It was a boring evening in the Torchwood Hub. There had been no spikes in rift activity, no aliens sitings, no Weevil attacks, not even sneeze of anything resembled anything occult or alien.

Ianto had taken to sitting in the tourist office. He was waiting for everyone to leave so he could sneak down to Jack's office.

Toshiko was tapping away at her computer, trying to improve her algorithms for analyzing Rift activity. For Toshiko, her work was never done. Everything had to be perfect and everything could always be improved, especially computer algorithms.

Gwen was filling out her paperwork for their latest coverup story, a device had come through the Rift causing people to spontaneously break out in dance. That had been a fun one to fix and easy to make a cover story for. Flash mobs were all the rage nowadays.

As for Owen, he was playing solitaire at his desk. There had been nothing for him to do lately. Not since he had finished his initial screening for their mysterious patient that had come in. Jack wouldn't give him any details at all as for how she got here. He recalled the heated conversation that they had had a week and a half earlier...

"This isn't a bloody hospital Jack!" Owen had said when Jack insisted they put the girl in one of their seldom used care rooms. "Who is this mysterious Doctor friend of yours anyway? Can't be a very good Doctor if he's passing his patients onto me." Owen paused for a second and thought about what he said "No wait, I must be a bloody brilliant doctor if my reputation is bringing in your friends from the Rift."

"She's not from the Rift. The Doctor is an old friend of mine and I'm doing this as a favor. Now run your tests on her. I want to know everything we can before she wakes up. We don't know what that device is on her back and if it's dangerous. The only thing we are certain of is that it's alien."

Jack really wished he had been the first one to discover the blood stained note in her hand. It was a hastily scrawled message that said,

'Jack, please look after her until I get back. Sincerely, The Doctor'

Fat lot of help that had been. He hadn't even given us her name. If he had been the first to find it, he could've avoided a lot of awkward question from his team, a lot of questions that he didn't have answers to.

Owen scanned the report that Tosh had given him from the finger print results. Her name was Lucy Schwart, American born, college student, 22 years old. From what he could gather, nothing out of the ordinary. Gwen had gone through all the personal information she could find. No link to anything alien or occult. Hell, the girl wasn't even religious. Brown hair and eyes. 162.5 centimeters. Her profile was so average, it almost hurt.

What had Lucy been doing a week and a half ago with this Doctor that had gotten some alien device attached to her spine? From what he could gather from the x-rays, it was embedded into the muscle and tissue around her spine with tiny connections into her central nervous system. He was afraid to do too many tests to her until she woke up. She had been a mess when he had found her on the autopsy table. He thought someone had left a dead body for him to exam, she was so beat up. A quick analysis showed she had fallen from a high height and collided with something on the way down. There were numerous bone fractures and breaks. Countless amounts of internal bleeding. By every right, she should have been dead. But there she was, breathing shallowly.

It had become obvious very quickly that her body was self healing at a faster than normal pace. Within three days, all of the breaks looked as though they were a couple of weeks old instead of the few days old that they were. They were healing so quickly that Owen had to rebreak some and reset them, It wouldn't do for her to wake up with a crooked leg.

After a day of her being there, Owen had to put her in an induced coma. He was trying to get data from the device on her back with Tosh when she woke up for the first time. Lucy had started thrashing in screaming. Whether it was out of pain or surprise from not knowing where she was, it was impossible to tell. She was still too injured to be awake, Owen knew, and had torn out most of her stitches with that episode.

A few days ago, he stopped giving her the medication to sedate her, deeming her healed from the worst of her injuries, which by all rights was completely unheard of. At worst, now Lucy had a few sprains. He had already removed all her stitches. All that was left was some slight bruising. She was a medical miracle.

Now he played the waiting game with her. She should be waking up any time now and he wanted to be here when she did. There was always someone in the Hub these days, watching the cameras, waiting for her to wake up. They had put her in restraints after the majority of her fractures had healed. Jack had voiced his worry about the device being a weapon and not wanting her to panic and use it when she woke up. The rest of the team agreed, although of course Gwen had fought it a bit at first with her "It's not right, she hasn't done anything wrong" debate. Jack quickly shut her up about that saying then she could be the first one in the room when she woke up, hope Rhys wouldn't miss her if Lucy overreacted to being in a strange place after being on the brink of death.

Jack came up behind Owen "Nothing new?"

Owen switched over to the camera monitoring the care room. "Nothing. No, wait." Owen switched over to his remote monitoring system that he used to track her vitals. "Her heart rate has picked up. It seems our mysterious patient has awoken."

