In Memoriam

To Russell T. Davies – because some of us prefer happier endings...

Not again. The darkness. Nothing. Pure, unadulterated nothing – meaningless thought, that, he realised. You can't quite adulterate nothing anyway. Although it couldn't be nothing exactly, as he remained conscious of it. His mind was still there. That was the worst of it. Endless darkness, just him and… No. No, it couldn't be. He'd beaten this thing, triumphed over Death. There was nothing here. Still, he could sense it, something in the nothing, a presence in the dark. It made the hair on his back stand on end. Well, sort of – there was no corporeal back, no follicles to be excited, no hair to be raised. Yet here he was, shivering, somehow, as he felt it draw closer, closer and…

'Owen?' He looked round, startled. 'Owen, are you okay?' Jack's voice rang out from behind, tinged with worry.

'Yeah, yeah, I'm fine. Idiot missed me by a hair.' They'd just raided the Pharm facility, shut it down, killed the poor buggers of aliens this moron had been torturing in there. Mercy killing. They were beyond rescue, anyway. He'd respected Professor Copley, hell, he'd based his own MD thesis partly on this guy's immunology research. Owen wondered how the man had come to stray so far. And now they'd never know. Instinct, that's all it was, really. They'd fired at almost exactly the same moment. Except Owen hadn't missed.

'Ianto?' Gwen was at the monitor station. 'Could you come up here for a sec?' She waved at the leftmost screen as he came walking up. 'Strange reading coming from the vaults. Just for a second, it's probably just a blip. Think we should tell Jack?'
'Don't know.' Ianto hedged, doubt in his voice. 'I think we shouldn't bother him too much. He's still working on those reports.'
'Yeah, maybe you're right. God, I wish Tosh was here right now.'
'Yeah.' He put a hand on her shoulder.

Tosh swivelled around, turning from the monitors. Owen kept his hand on her shoulder, lightening his touch as she moved, bending over to face her. 'So', he said. 'Still got a lot of work to do, then?'
She looked up at him, a slight blush in her cheeks. It suited her, made her look less stern, more womanly. 'I think it can wait', she said.
'Well then, how about that date? Drinks and pool it was, yeah?' He winked and offered her his hand, pulling her up from the chair. 'Jack, we're off.'

As they walked towards the door, he hesitated for a moment. Oh, what the hell. This had been her idea, hadn't it? Quickly, almost casually, he put his right hand on her hip, pulled her in a bit closer. There. Now it was a proper date.

The monitors didn't lie. Tosh had programmed the software far too well for that, and although the sensors were of alien origin, they hadn't failed them yet. One blip? Maybe. A false reading, a spike from some of the Rift-salvaged tech humming away in the Hub. Two blips? Yeah, that meant something was going on.
Gwen knocked on the window of Jack's office. 'Jack? I'm sorry to disturb you, but there's something you might want to have a look at.'

Ah, now that was a sight to behold. Owen sighed happily at the view from the bed. As Tosh walked past the bedroom mirror, he could glimpse the front of her body, with those small but firm breasts he'd taken to immensely these past few weeks, while also catching an eyeful of her delightful arse.
'Tea?' She turned her head, looking at him over her shoulder, a smile playing around her lips. 'Yeah, no, love, think I'd prefer coffee. Need to get my energy back up.' He grinned and propped his head up on his arm, watching with approval as she made her way out the bedroom door and into the kitchen.

It had taken a little while before they'd become this close, before she'd become relaxed enough in his presence for naked coffee-making. Their first time together had been clumsy, uncomfortable, unfamiliar. Tosh had seemed ashamed afterwards, afraid he'd tell her thanks for the shag and that would be it. To be fair, he'd considered it for a moment. Easier to leave than to be left. Still, this wasn't like Diane, and it was certainly not like Katie. They were just friends. Friends with benefits. Friends with benefits and nice arses and smiles and naked coffee. More than fuckbuddies, perhaps, but not exactly... Well, what exactly? Owen wasn't sure. He wasn't sure it even mattered.

'Still nothing?' Jack was going through the archives, grabbing item after item in approximately the location the computer had indicated. 'No change in the readings yet?' 'No, nothing yet,' Gwen answered on his earpiece. 'Keep going.'
He grabbed a plastic bag that held some sort of box, the exterior built out of a kind of intricate latticework. Almost like a puzzle. 'Yes, that's it. Whatever you're holding right now is causing the energy spikes.' Jack took a closer look at the box. He remembered this thing, but only vaguely. It hadn't been that long, but...

