The Velocity Of A Kebab [7/7]
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...
**********
"Torchwood's idea of a day off," Andy said, and started to laugh helplessly into his folded arms. "Sorry I had to go and drag you into this, mate."
"Aye, well, probably safer here than anything. Still dozens of coppers in this building, right?"
It hadn't helped the four most senior officers. Even after all this while with Torchwood the stink of blood was turning his stomach, too earthy and ultimately human to pretend away like some stray whiff of ichor and ozone from an alien's exploding head. Beside him Rhys was still pale as a Welsh sheet from it all, the smell and the screams and the chalky terror of wondering if they'd be able between them to shift that column in time -- Andy took a deep breath that did little to steady him and lurched to his feet. "I need to get back to the Hub, you'll have to be the one to keep it together here."
"Me?"
The comm in Andy's ear was still relaying fragments of chatter amongst the rest of the team, clipped voices muttering tersely about power and servers and who was in position to attempt to sort what. He pulled it off and handed it to Rhys: "Let this sync to your phone so I can --" hear the lot of you die -- "I'll try to... I have to go."
It wasn't enough, it couldn't be enough, but it was all he had, one terrified man trying just as hard to live up to his own memories of Gwen Cooper. Like all those long, lost days that he wasn't Jack, couldn't possibly be Jack, but he was Andy Davidson, and sometimes that had even been good enough. Rhys was already mumbling into the unfamiliar earpiece, explaining his sudden intrusion with an admirable steadiness. Andy turned away and ran like hell from the station.
The great cog rolled open to yield the sight of Captain John Hart, in the Hub, their Hub, rifling through files on Tosh's computer -- "On your knees!"
"You're a romantic."
"Now!"
Even Hart apparently understood the logic in choosing not to argue with a drawn gun. He put his hands on his head as if he practised this fairly often and knelt calmly on the decking. "I can find Jack," he said as Andy came up the stairs and touched the barrel to his temple. "But I don't know your system well enough to pick up my tracking signal with this primitive equipment --"
Andy motioned him to stay down and went scrabbling through the rubbish on Tosh's workstation for a spare comm, twisting it into his ear: "-- Yeah, why not, just buttle your way through the ravening hordes, you can ask them if they want a biscuit with their nice juicy leg of Ianto --"
"We can argue or I can do this."
There was a... no, that couldn't have been what it sounded like. Not from Owen. "Right, whatever. Good luck, you stupid bastard."
"Anyway zombie legs aren't juicy."
"Just go, will you? Andy, if you're there, we've got weevils near our positions, dozens of them --"
"And I've got Hart here in the Hub."
"Fucking perfect. Tell me you're already killing him slowly."
"He says there's a tracer on Jack."
Tosh's voice now, doubled faintly through another pickup where she must have been huddling near Owen; "I have a remote monitor here, what's the frequency?"
Hart lifted an eyebrow and Andy nodded permission for him to rise. "Etheric particle signal, 200 betacycles. Might be a few metres down?"
A pause. Andy pictured her brow furrowing in concentration over her handheld. "No signals even vaguely resembling that. Maybe if we can get back to the Hub I can recalibrate the -- Owen, where are --?"
"Transport." Andy heard a small engine farting to life in the background. "Here, you take the helmet --"
Andy shook his head at the mental image of Torchwood resorting to nicking a Vespa to outrun the weevils and turned his attention to Hart's renewed tapping at Tosh's keyboard. "Last time I believe the bloody guarantee. Has she got anything like a Branksian filtering algorithm on this?"
He didn't even know what that was, but with Tosh apparently having removed her comm to put on the helmet they were left to muddle around the mainframe blindly, the organisational scheme for materials that only she amongst them understood anyway a web of opaque associations without her keys. "You know, the secret back-door is one of the first things I go after in the pillow-talk," Hart observed mildly at Andy's fumblings.
"Piss off."
"Just saying --" The Time Agent looked up sharply at a snuffling growl. Of course. Weevils in the streets, weevils loose in the Hub as well. "Real pest problem around here, too."
Andy caught up the gun he'd set aside by Tosh's keyboard and squeezed off a shot at the weevil in the doorway of Jack's office. It grunted and went to one knee, staggered but not stopped. Right, only makes them angrier than the boilersuits...
The crash of the door from the car-park announced Tosh and Owen's entrance, quick glances to assess the situation and opening fire on the rogue weevils. Enough rounds scoring between them all to drop the aliens, if not kill --
Owen came up the stairs and raised his gun again to aim at Hart. Andy grabbed for his arm. "No, we might still need him. He can start by helping us get these weevils down the cells, if he's not cooperative we can leave him there to think about it for a while."
