"I'm sorry."
Owen Harper turned round at the sound of the voice. The girl—the alien girl—stood before him. He tensed internally, but on the outside he only took a breath and drew himself up and out of his hunched, brittle posture.
"Pardon?" he said stiffly, acting as if he hadn't heard.
"I'm sorry," she repeated. It was a tense apology—executed with the gentle force one would use to bring up a thick, slimy bit of food lodged at the back of their throat—but an apology nonetheless. Wearily, Owen examined her face and body language, searching for signs of the strange, sly thing that had confronted him earlier that day. He could find none. She stood awkwardly before him, shoulders hunched inward so that she seemed to have shrunk. She kept eye contact, though, with a carefully blank expression that betrayed nothing.
"Alright." Owen leaned on the console to his immediate right.
"Alright?" She raised her eyebrows in disbelief, as if to say, surely it wouldn't be that easy.
"I'm not saying I trust you, 'cause I don't," Owen said curtly. "But Jack seems to think you won't kill us in our sleep and I suppose I'll just have to live with that."
She was silent for a moment. Then, she cocked her head to one side and squinted at him.
"Was that a joke?"
Owen almost chuckled. "Not exactly, but I like your sense of humor."
She relaxed visibly. "I'm Alice. I mean, I suppose I should reintroduce myself." She held out a hand. "That's how you greet each other on this planet, isn't it? By shaking hands?"
"You're getting it," Owen said as he leaned forward and took her small hand in his. "Owen Harper, but you already knew that." Alice flushed, two spots of pink appearing high in her pale cheeks.
"I am sorry," she muttered, breaking eye contact for the first time since he'd turned round. He shrugged.
"Forget it."
Alice looked down and bit her lip. She could see inside him; she knew that she'd caused more damage than he'd ever admit. She thought of the Doctor and felt instantly ashamed, but deep down within her gut, something whispered to her, told her that she didn't care about these humans and their fragile psyches. She shook herself, remembering what Jack had said. The humans were her family now, no matter how easy it was to break them. The Doctor wasn't going to come back, wasn't going to materialize in the middle of the Hub, stick his head out the TARDIS doors and announce with a grin that he'd only been having a laugh, that he wasn't really going to leave her on Earth with a bunch of strangers. There was a bitter taste in Alice's mouth, but she swallowed it. It was time to get to know her knew family, starting with Owen Harper.
"So, what do you actually do here?" Alice asked. Owen, who had dazed off into a reverie of his own, jumped and made a face that could almost qualify as a strained smile.
"I'm assuming Jack told you about the Rift, right?" Alice nodded. "Well, we monitor it from the Hub. If there's even so much as a ripple—" he tapped a screen in front of him—"We'll know."
"And if there is a…ripple?"
"We investigate. If there's something alien, something out of place, we deal with it."
Alice raised an eyebrow. "Deal with it?"
"If it's an object, we take it back here and lock it away. If it's something sentient…we're nonviolent if we can be."
"And if you can't?"
Owen turned away from the monitor to face her. "Then we kill them."
If Alice had a reaction she didn't show it. She knew Owen probably expected something out of her, a gasp or an expression of shock or anger. How would an alien feel about living under an organization that had murdered countless aliens? In truth, what Owen knew was barely scraping the surface. It was all so twisted, Alice thought, so ironic. She was alone on a planet full of people that lived in ignorance and fear of what lurked beyond their atmosphere, that would kill an alien as soon as look at one. Not only that, but she had been raised by a man who was the savior of countless species, who valued life above all else and tried to maintain peaceful coexistence between all creatures when possible. She knew that her Doctor wasn't exactly innocent; he had his fair share of blood on his hands. But he was still her Doctor, that shiny, bouncy man who roamed through all the colorful corners of the universe in his box, bluer than the bluest ocean. Compared to him, Torchwood would always be darker.
"So you kill aliens," Alice said briskly.
"But only if they're violent," Owen said hastily. "Only if they pose a real threat to the earth."
"And what if start presenting a 'real threat to the earth'?" She fixed him with her most piercing stare. "Would you kill me?"
Owen looked at her sharply. She was testing him and he knew it. "I don't know," he said tightly. "You're Jack's problem. Ask him."
"I'm nobody's problem," Alice said mildly. "At least not yet." Owen gave her a look and she grinned at him. "Only joking." When he continued to look suspicious, she let out a little laugh. "Don't be thick, Owen. I'm here to find out who I am. I'd hardly accomplish anything by killing you all." She used his first name because she knew it would unnerve him, and it did.
