fic: gaze into the abyss (and survive this viper's nest) - 1/2
Title: gaze into the abyss (and survive this viper's nest)
Author: jadehunter
Fandom: Torchwood
Pairing(s): Gen, with mentioned Gwen/Rhys and Jack being Jack
Rating: PG-13
Warning: Some bad language, some dead bodies, lots of casual talk of dead bodies and dying, poorly researched stuff on ancient things, and made up stuff about ritual sacrificing.
Masterpost
*****
"What have we got?"
Owen scowled, "A dead body, what does it look like, Harkness?"
It was the ninth body in as many months.
That, in itself, wouldn't be cause for Torchwood to gear up and trample over the toes of the local police as they had done tonight, but post-mortem examinations had placed the time of death for all eight previous victims as midnight on the night of the new moon. While there still remained a possibility that the murders had been committed by a disturbed serial killer, the specifics of the timing involved also pointed to the possibility of ritual sacrifice.
Ritual sacrifice usually meant black magic, and that was a problem best handled as early as possible.
It also meant that Jack wasn't in the mood for Owen's attitude, and the gaze he leveled on the doctor was of pure annoyance. "Not the time or place, Owen."
"That's funny coming from you," Owen snorted, but his eyes were focused and his hands steady as he continued to examine the body. "Who was the one chatting up that bartender last week while the rest of us were trying to find that stupid shapeshifter?"
Jack grinned unrepentantly at the memories that surfaced, his change in mood instantaneous. "He was an incubus! Do you know what it's like to have sex with an incubus? Shapeshifters are nice, too, but there's something about incubi that just - "
"Yeah, it's called a thrall - it's the thing they do to make you docile before they suck the life out of you through your cock," Suzie snorted as she ran the EMF detector over the body.
Owen paused, then told Suzie, "Doesn't sound so bad when you put it like that."
"As riveting as this conversation is," Tosh said witheringly from where she was crouched down next to the corpse's head, "I'll interrupt in the hopes that the dead man takes precedence." She stood, brushing non-existent debris off of her clothes and looked at Jack. "He's clean, like the others - I can't get a single impression."
"Which means he most likely went through a ritual cleansing before he was killed," Suzie mused, then stood up as well. "The scanner's not showing anything, either. Whoever did this isn't making any mistakes, that's for damn sure."
"Everyone slips up sooner or later," Jack said, then glanced at Owen. "You done?"
Owen nodded, "Cause of death is fairly obvious, the throat being slashed open and all, but - more importantly - it looks like he was drained of blood like all the rest. He was probably killed last night, seeing as how that was the new moon, but I'll confirm time of death in autopsy. Nothing else I can do in an alley."
"All right then, let's get this guy bagged up and back to base!" Jack clapped his hands together like a school teacher trying to catch the attention of rowdy children.
Wordlessly, Suzie and Tosh headed back to the SUV with the equipment, while Owen started unfolding the black body bag with an expression of distaste.
"What's the use of having Jones around if he's not here to do the heavy lifting?" he grumbled, grabbing hold of the body's ankles.
Jack had the shoulders, and he grunted with effort as they lifted the body, "You were free to call him up before we left. I'm sure he wouldn't have minded you interrupting his dinner."
"What, and be stuck in the SUV with him while he's hungry? Like hell!"
"Then shut up and lift with your knees."
-----
Ianto was waiting for them when they got back.
"Hello, honey, and how was your day?" Jack greeted him exuberantly, bounding across the main floor of the Hub.
"Slightly troubling," Ianto replied. "I was monitoring you on the CCTV - you had a guest while you were working."
Jack immediately become serious, and Ianto gestured towards the screen where he had pulled up the footage. The team gathered around the computer screen, where it was immediately obvious what Ianto had been referring to. A dark head was peering out over the alley where the team had been huddled around the body of the day, and the owner of said head was clearly doing their best to listen in.
"Who the hell is that?" Suzie demanded.
Ianto pulled up another CCTV picture, this one a somewhat blurred of a dark-haired woman with wide eyes. "She wasn't very careful about hiding from the cameras, so it wasn't difficult to get enough to run the facial recognition software. I wasn't expecting much luck, but she was actually in the local databases and a match came up right away." He changed the picture on the screen to a much cleaner photograph, in bright colors instead of muted grays, one that belonged to an employee profile. "Meet Gwen Cooper, 29, Cardiff police."
"She looks familiar," Owen said. "I think maybe I had sex with her once."
Jack laughed, even as Tosh rolled her eyes.
"You've had sex with half the women in Cardiff," Suzie said.
"But not with this one," Ianto corrected. "The reason she looks familiar is because we've all met her before."
"We have?" Jack frowned.
"It may be a blur to you; I've heard that's what being in thrall does to one's memory," Ianto said dryly. "She was one of the PCs that tried to break up the brawl that broke out last week at the pub with the incubus and the shapeshifter."
"Oh, yeah," Jack said, grinning widely. "We were just talking about that."
"If she was there, wouldn't you have erased her memories?" Tosh asked pensively. "I thought you'd gotten everyone."
Ianto inclined his head slightly as he replied, "I'm afraid she was the one with the concussion. It wasn't advisable at the time to manipulate her mind. Too much of a risk with head injuries, if you'll recall."
"Right, I remember, we thought she'd just attribute anything strange to her concussion," Tosh nodded, then sighed. "I guess not."
"No," Ianto agreed. "I've taken the liberty of going through the CCTV footage of all the cases we've been called out on since PC Cooper's first encounter with us, to see if she's been following us since that incident. Although she hasn't had the best success, she has indeed been trying. Usually, she arrives long after we've left, but it's clear that she's tracking us."
Owen sighed irritably, "Well that's just great, isn't it?" He turned to look at Jack, "This is going to turn into a team meeting situation, right?"
"Yep."
"Can we at least have a team meeting with food? I'm starving, and you're the only one that's gotten to eat recently," Owen said acerbically to Ianto.
Ianto simply replied, "I've ordered Chinese. It's in the conference room."
"And I've got a dead body that needs to get to autopsy," Owen called over his shoulder, already making his way towards the promised meal. "It's in the SUV."
-----
Jack pulled his chopsticks apart and gestured to the screen, where Ianto had put up Gwen Cooper's picture, profile, and history. "What do you think?"
"She could be useful when dealing with the local police," Tosh said, opening her own carton of take-away. "She's one of them, they might be more willing to cooperate with her on the team."
Owen scoffed, "She's only been a cop, what, a few months? She doesn't even have the influence to get herself out of doing the shitty jobs yet."
"The only experience she has is on the beat or guarding crime scenes - a trained monkey can do that," Suzie noted, frowning. "I doubt she has any useful skills to contribute. If we need a contact to smooth things over, someone higher up might be better, a detective or something."
Ianto made a soft, thoughtful noise. He was the only one who wasn't eating, but felt none of the awkwardness a human might have felt in being left to watch the others eat. Well, watching the girls eat, anyway. Jack and Owen ate with no manners, which was extremely disgusting, so he angled his chair towards the screen instead.
"She's not too entrenched, then," he pointed out. "Anyone high up, with enough experience on the job, they might be too set in their ways to be much help here."
Jack nodded, jabbing his chopsticks at Ianto. "Exactly. At least we won't have to break PC Cooper out of too many bad habits before we can put her on the field. She's the closest thing to a blank slate."
"That's supposed to be a good thing?" Owen snorted, shoving noodles into his mouth. "She's practically a civilian. A fully human civilian, at that. She'll be dead before you know it."
A heavy silence filled the room, only punctuated by the awkward sounds of chewing. Tosh couldn't help but glance at Jack and Suzie, and she wasn't the only one. Owen was a bit less subtle about it, and though it didn't seem to bother Jack at all from the way he met their gazes evenly, Suzie's grip on her chopsticks tightened until her knuckles were white and she determinedly glared at the table top.
Unperturbed by the tension, Ianto finally turned away from the screen with Gwen Cooper's face and slid his impassive gaze over the others. "Have we reached a decision, then?"
-----
Gwen Cooper was allowed to join Torchwood on a probationary basis. She would have six months to prove herself capable of keeping up with the demands of Torchwood and, at the end of the six months, she would either become a full field agent or she would find herself back as a policewoman, all memories of Torchwood wiped from her mind and with her colleagues thinking she was simply returning to work after recovering from an injury.
That was what she was told, of course, and it was a bit more palatable than the truth.
The truth was, the majority of the human agents recruited into Torchwood had the terrible habit of dying within their first six months. If the six months had passed and the agent was still alive, well, that was a fair indicator of how adaptable the agent was, and they would remain Torchwood agents until they were inevitably killed in duty. There was always the retirement option of having one's memories erased and going back to civilian life, but the type of people recruited by Torchwood also tended to be the type that could never walk away from the truth of what lay in the shadows of the world.
