Torchwood
Jack's introduction to Torchwood was to treat me very much like I was wasting his time, the second tour was cursory too, it looked like I wasn't expected to even know how to use a computer- and I wasn't worth teaching. What I did get was an extensive session in the shooting range with his surly instruction, and a table full of ugly looking deliverers of death. I didn't want to even touch them.
Jack picked up one after another, named it, said what it fired, there were two beam weapons in the pile, my interest was piqued as to how they worked but I stayed back from the table, I have never liked guns, the injuries they inflict are almost always serious, often terminal, they're too final.
Jack walked up to me with a earth gun in his hand, he was beginning to get impatient with me, he dragged me over to the shooting position by one shoulder, and stood behind me,
"Stand side on." He pulled me round by my shoulders, grabbed my right hand and put the gun in it and wrapped his hand painfully tight around it and the gun,
"Grip your weapon firmly," he raised our hands to the target,
"Sight along the barrel, fire." He put six rounds into the human shaped target on the backwall, the gun kicked hard against my hand,
"Keep your arm and shoulder strong." he chided. He dropped his hand away from mine, leaving me the gun. "Now you do it."
"I don't want to do this."
"Just raise your damn arm and fire!" He yelled at me, "DO IT!" He slapped my arm into a raised position, grabbed my wrist tightly, "DO IT!" He yelled in my ear. "ONE SHOT!" He demanded. I pulled the trigger, the gun smacked against my hand painfully, the bullet hit the back wall. "Now, again!" He bellowed in my ear, "One shot!" I hesitated, "SHOOT!" My hand contracted reflexively and the gun fired. "SHOOT!" He yelled again, "The lives of your teammates depend on you! What would you do if the Sontarans were bearing down on you? Protect your teammates! SHOOT!" The gun stitched four shots in a wavering line across the target, he wrapped his other arm around me holding me tightly against him, "SHOOT HIM!" he yelled in my ear, the bullet went through the target's forehead. I was shaking when he let me go. He showed me how to put another clip in a gun, handed me one, "Change it." Shakily I did. He ran through the other guns again, describing the kick and showing me how to reload, and any safetys. Then he gave me a long , loud, imperative lecture on sticking with your team, covering their backs, entering buildings. He made me walk into the shooting range and cover corners while he stood behind me, instructing. He tossed me a torch- which I dropped, and made me do it again, holding both. Then he pulled out his over-sized Webley and pointed it at my face from six inches distance,
"This is what it comes down to." I couldn't take my eyes off the end of the barrel, "You have to shoot first, there's no second chances in this job. You need to defend us, or this will happen." He holstered his gun, walked away, "Keep your gun in your desk." he said over his shoulder.
I had a dream that night- it woke me up- of being forced to fire the gun, and Jack holding me against him in a way that made me want another thing entirely, I ground my teeth, the last thing I needed was getting interested in a overbearing control-freak like Jack.
The gravel spat out from under my feet as I rounded the corner of the warehouse to close the pincer movement on the weevils, I couldn't keep up with Jack or Gwen, so I had to run clever, I dragged the gun out from under my armpit and ran lightly, looking, listening, for targets, trying to quiet the Jack screaming instructions in the ear of my memory. I ran to the warehouse door, checked the gloom carefully, I touched the gun to check the safety, something with a unkempt humanoid outline and stinking breath jumped at me, the gun went off wildly, missing by a mile, and the weevil slapped me across the head with an incredibly hard hand, then it grabbed my gun arm and bit it, I dropped the gun instantly, I could feel those evil little teeth sinking way in, it let go, roared in my face, tiny piggy eyes, round mouth lined with razor teeth and a stench like sewage, and pushed me backwards- hard- onto the ground, and leapt at me with blurring speed, I stuck out the heel of my extended leg and its' momentum rammed it into its' own throat, I lifted my backside off the floor with my hands and kicked the other heel as hard as I could under its' chin, it groaned and folded. Just because you're lying on your back doesn't mean you're defenceless. God bless kung fu.
Jack, Gwen and Owen came pelting through the warehouse, trained guns on the slumped weevil, Ianto came puffing through the door behind me, "Did we get it?"
"Yeah, we got it." Owen advanced cautiously on the weevil and stabbed a needle into it, the team began putting away their guns, "You," Jack pointed at me, "need to keep up."
I blinked at him as I scrambled to my feet, "Could be a problem, that." My hand was starting to feel wet, Ianto went off to bring the van for the weevils, Gwen went back to keep an eye on the one she and Jack had incapacitated.
"That," said Jack, pointing at my arm, "is why you don't come in without your team, and you come in prepared, you don't mess around!"
