Fandom: Torchwood

Characters: Owen, Jack, Gwen, Ianto

Author: m_findlow

Rating: PG

Length: 2,340 words

Content notes: Spoilers for Episode 1.6 - Greeks bearing gifts

Author notes: Written for Challenge 271 - Heart

Summary: Owen has discovered something and now all the pieces of the puzzle are starting to fall into place.

'This had better be good, Owen,' Jack announced as he strode into the hub. 'I had a rendezvous with a handsome young man from the mayor's office who may or may not know something about a member of the Senedd who's actually an unregistered alien.' He sighed dramatically. 'Who knows really. With politicians it's so hard to tell. Are they a crazy alien or just a wacko pushing their own agenda?' He made a little mirth-filled sound. 'Sometimes I think they're all aliens, or that aliens would do a better job. Anyway... I guess Rhydian will just have to wait another night. So, what is it that you desperately had to show me?'

Owen leaned back and set his sneaker up on the edge of the desk, his computer keyboard still couched in his lap. 'I've been going over the details from that dead body we found with the stapler.'

'Oh?' Jack smirked. 'The woman with the gunshot wound that turned out to be a man possibly impaled by a pole? That's how I'd wanna go.' He chuckled at his own joke.

'Har har,' Owen seethed. 'If you want to take over autopsying two hundred year old corpses be my guest. I can't help it if he was a really girly man killed by something unidentifiable that existed two centuries ago.'

'So, tell me, then,' Jack insisted, cutting off Owen's tirade. 'What is the unidentified trauma of our dead guy?'

Owen tapped a few keys on his computer showing Jack the results. 'For one thing, it's no longer unidentified. Or isolated.'

Jack's face grew grim as he scanned the screen. 'Call in Gwen and Ianto.'

'You mean Gwen and Tosh, right?' Owen said, sure he'd misheard the instruction.

Jack's head shook as he thrust his hands deep into his pockets. 'No. For now we don't involve Tosh.'

'Why the hell not?'

'Just get the others here asap and be ready to brief them on what you've found.'



Ianto and Gwen arrived shortly after Owen made the call. Not long after that they were settled in the boardroom with a round of coffee.

Gwen looked around the room at the four places with mugs and frowned. 'Where's Tosh?'

'She's not coming,' Jack replied, refusing to elaborate further. The coffee in front of him, though appreciated, was unpalatable for the moment as he chewed over their current situation. He turned his attention to Owen. 'Owen, tell us what you found.'

Owen cleared his throat and pressed the button on the remote, lighting up the wall display. It showed a photograph of the skeleton found at the scene which was still lying on Owen's autopsy table, its chest cavity caved in and full of dirt. 'I was doing further investigation into our dead body and the cause of death.' He ignored the small smirk that crept over Gwen's face.' I went back to see if there had been any similar cases recorded of traumas where the ribs were shattered around the same time as our old mate. Now, obviously the body is too old for any of the organs or tissues to have survived, and the medical records back in those days weren't crash hot, so there was no way to be certain if the other cases were related, but...' He changed the image on the wall. It flickered through dozens of medical records in quick succession. 'Not only did I find similar cases, but they've been happening regularly from when our guy bit the dust all the way up until now. And there was one thing they all had in common: the heart had been removed. I tried digging deeper into NHS records but came up empty because they'd all been deleted and classified.' He changed the image on the screen again. 'In 1998 British intelligence set up a task force called Operation Lowry. They'd been collecting a case file full of these deaths, over sixty at last count. They think it's some kind of weird cult, selecting victims at random as part of some religious sacrificial ceremony or something. They've spent nearly three million pounds to date trying to track down the cult and its leaders.'

'What makes them think it's a cult?' Gwen asked, sipping her coffee. 'Could be a serial killer.'

Owen shook his head. 'The deaths go back decades. Too far for it to even be a copycat killer. And you've have to be bloody good to get away with sixty murders. A cult was far more likely.'

'Only there is no cult,' Jack said. 'There never has been. Operation Lowry was shut down eighteen months ago for a lack of compelling evidence to support continuing the hunt.'

'So,' Ianto began, 'the thing that killed our victim is the same thing that killed all these other people and we think it's alien?'

'Oh, it's alien alright,' Jack replied.

Owen changed the display once more. 'I did a timeline of the reported deaths. Obviously there's a few gaps in it. Not all of the victims were ever discovered, but when you look at the space between killings, accounting for the missing data, here's where it gets weird. Each murder is exactly seventy two days apart.'

'The clockwork killer,' Ianto replied, looking slightly pleased at the name he'd come up with on the fly.

'But what's it killing them for?' Gwen said, leaning over the table with her elbows. 'What does it want with the heart?'

'Food,' Owen stated simply. 'Sustenance. This thing has a consistent metabolic rate that requires protein rich muscle to sustain itself. It's the smallest amount of food it can ingest that will sustain it the longest amount of time. That's the theory, anyway. Why else leave the rest of the body intact?'

'And to be able to exert enough force to shatter the ribs of the human body and rip out a beating heart makes it pretty strong, ' Jack added. 'It's not killing them and scavenging what it wants. It's going straight for the source.'

'So, it's still out there,' Gwen surmised. 'Do we know when it's due to kill again? Can we track it based on knowing when it might kill? Do we even know where to start looking for it?'

Jack leaned back slightly in his seat at the head the table. 'We can do better than that. I think I know where it is right now.' He cast a glance sideways at Ianto. 'Any movement?'

The young man studied his PDA. 'Car's been parked there all night and no one has been spotted on CCTV leaving the building for the last two hours.'

Jack nodded. 'Good. That means it's probably still with Tosh.'

