FIC: I Dream Of Chocolate Fish (Torchwood)
Title: I Dream Of Chocolate Fish
Author: Jewels (bjewelled)
Web Link: http://www.bjewelled.co.uk/fanfic/twfic.shtml
Fandom: Torchwood
Disclaimer: Torchwood is the legal property of the BBC. In case you didn’t know.
Summary: Out of your time, and all you want is a nice bit of fish. It’s hard being a pterodactyl some days.
Word Count: ~3,650
**
This is how your world changes: one minute you find yourself peacefully soaring on air currents and contemplating a nice bit of fish for your supper, and the next you get tangled up in a temporal anomaly and you’re smashing beak-first into a mechanical flying craft.
The next time you wake up, you realise with dismay that you’ve managed to get captured by oversized monkeys who think you’re just a big dumb reptile they can teach tricks to, and you’ll be lucky if you ever see the sky again.
And you never did get that fish.
**
“Catch the ball, girl. Catch the ball!”
The pterodactyl glowered at the white-clad Human who was holding up a brightly coloured sphere and throwing it in her direction. She watched, unimpressed, as it bounced several times before rolling to a stop near her feet.
“Catch it yourself, you dumb primate,” she told it, though she knew perfectly well that the Human wouldn’t understand her. English was a perfectly easy language, almost pidgin-like in its simplicity, and it hadn’t taken her long at all to learn it, but it was frustrating that there was no way to wrap her beak around the words, and any attempts merely sounded like screeching that was indistinguishable from her usual language.
She miserably contemplated the ball. It wasn’t her fault the Humans were incapable of constructing even a basic multitonal translator. Monkeys did so like their little toys, their little caves made of metal and stone, but ask them to come up with something useful, and all they could provide her with was a bloody ball.
The pterodactyl bent down, picked up the ball in her beak, and punctured it. She dropped it again, then glowered at the Human for good measure. “Just think what I could do to your head,” she told the Human.
“Bad dinosaur,” it said.
She huffed to herself. “Idiot Monkey.” She furled her wings closer to her body and shuffled awkwardly across the cold artificial stone that was strewn with dried grasses. There was a waterfall that fell into a pool which would have been nice if she couldn’t hear the pump going in the background. It set her teeth on edge.
She pulled against the short tether that kept her tied to the ground, and lapped at the water that fell. It was so undignified. She never had a moment to herself. She knew perfectly well that the mechanical devices hidden in the corners of the artifical cave were watching her every movement, studying her. They were clearly aware that she had time travelled, but seemed to possess no capacity to return her.
Although, she supposed, what would have been the point? She’d been scheduled for an evacuation transport a few turns of the sun after she had been forced into this strange monkey-ruled world. If they did send her back, they’d probably get the day wrong and drop her in the middle of the asteroid collision, or in the aftermath. That really wouldn’t be at all fun.
So she was stuck here. She was surrounded by monkeys who didn’t think she could speak, and forced to play ball games for her supper.
She contemplated her reflection in the little pool that constantly drained away. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go at all.
**
This is how everyone knows the world is ending: the Silurians arrive and point out that there’s a great big rock flying through space towards the planet, and probably a lot of people are going to die. No one really likes the Silurians, because they have a tendency to kidnap the dumb ones and turn them into guard pets, and then try and blow things up, but everyone concedes that they might have a point.
Everyone ums and ahs about it, and after a while, they decide that getting the hell off the planet might be for the best. It’s going to get very cold very fast and no one wants to endure that. After all, most people are still living in unshielded nests and forests and will be instantly killed by the effect of a really big rock hitting the ground really fast.
So, reluctantly, people start to sign up for the evacuation transports, painstakingly negotiated from the Silurians. Three days before the last transport leaves, one of the flyers goes missing, and no one can find her. Her slot is given to a sea-goer, who sets up home on a small aquatic moon six systems over, and eventually winds up the distant ancestress of Queen K’Kim the Valiant, who, in roughly two million years time, saves six billion sentients from being annihilated when she negotiates a crucial peace treaty during a terrible war. So, at the end of the day, it all works out for the best, really.
**
Her captors had made a terrible, crucial error. They had been standing on the far side of the cave, over one of their delightfully primative little machines, running scans and tests, jabbing her with needles and cooing over the results. But then they had been called away.
And they had left their machine behind.
