Author's Note: OK, so it has been quite a while sense I've added to this story, I know. Unfortunately plot bunnies run rampant through the halls of my mind-palace, and I often times have no choice than to indulge them. That being said, I'm back, and nearly finished with this story. I hope to have it wrapped up for you before April 2013. (Yes that is my version of soon.)
I also reference the Doctor Who episode "Victory Of The Daleks" in this chapter, for those of you who are wondering eactly what I', taking about with blur boxes and Iron sides.
Reviews are lovely.
On to the show!
The Mayweathers followed behind Owen's car, wondering exactly what they had gotten into.
"I'm an old woman, whose been retired for over twenty years. How do they expect me to run around and shoot at things?"
Gertrude shook her head and head and laughed slightly.
"I seem to be doing a pretty good job at it, and I'm older than you."
Olivia glared at her wife.
"Besides, I'm pretty sure it's just an honorary thing. I severely doubt that Torchwood is going to want two old birds running around their place of business. Speaking of, why are we stopping?"
Owen's car had come to a stop in front of a small dock.
The two woman looked at each other warily, and then looked forward again, to see a large opening form in the wall of the building.
Owen's car drove forward into the gap, and then vanished. Olivia and blinked, and Gertrude shrugged, driving forward and stopping.
Suddenly, their car began to move, not forward, but down.
Olivia gripped Gertrude's arm tightly in surprise, and the elder woman simply laughed.
A few seconds more of falling, and the women found themselves in an expansive parking garage.
There was a light tapping on the car window, and Gertrude looked up.
She unrolled her window, and Owen leaned in.
"You can park were you want, but the lift is over there-" He pointed to the corner of the room. "It doesn't matter to me though."
Gertrude nodded, and the dead man stepped back, letting the woman pull forward. She parked a few spaces form Owen's car, getting out and helping Olivia from her side.
Martha walked over and grinned at them broadly.
"I should probably warn you about what's inside here."
Gertrude shrugged.
"Aliens?"
Owen glanced over with a look of pure shuck, and even Tosh looked surprised.
"Err, how did you know?"
Gertrude laughed and even Olivia cracked a smile.
"There were always rumors about you guys. Besides, I've seen enough Claw-Kin in my day to know that we aren't exactly alone."
Owen folded his arms over his chest and shared a wary look with Tosh.
"Claw-Kin? What are those?"
Olivia walked forward.
"I'm sure you've seen them. I thought Torchwood was running about catching them. They're about six feet tall. Sharp teeth, clawed hands, always wearing a boiler suit."
Tosh snapped her fingers.
"Weevils!"
Owens eyes widened.
"You know that Weevils are aliens? I thought all the locals thought they're some sort of lab experiment." Olivia shook her head and grinned.
"Those rumors have only been around for the past twenty years or so. When people started calling them Weevils and Sewer creatures. Claw-Kin is what we called them before. Back when Gertrude was little."
Gertrude nodded.
"The Claw-Kin, Weevils, aren't a new thing dear."
Owen shook his head.
"And here I was thinking that we had done a good job at covering our tracks."
He threw his hands up into the air and then sighed.
"Oh well. You're in on it, might as well get you inside."
The women nodded, and followed the group onto the lift. As soon as the rose into the center of the HUB, Myfanwy swooped down, squawking curiously at the guests.
"Is that a Pteranodon?"
Olivia said, on the verge of laughter.
"Yes, actually. She's Ianto's baby. His Myfanwy." Gertrude laughed.
"Little Lovely One. Not the name I would have chosen for a dinosaur."
Olivia looked up at the creature with wonder.
"She's beautiful! No wonder Ianto loves his job. To have a pet like that." Tosh smiled.
"When Ianto comes in, I bet he'd let you feed her."
Olivia's eyes widened with excitement, and Gertrude shook her head.
"What does a thing like that eat anyway?"
Martha raised her hand.
"Apparently Chocolate."
Olivia laughed again, hugging Jack's coat to her chest.
"It's wonderful."
Suddenly there was a crash from the other side of the HUB, followed by a string of high-pitched gurgling, and another string of wet slopping sounds.
"Oops. Sounds like Glib and Fall are having a bit of trouble." Owen looked up at Martha with alarm.
"They are still in there? Why? Shouldn't you have put them in the cells or something?"
Tosh smacked the dead man's thigh from her seat, and looked up at him sternly.
"They aren't animals Owen."
Owen glared down at the technician, but didn't say anything.
"And they saved Ianto's sight. It was Fall who concocted that, not me. And he hurt himself in the process."
Owen glanced back towards the autopsy bay once more, and then sighed.
"Fine, but they need to get out of there at least. IF something happens I need that place clean and ready, not overrun by two multi-tentacled aliens."
