I'm much more of a Whovian than a Torchwood fan (whatever the fan name for them is), but this story is technically a crossover, so we're about to dip our toes into the world of Torchwood. Two disclaimers: 1) I'm not great at it, and 2) I am not the biggest fan of Gwen Cooper.
Actually, let me rephrase that.
I think Gwen Cooper is at her best when she is communing with Rhys, her fiancé. He is truly her other half... maybe her better half. He completes her, makes her more tolerable (I have an uncle who buffers my aunt in the same way). Rhys is utterly charming (he is not unlike my own partner, in both personality and looks, which makes me a bit less objective, I admit), utterly adores her, and I love when she gets protective of him! As such, I am annoyed by the Jack/Gwen sexual tension... I just don't buy it, and I find Gwen rather adolescent sometimes, and clingy (Rose-like, only less nice?). I know that many people are annoyed by the Ten/Martha tension in the same way, but the fangirl's heart wants what it wants. *Shrug*
Anyway, I try to be sympathetic of Gwen, because irrational as it may be, her heart also wants what it wants, and sometimes, it wants Jack. And who could blame it? But Gwen isn't the most gushy of people, and often her unresolved issues manifest as anger and other poor decisions. So here we go. Gwen.
I am, however, a big fan of Tosh, who, in her way, reminds me of Martha. I think that's all that needs to be said about that.
Now we really careen toward the end, tying up loose ends. We've already seen what it takes to get rid of a Weeping Angel... it's f***ing bonkers. I didn't feel like it needed re-hashing, but I did feel like it needed to be addressed, and the consequences of it needed to be shown, and that's why this chapter exists!
Enjoy this PENULTIMATE installment of Screen Angels!
NINETEEN
Gwen Cooper arrived at work fifteen minutes earlier than usual, and seemingly on the warpath.
"Well, you're in a lovely mood," Owen said, as she brushed past, scowling.
"Fuck off," she told him, spiralling down the stairs into a makeshift lounge area, where she peeled off her coat as though it were made of rubber adhesive, and poured herself some tea.
Owen responded by laughing, and returning the medical records he had been looking at, those of a murder victim who may not be human, but whose pathology report had been suppressed, and to whose body all access had been barred.
"What's the word, Owen?" Tosh asked, already well underway in her work. Until she received word from Jack, she was working on a robotic unit that could neutralize a Weevil from fifty metres.
He sighed, and said, "This could go either way. He could be human," Owen said. "It makes reference to a heart condition, aortic arrhythmia, being treated with medication, but we've seen non-humans of several species who have vascular… pulsations, of a sort, that mimic aortic arrhythmia. He's had several rounds of shock therapy for suicidal depression, but there are crossovers with several species that thrive on electrical activity of that sort. He's also had a broken arm reset, but his x-ray looks completely normal."
"But the skeletal structures of some humanoid aliens are nearly identical to humans…"
"Especially in the extremities. There's been nothing invasive. I cannot find any evidence that anyone has cut into him, nor x-rayed anything other than his arm. No MRI, no surgeries, not even blood work. And he's got no living biological relatives – just a wife, and an adopted daughter. I've been scouring the documents for anomalies, little fudges to the facts and whatnot… either he's human or he's a humanoid alien who's cleverer than I am. Which is entirely within the realm of possibility, as we all know," Owen said, by now, muttering. Then he looked up at Tosh. "I'll tell you, it's a pisser we can't get access to his remains."
"Yeah, I hear that."
"It's times like this, we really could use the likes of Jack around here," he said.
This was a poorly-timed comment, as Gwen then brushed back in, tea in-hand, scowl still alive and well on her face. "Yeah, bloody tell me about it!" she shrieked. "What the hell are we supposed to do? No cohesion, no focus…"
"I just mean, a man who can't die has very little fear of getting shot whilst breaking into a secure facility," he retorted flatly. "That's all."
"I'll tell you what he should fear," Gwen spat. "Me!"
"Okay, okay," Tosh said, coming out from behind her console. "Let's look at this logically. Owen, you need an in. Gwen, you've got ins all over the place…"
"I've already tried, Tosh," Gwen sighed.
"Number one, you haven't tried everything, have you? Every twisty-turny, sneaky-peaky, borderline legal way, wherein people owe each other favours, and you fib a little bit, and use me to take down technology, and whatnot?"
"Okay, fine."
"Brilliant. Start making a plan, and tell me when and where I come in," Tosh said. "Meanwhile, I'm going to work on our Weevil problem."