She eyed it carefully, and gave the tether attached to her leg an experimental tug. It was soft, padded and leather, and there was a certain amount of give in it. She shuffled towards the metal table with wheels on that that machine sat on top of. She paused every few steps, waiting for the screeching of the door opening, and the sound of Humans coming to stop her.
It was hard. They’d positioned it almost completely out of her reach. She wound up lying on her stomach, delicately pinching the leg of the wheeled table and trying to pull it towards her. It toppled over, and she cringed, convinced that she’d ruined her chances, but fortune, it seemed, was still with her. It was intact, though scratched.
She gingerly nudged it with her beak until it was within comfortable reach, and squinted at the screen. She had a rough idea of which letter conformed to which sound, but no way of knowing what their written language was supposed to be like. Written language had never really taken off, back home. You had to scratch things in the soil or on stones, and really that was more suited to people with actual digits, as opposed to wings.
It wasn’t helped that the screen was designed for their tiny close-together eyes. When she closed on eye, and turned her head, she could sort of see the screen. It was awkward, but if she was very very careful, she could use her wing claws to depress the keys. She nearly broke the delicate machine the first time she tried, but after a few moments, she managed to find the right pressure.
U STOPID MUNKES, she typed, I KN TAAK
Before she could go into any more detail, the door screeched open.
“Oh my God!” One of the white Humans yelled, raising her hands in a shooing gesture. “She’s smashing the laptop!”
“Someone get the tranqs!” another yelled.
Startled, she slipped from her delicately poised position over the machine, and her head came down hard on the machine. It sparked, and went dark, and her eyes crossed from the impact. When she managed to raise her head again, she stared at the remnants of the machine with dismay.
“Oh, for the love of fish,” she muttered, disheartened.
**
This is how you wind up in a stasis pod: the Humans decide that you’re about as trainable as you’re going to get, and besides which, they need to devote more of their resources to some sort of sphere you heard them talking about. They need something called ‘funding’ and a lot of it apparently goes in your food.
So one day, they come for you, lots of white Humans accompanied by green Humans. You try and fight, but to very little avail. The green Humans jab you in the side with a really big needle, and everything goes floppy. You’re vaguely aware that they bundle you onto a moving surface, and take you to a room that’s too bright and smells like chemicals.
You see that they’re preparing a Jvari stasis pod, and if you could move, you’d tell them that it was a piece of crap that was out of date even in your time, but you can’t, so you don’t. They bundle you into the stasis pod, and the world elongates into one enduring moment of pain.
**
She landed heavily on the fake-stone floor that she’d come to associate with Humans. What would be the harm in some nice grass, she mused foggily, or perhaps a nice tree? She opened her eyes, and caught sight of the stasis pod lying cracked open, and inactive, and realised why exactly she felt like she’d been chewed up and spat out again.
She lay on the floor, and whimpered pitiful to herself. She was surprised when she felt a gentle touch raising her head and settling it onto something soft. She cracked open an eye again, and looked up into the face of a Human. It had taken her head, and was cushioning her with his legs.
“Don’t you know I’m a dangerous monster?” she tried to say, though it only came out as a pathetic creel. She didn’t recognise him. He wore different colours than the Humans she was used to. She wondered if he was one of the researchers that had worked on her, but she had no way of knowing. All Humans looked alike to her.
“I’m sorry,” it said to her, “The pod was failing. If I hadn’t gotten you out, you would have died too.”
“Oh,” she said, “Stasis fugue. That’d do it.” She was dimly aware she was drooling uncontrollably over his legs, but he didn’t seem that bothered.
His fingers, so tiny but peculiarly dextrous, stroked her beak, and along her head. “It’s stupid, worrying over a pterodactyl, but I don’t want to lose everything that I have left. No one else should die. It’s not… not fair.”
“You make no sense,” she would have said, but she was too busy breathing hard and wishing that she was back home, soaring on air currents.
**
This is how your life goes for a while: you find out that the Human is a ‘he’, and He has a name that’s as hard to pronounce as the rest of his language. You’re trapped in a massive artificial cave, but at least it had clear panes of glass through which you can look and see what the world has become. It’s full of big metal and stone towers, and the only things in the sky are tiny birds or big machines. It’s depressing, so you don’t look. You comfort yourself with the knowledge that the cave is big enough to fly around in, and He doesn’t care to tie you to the ground. He brings you fish, and something divine he calls ‘choklat’ and you think that if He was a bit bigger and had wings, you might just keep him for yourself.