'Seems like yesterday, really.' Tosh smiled. There'd been a box of chocolates with a bow on it on her desk that morning. Another side of Owen she'd never have expected a year ago. Obviously, Gwen had teased her, had wanted to know the occassion. One year. One year since the day of the date she hadn't even expected to go anywhere. A year of confused beginnings, of growing closer, of finding comfort in a relationship that fit so strangely, so unexpectedly seamless. Almost too perfectly. Like it was meant to be.

'What is it?', Ianto asked. 'I don't think I've seen that thing before.' 'No, nor have I', said Gwen. Jack sighed. 'Okay, this is going to sound strange, but remember that day we all forgot? I found this in the archives straight after. Nothing in it but sand. I put it into storage, didn't really think twice.'
'Ah. And now it's giving off strange readings.' Gwen looked puzzled, a bit worried. 'Yeah, well', Ianto said, 'Maybe there's a reason we chose to forget that day.' 'Maybe we didn't choose.' Gwen theorised. 'Maybe this thing made us forget something, and now it's doing it again.'
'Anyone have any memory issues?' Jack replied, 'Cause I don't. I don't think that's what happened. No, I think we chose to forget, which means that whatever this thing does, it's not something we're going to want to remember.'

Memories. Owen had done this once before, and it hadn't ended well. Should he? It almost felt like a betrayal of Katie, to be happy again, to make a promise he'd made to her and hadn't kept. Hadn't been able to keep. A summer wedding. A fucking summer wedding, with flowers in her hair and drunk uncles and fighting relatives. Normalcy. He thought he'd closed that chapter when she died, when he hadn't been able to save her. When he'd joined Torchwood to save all the others, all the regular girls and their blokes and their summer weddings and drunk uncles and their happy lives and their lovely, normal, oblivious existence. Theirs. Not his. Never his again. He'd save them, but who'd save him?

She had. She'd saved him, even after he'd ignored her for all those years. They'd clung together in the eye of the storm, wrestled a semblance of normalcy from the claws of absolute madness. And here he was again. Owen Harper, touching on a happiness he hadn't ever deserved, but that had been handed to him anyway. And he was so afraid, afraid it would be taken from him the moment he asked. Yet he'd seen enough these past few years to know that it could be taken from him even if he never asked the question, and maybe that was worse. Maybe it was best to face your demons head on, to defy all their destructive efforts.

'If you ask me, I think we should destroy it.' Ianto eyed the box with suspicion. It was sitting in a containment field, surrounded by sensors, and it was still causing those weird energy spikes. 'We don't know what it does. Come on, Jack, haven't we learned anything from what happened? It's of no use to us, and it might well be dangerous.' 'Yeah, and destroying it may well be far more dangerous', Jack answered. 'We do not know what it is. For all we know, it'll blow up in our faces the second we start tampering with it.'
'All right, boys', Gwen intervened. 'If we can't destroy it until we know what it does, then let's find out what that is, hm? Let's not just stand here arguing.'

'Kento Harper, leave your sister alone this instant!' Owen's voice sounded strict, but inside he was amused. Teasing your big sister, such a wonderfully normal thing for a little boy to be doing. So unlike his own childhood. Or his own adulthood, at that – normal was not exactly the word he'd use for that, either. But Lyn and Kenny were decidedly not as messed up as him. Just regular, standard kid-edition messed up. Pulling braids, teasing one another, almost like one of those picture-perfect toothpaste ad families.

He'd never imagined this life for himself. A life after Torchwood. And a non-retconned life, as well – they'd had Gwen and Rhys to thank for that, he supposed. Well, that and the fact that nobody knew what side-effects the drug would cause in a pregnant woman.
Not that they'd wanted to quit. It had been Jack who insisted. Owen had never really noticed that side of him until that point – the softness in his eyes, the urgency with which he'd insisted they'd 'lead a normal life now'. In order to convince them, he'd even gone as far as using his connections – probably through Martha – to get Owen a rather nice job at a teaching hospital.
Owen and Tosh had wanted to abbreviate Jacquelyn's name to Jackie, after him, to acknowledge what he'd done for them, what he meant to them. But Jack had laughed and said he'd once known a Jackie, and he wasn't sure they'd want to name their daughter after her.

