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"One more foot Captain Jack Harkness!" Erin bellowed dangerously, "If you so much as think about leaving this Hub - I'll personally kill you. A hundred times."
"Sounds like a threat," Jack muttered darkly, much too exhausted to play along with Erin's jokes. She was fun, a grateful breath of fresh air for Torchwood, but it was times like these that Jack needed quietness and a considerate hand of comfort. He froze in his tracks, spun dramatically on one foot and glared meaningfully at Erin before stalking back to his office, "happy now?"
"Tremendously," she waggled her finger pretentiously at him, chuckling happily to herself as she refocused her gaze on the flickering computer display on her desk.
"Where have the others gone?" Jack glowered at her back. He was skulking like a resentful teenager and, for all the shame it made him feel, he couldn't help but feel that way towards her. He wasn't entirely sure what she had done to upset him in such an immediate way, it almost felt that, not too long ago, they had been arguing and shouting - like enemies, the defender of earth versus the invading alien threat… But that was an odd thought - strange - stupid - impossible! He banished it quickly from his mind, adding a slap to his forehead for emphasis. No, in the two years that he'd known Erin she'd been nothing but compassionate and sweet; his more prolific heart, the bearer of his soul.
"Bethan's still outraged about that message - she went to the police station to check it out. And the guys… well, now I come to think about it, I don't know where the guys have gone."
"Raise them on comms?" Jack suggested shortly, fighting a valiant but useless battle to keep the biting sarcasm from his voice.
"Can't," she politely ignored his tone, pointing towards two discarded headsets on the desk beside her.
"Idiots," Jack growled, "I'm sure I must've been drunk or something when I hired you lot. Brainwashed, more like…"
"Er - who'd ever be smart enough to brainwash you?" Her voice caught in her throat, as if it pained her to speak those words.
Jack, slightly smug at the idea of her worrying about the state of his brain, let a smile wash briefly over his face, "Only the best. It'd take a real genius, someone hard working and persistent, someone so dashing and sweet that I'd never suspect them. Someone so good at lying that I'd trust them with my life - figuratively of course. Someone I'd tell all my secrets to. Someone I'd… love. And trust me, that ain't easy. Brainwashing me ain't easy." He jabbed a thumb proudly at his chest, momentarily grateful that he had someone to boast to. Torchwood wasn't the same without his swollen ego - a favourite saying of Bethan's.
"No," Erin sighed dreamily, cutting across his smug monologue with a knowing smile, almost as if he had given her some great word of comfort. "How, technically, would someone brainwash you anyway?"
"Hmm… Don't know if I should tell you - wouldn't want you getting any ideas… Well, someone, theoretically, would have to possibly assimilate the lives, faces, voices, emotions of someone I trusted, someone close to me - you lot, for instance."
"And then?"
"Well, it's quite simple really. They'd have to get you out of the picture, somewhere you couldn't reach me, maybe even write you off totally."
"Kill us, you mean?"
"Yeah, basically."
"Sounds fail proof."
The room heaved with Jack's inflating ego, "Oh, I don't know about that. I know my team pretty well - I like to think I'd be able to tell if I was being lied to."
"Getting any vibes?"
"Nope. Rather empty on the vibe-front, although the strange couple under the Bay are setting me on edge."
Erin visibly wilted: Jack sympathised, it was all he'd spoken about since getting the transmission earlier that morning. Although, in his defence, it wasn't an everyday occurrence that someone managed to hack into Torchwood under such odd circumstances.
"I'd like to find out more about this Gwen girl," Jack explained, pushing the chair with his legs so that he shot towards the board where he'd previously written on. "Let's collaborate - pull up the police files Bethan stored on the database."
Erin looked hesitant, but crossed slowly to the nearest computer, typing rapidly into the search bar until she and Jack were faced with a magnitude of lists, throbbing with names that moved up and down the lists like a pulsating caterpillar.
"Type in her name."
Again, Erin went strangely pale, but obeyed until the list had been narrowed down to a few thousand names, each one flickering on the screen impatiently.
"Dang you Welsh with your names," Jack mumbled, "okay, cross check that list with a screenshot of her from the VT."
"Jack - are you sure we should be doing this?"