He names you ‘Myfanwy’ and you think it’s kind of nice, if you have the mouth for vowels.
He tells you all sorts of things. He tells you about himself, about his mate, about his life and what happened to your old captors. He tells you about the world, and says that he wishes you could be set free, but that you might come in useful. You try not to be too disheartened at that thought.
And then one day, he brings home a friend.
**
When she shook off the sedative, she realised that she was lying in some sort of tunnel filled with dry grasses, spread thickly enough that it provided some sort of comfortable padding between her and the hard ground of the tunnel. One end was brightly lit, and seemed to drop away, opening up into a wide open area.
He was standing there, looking wary. She tried to stand, and staggered, using her wings to prop herself up.
“I’m sorry,” He whispered to her. “But I didn’t have a choice. There was no other way to get in here.”
“You bastard,” she told him, thickly, “I thought you were my friend. You brought me fish.” She toppled over backwards, and sprawled in an ungainly fashion on the straw.
“Look at it this way,” He said, “You’ve got lots of room to fly about in. If we train you right, you might even get to go outside and have a fly around.”
“I don’t know you,” she said, flopping onto her stomach petulantly.
“I brought you a present,” He added, and produces a bar of choklat out of his clothes.
“Alright,” she grudgingly allowed, “I’ll pretend to know you.”
**
This is your new life: you have a fair bit of freedom, pretending to be trained, and they let you come and go as much as you please. As long as you don’t draw too much attention by killing the woolly animals, they leave you alone. Sometimes you dangle your head out of your tunnel and watch them running around, doing things that seem important to themselves, and its like having a bit of a family again. They seem brighter than your average monkey, but they still haven’t figured out you have enough intelligence to understand them. But that’s ok. They bring you food and let you fly, and as you soar on air currents, you muse that that’s about all you ask from life these days.
They do have this habit of dousing food in a protein marker, as some sort of behavioural conditioning to force you to stop eating their ‘peetsas’. It’s a bit insulting, but you’re not that bothered; it’s actually sort of tasty.
Then one day they call you, and you realise they’re in danger, from the way they cluster about their lift and scream. You see the metal Human, and realise from hours of Him talking to you, who this is, and that it might be dangerous. You try and puncture the power lines running under its skin, but it hits back, hard, and once they’re away, you retreat, bloodied and broken.
Hours later, His Friend comes up to your tunnel, and treats your injuries with surprising gentleness. You’ve never had His Friend deal with you before.
“Sorry,” His Friend whispers, “I’m so sorry.”
You get the feeling that it’s not you that he’s apologising to.
**
She was watching them on the day they came back with the device, a simple gold disc on a chain, and she nearly fell out of her tunnel when she realised what it was. She had been quietly heckling one of them while they attempted to sing, but all thoughts of her amusement were gone out of her mind when she saw one of the females (she still got them confused) held it out triumphantly.
“Oh my,” His Friend said, looking at it, “Haven’t seen one of these in a while. Multitonal translator. Simplistic, but they do a fantastic job of tweaking sounds. Like, if you can’t quite make the right clicking noises for one language, they’ll fix it for you.”
She leant so far out of her tunnel that she nearly slipped, watching the disc and chain as it passed from hand to hand. She had to have it. It had to be hers. Finaly, the chance she’d been waiting for.
“So,” one of the females said, “It doesn’t translate languages.”
“No,” His Friend said, “You’d have to already know the language. It does a best-guess match at the noises you make and matches them to the subject language.”
It was her chance. She had the element of surprise on her side. The male who wore white like the Humans who had caught her did was holding the translator up to the light. She’d caught fish that hadn’t displayed themselves so brazenly. She launched herself from her tunnel and dove towards the shiny gold prize.
They all yelped in fright as she dove them, and unfortunately, the element of surprise wasn’t enough. The male tucked his hand down and ducked as she flew inches over his head. She landed on the metal ground and looked about frantically.
“What the hell?” Someone yelled.
There! The male had dropped it, but they were all clustered around it. She gave a good screech that she’d learnt frightened the monkeys, and raised her wings aggressively. They all reflexively stepped back. She kept advancing, pushing them back bit by bit.
“I’m a big scary monster!” She yelled at them, “Fear me, for I might eat your babies.”
They all retreated another step.
“Jesus. Owen, get some tranqs. Ianto, what the hell?”
“Sir, I don’t know, I’ve never seen her act like this.”
