about the case that'd had them out last night in that wet, to wondering if you'd ever hear her talking any rubbish, ever again --
This medic wore an even grimmer expression than the previous one had, taking too many words to explain that no change yet was closer to who should we notify than anything warranting optimism. "No, no, I've rung her partner, I mean, I'm her partner, I've rung her boyfriend..."
Rhys turned up not long after Andy's third cup of shite coffee, looking like the one who'd been hit on the head. "Thanks for staying, mate."
Andy shrugged. "'S my job, yeah, she's..."
Down the corridor beyond Gwen's boyfriend a flicker of blue-grey swirled down a flight of steps. She was talking about the man in a coat, the man in an old-fashioned military coat...
Without really thinking about it Andy was up and following with a mumbled word to the preoccupied Rhys about he wasn't sure what, copper priorities or notifications or something that he'd probably realise had been daft for a moment like this when he'd had the chance to examine it. And this must be Gwen's mystery man, there couldn't be two nutters running about Cardiff in antique RAF greatcoats? Slightly deranged flair for the dramatic or not, he wasn't alone as he pelted for the exit, a tiny Asian woman poking at her PDA as she trotted along in his flapping blue wake and two others supporting a staggering man in a shiny boiler-suit, head lolling as if drugged. (Dear god, what was wrong with his face --) The man in the coat was clearly the leader of this little gang, gaze scanning round the car-park as his henchmen unceremoniously chucked their impaired comrade into the boot of what had to be that same black vehicle Andy had glimpsed pulling up at last night's scene. Who in the flipping hell are these people?
Instinct settled Andy behind the wheel of his patrol-car as the Range Rover scarpered, stamping the accelerator to catch up a receding glimpse of shiny black. They appeared to be heading for the centre of the city, flight taking them at barely-safe speeds towards the revitalised bay, indeed, straight for the open space of Roald Dahl Plass itself. Andy's mind started running down a long list of all the potential mayhem even a small group of thugs could get up to in an area crowded with tourists.
He was still considering how to call this in to Control regarding the nature and severity of a potential threat when the black vehicle pulled up near the shining bulk of the Millennium Centre and slowed almost but not quite to a stop. Andy's four suspects hopped out of the Rover with three loud slams, leaving some unseen fifth mate to roar off towards the Centre's car-park with the drugged one still in the boot. Organised enough for a getaway driver, yet. This had to be a gag, he'd get a ring later tonight asking him to sign some sort of reality-show release. This whole sodding day had to be a gag, if he was that lucky. He pulled his own car up onto the paving and got out to follow the four on foot across the Plass. In no particular hurry, any of them, just strolling towards the water-sculpture --
"Oi, you can't leave that here." Andy glanced away to see a security officer striding angrily towards him from the Millennium Centre.
"Police, I was just --" He turned back to gesture after...
The four people were gone.
Well, that was peculiar no mistake. They hadn't had time to cross out of the Plass altogether, surely? "It doesn't matter who you are, you still can't park it here --" But it's wide, there isn't anywhere that they could have slipped out of sight so quickly...
Andy gawped at the base of the fountain, wondering if he might want to consider asking for a good long leave before he was made to take one, until the increasing volume of the security guard's hectoring and threats to call his superiors prodded him back into the patrol car. Where he lingered a moment longer to note down the black vehicle's number-plate properly into his evidence notebook, because he was damned if he was going to let this pompous arse put him off doing his real police work, thank you very much. That done, he put the notebook away in its holder, smiled pleasantly out the window at the fuming guard, and returned to St. Helen's just in time to be caught up by a porter who'd been sent to find him, to tell him that Gwen was already gone.
The next while was a blur of medics in white coats tossing around terms like talk-and-die syndrome and epidural haematoma and a grey-faced Rhys mumbling "I'll have to tell her Mam and Da." He declined Andy's offer to drive him out to Swansea, probably because he wanted to pull off and have a good cry once he'd got out of the city, and the constable took his leave hoping he'd have the sense to stay over and get properly pissed while he was about it. Which was advice he should probably take for himself, from the look on Temple's face as he let Andy off his duties, but somehow a pub and its promise of noise and aggro was the last place Andy wanted to be tonight. Not after today. Not after helping her up after that scrum, catching her elbow as she starts to go down again --
Out of sorts, wandering without conscious purpose, Andy found himself drawn to the water-sculpture in the Plass for the second time that day, pacing back and forth across the paving where those four had vanished between one blink and the next and realising after a while that he'd been trying to work out whether there was any sightline that could possibly have explained it. And there wasn't. Torchwood. What's a Torchwood? At last he came to a stymied halt, staring up at the water flowing down the plane of the fountain and trying to decide if maybe the better option would be to spend the rest of the evening getting off his face after all.
