Editing
Part 1
It was raining. He'd hidden Lisa in a warehouse in London and travelled through the night to Cardiff. The plan was still fresh in his head. The sooner he could get Lisa into Torchwood Three, the better.
He'd parked his car near the bay so he could watch the tourist office entrance. His laptop was open and he was using it to research the Captain he needed to impress. He had to get into his team, it was the only way to save Lisa and he would do anything to save her.
He had sat there for hours, observing the team he needed to join, putting the finishing touches to his plan. He knew everything about each member of the team, all their weakness. The Captain was going to be hard to convince. Everyone knew that he hated One and would never want to hire a survivor of the Battle. But he had to get into Torchwood Three. Torchwood Two, hidden away in the Scottish countryside, with it's weird leader would be even more impossible to infiltrate. It had to be Cardiff.
So, his only hope was to impress Captain Jack Harkness.
Rumours about Harkness had been a common topic of conversation around the water cooler in London. The one thing repeated over and over again about Harkness was that he flirted with anything with a pulse. And would sleep with the majority of them too.
That, he thought, was his in.
He watched throughout the day, as members left periodically. Sometimes alone, returning minutes later with coffee from a nearby Starbucks. Sometimes together, returning hours later with something alien looking.
As night had fallen and the rain had started, he'd watched as each member of the team left. Dr. Owen Harper, the team doctor, had slouched off first, disappearing into a pub on the Bay. Then Toshiko Sato, technology genius, had left, walking past his car without even looking up from her PDA. Finally, close to midnight, the second-in-command, Suzie Costello, had come through the door before locking it behind her. She stopped near his car, checked something in her bag and then hurried off down an alleyway towards the centre of Cardiff.
He continued watching for Harkness to come out. Surely, he had to go home eventually. At two a.m. he noticed someone appear on the Plass, he ran along in the darkness, with his coat flapping behind him. Could this be Harkness? Someone had once described the old World War Two style RAF coat that he wore. Was there a second entrance to their base that he didn't know about?
He got out of his car, turning his collar up against the rain, and walked around the Plass looking for anything that could be an entrance to the Hub. Finding nothing, he hid in the same alleyway that he had seen Suzie Costello go down hours earlier. He watched and waited, looking in the direction of the spot that Harkness had seemed to appear from. He watched until almost four a.m., when Captain Jack Harkness strolled back along the Plass and disappeared on the same spot, near the water tower.
He frowned with confusion, how could a man disappear into thin air. He left the alleyway and ran over to the water tower. He circled the water tower several times before concluding there was no hidden entrance.
Instead, he stood by the railings, where he could see both the tourist centre and the water tower clearly, until morning.
When the first signs of sun came he returned to the safety of his car.
He decided that catching Harkness of his own would be best, and he only seemed to go out alone at night. Did he live in the Hub? He'd certainly stayed there all night, leaving only once. He decided to fulfil his plan the next night. He would wait near the water tower for Harkness to go out and follow him. He would then find some way to help Harkness in whatever he had gone out to do, before introducing himself and then leaving. That should be enough to get Harkness to do some research on him.
He just needed to make sure that there was nothing, other than his history with Torchwood One, that would put Harkness off.
A quick search of his name would obviously lead to his Torchwood file. That shouldn't be too hard to edit. He hacked into the Torchwood server easily. It wasn't really even hacking, as a Torchwood employee he had every right to access it. Admittedly, changing his personnel file was frowned upon, or slightly illegal, it certainly wasn't encouraged.
However, he knew computers. And it would be easy to remove all evidence of his editing. It would take him only minutes to completely re-write his personnel file. To become the person he would like to be. He could delete his history with just the tap of a key.
He wrote himself an ordinary childhood. Working class family, parents, sister. Average school, average grades, average man. Nothing to mark him as unusual. He remove all mentions of mental illness. Removed the OCD, the depression. Torchwood One had never cared anyway, he told himself, Three surely wouldn't either.
He loaded it back on the server and closed the laptop with a bang. Now he just had to wait.
TBC...
(...when I've finished the second part!)