Gertrude grinned at Olivia, who nodded, the two of them bolted past the Torchwood group and down the steps, following the sounds.
They saw the two aliens gurgling loudly at each other, a stray of syringes scattered on the floor.
One of the creatures was getting darker and darker as he gurgled.
And the other was paling. Gertrude cleared her throat loudly, and the two beings turned to her, going completely silent. Fall grabbed the translator, flicking it on and holding it up.
"Who are you ma'am?"
Olivia burst out laughing and Gertrude cracked a smile.
"You're are polite, you are! That's amazing! Absolutely bloody amazing."
Olivia elbowed her wife to silence her.
"Now hush Gerty, you're being rude!"
She smiled warmly at the creatures.
"I'm Olivia Mayweather, and this is my wife, Gertrude." Glib looked over at Fall, before speaking.
"The Humans here call me Glib, this is my pair bonded, Fall. We were not aware that there were any other Torchwood operatives."
Gertrude shook her head.
"We're new."
Fall tilted his eyestalks to the side, inquisitively.
"You do not look new. Compared to the other human's you look quite old."
Olivia laughed harder then, and Gertrude folded her arms across her chest.
"I'm going to assume that you were being sincere, and do not understand that that was rude. Yes I am physically older than most of the humans you've met, but I am new to Torchwood, in the sense that I have only been working with them for a very short amount of time."
Fall inclined his eyestalks again.
A nod.
"Understood. Tell me, do you know of the one they call Ianto Jones? How he is fairing?"
Olivia stopped laughing long enough to look in amazement at the creatures.
"He is well. Pardon my asking, but why do you care?"
Glib picked up the fallen tray and it's contents, setting them on the autopsy table.
"He saved both our lives, we are eternally grateful. We owe him a life debt. More than one. We only hope that he is alright for us to repay it. It brings us great joy to know that he is living."
The woman shared a mutual smile, growing further as they heard the Torchwood operatives coming closer.
"I see you two have met our guests."
Martha leaned against the railing smiling fondly at the odd group.
"Yes, yes we have. These are a bit more normal looking than the last set we ran into."
Owen frowned, walking around the other edge of the Autopsy bay to face them.
"What do you mean other ones. You've met other aliens?"
Martha leaned forward.
"Aside from Weevils."
Gertrude smiled softly, and nudged Olivia.
"How do you think that we came to know UNIT in the first place?"
Owen looked over at Tosh, who was apparently enraptured in their speech.
"We should probably go somewhere a bit more comfortable, My hip's iving me a fuss."
Tosh nodded.
"Head up to the Conference room. I'll take care of some admin stuff down here."
"No, Tosh. We'll just stay on the couch. Martha? Would you mind grabbing us some water's or something?"
The medic nodded, heading off, while the rest of the human's made their way to the sofa area.
"So, what do you mean by more normal? In my experience those two are not normal."
Gertrude settled onto the worn sofa, and Olive cured up next to her.
"Those aliens look like proper aliens should. All tentacles and different colors."
Tosh leaned back in her chair, wincing slightly.
"And what did you're alien look like."
"A regular bloke. His hair was normal, his clothes were a bit off for a man his age, bowties and braces. And his companion was barely wearing anything!"
Martha came in then, a tray full of crisps and water before her.
Her face seemed to light up at the word "Companion."
"When did you meet him?" She said eagerly earning her a few confused glances.
Olivia answered non the less.
"When we were serving in the war, we had, well I guess you could say a close encounter."
Gertrude grinned.
"I was sitting their doing my usual routine of translating incoming data, wile Gerty hovered over my shoulder like the obsessive stalker that she is."
The other woman grinned wider.
"When a blue box just appeared out of thin air."
The Torchwood members looked at each other in shock, while Martha simply smiled.
"Out steps this bloke, normal as can be, and his red haired side kick. Mind you this was when that whole iron-sides scandal was starting."
Toshiko snapped her fingers, sitting strait in her chair.
"I remember that! Daleks, gravity bubbles, bomb in the scientist. The whole thing was so outlandish that most people wrote it off as a hoax."
Owen looked at the others as though each of them had grown an extra head.
"There were Daleks in the Second World War, and nobody told me?"
The Mayweathers shrugged.
"If it makes you feel any better, they tried to make us forget too."
Owen snorted.
"How? Did they pay you off? Offer you a lucrative position somewhere exotic?"
Olivia paled slightly, and Gertrude stiffened in her chair.
"They tried to MAKE us forget. Brand new tool. Reset, they called it. I'd heard that it could turn a grown man into a drooling mess."