She was close enough. She darted her head forward, grabbing the chain in her beak, fortunately sturdy enough not to immediately snap under the pressure, and she launched herself back upwards, back towards her tunnel.
She could hear their voices chattering confusedly behind her as she landed. She delicately hooked the chain over an exposed bit of metal, and stared at it. There was no time, but this had clearly not been made for one of her species. It had been made for one with fiddly bendy arms.
She gave it an experimental poke with her beak and she wriggled her head through the chain. It was a tight fit, and nearly got stuck on the back of her head, but a lot of choking and cursing, and she managed to get it to fall about her neck. She could hear footsteps pounding their way up to her tunnel nest.
“Please please please,” she chanted, tapping the device with a wing claw. “Please work, please work.”
“Who’s up there?!” It was His Friend’s voice, coming closer.
He was accompanied by the others, and they were all holding weapons. She tapped it again. “Please work,” she said, desperately, “I don’t want them to shoot me. So much fish yet to eat, I can’t die yet.”
“I can hear you,” His Friend said, “Come out with your hands up.”
In a burst of motion, His Friend and the others burst through the access door, and into her tunnel. She turned away from them, reflexively ducking behind her wing.
“Don’t shoot!” she tried, in her awkward attempts at English.
They were silent.
“Oh God,” one of the Humans said, “Did the pterodactyl just talk?”
She lowered her wing and peered over it. They were standing, staring, open mouthed, and their weapons pointed uncertainly at her. Screwing up her courage, she snapped her beak at them.
“Of course I can talk, you stupid sodding monkeys,” she said. From their suddenly shocked reactions, she realised that they could understand her. “Oh! That feels so good to say.”
“You…” It was Him, his weapon lowering. “You can talk. You’ve been able to talk all this time?”
“Yes,” she said, shuffling her feet in the dried grass. “You lot just wouldn’t listen.”
**
“I can understand it,” She explained, feeling magnanimous all of a sudden, though she couldn’t quite fathom why. “You monkeys have been running the planet into the ground for a few millennia now. I suppose you can’t be blamed for your terribly Humanocentric viewpoint. Not your fault that you never believed other intelligent life evolved.”
They were sitting in her nest, perched atop of piles of dried grass that she’d hastily swept into piles for them.
His Friend seemed remarkably at ease with the whole situation. “We can’t really send you back, you know. We can’t control the Rift that well. We can release you, though, if you like.”
She self-consciously preened a wing. “Well,” she finally said, “I suppose if it’s unavoidable, this place is as good a place as any. Free fish. And choklat. I suppose that’s alright.”
His Friend and Him glanced at each other, and shared what she thought was an expression of amusement.
“The… translator…” One of the females said, tentatively, “It has limited charge. It won’t last very long.”
“Oh,” she said, disappointed. “I see.”
She must have sounded sad, because He extended a hand towards her, as if to scratch her jaw in the way she liked, but he hesitated halfway there. “Do you have a name?”
She shifted from foot to foot. “I like the one you gave me,” she said, after a moment’s thought, “It’s pretty.” She extended her head, and gave him a significant look.
He smiled and scratched her jaw obligingly.
“Well, Missy,” His Friend said, clapping his hands together, and startling her. “If you’re going to stick around, it’s no more free ride. Got any useful skills?”
She straightened, and thought about that. “I’m really good at nest-building,” she said, after a moment.
“Hmm, good, but not a skill Torchwood needs a lot.” His Friend nodded sharply to her. “You’ve been pretty good at being a guard dog so far. You happy to keep doing that?”
She snapped her beak. “Yes, sir,” she said, smartly.
“Oh God,” the Other Male said. “Another one with the sirs.”
“She learnt from the best,” He said, and smiled at her.
**
This is how you know nothing much has changed: they take off the translator to preserve what little charge remained, and now it hangs in your tunnel on a bent nail. You still get your food brought to you, and they still let you come and go as you please, but now they call a greeting up to you when they enter or leave the cave. Sometimes one of them comes up and tells you about their day, or what’s going on, and you listen patiently. Sometimes they tell you deep dark secrets that they can’t tell anyone else. “I think I love him,” one says. "I have so many regrets," another confides. You don’t understand, but you sympathise with the tone. Sometimes you talk to them in return, and even though they can’t understand you, they do you the courtesy of listening, which helps, oddly enough.
You’re stuck out of your time, but some days, you think, maybe this isn’t such a bad place to be stuck after all.
