The Velocity Of A Kebab [4/7]
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...
**********
All of that and she was still more happy to be back to work, Tosh thought with rueful amusement at herself, feeling her pace quickening the nearer she came to the great cog door. Perhaps it was just that after nearly five years anyone would have grown closer to the people she spent so much of her time with than the okasan of fading memory, the stiff formality of adult strangers barely given time to thaw before she was rushing back to her flight and this dank hole in the ground and Owen giving her his best fuck, she came back look. Maybe she'd missed a memo while she was gone, he looked nice today, all got up to a far higher standard than his usual casual-Friday-at-the-hostel taste --
There was a strange woman sitting at Tosh's workstation. "Excuse me? Who are you?"
A moment of confused panic in wide blue eyes before the interloper rose and smiled at Tosh broadly. "I work here? Three years? We went shopping for shoes before you left, remember?" She slipped an arm around Toshiko's waist. "Best mates, except when you broke the strap on my favourite purse."
Yes, Eve had been furious about that, Tosh thought, seeing the links of a delicate chain slither through her fingers and separate -- "Just having you on, it feels like I've been away so long," she said, returning the hug. "Have I missed anything good?"
"Just the usual inappropriate snogging," Jack said, with a roll of his eyes for the way that Eve had gone to lean over Owen at his workstation. "Deliver me from newlyweds, huh?"
Yes, looked like it would be just another day back at the office, with Jack swaggering about, and Ianto ducking him to try to get the actual work around here done, and Andy, their ex-police junior operative, peering over his hopelessly clunky spectacles at Owen. As usual. Ianto leant closer with Tosh's coffee to remark, "Tragic, really. If he would just admit to himself that he fancies blokes..."
"I suppose so," Tosh said absently, wondering why this conversation felt as if she was hearing it distorted through water. Had Ianto's bum always looked so good in jeans?
...No, she was here to work, whatever Jack's loose standards might have allowed for. Tosh set up her travelling laptop to interface itself with the mainframe and sank into a contented half-trance of maths and data, losing herself deep in the intricacies of code, until time had gone quite away and she couldn't help but jump at the sudden tumult of Owen storming down the stairs from the conference room where he'd been sorting that artefact with Andy, in a lather at the man trailing along behind: " -- Completely inappropriate. I mean, you haven't noticed that I'm married? To a bird? You know, hair, tits, big brown -- Erm." Eve had folded her arms across certain of said attributes. "I'm about to be sleeping on the sofa tonight, aren't I."
"I'm, I'll, erm, I'm for home, then," Andy said forlornly. Poor thing, it's like teasing a puppy. She did rather like him, really, if she'd been in the market she might even consider --
But that was silly, when she knew perfectly well how all-consuming it was to fancy someone unattainable. Owen had settled back at his workstation in a funk that even Eve's hands working at his knotted shoulders didn't seem to be easing at first. The former constable gave them a lingering glance back as he scuttled past to fetch his coat that nearly broke her heart to see it, all confused longing and dashed hopes that she must have worn on her own face sometimes, not so long ago. But she was over that now, she'd found -- she'd found --
Eve gave her shoulders a quick hug in passing as she went off up the stairs to powder her nose. Touchy-feely women usually made Tosh want to shrink away into herself, too many memories of attempts to winkle a shy girl out of her shell whether she wanted to go or not, but there was something nice about having someone so spontaneous and warm on the team now, someone to cheer them up in their gloomy cave-dwelling lives. Look how she'd even brightened Owen, sitting there with a faint smile on his lips instead of that tired old sneer. Probably thinking about how good it was to have a regular mate to go home with at night, off the endless treadmill of casual shags at last. (And it was so good -- but how would she know that, she'd never, not really...) What had she just been thinking about? Ah, well, gone now...
Tosh made it through another hour before Jack laughingly all but wheeled her jet-lagged and yawning out the door in her desk-chair. She suspected he'd have driven her home himself, if Ianto hadn't been giving him one of those as soon as we get shut of the kids sort of looks. It had probably been a mistake to come in even for the partial day, but with all that to transfer from the laptop she'd brought along and then the new changes she'd thought of as she drove in, and she'd wanted... she'd wanted to... Oh, she wanted her bed and to get out of these tights, her feet were killing her. And it didn't help to stumble over something as she went to flip on a light in her flat. Trainers? I don't own any grey trainers, those are twice the size of my feet --
A rustling from the bed as the light came on and then a startled shriek. Andy Davidson, late of the Cardiff police, was sitting bolt upright in her dark sheets, clutching the duvet to his bare (and impressively hairy) chest. "What, what the hell -- Toshiko?"
