"She's not picking up," said Buffy, with a sigh, hanging up the phone. "So either she's out of the apartment, getting into trouble. Or she's broken something, and doesn't want me to know about it." She paused. "Or… she's finally gone and blown up the apartment." She bit her lower lip. "Damn. I bet that's not covered by the fire insurance."
"Probably out getting into bloody trouble, again," Owen said, struggling, with Suzie and Ianto, to move the corpse of the alien creature into the lab for an autopsy. "Way I see it."
"Well, what's her mobile number?" asked Tosh, dragging her laptop out of her bag. "I can trace it."
Buffy gave a grim laugh. "She doesn't have one," she said. "Seo refuses to use a cell phone. I don't know if she just doesn't want me to be able to trace where she is, or if she's seriously freaked that Saxon's going to go after her for screwing up his network the moment she got here, but… she just won't use a cell phone. Period."
"You want to go back to London?" asked Jack, handing her back her alien-blood-drenched sword.
Buffy thought the matter over. Then shook her head. "I'll help you clean up," she decided. "After all, wherever Seo is, now, it's not like I'll be able to find her and help her out."
Ianto looked between Jack and Buffy. "Right…" He cleared his throat. "We'll just… put this alien corpse away, and let you two get on with the… 'cleaning up'. Alone."
The moment the robots finished, Seo overrode the locks to the bulkheads. And, an angry, biting expression on her face, she stormed through the space ship, her eyes glaring ahead of her, her teeth gritted. Alison and David scurried after her, trying to keep up.
This was it, Alison realized. This was the final showdown.
The final bulkhead door lay ahead, and Seo slammed her hand down on the button, making the door slide away, to reveal…
Alison saw the gun before Seo did. "Get down!" she shouted, shoving Seo to the ground, as the flash of an energy beam ripped through the air where they'd been standing.
Alison looked up, staring at the creature who'd fired the gun.
A thin, reedy-looking creature, with red scaly skin and a gigantic, oblong head, his eyes narrow slits and his six fingered hands looking gnarled and wrinkled. He stepped forward, his eyes falling on Alison. "Human animal," he said, in a gruff, coarse English. "Vile little human animal. You think you can…"
Then his eyes fell on Seo. He hesitated, just a hair.
"Who are you?" he demanded of Seo.
Seo jumped to her feet, and surged towards him, jerking the gun out of his hand before he had time to register what was happening. He stood a good half-meter taller than her, but she stared him down as if she were the one in charge. "No," she snapped. "That's not what I want to know." She tossed the gun over her shoulder, and it fell, way far back in the hallway. "I want to know… why?"
The alien growled at her. "I don't need a gun to dispose of you, little human animal."
Seo crossed her arms. "Let me explain," she said, giving him a hard, dark stare. "You locked up children. Poor, frightened little children. You kept them alone and afraid in the dark, separated from their parents and those that loved them." Her voice dropped, shaking with repressed fury. "The only reason you're still alive, right now, is because I want to know why."
The alien gave a soft, hissing laugh. Coming up to Seo. Whispering into her ear, with a malicious voice, "Because the meat from human children is so much more tender than from adults."
Alison's jaw fell open, in horror. "You…?!"
But before she had a chance to say another word, the alien was thrown back against the control panel of his space ship, the impact denting into the metallic surface below, the switches sparking and sizzling around him.
Seo stepped into the room, every single cell of her body pulsing with a raging, violent anger. "How dare you," she whispered, her eyes fixed on him. "How dare you!"
"You're… not human," the alien realized. He gave a sharp, disjointed laugh. "Should have known. Humans are too stupid to be able to stop something like this."
He tried to get up, but Seo hurled herself at him, kicking him back into the control panel, even harder, so that a zap of electricity ran through his body.
Alison's breath caught in her throat.
"Alison?" David said, his eyes fixed on the scene before him. "Why's she superwoman?"
Alison honestly had no idea.
"Animals," the alien rasped out. "Vile little animals. Barely worth the meat they produce."