Hart's face said he'd rather like to see Andy try to make good on that, but he moved readily enough to join Owen in hauling two of the three wounded aliens off towards the vaults. Andy spared a few precious seconds to touch his forehead to Tosh's, murmuring, "You can talk Ianto through the shutdown, love, I know you can. And then we're going to find Jack."
"Now I'm here I may be able to do more to trace that signal," she said, pulling away to take up her post at her workstation. "Ianto? Are you at Turnmill yet...?"
Weevils were heavy, especially as dead weight. By the time they'd reached the vaults Andy was stumbling, unable to concentrate on more than the narrow slice of flooring he could see without letting go his grip under the alien's arms as he dragged it backwards. But finally there was a doorway behind him, the sounds of strained cursing as Owen and Hart pulled their own passengers into other breached units alongside --
Three solid thunks as the doors to the cells swung closed. Andy dropped his weevil's shoulders to tap his earpiece: "Tosh? Tosh...? Shit, we've lost comms."
"I'd have pointed out that it was a trap, but you didn't actually give me the chance," Hart remarked petulantly from the next cell.
There was a long silence, and at length Owen said, "It's the part where I woke up this morning thinking about having a look-in at that new club the other side of the bay when I got off tonight and now I'm locked in with a weevil wondering if it's going to wake up peckish, that's what I haven't been able to work out."
Andy did still have his gun, for what that was worth, but the thought of euthanising, no, executing an unconscious weevil in cold blood made his gorge rise despite the threat. Leave it until needs must, if it came to that. Presently he began rambling aloud to try to drown out his own morbid thoughts, sitting on the concrete bench with his knees drawn up and guessing from the occasional grunt of acknowledgement that Owen had chosen the corner of his respective cell just the other side of the wall. "And the whole, me and Tosh, I know you sort of... Never really meant to come in here and sweep her off her feet, it just... happened."
He could picture the medic's face, screwed up into reflexive denial. "Well, yeah, I mean, if you hadn't... I might. Not saying I'd, but, I..."
"Oh, Lord and Lady, are we really having a meaningful moment here? I think I'm going to sick up. And you haven't provided adequate facilities for that in these cells of yours --"
"Piss off," Andy said in unison with Owen.
But it had been enough to disrupt the moment, damn Hart. Andy's throat was too dry to go on, anyway. Owen's turn now to rail against the silence, the steady cursing from the next cell almost like the soothing sound of rain on a roof.
And then, inexorably, it had come to this. "I spy with my little eye, something beginning with W."
"Wanker." Owen didn't sound as if his heart were in it, though. Andy was beginning to worry about him. "Oh, tell me you don't actually have your hand down your trousers --"
"Jack?"
"You're neither of you very good at this game, you realise --"
But Andy hadn't been imagining that flicker of dirty grey beyond the smeared perspex, three catches on three doors clicking open at a touch inside Jack's magic wrist-strap. The familiar sparkle in those blue eyes dulled by whatever it had cost him to make it back here, now, to be with them: "It's done." Andy buried his face shamelessly in an epaulette that smelt of damp earth, barely aware of Owen's quaking against Jack's other shoulder and some fatuous remark of Hart's in the background that the Captain, his Captain, brushed off gently but firmly.
Jack was patting Andy's back now, not quite a warning that the situation was circling the brink of mortal embarrassment; "So, where's Tosh?"
Andy pulled back. "But, she didn't, rescue you...?"
The comms were still dead, and it took too long to get upstairs from the vaults. Andy broke into a run as he saw the trail of dark staining from Tosh's workstation down into the autopsy room, the small form propped against a chair in the midst of scattered syringes and gauze. And gore. Far, far too much gore for such a tiny woman. But Toshiko managed a trembling smile for her husband, as Owen knelt at her other side to render what assistance he could, drawing in a shaky breath to whisper, "Ianto's on his way. He... we stopped the meltdown. Just in time..."
"Tosh? Tosh? Stay with us, love, Tosh... Toshiko. Toshiko."
***
Owen's idea of being comforting was a drunken handjob and letting you sleep in his bed, but it made about as much sense as anything to do with Torchwood, these days. Somewhere around the third night they'd admitted that as suicide watches went they were both somewhat in need of adult supervision and fucked off down the pub, and things got easier, a little.
They'd had some... interesting conversations, in that pub, over a sea of bitter. Just as well everyone in this city had far more on their minds than the mad ramblings of two more drunks trying to self-medicate away the horror. "But, if you retconned yourself..."