'What?' 'Scuse me?' Gwen and Owen's voices protested in unison

Gwen turned her fiery gaze on Jack. 'What do you mean you think it's with Tosh? You knew she was in danger and were just sitting here and-'

'Relax,' Jack said, keeping his tone firm. 'It's not going to kill her. It needs her.'

Owen scowled. 'Explain. I thought we were just dealing with a serial killing alien. What's it got to do with Tosh?'

Jack sat up straighter. 'That thing we found with the body-'

'The stapler,' Gwen said.

'It's a ship,' Jack replied. 'A transporter to be exact. Took me a little while to figure it out, but I got there in the end. I assumed that the occupants didn't survive the crash landing. It wasn't until Owen showed me his findings that I realised one of them must have survived. And not the one I was hoping for.'

Ianto pushed his coffee away, no longer finding it appealing. 'What's that supposed to mean?'

Jack heaved a breath and leaned over the table. 'It's a two man transporter. The kind they use for prisoners and criminals, capable of reducing and storing the physical forms of one prisoner and one captor. With a serial killing alien on the loose, I think you can guess which one made it out alive.'

'So, why didn't it just get right back in and take off?' Owen asked. 'Why hang around this dump?'

Jack gave a little shrug of the shoulders. 'Why wouldn't it? No one knows it's here and it's got a plentiful supply of food. It could hide out here for centuries until they gave up searching for it.'

'And Tosh?' Gwen asked, redirecting the conversation. 'What does she have to do with it?'

'We took its ship. Its one way out of here. It needed to get close to us, find out what we'd done with it and somehow get it back. It's using Tosh, manipulating her to get what it wants.'

'How do you know that?'

'This all started when we dug up that spacecraft. Tosh was just a little too keen to know if I'd figured out what the spacecraft actually was. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for inquisitiveness, but there was just something a little off about it. For days she'd just ignored it, like she had other things on her mind, and then all of a sudden she's desperate to know. It doesn't take a genius to put two and two together. And then there was that whole thing with stopping the guy about to murder his family.'

'What? Right, now you've lost us,' Owen said.

Jack waved a hand in the air. 'Oh, she claimed that she heard a guy on the street muttering about killing his family so she followed him all the way to his house. When he pulled a gun on them she came up behind him and clubbed him over the head. Literally. A nine iron, so I was told. Got him in one.'

'Rubbish,' Owen scoffed. 'As if Tosh would do that.'

'It's true,' Jack insisted. 'Got the call from Detective Inspector Henderson myself. Only I don't think she heard him say anything. I think she was reading his thoughts, or at least the alien was helping to do it. I got the same feeling when she was asking me about the transporter, like she was using some kind of psychic probe to drag it out of me. I had some psychic training back in the day, so I know how to pick up on some of those techniques and to block them.' His expression became momentarily glazed. 'This was different, though. It wasn't forcefully intrusive, more like stumbling around in the dark, feeling your way. I don't think Tosh mean to do it, not exactly. I think the alien is using Tosh to gather information, trying to read our thoughts. And I think Tosh is unwillingly helping it.' He frowned as he looked around the room at his teammates and their looks of confusion and perplexment. 'What? Don't tell me you didn't notice Tosh was acting a little weird?'

The three of them kept their eyes on the table in front of them.

'She did seem a little bit down and distracted,' Ianto confessed.

'Tosh has always been a bit weird,' Owen added. 'That's not exactly anything new.'

'I thought she must have met someone,' Gwen replied. 'She seemed all kind of... well, you know, how when you first start dating someone and it's all you can think about.'

She tried desperately not to look at Owen as she said it but Jack spotted the awkward moment clear as day. He'd suspected as much for about a week now and this confirmed it. Jack gave a little shake of his head. After everything they'd been through with Suzie, and then Ianto, and yet still they were seemingly oblivious to what was going on with their own teammates. He'd learnt his lesson the hard way but no one else appeared to have.

'I think it's all of the above,' Jack said. 'How would you cope with being able to see inside people's heads, hearing what they were really thinking, deep down? Wouldn't you need someone to come home to at the end of the day to help you process it all?' That last comment Gwen made had him worried but he didn't show it. Could she really have gotten involved romantically with it? That complicated things. Falling in love with an alien wasn't a bad thing, not as a general concept. Jack was all for life in whatever shape it took, but using someone's feelings to get what you wanted was definitely not on.

'Tosh wouldn't harbour an alien and not tell us,' Gwen said, firm in her own conviction despite what she'd seen and suspected. 'Not if she knew it was a criminal.'

'I might if I was getting a decent shag out of it, ' Owen said, unable to hide the smirk from his face. Gwen glared daggers at him across the table.

Ianto clasped his hands together on the table. 'So, it's not going to kill her? It just wants the transporter?'

Jack nodded. 'For whatever reason it was happy to leave it buried, but now we've upset the status quo.'

Gwen shuffled in her seat. 'So, what do we do?'

'Treat it as dangerous,' Jack replied. 'We go over there, capture it and find out what its game is. Then we find out a way to send it back whenever it belongs, or at worst, put it on the next Proclamation reformation vessel. Whether it was rightly or wrongly incarcerated in the first place doesn't matter. It's killed hundred of people. Prison is almost too good for it.'

'Uh, sir,' Ianto interrupted. 'Tosh's car just left the building.' He fell silent for a few moments as he studied its movements on the screen. 'Based on the direction it's going I'd say she's headed here.'

'As is our alien,' Jack added, certain that it was about to make its move. His expression turned serious. 'We don't have much time.' Just enough perhaps to reprogram the transporter, he thought. If that's what it wants, then that's what we'll give it. If a heart got broken in the process than that was going to be unfortunate.