Looking at the wide-eyed, delighted way Gwen was gaping at everything in the Hub, it was difficult to believe she'd last long. Jack was just as enthusiastic as she was while giving her the tour; something about new agents made him come alive, and he resembled nothing more than a young boy bragging about how brilliant his toy was.
The others stayed out of the way, clustered together on the second level outside of Jack's office, watching the proceedings with varying levels of interest.
"Twenty says she won't make three months," Owen said, propping his elbows on the railing.
Suzie snorted, "That's being a little generous, don't you think? Look at her, she's got Bambi eyes, she won't last three weeks."
Tosh remained quiet as Owen and Suzie bickered. Placing bets on how long Gwen was going to stay alive was a bit too morbid for her, and it wouldn't help anyone when Gwen really did die. She turned to Ianto and was about to ask his opinion when Jack's voice boomed a little louder than usual.
"And that's the team," he said, gesturing to where they were standing in a row. "Gwen, the short one is Owen Harper - "
"Doctor Owen Harper, you wanker!"
" - he's our medic," Jack continued blithely. "The one next to him is Suzie Costello, she's our weapons expert and my second. The one in the heels is Toshiko Sato, our resident tech and information gal. The pretty one is Ianto Jones, who organizes everything and does the heavy lifting."
"Flattering," Ianto muttered, and Tosh hid a grin.
Jack continued, "Team, this is Gwen, say hi."
Obediently, they all gave a wave, though it ranged from half-arsed to nearly non-existent. Their lack of enthusiasm was obvious, and Gwen's excited smile turn a bit more tentative.
Jack was oblivious to it all, turning Gwen and leading her towards the armory, "Lots of things you need to know before we can trust you out there, so let's get started with the most important one: guns, and how to shoot them."
His voice faded away as the two of them headed deeper into the Hub, and the team exchanged wry glances as they started back for their stations.
"Ten says he'll grope her first chance," Owen said challengingly.
"That goes without saying," Ianto replied. "Though I have twenty that says he grows impatient and makes Suzie take responsibility for training Gwen by the end of the week."
Suzie rolled her eyes. "That also goes without saying, Ianto."
-----
The chance for Gwen to prove her mettle came quicker than expected. The day after she had been inducted into Torchwood ranks, Tosh's computer transmitted a series of alarms to each of their mobiles in the middle of the night, followed quickly by a text from Jack saying he would be picking them up in the SUV.
Gwen frowned as she got in next to Tosh in the back, saying, "Wait a moment. There are six of us, yeah? How're we all supposed to fit in here?"
"Close the door, you'll see," Jack grinned.
"And hurry up about it, we still have to pick up Suzie," Owen snapped from his seat on Tosh's other side.
Annoyed, Gwen closed the door a bit harder than necessary - and then blinked in shock. What had seemed like a perfectly normal interior had suddenly expanded. It wasn't excessively large; there was room enough for four people to sit comfortably without brushing up against each other, but the majority of the space was taken up by several computer screens that hung from the roof.
She stammered, "How - this is like - "
"Don't say Harry Potter," Jack said warningly, and his driving turned even more erratic. "Everyone always says Harry Potter now - you know, there a lot of other examples where things are bigger on the inside."
Gwen was too distracted looking for a handhold to reply, but Owen asked, "Like what?"
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," Ianto said promptly from the passenger seat, without bothering to turn back. "Discworld - "
"Thank you, Ianto," Jack said pointedly, even as Owen protested loudly in the background.
"Like I have the time to read all those books with this job," he complained. "How about something a little less obscure - "
Ianto didn't falter for a minute; he continued obligingly, "Mary Poppins' carpet bag, Oscar the Grouch's garbage can from Sesame Street - "
"Oh, shut up," Owen said.
-----
"What's the situation?" Suzie asked the moment she got in the SUV, and the atmosphere changed into one of seriousness.
"Remember that girl that was murdered in the alley next to Night Spot last year?" Tosh tapped at one of the computer screens that hung in the vehicle. A picture came up of a young girl, late teens to early twenties, pretty enough. "Carys Fletcher?"
"I remember that," Gwen said. "Wasn't it a robbery gone wrong or something like that?"
"That's what the police thought," Tosh confirmed. "She was killed with a knife, and the contents of her purse were missing. The reason we decided to keep track of it was because of how she was killed."
At Gwen's confused look, Jack explained, "Sometimes, when people die violent deaths, things start happening in the place they died. Sometimes it's just freak accidents, other times things go a step further and there are more deaths. One theory is that when people die in a state of heightened emotion - like fear, anger, or what have you, the negative energies they emit become absorbed by the area and then bad things start happening as a result."
"Then there's the simpler explanation from human history: people get killed, they get angry, their ghosts stay on to do a bit of haunting," Suzie added, then smirked. "Jack doesn't like that theory. Something about it disturbs him."
"For whatever reason, the fact is, it happens," Jack continued, casting an annoyed look at Suzie through the rearview mirror. "So when a person dies a violent death, Torchwood protocol states that we have to keep tabs on the area for a set period of time, to make sure that there are no...side-effects."
Gwen looked at the picture of the girl, Carys Fletcher, again; "And she...decided to stay?"
"It seems so," Tosh said, and she was going over data, brows furrowed. "Five nights ago, an ambulance was called to the area when a man tripped and struck his head on the wall in the alley next to the club. Two nights ago, another ambulance was called to the same alley; a couple received several cuts on their arms and legs when they tripped into several crates filled with broken glass."
Ianto raised an eyebrow; "They all tripped?"
"The first man's blood alcohol level makes it plausible he might have done. The second incident, on the other hand...the report states that the man stumbled into the woman, causing her to trip into the crates and pull him along," Tosh replied, scanning the document quickly. "The man claimed he was pushed, but there was no one else in the alley with them."
"Of course," Suzie sighed, leaning back. "And tonight's incident?"
Tosh smiled humorlessly. "999 was called again. A man sustained several deep lacerations to the arms and chest under mysterious circumstances: CCTV shows no one else in the alley with him, the lights flicker for a few moments, and then he staggers out into the crowd trying to get into the club, bleeding from his wounds. He lost a lot of blood before they managed to get him stabilized."
"Let me take a wild guess here," Jack said, glancing at Tosh's reflection. "This alley where all the injuries happened - same alley where Carys Fletcher died?"
"Mm hmm."
Jack nodded thoughtfully. "And the timing of all this...anniversary of her death?"
"Five nights ago, when the first man was injured, marked the year down to the hour," Tosh reported grimly.
"The ghost spent the year growing in power and that power reached a peak at the anniversary of her death, which is when she could finally lash out," Suzie explained to Gwen, who had been looking a bit uncertain. "The escalation is violence is similar to what you see in human serial killers; they start off smaller to test their capacities, and then grow more violent when they grow more experienced and more confident. Same principle, except with a ghost."
"But why would she do this?" Gwen asked. "Why is she attacking people like this? She wasn't violent when she was alive, was she?"
Ianto said, "Who you are when you're alive has very little to do with who you are after death." He didn't elaborate, choosing to watch the streetlights go flashing by as the SUV whipped through the streets.
It was Jack who continued, "When a ghost first manifests like this, there's no thinking or premeditation involved, just feelings and emotions. Most of what they do is relieve the violence of their deaths by re-enacting it with other victims."
"Coroner's report says she suffered a severe blow to the head, enough to crack her skull, most likely to subdue her initially," Owen interjected. He had pulled one of the screens towards himself and was now flipping through the crime scene photographs. "After that, most of her major arteries were severed: femoral, brachial, carotid - she bled out in minutes. Whoever did this was one methodical son-of-a-bitch."
Gwen was frowning. "So...the man hitting his head, the people getting cut - "
"It all follows the injuries Carys received before dying," Jack finished. "That's what they do."
-----
When they arrived at the scene, there was a flurry of movement, everyone spilling out of the SUV and heading towards the back, where the open boot displayed a variety of items arranged very neatly in customized racks. Suzie picked up two devices, tossing one to Tosh and keeping the other for herself; Ianto picked out a medium-sized tool box from a row of identical tool boxes and opened the lid briefly to check the contents before handing it off to Owen. Jack -
Jack was standing in front of Gwen, arms crossed. "Your job tonight is to stay by the car," he said.
"What?" she asked, keenly aware of how everyone else slowed down their movements in order to eavesdrop. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, stay by the car. You're not trained yet; this isn't the kind of job where you learn from your mistakes - this is the kind of job where you die from them," Jack told her. "You can observe from here, don't get close enough to interfere. And whatever happens, stay calm."