The medic's eyes said he'd put in his time considering pills in the palm of someone's hand, his own or Jack's, and drawn the same conclusions about the relative costs. "I wouldn't remember her." Andy sighed and knocked back the rest of his pint, poor man's effort at inducing temporary amnesia. But only temporary.
And now they were back to work as if nothing had happened, because there was work to be done and no one else who could do it. Owen had finally got round to the post-mortem this morning, as cursory a job of it as he could get away with for the purpose of the records but a final duty he had insisted upon performing himself. Andy wasn't quite sure if this was an act of self-flagellation or an admission of the esteem he'd held her in. His own day had been spent in sorting a report on the action, including a lengthy explanation of how a job offer would be a more efficient solution to certain issues that had arisen than retconning one Rhys Williams. He'd be surprised if Jack listened, but then again it wasn't exactly as if the man could make a case that even breathing was a requirement for employment here.
There came a point where Andy realised he'd been sitting staring at the tangling pulse of the mainframe's idling state for a good while, report long since filed and a hapless biro clenched in his folded hands to no purpose. Owen had finally ventured out of the autopsy bay, looking over from his own workstation as if he were evaluating whether to suggest the medicinal application of an arseload of brandy. "Seriously, mate, you look worse than Ianto."
"Yeah, thanks for that." Andy laid the biro down on the desk and pinched the bridge of his nose. Go home, to dream of a too-tight gauntlet and the feeling of a knife slowly sinking into his chest? Or sit here at her computer until he dropped before it, going down fighting like they all would someday?
And their one consolation and constant: Ianto set Andy's mug down with a hand still and forever wrapped in gauze to protect cooked skin. The new machine's coffee might have lacked some phantom measure of the intensity Ianto's affection had drawn out of its predecessor, lost in that hail of frustrated bullets after the steamer had turned on him, but it was still better than mortal man deserved. Andy smiled thinly up at him. "Mate."
Ianto looked as if he were about to say something, but then settled for giving Andy's shoulder an awkward pat with his good hand. "I believe that's Zombie for she did good," Owen observed.
Jack would probably be watching them from the round window of his office, if Andy cared to look. "Never enough, is it. Everything we do, it's never enough."
"Never is," Ianto agreed sombrely. "But, like Jack says: the end is where we start from."
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...
**********
"Torchwood's idea of a day off," Andy said, and started to laugh helplessly into his folded arms. "Sorry I had to go and drag you into this, mate."
"Aye, well, probably safer here than anything. Still dozens of coppers in this building, right?"
It hadn't helped the four most senior officers. Even after all this while with Torchwood the stink of blood was turning his stomach, too earthy and ultimately human to pretend away like some stray whiff of ichor and ozone from an alien's exploding head. Beside him Rhys was still pale as a Welsh sheet from it all, the smell and the screams and the chalky terror of wondering if they'd be able between them to shift that column in time -- Andy took a deep breath that did little to steady him and lurched to his feet. "I need to get back to the Hub, you'll have to be the one to keep it together here."
"Me?"
The comm in Andy's ear was still relaying fragments of chatter amongst the rest of the team, clipped voices muttering tersely about power and servers and who was in position to attempt to sort what. He pulled it off and handed it to Rhys: "Let this sync to your phone so I can --" hear the lot of you die -- "I'll try to... I have to go."
It wasn't enough, it couldn't be enough, but it was all he had, one terrified man trying just as hard to live up to his own memories of Gwen Cooper. Like all those long, lost days that he wasn't Jack, couldn't possibly be Jack, but he was Andy Davidson, and sometimes that had even been good enough. Rhys was already mumbling into the unfamiliar earpiece, explaining his sudden intrusion with an admirable steadiness. Andy turned away and ran like hell from the station.
The great cog rolled open to yield the sight of Captain John Hart, in the Hub, their Hub, rifling through files on Tosh's computer -- "On your knees!"
"You're a romantic."
"Now!"
Even Hart apparently understood the logic in choosing not to argue with a drawn gun. He put his hands on his head as if he practised this fairly often and knelt calmly on the decking. "I can find Jack," he said as Andy came up the stairs and touched the barrel to his temple. "But I don't know your system well enough to pick up my tracking signal with this primitive equipment --"
Andy motioned him to stay down and went scrabbling through the rubbish on Tosh's workstation for a spare comm, twisting it into his ear: "-- Yeah, why not, just buttle your way through the ravening hordes, you can ask them if they want a biscuit with their nice juicy leg of Ianto --"
"We can argue or I can do this."