"You're very strange, even for an alien," Owen said, shaking off the chills that ran up and down his spine whenever she looked at him. "D'you know that?" Alice grinned widely and opened her mouth to answer, but she never got the chance. At that moment, a loud siren went off and one of the monitors began to flash red. Alice had to dodge smartly out of the way to avoid getting trampled as the rest of the team rushed to the center of the Hub. A door opened and closed as Jack emerged from his office, calling, "Toshiko, what've we got?"
Toshiko, who turned out to be the soft-spoken female, was tapping at the flashing monitor. "Rift activity," she said, "but only a slight tremor. It doesn't look big enough to let anything through."
"Keep an eye on it in case it grows, will you? Ianto, make sure you watch the papers for anything strange." The soft-spoken man—Ianto—nodded. "You can go home for the night. Gwen, Owen, you too. And Gwen, you make sure to let us know if the police call you with anything."
"I won't forget, Jack," Gwen said firmly. Alice watched carefully as she left the Hub. The firecracker. Alice would have to get to know her.
"Tosh, if you could stay for just a few more moments to watch the Rift, that would be excellent," Jack said. "I'll be in my office, just yell if you need me." Tosh nodded dutifully and peered at her monitor. Ianto had left the Hub so quietly it was as if he'd never been there. Alice found Owen by the door, putting on his coat. He glanced at her, the expression on his face unreadable, before ducking out the door. Alice stood uncertainly for a few moments, shifting awkwardly, and then she made for Tosh.
"What happens if it gets bigger?" Alice asked. Tosh jumped and whirled round to look at her.
"If—if the Rift activates any more than this, something could fall through…or get sucked in."
Alice shook her head in disbelief. "How can an entire city of people live on a rift in time and space and not know it?"
Tosh shrugged. "We're too preoccupied with ourselves, I guess. That, and, I suppose we don't want to acknowledge reality. Strange things occur, and we'd rather them be explained away than know the truth. Though I think the rest of humanity have become more open to the idea of other life in the universe. I mean, they've had to. What with Christmas Day and Big Ben and the Battle of Canary Warf."
"What?"
"Oh, I forgot, you're not from here. There were some encounters—invasions, I should say. Spacecraft coming down on Christmas Day and crashing into one of our national monuments just a year earlier. It got a great deal of people to believe in aliens and intelligent life outside of Earth."
"What about the—the Battle of Canary Warf?"
"That was a full on invasion. Two separate species, fighting each other and killing anyone that got in their way. Torchwood was involved—it was all before my time here, though."
"Oh." Alice fell silent, wondering what drew so many aliens to such an insignificant planet. Then, she looked at the monitor on which the Rift slumbered, mapped out across the city in a softly pulsing grid. It was inactive now, but if it were to waken, anything could pull its way out of the universe and on to planet Earth. The rubbish of the stars, spat up into a world of ignorance.
"Toshiko!" Jack called, poking his head out of his office. "It's been long enough. You can go home now."
"Thank you, Jack. Goodnight." Tosh stopped to gather her things, but as she straightened up and turned to leave, she hesitated. She turned round. "Goodnight, Alice."
Caught off guard by Tosh's acknowledgement, it took Alice a moment to find her words. "Goodnight, Tosh," she stuttered after a second's pause. Tosh smiled a little and walked down and around from the center of the Hub and out the door. Alice stood there for a moment, staring at the screens that surrounded her. She had an itch inside her, born from a lifetime of travel with the Doctor; she yearned to know what lay beyond the Rift, through the stormy vortex of time and space.
"Alice?" Alice jumped and shook herself out of her trance.
"Yes, Jack?"
"I was looking through storage and I found a futon that you could sleep on…it's not much but it beats the surgical table."
Alice turned and ascended the stairs to Jack's office. In his room, a small mattress lay adjacent to the alcove where his bed was. Jack came out of the bathroom, drying his hands on a towel. "You can go to sleep if you want. I just have some work to do." Alice nodded and yawned widely. "Hey," Jack laughed, "We do that, too."
Alice raised her eyebrows. "I know. So does the Doctor."
"I wouldn't know," Jack said with a grin. "I've never slept in the same place as him. Not that I haven't tried," he added impishly. Alice gave him a look. "Alright, alright, I'm leaving." He backed out the door, still grinning, and closed it with a click. Alice rubbed her eyes, and yawned again. She was exhausted, and her mind was full of the day's occurrences. She lay down on the mattress and pulled the sheet over her; closing her eyes, she slipped into the trancelike state that preceeded her sleeping, where she could meditate over all that she had learned. Foremost in her thoughts were Torchwood's purpose and the nature of its employees. How did they fit in to her own desires, her own mission? And, more importantly, how could she live up to the Doctor's ethos, and resist the urge to pick her human companions apart from within? Or, a small voice whispered as she drifted off, would she abandon the morals of the man who had abandoned her, and manipulate the humans to her heart's content? Only time could tell.
