Chapter 2: Aubrey
Crystal let out a short string of words that Aaron assumed were swear words, but since none of them were in English, he wasn't sure.
Scratch that, Crystal's tone made it pretty clear she wasn't hearing good news. "Tosh, where are Jack and Owen? Is Ianto with them?"
Aaron wondered exactly who they were.
"Alright, Tosh. Find some cover, and preferably some ammo. I'll be there in three minutes. Hang on!"
As Crystal started ushering them towards the black van she arrived in, Ronaldo planted his feet and refused to budge. "No. No, you tell us what's going on here first."
Crystal looked like she was about ready to either punch Ronaldo or shoot him, still obviously very on edge. "Alright, you want the short version?" She practically spat the words at him, clenching her jaw, obviously trying to stop a long string of profanities from leaving her mouth. "I work for a secret government agency that deals with alien threats and right now my teammate is pinned down in our home base with very little ammunition and very little backup, and you have about two seconds to get your whiny rear end into that van or I will stun-gun you and throw you in the back of said van." She glanced at Aaron, who was getting more confused by the second. "And that goes for you, too."
Both boys scrambled into the backseat in record time.
Crystal started the van and pulled out onto the dirt road. Aaron realized that this road led directly to the bay. "How do you plan to get to the bay in three minutes? It's almost six miles from here!" Then he got a good look at the speedometer. And really wished he hadn't looked. "Are you freaking insane!? These speeds on this road is near suicidal!"
"The operative word in that sentence being 'near'!" Crystal replied as they rounded a hairpin turn that nearly tipped the van over. Aaron decided to close his eyes before he nearly threw up again.
It's just one of those stupid flight simulator things. Yeah, that's why we're almost spinning a 180 and nearly falling out of the seats. Just a flight… Oh, who do I think I'm bloody kidding, we're going to die!
Crystal, on the other hand, was laughing like a maniac. "Oh, I forgot just how bloody brilliant this is! The rest of the team NEVER lets me drive this fast!"
"Gee," muttered Aaron to himself, feeling nauseous again, "I can't imagine why."
Ronaldo rolled down the window to hurl, but nearly got snatched out of the car by the sheer wind force. He quickly decided to roll said window back up. Crystal just laughed and swung around another hairpin turn.
2 minutes later
Crystal walked into the Torchwood Hub warily, gun at the ready. "Tosh?" She called out, voice trembling slightly, "Are you here?" Silence was all they heard as Crystal's question echoed around the seemingly empty control room. Suddenly she heard a clatter from somewhere near Tosh's workstation.
"Crystal?" Oh, lord, she had never been so happy to hear the voice of Dr. Toshiko Sato, scared and broken as it sounded.
Crystal immediately darted up the stairs and was at Tosh's side in an instant, looking for blood or bruises in the dim light. "It's okay, Tosh, it's me. Just me. What happened here?"
Tosh whimpered slightly and pointed towards Jack's office. Crystal got the message. They weren't alone.
Crystal took out her gun, and decided to wait for the culprit to show themselves.
Whoever had done this to her beloved Torchwood was going to suffer.
Lila couldn't believe her luck. She was actually inside Torchwood. Torchwood. Oh, she was going to become thieving legend for this stunt. However, as she stepped out the door and back into the main control center, she started to regret her choice of targets. First, someone started shooting at her, then she was swooped up by what felt rather like a large bird, but was making screeching sounds completely out of character for any bird. As the lights came up, she realized she was dangling about a hundred feet above the ground… from the claws of a pterodactyl. The girl shooting at her cursed and put the gun away.
"Just hold on!" the girl shouted, then the strangest thing happened. She started singing.
We dreamers have our ways
of facing rainy days,
and somehow we survive.
We keep the feelings warm,
protect them from the storm,
until our time arrives.
The girl's voice reverberated throughout the space, clear and beautiful, albeit a bit shaky and nervous. The pterodactyl began slowing down just slightly, and Lila felt an overwhelming sense of calm wash over her. Everything would be fine, somehow.
Then one day the sun appears!
And we come shining
through those lonely years!
I made it through the rain,
I kept my world protected.
I made it through the rain,
I kept my point of view.
I made it through the rain,
and found myself respected
By the others who
got rained on, too,
and made it through.
The pterodactyl started spiraling slowly downwards, and the girl's voice lost some of the shakiness in it. She kept singing, and slowly but surely, Lila was getting closer and closer to the ground.
When friends are hard to find,
and life seems so unkind,
sometimes you feel afraid.