"Y'know, I get the sinking feeling that my team needs a serious work ethic transplant. What's the matter with you guys lately? Ever since last night, you've been acting odd."
"Nothing. Nothing's wrong with us. It's just that… I think this should be left to the police and-"
"Yeah," Jack drew the word out slowly and stared up at Erin in confusion, "I thought you said Bethan was talking to the police?"
A strange expression melted over Erin's face - it was almost as if he'd caught her red handed in the midst of a great theft. It worried him in a way he hadn't expected, and faint distrust crept forwards in the back of his mind - signalling that something was wrong and, inexplicably, that everything was linked to the drowning girl named Gwen.
Erin was quick to recover, "she is. Don't worry about it. She's dealing with everything."
"There's something you guys aren't telling me," Jack said the words gently, unsure of how he could make sense of everything.
"There's nothing."
"There's something. Cross check her name with her picture, use the police database."
Erin swallowed slowly, "shouldn't we wait until the others come back?"
"Why?" Jack's confusion deepened; nerves set in. What could be so bad that they would all be lying to him. "There's no need - do it now."
"Seriously Jack-"
"Seriously! I'll do it myself." It was a simple enough procedure, one he'd seen Bethan doing a thousand times, so why was Erin struggling so much? He pulled up the VT again, dragged the cursor over a picture of the girl mid-cough and clicked 'cross reference with database'. Flashing a searing glare at Erin, he leaned back and waited for the computer to sieve through the information, until at long last one name remained on the blue screen. Jack stared, mind struck, at her full name, date of birth, home address, blood type as he realised, with a cold jolt in his chest, what he was looking at: a Torchwood employee medical file.
"What the hell…" He breathed, running his fingers through his hair.
"Technical glitch," Erin laughed uneasily.
He wasn't listening: a picture demanded his entire concentration, one of the couple currently submerged in water - one of them both standing either side of Jack, laughing and hugging him. Another - this time of the three of them with another pair, joking and posing for the camera.
"Out of my way Erin," he growled angrily, feeling his thirst for adventure fire up again.
"Where are you going?" Erin's mouth hung open as she stared after him, making for the Cog door exit.
"I'm fed up of being the only one left out of the joke - it's about time I found out the punch line…" Truthfully, he wasn't exactly sure where he was going - it only made sense to escape the tense atmosphere of lies and confusion.
As the salty air of the Bay hit him he reeled from the sickness of distrust. Somehow, although it made little sense, the key to all of this insanity was the girl named Gwen and her partner. A million questions fizzled through Jack's mind as he set off across the Plass, grumbling under his breath. Who, really, was Gwen Cooper? Why did the database recognise her as a Torchwood employee when no one had ever heard of her? How on earth could those pictures exist?
He froze when he reached Mermaid Quay, unsure of where he was headed. To go back to the Hub whilst he was flooded with this confusion was unthinkable. Suddenly, as if in response to his thoughts about the girl called Gwen, he remembered reading something on the file: 'former employee of the South Wales Constabulary.'
And, all of a sudden, nothing seemed to matter anymore. Erin - Bethan - his entire lying team - they meant nothing… The only truth he could hold onto was that somewhere in the murky water, a girl named Gwen was trapped, was dying, had called for him, needed him. It felt only natural that he should help, rescue her, the eternal dashing hero - and the answer apparently lay close by at the police station.
Meanwhile, merely thirty feet away, the girl called Gwen was exhausted to the bone, and was struggling to remember why she shouldn't give in to the cold embrace of the water. It made almost no sense to continue pumping her legs, eating away at her diminished energy stores, in the dim and childish hope that someone would come and save her. Her mind was half-lost to the frozen inevitability that, as soon as she lost consciousness, both she and Ianto would have lost all hope. No one was coming - there was no eternal dashing hero to save his somnolent team. The girl called Gwen gulped in a hasty breath of sparse air, followed by an inrush of bitter water - her eyes stung - her throat hurt - her mind burnt with a decreasing will for survival. Yet faintly, none of it seemed to matter - not the creeping icy water, not the tiredness and mortal exhaustion taking hold over her body, not the realisation that Ianto was getting heavier by the second, not the excruciating sense of loss and rejection that Jack had allowed this to happen - it was all a foggy joke…
A/N: I hope you like where this is going. Let me know what you think [=
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