Fic: Torchwood et la Bête (Team. Jack/Ianto PG-13) Chapter 16 / 28
Title: Torchwood et la Bête
by wynkat1313
Pairing(s) Team, Jack/Ianto, Tosh/OC, references to Gwen/Rhys
Rating: PG-13
Warnings/Enticements: Some mild violence, a near death, romance, and a whole lot of colored lights
Spoilers: Anything is S1 is fair game as this takes place about mid S2
Prompt: Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast) written for Reel_Torchwood round one
Beta’d by the amazing and incredibly patient and geeky temporal_witch , bless you hun!
Summary: When the team is invited to France to assist in a UNIT investigation of unusual Rift Activity, they go with dreams of a quick mission and a chance for a little R & R. Instead they find a wall of roses, an alien, and a mystery. Really, you’d think they would know better by now, they are Torchwood after all, and *nothing* in their world is ever simple.
Author's Note:
Since this got REALLY long, I am going to post it chapter by chapter - a little Romance / Action/Adventure Serial-ness for everyone's viewing pleasure :) There are 28 chapter's total, so this will take a bit. If you really want to know how it ends before then, the PDF is still up at my writing journal :D along with a few surprises related to the story, 'cause i could.
Start at Chapter One
Chapter Sixteen
The work room was quiet for a change. The overheads had been long since turned off, mimicking the comforting darkness of the Hub. They had all gravitated to using desk lamps, with Avenant mumbling about crazy Torchwood as he rounded up enough to fill each desk for them. Tosh smiled at the memory. He’d mumbled a few other, sweeter things to her as he set her lamp up. She felt her skin flush as she remembered the feel of his breath on her skin whispering delicious innuendos into her ear.
She dragged her thoughts back to the records she was supposed to be reviewing. On the laptop in front of her was the file of all Torchwood incident reports for France. The file was both frighteningly large and woefully lacking in the data they needed. That made it all so very easy to be distracted by the handsome Frenchman sitting beside her, his deep black hair curling in soft waves down his back from his ever present pony tail.
She shifted her head a little to look across at Avenant through the curtain of her hair. He was making notes on a piece of paper while he read over a report on the screen in front of him. He was supposed to be sorting through all of UNIT’s alien incident reports for the region so they could compare notes, but given how the page on the screen was the same one he’d had up a few minutes ago, she guessed that he was having as much trouble concentrating as she was. Tosh smiled, and hoped she was the source of his distraction.
He knew how to work in silence; she had to give him that. It was not the silence of one who hated being quiet and was just doing it to humor her. He seemed to genuinely understand that two people could be in a room together and speak without words.
Avenant reached for his coffee cup, his fingers brushing lightly over her hand where it was resting on top of a file. She saw him smile and dipped her head, unaccountably shy, before being brave and raising her eyes to meet his. His smile widened as she looked up and she found it impossible not to respond to the warmth she saw there.
With his other hand, Avenant reached out and slowly brushed her hair out of her face and tucked the long strands behind her ear. She nearly stopped breathing as he looked at her, his eyes filled with longing. He leaned in towards her and then paused, so close to her lips.
“May I?”
She nodded, breath catching in her throat.
She watched him close his eyes before giving in to the weight of her own lids. Then he was kissing her so softly and sweetly, his lips full and soft on hers. She opened her mouth to sigh and felt his tongue trace the line of her bottom lip.
“Avenant?” Gwen called from across the room.
Tosh froze. Her eyes flew open. Damn Gwen and her horrible timing!
Avenant pulled away slowly, a soft smile on his face, then sat up straight, turning his whole body to face Gwen. Tosh realized that he was shielding her from her teammate, giving her a little time to collect herself and she blessed him for that. She didn’t think she could deal with Gwen’s cooing over this - whatever this might be - that was blooming between herself and Avenant. Not yet, not until it had had a little more time to grow and find the light of its own accord.