There was a... no, that couldn't have been what it sounded like. Not from Owen. "Right, whatever. Good luck, you stupid bastard."
"Anyway zombie legs aren't juicy."
"Just go, will you? Andy, if you're there, we've got weevils near our positions, dozens of them --"
"And I've got Hart here in the Hub."
"Fucking perfect. Tell me you're already killing him slowly."
"He says there's a tracer on Jack."
Tosh's voice now, doubled faintly through another pickup where she must have been huddling near Owen; "I have a remote monitor here, what's the frequency?"
Hart lifted an eyebrow and Andy nodded permission for him to rise. "Etheric particle signal, 200 betacycles. Might be a few metres down?"
A pause. Andy pictured her brow furrowing in concentration over her handheld. "No signals even vaguely resembling that. Maybe if we can get back to the Hub I can recalibrate the -- Owen, where are --?"
"Transport." Andy heard a small engine farting to life in the background. "Here, you take the helmet --"
Andy shook his head at the mental image of Torchwood resorting to nicking a Vespa to outrun the weevils and turned his attention to Hart's renewed tapping at Tosh's keyboard. "Last time I believe the bloody guarantee. Has she got anything like a Branksian filtering algorithm on this?"
He didn't even know what that was, but with Tosh apparently having removed her comm to put on the helmet they were left to muddle around the mainframe blindly, the organisational scheme for materials that only she amongst them understood anyway a web of opaque associations without her keys. "You know, the secret back-door is one of the first things I go after in the pillow-talk," Hart observed mildly at Andy's fumblings.
"Piss off."
"Just saying --" The Time Agent looked up sharply at a snuffling growl. Of course. Weevils in the streets, weevils loose in the Hub as well. "Real pest problem around here, too."
Andy caught up the gun he'd set aside by Tosh's keyboard and squeezed off a shot at the weevil in the doorway of Jack's office. It grunted and went to one knee, staggered but not stopped. Right, only makes them angrier than the boilersuits...
The crash of the door from the car-park announced Tosh and Owen's entrance, quick glances to assess the situation and opening fire on the rogue weevils. Enough rounds scoring between them all to drop the aliens, if not kill --
Owen came up the stairs and raised his gun again to aim at Hart. Andy grabbed for his arm. "No, we might still need him. He can start by helping us get these weevils down the cells, if he's not cooperative we can leave him there to think about it for a while."
Hart's face said he'd rather like to see Andy try to make good on that, but he moved readily enough to join Owen in hauling two of the three wounded aliens off towards the vaults. Andy spared a few precious seconds to touch his forehead to Tosh's, murmuring, "You can talk Ianto through the shutdown, love, I know you can. And then we're going to find Jack."
"Now I'm here I may be able to do more to trace that signal," she said, pulling away to take up her post at her workstation. "Ianto? Are you at Turnmill yet...?"
Weevils were heavy, especially as dead weight. By the time they'd reached the vaults Andy was stumbling, unable to concentrate on more than the narrow slice of flooring he could see without letting go his grip under the alien's arms as he dragged it backwards. But finally there was a doorway behind him, the sounds of strained cursing as Owen and Hart pulled their own passengers into other breached units alongside --
Three solid thunks as the doors to the cells swung closed. Andy dropped his weevil's shoulders to tap his earpiece: "Tosh? Tosh...? Shit, we've lost comms."
"I'd have pointed out that it was a trap, but you didn't actually give me the chance," Hart remarked petulantly from the next cell.
There was a long silence, and at length Owen said, "It's the part where I woke up this morning thinking about having a look-in at that new club the other side of the bay when I got off tonight and now I'm locked in with a weevil wondering if it's going to wake up peckish, that's what I haven't been able to work out."
Andy did still have his gun, for what that was worth, but the thought of euthanising, no, executing an unconscious weevil in cold blood made his gorge rise despite the threat. Leave it until needs must, if it came to that. Presently he began rambling aloud to try to drown out his own morbid thoughts, sitting on the concrete bench with his knees drawn up and guessing from the occasional grunt of acknowledgement that Owen had chosen the corner of his respective cell just the other side of the wall. "And the whole, me and Tosh, I know you sort of... Never really meant to come in here and sweep her off her feet, it just... happened."
He could picture the medic's face, screwed up into reflexive denial. "Well, yeah, I mean, if you hadn't... I might. Not saying I'd, but, I..."
"Oh, Lord and Lady, are we really having a meaningful moment here? I think I'm going to sick up. And you haven't provided adequate facilities for that in these cells of yours --"
"Piss off," Andy said in unison with Owen.