It was difficult to argue with that kind of logic, so Gwen was left standing by the SUV, peering down the alleyway after the others in an effort to see what they were doing. The night club was still letting people in, music thumping into the air, and Gwen felt distinctly awkward and somewhat like she had been abandoned as she received several curious looks from the people headed into the club.
Although there were lights in the alley, they weren't very bright, so Gwen was left to do a bit of guessing as to what was going on. Suzie and Tosh were walking slowly up and down the alleyway, eyes on the devices in their hands, and they passed by on either side of Jack several times. He was standing still in the middle, gazing up at the night sky, seemingly content to wait all night for something to happen. Owen was crouched down on the ground, the tool box open in front of him, and he was fiddling with something she couldn't quite make out -
Ianto was gone.
She realized this right as the lights in the alley flickered. Jack turned his head sharply to Suzie, who was saying something very quickly, and then Tosh was saying something, too, and it was so frustrating to be unable to hear any of what was going on - and where was Ianto, anyway?
Owen stood up, and there was a tiny column of smoke rising from a small bowl at his feet.
The lights flickered again, violently this time.
Jack was talking now, his tone calm, and she could only hear snatches of what he was saying: " - Carys - I know - confused, but - you don't belong here anymore - "
There was a crackling sound, and one of the light bulbs exploded overhead. Gwen barely restrained a scream, though none of the others in the alley so much as batted an eye. Owen was crouched down again, and the barely visible wisp of smoke from the bowl grew just a bit larger.
"The reading's still off the charts, Jack," Suzie said, her mouth twisted in an unhappy line, dark eyes focused on the device in her hands. "I think it's - "
"Energy spike!" Tosh warned -
"Shit!" Owen swore as he jumped to the side, and the glass bottle that had been on a collision course with his head hit the wall and shattered. "Fucking bitch!"
Jack glanced at him, "Owen!"
"Yeah, yeah, think happy thoughts," Owen said mockingly, but he took a deep breath and visibly calmed himself. "I hate ghosts," he said conversationally, eyes wary. "Fucking drama queens, the lot of them."
Tosh was frowning, "I don't understand, the energy levels should be tapering off with the cedar and the sage but they're climbing - it's gaining energy from some source - "
"Gwen!" Suzie barked, and Gwen jumped, eyes wide.
Jack whirled around; the expression on his face shifted ominously several times, but he took a deep breath and said very calmly, "Gwen, I thought I told you to stay by the car."
"I - I was," Gwen stammered nervously, "but I couldn't hear what you were saying - and I didn't mean to, I swear - but I was just - "
"Gwen, calm down," Suzie ordered. "Right now."
There was a slight, clinking sound that floated through the alley and began to turn into a louder sort of scraping, rattling noise - like shattered pieces of glass being dragged across the ground.
"Shit," Owen said. "It's going to try and cut us all to ribbons, most likely."
Gwen jumped again when Jack placed his hands on her shoulders. "I need you to calm down," he told her, looking her straight in the eyes, and she could feel her heart pounding. "Ghosts feed off of negative energy - fear, anger, sadness, anxiety. You need to calm down right now, because you are making it stronger."
That was easier said than done, with everyone's eyes on her - well, Suzie wasn't looking at her, she was looking down at her device, but that was just as bad, because it was only reminding Gwen of how she wasn't calming down -
"Think about something that makes you happy," Jack suggested. "You have a boyfriend, right? Rhys? Tell me about him."
A bit thrown, Gwen began a bit uncertainly, "His name is Rhys Williams, he works as a manager at Harwood's Haulage. Um, he's very straightforward and easy going most of the time, that's what I liked about him when we first met in college." Jack was nodding encouragingly. "He's always friendly with everyone, and I don't think he has a cruel bone in his body - " Amazingly, it was working. She felt calmer as she thought about Rhys, sweet, oblivious Rhys who was currently sleeping the night away without a clue as to what sorts of things existed in the world.
The sound of glass stopped abruptly, and Ianto was there in the next instant, seeming to step out of the shadows. He held a large bag of...something in the crook of his elbow, and looked as immaculate as ever.
"It's done," he told Jack.
Jack sighed, and let go of Gwen's shoulders. "All right, let's pack it up and go home," he said tiredly.
-----
Suzie came over the next morning and dropped a thick book on Gwen's desk.
"What's this?" Gwen asked, flipping through the pages and wincing at the vast pages of small print.
"The unofficial Torchwood handbook for new employees," Suzie said, bringing over her chair and settling in. "You need to know it, front and back." At Gwen's incredulous look, Suzie explained, "Unlike other companies' handbooks, ours has less to do with rules and regulations and more to do with what monsters are out there and how to defeat them."
Her interest peaked, Gwen began to examine the pages more slowly. "So this would tell me about what you did last night to get rid of the ghost?"
"Chapter 6: Ghosts, Poltergeists, and Hauntings."
Gwen turned to the page shown on the index for that particular chapter, eager to fill in the blanks on what had happened. Unfortunately, the text was still very small and filled over a dozen pages, and she hadn't exactly slept much last night. The words blurred together as she tried to read, and she cast a sheepish glance in Suzie's direction.
"Would it be possible for you to summarize?" she asked, biting her lip.
Suzie pursed her lips in annoyance but said, "The basics of it is, when we get the reports, we go down to the scene and verify with our equipment. Strictly speaking, a regular EMF reader is pretty much useless when it comes to detecting actual ghosts, because - even without taking into consideration all the electronic equipment in the world - a sensitive meter can detect the vibration of a metal filing cabinet and throw out a reading. Our EMF meter, on the other hand, has been...enhanced so that interference readings are not an issue."
"How was it enhanced?" Gwen interrupted, curious.
There was a moment where she thought Suzie wouldn't answer, but the other woman only sighed a little. "Tosh and I did it, a few years back, when she first started working here. There's a scale model of Cardiff down in the Archives that Torchwood used before the EMF device was - actually, before it was even invented, since the creation of Torchwood. It detected supernatural events in the city through a combination of runic magic and thaumaturgy - a process of creating a magical link between two things," Suzie added hastily, before Gwen could interrupt again. She leaned back in her seat a big, looking rueful, "That thing was a right pain, let me tell you. Everything in the scale model had to reflect Cardiff proper, so every time something changed in the city - like a new building going up, or a shop closing business - we had to scramble to change the model, otherwise the whole system became useless."
"Wow." Privately, Gwen thought the model sounded a lot more interesting than the system they had now, though admittedly it sounded extremely high maintenance and far less practical. "Wait, how did we get from that to...?" she gestured to the computers.
"The computer alert system came first," Suzie conceded. "Tosh thought that we could replace the model with a digital one, and I didn't think it was impossible for runic magic to work in code, so we convinced Jack to let us try. After about a year or so, we retired the old model to the Archives and we've been relying on the computer model ever since."
Gwen was wide-eyed, "You know how to do magic?" It was a little intimidating to think about a person with powers as more than just an abstract concept, but it was also awe-inspiring.
Suzie shook her head sharply. "No, I'm just human," she said shortly. "Runic magic is something anyone with the proper linguistic knowledge can do - the power lies in the runes, not the person. Anything like what you're thinking, throwing around fireballs and changing people into toads or whatnot - that kind of power, you have to be born with. Some things are just...the luck of the draw."
Looking at the almost ugly twist to Suzie's mouth, Gwen prudently decided to change the subject. "So, you and Tosh used runic magic to modify the EMF detector?" she asked, trying to sound as if she hadn't noticed anything. "That's amazing!"
Clearing her throat, Suzie straightened her posture, tapping a finger on the handbook in order to direct Gwen's attention. "Yes. We also modified the infrared thermometer that Tosh was using last night to detect cold spots. Again, a normal infrared thermometer would be useless, because they only have the ability to pick up surface temperature - meaning they can't detect anything without a visible surface. Our infrared thermometer has can detect ambient temperature and, thus, actually manages to be of use."
"That was what you and Tosh were doing, then," Gwen mused aloud. "What was Owen doing?"
"Burning cedar incense and natural sage to dispel the negative collection of energy that allowed the ghost to remain," Suzie replied. "It's more effective inside homes than it is outside, because the important bit is the smoke. That's why Ianto had to go around the perimeter of the alley and seal it off with the rock salt, in order to trap the ghost within a barrier. As long as the ghost is trapped, it's exposed to the smoke from the cedar and sage, which weakens its energy enough for the sunlight to completely dispel it in the morning."
Gwen's brows furrowed. "So Carys' ghost is gone?"
"As of dawn," Suzie said, then nodded sharply towards the book. "Now, turn to the beginning so we can get started..."