“Oh, there you are,” Gwen said, striding over to Avenant. “Have you turned up anything in the UNIT records yet? We really need to know about any Rift activity for the area from for that eighty-year mark.”
Avenant shook his head slowly. “Not yet; the records from back then are less than impeccable.”
Gwen’s shoulders slumped. “Tosh? Anything in the Torchwood files?”
“There was one thing; I was just double checking. Hang on.” Tosh hit a handful of keys, sending an image to the large screen on the wall screen near her desk. They turned as one to look at the images. “There’s a memo from UNIT to Torchwood London about a Rift spike in this region. It’s dated 31 October 1929.”
“Did London do anything about it?” Gwen asked. Tosh could see her cheering up at the thought of data to sink her teeth into.
“Doesn’t seem to have.” Tosh looked back at her own monitor and scrolled through a few entries before settling on a long one from the head of Torchwood One to send to the main screen. “There’s some additional chatter in the notes. It seems they sent a junior agent to investigate. She came back after two weeks with a wardrobe full of new clothes, six cases of a highly regarded 1916 Chateau Latour, and a thin report noting a case of teenagers playing with pumpkins on Halloween around the location of the Rift spike.”
“Bollocks.”
“Wait, October 31st?” Avenant asked. “I remember something, but it didn’t seem to fit the parameters of our search.” He dragged the keyboard from in front of Tosh, typed a command into the system and sent information to the wall screen.
“Here it is. A UNIT report that mentions a Miss Hillary Westmore arriving on that date from London. They don’t state who she was working with, though, so I didn’t think anything of it at the time.”
As Avenant spoke an image appeared of a scanned handwritten UNIT report, then a sepia-toned photo stamped with the words “Property of UNIT” showing a young woman in a modified uniform jacket and skirt. A final image appeared on the screen of a handwritten note from the UNIT Medical Officer’s desk.
“Well, we have it now.” Gwen leaned in to look more closely at the screen. “Here’s note from the medical officer’s office.” Gwen stepped over to the door leading to the medical suite and shouted, “Owen!”
A moment later Owen strode through the door looking annoyed. “Can’t a person get some sleep around here?”
“You can sleep later like the rest of us.” Gwen waved Owen over to the screen. “Come look at this. Can you read it for us? It looks like a medical report.”
“My French is rusty as fuck, but I’ll give a go.” Owen stepped over to the computer screen and leaned in. He mumbled to himself a bit then nodded. “Seems someone name of Miss Westmore went out to, um… investigate a sighting,” Owen looked over at Tosh and Avenant. “Is this about that missing power source Ianto mentioned?”
Tosh nodded. “We think so, yes. A Hillary Westmore from Torchwood saw or found something around here about eighty years ago. ”
Owen bobbed his head and turned back to the medical report. “Well, it looks like while she was out investigating the lady slipped, I think. Or maybe fell. Either way she hit her head. When she came to she was talking about a …” Owen squinted at the screen. “Avenant, can you make that out? Chev… cheval…?”
Avenant stepped up to the screen. “Yes, I believe so. Cheval. Horse.”
“Cristal... … A crystal horse?”
“Ah… crystal as in clear white perhaps?” Avenant offered.
Owen snorted. “… and shot fire.”
“Sounds like quite a concussion,” Avenant said.
“Funny thing is,” Owen continued over Avenant. “It goes on to say that the attending physician treated her for burns to her cheek and upper arm, but there was no blistering or bleeding in the wound track. It was cauterized clean.”
Gwen looked back at the screen and then slowly pivoted on her heel, looking at each of them in turn. Tosh could see a myriad of thoughts working their way through Gwen’s eyes. Finally, she turned back to Avenant. “Did anyone go with her to the site?”
Avenant tapped several keys, scrolling through the report, then settling on one page and leaving it up on the screen. “A UNIT officer was sent as her liaison. The report says she ordered him to stay with the car, so he never saw a thing.”
“How convenient.”
“What are you thinking?” Tosh asked, watching Gwen tap a finger against her bottom lip.