"Which Weevil problem is that?" Gwen wondered.
"All of the Weevil problems," Tosh told her.
Gwen drifted over to Owen, and the two of them began whispering about how to get access to the corpse.
Tosh, for the moment, was distracted by Gwen. She liked to believe that Gwen, a take-charge person, who always liked to be in control (or at least be assured that everything was under control), was acting out because of uncertainty. Having their boss gone from the fold most of the time for the past several months, and knowing that he would only be getting in touch at irregular intervals for the next who-knows-how-many-more-months, was daunting. No-one was fond of the situation – for one thing, Jack was their friend and they worried about him.
But over and above that, even if the crew was able to direct themselves, and circle the wagons when a groupthink was necessary, Jack provided something irreplaceable to the group. Not just his leadership skills and charisma, but an almost total lack of physical fear. A guy like that is great in a crisis, and without him, they had to explore other, much less reliable avenues.
However, she knew from observation, and from her own experience, that Gwen's anger stemmed from somewhere else entirely. It was complicated, because she was engaged, and she loved her fiancé, and fully knew that Jack was off-limits. But the human heart is a demanding little bitch sometimes, and Tosh knew that just as well as anyone. She watched Owen wistfully for a few moments… then caught herself.
She very much hoped that Gwen could martial her emotions and get herself into check before the next time she had the opportunity to interact with Jack. Tosh knew it was unlikely, but Gwen's behaviour was… well, unprofessional, unseemly, and frankly, annoying.
Tosh had not yet got her mind back on the Weevil-zapper when the comm sounded. The origin code display (colloquially called by everyone except Tosh, the caller ID) was scrambled, un-decodable to Torchwood's equipment, which meant it was probably coming from the TARDIS. It had only been slightly less than twenty-four hours since last they heard from Jack, but they knew the next call would be soon, because the TARDIS crew was just about ready to throw another Angel into the Rift.
"Oh, here we go," Tosh said to herself, running down a ramp to the newly-repaired controls that operate the Rift Manipulator, to welcome the call from the comm extension there.
Gwen and Owen appeared at the top of the stairs, and made to follow her down.
"No, it's nothing to do with you. You two work on the alien corpse," she commanded them. "I'll let you know if and when I need you."
Mostly, she just didn't need Gwen with her hands in whatever was about to happen that might make Jack's communication disappear for another five weeks. Things were complicated enough.
Owen got the message and pulled Gwen back to what they were doing, and Tosh used a headset to answer the communiqué, rather than let the whole Hub hear. "Jack?" she said, fitting it on.
"Nope, just little old me," said a man's voice, probably a bit too sprightly for the occasion.
"Hi, Doctor," she said. "Ready for action?"
"Always," he told her. "You?"
"The Rift Manipulator is repaired and ready," she answered. "We'll probably need to re-establish our so-called 'Bluetooth' connection, TARDIS to Torchwood."
"I'm locked on to you," he said. "All systems go on our end."
"Fire away," she instructed.
Like before, the TARDIS "Bluetoothed" into the Torchwood Hub via the Rift Manipulator, and then there was a lot of yelling and screaming over the comm. From what she could tell, the Weeping Angel was switching out the lights in the TARDIS, and coming after the Doctor. Jack the other man (Glenn, was it?) were doing their best to get in its way because they couldn't be zapped, and Martha seemed to be using herself as bait.
She heard Jack say, "Martha, it doesn't want you, it wants the Doctor! Just try to stabilize the electrical units so we can control the lights!" It told her a lot about the situation.
What was more, she was mightily glad she had decided to put all the chaos on her headset, because as far as Gwen and Owen were concerned, everything was quiet.
And then, there was an ungodly noise, another ungodly noise, several minutes of these noises mixing and pulsing, changing, growing louder. Then, the Rift Manipulator seemed to explode in a hail of yellow sparks, then catch fire.
Tosh cursed, then ran for the fire extinguisher. By the time the smoke cleared, the line was dead, and the Doctor, Jack, Glenn, and Martha were gone… she hoped only for a few weeks.
Smoke alarms were going off, and once they were silenced, Gwen, Owen, and Ianto turned up at her side.
"What the hell happened?" asked Gwen, her gigantic blue eyes as wide as they had ever been.
"The Doctor and friends just catapulted another Weeping Angel into the Rift," Tosh answered with a sigh, staring at the melted Rift Manipulator.