-----
Gwen was exhausted by the time Suzie called off the studying in time for lunch. Her head spun with so many new details, all of them important to remember for their own specific reasons, that it was a relief to be able to think about nothing as she ate.
After lunch, despite her fears that she would be asked to resume studying the handbook, Suzie and Jack went up to his office for a meeting, leaving Gwen with the others in the conference room slash common eating area.
"Got all caught up, then?" Owen asked snidely, crumpling up the remains of his sandwich wrapper. "Ready to take charge on a mission yet?"
Gwen looked at him blankly, "What?"
"Ha, so they haven't even told you," he said triumphantly, sneering a little. "Not surprising, with the way you 'proved yourself' last night."
Although she didn't understand what he was talking about, Gwen still flushed at the reminder. It was unreasonable to expect anything better from someone who hadn't even known what was going on, but the open disdain did sting.
Tosh was frowning at Owen, "Leave her alone, she didn't know anything. Jack shouldn't have even called her out, it's not her fault she wasn't prepared - and it's not her fault the rules are what they are, Owen."
"What are you talking about?" Gwen asked, bewildered.
"Torchwood regulations state that only a full-blooded human with no ties to the supernatural community may hold a position of command," Ianto said, his face impassive and his voice positively bland.
Gwen frowned, "Well what has that got to do with me?"
"Jack's in charge, Suzie's the heir, you're the spare," Owen said sourly. "That clear enough for you? Why else do you think Suzie's wasting her precious time tutoring you in the basics? You think she doesn't have anything better do to?"
"But, what about the rest of you? You've been here for years, right?" Gwen asked, still confused. Why would she, the newest of the team, with absolutely no experience, be in the running for leadership when it was only her first week?
Owen rolled his eyes, "Weren't you listening? Only full-blooded humans can be in command."
Gwen stared at him blankly, causing him to sigh in aggravation, and Tosh took pity on the other woman, interjecting quietly, "None of us are qualified, by those standards."
"You - you mean, the three of you aren't human?" Gwen gaped, eyes moving from Ianto to Tosh to Owen and back again, as if searching for visible signs of their non-human status.
Ianto smiled slightly, in that blank way he had that communicated absolutely no emotion and reduced the action to a simple, meaningless quirk of the lips. "Close enough for some, but not enough for others," he said cryptically, and then elaborated, "I used to be fully human, like you, until I was Changed."
Gwen could hear the capitalization in his voice. "Changed to what?"
"A vampire," Ianto said simply, and his smile turned a bit more genuine when Gwen automatically leaned back. "Don't worry, Torchwood regulations also state that any vampire that Torchwood employs cannot drink the blood of any creature, human or animal."
"O-oh," she stuttered, her eyes wide. "What is it that you...eat, then? If you can't drink blood?"
"Synthetic plasma," Owen interjected. "Torchwood make. It's got all the proteins and nutrients that a growing vampire needs to keep themselves from attacking their co-workers in a hungry rage."
Ianto's expression turned unreadable, though Gwen thought she detected a bit of annoyance there. It was understandable; she had just met these people, and it was already obvious that Owen was a bit of a prat. Deciding to change the subject, she turned to Tosh.
"And you?" she asked. "Are you a vampire, too? Or a werewolf or something like that?"
Tosh's smile was a bit more friendly than Ianto's, but it was also distant. Rather like the kind of smiles people gave to distant co-workers they didn't know very well, or familiar faces in the neighborhood they weren't exactly on friendly terms with.
"Nothing like that, I'm afraid," Tosh answered. "I'm mostly human. But I do have a great-great-great-grandmother who...well, she wasn't what she seemed at the time."
Gwen frowned, "But that was so long ago, I can't believe that matters!"
"Her blood is very potent." This was said with a rather smug smile, somewhat uncharacteristic of what Gwen had thought to expect from the quiet tech.
Curious to know more, but sensing that Tosh would not welcome further questions at this point, Gwen turned to Owen, "What about you, then?"
There was a slight pause, and then Ianto said, "It's obvious, if you look at him. He's a gnome."
Tosh dissolved immediately into giggles as Ianto smirked, even as Owen scowled and made a rude gesture in Ianto's direction, blistering the air with insults. Gwen laughed, too, and it wasn't until she got home later that night she realized that Ianto had been the only one to give a straight answer, and even that had only been about himself, not the others.
-----
After her first week at Torchwood had passed, Gwen felt settled in enough to start relaxing instead of gawping at everything like an idiot. Eventually, her natural curiosity turned itself towards her new teammates, who were all very, well, mysterious. Not only were they all still little more than strangers to her, colleagues though they were, it didn't take long for her to notice that they were all singularly private individuals. None of them were the type to share anything, much less share their thoughts or feelings. That wasn't to say they were all quiet, because it was sometimes an ordeal to get Owen to shut up and Jack never let an opportunity to tell an outrageous anecdote pass him by - but none of them ever said anything.
Anything meaningful, anyway.
Owen could complain bitterly about everything and anything for hours, or chat about the women he'd pulled the night before, how drunk he'd gotten, but it was all empty. It never said anything about him, except maybe give the impression that he was a drunken lout. He never told stories about anything else, just sex and alcohol. And even after three weeks, Gwen still had no idea what made him not human enough for Torchwood.
Jack, too, could talk for hours about nothing. Oh, his stories were entertaining, if a bit unbelievable, but they were all grand adventures were everyone had sex in the end or someone ended up naked. He made them laugh with tales about embarrassing situations he'd ended up in, but they would knowing nothing about where he'd been, how old he'd been, or what he'd been thinking. Gwen had no idea how someone could talk about themselves most of the time without ever giving anything way, but Jack managed to do it on a daily basis.
And if Gwen thought Owen and Jack were secretive, well, Tosh, Ianto, and Suzie were worse, in a way, because at least Jack and Owen were talkative.
Tosh kept to herself at her station, though she did join in on games and such when Jack coaxed her away from her computer. Aside from that, however, Gwen found her a bit difficult to talk with. Tosh was always polite, but never really warm or welcoming; when Gwen tried to talk to her, she gave the impression that it was an ordeal, that she would much rather get back to work. Gwen tried to be friendly and make conversation anyway, but Tosh never spoke much, just listened to Gwen and made comments here and there, and their conversations always ended sooner rather than later.
As for Ianto, well, it was impossible to pin him down, wasn't it? He and Tosh were a lot alike; he was just as polite when Gwen approached him, but the moment an opportunity appeared to extricate himself from conversation, he took it and ghosted away. Most of the time, Gwen didn't even know where in the Hub he was - if he was even in the Hub. Sometimes he would come in through the front entrance when she'd thought he was in the Archives. More than that, Ianto was always so...controlled, every action and emotion calculated, and it was too strange for Gwen, who tended to react more than anything else.
And for all that she was fully human like Gwen, Suzie was, in every other way, different. While Gwen wanted to approach her, wanted to be friends, she never ended up following through. There was something about Suzie that seemed to disapprove of Gwen's presence. Oh, she treated Gwen as well as any of the others (that is, briskly but not unkindly), but there were times when she gave the impression that Gwen was the unwanted stepchild. Considering that Suzie had the bulk of the responsibility of training Gwen, well...
Sometimes, it got a bit uncomfortable, being surrounded by so many solitary souls.
At least, Gwen often found herself thinking, she still had Rhys for company.
-----
Little by little, though, Gwen was learning. Not just about her job, but also about her co-workers.
For example, although she was very evasive as to the origin of her powers, Tosh wasn't one to hide her use of them, either. After several scenes where Gwen saw Tosh forgo an electronic device in order to move her hands over an area, it wasn't difficult to come to the conclusion that Tosh had some kind of psychic powers.
"That's not really the right word for it," Tosh said, when Gwen tentatively broached the subject. "It's a sensing ability, I suppose you could call it. Similar to psychometry, except I don't have to actually make physical contact with an object - I just need to sense the energy field around things to be able to make relevant associations."
Gwen's first impression of Tosh's pride in her abilities hadn't been wrong. The other woman, while secretive, wasn't ashamed in the least; what kept her from talking about herself wasn't embarrassment, it was simply because she was a private person. More than that, there was a confidence to Tosh when it came to her powers, a certainty that she was right, and even her pride in her technological abilities came a distant second.
"You can also get readings from people, too, right?" Gwen said, trying to remember all the differences between various noted psychic abilities. She'd read up on it last night, which was what had prompted the questions, but it was all so similar...
Tosh nodded, "But not about feelings or emotions or thoughts. Those are for telepaths or empaths. What I get from people is similar to what I get from objects - where they've been, if anything good or bad happened around them, that sort of thing. It's a lot less personal than empathy, and far less distracting than telepathy. Very useful in this job."
It didn't, Gwen noticed, stop Tosh from putting on gloves when she wasn't out on a scene.