- Fin -
Author: Jewels (bjewelled)
Web Link: http://www.bjewelled.co.uk/fanfic/twfic.shtml
Fandom: Torchwood
Disclaimer: Torchwood is the legal property of the BBC. In case you didn’t know.
Summary: Out of your time, and all you want is a nice bit of fish. It’s hard being a pterodactyl some days.
Word Count: ~3,650
**
This is how your world changes: one minute you find yourself peacefully soaring on air currents and contemplating a nice bit of fish for your supper, and the next you get tangled up in a temporal anomaly and you’re smashing beak-first into a mechanical flying craft.
The next time you wake up, you realise with dismay that you’ve managed to get captured by oversized monkeys who think you’re just a big dumb reptile they can teach tricks to, and you’ll be lucky if you ever see the sky again.
And you never did get that fish.
**
“Catch the ball, girl. Catch the ball!”
The pterodactyl glowered at the white-clad Human who was holding up a brightly coloured sphere and throwing it in her direction. She watched, unimpressed, as it bounced several times before rolling to a stop near her feet.
“Catch it yourself, you dumb primate,” she told it, though she knew perfectly well that the Human wouldn’t understand her. English was a perfectly easy language, almost pidgin-like in its simplicity, and it hadn’t taken her long at all to learn it, but it was frustrating that there was no way to wrap her beak around the words, and any attempts merely sounded like screeching that was indistinguishable from her usual language.
She miserably contemplated the ball. It wasn’t her fault the Humans were incapable of constructing even a basic multitonal translator. Monkeys did so like their little toys, their little caves made of metal and stone, but ask them to come up with something useful, and all they could provide her with was a bloody ball.
The pterodactyl bent down, picked up the ball in her beak, and punctured it. She dropped it again, then glowered at the Human for good measure. “Just think what I could do to your head,” she told the Human.
“Bad dinosaur,” it said.
She huffed to herself. “Idiot Monkey.” She furled her wings closer to her body and shuffled awkwardly across the cold artificial stone that was strewn with dried grasses. There was a waterfall that fell into a pool which would have been nice if she couldn’t hear the pump going in the background. It set her teeth on edge.
She pulled against the short tether that kept her tied to the ground, and lapped at the water that fell. It was so undignified. She never had a moment to herself. She knew perfectly well that the mechanical devices hidden in the corners of the artifical cave were watching her every movement, studying her. They were clearly aware that she had time travelled, but seemed to possess no capacity to return her.
Although, she supposed, what would have been the point? She’d been scheduled for an evacuation transport a few turns of the sun after she had been forced into this strange monkey-ruled world. If they did send her back, they’d probably get the day wrong and drop her in the middle of the asteroid collision, or in the aftermath. That really wouldn’t be at all fun.
So she was stuck here. She was surrounded by monkeys who didn’t think she could speak, and forced to play ball games for her supper.
She contemplated her reflection in the little pool that constantly drained away. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go at all.
**
This is how everyone knows the world is ending: the Silurians arrive and point out that there’s a great big rock flying through space towards the planet, and probably a lot of people are going to die. No one really likes the Silurians, because they have a tendency to kidnap the dumb ones and turn them into guard pets, and then try and blow things up, but everyone concedes that they might have a point.
Everyone ums and ahs about it, and after a while, they decide that getting the hell off the planet might be for the best. It’s going to get very cold very fast and no one wants to endure that. After all, most people are still living in unshielded nests and forests and will be instantly killed by the effect of a really big rock hitting the ground really fast.
So, reluctantly, people start to sign up for the evacuation transports, painstakingly negotiated from the Silurians. Three days before the last transport leaves, one of the flyers goes missing, and no one can find her. Her slot is given to a sea-goer, who sets up home on a small aquatic moon six systems over, and eventually winds up the distant ancestress of Queen K’Kim the Valiant, who, in roughly two million years time, saves six billion sentients from being annihilated when she negotiates a crucial peace treaty during a terrible war. So, at the end of the day, it all works out for the best, really.
**
Her captors had made a terrible, crucial error. They had been standing on the far side of the cave, over one of their delightfully primative little machines, running scans and tests, jabbing her with needles and cooing over the results. But then they had been called away.
And they had left their machine behind.