"Fuck you." I said almost as a reflex, he walked up, poked his face close to mine,
"I'm not one with a hole in my arm." he almost entirely avoided mocking,
Actually.."You have a point." I said.
On the drive back I wrapped my neckerchief around my wrist to soak up the blood.
Owen muttered and complained about 'carelessness' as he sorted out the kit to stitch up my arm, even taking the jacket off had sent a thump of nausea through my gut, my shoulders were bunched with urge to run from the pain, I distracted myself with inspecting the wound, I'd never seen a deep one before, I thought I could see muscle, I noted how thick the epidermis was, and how ragged- that's going to need a lot of stitches,
"Ready?" He held up a threaded needle clamped in forceps, I nodded. The first stitch made me curse, he moved quickly onto the second, my stomach wanted to heave, I broke out into sweat all over my body,
"You might wanna use an anaesthetic." I muttered,
"What? For this little scratch?" Owen glanced up but didn't pause in his stitching, sweat ran into my eyes,
"Pain makes me nauseous." I swallowed,
"Well, you'll just have to tough it out, and try not to throw up in my medical area." He held the wound with one hand and jabbed the needle in again, both excruciating, my wounded arm was pressed down so hard onto the cold trolley top it was shaking, for a second I lost vision and the wave of nausea rolled over me, I half turned and punched hard into the square hatch in the wall beside me with my left arm, the counterpoint pain and the adrenaline kicked in, my vision sharpened and the nausea diminished, I breathed hard and thought about violence, my heart began beating wildly and the attention on my injured arm diminished, a little. It worked, for a while, but my vision began to become grainy again, I really wished Owen would stop, I began to feel precarious,
"I think..." It was hard to speak,
"You gonna pass out?"
"Yeah."
I put my left arm on the trolley in front of me, lowered my wobbling head toward it, I didn't want to fall off the chair with Owen still stitching. Everything got hot and blurry, and sick and painful, it got hard to breathe, and everything else faded away...
I woke up on the floor with Owen checking my pupils for responsiveness, he helped me up onto the chair and checked my reflexes, my forearm was tightly wrapped in a large bandage. "It'll be two or three weeks before you can have those stitches out. Are you allergic to any painkillers?"
"They all make me stoned apart from aspirin." He snorted and put a bottle in my good hand,
"Two every three hours. Don't overdo them." Then he got Ianto to help me walk to the car and take me home.
I fell into bed without undressing, nothing inside me but two pills.
Two days later I finally got some instruction on the computers, with my arm wrapped and held close to my chest, Toshiko described the Rift and the rift monitoring stations, she said it was a wormhole with only this end tethered, the end flopping about like a hoover tube in spacetime, sucking things down. She had some complex theories about how it worked ("Sort of at an angle to the four dimensions as we know them," ) and complex geometry formulae which I didn't begin to understand- unlike earth physics in general which had the concept, but no hard data, or testable theories- and who didn't seem to have even noticed one emptying like a drain onto Cardiff. I wondered if she'd mind walking me through the formulae but Jack was huffing and puffing about scans and decoding some signal, so I didn't get the chance to ask. She set me up with some record keeping, and Gwen showed me how to do searches on the more complicated internal and police databases. Then alarms started going off, Toshiko yelled that was an 'incursion' and the team went galumphing off to round up todays' flotsam, and I was left alone with a database.
I tried searching it for Jack, and there was one page with a tiny amount of information, not so much a record as a sort of visual 'Nyardy-nyardy-nyah! Made you look!' I tried the Rift and got reams of information, with not much explanation but lots of records of activity, and a big database of what had come through, but when I tried searching it a lot of it was security locked, I wondered where they kept all this stuff- there had to be storerooms somewhere. I searched for details of the attack at the shopping centre, there were casualty and news reports but details of the attackers were securitied, there was only a name: Sontarans. All the data relating to them was securitied. Then I tried looking up drink/drug and got the expected sea of references- I had to plough through, I didn't know how to narrow down, on page 4 I found a reference to an amnesia pill, Retcon, used by Torchwood- dropped in a drink to wipe a witness' memory, I decided there and then that Jack was a bastard. After a bit of thought I tried to search for the strange bloke with the dodgy dress-sense, hairdo, and the time machine, but I couldn't pull up anything because I didn't know any names. I cursed, I'd got sucked into Torchwood so quickly I hadn't tried to search an external database. I tried to connect with google, after a few deadends, I managed to find search terms the base's computers recognised, and got access to outside databases. 'Blue box' yielded instant hits, suddenly I was looking at all sorts of slightly mad people's sites, 'Have you seen this man?' With drawings of all sorts of different people associated with this fairly unmistakeable blue box, there looked to be a whole tribe of these people, all apparently travelling in what looked like a 1960s police box. I scanned the drawings to see if any looked like the slight man in the blue suit, and eventually I found one that could be him, it was a pretty bad drawing, it didn't have any accompanying information. Some of the other people were referred to as 'The Stranger', or 'The Doctor'. That stopped me dead- when the time machine turned up, Jack had greeted the man as.."Doctor." The picture referred to as the Doctor definitely wasn't him. This was just confusing. I opened up another window, into the Hub's internal database this time, and searched for 'The Doctor', it has a lot of hits, almost all of them securitied, but one of them had a picture, of the little guy in the blue suit, he was frowning at the camera, eyes looking slightly unnerving. The only conclusions were ridiculous. When the immense, ridiculous, cogwheel-shaped main door behind me started to cycle, I shut down the databases and erased my search history, I didn't think for a minute that would remove all trace, but I didn't know how to do that. I went to put the kettle on.