And the paver began to sink.
He nearly jumped off. It would have been the sensible thing to do, to back away and come at the problem through the proper channels, hedged around in words sucked dry of any hint of autonomous reasoning. But Gwen Cooper had thought she'd seen a man woken from the dead not twenty-four hours ago, and if there was a procedure for following up on an incident like that, it sure as fuck didn't involve standing about giving a caution. He owed her memory this much. So Andy held himself still on the descending slab, and let it carry him beneath the world he'd thought he knew. Straight down the rabbit-hole like Alice.
So his city was hosting a team of would-be superheroes, here in a secret cavern bored through its heart: a woman welding, another hunched over a keyboard, some sort of monkey in a lab coat who introduced himself as their doctor. And the military-coat man, Harkness, twitting them all about the lax security. (And all but pinching the bottom of his PA bloke, curiously the best-dressed out of all of them.) Calling himself a Captain, saying that he and his people hunted aliens -- Andy would have called this a madhouse, except that would mean admitting he'd lost his mind as well, and who was to say he hadn't when it turned out that Batman was not only real he had a flatshare with the men in black under the centre of, well, dull, grey, completely uninteresting here...?
After a brief, absurd tour, Harkness escorted him home and invited himself in, digging round for the last two beers in the larder and bringing one to Andy where he'd collapsed onto the settee, head still reeling with impossible visions. (Had that really been a pterodactyl?) "Bit much, huh."
Andy took a long pull from his bottle. "I thought she was just taking the piss," he said. "I was slagging her off for saying there was something weird going on in this city. 'Cos it's bollocks, you know? Bloody X-Files, this is bloody Cardiff." The Captain's blue eyes were piercing, but they could still soften with an amused chuckle. "But apparently it isn't. Bollocks, I mean. It was the last thing I said to her --" He shivered, thinking the cumulative effect of this bloody mad day must have been a far worse shock than he'd thought if he was crashing this hard before he'd even finished a first round empty stomach or no, and grasped after a fleeting thought: "Thing is, we could help you, the police I mean. People report things, little things, mostly it gets ignored because we think they're talking rubbish, but if some of it's real -- If you had someone keeping their ear to the ground for it, is all I'm saying."
"But to do that, you'd have to remember what you were listening for..."
***
Andy woke in his bed, in most of his clothes, with the beginnings of a headache and -- the faintest recollection of someone who smelt really good bending down to give him a peck on the forehead? No, that must have been part of the strange dream as well, bright shards shattering away like fading sparks even as he tried to gather them up for a look before he could forget what it had been about. Dinosaurs, there had been dinosaurs. In welding masks.
He wasn't late for work, because he was off work today, because Gwen was dead. That much he did remember from yesterday, whether he wanted to or not. (And the thought of four people vanishing into the thinnest of air on the Plass, where had that come from?) There was a message on his voicemail with the particulars about a memorial service at the station, which he deleted, and another from a broken-sounding Rhys inviting or rather begging him to drop in at the family's own arrangements over in Swansea, which he noted down the details of wondering if he meant to try for it even as the biro scratched across the paper.
But in the end he went, of course, and of course having to see Rhys was all sorts of tangled feelings, survivor's guilt and envy of the licence to weep openly with her Mam and, somewhere small and shameful, that tiniest flicker of relief that she'd broken it off before he was the one completely unmanned in front of a hall of their nearest and dearest. Bad enough to have lost her as a professional partner, and let what might never have been lie. After the service he let Rhys draw him in for a brief, awkward hug, and promised to stay mates, to the extent that they ever really had been, bound together now with each other's memories all that was left of her in this sorry world. And then went home to his small flat, and some empty while yet stretching ahead of a leave that he would never have wanted to take.