She eyed it carefully, and gave the tether attached to her leg an experimental tug. It was soft, padded and leather, and there was a certain amount of give in it. She shuffled towards the metal table with wheels on that that machine sat on top of. She paused every few steps, waiting for the screeching of the door opening, and the sound of Humans coming to stop her.
It was hard. They’d positioned it almost completely out of her reach. She wound up lying on her stomach, delicately pinching the leg of the wheeled table and trying to pull it towards her. It toppled over, and she cringed, convinced that she’d ruined her chances, but fortune, it seemed, was still with her. It was intact, though scratched.
She gingerly nudged it with her beak until it was within comfortable reach, and squinted at the screen. She had a rough idea of which letter conformed to which sound, but no way of knowing what their written language was supposed to be like. Written language had never really taken off, back home. You had to scratch things in the soil or on stones, and really that was more suited to people with actual digits, as opposed to wings.
It wasn’t helped that the screen was designed for their tiny close-together eyes. When she closed on eye, and turned her head, she could sort of see the screen. It was awkward, but if she was very very careful, she could use her wing claws to depress the keys. She nearly broke the delicate machine the first time she tried, but after a few moments, she managed to find the right pressure.
U STOPID MUNKES, she typed, I KN TAAK
Before she could go into any more detail, the door screeched open.
“Oh my God!” One of the white Humans yelled, raising her hands in a shooing gesture. “She’s smashing the laptop!”
“Someone get the tranqs!” another yelled.
Startled, she slipped from her delicately poised position over the machine, and her head came down hard on the machine. It sparked, and went dark, and her eyes crossed from the impact. When she managed to raise her head again, she stared at the remnants of the machine with dismay.
“Oh, for the love of fish,” she muttered, disheartened.
**
This is how you wind up in a stasis pod: the Humans decide that you’re about as trainable as you’re going to get, and besides which, they need to devote more of their resources to some sort of sphere you heard them talking about. They need something called ‘funding’ and a lot of it apparently goes in your food.
So one day, they come for you, lots of white Humans accompanied by green Humans. You try and fight, but to very little avail. The green Humans jab you in the side with a really big needle, and everything goes floppy. You’re vaguely aware that they bundle you onto a moving surface, and take you to a room that’s too bright and smells like chemicals.
You see that they’re preparing a Jvari stasis pod, and if you could move, you’d tell them that it was a piece of crap that was out of date even in your time, but you can’t, so you don’t. They bundle you into the stasis pod, and the world elongates into one enduring moment of pain.
**
She landed heavily on the fake-stone floor that she’d come to associate with Humans. What would be the harm in some nice grass, she mused foggily, or perhaps a nice tree? She opened her eyes, and caught sight of the stasis pod lying cracked open, and inactive, and realised why exactly she felt like she’d been chewed up and spat out again.
She lay on the floor, and whimpered pitiful to herself. She was surprised when she felt a gentle touch raising her head and settling it onto something soft. She cracked open an eye again, and looked up into the face of a Human. It had taken her head, and was cushioning her with his legs.
“Don’t you know I’m a dangerous monster?” she tried to say, though it only came out as a pathetic creel. She didn’t recognise him. He wore different colours than the Humans she was used to. She wondered if he was one of the researchers that had worked on her, but she had no way of knowing. All Humans looked alike to her.
“I’m sorry,” it said to her, “The pod was failing. If I hadn’t gotten you out, you would have died too.”
“Oh,” she said, “Stasis fugue. That’d do it.” She was dimly aware she was drooling uncontrollably over his legs, but he didn’t seem that bothered.
His fingers, so tiny but peculiarly dextrous, stroked her beak, and along her head. “It’s stupid, worrying over a pterodactyl, but I don’t want to lose everything that I have left. No one else should die. It’s not… not fair.”
“You make no sense,” she would have said, but she was too busy breathing hard and wishing that she was back home, soaring on air currents.
**
This is how your life goes for a while: you find out that the Human is a ‘he’, and He has a name that’s as hard to pronounce as the rest of his language. You’re trapped in a massive artificial cave, but at least it had clear panes of glass through which you can look and see what the world has become. It’s full of big metal and stone towers, and the only things in the sky are tiny birds or big machines. It’s depressing, so you don’t look. You comfort yourself with the knowledge that the cave is big enough to fly around in, and He doesn’t care to tie you to the ground. He brings you fish, and something divine he calls ‘choklat’ and you think that if He was a bit bigger and had wings, you might just keep him for yourself.