“Did she fall? Or was she pushed?” Gwen asked, answering, as she often did, a question with yet more questions. “We’ve all seen weapons which shoot fire and can cauterize wounds, only we call them lasers nowadays. So who’s to say Hillary didn’t find something important out near the castle and nearly lose her life over the information?”
“Oh, it’s Hillary now, is it?”
“Stuff it, Owen, you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I do.” He folded his arms across his chest. “Okay, say she did find something. Where did it go?”
“And why did she get sent home after a shopping trip?” Avenant asked.
“To make her look like a useless woman,” Tosh said heatedly. “It would be easy to dismiss a flighty woman’s report if all she did was spend company time shopping and larking about. Bury the evidence and retcon the operative so even she didn’t remember what happened. Then she would have spent the rest of her life thinking she was a failure or just plain stupid.” Tosh shivered. “We need to find that weapon.”
“Agreed.” Gwen looked at her with a knowing grimace and nodded. Then she turned to Owen, her hands gripped in the air. “Tell me some good news please, Owen. How’s Jack?”
“Sorry.” Owen shook his head. “No improvement. He’s breathing on his own but it is way too shallow and his core body temperature hasn’t risen above 88 degrees all day.”
“That’s bad, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So what do we do now?” Tosh asked.
They stared at each other for a moment then Gwen shook herself. “Tosh, try analyzing the note Ianto left us. Maybe there’s something in the fabric that we can use.”
“Like what?” Avenant asked.
“I don’t know, but we have to try something.”
“Okay.” Tosh picked up the note that she had separated from the rose earlier. “The silk is very old, but in excellent condition. That should tell us something.”
“Anything you can find out, Tosh.”
Avenant reached over for the rose. “Huh. I had not seen this before, out by the castle. But this rose is also very old and very rare.” He looked up at Gwen. “Not the flower itself, but the variety.”
“It’s a Rosa gallica officinalis,” Owen said, taking the rose from Avenant and twirling it between two fingers. “Old certainly, but not all that rare, not around here at least. It’s practically native to France.”
“It is a Rosa gallica, yes.” Avenant took the rose back to twirl it in his own fingers. “But not an officinalis. This is Rosa gallica decur.”
“No such rose,” Owen scoffed.
Avenant nodded his head and Tosh hid a smile. Avenant had finally found something he knew more about than Owen did, which was a rare enough occurrence for most of the men in UNIT. Owen was a brilliant doctor and about as arrogant as they came. The combination made it very hard to get one over on him.
“It is as its name implies: tres belle. Beautiful. It grows only here in this part of the Aquitaine. Specifically here in the hills above Perigueux, and has never successfully been cultivated anywhere else in the world.” Avenant presented the rose to Owen with a flourish.
“Huh.” Owen placed the rose on the scanner next to him. He typed a series of commands into the computer, muttering the whole time.
“How do you know so much about this rose, Avenant?” Gwen asked as they watched Owen work.
“A friend of mine kept a rose garden filled with the most beautiful roses. I used to help her after school and she would tell me stories about the different roses, where they came from and how they got their names.” Avenant smiled and Tosh could not help but smile with him.
“Her favorite was the decur, she said, because it was named for a maiden known only as Belle. She was supposed to have been the daughter of a French nobleman whose family had won the rights to an old Crusader’s chateau during the Hundred Years War. One night, after a terrible storm, Belle and the chateau vanished. In its place was a wall of roses no one had ever seen before. Its petals were as pink as Belle’s lips, its leaves as green as her emerald eyes, and its center, midnight black like her hair.”
“That wouldn’t be the same castle that just reappeared, would it?” Owen asked, looking up from his machines.
“The very same.”
“So a rose that appears starting around the turn of the sixteenth century just as a whole castle goes missing... sounds like aliens to me.”
“The timeline also fits with the silk Ianto used,” Tosh said, handing the fabric to Gwen. “It was definitely made in the late 15th century, early 16th no earlier than 1505 or so. And there are signs of extraterrestrial fibers woven into the fabric as well.”