"What?" Gwen shrieked. "Why the fuck…"
"Well!" Tosh interrupted what was sure to be a half-crazed tirade about why Jack either didn't ask to speak to Gwen or call Gwen himself, by clapping her hands, and changing the subject. "Time to get on top of fixing this thing. No telling how soon we'll need it again! Ianto, with me, please!"
And she jogged back up the ramp, with Ianto in tow.
It was three and a half weeks before they needed the Rift Manipulator again – sooner than Tosh had anticipated. Fortunately, the apparatus was fixed, and ready to perform again.
"Thanks, Tosh," the Doctor said. "When this is all over, I will do my best to help you replace that equipment… hopefully something that doesn't have melted parts and knobs makeshifted back into place with solder."
"That would be nice, thanks!" she chirped.
Once again, she put the TARDIS crew on the headset, and didn't let anyone else know it was happening, until there was an explosion.
This time, before the chaos began, Jack got on the line. "Hey, Tosh. How are things there?"
"Okay," she said. "So, how long ago did we talk? A few minutes?"
"No, it's been… er, twenty six hours. The TARDIS needed a rest after the last go."
"So did I," Tosh heard the Doctor say from somewhere faraway.
"Yeah, they're getting more aggressive about coming after the Doctor," Jack sighed. "I think they know what's going to happen to them."
"So, are you standing there with your eyes on it?" she wondered.
"Yep," he said. "Glenn and I are the sentries, while the Doctor and Martha do the clever part."
"I'm not doing anything clever," Martha said, again, from faraway. "The only thing I can do is turn a knob to make the TARDIS jostle and make the Angel slide away from us, and make sure the lights stay on."
"Don't knock it," Jack said. "It's valuable work, activating gravity! Especially when your foe weighs a literal tonne."
"But I can't do both at the same time, so I'm running about like a chicken with its head cut off. It's very sexy work," Martha said.
"Well, are you ready get back online?" Tosh asked.
"Yep, you?" Jack responded.
"Yeah, but I had to switch frequencies on that Bluetoothy thing. The Doctor is going to have to change settings on his receiver."
"Hang on," Jack said, handing the comm to the Doctor.
And from there, once again, Tosh and the Time Lord worked together to get the Hub and the TARDIS linked up, then there were screams, horrific noises, a fire, and silence.
It was six weeks and one day before the scene repeated itself again, and it caused Tosh to wonder what exactly caused the variations in time. Upon this occasion, Jack reported that the time lapse for the TARDIS crew had been only about twelve hours. She speculated that possibly it had to do with the violence of the Angel's resistance to being tossed into the Rift, the TARDIS' resistance to the Angel, and perhaps its level of energy reserves… maybe even something about the way in which she repaired the Rift Manipulator. Any of them seemed plausible, and she hoped that someday, she would have the chance to ask the Doctor.
In fact, she was developing a running mental list of stuff she wanted to ask the Doctor if she ever got the opportunity. She wondered if it would be appropriate to ask him to have a drink with her sometime, just to get her questions answered…
"When the fuck are you coming back?" Gwen demanded of Jack, as this time, Tosh had been slightly careless in letting the communiqué be heard.
"As soon as I can, Gwen, and that's all I can say," he said. "Doing this Angel-toss thing again means I have no idea when we'll come out the other side of it… don't you know that by now?"
"I do, but…"
"This is the last Angel," Jack said.
"Right," Tosh said, intentionally cutting across whatever Gwen was going to say next. "So I'm quite keen to have this over with! Doctor, we're still on the same frequency as last time, fortunately. Plug in, and let's do this."
And over the next four weeks and two days, Tosh worked on fixing the Rift Manipulator again, except the last Angel-toss had verily done it in. More was melted than just the remote connection device, and she just hoped that the Doctor could help, whenever they came out the other side of what they were doing, and that he meant it when he said he would try to find her some newer equipment.
Then one day, they heard that otherworldly sound, followed by an indoor wind carrying papers across the room and blowing back everyone's hair. At that moment, they were in the conference room, and Tosh was leading a discussion as to how to handle the higher concentration of Thykings from the Raldo Realm hanging about near the bay area. In the absence of a Rift Manipulator to study how they had got here, and monitor whether others were coming in and/or whether they were being followed here by Raldo law enforcement, they were having to brainstorm about ways to deal with them without using complete blinding barbarity in full view of most of Cardiff.
The four of them looked just outside the glass wall that cordoned them off from the rest of the Hub, and began to see a rectangular blue shape blink into existence.