Problem was, he didn't have anything better to do. Not an entire day before Andy found himself rummaging mechanically through his locker to get himself kitted out for a shift, stab-vest, hi-vis... and there on the current page of his notebook his own handwriting giving a terse account of the callout that had led to Gwen's injury, and her subsequent collapse, and just above the grim conclusion one curious entry that suggested he'd asked for a check on a vehicle with the number-plate CF06 FDU. He'd left St Helen's as Gwen was dying to deal with some bloody traffic violation?
Well, Control would know what he'd been about that day, even if it meant admitting he was just that distracted with it all yet. "Yvonne, did the results ever come back on a plate CF06 FDU I was looking into from while Gwen was -- was at..."
Yvonne looked up from her screens to give him a puzzled stare. "First Cooper and her imaginary Captains, now you're chasing phantom cars in her memory? I told you, no such number registered anywhere in the country."
"What? When did you tell me that?"
The look he got said grief is one thing, mate, but now you're just going mental. "You could just have asked Temple for more time, Andy, you don't have to prove how broken up you still are about it. If you really feel like you have to get back on the horse straight away I can find you something to do behind a desk, but I don't think we want you out on patrol if you're not ready --"
"I am fine," he insisted, wondering why it felt so much like he was trying to convince himself rather than her. Imaginary Captains... "I just -- Look, what was I even doing that I asked you to run the check?"
"I don't know, you'd stepped out to find a better coffee and someone made an improper turn in front of you? Weren't exactly in anyone's right mind, were you."
"But --"
"Andy. Go home. Before I have to find Temple and have him make it an order. Go for a nice long walk down by the bay and let the sea air clear your head. The ugly arse-end of the criminal justice system will still be here when you are ready to come back, god knows."
"But --"
"Go." Yvonne planted a hand firmly between his shoulderblades and gave him a shove towards the door that set him walking more from polite reflex than any actual power she'd have to move something so large as him.
A walk by the bay. It sounded... curiously right, actually, like it might scratch this itch in his head. So Andy shrugged, and signed himself back out with his regrets, and presently found himself coming to the waterfront as twilight deepened, lights just coming on across the broad expanse of Roald Dahl Plass.
There was a woman standing in front of the fountain, looking as if she'd been -- waiting for him? (But that couldn't be, where had he seen...) "He didn't use enough."
"Pardon?"
"You're too big, he mustn't have used enough retcon to erase everything. Or he didn't want to, that would be just like Jack. Always leaving us to clean up his shit."
"Sorry, who's Jack? Who are you?"
"It's how they all are," the woman continued as if Andy hadn't spoken, rummaging in her handbag for something that appeared to have sifted to the very bottom. "None of them take this job seriously enough. And it's a shame, because you're pretty, and I wouldn't have minded it, but I still need to test the glove, you see, and --"
She finally found what she'd been searching through the bag for. Andy froze as the streetlamps glittered off a wicked blade, all prongs and ugly suggestion. (That knife, he'd seen a, a sketch? A sketch on the board for that case, the case that, the case that he'd been out in the rain with Gwen --) "You don't want to do this, Miss."
She gave him a small, sad smile. "You're right, though. I don't want to. But it's all I had. And there's still time, I can still fix this. If you're the only one who can connect it all... I still need to test the glove."
All that time, Andy thought in mesmerised horror as the woman sprang for him with the blade, all that time itching in a stab-vest and the one time there's really a knife? Training was one thing but the sheer surprise of it had her upon him, one of those jagged teeth scoring a line down his arm before reflex quite caught up to the situation. Grab here; twist there; restraint hold and --
-- bugger. Apparently she'd been practising as well. Andy ended flat on his arse on the paving, looking up into calmly mad eyes.
Two pairs of calmly mad eyes -- "Suzie. Drop it. Now."
He'd heard that voice before. She obviously knew it, by the stiffening of her shoulders. "You know I'm right, Jack. We could be doing so much more. The glove could be made to resurrect. We can't be afraid to -- to... You know I'm right."
With a tiny sob, Suzie Costello reversed the blade and drove it through her own ribs.
And he remembered --
***
They were efficient, this Torchwood. At least after the fact. They'd bundled away the body, and they'd bundled him below into their base, and they'd bundled him up into a scratchy grey blanket to shiver out his shock on a tatty old settee while their doctor stitched the long gash on his arm. "Typical bloody Suzie." Andy wondered suddenly if the two had been more than workmates. One generally didn't sound that... bitter, about losing a workmate.
Jack's administrator silently brought Andy a steaming coffee. He sniffed at it suspiciously. "Not drugged this time, I hope?"