-----
Part 2
Author: jadehunter
Fandom: Torchwood
Pairing(s): Gen, with mentioned Gwen/Rhys and Jack being Jack
Rating: PG-13
Warning: Some bad language, some dead bodies, lots of casual talk of dead bodies and dying, poorly researched stuff on ancient things, and made up stuff about ritual sacrificing.
Masterpost
*****
"What have we got?"
Owen scowled, "A dead body, what does it look like, Harkness?"
It was the ninth body in as many months.
That, in itself, wouldn't be cause for Torchwood to gear up and trample over the toes of the local police as they had done tonight, but post-mortem examinations had placed the time of death for all eight previous victims as midnight on the night of the new moon. While there still remained a possibility that the murders had been committed by a disturbed serial killer, the specifics of the timing involved also pointed to the possibility of ritual sacrifice.
Ritual sacrifice usually meant black magic, and that was a problem best handled as early as possible.
It also meant that Jack wasn't in the mood for Owen's attitude, and the gaze he leveled on the doctor was of pure annoyance. "Not the time or place, Owen."
"That's funny coming from you," Owen snorted, but his eyes were focused and his hands steady as he continued to examine the body. "Who was the one chatting up that bartender last week while the rest of us were trying to find that stupid shapeshifter?"
Jack grinned unrepentantly at the memories that surfaced, his change in mood instantaneous. "He was an incubus! Do you know what it's like to have sex with an incubus? Shapeshifters are nice, too, but there's something about incubi that just - "
"Yeah, it's called a thrall - it's the thing they do to make you docile before they suck the life out of you through your cock," Suzie snorted as she ran the EMF detector over the body.
Owen paused, then told Suzie, "Doesn't sound so bad when you put it like that."
"As riveting as this conversation is," Tosh said witheringly from where she was crouched down next to the corpse's head, "I'll interrupt in the hopes that the dead man takes precedence." She stood, brushing non-existent debris off of her clothes and looked at Jack. "He's clean, like the others - I can't get a single impression."
"Which means he most likely went through a ritual cleansing before he was killed," Suzie mused, then stood up as well. "The scanner's not showing anything, either. Whoever did this isn't making any mistakes, that's for damn sure."
"Everyone slips up sooner or later," Jack said, then glanced at Owen. "You done?"
Owen nodded, "Cause of death is fairly obvious, the throat being slashed open and all, but - more importantly - it looks like he was drained of blood like all the rest. He was probably killed last night, seeing as how that was the new moon, but I'll confirm time of death in autopsy. Nothing else I can do in an alley."
"All right then, let's get this guy bagged up and back to base!" Jack clapped his hands together like a school teacher trying to catch the attention of rowdy children.
Wordlessly, Suzie and Tosh headed back to the SUV with the equipment, while Owen started unfolding the black body bag with an expression of distaste.
"What's the use of having Jones around if he's not here to do the heavy lifting?" he grumbled, grabbing hold of the body's ankles.
Jack had the shoulders, and he grunted with effort as they lifted the body, "You were free to call him up before we left. I'm sure he wouldn't have minded you interrupting his dinner."
"What, and be stuck in the SUV with him while he's hungry? Like hell!"
"Then shut up and lift with your knees."
-----
Ianto was waiting for them when they got back.
"Hello, honey, and how was your day?" Jack greeted him exuberantly, bounding across the main floor of the Hub.
"Slightly troubling," Ianto replied. "I was monitoring you on the CCTV - you had a guest while you were working."
Jack immediately become serious, and Ianto gestured towards the screen where he had pulled up the footage. The team gathered around the computer screen, where it was immediately obvious what Ianto had been referring to. A dark head was peering out over the alley where the team had been huddled around the body of the day, and the owner of said head was clearly doing their best to listen in.
"Who the hell is that?" Suzie demanded.
Ianto pulled up another CCTV picture, this one a somewhat blurred of a dark-haired woman with wide eyes. "She wasn't very careful about hiding from the cameras, so it wasn't difficult to get enough to run the facial recognition software. I wasn't expecting much luck, but she was actually in the local databases and a match came up right away." He changed the picture on the screen to a much cleaner photograph, in bright colors instead of muted grays, one that belonged to an employee profile. "Meet Gwen Cooper, 29, Cardiff police."
"She looks familiar," Owen said. "I think maybe I had sex with her once."
Jack laughed, even as Tosh rolled her eyes.
"You've had sex with half the women in Cardiff," Suzie said.
"But not with this one," Ianto corrected. "The reason she looks familiar is because we've all met her before."
"We have?" Jack frowned.
"It may be a blur to you; I've heard that's what being in thrall does to one's memory," Ianto said dryly. "She was one of the PCs that tried to break up the brawl that broke out last week at the pub with the incubus and the shapeshifter."
"Oh, yeah," Jack said, grinning widely. "We were just talking about that."
"If she was there, wouldn't you have erased her memories?" Tosh asked pensively. "I thought you'd gotten everyone."
Ianto inclined his head slightly as he replied, "I'm afraid she was the one with the concussion. It wasn't advisable at the time to manipulate her mind. Too much of a risk with head injuries, if you'll recall."
"Right, I remember, we thought she'd just attribute anything strange to her concussion," Tosh nodded, then sighed. "I guess not."
"No," Ianto agreed. "I've taken the liberty of going through the CCTV footage of all the cases we've been called out on since PC Cooper's first encounter with us, to see if she's been following us since that incident. Although she hasn't had the best success, she has indeed been trying. Usually, she arrives long after we've left, but it's clear that she's tracking us."
Owen sighed irritably, "Well that's just great, isn't it?" He turned to look at Jack, "This is going to turn into a team meeting situation, right?"
"Yep."
"Can we at least have a team meeting with food? I'm starving, and you're the only one that's gotten to eat recently," Owen said acerbically to Ianto.
Ianto simply replied, "I've ordered Chinese. It's in the conference room."
"And I've got a dead body that needs to get to autopsy," Owen called over his shoulder, already making his way towards the promised meal. "It's in the SUV."
-----
Jack pulled his chopsticks apart and gestured to the screen, where Ianto had put up Gwen Cooper's picture, profile, and history. "What do you think?"
"She could be useful when dealing with the local police," Tosh said, opening her own carton of take-away. "She's one of them, they might be more willing to cooperate with her on the team."
Owen scoffed, "She's only been a cop, what, a few months? She doesn't even have the influence to get herself out of doing the shitty jobs yet."
"The only experience she has is on the beat or guarding crime scenes - a trained monkey can do that," Suzie noted, frowning. "I doubt she has any useful skills to contribute. If we need a contact to smooth things over, someone higher up might be better, a detective or something."
Ianto made a soft, thoughtful noise. He was the only one who wasn't eating, but felt none of the awkwardness a human might have felt in being left to watch the others eat. Well, watching the girls eat, anyway. Jack and Owen ate with no manners, which was extremely disgusting, so he angled his chair towards the screen instead.
"She's not too entrenched, then," he pointed out. "Anyone high up, with enough experience on the job, they might be too set in their ways to be much help here."
Jack nodded, jabbing his chopsticks at Ianto. "Exactly. At least we won't have to break PC Cooper out of too many bad habits before we can put her on the field. She's the closest thing to a blank slate."
"That's supposed to be a good thing?" Owen snorted, shoving noodles into his mouth. "She's practically a civilian. A fully human civilian, at that. She'll be dead before you know it."
A heavy silence filled the room, only punctuated by the awkward sounds of chewing. Tosh couldn't help but glance at Jack and Suzie, and she wasn't the only one. Owen was a bit less subtle about it, and though it didn't seem to bother Jack at all from the way he met their gazes evenly, Suzie's grip on her chopsticks tightened until her knuckles were white and she determinedly glared at the table top.
Unperturbed by the tension, Ianto finally turned away from the screen with Gwen Cooper's face and slid his impassive gaze over the others. "Have we reached a decision, then?"
-----
Gwen Cooper was allowed to join Torchwood on a probationary basis. She would have six months to prove herself capable of keeping up with the demands of Torchwood and, at the end of the six months, she would either become a full field agent or she would find herself back as a policewoman, all memories of Torchwood wiped from her mind and with her colleagues thinking she was simply returning to work after recovering from an injury.
That was what she was told, of course, and it was a bit more palatable than the truth.
The truth was, the majority of the human agents recruited into Torchwood had the terrible habit of dying within their first six months. If the six months had passed and the agent was still alive, well, that was a fair indicator of how adaptable the agent was, and they would remain Torchwood agents until they were inevitably killed in duty. There was always the retirement option of having one's memories erased and going back to civilian life, but the type of people recruited by Torchwood also tended to be the type that could never walk away from the truth of what lay in the shadows of the world.