"Andy?"
"What are you doing in my flat?"
"Your flat? Why, how are you, you're naked, you're naked in my bed --"
"I live here! What are you doing here? How did you get the keys?"
"Ianto has copies of all of our keys, you must have --" Tosh stopped herself and took a shuddering breath. "Something is very wrong here."
"I'll say." Andy started to get up, then thankfully thought better of it and clutched the duvet to his chin. "We're flatmates? I mean, I know I live here..."
"Why would we be flatmates? This is an open-plan -- why would we be flatmates?"
But she had his picture everywhere, some the both of them together, one beside the telly where they were even exchanging a kiss? (A scrap of memory, Ianto saying You don't have to be bisexual to work here but you'd be missing out at the office parties...) Andy was glaring at her. "That's my dressing-gown there on the peg behind you, could I please have it?"
Tosh reached blindly and came back with a length of drab plaid. She tossed it to him and he sat fuming silently until she averted her eyes. "I'm going to call Jack," she said to cover the sounds of cloth rustling.
Nowhere to go but over to the kitchen, but then she'd never thought to want for privacy in her own flat. Her mobile rang through to voicemail three times straight before she could collect herself enough to remember the number that would sound every alarm in the Hub, loud enough to wake the dead if it had to. Or the shagging, more like. Finally the Captain picked up, all carefully restrained annoyance even as she cut him off: "Jack, there's something strange going on, I've just got home and Andy's here in my flat --" (Toshiko is in my flat, Andy protested from behind her, loud enough that Jack made a surprised little noise --) "I don't know, I don't know what he thinks he's doing here, how he got in --"
Jack had switched to the steady stream of calm assurances Tosh had seen him use on any number of the victims of Torchwood's routine fiascos, usually right before he retconned them. It did actually make you want to slow down and listen to him despite yourself. She took deep breaths until she was able to concentrate on the words, a part of her noting abstractly that it was about equal parts this is what we're going to do to make this be Not Bad and he's probably more scared of you, as if Andy were a bear who'd wandered into her flat by mistake. After he seemed to have decided she was soothed enough that he could ring off Toshiko folded the phone upon itself and stood staring blankly at it for a long moment, trying to recall anything that he'd specifically said. "He's going to bring Owen over to see if there's any possible medical explanation for this."
"Like what? That aliens have bodysnatched our flats?" Andy pulled the belt of the dressing-gown tighter (why would there be a robe that big in my flat?) and huffed down onto her sofa.
"Or that one of us has gone mad," Tosh shot back, desperately hoping that it wouldn't turn out to be her. "Or accidentally got into the retcon?" (In fact, now she thought about it --)
From the sudden softening of Andy's face this last option seemed to have jumped to the top of his list as well. "It could be a delayed reaction from some time we'd been retconned before," he agreed sombrely, shifting aside for her to join him on the sofa. "Like Suzie's pet." Here he ran a hand through his hair nervously; "Oh, god, are we about to turn into serial killers? My Mam still thinks I'm issuing the public-indecency citations after the football --"
She didn't have an answer for him. They sat side by side on the sofa, carefully not touching, until the bell from downstairs went. Tosh rose stiffly and went to let her colleagues in.
"All I can say is this had better be good, Tosh. Do you have any idea how hard it was to get those tickets?" Owen in a tux was oddly endearing, even as his eyes blazed with indignation. "Worse bloody hours around here than the NHS --"
"You're not the only one they're putting out, Owen," Ianto snapped. (Tosh was trying her best not to picture how his shirt had come to be on inside-out since she'd last seen him.) "Right, Jack, where do we even start with something like this?"
"Step number one, Owen looks them over while we try to work out if anything unusual's happened at work that we might not have noticed at the time." Jack scooped up Tosh's laptop and pushed it into Ianto's hands. "See what you can get from internal CCTV for the last couple of days. Usual drill, any detail no matter how small."