The PA -- Jones, Ianto Jones, the names were starting to stick to the faces again as well -- gave him a look. A very subtle, understated look, but definitely a look. "Ianto would not defile his artistry by putting retcon in your coffee," Toshiko explained. "Although you could have mine if you'd like? If you don't mind two sugars..."
Feeling a bit of a prat for being so distrustful, Andy swopped for the mug she held out to him, turning it round in his hand to sip from the rim opposite the ghostly pink butterfly that proved Toshiko had already tasted of this cup without incident. It was, indeed, artistry. Even with too much sugar. She put a hand to her mouth to cover a smile, and Andy realised he'd been staring into the mug with what must have been a dreadfully foolish expression.
"Leaves us with the problem of what we do do with him," the doctor said as Andy took another sip of the best coffee in the bloody world. "I think his mates at the station would notice something was wrong with him if we tried to scrub out his associations with the area now he's worn that groove in our paving up top." And here he scowled at Harkness; "Maybe if someone had used enough retcon the first time --"
"He did have to remember part of the day, what if he'd gone in to work the next morning expecting to see his partner?" A twist of fresh grief, but blurred now, as if circuits that had been jammed wide open too long had simply lost their capacity to transmit any more signal load. Or perhaps that was the lingering effect of this retcon thing talking, film of oil on the lens of memory never to be completely polished away. "I was trying to finesse the timing. Calculated risk. And you didn't think to go after his notebook?"
Jones gave his employer a look as if to say And we're going to find the time and resources to smuggle ourselves into a building full of police after a tiny notebook that may or may not contain anything incriminating to us, where? "It was a calculated risk," he said.
"For a high-tech secret organisation you're surprisingly rubbish," Andy said.
"He has us there," Toshiko said. Jones and Harper were nodding in reluctant agreement.
"Hey, I can only work with what I have, you know. If an ordinary Cardiff beat-officer can stay on our scent as well as this one has maybe we need to stop and do a re-think."
"Or hire him," Doctor Harper said with a sardonic twist of his lips.
Harkness fixed Andy with a long, considering stare. "Well, he's persistent, methodical, healthy touch of paranoia... I do like that in a man."
"Your standard for what you like in a man is 'breathing', Jack." The doctor was wearing a look on his homely face that suggested Jones's earlier comment about harassment hadn't been meant in jest. "In fact I suspect breathing might be optional, from some of your stories --"
"I was raised never to speak ill of the dead, especially when they're still hot," Harkness replied with a slyly raised eyebrow, and then turned serious again; "Still, we do find ourselves with a sudden job opening here. And it would save us the paperwork on dumping him in the harbor... I say we keep him. Guys?"
"You're the boss," Toshiko pointed out, shrugging. (Not all that disapproving, Andy thought.) The other two agents or staffers or whatever they considered themselves in this organisational chart looked him up and down as if trying to find some hint of fault to legitimise an objection, or possibly considering whether he'd be the one that they'd eat first if they were ever trapped down here by a broken lift, and then Harper slouched back to his desk with a mutter that couldn't have been Just so you don't make me have to think about shagging him, Harkness...
Those teeth couldn't be natural. "So, how about it? Yours if you want it."
As if he had the choice, really. "One thing. Just, one thing." Andy swallowed hard. "Could you have saved her? With that glove. Could you have brought Gwen Cooper back?"
Harkness shook his head, genuine regret touching those blue, blue eyes. "No matter what Suzie thought, the glove isn't an answer to anything. You have this, for however long, and then... But it's better not to think about that too hard, you'll go kind of nuts." A strange, strange grimace. "May as well grab life as it comes, really."
"And what about you?"
"Our job is to see that people get that chance. Not always that different from being a cop, now I think about it. Although the hours aren't as predictable. So, are you in?" Jack held out a hand, and grinned broadly as Andy took it. "Welcome to Torchwood, Andy Davidson."
>
Rating: Teen [language and sexual situations]
Characters: PC Andy/Tosh, Owen, Jack, Ianto, Rhys
Advisories: AU, character death
Disclaimer: I'm denying I speak English at this point
Note: Written for tw_bigbang 2009
Summary: The flap of a wing, a slight change of angle, and the task of chasing after the spooky-do's could have fallen to another of Cardiff's finest...