'No. No, I won't, and that's the end of it.' When Jack was being stubborn, he could really drive you up the wall. 'I'm not getting UNIT involved in this. End of discussion.'
'Jack.' Gwen went after him. 'There's a strange box in the middle of the Hub. It's giving of energy spikes and God knows what else. It could be ticking down to an explosion, it could be trying to open the Rift, for all we know it could be some kind of an alien homing beacon inviting little green men to invade Cardiff. You are not walking away from this simply because you don't want to hand the credit to someone else. What the hell, Jack?'
He turned around, a stern look on his face. 'And what if it's a weapon? If I call on her, UNIT is going to know about this. They're not exactly subtle in their use of alien technology. I don't want to be the one to start a war.'
'Well, it's not exactly like you can contact this doctor of yours. You said it yourself, the only person on Earth who even has a fraction of his knowledge is Martha.'

'Jack?' They turned their heads simultaneously as Ianto's voice called out from below. 'The energy readings are spiking again.' As they walked quickly back to the centre of the Hub, Jack turned to Gwen. 'I guess you're right. This is beyond our knowledge. Time to make that call.'

'I drove over as soon as I got the call.' Lyn walked straight to the bedside, sat down and grabbed Owen's hand. 'I didn't realise it would be this quick.' Owen smiled at her, smiled at Tosh and Ken at his other side. 'Not so quick at all, love. I got a lot more time than I expected.' The smile remained as he closed his eyes and his face relaxed completely.

'Where did you get that? That is a truly priceless item you have there.' Martha looked surprised. 'Yeah, eh, that's the thing. We don't know exactly.' Jack seemed slightly ashamed. 'Anyway, what is it? What does it do?'
'It's a euthanasia box. They are extremely rare. They stopped producing them because of the misuse.'

Martha looked at Jack's puzzled face, at Ianto and Gwen's badly hidden shock, and smiled. 'I didn't mean euthanasia in the sense of mercy killing. It's the closest approximation in English of the true term, I guess. Euthanasia, good death, you know? That's what it does.'

'You see, you rarely, well, die in a perfect way, I guess. There's always ends left untied, things left unsaid, stories left unfinished. The people who made the euthanasia boxes couldn't stand that thought. So they did this. They created a box that registers your energy patterns, stores your hopes and dreams and checks in with you periodically. And when you die, if it happens within a few miles of the box, it will pick up on that and compare your experiences to your hopes and dreams. It will recreate your consciousness, creating you again in effect, and it will let you live out those hopes and dreams. Almost like a save-point in a computer game. And once it's run its course, once you've had your perfect life, it will create a memento for those left behind.'

'Only problem was, people started misusing it. They didn't want a perfect life and death, they wanted to live forever. They developed techniques to use their own mental energy to manipulate the circuitry of the box, to use its memory altering technology on the outside world. Or as the Doctor put it, they thought out of the box. I met one of them once.' She frowned. 'Very scary experience.'

'So is that what's happening here?' Gwen asked. 'Is one of those things trying to get out of this box?' Martha smiled again, shook her head. 'No. If that were the case, you wouldn't be showing me that box right now. You'd be too busy entertaining your new friend. They're not that subtle, you know. No, I think this one is doing exactly what it was meant to do.'

Exactly how it was meant to be. Toshiko smiled to herself. Her life had been so unexpectedly perfect. Almost too perfect, she realised. But no – they'd saved the universe often enough in their day. She supposed it was only right that it had paid them back in its own mysterious way. Them. Her and Owen. She'd missed him. She'd be with him again soon, she could sense that. She raised her right hand, looked at her ring finger. His ring, too large for her finger, held in place by her own. Like they'd always held each up. 'You and me against the world', she whispered with a smile. Like a fairy tale, complete with their happily ever after. She caressed the rings, then slowly took them of her finger. She reached for the ornate box on the nightstand. Strange – she could not remember getting it, yet it seemed like it had always been there. Now, she knew its purpose. She opened the lid and dropped the rings in. No use where she was going. No, she'd leave them here, keep them safe. A keepsake.

Something to remember them by.

Jack held the box in his hands carefully, pensively, as he stepped onto the pillar lift. He remained lost in thought as he drove the car through Cardiff traffic to its destination. As he walked towards the storage units, he looked it over carefully, turning it over in his hands, studying it. Then, he opened the lid and took out two rings. The larger of the two went into the box labelled 'Owen Harper – personal possessions'. The smaller band, with the diamond in it, he dropped into a similarly labelled one: 'Toshiko Sato – personal possessions'. He looked at the box again, standing still, pondering something for a minute. Then, he closed the doors to the storage units and walked back to the car, still clutching the box under his arm.

The twenty-first century was when it all changed. And he had to be ready.