“What?!”
“See, look at this.” Tosh sent a close-up image of the note to the wall screen. “These fibers have been treated with a chemical marker not found here on earth. There’s no way this is human.”
“Well then, we are three for three,” Owen said, coming to stand next to Gwen, the rose in his hand. “Avenant was right. This is not officianalis. And it’s not purely terrestrial either. The molecular structure has been altered, changing the genetic sequencing for color, scent, and size, not just of the petals but of the leaves as well. It’s a wonder earth bees can recognize this thing to pollinate it!”
Owen reached across Tosh’s lap to tap on her keyboard, sending two more images to the screen.
“There’s a problem though.” The new images were of two roses, similar to the one in Owen’s hand, each one fuller and more vibrant than what Owen was waving around. “The one on the right is what the decur should look like.”
“Should?” Avenant asked.
“Yep. That is regional champion photographed two months ago.”
“It looks like something out of my friend’s garden. No wonder I didn’t recognize the rose we found near the castle.”
“Exactly. The image on the left is a specimen from 85 years ago.”
“Oh my,” Gwen gasped, then looked from the screen to the pale imitation of a rose in Owen’s hand and back to the screen. “So what does this mean?”
Owen used the rose in his hand to point at the rose on the screen. “The roses are just an outward sign of a larger problem. Tea-Boy and Jack were both right. Our alien is sick, probably even dying, if the rate of deterioration in the rose stock is anything to go by.”
“Can you figure out what’s causing the decline in the roses?” Gwen asked.
“It’ll depend on how well the local floriculturists have kept their records.”
“I’ll give you a hand with that if you’d like.” Avenant offered.
Owen nodded, already walking back to the scanner.
“Owen?” Tosh called softly.
Owen turned back to look at her.
“If you figure out what’s wrong with the rose, will it help you find a cure for Jack?”
“I don’t know.” Owen shook his head. “I don’t know.”
On to Part Four Chapter Seventeen
by wynkat1313
Pairing(s) Team, Jack/Ianto, Tosh/OC, references to Gwen/Rhys
Rating: PG-13
Warnings/Enticements: Some mild violence, a near death, romance, and a whole lot of colored lights
Spoilers: Anything is S1 is fair game as this takes place about mid S2
Prompt: Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast) written for Reel_Torchwood round one
Beta’d by the amazing and incredibly patient and geeky temporal_witch , bless you hun!
Summary: When the team is invited to France to assist in a UNIT investigation of unusual Rift Activity, they go with dreams of a quick mission and a chance for a little R & R. Instead they find a wall of roses, an alien, and a mystery. Really, you’d think they would know better by now, they are Torchwood after all, and *nothing* in their world is ever simple.
Author's Note:
Since this got REALLY long, I am going to post it chapter by chapter - a little Romance / Action/Adventure Serial-ness for everyone's viewing pleasure :) There are 28 chapter's total, so this will take a bit. If you really want to know how it ends before then, the PDF is still up at my writing journal :D along with a few surprises related to the story, 'cause i could.
Start at Chapter One
Chapter Sixteen
The work room was quiet for a change. The overheads had been long since turned off, mimicking the comforting darkness of the Hub. They had all gravitated to using desk lamps, with Avenant mumbling about crazy Torchwood as he rounded up enough to fill each desk for them. Tosh smiled at the memory. He’d mumbled a few other, sweeter things to her as he set her lamp up. She felt her skin flush as she remembered the feel of his breath on her skin whispering delicious innuendos into her ear.
She dragged her thoughts back to the records she was supposed to be reviewing. On the laptop in front of her was the file of all Torchwood incident reports for France. The file was both frighteningly large and woefully lacking in the data they needed. That made it all so very easy to be distracted by the handsome Frenchman sitting beside her, his deep black hair curling in soft waves down his back from his ever present pony tail.