**********
The coffee in these places always seemed to be almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea, Andy thought morbidly, staring at the thin grey dregs in the paper cup. Maybe it was meant to be a disincentive to letting your friends take the sorts of risks that might end in this. A stupid bang on the head. A stupid bang on the head, sorting a stupid row in a pub, and here you were, sitting in a corridor, wondering how the day had gone from Gwen Cooper's gap-toothed grin talking X-Files rubbish about the case that'd had them out last night in that wet, to wondering if you'd ever hear her talking any rubbish, ever again --
This medic wore an even grimmer expression than the previous one had, taking too many words to explain that no change yet was closer to who should we notify than anything warranting optimism. "No, no, I've rung her partner, I mean, I'm her partner, I've rung her boyfriend..."
Rhys turned up not long after Andy's third cup of shite coffee, looking like the one who'd been hit on the head. "Thanks for staying, mate."
Andy shrugged. "'S my job, yeah, she's..."
Down the corridor beyond Gwen's boyfriend a flicker of blue-grey swirled down a flight of steps. She was talking about the man in a coat, the man in an old-fashioned military coat...
Without really thinking about it Andy was up and following with a mumbled word to the preoccupied Rhys about he wasn't sure what, copper priorities or notifications or something that he'd probably realise had been daft for a moment like this when he'd had the chance to examine it. And this must be Gwen's mystery man, there couldn't be two nutters running about Cardiff in antique RAF greatcoats? Slightly deranged flair for the dramatic or not, he wasn't alone as he pelted for the exit, a tiny Asian woman poking at her PDA as she trotted along in his flapping blue wake and two others supporting a staggering man in a shiny boiler-suit, head lolling as if drugged. (Dear god, what was wrong with his face --) The man in the coat was clearly the leader of this little gang, gaze scanning round the car-park as his henchmen unceremoniously chucked their impaired comrade into the boot of what had to be that same black vehicle Andy had glimpsed pulling up at last night's scene. Who in the flipping hell are these people?
Instinct settled Andy behind the wheel of his patrol-car as the Range Rover scarpered, stamping the accelerator to catch up a receding glimpse of shiny black. They appeared to be heading for the centre of the city, flight taking them at barely-safe speeds towards the revitalised bay, indeed, straight for the open space of Roald Dahl Plass itself. Andy's mind started running down a long list of all the potential mayhem even a small group of thugs could get up to in an area crowded with tourists.
He was still considering how to call this in to Control regarding the nature and severity of a potential threat when the black vehicle pulled up near the shining bulk of the Millennium Centre and slowed almost but not quite to a stop. Andy's four suspects hopped out of the Rover with three loud slams, leaving some unseen fifth mate to roar off towards the Centre's car-park with the drugged one still in the boot. Organised enough for a getaway driver, yet. This had to be a gag, he'd get a ring later tonight asking him to sign some sort of reality-show release. This whole sodding day had to be a gag, if he was that lucky. He pulled his own car up onto the paving and got out to follow the four on foot across the Plass. In no particular hurry, any of them, just strolling towards the water-sculpture --
"Oi, you can't leave that here." Andy glanced away to see a security officer striding angrily towards him from the Millennium Centre.
"Police, I was just --" He turned back to gesture after...
The four people were gone.
Well, that was peculiar no mistake. They hadn't had time to cross out of the Plass altogether, surely? "It doesn't matter who you are, you still can't park it here --" But it's wide, there isn't anywhere that they could have slipped out of sight so quickly...
Andy gawped at the base of the fountain, wondering if he might want to consider asking for a good long leave before he was made to take one, until the increasing volume of the security guard's hectoring and threats to call his superiors prodded him back into the patrol car. Where he lingered a moment longer to note down the black vehicle's number-plate properly into his evidence notebook, because he was damned if he was going to let this pompous arse put him off doing his real police work, thank you very much. That done, he put the notebook away in its holder, smiled pleasantly out the window at the fuming guard, and returned to St. Helen's just in time to be caught up by a porter who'd been sent to find him, to tell him that Gwen was already gone.