Owen sat her down in a chair under the floor-lamp he'd given her when it hadn't suited his new flat. Tosh followed his murmured prompts, trying to ignore the rattle of Ianto's fingers moving over keys, and Andy standing there in that dressing-gown looking as if someone had just told him he'd need to have this fish in his ear. "Nothing out of the ordinary physically that I can see," their medic finally concluded with a scowl. "Which suggests you've just finally cracked under the pressure, I reckon. Maybe you can get the bloke that gave you that rock to come visit you when we put you away somewhere quiet."
Tosh stretched out her left hand and stared at the flash of an elegant solitaire. (Tommy, Tommy Brockless, he'd been happy for her, he'd said you've got a... got a... "You've got a new beau?") "I don't remember you having a boyfriend, Toshiko," Eve said.
(When had she come in?)
Owen gave his wife a sidelong look. "S'pose she could be winding us up with it," he said. "Wouldn't put it past her to come back from hol with a story to make herself look better after she lost out to you."
"Oi, you're the one Ianto had to comb every pub in the city for that night after -- after we..." Andy faltered, a puzzled frown spreading across his boyish features.
"Right, two bloody amnesiacs, almost forgot that bit. Down here, then, let me waste some more of my valuable time making sure you're a mental as well and then maybe we can get back in time for the third act." Owen started rooting through his instruments again. "Put you away together, sure she'd like that..."
Jack had drifted into the kitchen to poke through the fridge, though whether he was searching for evidence or just considering helping himself to her food Tosh wasn't entirely sure. Now he closed the door again and stood staring at it with the oddest expression, presently remarking, "You've got enough pictures of Andy I'd start to think you were stalking him, Tosh. If you didn't have so many of the rest of us as well. In fact, you've got pictures of everybody you know on here. Except for Eve."
Was it Tosh's imagination, or had Eve gone stiff? "You know how the camera adds twenty pounds, Jack, I've told Tosh how I hate having my photo taken --"
Ianto suddenly sat up straight from the laptop. "But you shouldn't be able to avoid the CCTV. But you have. Or... something." He enlarged a window until they could all see the timestamps, then advanced it carefully; "There doesn't seem to be any record of her being in the Hub."
Jack fixed Eve with his gruffest Captain of this ship look. "Care to explain yourself?"
Eve was all hurt blue eyes now. "Jack, I've been working for you for the past three years. You gave me away at my wedding. Don't you remember?"
"Around here? Memory's hardly evidence, lady. Or whatever you might actually be. Since I prefer to leave the vampires who don't show up on film to bad late-night tv, I'm thinking maybe you're some kind of virus in our collective subconscious. Only it'd be hard to run your program on our wetware, so you keep shuffling details around to make space for yourself -- Owen, what color are her eyes?"
"Don't be an arse, Harkness --"
"Simple question, Harper, the color of your wife's eyes?"
Owen swallowed. "They're brown," he said, sounding as if he were having to force out the words. "About the same colour as mine."
"But they're green," Andy said. "Like Gwen Cooper's. Green as a bottle. Well, a cheap bottle --"
Tosh looked to Ianto. "Grey like my Mam's," he murmured.
Jack drew his pistol. "Now, I don't actually know if shooting you would have any effect, if you're nothing but a communal hallucination. But if you only exist because we believe you do, maybe we'd all expect to see you go down."
Owen interposed himself between Eve and the gun. "No one is shooting my wife!"
Tosh glanced over at Ianto's carefully neutral expression. "He's right, Jack, there has to be some other solution. If she's only here because we think we remember that she is --" And she swayed as the obvious answer presented itself. "Oh. Of course."
Andy was right with her thoughts: "We have to not remember her?"
"What? What sort of a plan is that?"
Jack began burrowing round in his overcoat pocket with his free hand. "It's simple, though, if she is who she says she is, no harm done, right?"
Owen's eyebrows had set into an ugly knot. "Retcon is not a recreational drug, Jack."
Andy was frowning thoughtfully behind those horrid spectacles. "And how would we know how far back we needed to go? We don't have a way to know how long she's been here --"
"I wore suits to work until Tuesday," Ianto said from his post in front of the laptop. "Seems indicative of something."