She shifted her head a little to look across at Avenant through the curtain of her hair. He was making notes on a piece of paper while he read over a report on the screen in front of him. He was supposed to be sorting through all of UNIT’s alien incident reports for the region so they could compare notes, but given how the page on the screen was the same one he’d had up a few minutes ago, she guessed that he was having as much trouble concentrating as she was. Tosh smiled, and hoped she was the source of his distraction.
He knew how to work in silence; she had to give him that. It was not the silence of one who hated being quiet and was just doing it to humor her. He seemed to genuinely understand that two people could be in a room together and speak without words.
Avenant reached for his coffee cup, his fingers brushing lightly over her hand where it was resting on top of a file. She saw him smile and dipped her head, unaccountably shy, before being brave and raising her eyes to meet his. His smile widened as she looked up and she found it impossible not to respond to the warmth she saw there.
With his other hand, Avenant reached out and slowly brushed her hair out of her face and tucked the long strands behind her ear. She nearly stopped breathing as he looked at her, his eyes filled with longing. He leaned in towards her and then paused, so close to her lips.
“May I?”
She nodded, breath catching in her throat.
She watched him close his eyes before giving in to the weight of her own lids. Then he was kissing her so softly and sweetly, his lips full and soft on hers. She opened her mouth to sigh and felt his tongue trace the line of her bottom lip.
“Avenant?” Gwen called from across the room.
Tosh froze. Her eyes flew open. Damn Gwen and her horrible timing!
Avenant pulled away slowly, a soft smile on his face, then sat up straight, turning his whole body to face Gwen. Tosh realized that he was shielding her from her teammate, giving her a little time to collect herself and she blessed him for that. She didn’t think she could deal with Gwen’s cooing over this - whatever this might be - that was blooming between herself and Avenant. Not yet, not until it had had a little more time to grow and find the light of its own accord.
“Oh, there you are,” Gwen said, striding over to Avenant. “Have you turned up anything in the UNIT records yet? We really need to know about any Rift activity for the area from for that eighty-year mark.”
Avenant shook his head slowly. “Not yet; the records from back then are less than impeccable.”
Gwen’s shoulders slumped. “Tosh? Anything in the Torchwood files?”
“There was one thing; I was just double checking. Hang on.” Tosh hit a handful of keys, sending an image to the large screen on the wall screen near her desk. They turned as one to look at the images. “There’s a memo from UNIT to Torchwood London about a Rift spike in this region. It’s dated 31 October 1929.”
“Did London do anything about it?” Gwen asked. Tosh could see her cheering up at the thought of data to sink her teeth into.
“Doesn’t seem to have.” Tosh looked back at her own monitor and scrolled through a few entries before settling on a long one from the head of Torchwood One to send to the main screen. “There’s some additional chatter in the notes. It seems they sent a junior agent to investigate. She came back after two weeks with a wardrobe full of new clothes, six cases of a highly regarded 1916 Chateau Latour, and a thin report noting a case of teenagers playing with pumpkins on Halloween around the location of the Rift spike.”
“Bollocks.”
“Wait, October 31st?” Avenant asked. “I remember something, but it didn’t seem to fit the parameters of our search.” He dragged the keyboard from in front of Tosh, typed a command into the system and sent information to the wall screen.
“Here it is. A UNIT report that mentions a Miss Hillary Westmore arriving on that date from London. They don’t state who she was working with, though, so I didn’t think anything of it at the time.”
As Avenant spoke an image appeared of a scanned handwritten UNIT report, then a sepia-toned photo stamped with the words “Property of UNIT” showing a young woman in a modified uniform jacket and skirt. A final image appeared on the screen of a handwritten note from the UNIT Medical Officer’s desk.
“Well, we have it now.” Gwen leaned in to look more closely at the screen. “Here’s note from the medical officer’s office.” Gwen stepped over to the door leading to the medical suite and shouted, “Owen!”
A moment later Owen strode through the door looking annoyed. “Can’t a person get some sleep around here?”