The next while was a blur of medics in white coats tossing around terms like talk-and-die syndrome and epidural haematoma and a grey-faced Rhys mumbling "I'll have to tell her Mam and Da." He declined Andy's offer to drive him out to Swansea, probably because he wanted to pull off and have a good cry once he'd got out of the city, and the constable took his leave hoping he'd have the sense to stay over and get properly pissed while he was about it. Which was advice he should probably take for himself, from the look on Temple's face as he let Andy off his duties, but somehow a pub and its promise of noise and aggro was the last place Andy wanted to be tonight. Not after today. Not after helping her up after that scrum, catching her elbow as she starts to go down again --
Out of sorts, wandering without conscious purpose, Andy found himself drawn to the water-sculpture in the Plass for the second time that day, pacing back and forth across the paving where those four had vanished between one blink and the next and realising after a while that he'd been trying to work out whether there was any sightline that could possibly have explained it. And there wasn't. Torchwood. What's a Torchwood? At last he came to a stymied halt, staring up at the water flowing down the plane of the fountain and trying to decide if maybe the better option would be to spend the rest of the evening getting off his face after all.
And the paver began to sink.
He nearly jumped off. It would have been the sensible thing to do, to back away and come at the problem through the proper channels, hedged around in words sucked dry of any hint of autonomous reasoning. But Gwen Cooper had thought she'd seen a man woken from the dead not twenty-four hours ago, and if there was a procedure for following up on an incident like that, it sure as fuck didn't involve standing about giving a caution. He owed her memory this much. So Andy held himself still on the descending slab, and let it carry him beneath the world he'd thought he knew. Straight down the rabbit-hole like Alice.
So his city was hosting a team of would-be superheroes, here in a secret cavern bored through its heart: a woman welding, another hunched over a keyboard, some sort of monkey in a lab coat who introduced himself as their doctor. And the military-coat man, Harkness, twitting them all about the lax security. (And all but pinching the bottom of his PA bloke, curiously the best-dressed out of all of them.) Calling himself a Captain, saying that he and his people hunted aliens -- Andy would have called this a madhouse, except that would mean admitting he'd lost his mind as well, and who was to say he hadn't when it turned out that Batman was not only real he had a flatshare with the men in black under the centre of, well, dull, grey, completely uninteresting here...?
After a brief, absurd tour, Harkness escorted him home and invited himself in, digging round for the last two beers in the larder and bringing one to Andy where he'd collapsed onto the settee, head still reeling with impossible visions. (Had that really been a pterodactyl?) "Bit much, huh."
Andy took a long pull from his bottle. "I thought she was just taking the piss," he said. "I was slagging her off for saying there was something weird going on in this city. 'Cos it's bollocks, you know? Bloody X-Files, this is bloody Cardiff." The Captain's blue eyes were piercing, but they could still soften with an amused chuckle. "But apparently it isn't. Bollocks, I mean. It was the last thing I said to her --" He shivered, thinking the cumulative effect of this bloody mad day must have been a far worse shock than he'd thought if he was crashing this hard before he'd even finished a first round empty stomach or no, and grasped after a fleeting thought: "Thing is, we could help you, the police I mean. People report things, little things, mostly it gets ignored because we think they're talking rubbish, but if some of it's real -- If you had someone keeping their ear to the ground for it, is all I'm saying."
"But to do that, you'd have to remember what you were listening for..."
***
Andy woke in his bed, in most of his clothes, with the beginnings of a headache and -- the faintest recollection of someone who smelt really good bending down to give him a peck on the forehead? No, that must have been part of the strange dream as well, bright shards shattering away like fading sparks even as he tried to gather them up for a look before he could forget what it had been about. Dinosaurs, there had been dinosaurs. In welding masks.
He wasn't late for work, because he was off work today, because Gwen was dead. That much he did remember from yesterday, whether he wanted to or not. (And the thought of four people vanishing into the thinnest of air on the Plass, where had that come from?) There was a message on his voicemail with the particulars about a memorial service at the station, which he deleted, and another from a broken-sounding Rhys inviting or rather begging him to drop in at the family's own arrangements over in Swansea, which he noted down the details of wondering if he meant to try for it even as the biro scratched across the paper.
But in the end he went, of course, and of course having to see Rhys was all sorts of tangled feelings, survivor's guilt and envy of the licence to weep openly with her Mam and, somewhere small and shameful, that tiniest flicker of relief that she'd broken it off before he was the one completely unmanned in front of a hall of their nearest and dearest. Bad enough to have lost her as a professional partner, and let what might never have been lie. After the service he let Rhys draw him in for a brief, awkward hug, and promised to stay mates, to the extent that they ever really had been, bound together now with each other's memories all that was left of her in this sorry world. And then went home to his small flat, and some empty while yet stretching ahead of a leave that he would never have wanted to take.