Looking at the wide-eyed, delighted way Gwen was gaping at everything in the Hub, it was difficult to believe she'd last long. Jack was just as enthusiastic as she was while giving her the tour; something about new agents made him come alive, and he resembled nothing more than a young boy bragging about how brilliant his toy was.
The others stayed out of the way, clustered together on the second level outside of Jack's office, watching the proceedings with varying levels of interest.
"Twenty says she won't make three months," Owen said, propping his elbows on the railing.
Suzie snorted, "That's being a little generous, don't you think? Look at her, she's got Bambi eyes, she won't last three weeks."
Tosh remained quiet as Owen and Suzie bickered. Placing bets on how long Gwen was going to stay alive was a bit too morbid for her, and it wouldn't help anyone when Gwen really did die. She turned to Ianto and was about to ask his opinion when Jack's voice boomed a little louder than usual.
"And that's the team," he said, gesturing to where they were standing in a row. "Gwen, the short one is Owen Harper - "
"Doctor Owen Harper, you wanker!"
" - he's our medic," Jack continued blithely. "The one next to him is Suzie Costello, she's our weapons expert and my second. The one in the heels is Toshiko Sato, our resident tech and information gal. The pretty one is Ianto Jones, who organizes everything and does the heavy lifting."
"Flattering," Ianto muttered, and Tosh hid a grin.
Jack continued, "Team, this is Gwen, say hi."
Obediently, they all gave a wave, though it ranged from half-arsed to nearly non-existent. Their lack of enthusiasm was obvious, and Gwen's excited smile turn a bit more tentative.
Jack was oblivious to it all, turning Gwen and leading her towards the armory, "Lots of things you need to know before we can trust you out there, so let's get started with the most important one: guns, and how to shoot them."
His voice faded away as the two of them headed deeper into the Hub, and the team exchanged wry glances as they started back for their stations.
"Ten says he'll grope her first chance," Owen said challengingly.
"That goes without saying," Ianto replied. "Though I have twenty that says he grows impatient and makes Suzie take responsibility for training Gwen by the end of the week."
Suzie rolled her eyes. "That also goes without saying, Ianto."
-----
The chance for Gwen to prove her mettle came quicker than expected. The day after she had been inducted into Torchwood ranks, Tosh's computer transmitted a series of alarms to each of their mobiles in the middle of the night, followed quickly by a text from Jack saying he would be picking them up in the SUV.
Gwen frowned as she got in next to Tosh in the back, saying, "Wait a moment. There are six of us, yeah? How're we all supposed to fit in here?"
"Close the door, you'll see," Jack grinned.
"And hurry up about it, we still have to pick up Suzie," Owen snapped from his seat on Tosh's other side.
Annoyed, Gwen closed the door a bit harder than necessary - and then blinked in shock. What had seemed like a perfectly normal interior had suddenly expanded. It wasn't excessively large; there was room enough for four people to sit comfortably without brushing up against each other, but the majority of the space was taken up by several computer screens that hung from the roof.
She stammered, "How - this is like - "
"Don't say Harry Potter," Jack said warningly, and his driving turned even more erratic. "Everyone always says Harry Potter now - you know, there a lot of other examples where things are bigger on the inside."
Gwen was too distracted looking for a handhold to reply, but Owen asked, "Like what?"
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," Ianto said promptly from the passenger seat, without bothering to turn back. "Discworld - "
"Thank you, Ianto," Jack said pointedly, even as Owen protested loudly in the background.
"Like I have the time to read all those books with this job," he complained. "How about something a little less obscure - "
Ianto didn't falter for a minute; he continued obligingly, "Mary Poppins' carpet bag, Oscar the Grouch's garbage can from Sesame Street - "
"Oh, shut up," Owen said.
-----
"What's the situation?" Suzie asked the moment she got in the SUV, and the atmosphere changed into one of seriousness.
"Remember that girl that was murdered in the alley next to Night Spot last year?" Tosh tapped at one of the computer screens that hung in the vehicle. A picture came up of a young girl, late teens to early twenties, pretty enough. "Carys Fletcher?"
"I remember that," Gwen said. "Wasn't it a robbery gone wrong or something like that?"
"That's what the police thought," Tosh confirmed. "She was killed with a knife, and the contents of her purse were missing. The reason we decided to keep track of it was because of how she was killed."
At Gwen's confused look, Jack explained, "Sometimes, when people die violent deaths, things start happening in the place they died. Sometimes it's just freak accidents, other times things go a step further and there are more deaths. One theory is that when people die in a state of heightened emotion - like fear, anger, or what have you, the negative energies they emit become absorbed by the area and then bad things start happening as a result."
"Then there's the simpler explanation from human history: people get killed, they get angry, their ghosts stay on to do a bit of haunting," Suzie added, then smirked. "Jack doesn't like that theory. Something about it disturbs him."
"For whatever reason, the fact is, it happens," Jack continued, casting an annoyed look at Suzie through the rearview mirror. "So when a person dies a violent death, Torchwood protocol states that we have to keep tabs on the area for a set period of time, to make sure that there are no...side-effects."
Gwen looked at the picture of the girl, Carys Fletcher, again; "And she...decided to stay?"
"It seems so," Tosh said, and she was going over data, brows furrowed. "Five nights ago, an ambulance was called to the area when a man tripped and struck his head on the wall in the alley next to the club. Two nights ago, another ambulance was called to the same alley; a couple received several cuts on their arms and legs when they tripped into several crates filled with broken glass."
Ianto raised an eyebrow; "They all tripped?"
"The first man's blood alcohol level makes it plausible he might have done. The second incident, on the other hand...the report states that the man stumbled into the woman, causing her to trip into the crates and pull him along," Tosh replied, scanning the document quickly. "The man claimed he was pushed, but there was no one else in the alley with them."
"Of course," Suzie sighed, leaning back. "And tonight's incident?"
Tosh smiled humorlessly. "999 was called again. A man sustained several deep lacerations to the arms and chest under mysterious circumstances: CCTV shows no one else in the alley with him, the lights flicker for a few moments, and then he staggers out into the crowd trying to get into the club, bleeding from his wounds. He lost a lot of blood before they managed to get him stabilized."
"Let me take a wild guess here," Jack said, glancing at Tosh's reflection. "This alley where all the injuries happened - same alley where Carys Fletcher died?"
"Mm hmm."
Jack nodded thoughtfully. "And the timing of all this...anniversary of her death?"
"Five nights ago, when the first man was injured, marked the year down to the hour," Tosh reported grimly.
"The ghost spent the year growing in power and that power reached a peak at the anniversary of her death, which is when she could finally lash out," Suzie explained to Gwen, who had been looking a bit uncertain. "The escalation is violence is similar to what you see in human serial killers; they start off smaller to test their capacities, and then grow more violent when they grow more experienced and more confident. Same principle, except with a ghost."
"But why would she do this?" Gwen asked. "Why is she attacking people like this? She wasn't violent when she was alive, was she?"
Ianto said, "Who you are when you're alive has very little to do with who you are after death." He didn't elaborate, choosing to watch the streetlights go flashing by as the SUV whipped through the streets.
It was Jack who continued, "When a ghost first manifests like this, there's no thinking or premeditation involved, just feelings and emotions. Most of what they do is relieve the violence of their deaths by re-enacting it with other victims."
"Coroner's report says she suffered a severe blow to the head, enough to crack her skull, most likely to subdue her initially," Owen interjected. He had pulled one of the screens towards himself and was now flipping through the crime scene photographs. "After that, most of her major arteries were severed: femoral, brachial, carotid - she bled out in minutes. Whoever did this was one methodical son-of-a-bitch."
Gwen was frowning. "So...the man hitting his head, the people getting cut - "
"It all follows the injuries Carys received before dying," Jack finished. "That's what they do."
-----
When they arrived at the scene, there was a flurry of movement, everyone spilling out of the SUV and heading towards the back, where the open boot displayed a variety of items arranged very neatly in customized racks. Suzie picked up two devices, tossing one to Tosh and keeping the other for herself; Ianto picked out a medium-sized tool box from a row of identical tool boxes and opened the lid briefly to check the contents before handing it off to Owen. Jack -
Jack was standing in front of Gwen, arms crossed. "Your job tonight is to stay by the car," he said.
"What?" she asked, keenly aware of how everyone else slowed down their movements in order to eavesdrop. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, stay by the car. You're not trained yet; this isn't the kind of job where you learn from your mistakes - this is the kind of job where you die from them," Jack told her. "You can observe from here, don't get close enough to interfere. And whatever happens, stay calm."