"Two days, then." Jack handed Tosh a small vial. "If you'd do me the honor of calculating the dosages --"
Since their medical officer didn't look as if he was having any of this. Tosh's hysterical vision of having to hold Owen down and tickle his neck to force him to swallow the pills shattered as the medic drew his own gun. To point it at her -- "Why am I always the one who has to lose everything?" The barrel trembled wildly. "You took Katie, you took Diane, you took, you took... Mark?" Owen's face twisted in confusion.
"Honey? Who's Mark?" Eve reached to take his arm --
"Back off," Jack barked, sounding more like a cheap gangster than a boss. Late-night telly, indeed. "For all we know you work by skin contact. You stand over there away from the rest of us. If you're still here when we wake up, then you get to explain why we all decided to take a nap in the middle of Tosh's living room, but not before."
"No, this is, this is bollocks, I remember wearing this at the, at the..." Owen stopped, and took a deep breath, eyes gone unfocused and too bright. "But I can't have, she... she died before we..."
Ianto's voice was heartbreakingly gentle in the sudden silence: "Owen. Eve's not real."
Brown eyes squeezed shut as the wavering gun finally lowered. Tosh could see a glitter of moisture on his dark lashes. Slowly, Owen reached up, and pulled the knot of his tie loose, a child caught out at dress-up.
***
Tosh went to stretch and smiled to herself as she realised that she'd fallen asleep curled up on the sofa against her fiancé, cheek snuggled to the triangle of furry chest left bare by his dressing-gown. "I shouldn't have sat down when I came in, here I am still in my stockings."
"We must have made an early night of it," Andy said into her hair. "I don't even remember you getting in from the airport."
"Sympathetic jet-lag." She pulled herself up a bit straighter and kissed him. "Now that's a proper boyfriend."
"Just don't expect me to do the sympathetic morning-sickness," he said, and then his ears went endearingly pink; "Erm, that is, if we ever decided to..."
"We work for Torchwood," she said, pushing herself up to rise. "Jack could probably arrange for you to carry the babies." She grinned at his not-entirely-mock-horrified look and turned to begin shimmying out of rumpled travelling clothes. Stockinged feet scattering a small heap of sand...
>
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...
**********
All of that and she was still more happy to be back to work, Tosh thought with rueful amusement at herself, feeling her pace quickening the nearer she came to the great cog door. Perhaps it was just that after nearly five years anyone would have grown closer to the people she spent so much of her time with than the okasan of fading memory, the stiff formality of adult strangers barely given time to thaw before she was rushing back to her flight and this dank hole in the ground and Owen giving her his best fuck, she came back look. Maybe she'd missed a memo while she was gone, he looked nice today, all got up to a far higher standard than his usual casual-Friday-at-the-hostel taste --
There was a strange woman sitting at Tosh's workstation. "Excuse me? Who are you?"
A moment of confused panic in wide blue eyes before the interloper rose and smiled at Tosh broadly. "I work here? Three years? We went shopping for shoes before you left, remember?" She slipped an arm around Toshiko's waist. "Best mates, except when you broke the strap on my favourite purse."
Yes, Eve had been furious about that, Tosh thought, seeing the links of a delicate chain slither through her fingers and separate -- "Just having you on, it feels like I've been away so long," she said, returning the hug. "Have I missed anything good?"
"Just the usual inappropriate snogging," Jack said, with a roll of his eyes for the way that Eve had gone to lean over Owen at his workstation. "Deliver me from newlyweds, huh?"
Yes, looked like it would be just another day back at the office, with Jack swaggering about, and Ianto ducking him to try to get the actual work around here done, and Andy, their ex-police junior operative, peering over his hopelessly clunky spectacles at Owen. As usual. Ianto leant closer with Tosh's coffee to remark, "Tragic, really. If he would just admit to himself that he fancies blokes..."
"I suppose so," Tosh said absently, wondering why this conversation felt as if she was hearing it distorted through water. Had Ianto's bum always looked so good in jeans?
