She flares briefly at him, but he stares her out.
'What are you?' he asks, in his special talking-to-aliens voice.
'Gwawr,' she says.
'It means "dawn",' I tell Jack.
'Is it a name?' he asks. It is.
'A name like that in the local language?' says Jack. 'Not a good sign. What are you?' he asks again.
'Gwawr.'
'Hold on, sir.' I say and speak to her in Welsh.
'What are you?' I ask, and get the same reply.
'You are the dawn?' I ask.
'I am,' she says.
'Why are you the dawn?'
'Because, after me, everything will be reborn.'
I'm definitely agreeing with Jack's 'not good' assessment.
'What?!' says Tosh. I translate.
Then she says the 'reborn' bit, again, in English.
Tosh begins to speak to her in Japanese, and it's obvious from her face she's getting the same answers.
Jack musters some French, but I can tell it's been a while since he used it, then seems to yodel a language at her. 'Gwawr,' she says.
'Human languages only, I think,' says Jack. 'Where are you from?'
No one's surprised when she says something vague: 'A different place.'
'We're not getting anywhere,' says Gwen. 'Try finding out what she does know. Tosh?'
I move away, as Tosh begins to ask simple facts: what's the capital of the United Kingdom? What year is it? She answers fast, with no thinking time. By the time I've moved out of range, Gwawr is pinning down Shakespeare quotations to the right play and scene. I come back several hours later and she's answering questions about rivers in Nepal. Owen's cutting in when he thinks of something medical to ask her. They usually involve very long words, on his part or hers.
'Are we any closer to knowing what she is?' Gwen asks Jack, who's standing over the autopsy bay.
'She knows a lot about us; she's human, but not; and she can create fire at will. Ianto, what happened when she had her hands on your forehead?' I was waiting for someone to get round to that bit.
'She was going through my mind, sir. It was as if she was looking for something.'
'Do you have any idea what it was?' asks Gwen. 'Did she focus on anything in particular?'
'No, it was like she was just – flicking through. She didn't like it when I tried to hide things at the back of my mind, she went after that like a rat down a drainpipe.'
'Er, help?' says a little, but still sarcastic, voice.
Owen's bent back over his chair, head almost touching the desk behind him. Gwawr's hands are clamped round his head. Tosh rushes over to him and tries to pull Gwawr's hand away. Gwen tries that too, on the other side, but neither of them move her at all, even when Gwen dangles her entire body off Gwawr's arm. Jack has his pistol up but I haven't heard him cock it.
Gwawr drops Owen's head onto the desk with a clunk, and looks at the girls like a drunk saying to bouncers 'I'll go quietly now'. They let go, giving it the 'mind that you do'. She whirls round, too fast for Jack. And then it's like they're hugging at arms' length, her at his temples, him with his hands and pistol planted in her chest, and I hear the long slow sound of him cocking the gun.
And like that they stay. Jack isn't going to shoot her for scanning his brain, and she doesn't seem to be doing anything more.
'If she's going to scan his brain, this is going to take a while,' says Owen, helping himself to painkillers and waggling his mug at me for coffee to take them with. 'What with him living forever, or in several dimensions or whatever.'
'You know if you take those you can't drink tonight,' says Tosh, when I come back.
'Tosh,' says Owen. 'I'm a doctor. I know what I'm doing.' Even I can't quite keep the 'yeah right' off my face. 'And yes, I do intend to go out and get a bit drunk tonight, because it's Friday, and that's what people do.'
'But we have to be in tomorrow,' says Tosh. 'We don't get Saturdays off; you may have noticed.' We rarely get Sundays, either, but no one says anything about that.
'Well, in that case, I will take some more of my little friends in the morning,' says Owen.
What looks like becoming a lecture on how we should all get a life is interrupted by a groan from the floor. I go pick up Jack's gun from where it's hanging loosely from his trigger finger, stepping around the barrel carefully. Owen hands me a cold compress to put on Jack's forehead.
'Gwen,' he says thickly. 'Go stand in front of Gwawr.' Gwen does not look keen, but she does it. No reaction. 'Tosh.' No reaction.
'Men,' says Jack. 'Not women. Men.'
'That your new year's resolution?' asks Gwen.
'It's only men,' says Tosh. 'She's looking for a specific man.'
'And we all agree letting her find him is a bad thing?' says Owen.
'We can't let her near any men,' says Tosh. Only Tosh can deliver a line like that without a smile.
'Bit like you, Jack,' says Gwen, and he smirks and peels himself off the floor.
'I think we should put her in the cells to be on the safe side,' says Jack and then flexes his entire body including his face. 'Wow. There were some good bits in there I'd forgotten.'
'Human food, sir?' I say. He nods. Gwawr comes quietly, which makes a nice change, with no more attempts to scan me. I put her a long way from the weevils, down at the far end, take her some dinner and do all the things I have to do before I can leave.
She's still there in the morning, just arranged on the floor, asleep. The white of her shines through the CCTV as bright green, so I turn the contrast down a touch, check the weevils are sleeping and start on the coffee.
I'm not the least bit surprised when Jack is in early.
I can feel the hesitation as he enters me, the slight shake of his body as he worries it will happen again. But everything goes to plan, and when we've finished, I can see all over his face that he's relieved. In both senses. This time we're not disturbed, and there's time to hold each other before I have to put Tosh's coffee on.
I knock up a cooked breakfast, surprising Jack and Tosh with warm plates, and take one down to the cells. The weevils bare their teeth at me as I walk along the corridor.
'Bore da, Gwawr!' I say, before I get to the cell at the end. 'I brought you breakfast.' I say, opening the hatch.
I'm about to shovel in the food when I notice the cell is dark. She's not there. It's empty.