Both Owen and Tosh looked at each other in horror. They knew exactly what Reset could do. "New procedure they had for it too. Inject it into the temporal lobe, a very small amount. Just enough to erase the last few months or so. Created a hell of a lot of cases of permanent brain damage that way. May as well have been lobotomized."
Martha nearly choked on her water.
"That's horrible!"
The women smiled softly at her.
"There was another treatment. Something someone had come up with using the blood of some random secret operative. It was supposed to cure illness' and slow aging. They wanted to see what this 'miracle serum' could do to someone who had bee affected by Reset."
Martha let out a soft, "Oh No."
"Oh yes. We both underwent the treatment voluntarily of course. Told us it was an inoculation and had us unconscious for the procedure."
Olivia's voice faltered, and Gertrude patted her shoulder lightly.
"We woke up, both fit as a fiddel, with all of our memories in tact."
Owen let out a low whistle, and Tosh leaned forward.
"That's amazing!"
Gertrude grinned.
"I know. It's shear luck if you want the truth of it."
The dead man leaned back in his chair, folding his arms behind his head.
"What happened then."
Olivia shrugged.
"We were forced into UNIT. It was either that or, well, removal."
The tightness in her jaw showed exactly what she meant by that.
Martha shifted uncomfortably in her seat.
"Forced?"
Olivia nodded.
"Yes. Forced in. It wasn't as bad as all that. Though it was the early years, mind."
"We had an awful lot of fun in UNIT." The Mayweathers smiled softly at each other, each reminiscing their own UNIT memories.
"Anyway, we've seen a lot of aliens in our time. Lot of alien tech too. But they were usually so dishearteningly normal in appearance. Robots or Humanoids. It's nice to see an honest to goodness tentacles alien. Like what's in the films."
Martha smirked. She knew that feeling well.
"Unfortunately, their were plenty of bad in with those goods, so we found a way out."
Martha frowned.
"How did you though. Seeing as how you would have been high-level security risks at any time. How did you manage to get out alive."
Gertrude grinned softly.
"Olivia worked in the Archives. She managed to delete the studies done on us and write our recruitment down to 'special skills.'"
Toshiko laughed suddenly, her entire body shaking with the sound.
The others turned to her in bewilderment, not understanding her reaction.
It took several moments for her to finally calm down enough to speak.
"That makes so much sense!"
Owen frowned.
"What does?"
The technician wiped a tear from her eye.
"This entire time, I've been wondering how you two can do so much at your age, and look so good. It didn't make any sense. Even working with UNIT isn't exactly an elixir of youth."
They all continued to gawk at her.
"Experimentation from the HARKNESS program."
Owen rolled his eyes.
"Really. You expect me to believe that Jack had a whole project named after him. Specifically one that I don't know about?"
Toshiko shrugged.
"Ianto and I found it when we were doing that paper to digital conversion last year. It was just named HARKNESS. Only now do I see exactly why."
The dead man groaned.
"This whole bloody thing is so convoluted! Why can't things be simple and easy to understand! Why does everything have to link back to something else until there's this web of things, that Jack and his Doctor ALWAYS seem to be in the center of."
Tosh and Martha gave each other a knowing smirk and said, in unison.
"Because this is Torchwood."
Martha laughed, and then held up her hand.
"Alright, Alright, I think I've got this."
She took a deep breath.
"Project HARKNESS is a derivative made from Jack's blood. It somehow reverses the damage done to Gertrude and Olivia by UNIT. It also, apparently, slows their aging process slightly and keeps them in good health-"
Olivia coughed.
"Near perfect. My hips are bad and Gerty's eyes are going."
The medic nodded.
"Alright then, near perfect health. UNIT recruits them, they retire, buy an inn and live happily ever after?"
Olivia smirks.
"Well there was quite a bit between retiring and the inn, but that's a story for another time."
Gertrude blushes slightly, something that catches the notice of all the others in the room.
"Basically, that's the important bits of our life story. Now, would the rest of you care to share, or was this another case of old birds spinning yarns for young ones."
Tosh laughed, and Martha yawned loudly.
"Maybe we should all get some rest. You kids seem tired. I know I am."
Toshiko smiled and nodded, stretching her arms before glancing apologetically at Martha.
"We have three fold out cots and three sleeping bags down by the cells. We could set them up right here, and I'll take the couch."
Olivia frowned at Owen.
"What about you Doc? Where will you crash?"
Owen smirked and stood from his chair, needlessly stretching his back.
"Dead men don't sleep. Besides, I have a bit of work to do."
The Mayweathers looked at him curiously, but shrugged.
"To each his own then."
They both stood and yawned.
Gertrude and Martha brought up the cots and sleeping bags, moving the coffee table to set them up. With a finally goodnight, the HUB lights were dimmed, and the group settled in for some well needed rest.