It was difficult to argue with that kind of logic, so Gwen was left standing by the SUV, peering down the alleyway after the others in an effort to see what they were doing. The night club was still letting people in, music thumping into the air, and Gwen felt distinctly awkward and somewhat like she had been abandoned as she received several curious looks from the people headed into the club.
Although there were lights in the alley, they weren't very bright, so Gwen was left to do a bit of guessing as to what was going on. Suzie and Tosh were walking slowly up and down the alleyway, eyes on the devices in their hands, and they passed by on either side of Jack several times. He was standing still in the middle, gazing up at the night sky, seemingly content to wait all night for something to happen. Owen was crouched down on the ground, the tool box open in front of him, and he was fiddling with something she couldn't quite make out -
Ianto was gone.
She realized this right as the lights in the alley flickered. Jack turned his head sharply to Suzie, who was saying something very quickly, and then Tosh was saying something, too, and it was so frustrating to be unable to hear any of what was going on - and where was Ianto, anyway?
Owen stood up, and there was a tiny column of smoke rising from a small bowl at his feet.
The lights flickered again, violently this time.
Jack was talking now, his tone calm, and she could only hear snatches of what he was saying: " - Carys - I know - confused, but - you don't belong here anymore - "
There was a crackling sound, and one of the light bulbs exploded overhead. Gwen barely restrained a scream, though none of the others in the alley so much as batted an eye. Owen was crouched down again, and the barely visible wisp of smoke from the bowl grew just a bit larger.
"The reading's still off the charts, Jack," Suzie said, her mouth twisted in an unhappy line, dark eyes focused on the device in her hands. "I think it's - "
"Energy spike!" Tosh warned -
"Shit!" Owen swore as he jumped to the side, and the glass bottle that had been on a collision course with his head hit the wall and shattered. "Fucking bitch!"
Jack glanced at him, "Owen!"
"Yeah, yeah, think happy thoughts," Owen said mockingly, but he took a deep breath and visibly calmed himself. "I hate ghosts," he said conversationally, eyes wary. "Fucking drama queens, the lot of them."
Tosh was frowning, "I don't understand, the energy levels should be tapering off with the cedar and the sage but they're climbing - it's gaining energy from some source - "
"Gwen!" Suzie barked, and Gwen jumped, eyes wide.
Jack whirled around; the expression on his face shifted ominously several times, but he took a deep breath and said very calmly, "Gwen, I thought I told you to stay by the car."
"I - I was," Gwen stammered nervously, "but I couldn't hear what you were saying - and I didn't mean to, I swear - but I was just - "
"Gwen, calm down," Suzie ordered. "Right now."
There was a slight, clinking sound that floated through the alley and began to turn into a louder sort of scraping, rattling noise - like shattered pieces of glass being dragged across the ground.
"Shit," Owen said. "It's going to try and cut us all to ribbons, most likely."
Gwen jumped again when Jack placed his hands on her shoulders. "I need you to calm down," he told her, looking her straight in the eyes, and she could feel her heart pounding. "Ghosts feed off of negative energy - fear, anger, sadness, anxiety. You need to calm down right now, because you are making it stronger."
That was easier said than done, with everyone's eyes on her - well, Suzie wasn't looking at her, she was looking down at her device, but that was just as bad, because it was only reminding Gwen of how she wasn't calming down -
"Think about something that makes you happy," Jack suggested. "You have a boyfriend, right? Rhys? Tell me about him."
A bit thrown, Gwen began a bit uncertainly, "His name is Rhys Williams, he works as a manager at Harwood's Haulage. Um, he's very straightforward and easy going most of the time, that's what I liked about him when we first met in college." Jack was nodding encouragingly. "He's always friendly with everyone, and I don't think he has a cruel bone in his body - " Amazingly, it was working. She felt calmer as she thought about Rhys, sweet, oblivious Rhys who was currently sleeping the night away without a clue as to what sorts of things existed in the world.
The sound of glass stopped abruptly, and Ianto was there in the next instant, seeming to step out of the shadows. He held a large bag of...something in the crook of his elbow, and looked as immaculate as ever.
"It's done," he told Jack.
Jack sighed, and let go of Gwen's shoulders. "All right, let's pack it up and go home," he said tiredly.
-----
Suzie came over the next morning and dropped a thick book on Gwen's desk.
"What's this?" Gwen asked, flipping through the pages and wincing at the vast pages of small print.
"The unofficial Torchwood handbook for new employees," Suzie said, bringing over her chair and settling in. "You need to know it, front and back." At Gwen's incredulous look, Suzie explained, "Unlike other companies' handbooks, ours has less to do with rules and regulations and more to do with what monsters are out there and how to defeat them."
Her interest peaked, Gwen began to examine the pages more slowly. "So this would tell me about what you did last night to get rid of the ghost?"
"Chapter 6: Ghosts, Poltergeists, and Hauntings."
Gwen turned to the page shown on the index for that particular chapter, eager to fill in the blanks on what had happened. Unfortunately, the text was still very small and filled over a dozen pages, and she hadn't exactly slept much last night. The words blurred together as she tried to read, and she cast a sheepish glance in Suzie's direction.
"Would it be possible for you to summarize?" she asked, biting her lip.
Suzie pursed her lips in annoyance but said, "The basics of it is, when we get the reports, we go down to the scene and verify with our equipment. Strictly speaking, a regular EMF reader is pretty much useless when it comes to detecting actual ghosts, because - even without taking into consideration all the electronic equipment in the world - a sensitive meter can detect the vibration of a metal filing cabinet and throw out a reading. Our EMF meter, on the other hand, has been...enhanced so that interference readings are not an issue."
"How was it enhanced?" Gwen interrupted, curious.
There was a moment where she thought Suzie wouldn't answer, but the other woman only sighed a little. "Tosh and I did it, a few years back, when she first started working here. There's a scale model of Cardiff down in the Archives that Torchwood used before the EMF device was - actually, before it was even invented, since the creation of Torchwood. It detected supernatural events in the city through a combination of runic magic and thaumaturgy - a process of creating a magical link between two things," Suzie added hastily, before Gwen could interrupt again. She leaned back in her seat a big, looking rueful, "That thing was a right pain, let me tell you. Everything in the scale model had to reflect Cardiff proper, so every time something changed in the city - like a new building going up, or a shop closing business - we had to scramble to change the model, otherwise the whole system became useless."
"Wow." Privately, Gwen thought the model sounded a lot more interesting than the system they had now, though admittedly it sounded extremely high maintenance and far less practical. "Wait, how did we get from that to...?" she gestured to the computers.
"The computer alert system came first," Suzie conceded. "Tosh thought that we could replace the model with a digital one, and I didn't think it was impossible for runic magic to work in code, so we convinced Jack to let us try. After about a year or so, we retired the old model to the Archives and we've been relying on the computer model ever since."
Gwen was wide-eyed, "You know how to do magic?" It was a little intimidating to think about a person with powers as more than just an abstract concept, but it was also awe-inspiring.
Suzie shook her head sharply. "No, I'm just human," she said shortly. "Runic magic is something anyone with the proper linguistic knowledge can do - the power lies in the runes, not the person. Anything like what you're thinking, throwing around fireballs and changing people into toads or whatnot - that kind of power, you have to be born with. Some things are just...the luck of the draw."
Looking at the almost ugly twist to Suzie's mouth, Gwen prudently decided to change the subject. "So, you and Tosh used runic magic to modify the EMF detector?" she asked, trying to sound as if she hadn't noticed anything. "That's amazing!"
Clearing her throat, Suzie straightened her posture, tapping a finger on the handbook in order to direct Gwen's attention. "Yes. We also modified the infrared thermometer that Tosh was using last night to detect cold spots. Again, a normal infrared thermometer would be useless, because they only have the ability to pick up surface temperature - meaning they can't detect anything without a visible surface. Our infrared thermometer has can detect ambient temperature and, thus, actually manages to be of use."
"That was what you and Tosh were doing, then," Gwen mused aloud. "What was Owen doing?"
"Burning cedar incense and natural sage to dispel the negative collection of energy that allowed the ghost to remain," Suzie replied. "It's more effective inside homes than it is outside, because the important bit is the smoke. That's why Ianto had to go around the perimeter of the alley and seal it off with the rock salt, in order to trap the ghost within a barrier. As long as the ghost is trapped, it's exposed to the smoke from the cedar and sage, which weakens its energy enough for the sunlight to completely dispel it in the morning."
Gwen's brows furrowed. "So Carys' ghost is gone?"
"As of dawn," Suzie said, then nodded sharply towards the book. "Now, turn to the beginning so we can get started..."
-----
Gwen was exhausted by the time Suzie called off the studying in time for lunch. Her head spun with so many new details, all of them important to remember for their own specific reasons, that it was a relief to be able to think about nothing as she ate.