...No, she was here to work, whatever Jack's loose standards might have allowed for. Tosh set up her travelling laptop to interface itself with the mainframe and sank into a contented half-trance of maths and data, losing herself deep in the intricacies of code, until time had gone quite away and she couldn't help but jump at the sudden tumult of Owen storming down the stairs from the conference room where he'd been sorting that artefact with Andy, in a lather at the man trailing along behind: " -- Completely inappropriate. I mean, you haven't noticed that I'm married? To a bird? You know, hair, tits, big brown -- Erm." Eve had folded her arms across certain of said attributes. "I'm about to be sleeping on the sofa tonight, aren't I."
"I'm, I'll, erm, I'm for home, then," Andy said forlornly. Poor thing, it's like teasing a puppy. She did rather like him, really, if she'd been in the market she might even consider --
But that was silly, when she knew perfectly well how all-consuming it was to fancy someone unattainable. Owen had settled back at his workstation in a funk that even Eve's hands working at his knotted shoulders didn't seem to be easing at first. The former constable gave them a lingering glance back as he scuttled past to fetch his coat that nearly broke her heart to see it, all confused longing and dashed hopes that she must have worn on her own face sometimes, not so long ago. But she was over that now, she'd found -- she'd found --
Eve gave her shoulders a quick hug in passing as she went off up the stairs to powder her nose. Touchy-feely women usually made Tosh want to shrink away into herself, too many memories of attempts to winkle a shy girl out of her shell whether she wanted to go or not, but there was something nice about having someone so spontaneous and warm on the team now, someone to cheer them up in their gloomy cave-dwelling lives. Look how she'd even brightened Owen, sitting there with a faint smile on his lips instead of that tired old sneer. Probably thinking about how good it was to have a regular mate to go home with at night, off the endless treadmill of casual shags at last. (And it was so good -- but how would she know that, she'd never, not really...) What had she just been thinking about? Ah, well, gone now...
Tosh made it through another hour before Jack laughingly all but wheeled her jet-lagged and yawning out the door in her desk-chair. She suspected he'd have driven her home himself, if Ianto hadn't been giving him one of those as soon as we get shut of the kids sort of looks. It had probably been a mistake to come in even for the partial day, but with all that to transfer from the laptop she'd brought along and then the new changes she'd thought of as she drove in, and she'd wanted... she'd wanted to... Oh, she wanted her bed and to get out of these tights, her feet were killing her. And it didn't help to stumble over something as she went to flip on a light in her flat. Trainers? I don't own any grey trainers, those are twice the size of my feet --
A rustling from the bed as the light came on and then a startled shriek. Andy Davidson, late of the Cardiff police, was sitting bolt upright in her dark sheets, clutching the duvet to his bare (and impressively hairy) chest. "What, what the hell -- Toshiko?"
"Andy?"
"What are you doing in my flat?"
"Your flat? Why, how are you, you're naked, you're naked in my bed --"
"I live here! What are you doing here? How did you get the keys?"
"Ianto has copies of all of our keys, you must have --" Tosh stopped herself and took a shuddering breath. "Something is very wrong here."
"I'll say." Andy started to get up, then thankfully thought better of it and clutched the duvet to his chin. "We're flatmates? I mean, I know I live here..."
"Why would we be flatmates? This is an open-plan -- why would we be flatmates?"
But she had his picture everywhere, some the both of them together, one beside the telly where they were even exchanging a kiss? (A scrap of memory, Ianto saying You don't have to be bisexual to work here but you'd be missing out at the office parties...) Andy was glaring at her. "That's my dressing-gown there on the peg behind you, could I please have it?"
Tosh reached blindly and came back with a length of drab plaid. She tossed it to him and he sat fuming silently until she averted her eyes. "I'm going to call Jack," she said to cover the sounds of cloth rustling.
Nowhere to go but over to the kitchen, but then she'd never thought to want for privacy in her own flat. Her mobile rang through to voicemail three times straight before she could collect herself enough to remember the number that would sound every alarm in the Hub, loud enough to wake the dead if it had to. Or the shagging, more like. Finally the Captain picked up, all carefully restrained annoyance even as she cut him off: "Jack, there's something strange going on, I've just got home and Andy's here in my flat --" (Toshiko is in my flat, Andy protested from behind her, loud enough that Jack made a surprised little noise --) "I don't know, I don't know what he thinks he's doing here, how he got in --"
Jack had switched to the steady stream of calm assurances Tosh had seen him use on any number of the victims of Torchwood's routine fiascos, usually right before he retconned them. It did actually make you want to slow down and listen to him despite yourself. She took deep breaths until she was able to concentrate on the words, a part of her noting abstractly that it was about equal parts this is what we're going to do to make this be Not Bad and he's probably more scared of you, as if Andy were a bear who'd wandered into her flat by mistake. After he seemed to have decided she was soothed enough that he could ring off Toshiko folded the phone upon itself and stood staring blankly at it for a long moment, trying to recall anything that he'd specifically said. "He's going to bring Owen over to see if there's any possible medical explanation for this."