Just aim beyond the clouds,
and rise above the crowds
and start your own parade.
'Cause when I chased my fears away,
that's when I knew
that I could finally say…
I made it through the rain,
I kept my world protected.
I made it through the rain,
I kept my point of view.
I made it through the rain,
and found myself respected
By the others who
got rained on, too,
and made it through.
And made it through.
And made it through.
As the girl's voice trailed off, lingering softly on that last note, the pterodactyl set Lila gently on the floor and coasted to land in front of the girl who had been singing. She affectionately patted its head, and the pterodactyl flew off, up and around the main tower in the center of the room. Both of the girls it had been standing in front of let out a huge sigh of relief. Lila could have sworn she heard the girl who had been singing muttering about "Bloody Jack Harkness and his bloody 51st century hypnosis tricks," but she must have misheard, because this was the 21st century.
Suddenly, the door opened and three men rushed in, all holding guns. "Tosh," said the one in front, pretty obviously the leader, "We got the distress call, what happened? Are you okay?" The small Asian woman who had been shooting at Lila before the other girl had gotten there nodded weakly.
"Owen," said the girl who had been singing, "She's been shot. Nothing immediately fatal, but she's bleeding pretty bad, here, come help me move her over to the table." The guy in the leather jacket - the one who obviously didn't get nearly enough time outside, he was pale as death - rushed over and immediately put pressure on 'Tosh's' wound, trying to staunch the bleeding. He and the girl managed to get her onto one of the desks, rapidly cleared off by the third guy who had come in - dang, not many guys can pull off a suit that well and not look seriously uncomfortable. 'Owen' had pulled a portable first-aid kit out of the pocket of his jacket and was currently cursing avidly at the fact that he didn't have any anesthetic on hand.
"Tosh," he said, a warning in his tone, "This is gonna hurt like heck."
"Really, Owen? More than the bullet wound?"
"Fair point." He started stitching up the wound, 'Tosh' hissing slightly in pain every time the needle pierced through her skin. When 'Owen' had tied off and cut the thread, he picked up a bottle of vodka that had been sitting on a nearby desk. "and this is gonna hurt like -" here he said a word Lila was technically not allowed to repeat in any company, polite or otherwise. He carefully poured a bit of the 80-proof onto the wound, and Lila could see 'Tosh' trying so very hard not to scream. She obviously had feelings for this 'Owen' guy, but Lila couldn't tell if he felt the same way.
The only problem… Lila had forgotten about Miss Dinosaur Whisperer over there. She turned her head about 45 degrees to the right and was suddenly staring straight down the barrel of an old-style, but obviously new, 6-shot revolver. "Oh. Right. You." That didn't get a reaction. "Thanks for the help with the whole dinosaur thing and all." Still had a gun pointed at her. "I'll just… go now?"
From behind her came another voice. "I don't think so, princess." Then a stinging pain in her neck and the world spun slowly into black.
"Owen!" Gwen exclaimed, "Was that really necessary?"
"She broke into the bloody Hub! Yeah, it was!"
"Owen," Gwen stated calmly, "What I meant was, take a good look at the label on that needle."
Owen did so, and swore when he realized he'd used the wrong sedative. The girl would be out for at least an hour, possibly more.
Crystal had to seriously fight making a snide remark about that. Mainly because she had been spending way too much time around Jack recently and said remark was wildly inappropriate with the two kids present. Then she actually remembered the two kids present.
Except, when Crystal turned to look, only Ronaldo was standing there. "Where's Aaron?"
"I don't know." Ronaldo's voice was shaking, but more than that. His heart was beating extremely fast, elevated blood pressure levels, every single sign of a lie.
Crystal's hand rested lightly on her stun-gun holster. "I'll ask again. Where's Aaron? And don't bother lying this time. I can tell."
Ronaldo raised an eyebrow, suddenly seeming a lot more confident. "Oh, yeah? What, you gonna give me a polygraph test?"
"We don't need to," Jack replied, "We have Crystal."
"Oh, what, and she can tell exactly when someone's lying? She psychic or something?"
Crystal shot him a look that could freeze Hawaii. Twice. "Right now your heart rate is about 125 BPM, which could be attributed to the shock, but your blood pressure is elevated, your pupils are just slightly too wide, your breathing is slightly ragged and definitely too fast, all the signs, in short, that a polygraph measures to tell when you're lying, and those are just the easy ones. And yeah, I am, slightly."
Ronaldo couldn't have looked more dumbstruck if she had hit him.