Seo punched him so hard in the jaw that the bone cracked beneath the impact. Then dragged him up to her eye level, glaring at him.
"I like them," she hissed.
He met her eyes with his own, as if daring her to do it. Daring her to go on and take the final blow. Kill him, outright. A space crook, an alien pirate, daring her to exact justice.
Seo let him go.
He thunked down against the metal floor. Rasping for breath, pooling a dark green blood out from him.
"Coward," he accused, as best he could through his broken jaw. "Letting me go."
"Do you want to know what it's like?" Seo whispered to him. Her voice now more vicious than ever before. "To be put away. In a dark, noisy little room, caged up, alone, afraid, and ashamed. With monsters hounding you and the little bitty remains of those teleport transfer chemicals boring their way through your skull?"
Then, with one angry thrust, Seo threw her hands at the alien's head — no, no, through the alien's head, through the sides of his head and all the way deep into his mind — a surge of ectoplasmic energy rippling past his skull and dissipating into the air around them, as Seo's eyes bore into his.
"Now, you'll know!" she shouted.
He screamed, as an even greater surge of energy poured from his head.
"This is what you deserve!" said Seo. "This is what you did to them!"
David's eyes went wide, as he held Alison's hand even tighter, trying to hide behind her legs. Tears beginning to sprout in his eyes, as he tried not to watch the torture.
"Seo!" Alison shouted.
Seo blinked. Then… seemed to suddenly realize… what was happening… what she was doing, that the alien beneath her was writhing and screaming and sobbing, agonized, and — deserve it or not, she was torturing him. Purposely torturing him, just to watch him suffer.
Seo jerked herself away, suddenly plastered against the back wall of the control room, staring at the alien in utter horror.
The alien who was now jabbering nonsense to himself, trapped in his own little nightmare, his entire body trembling in terror.
"I… I…" She looked down at her hands. "I can brain suck people. I can actually…" Her voice shook, a sudden raw, desperate fear overtaking her. She looked back at the alien, her eyes suddenly deathly fearful. "No."
"Seo," Alison said, trying to go up to her, trying to convince her to just take them home.
But Seo couldn't even hear Alison anymore.
"No!" Seo screamed, dropping down to the floor, hands clasping her head, huddling into a ball. "No! I won't turn into her! I'm not going to let that happen! I'll never… let…"
"Why's she screaming?" David asked.
Alison had no idea. She dropped down by Seo. "Seo, please," she urged. "Let's just leave. Go home. You can…"
Seo looked up at Alison, hard, dark eyes. "I'm going to kill myself."
Alison started back. "What?!"
"The goddess unborn!" Seo shouted. "That's what it means. That's what the Judge saw in me! Why Twilight chose me! Why everyone keeps hunting me down. Deep down inside, I'm Glory!" She stumbled to her feet, pacing forwards. "But I won't let myself be like Ben. Not like that weak-willed spineless child-murderer. If killing myself will save everyone else, then I'll damn well make sure I'm dead!"
The entire space ship bucked and shook, as Seo began poking and punching at buttons on the control panel. A determination in her eyes.
The alien scurried away from her, sobbing. "The blond goddess," he muttered. "Goddess of vengeance. Won't let you hurt the kids. Won't let you. Won't let me. No, no place to go. Trapped. Alone and shattered and undone and…"
"Seo!" Alison said. "Stop! Just…"
Seo kept poking and prodding at buttons. "I can crash it," she said. "Into the ocean. No people, there. Quick death, sudden. Shouldn't be able to come back from that. No chance I'll survive…"
"Oh, God," breathed Alison. "She's completely flipped."
And she was going to kill them. Kill them all. Because she'd done something that Alison didn't understand, and now she was terrified and panicking. Terrified and panicking just like Alison had done, when she'd been staring at that android and it had gotten into her mind…
Alison dropped David's hand, raced over to Seo, tried to pull her away from the control panel. "Don't do this!" she said.