Problem was, he didn't have anything better to do. Not an entire day before Andy found himself rummaging mechanically through his locker to get himself kitted out for a shift, stab-vest, hi-vis... and there on the current page of his notebook his own handwriting giving a terse account of the callout that had led to Gwen's injury, and her subsequent collapse, and just above the grim conclusion one curious entry that suggested he'd asked for a check on a vehicle with the number-plate CF06 FDU. He'd left St Helen's as Gwen was dying to deal with some bloody traffic violation?
Well, Control would know what he'd been about that day, even if it meant admitting he was just that distracted with it all yet. "Yvonne, did the results ever come back on a plate CF06 FDU I was looking into from while Gwen was -- was at..."
Yvonne looked up from her screens to give him a puzzled stare. "First Cooper and her imaginary Captains, now you're chasing phantom cars in her memory? I told you, no such number registered anywhere in the country."
"What? When did you tell me that?"
The look he got said grief is one thing, mate, but now you're just going mental. "You could just have asked Temple for more time, Andy, you don't have to prove how broken up you still are about it. If you really feel like you have to get back on the horse straight away I can find you something to do behind a desk, but I don't think we want you out on patrol if you're not ready --"
"I am fine," he insisted, wondering why it felt so much like he was trying to convince himself rather than her. Imaginary Captains... "I just -- Look, what was I even doing that I asked you to run the check?"
"I don't know, you'd stepped out to find a better coffee and someone made an improper turn in front of you? Weren't exactly in anyone's right mind, were you."
"But --"
"Andy. Go home. Before I have to find Temple and have him make it an order. Go for a nice long walk down by the bay and let the sea air clear your head. The ugly arse-end of the criminal justice system will still be here when you are ready to come back, god knows."
"But --"
"Go." Yvonne planted a hand firmly between his shoulderblades and gave him a shove towards the door that set him walking more from polite reflex than any actual power she'd have to move something so large as him.
A walk by the bay. It sounded... curiously right, actually, like it might scratch this itch in his head. So Andy shrugged, and signed himself back out with his regrets, and presently found himself coming to the waterfront as twilight deepened, lights just coming on across the broad expanse of Roald Dahl Plass.
There was a woman standing in front of the fountain, looking as if she'd been -- waiting for him? (But that couldn't be, where had he seen...) "He didn't use enough."
"Pardon?"
"You're too big, he mustn't have used enough retcon to erase everything. Or he didn't want to, that would be just like Jack. Always leaving us to clean up his shit."
"Sorry, who's Jack? Who are you?"
"It's how they all are," the woman continued as if Andy hadn't spoken, rummaging in her handbag for something that appeared to have sifted to the very bottom. "None of them take this job seriously enough. And it's a shame, because you're pretty, and I wouldn't have minded it, but I still need to test the glove, you see, and --"
She finally found what she'd been searching through the bag for. Andy froze as the streetlamps glittered off a wicked blade, all prongs and ugly suggestion. (That knife, he'd seen a, a sketch? A sketch on the board for that case, the case that, the case that he'd been out in the rain with Gwen --) "You don't want to do this, Miss."
She gave him a small, sad smile. "You're right, though. I don't want to. But it's all I had. And there's still time, I can still fix this. If you're the only one who can connect it all... I still need to test the glove."
All that time, Andy thought in mesmerised horror as the woman sprang for him with the blade, all that time itching in a stab-vest and the one time there's really a knife? Training was one thing but the sheer surprise of it had her upon him, one of those jagged teeth scoring a line down his arm before reflex quite caught up to the situation. Grab here; twist there; restraint hold and --
-- bugger. Apparently she'd been practising as well. Andy ended flat on his arse on the paving, looking up into calmly mad eyes.
Two pairs of calmly mad eyes -- "Suzie. Drop it. Now."
He'd heard that voice before. She obviously knew it, by the stiffening of her shoulders. "You know I'm right, Jack. We could be doing so much more. The glove could be made to resurrect. We can't be afraid to -- to... You know I'm right."
With a tiny sob, Suzie Costello reversed the blade and drove it through her own ribs.