It was strange how time passed in the darkness. The shape and colors I saw betrayed no passing of time, Sometimes the shapes and colors formed into something concrete that I could recognize. Most of the time, they turned into the Doctor. I was running down an endless amount of halls with him.

The halls would never end. All we had to do was get back to his TARDIS, then we could go home. One time, the Doctor had disappeared and I ended up on an operating table with two people standing over me. They looked human, but I didn't recognize them. I fought them, they were trying to something to my back. They couldn't touch it, I wouldn't let them. If they did, then they'd know. Know that I wasn't normal. I just wanted to go home. After that, the darkness quickly came back.

The shapes and color appeared. Ever swirling. It was like they were trying to comfort me.

They formed the Doctor's face, "Lucy, it's time to wake up," he said in his British accent.

"I don't want to, I'm so tired Doctor." I was so warm. I just wanted to stay here forever. The colors and shapes wouldn't hurt me.

"Lucy, it's time to wake up," he said again, "everyone is waiting for you."

I sighed and reluctantly struggled to pull myself out of the place I was in. It wasn't easy, I just wanted to float back down.

Suddenly there was darkness. Not again, I want my shapes back. It took me a second to realize that it was dark because my eyes were closed. I tried to move my arm to wipe the sleep out of my eyes, but found that I couldn't. I immediately started to panic. Oh no, I didn't get off the ship. The Doctor didn't come back for me. I'm back on the operating table. Then I realized that the restraints holding me down were made out of some kind of acrylic material, not the vines of the operating table the Lorian had me on.

I looked around with some difficulty. My whole body felt very stiff, like I had been laying here for a while. The room appeared to be some kind of care room. It was set up like a hospital room, but instead of being white with tile everywhere, the walls were painted a warm brown color, there was carpet on the floor.

I tried with immense difficulty to remember what happened. I was on the Lorian ship with a man called the Doctor. Why had the Lorian been operating on me? Oh no, that's right... the device on my back. I fell. So how am I still alive? How did I get here? Is this where the Doctor lives?

Just then, a man came into the room. "Stay out there and don't come in until I say. Yes Owen, I know you want to check on your patient, but I need to talk to her first." He closed the door behind him and strode over to the bed where I laid. There was a frown on his face as he looked down at me. We stared at each other for a solid minute. He was definitely very handsome. The classic kind of handsome, not model on a billboard handsome. His attire was as timeless as his face; suspenders and dark khakis with a collared blue shirt.

I tried to say something, but it came out as a croak. My throat felt like a desert. The man took something off the table next to and held it up to my lips. I sipped at it gently, not taking my eyes off him. I coughed after the first sip. The water burned my raw throat. The second and third sip felt a lot better. I quickly finished the cup, still not taking my eyes off him. My memory was still a little shaky, but he was definitely not the Doctor.

"Who are you?" I finally managed to get out.

"I could ask you the same thing, only, we already know all there is to know about you except how you came to be here. Lucy Schwart, college student, graduated number 28th in her high school class, 5'4", 140 lbs, 22 years old, enjoys sewing and knitting. When my vortex manipulator started beeping, I thought it was the Doctor I would find back at the Hub, not some broken girl lying on our autopsy table. So care to tell me how you got here? I'd rather hear before the rest of my team does. Although they're used to dealing with aliens, there are some things I don't think they're ready to deal with yet. I'm Cap'n Jack Harkness by the way."

I regaled as much as I could to Captain Jack. I was in no position to argue. I just wanted help, and to get this thing off of me. Occasionally I had to back up when I would remember parts. Things came back to me as I talked. A few times, I had to stop and pause, collect myself as I tried not to cry. My memory became fuzzy towards the end. I remembered jumping and falling, but not really anything that came afterwards or why I fell in the first place. "So where is the Doctor?" I asked when I finally finished."

"Good question." Captain Jack had sat down on a stool while I was talking. He got up now. "I'm going to call Owen in so he can poke and prod you some more as we work out what to do about that thing on your back. I'm going to go brief them for a few minutes before I let everyone in, so they know what's going on."

"Wait, can you at least take these straps off me?" I asked. I could feel the soreness and rawness of my wrists and ankles as I had been talking.

"Sorry, not yet. Let Owen examine first and then we'll talk."

I sighed, wondering what was going to happen to me. Who were these people? Was I in some secret bunker under Area 51? With the way things had been going, I wouldn't be surprised. How long would they keep me here? Was I going to be locked up and experimented on forever?