“You can sleep later like the rest of us.” Gwen waved Owen over to the screen. “Come look at this. Can you read it for us? It looks like a medical report.”
“My French is rusty as fuck, but I’ll give a go.” Owen stepped over to the computer screen and leaned in. He mumbled to himself a bit then nodded. “Seems someone name of Miss Westmore went out to, um… investigate a sighting,” Owen looked over at Tosh and Avenant. “Is this about that missing power source Ianto mentioned?”
Tosh nodded. “We think so, yes. A Hillary Westmore from Torchwood saw or found something around here about eighty years ago. ”
Owen bobbed his head and turned back to the medical report. “Well, it looks like while she was out investigating the lady slipped, I think. Or maybe fell. Either way she hit her head. When she came to she was talking about a …” Owen squinted at the screen. “Avenant, can you make that out? Chev… cheval…?”
Avenant stepped up to the screen. “Yes, I believe so. Cheval. Horse.”
“Cristal... … A crystal horse?”
“Ah… crystal as in clear white perhaps?” Avenant offered.
Owen snorted. “… and shot fire.”
“Sounds like quite a concussion,” Avenant said.
“Funny thing is,” Owen continued over Avenant. “It goes on to say that the attending physician treated her for burns to her cheek and upper arm, but there was no blistering or bleeding in the wound track. It was cauterized clean.”
Gwen looked back at the screen and then slowly pivoted on her heel, looking at each of them in turn. Tosh could see a myriad of thoughts working their way through Gwen’s eyes. Finally, she turned back to Avenant. “Did anyone go with her to the site?”
Avenant tapped several keys, scrolling through the report, then settling on one page and leaving it up on the screen. “A UNIT officer was sent as her liaison. The report says she ordered him to stay with the car, so he never saw a thing.”
“How convenient.”
“What are you thinking?” Tosh asked, watching Gwen tap a finger against her bottom lip.
“Did she fall? Or was she pushed?” Gwen asked, answering, as she often did, a question with yet more questions. “We’ve all seen weapons which shoot fire and can cauterize wounds, only we call them lasers nowadays. So who’s to say Hillary didn’t find something important out near the castle and nearly lose her life over the information?”
“Oh, it’s Hillary now, is it?”
“Stuff it, Owen, you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I do.” He folded his arms across his chest. “Okay, say she did find something. Where did it go?”
“And why did she get sent home after a shopping trip?” Avenant asked.
“To make her look like a useless woman,” Tosh said heatedly. “It would be easy to dismiss a flighty woman’s report if all she did was spend company time shopping and larking about. Bury the evidence and retcon the operative so even she didn’t remember what happened. Then she would have spent the rest of her life thinking she was a failure or just plain stupid.” Tosh shivered. “We need to find that weapon.”
“Agreed.” Gwen looked at her with a knowing grimace and nodded. Then she turned to Owen, her hands gripped in the air. “Tell me some good news please, Owen. How’s Jack?”
“Sorry.” Owen shook his head. “No improvement. He’s breathing on his own but it is way too shallow and his core body temperature hasn’t risen above 88 degrees all day.”
“That’s bad, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So what do we do now?” Tosh asked.
They stared at each other for a moment then Gwen shook herself. “Tosh, try analyzing the note Ianto left us. Maybe there’s something in the fabric that we can use.”
“Like what?” Avenant asked.
“I don’t know, but we have to try something.”
“Okay.” Tosh picked up the note that she had separated from the rose earlier. “The silk is very old, but in excellent condition. That should tell us something.”
“Anything you can find out, Tosh.”
Avenant reached over for the rose. “Huh. I had not seen this before, out by the castle. But this rose is also very old and very rare.” He looked up at Gwen. “Not the flower itself, but the variety.”
“It’s a Rosa gallica officinalis,” Owen said, taking the rose from Avenant and twirling it between two fingers. “Old certainly, but not all that rare, not around here at least. It’s practically native to France.”