He names you ‘Myfanwy’ and you think it’s kind of nice, if you have the mouth for vowels.
He tells you all sorts of things. He tells you about himself, about his mate, about his life and what happened to your old captors. He tells you about the world, and says that he wishes you could be set free, but that you might come in useful. You try not to be too disheartened at that thought.
And then one day, he brings home a friend.
**
When she shook off the sedative, she realised that she was lying in some sort of tunnel filled with dry grasses, spread thickly enough that it provided some sort of comfortable padding between her and the hard ground of the tunnel. One end was brightly lit, and seemed to drop away, opening up into a wide open area.
He was standing there, looking wary. She tried to stand, and staggered, using her wings to prop herself up.
“I’m sorry,” He whispered to her. “But I didn’t have a choice. There was no other way to get in here.”
“You bastard,” she told him, thickly, “I thought you were my friend. You brought me fish.” She toppled over backwards, and sprawled in an ungainly fashion on the straw.
“Look at it this way,” He said, “You’ve got lots of room to fly about in. If we train you right, you might even get to go outside and have a fly around.”
“I don’t know you,” she said, flopping onto her stomach petulantly.
“I brought you a present,” He added, and produces a bar of choklat out of his clothes.
“Alright,” she grudgingly allowed, “I’ll pretend to know you.”
**
This is your new life: you have a fair bit of freedom, pretending to be trained, and they let you come and go as much as you please. As long as you don’t draw too much attention by killing the woolly animals, they leave you alone. Sometimes you dangle your head out of your tunnel and watch them running around, doing things that seem important to themselves, and its like having a bit of a family again. They seem brighter than your average monkey, but they still haven’t figured out you have enough intelligence to understand them. But that’s ok. They bring you food and let you fly, and as you soar on air currents, you muse that that’s about all you ask from life these days.
They do have this habit of dousing food in a protein marker, as some sort of behavioural conditioning to force you to stop eating their ‘peetsas’. It’s a bit insulting, but you’re not that bothered; it’s actually sort of tasty.
Then one day they call you, and you realise they’re in danger, from the way they cluster about their lift and scream. You see the metal Human, and realise from hours of Him talking to you, who this is, and that it might be dangerous. You try and puncture the power lines running under its skin, but it hits back, hard, and once they’re away, you retreat, bloodied and broken.
Hours later, His Friend comes up to your tunnel, and treats your injuries with surprising gentleness. You’ve never had His Friend deal with you before.
“Sorry,” His Friend whispers, “I’m so sorry.”
You get the feeling that it’s not you that he’s apologising to.
**
She was watching them on the day they came back with the device, a simple gold disc on a chain, and she nearly fell out of her tunnel when she realised what it was. She had been quietly heckling one of them while they attempted to sing, but all thoughts of her amusement were gone out of her mind when she saw one of the females (she still got them confused) held it out triumphantly.
“Oh my,” His Friend said, looking at it, “Haven’t seen one of these in a while. Multitonal translator. Simplistic, but they do a fantastic job of tweaking sounds. Like, if you can’t quite make the right clicking noises for one language, they’ll fix it for you.”
She leant so far out of her tunnel that she nearly slipped, watching the disc and chain as it passed from hand to hand. She had to have it. It had to be hers. Finaly, the chance she’d been waiting for.
“So,” one of the females said, “It doesn’t translate languages.”
“No,” His Friend said, “You’d have to already know the language. It does a best-guess match at the noises you make and matches them to the subject language.”
It was her chance. She had the element of surprise on her side. The male who wore white like the Humans who had caught her did was holding the translator up to the light. She’d caught fish that hadn’t displayed themselves so brazenly. She launched herself from her tunnel and dove towards the shiny gold prize.
They all yelped in fright as she dove them, and unfortunately, the element of surprise wasn’t enough. The male tucked his hand down and ducked as she flew inches over his head. She landed on the metal ground and looked about frantically.
“What the hell?” Someone yelled.
There! The male had dropped it, but they were all clustered around it. She gave a good screech that she’d learnt frightened the monkeys, and raised her wings aggressively. They all reflexively stepped back. She kept advancing, pushing them back bit by bit.
“I’m a big scary monster!” She yelled at them, “Fear me, for I might eat your babies.”
They all retreated another step.
“Jesus. Owen, get some tranqs. Ianto, what the hell?”
“Sir, I don’t know, I’ve never seen her act like this.”