After a few minutes, a thin faced man walked into the room holding a chart. He was wearing a white lab coat. His professional image was ruined with the buttons attached to the collar of his lab coat, his jeans and t-shirt underneath. "Dr. Owen Harper. No need to introduce yourself, we all already know who you are. It's nice to see you awake. We've all been wondering how you got here through all our security."

Owen sounded very snide and full of himself. I didn't really care, he was apparently the one who kept me alive apparently, so I better be at least a bit thankful. "Are you the one that patched me up when the Doctor left me here?" I said it a bit bitterly. It was true, he had left me here, abandoned me.

"Patched up is a bit of an understatement. You were utterly broken when we found you. The rate at which you healed is incredible," he flipped through some papers on his clipboard, "no it's more than that, it's impossible. I've never seen anything like it, and that's saying something," he thought for a second "Well maybe besides Jack, but he's a whole other story. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's the device attached to your back that's causing this." He flipped through some more charts and pulled out some X-RAYs, MRI's and other scans that I didn't recognize. He hung them up on the wall to my left. I craned my head to look at them.

"Jack's report seems to line up with my findings. However, one thing is puzzling me. I haven't told the others yet, except for Jack of course. He is the boss man," Owen rolled his eyes, "Your DNA seems to be changed a bit. It doesn't match anything in our systems and the rate at which it's changed seems to have slowed down. In fact, the rate at which your DNA changing has slowed down in correlation with the rate at which you healed yourself. You were healing much faster when you first arrived. Almost like your body was in a hurry to heal itself, although that's no surprise considering without the healing you probably would've died."

"So what does that mean? Am I no longer human or something? Are you going to dissect me now to figure out what this thing is?"

"Actually, it would be a vivisection since you're still alive, and no, we are not going to cut you up to figure out what it is. We were hoping you could tell us what it was. Jack mentioned something about it giving you superpowers? As for the DNA part, we're not exactly sure what it means yet." He smiled.

"Well I mean, i jumped across a huge opening, but I don't know how it works. I didn't exactly get a chance to try it out." If my DNA had changed, was I no longer human? Was I turning into an alien species?

"No, I suppose you wouldn't have. Oh, one more thing I forgot to ask, when you fell, did you land on your back? The tests seem to confirm that, but I just wanted to make sure." Owen had walked over to the wall with the X-rays again.

I thought for a second. "I think so. I hit a railing on the way down, which kind of spun me a bit."

"Ok. I don't know how the thing on your back looked when it was first put on, but Tosh reckons that part of it broke when you fell. I'm going to draw some blood now."

"Tosh?" I asked while squeezing my eyes shut. I hate needles. Owen seemed to notice my discomfort. I swore I could hear him smirk.

"Toshiko Sato, another member of the team. I'm sure you'll be meeting her and the others soon enough." He put another vial on the end of the tube.

"How many of you are there?"

"Me, Jack, Tosh, Ianto and Gwen. Now, I'm going to take these to my lab to run some tests." He got up and started to leave.

"Wait, who are you guys? Are you the CIA or something?" I called out.

"No, we're Torchwood." And with that, he closed the door behind him.

I fell asleep again shortly after Owen left. I was still exhausted and sore all over. Plus, being strapped to a bed with nothing to do was absolutely boring. On a scale of sitting in the DMV to going to an amusement park, it was below the DMV, which is saying something.

There were no dreams, just the familiar darkness.

I awoke later to the door being sharply closed. Captain Jack was back in the room along with Owen and an oriental woman who I had yet to meet. She was very pretty I decided. She had shoulder length black hair and wore glasses. "I'm Toshiko Sato," she said in a quiet voice. She stood back, like she was afraid of me.

"I won't bite," I said with a smile, trying to diffuse the obvious tension in the air.

"You almost did. Knocked Tosh's glasses clear off her face the first day you were here." Owen commented.

"What?" I asked. I didn't remember anything after I arrived here. I just assumed I had been in a comatose state the entire time I had been here.

"Yeah, you woke up when we were trying to look at your back. You started screaming and thrashing. We weren't quite sure what was going to happen when you woke up, hence the uh-" he nodded towards the restraints."

"But Owen has deemed you safe enough to take them off. Be warned, we are all armed, so if you've been hiding something or attack any of us, we will shoot without second thought," Jack was very serious. I didn't doubt he'd shoot me without second thought. I glanced at the holster attached to his belt.

According to Captain Jack, I had been out for a little over a week and a half. Despite my supposed amazing healing abilities, it took me a couple days to get both my mental and physical stamina back. My whole body was ridiculously stiff. It felt like I had been lying in a coffin for more than a century. The first time I swung my legs over the bed to walk around, they collapsed under me. Jack caught me, i felt like a child taking its first steps.