And he remembered --
***
They were efficient, this Torchwood. At least after the fact. They'd bundled away the body, and they'd bundled him below into their base, and they'd bundled him up into a scratchy grey blanket to shiver out his shock on a tatty old settee while their doctor stitched the long gash on his arm. "Typical bloody Suzie." Andy wondered suddenly if the two had been more than workmates. One generally didn't sound that... bitter, about losing a workmate.
Jack's administrator silently brought Andy a steaming coffee. He sniffed at it suspiciously. "Not drugged this time, I hope?"
The PA -- Jones, Ianto Jones, the names were starting to stick to the faces again as well -- gave him a look. A very subtle, understated look, but definitely a look. "Ianto would not defile his artistry by putting retcon in your coffee," Toshiko explained. "Although you could have mine if you'd like? If you don't mind two sugars..."
Feeling a bit of a prat for being so distrustful, Andy swopped for the mug she held out to him, turning it round in his hand to sip from the rim opposite the ghostly pink butterfly that proved Toshiko had already tasted of this cup without incident. It was, indeed, artistry. Even with too much sugar. She put a hand to her mouth to cover a smile, and Andy realised he'd been staring into the mug with what must have been a dreadfully foolish expression.
"Leaves us with the problem of what we do do with him," the doctor said as Andy took another sip of the best coffee in the bloody world. "I think his mates at the station would notice something was wrong with him if we tried to scrub out his associations with the area now he's worn that groove in our paving up top." And here he scowled at Harkness; "Maybe if someone had used enough retcon the first time --"
"He did have to remember part of the day, what if he'd gone in to work the next morning expecting to see his partner?" A twist of fresh grief, but blurred now, as if circuits that had been jammed wide open too long had simply lost their capacity to transmit any more signal load. Or perhaps that was the lingering effect of this retcon thing talking, film of oil on the lens of memory never to be completely polished away. "I was trying to finesse the timing. Calculated risk. And you didn't think to go after his notebook?"
Jones gave his employer a look as if to say And we're going to find the time and resources to smuggle ourselves into a building full of police after a tiny notebook that may or may not contain anything incriminating to us, where? "It was a calculated risk," he said.
"For a high-tech secret organisation you're surprisingly rubbish," Andy said.
"He has us there," Toshiko said. Jones and Harper were nodding in reluctant agreement.
"Hey, I can only work with what I have, you know. If an ordinary Cardiff beat-officer can stay on our scent as well as this one has maybe we need to stop and do a re-think."
"Or hire him," Doctor Harper said with a sardonic twist of his lips.
Harkness fixed Andy with a long, considering stare. "Well, he's persistent, methodical, healthy touch of paranoia... I do like that in a man."
"Your standard for what you like in a man is 'breathing', Jack." The doctor was wearing a look on his homely face that suggested Jones's earlier comment about harassment hadn't been meant in jest. "In fact I suspect breathing might be optional, from some of your stories --"
"I was raised never to speak ill of the dead, especially when they're still hot," Harkness replied with a slyly raised eyebrow, and then turned serious again; "Still, we do find ourselves with a sudden job opening here. And it would save us the paperwork on dumping him in the harbor... I say we keep him. Guys?"
"You're the boss," Toshiko pointed out, shrugging. (Not all that disapproving, Andy thought.) The other two agents or staffers or whatever they considered themselves in this organisational chart looked him up and down as if trying to find some hint of fault to legitimise an objection, or possibly considering whether he'd be the one that they'd eat first if they were ever trapped down here by a broken lift, and then Harper slouched back to his desk with a mutter that couldn't have been Just so you don't make me have to think about shagging him, Harkness...
Those teeth couldn't be natural. "So, how about it? Yours if you want it."
As if he had the choice, really. "One thing. Just, one thing." Andy swallowed hard. "Could you have saved her? With that glove. Could you have brought Gwen Cooper back?"
Harkness shook his head, genuine regret touching those blue, blue eyes. "No matter what Suzie thought, the glove isn't an answer to anything. You have this, for however long, and then... But it's better not to think about that too hard, you'll go kind of nuts." A strange, strange grimace. "May as well grab life as it comes, really."
"And what about you?"
"Our job is to see that people get that chance. Not always that different from being a cop, now I think about it. Although the hours aren't as predictable. So, are you in?" Jack held out a hand, and grinned broadly as Andy took it. "Welcome to Torchwood, Andy Davidson."
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