"Like what? That aliens have bodysnatched our flats?" Andy pulled the belt of the dressing-gown tighter (why would there be a robe that big in my flat?) and huffed down onto her sofa.
"Or that one of us has gone mad," Tosh shot back, desperately hoping that it wouldn't turn out to be her. "Or accidentally got into the retcon?" (In fact, now she thought about it --)
From the sudden softening of Andy's face this last option seemed to have jumped to the top of his list as well. "It could be a delayed reaction from some time we'd been retconned before," he agreed sombrely, shifting aside for her to join him on the sofa. "Like Suzie's pet." Here he ran a hand through his hair nervously; "Oh, god, are we about to turn into serial killers? My Mam still thinks I'm issuing the public-indecency citations after the football --"
She didn't have an answer for him. They sat side by side on the sofa, carefully not touching, until the bell from downstairs went. Tosh rose stiffly and went to let her colleagues in.
"All I can say is this had better be good, Tosh. Do you have any idea how hard it was to get those tickets?" Owen in a tux was oddly endearing, even as his eyes blazed with indignation. "Worse bloody hours around here than the NHS --"
"You're not the only one they're putting out, Owen," Ianto snapped. (Tosh was trying her best not to picture how his shirt had come to be on inside-out since she'd last seen him.) "Right, Jack, where do we even start with something like this?"
"Step number one, Owen looks them over while we try to work out if anything unusual's happened at work that we might not have noticed at the time." Jack scooped up Tosh's laptop and pushed it into Ianto's hands. "See what you can get from internal CCTV for the last couple of days. Usual drill, any detail no matter how small."
Owen sat her down in a chair under the floor-lamp he'd given her when it hadn't suited his new flat. Tosh followed his murmured prompts, trying to ignore the rattle of Ianto's fingers moving over keys, and Andy standing there in that dressing-gown looking as if someone had just told him he'd need to have this fish in his ear. "Nothing out of the ordinary physically that I can see," their medic finally concluded with a scowl. "Which suggests you've just finally cracked under the pressure, I reckon. Maybe you can get the bloke that gave you that rock to come visit you when we put you away somewhere quiet."
Tosh stretched out her left hand and stared at the flash of an elegant solitaire. (Tommy, Tommy Brockless, he'd been happy for her, he'd said you've got a... got a... "You've got a new beau?") "I don't remember you having a boyfriend, Toshiko," Eve said.
(When had she come in?)
Owen gave his wife a sidelong look. "S'pose she could be winding us up with it," he said. "Wouldn't put it past her to come back from hol with a story to make herself look better after she lost out to you."
"Oi, you're the one Ianto had to comb every pub in the city for that night after -- after we..." Andy faltered, a puzzled frown spreading across his boyish features.
"Right, two bloody amnesiacs, almost forgot that bit. Down here, then, let me waste some more of my valuable time making sure you're a mental as well and then maybe we can get back in time for the third act." Owen started rooting through his instruments again. "Put you away together, sure she'd like that..."
Jack had drifted into the kitchen to poke through the fridge, though whether he was searching for evidence or just considering helping himself to her food Tosh wasn't entirely sure. Now he closed the door again and stood staring at it with the oddest expression, presently remarking, "You've got enough pictures of Andy I'd start to think you were stalking him, Tosh. If you didn't have so many of the rest of us as well. In fact, you've got pictures of everybody you know on here. Except for Eve."
Was it Tosh's imagination, or had Eve gone stiff? "You know how the camera adds twenty pounds, Jack, I've told Tosh how I hate having my photo taken --"
Ianto suddenly sat up straight from the laptop. "But you shouldn't be able to avoid the CCTV. But you have. Or... something." He enlarged a window until they could all see the timestamps, then advanced it carefully; "There doesn't seem to be any record of her being in the Hub."