My first few days with the Torchwood team were filled with tests, tests and more tests. If it existed in my body or was suspected to, Owen tested for it. I spent some time with Toshiko as well while she tried to mapped the device on my back and determine its functionality.

It was decided that we would wait a couple days for me to recoup until doing more practical tests, as Owen put it. I was more than willing to comply, I was afraid of what the results would be or what I would become, I didn't want to lose control again.

My second day started and ended with me on a treadmill. Despite the fact that I was still fatigued, Owen wanted to test my stamina. "Just curious" he said. Soon, an hour on the treadmill turned into two. At the mark of the third hour, when it was obvious I wouldn't be slowing down anytime soon, and after a lot of begging, Owen set up a movie for me in front of the treadmill to keep me from getting bored to death. At a steady pace, I didn't start feeling tired until the fifth hour. Members of the team popped in and out all day and I got the chance to learn more about Torchwood.

My final time for the treadmill was eight hours and seventeen minutes. I could've gone longer, but Owen was afraid of me developing stress fractures. He told me that at full health, he wouldn't be surprised if I could run indefinitely.

Privacy was an illusion in the Hub. I was informed that I was under constant surveillance and to not try anything funny. I slept in the care room at night with the door locked from the outside. Sunlight was suddenly becoming a fantasy, the Hub had no windows.

"Alright Lucy, today we start our practical tests. This morning I mainly just want to see what you can do or what you think you can do. Afterwards, I've designed another lovely sheet for you to fill out."

"I thought being out of school would mean I had less assignments to do, not more," I sighed.

"Trust me sweetheart, you'll never get away from it," Gwen chimed in. She sat at her desk, filling out paperwork again. The team had been call out last to "unusual activity" just outside of Cardiff. They wouldn't tell me much more besides that. Who was I going to tell anyway?

Jack had cut me off from all communication to the outside world. Apparently two days after my "adventure" with the Doctor, I had been declared missing. I could only imagine how my parents were reacting. My mom would be the worst. She could barely handle me being away at college, I could only imagine what was going through her mind now.

Owen steered me down a labyrinth of halls. I heard Gwen behind me, "Oh come on Jack, this paperwork isn't going anywhere, we just want to watch." It looked like the whole team would be watching me today. Joy. I just prayed nothing would go wrong. I could already feel my palms sweating.

Owen seemed to notice my nervousness. He and I had grown to be able to read each other quite well over the past few days. "Don't worry. Just do what you think you can. This thing is hooked into your central nervous system, which means you're in control of it." I hadn't mentioned the psychic controls to any of them yet, and I didn't know if Owen or Toshiko had picked it up in any of their tests yet. I wouldn't be surprised if Tosh had, she seemed to be able to map out anything. If she had noticed it, it seemed she hadn't said anything to Owen yet.

Gwen, Ianto, Toshiko and Captain Jack caught up with us. Gwen smiled encouragingly at me. I smiled back, but it felt more like a grimace. Why did it feel like they were taking me to the gallows? Probably because it something bad happens, it will be the gallows, or at least Jack's gun.

The room we ended up in was a long room that reminded me of a shooting range. My suspicions were quickly confirmed. "I cleared out all the dummies so you have plenty of room to do whatever it is you're going to do. Now listen team, I want you to stay against this back wall while Lucy does her thing. If I say get out, do not question me. Yes that includes you Owen," Jack added when Owen started to protest, "Here Lucy, wear this so we don't have to shout across the room at you." Captain Jack handed me one of their ear pieces. "Now just relax and see what you can do." He gestured at me to move to the other end of the room.

I felt embarrassed. I had no idea where to start. I walked to the other end of the room, my face burning red. This shouldn't be happening. I should be in class right now. When was I going to wake up from this nightmare? I took a deep breath as I heard Captain Jack talk in my ear. "Can you hear me? Good. Now just remember, relax. We're all here if anything goes wrong." I honestly didn't know where to start. I voiced this to Jack. "You said you jumped some large distance back on the alien ship? Why don't you start with that?"

I nodded, he probably couldn't see it from all the way down there though. I crouched down and took another deep breath. Relax Lucy, you didn't do anything special for the treadmill the other day, just try to jump like it's natural for you. So I tried that. I aimed for the middle of the room, much farther than an ordinary person would be able to jump. I didn't bother with a running start. If my memory served correctly, I didn't need one for the ship. I leapt.