"You remember that very brief explanation of my job I gave you? About how we deal with alien threats?" Ronaldo nodded, not seeing where this was going. "They aren't always threats." Crystal's eyes flickered golden for a second, then back to deep-sea blue.
Now all that swagger just seemed to drain out of Ronaldo, replaced by stark fear.
"Okay, I'm going to ask one more time. Where. Is. Aaron?" Crystal's voice stayed icy calm, but she allowed her eyes to flicker to pure gold on every emphasised syllable this time, to give the kid an idea of just how pissed off she was right now.
"I- I honestly don't know. The people who hired me, they have a ton of hiding places, and nobody tells me anything. I don't know which one he's at. But I can get you in once we find it." Now some of the color was coming back to Ronaldo's face, fear being pushed out by determination.
"And why on god's bloody earth should we trust you?" Owen had some understandable issues with this plan.
"Aaron was my friend. All anyone told me to do was gather information. I never wanted to hurt anybody, and believe me, these people will hurt him." Ronaldo's voice was like frozen steel. "I want to help stop that from happening."
Silence echoed through the hub.
Jack was the first to react, obviously working off pure instinct at the moment if the nature of his order was anything to go by. "Tosh, see if you can isolate the energy signature of that spike we recorded, maybe we can track it."
Owen gave Jack a look that managed to say a whole lot, most of it swearing, in less than a second.
"Right, I'll do it." Crystal was up at Tosh's workstation before anyone could blink, forestalling the inevitable argument. Considering that she could type faster than the whole team combined, nobody argued. "Oh, by the way, Jack, the sonic resonance theory was completely accurate."
Jack allowed himself a small grin of triumph. Owen glared and flipped him off, then handed Ianto a ten-pound note. Ianto grinned. "I told you, Owen, never bet against Jack." Owen stalked off downstairs to his lab.
"Sonic resonance theory?" Ronaldo was understandably confused. Ianto decided to take some small measure of pity on the kid and explain.
"The sonic resonance theory is based off of the idea that sound waves affect everything around us, and if you can hit exactly the right frequency or set of frequencies you could do anything with it. The only problem is, we've never had an opportunity to test the full effects of it before, due to the fact that we didn't have the technology to replicate the range and combinations you would need.
"Then we met Crystal. Her spaceship had crashed in the bay, and we went to investigate. There had only been two survivors of the crash, Crystal and her little brother. We found her desperately trying to staunch the bleeding from a very deep cut in his arm. But we got there too late. Owen did everything he could, but… whatever made that cut had hit a major artery. There was only so much he could do."
"Wow." Ronaldo had known that something bad had happened in Crystal's past. Heck, she swore more than Owen, and that much anger didn't come without a reason. But he hadn't even imagined something like that. "That's…" He couldn't find the words.
"Yeah. We all did what we could, but she closed off after that. Wouldn't speak, barely ate. Nobody could get through to her. Except Jack. Nobody understood why, at first, but she would talk to him, a bit. Little by little, we got the story of how she ended up here. And no," Ianto immediately stopped Ronaldo before he could even ask, "I'm not going to explain that part. That's Crystal's story to tell, not mine. But little by little, she started adjusting to Earth. She started learning the language. From Owen, actually, which everyone admits wasn't the best idea.
"But the thing that pulled her back, the one thing that really got through to her, was music. Sometimes me and Jack would come back a bit late from a job - or the bar, depending on his mood that night - and she'd be sitting in her room, singing the saddest, sweetest songs. The sound would just carry throughout the entire Hub, and it was…" Here Ianto trailed off, unable to find the words, not sure there were words to describe those songs. Ronaldo seemed to get the general idea, though. "You could almost hear what she was thinking, feeling. You wanted to cry with her. Jack had the idea that she might be unintentionally using a sonic resonance technique, that her natural voice could do what no machine we've found yet could."
Here, Crystal cut in. "And it's a bloody good thing he was right, too, because the only other way to get Myfanwy to do what we say has…" She smirked, "other effects." Everyone cracked up laughing at that, the silence that had pervaded the room shattering in an instant. Ronaldo looked understandably confused again.
Owen, who had come back up to the main floor sometime during the story, refused to explain further than "Inside joke, mate. Believe me, you probably wouldn't understand if we did tell you."
Suddenly, Crystal let out a shout of triumph. The laughing immediately cut off. Back down to business.
"I found where they're holding him!" Crystal yelled, "He's in an abandoned warehouse down by the docks."
She glanced back at the screen, and her face paled immediately. She swore softly under her breath. "And there are explosives."