Jack fixed Eve with his gruffest Captain of this ship look. "Care to explain yourself?"
Eve was all hurt blue eyes now. "Jack, I've been working for you for the past three years. You gave me away at my wedding. Don't you remember?"
"Around here? Memory's hardly evidence, lady. Or whatever you might actually be. Since I prefer to leave the vampires who don't show up on film to bad late-night tv, I'm thinking maybe you're some kind of virus in our collective subconscious. Only it'd be hard to run your program on our wetware, so you keep shuffling details around to make space for yourself -- Owen, what color are her eyes?"
"Don't be an arse, Harkness --"
"Simple question, Harper, the color of your wife's eyes?"
Owen swallowed. "They're brown," he said, sounding as if he were having to force out the words. "About the same colour as mine."
"But they're green," Andy said. "Like Gwen Cooper's. Green as a bottle. Well, a cheap bottle --"
Tosh looked to Ianto. "Grey like my Mam's," he murmured.
Jack drew his pistol. "Now, I don't actually know if shooting you would have any effect, if you're nothing but a communal hallucination. But if you only exist because we believe you do, maybe we'd all expect to see you go down."
Owen interposed himself between Eve and the gun. "No one is shooting my wife!"
Tosh glanced over at Ianto's carefully neutral expression. "He's right, Jack, there has to be some other solution. If she's only here because we think we remember that she is --" And she swayed as the obvious answer presented itself. "Oh. Of course."
Andy was right with her thoughts: "We have to not remember her?"
"What? What sort of a plan is that?"
Jack began burrowing round in his overcoat pocket with his free hand. "It's simple, though, if she is who she says she is, no harm done, right?"
Owen's eyebrows had set into an ugly knot. "Retcon is not a recreational drug, Jack."
Andy was frowning thoughtfully behind those horrid spectacles. "And how would we know how far back we needed to go? We don't have a way to know how long she's been here --"
"I wore suits to work until Tuesday," Ianto said from his post in front of the laptop. "Seems indicative of something."
"Two days, then." Jack handed Tosh a small vial. "If you'd do me the honor of calculating the dosages --"
Since their medical officer didn't look as if he was having any of this. Tosh's hysterical vision of having to hold Owen down and tickle his neck to force him to swallow the pills shattered as the medic drew his own gun. To point it at her -- "Why am I always the one who has to lose everything?" The barrel trembled wildly. "You took Katie, you took Diane, you took, you took... Mark?" Owen's face twisted in confusion.
"Honey? Who's Mark?" Eve reached to take his arm --
"Back off," Jack barked, sounding more like a cheap gangster than a boss. Late-night telly, indeed. "For all we know you work by skin contact. You stand over there away from the rest of us. If you're still here when we wake up, then you get to explain why we all decided to take a nap in the middle of Tosh's living room, but not before."
"No, this is, this is bollocks, I remember wearing this at the, at the..." Owen stopped, and took a deep breath, eyes gone unfocused and too bright. "But I can't have, she... she died before we..."
Ianto's voice was heartbreakingly gentle in the sudden silence: "Owen. Eve's not real."
Brown eyes squeezed shut as the wavering gun finally lowered. Tosh could see a glitter of moisture on his dark lashes. Slowly, Owen reached up, and pulled the knot of his tie loose, a child caught out at dress-up.
***
Tosh went to stretch and smiled to herself as she realised that she'd fallen asleep curled up on the sofa against her fiancé, cheek snuggled to the triangle of furry chest left bare by his dressing-gown. "I shouldn't have sat down when I came in, here I am still in my stockings."
"We must have made an early night of it," Andy said into her hair. "I don't even remember you getting in from the airport."
"Sympathetic jet-lag." She pulled herself up a bit straighter and kissed him. "Now that's a proper boyfriend."
"Just don't expect me to do the sympathetic morning-sickness," he said, and then his ears went endearingly pink; "Erm, that is, if we ever decided to..."
"We work for Torchwood," she said, pushing herself up to rise. "Jack could probably arrange for you to carry the babies." She grinned at his not-entirely-mock-horrified look and turned to begin shimmying out of rumpled travelling clothes. Stockinged feet scattering a small heap of sand...
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