Seo fought back, struggling and pushing against Alison. "I have to!" she screamed, and Alison could feel the terrified tremble shaking through her, with every fearful word. "They gave me too much! They turned me into her! She's waking up, inside of me, and I can't give her the chance to get out! She'll kill Buffy. She'll kill Dawn. She'll rip apart the world, and not even care. I can't do it. I'd rather die than become some inhuman monster who'd murder kids to save his own neck! I'd rather die than—"
"Then who'll fix the bloody dishwasher?!" Alison screamed.
Seo stopped. Froze. Blinked.
"Dishwasher," she repeated. Her jaw dropped. "Oh, God, the dishwasher! Mom's gonna kill me if I don't…" Then stopped. Turned around, registering the person in front of her. "Wait, what are you still doing here?"
"Crashing into the Earth and drowning to death!" said Alison, pointing to the window, which showed the ship going into a nose-dive towards the Atlantic Ocean.
Seo's eyes turned to David, who was now looking extremely afraid, huddling away from her. "Oh, no." She threw herself back at the control panel, smacking buttons and flipping switches. She stopped. Stared. "Teleports are jammed. I must have shorted them out when I hurled that alien through the control panel."
"Seo," said Alison, real urgency in her voice, "get us the hell out of here. Right now."
Seo looked between Alison and David. Then, a new determination in her eyes, she raced forward, and jumped into the pilot's seat. Grabbing up the controls, swerving them up just before they hit the water's edge.
Alison tumbled against the far wall, as the ship spun and wove through the air. Seo pushed the controls to the right, and they sparked, flashed beneath her hands. The ship groaned and shuddered, then began to spin round and round again, even more violently than before.
"We're going to crash," Seo realized. "I can't…" She stared out ahead of her, and a small smile appeared on her face. "No, wait!" She grabbed for a lever right beside her. "I read this in a book somewhere." And she threw it, hard as she could, up into the air.
The space ship's engines began to scream in protest, as the ship itself bucked and tumbled and shook, jerking Alison and David across the control room. And just when Alison thought she couldn't take any more…
Slam!
The thud of landing smacked her and her brother back, colliding them with the soft form of the mumbling, mad alien.
Alison braced herself for the rush of water seeping in. But…
No.
Nothing.
"I did it," Seo breathed. She gave a shaken, incredulous laugh. "I… I crash landed an alien space ship. I…" She paused, a thousand thoughts racing through her mind.
Alison peeled herself and her brother up from the floor. The ship was gently listing to one side, but she picked her way across the still smoking floor, coughing, trying to peer through the front windshield of the space ship. "Where…?"
"Out!" Seo shouted, grabbing her and David up and yanking them towards an exit hatch in the ship's side. She forced it open, and they all three jumped down onto a damp, marshy soil.
Thick mud squelching around Alison's shoes.
She looked around herself. "Hang about," she said. "This looks like… Scotland."
The ship was part-way submerged into the loch, its hull still crumbling and smoldering, having sunk itself deep into the mud.
"Yes, and we need to get out of here," said Seo. "Right now. Because any minute, Torchwood 2's going to show up to investigate, and Archie's going to tell Jack, and…" She yanked Alison and David after her. "I'm going to be in so much trouble for this."
David, beside Alison, looked around himself. Then squealed, in delight.
"I wanna go again!" he cried.
Author's Note: Here's what Glory says, in the Buffy show, about how it feels to be brain sucked:
"It doesn't kill you. What it does is make you feel like you're in a noisy little dark room. Naked, and ashamed. And there are things in the dark that need to hurt you 'cause you're bad. Little pinching things that go in your ears and crawl on the inside of your skull. And you know that if the noise and the crawling would stop, you could remember how to get out. But you never ever will." - Glory, in "Tough Love."
Note that when Glory does it, she's actually absorbing the energy. When Seo does it, she just lets the energy dissipate into the air, because she wants the end-result, not the mental energy.
I don't know if this is better or worse.
But I can see why finding out she can do that would completely freak Seo out.
(Possibly the best line in this whole thing is, "Then who'll fix the bloody dishwasher?!" Oh, Alison. I love you for that line.)