"Oh, thank God," Tosh sighed.
"Excuse me, I have to go to the loo," Gwen said, leaving the room.
But Owen and Ianto simply got to their feet, stood with Tosh, and watched.
First one through the door was Jack, of course, and he hopped out with a huge smile and his arms spread. Ianto and Tosh ran enthusiastically forward, for a hug, while Owen hung back and said, "Great to see you," settling for a handshake. Before Jack pulled him aggressively into a hug, and then kissed him heartily on the cheek for good measure.
The Doctor was the next one through the door, then Martha, then Glenn. The three of them waited for the Torchwood team to say their tearful, cheerful hellos, during which, Jack asked, "Where's Gwen?"
"Hiding," Tosh sighed.
"Why?"
"Don't be daft," she snapped, rolling her eyes.
When it all died down, Martha asked, with rather an incredulous smile, "Wow, what a welcome! How long's it been, exactly?"
"Since you lot were last here?" Ianto said. "It's been five months. Give or take."
Jack locked eyes with him. "Sorry."
"It's all right," Ianto replied lightly, and with a flirty smirk. "Just glad you're back. Sir."
"I swear to God it's been…" Jack said, then he stopped and looked at the Doctor. "What? Two days? Two and a half? Maybe three?"
"Something like that," the Doctor shrugged. "I lost count of the hours. Go figure."
"Nice to see you, Doctor," Tosh said.
"You too," he told her. "And Toshiko, I hate to ask this, but I have one more favour to beg of you."
"Shoot."
"Do you have software for pervasive infiltration? Sort of a hunt-down-and shoot sort of thing?"
"What, like an antivirus?"
"Yes, but more pervasive than that?"
"How pervasive are we talking?"
A couple of nights ago, the Doctor had described what sort of "mainframe" he was going to need, and Martha said it sounded absurd.
But then there was Torchwood!
The Doctor, Tosh, and Glenn spent the next two hours immersed in their task. As it turned out, the code that the Doctor had written with Glenn's energy-reading help paired extremely well with Torchwood's semi-illegal seized alien tech, which had a boost from other computer components wired into the Rift.
When the three of them returned to the lounge area below, adjacent to the computer console, Jack, Martha, Ianto, Owen, and Gwen had been sitting, having coffee, telling stories of the past five months… or the past three days.
"So?" Martha asked, looking hopefully at the Doctor.
"Your brilliant idea has been launched," he told her. "It is done."
"Your brilliant idea?" Gwen marvelled, having now gathered herself and said everything she could reasonably say to Jack, all things considered. She smiled. "Good for you, girl!"
"It was just a musing that came to me whilst talking with another physician," Martha said. "Just a… thing. It took a Time Lord and a Half-Eternal, and whatever miraculous thing Tosh is, to put it into play."
"What are we talking about, exactly?" Owen wondered.
"Well, it turns out that the image of a Weeping Angel eventually becomes a Weeping Angel," Jack said. "And some photos have gone viral."
"Oh, shit," Gwen said, surprisingly calmly.
"Indeed, but Martha had the idea to treat the images of Angels like a virus, and release a vaccine," Jack went on.
"Right, but instead of tracking down a virus and deleting it, the Doctor's programme tracks down certain combinations of data – which is essentially what a virus tracker does – and well… gave it a virus."
"So now, all images of Weeping Angels on the internet, or stored on any computer connected to the internet, if opened or downloaded, will discolour and pixelate to the point of being unrecognisable. And no Earth-based technology will be able to recover the data, once lost," the Doctor explained, leaning coolly on a file cabinet.
"Nor will it be able to trace the source of the virus," Tosh added, making a gesture with both hands that said my hands are clean.
"Very nicely done, gents," Ianto said, equally coolly. "And ladies."
"Which brings us to our next order of business," Jack said, getting to his feet, and putting down his mug. "Ianto, Owen, Gwen, and I have been talking, and… Tosh, feel free to jump in here… Glenn, we'd like to offer you a job. We think you'd be a huge asset to our group, what with your abilities and disposition, and it might be good for you to be surrounded by, you know… people who get you. Especially me."
Glenn was taken aback. In a matter of a few weeks, he had gone from literally trying to destroy these people, to being offered a job by them. It was, he knew, more than he deserved.
He swallowed hard to avoid showing the depth of his emotion, and said, "That's so very kind of you, but I'll have to think it over."
Hope you are enjoying, would love to hear from you!
One more chapter to go... thanks for reading!