She was close enough. She darted her head forward, grabbing the chain in her beak, fortunately sturdy enough not to immediately snap under the pressure, and she launched herself back upwards, back towards her tunnel.
She could hear their voices chattering confusedly behind her as she landed. She delicately hooked the chain over an exposed bit of metal, and stared at it. There was no time, but this had clearly not been made for one of her species. It had been made for one with fiddly bendy arms.
She gave it an experimental poke with her beak and she wriggled her head through the chain. It was a tight fit, and nearly got stuck on the back of her head, but a lot of choking and cursing, and she managed to get it to fall about her neck. She could hear footsteps pounding their way up to her tunnel nest.
“Please please please,” she chanted, tapping the device with a wing claw. “Please work, please work.”
“Who’s up there?!” It was His Friend’s voice, coming closer.
He was accompanied by the others, and they were all holding weapons. She tapped it again. “Please work,” she said, desperately, “I don’t want them to shoot me. So much fish yet to eat, I can’t die yet.”
“I can hear you,” His Friend said, “Come out with your hands up.”
In a burst of motion, His Friend and the others burst through the access door, and into her tunnel. She turned away from them, reflexively ducking behind her wing.
“Don’t shoot!” she tried, in her awkward attempts at English.
They were silent.
“Oh God,” one of the Humans said, “Did the pterodactyl just talk?”
She lowered her wing and peered over it. They were standing, staring, open mouthed, and their weapons pointed uncertainly at her. Screwing up her courage, she snapped her beak at them.
“Of course I can talk, you stupid sodding monkeys,” she said. From their suddenly shocked reactions, she realised that they could understand her. “Oh! That feels so good to say.”
“You…” It was Him, his weapon lowering. “You can talk. You’ve been able to talk all this time?”
“Yes,” she said, shuffling her feet in the dried grass. “You lot just wouldn’t listen.”
**
“I can understand it,” She explained, feeling magnanimous all of a sudden, though she couldn’t quite fathom why. “You monkeys have been running the planet into the ground for a few millennia now. I suppose you can’t be blamed for your terribly Humanocentric viewpoint. Not your fault that you never believed other intelligent life evolved.”
They were sitting in her nest, perched atop of piles of dried grass that she’d hastily swept into piles for them.
His Friend seemed remarkably at ease with the whole situation. “We can’t really send you back, you know. We can’t control the Rift that well. We can release you, though, if you like.”
She self-consciously preened a wing. “Well,” she finally said, “I suppose if it’s unavoidable, this place is as good a place as any. Free fish. And choklat. I suppose that’s alright.”
His Friend and Him glanced at each other, and shared what she thought was an expression of amusement.
“The… translator…” One of the females said, tentatively, “It has limited charge. It won’t last very long.”
“Oh,” she said, disappointed. “I see.”
She must have sounded sad, because He extended a hand towards her, as if to scratch her jaw in the way she liked, but he hesitated halfway there. “Do you have a name?”
She shifted from foot to foot. “I like the one you gave me,” she said, after a moment’s thought, “It’s pretty.” She extended her head, and gave him a significant look.
He smiled and scratched her jaw obligingly.
“Well, Missy,” His Friend said, clapping his hands together, and startling her. “If you’re going to stick around, it’s no more free ride. Got any useful skills?”
She straightened, and thought about that. “I’m really good at nest-building,” she said, after a moment.
“Hmm, good, but not a skill Torchwood needs a lot.” His Friend nodded sharply to her. “You’ve been pretty good at being a guard dog so far. You happy to keep doing that?”
She snapped her beak. “Yes, sir,” she said, smartly.
“Oh God,” the Other Male said. “Another one with the sirs.”
“She learnt from the best,” He said, and smiled at her.
**
This is how you know nothing much has changed: they take off the translator to preserve what little charge remained, and now it hangs in your tunnel on a bent nail. You still get your food brought to you, and they still let you come and go as you please, but now they call a greeting up to you when they enter or leave the cave. Sometimes one of them comes up and tells you about their day, or what’s going on, and you listen patiently. Sometimes they tell you deep dark secrets that they can’t tell anyone else. “I think I love him,” one says. "I have so many regrets," another confides. You don’t understand, but you sympathise with the tone. Sometimes you talk to them in return, and even though they can’t understand you, they do you the courtesy of listening, which helps, oddly enough.
You’re stuck out of your time, but some days, you think, maybe this isn’t such a bad place to be stuck after all.
- Fin -