After lunch, despite her fears that she would be asked to resume studying the handbook, Suzie and Jack went up to his office for a meeting, leaving Gwen with the others in the conference room slash common eating area.
"Got all caught up, then?" Owen asked snidely, crumpling up the remains of his sandwich wrapper. "Ready to take charge on a mission yet?"
Gwen looked at him blankly, "What?"
"Ha, so they haven't even told you," he said triumphantly, sneering a little. "Not surprising, with the way you 'proved yourself' last night."
Although she didn't understand what he was talking about, Gwen still flushed at the reminder. It was unreasonable to expect anything better from someone who hadn't even known what was going on, but the open disdain did sting.
Tosh was frowning at Owen, "Leave her alone, she didn't know anything. Jack shouldn't have even called her out, it's not her fault she wasn't prepared - and it's not her fault the rules are what they are, Owen."
"What are you talking about?" Gwen asked, bewildered.
"Torchwood regulations state that only a full-blooded human with no ties to the supernatural community may hold a position of command," Ianto said, his face impassive and his voice positively bland.
Gwen frowned, "Well what has that got to do with me?"
"Jack's in charge, Suzie's the heir, you're the spare," Owen said sourly. "That clear enough for you? Why else do you think Suzie's wasting her precious time tutoring you in the basics? You think she doesn't have anything better do to?"
"But, what about the rest of you? You've been here for years, right?" Gwen asked, still confused. Why would she, the newest of the team, with absolutely no experience, be in the running for leadership when it was only her first week?
Owen rolled his eyes, "Weren't you listening? Only full-blooded humans can be in command."
Gwen stared at him blankly, causing him to sigh in aggravation, and Tosh took pity on the other woman, interjecting quietly, "None of us are qualified, by those standards."
"You - you mean, the three of you aren't human?" Gwen gaped, eyes moving from Ianto to Tosh to Owen and back again, as if searching for visible signs of their non-human status.
Ianto smiled slightly, in that blank way he had that communicated absolutely no emotion and reduced the action to a simple, meaningless quirk of the lips. "Close enough for some, but not enough for others," he said cryptically, and then elaborated, "I used to be fully human, like you, until I was Changed."
Gwen could hear the capitalization in his voice. "Changed to what?"
"A vampire," Ianto said simply, and his smile turned a bit more genuine when Gwen automatically leaned back. "Don't worry, Torchwood regulations also state that any vampire that Torchwood employs cannot drink the blood of any creature, human or animal."
"O-oh," she stuttered, her eyes wide. "What is it that you...eat, then? If you can't drink blood?"
"Synthetic plasma," Owen interjected. "Torchwood make. It's got all the proteins and nutrients that a growing vampire needs to keep themselves from attacking their co-workers in a hungry rage."
Ianto's expression turned unreadable, though Gwen thought she detected a bit of annoyance there. It was understandable; she had just met these people, and it was already obvious that Owen was a bit of a prat. Deciding to change the subject, she turned to Tosh.
"And you?" she asked. "Are you a vampire, too? Or a werewolf or something like that?"
Tosh's smile was a bit more friendly than Ianto's, but it was also distant. Rather like the kind of smiles people gave to distant co-workers they didn't know very well, or familiar faces in the neighborhood they weren't exactly on friendly terms with.
"Nothing like that, I'm afraid," Tosh answered. "I'm mostly human. But I do have a great-great-great-grandmother who...well, she wasn't what she seemed at the time."
Gwen frowned, "But that was so long ago, I can't believe that matters!"
"Her blood is very potent." This was said with a rather smug smile, somewhat uncharacteristic of what Gwen had thought to expect from the quiet tech.
Curious to know more, but sensing that Tosh would not welcome further questions at this point, Gwen turned to Owen, "What about you, then?"
There was a slight pause, and then Ianto said, "It's obvious, if you look at him. He's a gnome."
Tosh dissolved immediately into giggles as Ianto smirked, even as Owen scowled and made a rude gesture in Ianto's direction, blistering the air with insults. Gwen laughed, too, and it wasn't until she got home later that night she realized that Ianto had been the only one to give a straight answer, and even that had only been about himself, not the others.
-----
After her first week at Torchwood had passed, Gwen felt settled in enough to start relaxing instead of gawping at everything like an idiot. Eventually, her natural curiosity turned itself towards her new teammates, who were all very, well, mysterious. Not only were they all still little more than strangers to her, colleagues though they were, it didn't take long for her to notice that they were all singularly private individuals. None of them were the type to share anything, much less share their thoughts or feelings. That wasn't to say they were all quiet, because it was sometimes an ordeal to get Owen to shut up and Jack never let an opportunity to tell an outrageous anecdote pass him by - but none of them ever said anything.
Anything meaningful, anyway.
Owen could complain bitterly about everything and anything for hours, or chat about the women he'd pulled the night before, how drunk he'd gotten, but it was all empty. It never said anything about him, except maybe give the impression that he was a drunken lout. He never told stories about anything else, just sex and alcohol. And even after three weeks, Gwen still had no idea what made him not human enough for Torchwood.
Jack, too, could talk for hours about nothing. Oh, his stories were entertaining, if a bit unbelievable, but they were all grand adventures were everyone had sex in the end or someone ended up naked. He made them laugh with tales about embarrassing situations he'd ended up in, but they would knowing nothing about where he'd been, how old he'd been, or what he'd been thinking. Gwen had no idea how someone could talk about themselves most of the time without ever giving anything way, but Jack managed to do it on a daily basis.
And if Gwen thought Owen and Jack were secretive, well, Tosh, Ianto, and Suzie were worse, in a way, because at least Jack and Owen were talkative.
Tosh kept to herself at her station, though she did join in on games and such when Jack coaxed her away from her computer. Aside from that, however, Gwen found her a bit difficult to talk with. Tosh was always polite, but never really warm or welcoming; when Gwen tried to talk to her, she gave the impression that it was an ordeal, that she would much rather get back to work. Gwen tried to be friendly and make conversation anyway, but Tosh never spoke much, just listened to Gwen and made comments here and there, and their conversations always ended sooner rather than later.
As for Ianto, well, it was impossible to pin him down, wasn't it? He and Tosh were a lot alike; he was just as polite when Gwen approached him, but the moment an opportunity appeared to extricate himself from conversation, he took it and ghosted away. Most of the time, Gwen didn't even know where in the Hub he was - if he was even in the Hub. Sometimes he would come in through the front entrance when she'd thought he was in the Archives. More than that, Ianto was always so...controlled, every action and emotion calculated, and it was too strange for Gwen, who tended to react more than anything else.
And for all that she was fully human like Gwen, Suzie was, in every other way, different. While Gwen wanted to approach her, wanted to be friends, she never ended up following through. There was something about Suzie that seemed to disapprove of Gwen's presence. Oh, she treated Gwen as well as any of the others (that is, briskly but not unkindly), but there were times when she gave the impression that Gwen was the unwanted stepchild. Considering that Suzie had the bulk of the responsibility of training Gwen, well...
Sometimes, it got a bit uncomfortable, being surrounded by so many solitary souls.
At least, Gwen often found herself thinking, she still had Rhys for company.
-----
Little by little, though, Gwen was learning. Not just about her job, but also about her co-workers.
For example, although she was very evasive as to the origin of her powers, Tosh wasn't one to hide her use of them, either. After several scenes where Gwen saw Tosh forgo an electronic device in order to move her hands over an area, it wasn't difficult to come to the conclusion that Tosh had some kind of psychic powers.
"That's not really the right word for it," Tosh said, when Gwen tentatively broached the subject. "It's a sensing ability, I suppose you could call it. Similar to psychometry, except I don't have to actually make physical contact with an object - I just need to sense the energy field around things to be able to make relevant associations."
Gwen's first impression of Tosh's pride in her abilities hadn't been wrong. The other woman, while secretive, wasn't ashamed in the least; what kept her from talking about herself wasn't embarrassment, it was simply because she was a private person. More than that, there was a confidence to Tosh when it came to her powers, a certainty that she was right, and even her pride in her technological abilities came a distant second.
"You can also get readings from people, too, right?" Gwen said, trying to remember all the differences between various noted psychic abilities. She'd read up on it last night, which was what had prompted the questions, but it was all so similar...
Tosh nodded, "But not about feelings or emotions or thoughts. Those are for telepaths or empaths. What I get from people is similar to what I get from objects - where they've been, if anything good or bad happened around them, that sort of thing. It's a lot less personal than empathy, and far less distracting than telepathy. Very useful in this job."
It didn't, Gwen noticed, stop Tosh from putting on gloves when she wasn't out on a scene.
-----
Part 2