Title: Tears of the Weevil

Rating: PG

Disclaimer: Don't own Torchwood, the characters or anything related to the show.

Jack sat in his office looking at the small metal green orb in his hand. He'd ordered Ianto not to tell the others what he knew, he didn't want Owen shouting his mouth off about using the device to get Gwen back or Toshiko lecturing him on the rights of weevils. It was tempting to take a trip to the future, to see if it was his future-self that had taken Gwen, but he knew that using it would drain its power supply and risk leaving Gwen and himself stranded.

"When will she be back?" Ianto stood hesitantly by his office door. "Gwen. When will she come back?" Jack didn't even know why she'd been taken by the weevil, or to what year, and he certainly didn't know when, or if, she was coming back. His half-hearted shrug must have portrayed that as Ianto's face fell.

"I honestly don't know."

"She's beautiful." Gwen smiled as she pulled the blanket over Lacey's sleeping form. "I can't believe she's really Anne."
"Lacey." Owen corrected smugly. "I won, you got the middle name." He dodged Gwen's playful punch and pulled her away from the sleeping blonde on the couch.

"I never expected to have a twenty-one year old daughter before I was forty." Owen sighed as he stripped off his shirt and trousers to get ready for bed. He paused as Gwen suddenly erupted in to a fit of giggles.

"It's just…so domestic." She couldn't control her laughter. "We're going to sleep at ten on a Friday night and our daughter's asleep in the other room…we're like an old married couple."

Owen smirked mischievously as he pulled her in to bed. "Who said anything about going to sleep?"

"Daughter in the house!" Lacey shouted from under her pillow as she heard Gwen and Owen giggling. Rolling her eyes she pulled on her Converse and silently left the apartment. Once the cold night air hit her she was wide awake, all traces of tiredness gone.

She passed several nightclubs full of rowdy patrons and headed towards the Bay to see Jack. "Change?" She looked up to find a middle aged homeless man in a shabby old coat and long bushy hair.

"You were a weevil." It wasn't a question. The man looked startled.

"I'm human!" He still had the feral gaze in his eye of any low level weevil, yet he indignantly denied ever being turned. Lacey took out a collection of bills and stuffed them in to the polystyrene cup he was clutching in his grubby dirt stained hands.

"No, no you're not." She replied sympathetically and left the startled man to his begging.

The streets were littered with people, hoards of young and old people alike crowding in to bars and nightclubs. Lacey had never seen so many people in the streets before. In her time the population had been much slimmer, with only three billion humans left in the world, most of which lived in the USA. It had taken a while for the infection to spread beyond the UK, but within the decade the infection had spread to Australia, the US and the Middle East. The United Kingdom had become a desolate wasteland inhabited by weevils and a few stubborn northerners who had ignored the UN's quarantine on the dead rock that had once been the great and bountiful English empire. There was no England and no Torchwood.

She'd lived in America with Rhys and Sarah and her older brother, ignorant of Torchwood and weevils. The American president had left the UK to fend for itself, not wanting the infection to spread to his own people; but it came eventually. She remembered Rhys sitting her and her brother down the day the first case had been reported on the news, his kind eyes looking wiser and more burdened than she ever remembered them. By the time she was seventeen her entire family had been killed by weevil attacks. She'd devoted two years of her life hunting and killing any weevil she could get her hands on. It had always been easy. She quickly found she had a knack for finding weevils, for thinking like a weevil, and so she juggled school with hunting and by the time Owen came for her she was two different people. A nineteen year old loner whose life revolved around her pre-med classes, and a merciless hunter who wouldn't think twice about killing a weevil, lower level or not. She'd tried to take out Owen until she'd finally given him the chance to introduce himself; he was lucky Rhys had been open about who her real parents were and what they did.

How would the cure change the future? The world she had grown up in. Would the infection spread beyond the UK? Would she lose her family like she had, or would Owen and Gwen claim her back? None if it seemed to matter as she walked through the bustling streets. She wouldn't be able to get back to her time to find out what had changed and she doubted she'd live long enough to see it. She could feel the tension in the air all around her.

The public were growing wary of Torchwood, losing faith in them as they fought against the conversion of the weevils. They couldn't see how much pain the ex-weevils were in, how confused and tormented they were by their past. They were no longer sons and daughters but killers, and once you were a killer there was no way back, Lacey knew that all too well.

"Miss." She pulled herself out of her thoughts as she heard someone shouting behind her. "Miss, stop!" She turned to find two uniformed cops standing by their car, hands resting on top of their batons.

"What's the problem officer?" She asked confidently, not intimidated by their little metal sticks.

"Miss Cassidy?" Her entire body tensed, torn between the human instinct to flee and the animal inside her telling her to fight. "You need to come with us."

"And what's the charge? Loitering?" She kept them talking, assessing her options. She was close to the Hub but if she didn't get to the spot where perception was altered without losing them then they'd know the base was within range. The authorities had been trying to pinpoint their location for the better part of a year and were already suspicious of the bay.

"Having a smart mouth." One of them pulled the metal baton from it's holster, his stun gun in the other hand. They'd obviously been warned not to play around when trying to pick her up.

"I'd love to kick your ass, but I'm going to let you go." She gave them fair warning as they began to advance on her, laughing at her bravado. They actually thought she was joking. Her adrenaline was racing and her muscles were aching for a fight.

Her eyes widened as one of the officers fell to the floor. Jack stood behind him holding his Webley pistol in his hand and smiling at the other cop. "hey there." He struck him on the head before he could react and frowned at Lacey.

"Picking fights again?"

"It's not my fault I've got one of those faces." She shrugged and nodded down at the unconscious police. "Looks like they're trying the old fashioned way to stop us. Arrest us all. We should call Owen and warn them. Looks like the war's starting."

"Andy." Gwen smiled as she saw her old partner approaching her and Owen. "How's it going?" He didn't smile or wave as Gwen did, he didn't look happy to see her either.

"So it's true then?" He shoved his hands in to the pockets of his cheap suit. "You're with them, you're one of those terrorists." She lost her smile as she felt Owen standing protectively behind her.

"Tell me you're still one of the good guys." She pleaded. "You're not working for that monster Emmerich-"
"We are the good guys Gwen. I dunno what happened to you, because I thought I knew you Gwen…I mean no one ever trusted Torchwood, swanning around like they owned the place, but I trusted you…looks like I was wrong. Gwen Cooper you're under arrest-" He went to clamp a hand around her wrist but Owen reacted quickly and slammed him against the car, a hand wrapped tightly around his throat and his feet off the ground.

"What makes you think I'm going to let you just lock her up? Hmm?" The young detective was turning purple as he clawed at Owen's hand in an attempt to free himself.

"Owen! No!" She pulled him away, watching as Andy dropped to the ground in a wheezing heap. "You better bloody well listen to me Andy! We are not the bad guys here-"

"It doesn't matter what he thinks!" Owen spat angrily. "Let's get out of here." He took hold of her hand but she stood resolute.
"Andy-"
"I'm a cop Gwen, you were once."

"C'mon." Owen growled impatiently.