“It is a Rosa gallica, yes.” Avenant took the rose back to twirl it in his own fingers. “But not an officinalis. This is Rosa gallica decur.”
“No such rose,” Owen scoffed.
Avenant nodded his head and Tosh hid a smile. Avenant had finally found something he knew more about than Owen did, which was a rare enough occurrence for most of the men in UNIT. Owen was a brilliant doctor and about as arrogant as they came. The combination made it very hard to get one over on him.
“It is as its name implies: tres belle. Beautiful. It grows only here in this part of the Aquitaine. Specifically here in the hills above Perigueux, and has never successfully been cultivated anywhere else in the world.” Avenant presented the rose to Owen with a flourish.
“Huh.” Owen placed the rose on the scanner next to him. He typed a series of commands into the computer, muttering the whole time.
“How do you know so much about this rose, Avenant?” Gwen asked as they watched Owen work.
“A friend of mine kept a rose garden filled with the most beautiful roses. I used to help her after school and she would tell me stories about the different roses, where they came from and how they got their names.” Avenant smiled and Tosh could not help but smile with him.
“Her favorite was the decur, she said, because it was named for a maiden known only as Belle. She was supposed to have been the daughter of a French nobleman whose family had won the rights to an old Crusader’s chateau during the Hundred Years War. One night, after a terrible storm, Belle and the chateau vanished. In its place was a wall of roses no one had ever seen before. Its petals were as pink as Belle’s lips, its leaves as green as her emerald eyes, and its center, midnight black like her hair.”
“That wouldn’t be the same castle that just reappeared, would it?” Owen asked, looking up from his machines.
“The very same.”
“So a rose that appears starting around the turn of the sixteenth century just as a whole castle goes missing... sounds like aliens to me.”
“The timeline also fits with the silk Ianto used,” Tosh said, handing the fabric to Gwen. “It was definitely made in the late 15th century, early 16th no earlier than 1505 or so. And there are signs of extraterrestrial fibers woven into the fabric as well.”
“What?!”
“See, look at this.” Tosh sent a close-up image of the note to the wall screen. “These fibers have been treated with a chemical marker not found here on earth. There’s no way this is human.”
“Well then, we are three for three,” Owen said, coming to stand next to Gwen, the rose in his hand. “Avenant was right. This is not officianalis. And it’s not purely terrestrial either. The molecular structure has been altered, changing the genetic sequencing for color, scent, and size, not just of the petals but of the leaves as well. It’s a wonder earth bees can recognize this thing to pollinate it!”
Owen reached across Tosh’s lap to tap on her keyboard, sending two more images to the screen.
“There’s a problem though.” The new images were of two roses, similar to the one in Owen’s hand, each one fuller and more vibrant than what Owen was waving around. “The one on the right is what the decur should look like.”
“Should?” Avenant asked.
“Yep. That is regional champion photographed two months ago.”
“It looks like something out of my friend’s garden. No wonder I didn’t recognize the rose we found near the castle.”
“Exactly. The image on the left is a specimen from 85 years ago.”
“Oh my,” Gwen gasped, then looked from the screen to the pale imitation of a rose in Owen’s hand and back to the screen. “So what does this mean?”
Owen used the rose in his hand to point at the rose on the screen. “The roses are just an outward sign of a larger problem. Tea-Boy and Jack were both right. Our alien is sick, probably even dying, if the rate of deterioration in the rose stock is anything to go by.”
“Can you figure out what’s causing the decline in the roses?” Gwen asked.
“It’ll depend on how well the local floriculturists have kept their records.”
“I’ll give you a hand with that if you’d like.” Avenant offered.
Owen nodded, already walking back to the scanner.
“Owen?” Tosh called softly.
Owen turned back to look at her.
“If you figure out what’s wrong with the rose, will it help you find a cure for Jack?”
“I don’t know.” Owen shook his head. “I don’t know.”
On to Part Four Chapter Seventeen