But it had been enough to disrupt the moment, damn Hart. Andy's throat was too dry to go on, anyway. Owen's turn now to rail against the silence, the steady cursing from the next cell almost like the soothing sound of rain on a roof.
And then, inexorably, it had come to this. "I spy with my little eye, something beginning with W."
"Wanker." Owen didn't sound as if his heart were in it, though. Andy was beginning to worry about him. "Oh, tell me you don't actually have your hand down your trousers --"
"Jack?"
"You're neither of you very good at this game, you realise --"
But Andy hadn't been imagining that flicker of dirty grey beyond the smeared perspex, three catches on three doors clicking open at a touch inside Jack's magic wrist-strap. The familiar sparkle in those blue eyes dulled by whatever it had cost him to make it back here, now, to be with them: "It's done." Andy buried his face shamelessly in an epaulette that smelt of damp earth, barely aware of Owen's quaking against Jack's other shoulder and some fatuous remark of Hart's in the background that the Captain, his Captain, brushed off gently but firmly.
Jack was patting Andy's back now, not quite a warning that the situation was circling the brink of mortal embarrassment; "So, where's Tosh?"
Andy pulled back. "But, she didn't, rescue you...?"
The comms were still dead, and it took too long to get upstairs from the vaults. Andy broke into a run as he saw the trail of dark staining from Tosh's workstation down into the autopsy room, the small form propped against a chair in the midst of scattered syringes and gauze. And gore. Far, far too much gore for such a tiny woman. But Toshiko managed a trembling smile for her husband, as Owen knelt at her other side to render what assistance he could, drawing in a shaky breath to whisper, "Ianto's on his way. He... we stopped the meltdown. Just in time..."
"Tosh? Tosh? Stay with us, love, Tosh... Toshiko. Toshiko."
***
Owen's idea of being comforting was a drunken handjob and letting you sleep in his bed, but it made about as much sense as anything to do with Torchwood, these days. Somewhere around the third night they'd admitted that as suicide watches went they were both somewhat in need of adult supervision and fucked off down the pub, and things got easier, a little.
They'd had some... interesting conversations, in that pub, over a sea of bitter. Just as well everyone in this city had far more on their minds than the mad ramblings of two more drunks trying to self-medicate away the horror. "But, if you retconned yourself..."
The medic's eyes said he'd put in his time considering pills in the palm of someone's hand, his own or Jack's, and drawn the same conclusions about the relative costs. "I wouldn't remember her." Andy sighed and knocked back the rest of his pint, poor man's effort at inducing temporary amnesia. But only temporary.
And now they were back to work as if nothing had happened, because there was work to be done and no one else who could do it. Owen had finally got round to the post-mortem this morning, as cursory a job of it as he could get away with for the purpose of the records but a final duty he had insisted upon performing himself. Andy wasn't quite sure if this was an act of self-flagellation or an admission of the esteem he'd held her in. His own day had been spent in sorting a report on the action, including a lengthy explanation of how a job offer would be a more efficient solution to certain issues that had arisen than retconning one Rhys Williams. He'd be surprised if Jack listened, but then again it wasn't exactly as if the man could make a case that even breathing was a requirement for employment here.
There came a point where Andy realised he'd been sitting staring at the tangling pulse of the mainframe's idling state for a good while, report long since filed and a hapless biro clenched in his folded hands to no purpose. Owen had finally ventured out of the autopsy bay, looking over from his own workstation as if he were evaluating whether to suggest the medicinal application of an arseload of brandy. "Seriously, mate, you look worse than Ianto."
"Yeah, thanks for that." Andy laid the biro down on the desk and pinched the bridge of his nose. Go home, to dream of a too-tight gauntlet and the feeling of a knife slowly sinking into his chest? Or sit here at her computer until he dropped before it, going down fighting like they all would someday?
And their one consolation and constant: Ianto set Andy's mug down with a hand still and forever wrapped in gauze to protect cooked skin. The new machine's coffee might have lacked some phantom measure of the intensity Ianto's affection had drawn out of its predecessor, lost in that hail of frustrated bullets after the steamer had turned on him, but it was still better than mortal man deserved. Andy smiled thinly up at him. "Mate."
Ianto looked as if he were about to say something, but then settled for giving Andy's shoulder an awkward pat with his good hand. "I believe that's Zombie for she did good," Owen observed.
Jack would probably be watching them from the round window of his office, if Andy cared to look. "Never enough, is it. Everything we do, it's never enough."
"Never is," Ianto agreed sombrely. "But, like Jack says: the end is where we start from."