Jack dragged my reluctant ass out on another weevil hunt,
"You've got enough different types of gun here, haven't you got a stun gun?"
Jack frowned like I'd asked a stupid question, "Weevils can take enormous amounts of electric charge or sedatives before they slow down, most toxins we have simply don't work on them. It's simply not practical."
"Not practical." I muttered in disgust.
"Nope."
I hared after the weevils in Jack and Owen's wake across the wasteland, brushing by undergrowth and leaping dumped rubbish, Jack snapped off a shot and the weevil at the back dropped, his next shot clipped the second on the upper torso, he swore, the weevil bolted through the door of the empty factory, Jack went straight after it, Owen went right around the crumbling facade, I went left, "Stick with your team!" Jack's voice yelled in my memory, yeah, right.
The gun was already out, safety off. Jack's voice had also said "Shoot on sight." I hoped it ran the other way from me. Something dark and furred bolted out of the building in front of me and behind the warehouse ahead of me, I yelled "Over here!" and followed it, the alley led the length of the prefab building with no exits until the end, I was running out of air, and sprinting made my hands shake very badly. I reached the turn at the end of the building and nearly ran over the weevil, it was bleeding quite profusely from the shoulder, and snarled from the very short alley's mouth. The gun came up, but the weevil didn't attack, didn't move, "Shoot!" Yelled the voice in my memory, my finger didn't move. The alley was beginning to fill up with the smell of sewage and rotting meat, the weevil snarled and shuffled forward, I backed up quickly, keeping a bead on it, it kept coming, I kept backing the way I'd come, unless the guys turn up I get to deliberately shoot this creature before it makes a rush past me, I backed up a little more, I didn't fancy getting bitten again. Jack's harangue in the shooting gallery had been very clear on "Shoot!" but had avoided what he actually meant, which was "Kill!" I waved the gun menacingly at the weevil, it snarled and shuffled forward again, I could hold it a couple of minutes longer, I turned my head to scan the area with my peripheral vision- there was a metal pole on the ground, I scuttled over to the wall, covering the weevil with the gun in one hand, and picked the pole up, it was heavy, solid, a little overlong at about 6 feet, but perfect. I holstered the gun and squared up to the weevil with the pole in both hands. I couldn't kill it, but I could make it impossible for it to run, it snarled and considered for a moment, then it leapt, I only had time to smack it alongside the head with one end of the pole, it seemed to stun it, then I brought the length of the pole down across it's thigh in a temporarily crippling blow, it went down on one knee, I reversed the pole and smacked the full length across it's shoulder- which had to hurt the wound. It made a mewling noise, but didn't go down, I reversed the pole again and smacked it around the back of the calf, sweeping that leg out from under it. I backed off and kept an eye on it, belatedly yelled "Over here!" over my shoulder, I heard a door slam open, then running feet coming my way, Jack arrived. He looked at me strangely, but covered the weevil,
"Where's your gun?"
"Under my arm." I muttered, not taking my eyes off the weevil, who was stirring, I moved close to striking distance to it, I didn't trust Jack not to follow his instructions to me, Owen came running up, out of breath, eyed the weevil doubtfully,
"Is it..." The weevil leapt, I caught it a blow to the throat with one end of the pole, there was a deafening bang, and it fell limply back with a hole between it's eyes. I looked back at Jack, he holstered the gun, looking faintly...satisfied, smug, no... vindicated. I dropped the pole and turned my back and walked off.
The SUV caught up with me with a roar at the exit of the waste ground, the window lowered, I didn't even hear what Jack said, I whirled and flung the gun as hard as I could at him, and walked away.
I think I heard him curse me to my back.